Lord, help me to distinguish righteousness from scruples.

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.

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.

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.

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,...

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.

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.)

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? ✏️ 🎤 🎵

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

Lord, I am the dress.

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

It was a pleasure today to select recordings from which to make custom ringtones for when Sullivan and Éa call me. (I’ve been using “Whistle Stop” from Disney’s Robin Hood for Carla for years.) Éa even advised me on my selection for her, suggesting the winner (the first twenty-nine seconds of “Mrs. Robinson” by Simon & Garfunkel. For Sullivan, I chose the first thirty seconds of Quincy Jones’ “Soul Bossa Nova,” signifying his easygoing demeanor and his prioritizing enjoyment.

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.

In British English, collective nouns, such as “team” and “Microsoft,” often take plural verbs, as in “My team are headed for the championships” and “Microsoft charge me for cloud storage.” I wish we did it this way in America, at least for corporations and governments. That’s because using the singular here hides the personal agency at play in those corporations’ and governments’ decisions and policies, and therefore the credit or guilt people deserve. I dislike it for the same reason I dislike non-poetic metonymy.

A workaround in American English is to use something like “the folks at Google” or “the members of the Trump administration.”

You have heard it said, “Hate has no home here.” But I say to you, make a home for hate your heart. Hate heartily that which is hateful, including, yes, hate itself of any human being.

This is, I admit, merely a prescriptivist’s kvetch, since at some point somebody certainly did sneak a definition into the word “hate” that appears to mean “hostility and aversion based on category of human, such as skin color or sexuality.” But this new definition must not be permitted to elbow out its very useful precursor, that is, simply, “intense or passionate dislike.” Hate, defined as such, is, like trust and guilt, a very good thing—a virtue, even—when its is justly pointed. (I don’t need to point out the same about love, although the inverse is worth saying: Love is a very bad thing when it is unjustly pointed.) And there are plenty of things good and right to hate: ecocide, betrayal, unjustified violence, selfishness, and so on.

Just watched: The Killing (1956) adapted for screen and directed by Stanley Kubrick. A perfectly shot and richly instructive fable. (And I mean that fable part: My internal landscape has these character-constructs in it.) Tense the entirety of its short runtime. With dialogue whose clever audacity made me laugh out loud several times. Film noir bettered only by Touch of Evil and The Night of the Hunter. Its unconventional narrative structure is often praised for its ingenuity, but I think its primarily serves to (successfully) help the viewer understand the plot. (Plots are often hard to follow in film noir. See the otherwise excellent Out of the Past.) I can’t tell you my favorite part without spoiling it. 🍿

Have the folks at Google been trying to sell you a storage subscription because your Google account storage is running full? Is your Gmail the primary taker upper of space? Worry no more! They have provided an alternative solution free of charge: Open a second Google account and then follow the Get only old messages instructions here to effectively turn the second account into an archival repository.

Then delete your wayback emails, now safely archived elsewhere, from the original account by:

1. searching for all your messages from before a date (e.g., mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#search/before:2014),
2. ticking the checkbox column header at top left of the table to select all messages in view,
3. clicking Select all conversations that match this search to go beyond just the messages in view, and
4. clicking Delete.

The import process will take several days. Once it’s complete, you’ll want to disconnect the new account from the old one so the new one doesn’t become a second account whose storage space you have to worry about.

Thank God for evolution.

I can’t sleep at night.
Why?
It’s the problem of the heels.
I can’t win this fight.
Why?
It wasn’t part of the deal.

All I want is to feel the same
We could be walking on the ocean
But something’s always wrong ✏️ 🎤 🎵

I’ve gotta get a hold on my face ✏️ 🎤 🎵

I don’t want your mollification.
I want your real remorse. ✏️ 🎤 🎵

Your guyline is showing ✏️ 🎤 🎵

I stand amazed that humans can distinguish /m/ from /n/.

Just re-listened to: Supernatural (1998) by DC Talk, an album whose release was the first one I can remember anticipating with excitement, prompting me to assemble something resembling a listening party before I knew those were a thing. (Primary reaction: “Let’s go figure out the weird chord progression on ‘My Friend (So Long)’!”)

Yet I don’t post it to recommend it—despite its considerable formal, vocal, and especially harmonic virtues, it comes off sonically bloated, smugly identitarian, lyrically derivative, and vapidly devotional instead of inventive, moral, artistic, and Christian—but rather to wonder: How am I only just now realizing DC Talk was a boy band?

May may be merry
Yet September’s the real cherry ✏️ 🎤 🎵

•• ¡ 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.