For Your Consideration

In this installment, you can listen to the fourth week of Dr. Horner’s class, “Reading the Gospels: Distinctives, Contradictions, and Commonalities,” in which he discusses the gospel accounts of John the Baptist and the opening of Jesus’s public ministry. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

In this installment, you can listen to the fourth session of Michael Sacasas’s Director’s Class, “Displaced: Exploring the Moral and Theological Dimensions of Place.”The class briefly discusses nostalgia as peculiarly modern symptom of our displacement as well as the body as the focus or our experience of place. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

You can listen to the newsletter by clicking the play button above or you can click the “Listen in Podcast app” link and follow the directions to open this feed in your podcast app. Currently, you may find the feed on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and Spotify.In our “Readings in the Christian Imagination,” reading group this past Monday, we had the pleasure of hosting Zena Hitz for a time of discussion centered on her recent book, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life. In today’s podcast, you can listen to that event. During the first part of the hour, Mike Sacasas interviewed Prof. Hitz about her book, and during the latter part of the hour she fielded questions from other members of the group. In our next session (Monday, October 12th, 8: 00 PM), the group will continue to reflect on the life of the mind by reading and discussing “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” by the 20th century French thinker, Simone Weil. Please contact Mike Sacasas (mike@christianstudycenter.org) if you are interested in joining. Study Center ResourcesThis week our director’s classes continue. If you’re subscribed to this newsletter, you’ve been seeing our posts with the recordings of both classes. Our Wednesday Dante reading group continues making its way through Purgatorio as well. If you are interested in joining any of these offerings, contact Mike Sacasas. Recommended Reading— From Gracy Olmstead’s newsletter, drawing on the work of John Sommerville, a retired UF professor and dear friend of the study center:Journalists can do their part here by refusing to write “hot takes,” and seeking to offer readers better researched, more thoughtful news stories and op-eds. Reading biographies and histories, books of essays and longer analyses can also help us to “remember” better as we read.Sommerville, for his part, suggests putting news “in its place” by reading it monthly, rather than daily. This would be hard to do in some seasons, but the idea of prolonging the time between news readings suggests that we could perhaps skip some of the unnecessary or repetitive content in order to develop a more storied, context-filled understanding of what’s currently taking place.    This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

In this installment, you can listen to the third week of Dr. Horner’s class, “Reading the Gospels: Distinctives, Contradictions, and Commonalities,” in which he walks his class through the ministry of John the Baptist as presented in the gospel accounts. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

In this installment, you can listen to the third session of Michael Sacasas’s Director’s Class, “Displaced: Exploring the Moral and Theological Dimensions of Place.” In this session, the class briefly reconsiders the early chapters of Genesis through the lens of place, continues to reflect on place and identity, and reflects on the following lines from the early 20th century English writer, Hilaire Belloc: “Look you, good people all, in your little passage through the daylight, get to see as many hills and buildings and rivers, fields, books, men, horses, ships, and precious stones as you can possibly manage to do. Or else stay in one village and marry in it and die there. For one of these two fates is the best fate for every man. Either to be what I have been, a wanderer with all the bitterness of it, or to stay home and hear in one’s garden the voice of God.” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

