This guy. I’m telling you. This guy! He’s so good you almost want to stop writing. So gut-level and truthful and witty and articulate, yet somehow tossed off seeming. I’m talking about Tim Kreider, who batted another one out of the park this week with “I Know What You Think Of Me” for the NY Times. It’s a short and deceptively wise reflection on the insights one can glean when someone accidentally hits “reply” instead of “forward” on an email. What may sound like the epitome of a modern problem/nightmare is, in Kreider’s hands, not simply the latest iteration of…
Another Week Ends: Snowden Psychology, Child Stars Grown Up, Sleep Perfomance, the Science of Risk-Management, and Ira Glass on Jesus Freaks
1) I guess the graduation speeches were of quite the well-suited ilk this year—fitted more for the heart and less the diploma. Jonathan Safran-Foer spoke at Middlebury’s graduation (the transcript was then printed for the Times), and talked a lot about today’s ease of communication and, thus, today’s relational retreat. Entitled “How Not To Be Lonely,” he catalogues some of the cultural and social restraints of technology, something we love…to…talk…about, but what’s more interesting is the focus he takes on power of intervention and attention.
He remembers sitting in a park, next to a woman who crying in public. Not knowing…
From The Onion: Anxiety Resolved By Thinking About It Really Hard
The Onion’s been on fire this week, but they hit a real highpoint today. Just too apropos not to post:
WALTHAM, MA—Potentially offering hope to millions of Americans struggling with psychological and emotional problems, a study published this week in The New England Journal Of Medicine found that test subjects were capable of fully resolving their anxiety by thinking about it very intensely.
The study, which followed 1,200 adults suffering from mild unease to chronic anxiety, confirmed that focusing continuously and exclusively on one’s own specific sources of distress to the point that one’s mental and physical health began to suffer was…
So Lonely You Could Die
Lots to be gleaned from Judith Shulevitz’s “The Lethality of Loneliness” in The New Republic and not just because it dovetails so neatly with Ethan’s post on the bodily aspects of anxiety last week. The article explores some recent research into loneliness and manages to ring a few alarm bells in the process. It may go without saying, but far from being just a spiritual or emotional malady, loneliness has been shown to have a clear physical component/consequence. Introversion or extroversion simply changes the way a person experiences loneliness–it does not protect them from it outright. More commentary at the bottom,…
Kierkegaard and Young Adult Anxiety
Believe it or not, we’re down to the penultimate video from last month’s conference in NYC. This one comes to us courtesy of a true expert in the field (zing!). Will “WB” McDavid:
You may download the recording of this talk by clicking here.
Just Tell Me What I Want to Hear
I noticed an interesting phenomenon the other day: I only want to be told what I already know to be true. More specifically, I only want to hear the things I already think. It’s been a long time since I read a book that I didn’t know for sure I would like (a theology book anyway…I’m a little more forgiving of pop fiction) or ordered something from a menu that I hadn’t had (and liked) before. It’s a long-understood truism that the politically interested tend to watch and listen to the “news” programs that affirm their pre-existing beliefs. What I…
Poorly Navigating Kamikazes and the Secret History of the World
How do you write about the reality of the human condition in concrete terms without coming off as sanctimonious or a total downer? I don’t know, but I think Tim Kreider may. I’m sure I’m not the only one who was so impressed with (and addressed by) his essay “The Busy Trap” that appeared in The NY Times recently that they immediately ordered his essay collection, We Learn Nothing, which came out in paperback last month. Hard to imagine there’s another volume out there with endorsements from both Judd Apatow and David Foster Wallace, not to mention an astonishing opening…
Kierkegaard, Honesty, and Grace (200 Years Later)
Three days past Kierkegaard’s 200th birthday, some great articles have cropped up examining his legacy. The New York Times, for instance, featured a great mini-summary of his legacy; more interestingly, at aeon, atheist Julian Baggini writes a fantastic essay about his personal relationship with Kierkegaard’s thought:
He was an existentialist a century before Jean-Paul Sarte, more rigorously post-modern than postmodernism, and a theist whose attacks on religion bit far deeper than many of those of today’s new atheists. Kierkegaard is not so much a thinker for our time but a timeless thinker, whose work is pertinent for all ages yet destined…
I Can’t Fight This Feeling: The Problem of Emotion in Protestant Christianity – Simeon Zahl
Slightly re-titled but no less, er, plausible (or awesome):
You may download the recording of this talk by clicking here.
