Program Notes

Another of the king’s chief men, approving of his wise words and exhortations, added thereafter: “The present life of man upon earth, O king, seems to me, in comparison with that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through t…

My new favorite treatment of AI in the workplace is S1E37 of Shaun the Sheep, “Helping Hound”.

Buckle up for a long and extraordinary passage of Barthian theological exegesis: If God does not meet us in His jealous zeal and wrath—exactly as He meets Israel according to the witness of the Old Testament, exactly as He meets it later in the crucifixion

Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow:

Socrates had it exactly backwards.

Brad Littlejohn has out today a clever five-part vehicular typology of LLM use, riffing on Steve Jobs’ famous description of the personal computer as a “bicycle for the mind.”

When I encounter something foreign to me, I do not want to see only that which is my own.

Jason Staples’ Paul and the Resurrection of Israel: Jews, Former Gentiles, Israelites was one of my favorite reads of last year; a really path-breaking work in Pauline scholarship, that clears up a great many confusing issues surrounding St.

When writing the First Piano Concerto, surely Brahms must have been thinking of the Mozart D minor Concerto and Chopin’s G minor Ballade.

No, I still haven’t read Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine — it feels like a book I am “supposed to have read by now,” a feeling which always activates my contrarian impulse to keep on not having read it (“what do you mean, you never went to a single…

This is a fascinating story in The Atlantic on the scholarship (and, inevitably, politics) of “experiential relativity” — the hypothesis that human emotional and affective experience differs dramatically, perhaps almost incommensurably, between times and…

The investigative practices of the early modern sciences, when they function solely as regulative instruments for isolating discrete areas of investigation from every larger interpretive context, definitely allow for an enormous range of discoveries and a…

In Exodus 33:12–13, Moses famously pleads with the LORD to not abandon Israel after her apostasy with the golden calf — but he pleads in a curious manner: See, you say to me, ‘Bring up this people,’ but you have not let me know whom you will send with me.

It is not at all that the word of man in the Bible has an abnormal significance and function.

Most time-tested schools of thought ultimately converge, in some form, on one of two answers about the fundamental, generative reality of (depending on the field being analyzed) a person, society, culture, or the universe: either conflict or love.

“[Perhaps] it’s true that the surest path to certain kinds of scientific knowledge is the construction of strictly third-person accounts of things; but we mustn’t forget that there really is no such thing as a third-person perspective.

In a fabulous essay on the ambiguities of Paul Kingsnorth’s lifelong project as summed up in his new book, Against the Machine, Adam Smith takes a stab at defining “the Machine”: There are various ways to explain what the Machine is, but one way is to sta…

A spectacular (and spectacularly long) passage from Barth on the church: To understand this we must above all try to see that over against Jesus Christ the Church is not a chance, i.e., an arbitrary construction.

I was asked the other day to explain my habitual use of the honorific “St.” — e.g., St.

As an example of Wagner’s misunderstanding of his own expressivist genius, take his most self-conscious effort at a classicist work, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg.

The great works of European art music exist in an aesthetic field defined by the dipole of classicism and expressivism, the two generative sensibilities that drive (or drove) developments in musical style between about 1700 and 1950.

If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and, though they discipline him, will not listen to them, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders

A fantastic essay from Zac Koons, including this stellar line: “The rapid creep of AI into every nook and cranny of life represents a golden opportunity for our churches to grow and flourish.

The safety of home, the allure of afar: … modern everyday culture ceaselessly evokes and reproduces these two promises.

Sketch for a longer reflection: St.