“[Jimmy Stewart] may have been the least neurotic actor I’ve ever been around. He was almost too nice. No airs, never demanded special attention, seemed to always keep his insecurities to himself even when he was a kid in his twenties” (a stagehand who worked with Stewart in 1934, according to Scott Eyman in Hank & Jim).
“…least neurotic…always keeps his insecurities to himself…” This is part of why Jimmy Stewart is the closest thing I have to a hero. Not that I think you should keep your insecurities entirely to yourself; just that their airing is best kept to a very close circle. What’s the point in burdening everyone else?
“Amateur work is fun but the price for it is just simply tremendous. In the end you get ‘Thank you’ and that’s all. You give three performances which everybody promptly forgets and somebody has a breakdown—that somebody being the enthusiast” (F. Scott Fitzgerald to his daughter, trying to persuade her away from amateur theatre, as reported by Scott Eyman in Hank & Jim).
I recognize the sentiment, and it’s part of why I don’t do shows too often: Mounting them is a lot of work to be doing it for free!
The problem with ending your tour of Switzerland and eastern France with two mealsout in Lyon is that you forget all the other nice meals out that came before them. Exquis !
What prompts me to make note of it is a desire to avoid having to call the writer of Hebrews, Paul, the writer of 1 John, and the writer of 1 Peter all mistaken about the same rather basic christological claim of Jesus’ sinlessness. If scripture were otherwise silent on the matter of Jesus’ sinlessness, I’d be comfortable with a Jesus who had some moral learning to do. As it is, calling Jesus xenophobic, even if we partially excuse it by saying He was a product of His time and place, even if we’re able to nevertheless draw powerful inspiration toward acknowledging our own errors and pressing on toward boundless love, gives away more biblical...
Institutions, institutions! How I have denigrated you over the years. Yet I have not done so aright. What I ought to have loathed was institutions serving as mere vehicles of their leaders’ thirsts for power, wealth, or security, institutions whose missions are evil, and institutions nothing but sclerotic. Institutions capable of working toward good ends and led by people suspicious of their own power, such as DiamondBack Automotive Accessories, Inc. and University Baptist and Brethren Church, are obvious goods to me now.
I exhaust myself. I feel tired of pursuing this, that, and the other. I feel tired of always wanting to warm up my voice, read a book, watch a movie, listen to music, push forward on this or that goal. I just want to hang out.
Challenging art teaches you that lesson [that you are not yet what you could be]; great art insists on it. A great novel is, among other things, a document that is more human than human, that goes further than it has to in the effort to convey the human experience. A great, challenging novel knows things you don’t, says things that will not flatter you, and will not stop doing its work until it’s rearranged something in your chest. And who could stand that? We’ve spent years learning that discomfort is always, always a sign of harm. And so we took the only reasonable action a therapeutic civilization could take with an art form built on productive discomfort: we got rid of it. We replaced it with #content, which is art that has agreed as a condition of existence never to ask anything of you at all.
Just re-watched: Little Miss Sunshine (2006) at an open-air screening at Kocherpark in Bern. Darkly comic, peak indie-pop roadtrip quirkfest with a gooey caramel center. If only togetherness and courage rose this easily out of deep family dysfunction in real life. These characters are only pretending to be losers. Still, there’s enough nutrition in this R-rated, live-action cousin to Pixar to inspire, say, a merely mildly dysfunctional family to keep calm and pop the clutch.
I think I ought to start steering clear of politically charged, interplanetary sci-fi. (I’m thinking here of how I couldn’t finish Dune.) The subgenre just doesn’t seem to do anything for me. It could be that I’m just not into politics, i.e., all activities concerning questions of who is in charge of what and how those people make the rules.
But there were certain quotations I found beautiful or thought-provoking:
“That vivid memory and the cool, vast touch of night wind awakened him. His soul came out of hiding” (narrator of Shevek).
“Variety doesn’t come with just moving around. I was all over Anarres, young. Drove and loaded in every Division. Must have known a hundred girls in different towns. It got boring. I came back here, and I do this run every three decades year in year out through this same desert where you can’t tell one sandhill from the next and it’s all the...
It just registered with me that the shirt I just bought left off the God part. I confess I feel a little disappointed about that.
friend:
I did notice that. And then I noticed that I actually like that. And then I spent some time pondering—feeling some shame for being negatively associated with bad theology/“Christians" and if it was more accessible to people reading it that might discount the text if they knew it was a Bible verse, but might open the door for conversation if they compliment the shirt, and if that was just my excuse/out for being hesitant to wear a “God” shirt these days.
me:
Good thoughts. The Micah 6:8 commands are intrinsically good with or without direct reference to God, so in that sense, it’s still a great shirt. Yet it does seem unnecessarily diffident. I think I’ve noticed a tendency in progressive Christian circles to leave overt God talk to the conservatives. And I think this is counterproductive. It creates a unwanted positive feedback loop: If the...
Some Christians who take a traditionalist line about same-sex erotic behavior are quick to supply extrabiblical context to their exegesis on other matters in the name of preserving biblical inerrancy (e.g., GotQuestions on the question of eating meat sacrificed to idols) or defending current practices that are prima facie at odds with biblical injunctions (e.g., Ben Witherington on women teaching men). Yet they demur about doing so in the name of extending the right hand of fellowship to actively bisexual, lesbian, and gay Christians, despite a ready supply of much less speculative (albeit not uncontested; see Gagnon, Wright, and Loader) extrabiblical context that may similarly qualify the New Testament clobber texts on the subject.
