I’m not sure I enjoy any sociospatial context more than free-spirited, small-group conversation at a table at Webster’s Bookstore Café, surrounded by the sight and smell of used books, the taste of good tea, and the sound of vintage hipster music that isn’t even trying to be cool. (I just wish they stayed open past 7 PM!)

Just finished reading: Solito (2022) by Javier Zamora. I am dubious about most movie, music, and book recommendations from friends. Only book recommendations from Josh and, now, after reading this book, maybe book recommendations from Ruth, will I take without hesitation. (Although she did recommend The Night Watchman, which wasn’t for me.)

Solito is a thirtysomething Salvadoran immigrant’s memoir of his illegal migration to California at the age of 9. It’s a hard travelogue told in the historical present tense and in the voice of his 9-year-old self. It tempts me to go find and read a bunch of think pieces so I can tell myself I have an educated opinion about borders and immigration policy.

But no, I won’t concern myself with things to big for me, although I will say that the cats-and-mice act at the Mexican border just seems so very silly. I do hope multiple someones better positioned than me to make a difference in this arena read this book. And me, I’ll just recommend donating to Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights.

Also, Mr. Samora, I’d read your sequel if you wrote one: How did reuniting with your parents go? How was your first night at home? Your first month? What was your San Rafael neighborhood like? How about school? Life goes on, even after trauma. How?

“For others.” As I was concerned last night about whether my inclination to stay home on a Saturday night instead of socializing—not that I had an invitation—and in a more general sense about whether my current stance of what seems to me to social passivity, at least relatively speaking, as well as my choosing to read books or listen to recorded music by myself is OK, I went to bed pondering how to rephrase “Let everything you do be done in love” to be more incisively helpful in making daily decisions about what to do.

“For others” is the thought I woke up to this morning, as in, “Let everything you do be for others.” I have since expanded that slightly for clarity to “for the sake of others.” Let everything you do be done for the sake of others.

Staying home last night in particular fits this criterion just fine: I’ve been underslept since hearing about Frank’s cancer last Tuesday, and I’m well aware that sensitivity to suboptimal sleep volume is my behavioral Achilles’ heel. Going to bed early last night has set me up to contribute more heartily and happily to the wellbeing of others today and during the upcoming workweek . (This kind of thing is what prompts me to regard self-care is a necessary evil.)

But can I honestly say it’s for the sake of others that I, who have some capability as a community organizer, adopt of stance of not initiating social plans beyond ambulatory or telephonic tête-à-têtes? And can I honestly say it’s for the sake of others that I read books by myself or listen to recorded music by myself?

An observer will naturally reply to these questions, “Scott, I think you’re taking 1 Corinthians 16:14 too literally. Relax a little, will you?” To which I will naturally rejoin, “Dear observer, thank you for your concern. But no. That’s not how my brain works. Plus, the last thing the world needs or that God wants is for Christians to start compromising on the Royal Law in the name of self-care and inner peace.” (Okay, maybe the last thing is for us to start compromising on the Royal Law in the name of political success. Oops. Too late.)

To answer my first question about whether it’s OK for me to avoid throwing myself into organizing social gatherings and local political mini-movements, I must remember that I have decided to adopt this relatively passive social stance on purpose for the short season that remains when my children are guaranteed to live under my roof. I made the decision for their sakes. So yes, it’s perfectly OK because it’s done for the sake of others. And when my kids do move out, I already have an overlong list of civic, environmental, ecclesial, communally musical, charitable, preferential-option-for-the poor interpersonal, and public philosophical ideas for what to undertake then. My current avoidance is purely seasonal (and it’s not absolute anyhow).

Now, my second question about whether it’s OK for me to read books or listen to recorded music alone—well, this one is harder for me to answer in the affirmative. I might posit that reading books equips me to be a sympathetic human, which it does, or that listening to a symphony trains my capacity for the type of long attention that makes for being a good listener to other humans, which it does. But that kind of thinking is too close to the eat-your-broccoli approach to reading that Jacobs rightly disparages, at least if it’s underpins all my reading and listening.

What about reading or listening just for the joy of it? Can I faithfully substitute “Do everything for the joy” for “Do everything for the sake of others (i.e., in love)”? Again, observers will say to me, “Scruples, man. Of course you can! You are definitely way too serious.”

