1. Probably the smartest thing I did this week was bypass most election coverage to binge The Good Lord Bird, a limited series on Showtime about John Brown. The show’s title comes from a nickname for the glorious ivory-billed woodpecker, a rare bird that represents understanding: “They say one feather from a Good Lord Bird […]
Another Week Ends: Unhappy Affluence, Aging Springsteen, COVID Grief, High Art Humor, Ghostly Foes, and Billy Joe Shaver
1. Not a particularly easy week to round up, as almost everything out there right now is conjecture of one kind or another, and I’m pretty sure I just wrote something about the pitfalls of prediction addiction. So I’ll stick to the handful of evergreen subjects that’ve come across my screen. First up would be […]
Another Week Ends: Niche Sports, Faith Healers, Super-Parents, Rediscovering Privacy, and Your Done List
1. Mbird speaker emeritus Oliver Burkeman has a new twice-a-month newsletter with a great name, The Imperfectionist, which you can sign up for if you’d like. In his inaugural edition of the newsletter, Burkeman has an uncanny insight into the unpayable debt of the cosmic to-do list: What if — and personally I find this […]
Another Week Ends: Canceling Christmas, Acceptance Parenting, Emily Dickinson, the Church in 2020, Law and Gospel, and Myside Bias
1. Will COVID cancel Christmas this year? I certainly hope not, but that’s what Giles Fraser asks in his latest at UnHerd. Much about this year’s celebration will undoubtedly be different, if not cancelled; [The Grinch] COVID might steal our banquets, caroling, pageants, and large gatherings, but perhaps this year the pathos and joy of […]
Another Week Ends: Unconscious Sin, the NBA Bubble, the Religion of Politics, Millennial Burnout, Scary Halloween Costumes, Sally Rooney, and Eddie Van Halen
1. First up, Peter Ormerod contributed a fantastic op-ed to the Guardian defending “unconscious bias training.” For those unfamiliar, many major institutions have begun programs aimed at combatting bias against race, sexuality, gender, etc., under the assumption that “some of our beliefs may be held so deeply that we are unaware of them.” As Ormerod […]
Another Week Ends: Edenic Parenting, Stryper Envy, Miscarriage Stigma, Imposter Syndrome, Clergy Burnout, and Raised By Wolves
1. Lord Almighty, what a week. Feels like we could all use a good laugh right now, and thankfully, McSweeney’s delivered a masterpiece in Audrey Burges’s “On the Seventh Day, God Created Parenting, and Then Parenting Created Coffee“: In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth in just six days, the seventh […]
Another Week Ends: Bland Land, Digital Burnout, Pale Beyond, Dominion of Jack, Guilt Lit, Depression Meals, and Electric Jesus
1. Hum, Quip, Goby, Burst, Boka, Brüush, Gleem, Shyn — these are just a few of the brands, or “blands,” seeking to disrupt the toothbrush industry right now. If you’ve scrolled through Instagram recently, no doubt you’ve seen others trying to do the same in other industries. Caspar, Harry’s, Oscar, Burrow, Keeps, Roman, Rumpl, the […]
Another Week Ends: Justin Bieber, the Tyranny of Meritocracy, Accidentally Going Viral, Pandemic Show Tunes, and More Strange Rites
1. Leading off this week, the philosopher Michael Sandel has some hefty critiques of the idea of meritocracy, specifically its disastrous effects on social and individual wellbeing in a global capitalist economy. Within a meritocracy, success becomes the law to live by that ruthlessly judges personal failure, dividing the self-righteous deserving from the unrighteous lazy. […]
Another Week Ends: WEIRDos in the West, Feigning Wack-Jobs, the Twittering Machine, Enduring Work, and Lana Del Rey Talks to Jesus
1. A happy ending for a recovering alcoholic who was rescued from drowning by Paulist priests sailing by on a tiki bar pontoon. Not everything about 2020 is awful, folks! 2. In the first of two book reviews for your consideration this week, Judith Shulevitz reviews The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West […]
Another Week Ends: Operation Ceasefire, Idiot Prayer, Racism and Sin, Troublesome Empathy, Martin Luther, and Immortality
1. A pretty obvious place to look for the dynamics of law and grace is, well, the law. In a recent story from Mother Jones, Samantha Michaels describes a program designed to curb gun violence in cities with high murder rates. Operation Ceasefire identifies people who are at risk of shooting someone or being shot; rather […]
Another Week Ends: Toxic Positivity, Justin Townes Earle, Boredom, College Reopening Disasters, and Unsolicited Advice
1. Kicking off this week’s review is a fantastic reflection in the Wall Street Journal by Mike Kerrigan: “A Late Bloomer Learns to Forgive.” A lawyer by occupation, Kerrigan speaks of his long-standing, uncomfortable relationship with forgiveness: In his autobiographical “Confessions,” St. Augustine of Hippo, whose Feast Day is celebrated Friday, admits praying as a […]
Another Week Ends: Strange Rites, QAnon, Gracious Gardens, Accelerated Alienation, Imputed Memes, Masterclasses and The Killers
1. First up, I had the privilege of penning the lead review in the latest issue of Christianity Today on Tara Isabella Burton’s phenomenal new book Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World. While the title might suggest significant overlap with #seculosity, Strange Rites is very much its own thing, both in terms of […]
