Not sure how I missed this one, but here’s a couple-of-years-old clip of Andrew Peterson, new album almost finished now, singing a classic Don Henley song (with bgvs from some other amazing artists).
(hat tip to the artist and Twitter)
Sometimes I think going to a “Skywalker Saga” Star Wars movie for the John Williams soundtrack alone is perfectly fine. The director of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Rian Johnson, recently posted a clip of Williams directing one of the most famous snippets from the original soundtrack.
I was recently inspired to re-read The Moviegoer by Walker Percy. I read it soon after moving to Hawaii, and I’m enjoying it quite a bit (as I seem to have forgotten quite a bit). Here’s one of my favorite quotes from Binx so far.
What is the nature of the search? you ask.
Really it is very simple, at least for a fellow like me, so simple that it is easily overlooked.
The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. This morning, for example, I felt as if I had come to myself on a strange island. And what does such a castaway do? Why, he pokes around the neighborhood and he doesn’t miss a trick.
To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.
This poem by Wendell Berry showed up in my Twitter feed yesterday. I quite like it, particularly as a distillation of Berry’s thought and practice.
(hat tip to Nick Ripatrazone)
Earlier in the week I posted a short piece about what I did this past Saturday, when the “ballistic missile alert” text was sent and then, many minutes later, rescinded. These last couple of days has allowed me to catch up with students and co-workers. There are so many different responses to such an interesting and sobering moment!
Michael Brendan Dougherty of the National Review posted a great reflection on the moment from the lens of recent history. The whole thing is worth reading, but here’s a great quote:
The U.S. post–Cold War holiday from history was destined to end. And it should frighten every sensible person to consider that so many of the events that could have precipitated nuclear conflict during the Cold War were halted by men who personally remembered the last round of great-power conflict, and that all those men are now dead. They’ve been replaced by others whose experience of foreign policy could never be so educative. Similarly, in the Korean peninsula, the men who remember the awful horrors of that war are dying.
In many ways, the modern world is younger, dumber, and more innocent about these things than our grandparents were. We discovered that on Saturday in Hawaii. And now is the time to think it through. If you ever received such a text warning, would you fill your bathtub with water, or with your family members? How many of us turn to resources for advice — YouTube, text — that won’t be available in the event of real disruption?
You can read the whole thing here.
This past Saturday morning was one of those moments that will be difficult to forget.
It started out like almost every other Honolulu Saturday morning for me. Slept in a little bit (compared to a work day). Caught the bus down to the coffee shop where I usually grab a hot breakfast before walking over to check out what’s new at Barnes and Noble. Frustratingly, the wifi was out, so I had to settle for my phone and whatever was downloaded to my iPad. My phone, as usual, had been put to the side. I remember hearing what sounded like the buzz of a new email, which I didn’t check. Then I heard the worker at the counter ask someone if they had “gotten the message.” I looked at my phone and saw the the message from 8:07 am in all caps and ending “this is not a drill.”
I had no idea what to do. I’d left a movie theater for a tsunami warning. I’d put up plywood for a hurricane warning. I’d experienced an earthquake. But a ballistic missile alert? That’s something from the worst of my 1980s-fueled imagination, really. So I took my coffee and backpack and headed for Ala Moana Center, which was across the street. I wasn’t sure if it was all that safe, really. As I walked, I pointed out the phone message to others who had not heard anything. I came across a group of workers leaving their not-yet-opened story. Still not knowing where to go (and knowing that getting back home wasn’t an option), I stopped and spoke to a couple of bus drivers waiting on instructions from their office. And then, just after speaking to a couple of tourists at a bus stop, I made my way over to the new gym that just opened by the new Target.
Along the way I got a phone call from a friend and co-worker checking on me. I think I got a call in to my landlady. At some point long the walk, phone service stopped working. So I was glad to get a FaceTime call from a friend while waiting in the gym to see what would happen next. I couldn’t find anything of consequence online or with Twitter. The lady next to me, though, eventually said something about a false alarm. We looked it up and there it was. Others around the lobby confirmed what she had found. We quietly dispersed and went back to our Saturday mornings.
I went back to the coffee shop, grabbed a small coffee, and used my phone to look online for different responses (mostly Twitter, as I’d removed the Facebook app from my phone couple of years ago). Lots of confusion. Anger, too. After a while I made my way over to Barnes and Noble, reflecting on what had (and had not) just happened. On my way from there, I ran into a few friends, who still seemed to be processing things as well.
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Sunday brought a couple of different church services, a couple of different conversations. It brought more news, more processing things from a national perspective. My own Twitter feed (the people I follow) didn’t have much to say about the alert at all. Finally Rod Dreher posted a hypothetical-question that used the alert as a springboard for others to question what they would have done had they been a part of the situation. Most of the humor from almost every source was rooted in relief. One pastor I heard, after finishing the bulk of his sermon, took a small digression to share from his own experience. It was, perhaps, the most comforting and challenging thing I had heard.