To which I reply: Look, I can’t substitute “do everything for the joy” for ‘do everything for the sake of others’ except if by joy we mean “the joy of knowing others are flourishing in part because of my efforts.” But you’re probably right: I probably am overserious. If no social plans have presented themselves to me for a given evening, if I don’t feel up for trying to make social plans myself, if calling my sisters doesn’t feel like the thing right now, it is OK for me to opt for a receptive activity I enjoy. I might still take this little round of introspection to tilt a little further toward a bias for social engagement, but opting to read or listen nevertheless falls squarely in the “self-care is a necessary evil” bucket, and is therefore OK. Except maybe it’s an “enjoyment is a necessary evil” bucket. And maybe it’s not even that. Paul writes “do everything in love,” which is not precisely synonymous with “do everything for the sake of others.” Enjoyment and thanksgiving can be a form of love for the Creator of the good things I’m enjoying. So if the impulse of my heart is to read a book or listen to recorded music, I will read a book or listen to recorded music, provided that I can do so in thanksgiving and that I’m not ignoring some more pressing matter of love. After all:

• “Do not go on drinking only water, but use a little wine for the sake of your stomach and your frequent ailments” (1 Timothy 5:23).
• “My son, eat honey, for it is good / Yes, the honey from the comb is sweet to your taste” (Proverbs 24:13).

(But also: “Have you found honey? Eat only what you need so that you do not have it in excess and vomit it” (Proverbs 25:13). Or as Harrison put it: “All the world is birthday cake, so take a piece, but not too much.”)

One final, little question: How do I choose between competing “sakes of others”? I will simply choose whichever sake I sense to be more pressing.

Just finished reading: The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World (2024) by Christine Rosen. Its main idea is that it’s inadvisable to allow the ascendance of smartphones and similarly attention-sucking entertainment and communication technologies to extinguish the non-mediated experiences they often replace, all of which have benefits. The threatened experiences she covers are:

• face-to-face communication,
• working with your hands,
• waiting, idleness, and boredom,
• interpreting our emotions with our own senses,
• expressing our emotions with our own bodies,
• direct intake of pleasures (travel, art, sex, cooking, eating) instead of their simulacra or attendant digitalia (constant communication with one’s existing social network while traveling, repros, pornography, and cooking shows),
• serendipity, and
• a sense of place.

This is one of those reads that’s preaching to the choir. But I’m in that choir, and I like it. It prepares me to make my case with evidence. Here are some of my notes from her chapter on the value of face-to-face communication:

• It’s demonstrably easier to lie and be lied to via communication that isn’t face to face. This helps explain our current political climate. Rosen claims that Hancock’s studies even shows that when liars use screen-mediated communication, they are more motivated to lie.
• Face-to-face communication is also a demonstrably more reliable way to get a request fulfilled.
• Frederickson claims that the more attuned to others you become, the healthier your literal heart.
• “Looking someone in the eye is a subtle gesture of inclusiveness, a small but significant act of civil attention.”
• Empathy development is stunted in the absence of face-to-face communication.

However, after the chapter on face-to-face communication, and especially after the chapter on working with your hands, the precise, evidentiary quality of the argumentation all but dissipates. Additionally, it became difficult for me to take her seriously after I read the following phrase: “the passage from the New Testament book of Ecclesiastes.”

So mostly, I wouldn’t recommend reading the book, but I do strongly recommend the overall idea.

Inspired by part of this interview with Lisa Silvestri, the author of Peace by Peace: Risking Public Action, Creating Social Change, which I may read soonish with my friend Neill—after I finish:

• Forgiveness: An Alternative Account, which Ruth and I both got excited about roughly simultaneously and thus co-purchased (co-purchasing books—what a fun idea! an interpersonal nano-library…),
• parts of Stricken by God?, another of Neill’s recommendations after he read my essay about the Cross, and
• Watchmen, recommended to me by both my son and my wife—

here is a list of what bothers me:

• barriers to walkability,
• the predominance of solo, receptive, junky entertainment,
• words whose poor definitional boundaries cause moral problems,
• faulty exegesis,
• parroting, and
• roadkill.

There is a very fine line between abstruseness and nonsense. And neither writer nor reader can distinguish for sure.

In the first six pages of Potts’ introduction, which are viewable if you scroll down here, he makes so many dubious logical moves that, depending on my current frame of mind, it will require either an act of will or a perverse curiosity for me to continue reading. He has basically written, “I can’t make sense of the biblical witness on forgiveness. So let’s just move on from the Bible and cobble together a completely new definition using other literature.” It’s an admission of interpretive failure on his part, not a successful problematization of the biblical witness on the subject.

