A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma...
About Will McDavid
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Language, Witness, and Control: Some Thoughts on Rhetoric and Grace
Reading Hannah Arendt’s marvelous book on The Human Condition, I came across a particularly thought-provoking paragraph on the ancient ideal of speech. Arendt draws a sharp contrast between the Greek household—which was ruled by necessity, the need to provide food and shelter and to raise children—and the political life. The two were distinct because once […]
When God Turns Down a Title
Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” Jesus answered, “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?” Pilate replied, “I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. […]
Another Week Ends: More Declining Humanities, You Shall Know Them by Their Google-Searches, Some Simone Weil, Garrison Keillor Goes to Church, the New Male (?) Self-Improvement, and Social-Media Shaming
1. First up, education. Ross Douthat at the NYT this week wrote a thoughtful appeal for the humanities, which are in serious decline. At the top thirty colleges (according to the formidable US News rankings), the proportion of humanities majors has fallen from about a third in the early 2000s to around a fifth today. […]
Another Week Ends: Theistic 'Nones', Fleming on Faith, Ideological Is-es and Oughts, Urban Kenosis, and the New Meritocratic Aristocracy
1. First up, Pew released the results of a recent survey on a religious beliefs, glossed this week by The Atlantic: The third finding reported in the study is by far the most striking. As it turns out, “American ‘nones’ are as religious as—or even more religious than—Christians in several European countries, including France, Germany, and the U.K.” […]
Another Week Ends: Social Poverty, A Lutheran Take on Chik-Fil-A, Jacobs on Propaganda, Some Occult Stuff, Faking Russian Lit, New Prince, and the Work/Life Conundrum
1. Looks like David Brooks this week is onto something again–his article on “The Blindness of Social Wealth” strikes gold. Increasingly, the defining pathology of our time is loneliness, a theme we’ve surveyed on mbird pretty extensively. Brooks makes the case sharply and succinctly: Bob Hall was a rancher. In 1936, in the midst of the […]
Another Week Ends: Self-Defeating Measurements, Neurotic Moralities, Self-Justifying Meritocracies, and Gospel-Centric Snoop Doggs
1. Over at the New York Times, Molly Worthen (of Apostles of Reason fame) wrote an interesting piece on the burgeoning learning-assessment industry. For those seeking to hone their “truthseeking” and “analyticity” (!!), teacher assessments aren’t enough; we need big data to tell us what we’re learning. Worthen’s skeptical: Here is the second irony: Learning […]
Another Week Ends: Remembering Billy Graham, Masculinity, The Midlife of Brendan Fraser, Arendt on Auden, Antisocial Churchsoundboardmen, Norwegian Grace, and (More) Technological Law
1. First up, Tullian Tchividjian posted a reflection on his remarkable grandfather, the late Billy Graham: The last real conversation I had with him will forever live in my memory. We were sitting in his bedroom. His body was frail, but his mind was still sharp. He talked to me about how hard it was […]
Another Week Ends: Thomistic Burnout, Reforming Halloween, I'll Be Small for Christmas, Christian Book Parodies, and More Fleming Rutledge
1. First up, the Angelic Doctor. Aquinas’s body of work has always been daunting to me, but I’d never realized just how prolific he was–an average of 4,000 words a day, by one reckoning. And one of the great unsung heroes of theology was his poor scribe Reginald, who faithfully took dictation almost continuously–imagine trying […]
Just My (Christian) Imagination Running Away With Me
This article was originally posted by the John Jay Institute, as part of an online symposium it held on Christian Imagination a couple years back. It’s been lightly edited. It’s embarrassingly difficult to find oneself largely without answers but with questions, especially in the context of beautiful reflections on art, liturgy, the imago dei, and […]
Another (Conference) Week Ends: Paranormativity, Dream Deprivation, Millennial Morticians, Martin Luther, Christian Book Titles for the Age of the 'Net, and More Russell Brand
1. I think it was PZ who said that belief in the paranormal is almost a precondition of Christianity. It’s easy to think that science – which is properly concerned with empirically testing and proving/disproving those things which are subject to empirical testing – has vanquished the paranormal. Back in the old days, supernatural forces pressed […]
Another Week Ends: Apple's Future; the Problem with Present-ism; Rick, Morty, Jim Carrey, and JAZ; Denis Johnson's Darkness; Bergman's Light; and HGTV-Fights
1. At Apple’s Keynote on Tuesday, Tim Cook – in classic Jobs style – gave a short history of television. The first stage was black and white, and the second was color. A third was HD. Now, he assured his audience, we’re at another “inflection point” in television history: Apple TV 4K. In hindsight, the […]
Another Week Ends: Self-Citation, GoT Fatigue, Pros and Cons of Moral Lit, Wonder in Children's Books (and Movies), Millennial GENESI$, and Funeral Etiquette
1. In the academic world this week, a new study looks at self-citations among academics. One had 7,000 citations, which is pretty good–but more than 1400 of those came from his own (later) work. There’s some ‘bootstrapping’ for you. The study also found that men over the last couple hundred years have cited to themselves […]
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