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I’ve learned some things about myself over the last couple of days. I’ve realized some things worth un-learning. And I continue to learn more about what it means to live a single life, somehow rooted in the Christian faith, far away from family and a deep history. It’s been a reminder of the kind of “sitting duck” existence all of us live, some more than others, each in our own times and ways. And if I let Him, God will use it to continue showing me a better way.
Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD continues to hit it out of the space-time ballpark. Now, as their journey to the future crescendoes, some major plot devices from previous seasons are coming into play. The end-of-episode reveal this week was as cool as the return of Gravitonium (which some have been speculating about for a while). Here’s the preview for next week’s episode.
The floor of my digital mind is littered with reflections that didn’t make it to this site. At the end of December, I started titling a handful of entries with the phrase “Unclosed Loop.” It’s a reference to something I learned a few years ago from Douglas Rushkoff, who suggests that lots of stress comes from mental loops that we can’t seem to bring full circle. What’s nice is that this keeps some things open for reinterpretation as life continues. What’s frustrating is that a good and necessary “marker” doesn’t get made in my mental-and-digital record of things.
I had meant to spend a good amount of time with Alan Jacobs’s How to Think, a nice and quick read that dropped a few months ago. The book has a number of great things as components of the author’s main argument, things that I hope to revisit in my own “Thought” classes.
One of the best things that Jacobs brings out is the social nature of thinking. He does this brilliantly by contrasting two popular essays by C. S. Lewis: “Membership” and “The Inner Ring.” It’s a great example of “thinking Christianly” without beating people over the head with it. In the chapter titled “Attractions,” Jacobs asserts:
Along that path we can learn from one another in a great many ways– and we have a chance of discovering unexpected opportunities for membership: for there can be more genuine fellowship among those who share the same disposition than those who share the same beliefs, especially if that disposition is toward kindness and generosity.
That’s a very sobering assertion, particularly to someone who strongly thinks that what you believe matters. But I think Jacobs is onto something. I have found that similarity of belief doesn’t necessarily become the foundation for better work so much as it becomes an excuse to refrain from wrestling with difficult things (including the implications of the things believed in common).
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One of the other “unclosed loops” that I need to get back around to before the month closes out is a previous mention of C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. At the end of last semester, I decided to make the book required reading for my senior Bible class. It’s a trial run, a way of seeing (1) if it is doable and (2) if it could be a junior-level reading. Because I’d really like to get to Jacobs’s How to Think with students. Agree with him or not, Lewis and his work in Mere Christianity is a great example of a long-form argument that starts well and goes in the right direction.
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“How to think” is something that a professor like Christian Smith (mentioned in a post here yesterday) would probably say is missing from the current higher education experience. That he notes the deep roots of this in our recent past and the long-term implications of this for our future is a sobering reminder that many of us have not been trained in a good kind of metacognition (we can call it out in our students, but we probably aren’t all that able to call it out in ourselves). It’s a good and consistent challenge for each of us . . . and for the institutions we inhabit.
One of the first things that crossed my virtual desk this morning was this brilliantly rendered essay by Christian Smith. I quickly got a copy to a friend. And then, throughout the day, I couldn’t help but share it with others.
The awkward continuum that can exist between all levels of education, from elementary school to college, is one of the most interesting and elusive things to think about and try to capture. Some things trickle up; most things trickle down. Sometimes, schools lack the filters and frameworks necessary to combat some of the things that Smith calls out as BS. Here are some of Smith’s assertions that stand out to me:
BS is the university’s loss of capacity to grapple with life’s Big Questions, because of our crisis of faith in truth, reality, reason, evidence, argument, civility, and our common humanity.
BS is the farce of what are actually “fragmentversities” claiming to be universities, of hyperspecialization and academic disciplines unable to talk with each other about obvious shared concerns.
BS is the expectation that a good education can be provided by institutions modeled organizationally on factories, state bureaucracies, and shopping malls — that is, by enormous universities processing hordes of students as if they were livestock, numbers waiting in line, and shopping consumers.
And then:
BS is undergraduate “core” curricula that are actually not core course systems but loose sets of distribution requirements, representing uneasy truces between turf-protecting divisions and departments intent on keeping their classes full, which students typically then come to view as impositions to “get out of the way.”
That phrase “get out of the way” really stings.
It’s a worthwhile read. And even if it doesn’t look like it’s going to “go there,” Smith does a good job in the second half of the essay to handle the other end of the academic conversation that strengthens instead of weakens his observations.
Just when you think you’ve hit the real sweet-spot with super-hero shows on television, something else comes along that just might add something significant to the mix. While I’ve kept most of my super-hero watching to three shows on the CW, I have expanded this season to Fox’s The Gifted. And now we have the story of Superman’s ancestors coming on SyFy in March. Here’s the first full trailer for Krypton.
The production values look quite good. And the cast is off-the-beaten-path enough that it could feel fresh. Definitely worth at least one viewing when it drops in the spring.
Space Enough, and Time 