“Isn’t it a moral hazard of some sort when a person who remains entirely unrepentant and absolutely allergic to reparations, who still menaces violence and still threatens victims, is offered forgiveness without any condition at all?” Yes, but the solution is to correct the unconditionality of the forgiveness—as per the Bible—not to redefine forgiveness beyond recognition.

“Why is it so often people of color and people already marginalized by systemic violence upon whom this forgiving responsibility falls?” Because powerful people seek to maintain their power by warping the biblical witness on forgiveness.

“What unjust purpose might the valorization of such suffering serve?” The maintenance of power over other people.

“Isn’t the offer of forgiveness more of a salve to the conscience of power than an instrument of victims' healing?” If forgiveness of the powerful by the powerless is unconditional, then yes.

“And isn’t it a moral outrage to pressure victims into offering this forgiveness, to mandate that those already subject to loss and victimization assume responsibility for redeeming their offenders?” Yes.

“When a law or code demands some recompense for wrong, how can we at the same time obligate or encourage the setting aside of that recompense?” We shouldn’t. To do so would be to misinterpret the biblical witness on the subject.

What he is trying to pass off as a definition of forgiveness is in fact a definition of lament and self-restraint, which are themselves a moral good in good time, but which are not forgiveness.

Why respond to bad hermeneutics by abandoning hermeneutics altogether? Why not hold the definition of forgiveness but change its mandates?

“Instead of attempting to parse or coerce an impossible consistency…” That is to beg the question, sir. You’re certainly not going to reach consistency if you already think it’s impossible!

“For all the Christian talk about unconditional forgiveness…” So the solution is to stop requiring forgiveness be unconditional, not to abandon forgiveness altogether by redefining it as something it’s not.

Why does the New Testament witness about forgiveness seems to have a little more weight of responsibility on the forgiver than on the offender? Because all exhortations to forgive assume that the offender has already tried to make amends**.** Forgiveness of a human by another human without amends is, in the Bible, not the way. The only reason God or Jesus sometimes do it is because there is no moral hazard posed to Them by our continued sin. They are untouchable. But even there, as a general rule, They require amends usually because of the moral hazard to the offender if they don’t.

Of course, this is not the only theological story we can tell about the death of Jesus. There are other interpretations of this sordid history, other accounts we can give of our hope in the cross. The outlines that have been carved into this atonement model are so familiar we barely question their necessity, but there is no necessary interpretive frame for the cross of Christ. We may preach Jesus Christ and him crucified, but that doesn’t mean we always know what to say or what it means. The metaphor that traditionally grounds this theology is entirely economic, usually given in terms of debt, obligation, and repayment,

You suggest alternative accounts of the Cross are possible. But then you abandon the attempt two sentences later! Don’t suggest you can but then not even try!

But aphiemi and remittere, the words translated as forgiveness from the Greek and Latin New Testament, concern not debt but distance in their literal etymologies. Aphiemi means to send away. To remit, at its root, is to establish a distance. When authority to forgive sin is granted Peter and the disciples, for example, the operative verb is luo, to set loose." So New Testament forgiveness is a slippery thing, to say the least.

First of all, who cares about the Vulgate? Second, there is no such thing as a literal etymology, at least not one that has any necessary bearing on the meanings of the words in question. (By the way, if you admit “literal etymologies,” then you greatly weaken the liberal dismissal of arsenokoitai as referring to all sex between men.) And what does the English word “remit” have to do with the Latin remittere, anyway! This is sloppy, sloppy, sloppy. And you have not in the slightest established that “New Testament forgiveness is a slippery thing.”

All of this is only to admit that aphiemi is used in the New Testament without a great deal of consistency (5).

“All” of this? “All” of what? You have not provided nearly enough evidence to substantiate this claim.

I’m not particularly interested in extrapolating from scripture a semantic consistency in the usage of these Greek words, (5)

Why not? Why say so? Again, just brushing the hard work aside.

[The Gospels] are contradictory stories studded with paradoxical aphorisms (5)

That is a huge assertion that Mark Jordan is offering, and here in Potts’ use without a single piece of evidence!

