Scott Stilson

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Hope is:

Fear is the undesired version of the same.

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I see colors in the dark ✏️ 🎤 🎵

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Revive us, O Lord.
But this time, do it right. ✏️ 🎤 🎵

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Just listened to: Leonardo da Vinci: La musique secrète (2019) performed by Doulce Mémoire under the direction of Denis Raisin Dadre. Seventy-eight minutes of exquisite Renaissance chamber music selected as an expression of Raisin Dadre’s musicological reflection on ten paintings of Leonardo.

I especially like me the sound of some lira da braccio, an instrument which sounds like a slightly more primordial Italian take on the Swedish nyckelharpa. When nobility is built into the very timbre of the instrument, it’s hard to go wrong.

Bonus points for to whoever decided to allow little to no gap between the tracks on this album, a decision that in my limited experience listening to classical recordings is an interest-propelling rarity.

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Karl Barth and Warren Buffet look like fraternal twins and they were/are both polyamorous? It’s all too much.

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Just re-listened to: I Want To See Pulaski At Night (2013) by Andrew Bird. Pretty. Mostly just layers of strings loops surrounding the one song in the middle. Thus I’m not sure it’d stand up well to fully attentive listening. But still, quite pretty.

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Just watched: A Fish Called Wanda (1988), written and directed by Charles Crichton and John Cleese. It took some time for me to warm up to the humor (or maybe it was the humor itself that took some time to warm up). But once warm, the (admittedly rather broad) comedy came in buckets. All three leads whose lines were written for laughs do it excellently: Cleese does sympathetic pathetic very believably. Kline played a “live-action Daffy Duck”: Annoying at first, then annoying and hilarious. And he won an Oscar for it. Palin manages to play a severe stutterer without, as it seemed to me anyway, playing the stutter itself for laughs. (The stutter does serve as a small plot device sometimes, and it does enable at least one very funny scene in which it is a miracle Cleese and Palin don’t bust out laughing. But mostly it serves to develop sympathy for the character. If the stutter is ever the butt of a joke, it’s a mean joke told by another character and makes you like Palin’s character...

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Listening to Peter Gabriels’s “Big Time” with the volume cranked up is an excellent way to extract and maintain one’s hold on the verve created by a winning streak but satirically strip out the attendant bigheadedness.

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Questions are good.
Answers are better. ✏️ 🎤 🎵

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I have concluded that:

yet I still feel like a conservative Christian. It probably has something to do with me maintaining in my Christianity a robust vertical dimension. God is real, personal, and knowable. It seems so many who hold positions similar to those I outlined above jettison theology altogether—or at least any theology they feel comfortable sharing or acting on in any social context—limiting their observable Christianity to horizontal, that is, human-to-human relationships.

As such, it’s often hard to feel at home anywhere.

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Just listened to: Matthias Goerne’s and Leif Ove Andsnes’ recording of Robert Schumann’s Liederkreis, op. 24 & Kernerlieder op.35 on Harmonia Mundi (2019).

I’m new to lieder. But it’s more than apparent that Schumann was a master at writing them and Goerne a master at singing them. Add to this a world-famous pianist recorded at roughly the same volume level as Goerne’s baritone, and you have yourself a superlative 53-minute recital of German Romantic art songs.

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Familiarity breeds laxity.

By this I mean that in my relationships with my wife and kids, I am not consistently stanced to apply the same effort toward socially sensitive demeanor and diction that I do in my relationships with friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. My habitus outside the family is more disciplined and sympathetic than that within. There’s a certain alertness and natural effort to fit with other people that seems to arise only outside the comfortable confines of home.

I’d like to reimport that stance back into my home life. Sure, home is for relaxation. But I sense in myself a slackness of love. Carla, Sullivan, and Éa deserve better.

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I have occasionally found myself wondering whether journaling and posting as frequently as I have been is good. Doing so requires time and attention that I could deploy toward other, more directly interpersonal matters. And it’s probably sometimes a neurotic response to the fear of death. But the fact is I do feel more fully alive when I have been writing. And just now, as I was grabbing a late-morning protein snack from the kitchen, it occurred that I would pay a non-significant sum to have access to the collected written output of my parents, my grandparents, or my great-grandparents. The more voluminous and representative of their psyches I knew their output to be, the higher sum I would pay. I want to know them. It would be good for me to know them. It would be good in the way similar to how reading a great novel is good: You get to know your fellow humans, you cultivate sympathy, and you get to know yourself, all of which foster loving, harmonious, sympathetic, self-controlled...

