Monday, December 22, 2025
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”.
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?