I therefore take the incoherencies and contradictions of scriptural forgiveness for granted. (5)

Or you could take them as invitations to explore and find out that what you thought were incoherencies and contradictions—of which, again, you haven’t even listed a single one—are actually things you didn’t understand.

If sin is distance, then God’s love will be signaled by the chasm Christ crosses to meet us rather than the torture he bears to win us.

It’s “God demonstrates His love for us in that…Christ died for us” not that Christ became human for us. I’m not saying God doesn’t demonstrate His love for us in the Incarnation. But don’t you say God doesn’t demonstrate His love for us in the Crucifixion.

He thinks through and articulates the social problematization of forgiveness as sometimes practiced today just fine. But his biblical hermeneutics are wholly unoriginal and unthoughtful. His attempt at exegetical problematization falls completely flat.

He sees a bad hermeneutic. But instead of correcting the hermeneutic, he just abandons all attempt. The effect will be to cave to secular ethics about the dismissal of sin and thus erase a virtue, and he’ll denigrate the Bible.

Is there a social problem with mandating conditionless forgiveness? Absolutely. Is there also a social problem with eliminating forgiveness altogether—which Potts doesn’t claim to be doing, but which he is effectively doing by redefining it? Absolutely. (There’s also an are-you-actually-following-Jesus? problem if you do so.)

Holy smokes. Beloved is not remotely a Christ figure. Claiming as much amounts to literary malpractice.

So far, Potts’ Forgiveness: An Alternative Account seems beautiful…and spurious.

Idea for a novel: Upon His arrest, Jesus goes ahead and does appeal to the Father to send twelve legions of angels. Then what happens?

Today was the first day I had “If reading a book, read the book” on my to-do list. It appears at 5 PM instead of at the beginning of the day so I’m not prompted to read a book over lunch, which is always a matter of divided attention and never long enough to give the book the time it needs to actually enter my mind and be fully enjoyed. I’ll read articles over lunch when I’m eating alone, sure. But sometimes I even question that, wondering whether the time might be better spent fully enjoying my food or allowing my mind to wander.

Anyway, I just dedicated all my attention to reading a mere half a chapter of Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries by Kory Stamper. My reading pleasure in doing so, was, like triple that when I was reading the same book while also eating. This is the way.

•• ¡ spoiler alert ! ••

The most remarkable thing about The Night Watchman, which is a good friend’s favorite book ever, is the suggestive congruence between Bucky’s paralysis, brought on by his sin, and Thomas’ stroke, brought on by his struggle against others’ sin.

I suppose it’s more accurate and parallel to say it’s Patrice’s vengeful unforgivingness that brings on Bucky’s paralysis. But may be wading into dicey discussional waters.

Hypothesis: A big reason we love books, movies, and recorded music is that they offer to our lower brains a passable simulacrum of company. Inspiring, beautiful, mind-expanding they can be. But they are, at their root, an inferior substitute for basic emotional and relational goods that come from real, live, human company…

…writes the man whose wife of twenty years hasn’t been home in a week and is currently incommunicado on a sailboat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

Dr. Seuss should’ve entitled it Oh, the Mistakes You’ll Make!

Finished reading: How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told (2023) by Harrison Scott Key. A breezy, raw, comic, winsomely Christian cuckold’s memoir.

headlamp + summertime + living next to a large park → reading a book while meandering outdoors at night 🔦📚

Pretty much everything written in this book about adolescents could be written about any of us (except the course of development stuff and the added intensity and volatility it brings).

I take it that it is normal for an adolescent to behave for a considerable length of time in an inconsistent and unpredictable manner; to fight his impulses and to accept them… to love his parents and to hate them … to revolt against them and be dependent on them … to be more idealistic, artistic, generous, and unselfish than he will ever be again, but also the opposite: self-centered, egoistic, calculating. Such fluctuations between extreme opposites would be deemed highly abnormal at any other time of life. At this time they signify no more than that an adult structure of personality takes a long time to emerge.

Anna Freud is quoted as saying the above in 1958 in the front matters. It is good to keep in mind.

Perhaps most important, this book will ditch the dangerous view that adolescents are mentally healthy only when they can sustain a sense of feeling good. In its place, we’ll get to know a truly useful and psychologically accurate definition of emotional health: having the right feelings at the right time and being able to manage those feelings effectively (xxiv).

