First, St. Augustine’s sermon 185:
Rise, you that sleep, and arise from the dead, and Christ will enlighten you (Eph 5:14). For you, I repeat, God became man. You would have died for eternity, unless he had been born in time. You would never be set free from the flesh of sin, unless he had taken to himself the likeness of the flesh of sin (Rom 8:3). You would have been in the grip of everlasting misery, had it not been for the occurrence of this great mercy.
This will hopefully be the first of many “Five Things” posts. I plan to use them to highlight interesting things that I’ve read or reckoned with over the preceding week. Without further preamble, my first two things belong to a similar category: the sort of biblical scholarship (my favorite sort, really) that compellingly says “you keep using that word; it does not mean what I think you think it means”.
In this post, Alan Jacobs concludes with an insightful and concise hierarchy of technological tools:
Paper in preference to digital; flat files in preference to databases; cross-platform tools in preference to one-platform tools. This is the only way.
I can’t speak for him, but behind this hierarchy I perceive a pair of countercultural but correct and urgent moral and intellectual conclusions: we must own our data, and it must be portable.
After reading Simone Weil’s The Need for Roots (which is itself an inevitable result of reading enough Alan Jacobs, Matthew Crawford, and Paul Kingsnorth, who all cite her on various key points), I think this brief quote may summarize the weightiness and urgency of this book:
The acquisition of knowledge brings us closer to the truth when it is knowledge of what we love, and not in any other instance (Simone Weil, The Need for Roots, trans. Ros Schwartz [Penguin, 2023], 195).
The pressing question: how can we learn to love our subjects, and, even more, teach our students to love them?