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Another Week Ends: Underconfidence, Kate Middleton’s Picnics, Unreported Medical Advice, D.H. Lawrence’s Christian Wonder, the Double-Bind of Summer Movies, More Christian Wiman, and (Way) Too Much Sociology
1. How confident are you? Over at The New York Times, David Brooks surveyed his readers to get a sense for self-confidence, lack thereof, and the ways males and females experience confidence differently. While the word itself is a bit vague and murky, and Brooks found few trends in the survey data, the individual responses are definitely worth a look:
But it was really hard to see consistent correlations and trends. The essays were highly idiosyncratic, and I don’t want to impose a false order on them that isn’t there. Let me just string together some of the interesting points…
It Came From The (Church) Basement: Addiction, Grace, and Alcoholics Anonymous
Here comes another video from our NYC conference, this time from John Zahl. In addition to some deep wisdom, it features what was hands-down the best joke of the conference.
You may download the recording of this talk by clicking here. And you may order a copy of the book that the talk is based on by clicking here.
The Law of Lightbulbs
Andrew Sullivan alerted his readers to a new study whose results should come as no surprise to readers of this blog. The study came from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and was picked up by grist.org. Here is how grist.org described the study:
With a fixed amount of money in their wallet, respondents had to “buy” either an old-school lightbulb or an efficient compact florescent bulb (CFL) . . . . Both bulbs were labeled with basic hard data on their energy use, but without a translation of that into climate pros and cons. When the bulbs cost…
Oh I’ve Been to Prague: Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig on Truth, Joy, and O’erhanging Firmaments
If for whatever reason you are ever asked to address a group of college students, I’ve found that few things hit home with as much depth or laughter as the first ten minutes of Noah Baumbach’s overstuffed yet incredibly charming debut film, Kicking and Screaming. Some of the trappings might have dated a little, but the humor holds up, as does, more importantly, the content. The opening depicts a bunch of college seniors moping around a table at their graduation party, lamenting the loss of their identity and contemplating the uncertainty of their future(s). Who am I now that I’m…
The Subtle Horror of Mad Men
Mad Men is a horror series. There… I said it. I didn’t believe this until recently. My impression was that it was a dark and brooding drama about the desperate and horny realities of life. This was until I had a conversation with a woman who could not watch the show. “Not watch Mad Men?” I thought… “How could you not watch Mad Men?” “You don’t understand,” she said… “Watching Mad Men to me is like watching horror movies to you.”
That registered with me because I am a notoriously scaredy-cat horror movie-viewer. I fidget, cover my eyes like a kid, and furiously…
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From One Juliet to Another: Sufferers Comforting Sufferers
One of the criticisms of Gospel preaching is that it can, at times, be gloomy. “Do we have to hear about sin again?”, the complaint goes, “Do you have to be so down on humanity?”, “Can’t we talk about how great life is sometimes?”, “Can’t you give me some self-improvement tools?”
To these voices the Gospel preacher replies that life is often (perhaps mostly) hard, and that as much as we might crave a word of optimism, a little fuel for the part of us that longs to live in blissful ignorance (or denial), what we really need is not to…
Alison: Thank you Ethan. That was encouraging....
Darren Sombke: One of our former students and chapel band members at Rockford Luthera...
michael cooper: Thanks for this fantastic interview...what an honest man. The Heaney p...
Todd Brewer: A brilliant, but sad, analysis. The fall of Michael and George Michael...
Clay: Michael - You could have also named this article "The Grace of Looking...