The above is the main point of the book. And a good one not only for adolescents, but for all people. A good corrective to some of what you hear out there, and a good corrective to how I think sometimes (although I never put it in the exact term “mental health” but rather in my constant quest for happiness).

First and foremost, we want our teenagers to regard their feelings in this important way: as data. Whether painful or pleasant, emotions are fundamentally informational. They bubble up as we move through our days, delivering meaningful feedback. Our emotions give us status reports on our lives and can help guide decision making (10).

Love the above.

Emotional pain promotes maturation Feeling the emotional impact of difficult experiences helps us to grow up (17)

Ethan? Paging Ethan? She wrote that one having heard it from you.

People stop maturing at the point when they start abusing substances…when substances come into the mix…maturation halts. Whatever else can be said about drugs and alcohol, they are very good at blocking emotional pain, and therefore the maturation that comes with it. (17)

Handy to keep in mind when interacting with anyone.

Remaining calm when teenagers become undone communicates the critical point that we are not frightened by their acute discomfort, and so they don’t need to be frightened by it either (20).

More good advice above! Read it again!

“I can tell you from both the research and my own clinical experience that emotional intensity actually peaks around age thirteen or fourteen and then slowly tapers down from there” (78).

Got it.

As for effective apologies, researchers have found that they include six components: explicitly saying that you are sorry, offering an explanation, acknowledging responsibility, promising not to repeat the mistake, trying to make amends, and requesting forgiveness.

Memorize the above! SERPAF is a good mnemonic.

[S]leep is the glue that holds human beings together (160).

Hear ye, hear ye!

“Love is never any better than the lover.”

— Toni Morrison

Remember: Jon Levenson says that the controlling metaphor in the Hebrew Bible for the relationship between Israel and YHWH is that of a suzerain and vassal or a king and subject and that love from the Israel side is therefore primarily expressed as glad, grateful obedience. When we say we’re going to love the Lord our God with our all hearts, minds, souls, and strengths, what we’re saying is we’re going to gladly obey Him with all of ourselves.

On having “enough” time to write songs:

One of the main ways we cheat ourselves out of creating is the widely held belief that we need the right amount of time to make something of value—to make something worthwhile. We often resist a moment of inspiration because we’re aware of a limited time window that might interrupt the flow and therefore think, “It’s not even worth it to get started because I know I won’t be able to finish it.”

— Jeff Tweedy • How to Write One Song: Loving the Things We Create and How They Love Us Back (2020)

On just creating, damnit:

But all the time spent creating, if I’m in the right frame of mind, is not really so much about “Is this good or bad?” There’s just a lot of joy in it, in having created something at all. I don’t feel as bad about other things. I don’t necessarily feel high, or overly joyed. I just feel like, “Oh, I’m not wasting my time.”

— Jeff Tweedy • How to Write One Song: Loving the Things We Create and How They Love Us Back (2020)

On writing without thinking about what you’re writing about:

Creating something out of nothing is the important part. And maybe, like me, you’ll discover that you’re often better off learning how to write without much concern for what you’re writing about. And through that process, you’ll discover what is on your mind. “Jesus, Etc.” was never about anything specific to me until I sang it live for the first time and learned how sincerely it conveyed my wish for a better sense of unity with my extremely devout Christian neighbors. So do some free writing. Write without thinking. I’m sure there will be some things that will surprise you, along with some nonsense.

— Jeff Tweedy • How to Write One Song: Loving the Things We Create and How They Love Us Back (2020)

“You going to be here much longer?” He asked, and then turned rather red. She might suspect his reasons for asking.

“Another week,” she answered, and stared at him as if to lunge at his next remark when it left his lips.

– Warren & Bernice in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” (1920)

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald • “The Rich Boy” (1926)

This made me think of Donald Trump.

The house loomed up suddenly beside him, and his first thought was that it had assumed a strange unreality. There was nothing changed—only everything was changed. It was smaller and it seemed shabbier than before—there was no cloud of magic hovering over its roof and issuing from the windows of the upper floor. He rang the door-bell and an unfamiliar colored maid appeared. Miss Jonquil would be down in a moment. He wet his lips nervously and walked into the sitting-room—and the feeling of unreality increased. After all, he saw, this was only a room, and not the enchanted chamber where he had passed those poignant hours. He sat in a chair, amazed to find it a chair, realizing that his imagination had distorted and colored all these simple familiar things.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald • “‘The Sensible Thing’” (1924)