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Just listened to: Portraits of a Mind (2023) featuring works composed by Ralph Vaughan Williams and Ian Venables performed by Alessandro Fisher, The Navarra Quartet, and William Vann. Maybe an hour of a tenor emoting impressionistic and devotional lyrics atop a string quartet and a piano isn’t your cup of English breakfast. It, or at least this particular hour of it, is certainly mine.

And maybe you’ll listen anyway to share in Vaughan Williams’ love for Dorian and Mixolydian modes, or to hear strong evidence in the Venables that the craft of contemporary art song lives on beautifully, or to wonder at or join in on the ardently devotional lyrics the agnostic RVW chose to set to equally ardent music.

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If the 35–40 minutes it’ll take to read my essay about the reasons for and mechanisms of the cross of Christ is too verbose, Richard Beck, professor of Psychology at Abilene Christian University, has managed to encapsulate almost all of my answer in the just five short paragraphs that close this post.

The only fault I can find with his take isn’t really even a fault per se: He puts forward no explicit caveat that the forgiveness on offer is not human-to-human forgiveness but rather God-to-human only. I’m sure, however, Beck would agree with that if asked. I suppose also don’t agree with some of the ontology and hamartiology he puts forward in the posts leading up to the one I’m recommending.

But still, “A Theology of Everything: Part 7, Love Made Visible Within History” is well worth your four minutes.

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Lord, help me to distinguish righteousness from scruples.

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Goodbye, Facebook. “To give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together”? Ha. I should have shut down my account five years ago.

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The Holy Spirit ≠ spontaneity. The Holy Spirit ≠ awe at nature. The Holy Spirit ≠ frissons, feelings, or warm fuzzies. The Holy Spirit’s presence and activity may sometimes be coterminous with these phenomena. But He is not them, and the presence of these phenomena does not mean He is at work. Thinking otherwise can be quite misleading. Look instead for the fruit.

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Related to my last post, the average Peruvian woman (4'11¾") would see me as pretty tall, but the average Dutchman (6'0") would see me as of average height. Meanwhile, the average adult blue whale would see me as larger than its food but still pretty tiny, and the average sugar ant probably wouldn’t see me to notice me at all, but if it did, would think me beyond colossal.

Of course, there’s a non-relative right answer: I stand 5'11¾ inches tall. But none of the four viewers in the above paragraph is wrong in seeing what they see. I’m not saying people couldn’t be wrong about my height or about the nature of God. But I am trying to give people like me who worry about the problem of religious pluralism a little less to worry about.

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In in attempt to reply to Éa’s examining questions on Friday night that were essentially restatements of the problem of religious pluralism which came after she returned from a school field trip to Buddhist, Sikh, Hindu, and Jain temples in Pittsburgh, I stumbled into what I now take as a highly satisfactory answer: Think of how various people would describe me. Carla would describe me one way. Sullivan would describe me another way. You would describe me still another. A stranger on the street looking at me for the first time would describe me still a fourth way. And so on. In fact, everyone would describe me at least a little bit differently. The various takes on me would be accurate in part but inaccurate in others. Descriptive patterns and similarities would be evident, but never total. And a person who had never seen me wouldn’t really be able to describe me at all—nor even be able to say with any confidence that I exist. (Here we bump up against the problem of divine hiddenness,...

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Just re-listened to: Cusp (2018) by Alela Diane. A gentle yet sometimes haunting song cycle foregrounding self-harmonized alto vocals delivering maternal lyrics over perfectly understated instrumentation. Indie piano folk with just enough vocal reverb to make the songs feel old—which is weird because in the era these songs lightly evoke, no one made records with reverb on them because they were doing it on wax cylinders. But hey, it worked for Fleet Foxes, and it works for her, their obvious fellow Pacific Northwesterner and tourfellow.

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Just listened to: The Livelong Day (2019) by Lankum. If you’re an Irish tradster but you let too much North Atlantic rain into your soul, your insides start to transmute into wet peat. For Ian, Daragh, Cormac, and Radie, that meant drone metal started to seep out of their pores. (And it’s getting worse.)

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Our Father, who are in heaven…

…hallowed be Your name.
…how I want You here.
…help me get some sleep.
…how long will it take? ✏️ 🎤 🎵

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A dress draped to dry over a stainless barbell. Poetic and resourceful.

An olive green dress draped to dry over a loaded staineless steel barbell in a basement

Lord, I am the dress.

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Lord, grant me a good, true, and beautiful sense of what is good, true, and beautiful.