I lack the vocabulary and leisure to write much about the cracklingly alive music of the great 20th-century Hungarian composer Béla Bartók, seven hours of whose greatest music can be found in this playlist. But what I can tell you is that he comes across to me as an intensely focused über-Puck, as ingenious as he is impish. He alternately grins maniacally and aches with grief as he employs chromaticism, weird harmonies, percussive pianism, asymmetric meters, novel bowings and pluckings (including one named after him), oddly located sforzandos and other displaced accents, and a dozen other tricks from his rather large bag to make all kinds of unexpected musical turns. He hides peasant tunes in music that pushes tonality just shy of its breaking point. He makes life fiendishly difficult for violinists and pianists.
To some, like my friend Travis, who has been a great sport to listen all the way through Bartók’s repertoire with me, all the above is in service to...
It never occurred to me how head-turningly paradoxical this command from Galatians is: “Become slaves to one another” (5:13). The very nature of a slave relationship is that the power is unipolar. How can slavery be mutual? (There’s certainly an antisocial, obsessional, probably erotic way of interpreting this that describes a possible meaning, but—hopefully obviously—neither desirably nor plausibly.) Paul here pushes semantic boundaries to rhetorically amplify Great Commandment no. 2. It’s a dangerous amplification: If only some people in a group heed it, then you’ve got a cult. But man, if everybody has bought in and there’s that kind of earned trust in a group, what a great way of thinking about it.
And talk about destabilizing institutional slavery! Masters commanded to be slaves of their slaves! Mm mmm. You probably didn’t hear too many American slaveholders quoting that translation of Galatians. Most translations soften things by saying “serve one another,” which I suppose a...
Just finished reading (in one sitting): Miracles & Marvels: A Life-Long Love Affair with God (2024) by my neighbor Marie Hamilton. A brief, guileless, autobiographical and episodic account of thirty healings, improbable moments, timely pairings of prayer-and-answer, divine taps on the shoulder, audible voices, and assorted other remarkable happenings that have accompanied this creative, compassionate, award-winning salt of the earth do-gooder throughout her life. She and I have never met, but I think I’d like to go walk the quarter-mile over to her house, knock on her door, and tell her thanks.
Charlie, Carla, and I bumped into the sons of Bryant & Lynelle Martin and Hector & Lois Troyer at the sheep farm swimming hole this evening. They were enjoying the diving board they had tapconned into the concrete pylon on the east bank probably sometime in the spring. Charming, conversationally able boys, all seven or so of them.
Charlie and I agreed on our amble down the sheep driveway home that there’s something about their old-fashioned Anabaptist culture that we find appealing. I’d even call it alluring. Alluring in the way I’ve always imagined a fully Christian culture would be: creative, down-to-earth, obviously committed to one another yet very openhearted to outsiders, playful, and dedicated to the common good and to the will of Jesus as if the two are nearly coterminous. I suppose I could write that last part about many Christian groups. But these folks appear to do it with such abundant industry and sense of play that it elicits in me something close to envy.
Just finished reading: Paul and the Power of Grace (2020) by John M. G. Barclay. A 70% reduction for laymen of Barclay’s well-received, paradigm-establishing academic doorstop Paul and the Gift (2015), which through a brief survey of the anthropology of gifts followed by close examinations of Paul’s letters to the Galatians and Romans establishes “grace” (charis) as the linchpin of Paul’s entire theological and ethical program and demarcates what is so amazing about it from what is not, thereby providing important correctives to Wright’s rendition of the New Perspective on Paul and to Paul Within Judaism, establishing a firm theological foundation for building churches/societies on mutuality and without regard to preexisting markers of social capital, and, most excitingly to me, resolving centuries-old Protestant soteriological conundrums.
“Love your neighbor as yourself.” I’ve always taken this to mean something like “regard and act toward those around you as if they and their good are as important to you as you and your good.” We can call that an equivalential reading. It’s probably a valid way to take it. But a passing remark in John Barclay’s Paul and the Power of Grace (that I’m having some difficulty re-finding so as to quote) has me thinking of another subtly but importantly different way of parsing it: “Regard and act toward those around you as if they and their good are you and your good.” We can call this a constitutive or even identificatory reading. I like it.
[edit, 7/8/26] Here’s the Barclay quote:
Love, then, does not mean self-sacrifice in the sense of negating oneself for the sake of others and expecting nothing back. The scriptural citation—“You should love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18, cited in Galatians 5:14)—could be understood in a number of ways, but it seems to include, not...
“Justice is patriotic,” intoned Bonnie Kline Smeltzer from the pulpit at University Baptist and Brethren Church today. I was this close to shouting “Amen!” I totally shoulda.
(It helped that she was wearing a one-of-a-kind, red-white-and-blue Free Subu button she had handmade last week. Appropriation of Old Glory for the sake of something good and having nothing to do with government authority or selling something is something I go in for.)
Just re-listened to: Goes West (2019) by William Tyler. Poppy, lilting guitar Americana, like so many Alison Krauss tracks, but without the singing and with drums. In other words, hold music nonetheless capable under the right conditions—which apparently include doing the dishes alone on an unusually cool, overcast June evening—of eliciting tears.
My basic problem with spontaneity—generating my own and fielding that of others—is one of greed: I learned early on that the only way to get done all the things one wants to get done is to fully regiment one’s time. I got no time for whim!
But I say to myself (as I’ve said before): I need to let go. It’s “do everything in love,” not “do everything you want or feel obligated to do.” The latter is impossible anyway.
May the scales of how I spend the leisure that’ll temporarily open up during Éa’s upcoming absence and then permanently open up in 2028 tip heavily toward doing good over enjoying good—and in forms that are highly altruistic, that make sense only in light of discipleship to Jesus and hope for resurrection, thus putting flesh on those propositions I call Christianity.