You can listen to the newsletter by clicking the play button above or you can click the “Listen in Podcast app” link and follow the directions to open this feed in your podcast app. Currently, you may find the feed on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and Spotify.In 1943, Simone Weil, the French philosopher and activist who was living in England at the time, was tasked by the Free French government with writing a report exploring how French society might be revitalized after its liberation from Nazi Germany. Despite suffering from debilitating headaches and generally poor health, Weil completed her work during a remarkable burst of activity. She died later that year at the age of 34. The report was published in 1949. The first English translation appeared in 1952 as The Need for Roots: prelude towards a declaration of duties towards mankind. I was immediately struck by how Weil began her report. In the midst of a global cataclysm of unprecedented scope and scale, tasked with drawing up plans for the renewal of society, she begins by arguing for the primacy of human obligations rather than human rights. The very first sentence reads: “The notion of obligations comes before that of rights, which is subordinate and relative to the former.” Quite the claim coming from a French thinker, as she is well aware. As Weil sees it, rights are ineffective so long as no one recognizes a corresponding obligation, and obligations are always grounded in our common humanity. “Duty toward the human being as such—that alone is eternal,” she writes. Our obligations toward our fellow human beings, Weil goes on to argue, “correspond to the list of such human needs as are vital, analogous to hunger.” Some of these needs are physical, of course—housing, clothing, security, etc.—but Weil identified another set of needs, which she described as having to do not with the “physical side” of life but with what she calls life’s “moral side.” The non-physical needs “form … a necessary condition of our life on this earth.” In her view, if these needs are not satisfied, “we fall little by little into a state more or less resembling death.” And while she acknowledges that these needs are “much more difficult to recognize and to enumerate than are the needs of the body,” she believes “every one recognizes they exist.”I’m inclined to believe that Weil is right about this. As she suggests, “everyone knows that there are forms of cruelty which can injure a man’s life without injuring his body.” Weil goes on to call for an investigation into what these vital needs might be. They should be enumerated and defined, and she warns that “they must never be confused with desires, whims, fancies and vices.” Finally, she believes that “the lack of any such investigation forces governments, even when their intentions are honest, to act sporadically and at random.” Naturally, the rest of the work is an attempt to provide just such an enumeration and discussion of these vital needs with the express purpose of supplying a foundation for the rebuilding of French society. She deals briefly with a set of fourteen such needs before turning to a longer discussion of “rootedness” and “uprootedness,” a discussion which opens with this well-known claim: “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.” It is useful to pair this claim with Hannah Arendt’s discussion of loneliness, alienation, and superfluousness, which, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, she identifies as ideal conditions for the emergence of totalitarian regimes. “Under the most diverse conditions and disparate circumstances,” Arendt wrote, “we watch the development of the same phenomena—homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth.” Combining Weil and Arendt, then, we might say that to the degree that the need for rootedness—which is to say, a sense of belonging in relatively stable communities—goes unfulfilled, to that same degree human beings become vulnerable to destructive political regimes. My aim here, however, is not to discuss the merits of Weil’s particular enumeration of these vital needs nor to elaborate on Arendt’s argument. Rather, it is simply to recommend that we, too, undertake a similar radical analysis along the lines Weil proposed, recalling, of course, that our word radical comes to us from radix, the Latin word for roots. In other words, as we examine the multiple ills that beset our society, it may be that by returning to a fundamental consideration of human needs we may find the resources that lead to cultural renewal. Presently, we are focused on formal injustices that manifest themselves in key institutions. This work is always crucial, but its essentially critical nature may prove inadequate to the task of building a good society. To borrow a set of distinctions made by the philosopher Albert Borgmann, we may achieve a formally just society and still not have a good society. In other words, it may be possible in theory to eliminate political and economic inequalities without also providing for genuine human flourishing. Moreover, Borgmann argued that without a vision for a good society, even formal justice may prove unachievable. In his last essay for this newsletter, Dr. Horner wrote about the inadequacies of a posthumanist framing of our cultural disorders, one which accounts only for our differences without also recognizing our shared humanity or providing a vision for what a society ordered toward the common good might look like. He challenged his Christian readers, especially, to recover a distinctly Christian humanism as a foundation for our pursuit of justice. As Dr. Horner reminded us, the posthumanist framing of our experience emerged out of the distinctly modern understanding of the human being, one which ruled out any normative account of human nature or human purpose. And as Alasdair MacIntyre, among others, has pointed out, the loss of a model of human flourishing undermined all efforts to formulate a new moral theory to replace traditional models of the ethical life.Clearly this posthumanist framing poses a serious challenge to any effort to imagine a good society ordered toward virtue and human flourishing. But perhaps Weil’s project offers us a way forward, a renewed humanism premised not merely upon human exceptionalism and self-sufficiency but rather upon human needs, interdependence, and mutual obligations. Indeed, it recalls MacIntyre’s own efforts to reground an account of human nature not merely upon our capacity for reason, as was typical of the classical tradition, but also upon upon our fundamentally dependent status as human creatures. We are, as the title of a 1999 work puts it, “dependent rational animals.” The mere acknowledgement of our dependent status and a renewed attention to what constitutes genuine human needs, the satisfaction of which can serve as the foundation of a good society, will hardly heal all our rifts. And a determination of how exactly our dependence is manifested and what are, in fact, genuine needs will itself be a source of debate and contention. But it may prove a more productive starting point than those which currently frame our public discourse. Over the coming weeks, this newsletter will feature a series of reflections exploring both the nature and conditions of human flourishing as well as the forces that undermine such flourishing. We hope these reflections will prove helpful to those seeking a thoughtful and faithful way to address the myriad of problems that now confront us. Michael SacasasAssociate DirectorStudy Center ResourcesThis week, we especially want to draw your attention to our Zoom reading group on Tuesday, September 29th, at 8:00 p.m. We will be joined by Dr. Zena Hitz, the author of Lost In Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life. Dr. Hitz will discuss her work with Mike Sacasas during the first part of the evening and then field questions from participants. Please feel free to join in even if you have not read Lost In Thought. Use this link to join the Zoom session.The rest of our program enters its third full week with our Director’s classes meeting via Zoom and in-person and our Dante group meeting via Zoom on Wednesday afternoons. If you have any questions about taking part in these events, please email Mike Sacasas at mike4416@gmail.com.Recommended Reading— In “The Supply of Disinformation Will Soon Be Infinite,” Renée DiResta, technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, examines the challenges posed by GPT-3, a program that is capable of churning out meaningful text:The letters in GPT-3 stand for “generative pre-trained transformer.” It works by taking text input  and predicting what comes next. The model was trained on several massive data sets, including Wikipedia and Common Crawl (a nonprofit dedicated to “providing a copy of the internet to internet researchers”). In generating text, GPT-3 may return facts or drop the names of relevant public figures. It can produce computer code, poems, journalistic-sounding articles that reference the real world, tweets in the style of a particular account, or long theoretical essays on par with what a middling freshman philosophy student might write.— Alan Jacobs reflects on the value of plurality (as opposed to pluralism):In a recent conversation with Cherie Harder of the Trinity Forum, I recommended what I called — then half-jokingly, and now that I think about it more seriously — the Gandalf Option. I take that phrase from something Galdalf says to Denethor, the Steward of Gondor, who believes that Gandalf is plotting to rule that kingdom:“The rule of no realm is mine, neither of Gondor nor any other, great or small. But all worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands, those are my care. And for my part, I shall not wholly fail of my task, though Gondor should perish, if anything passes through this night that can still grow fair or bear fruit and flower again in days to come. For I also am a steward. Did you not know?” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

This year we are recording both of our Director’s Classes and offering them as part of our podcast through this newsletter.In this installment, you can listen to the second week of “Displaced: Exploring the Moral and Theological Dimensions of Place,” in which Mike Sacasas discusses the relationship between place and identity as well as the role of place in the early chapters of Genesis.Should you be interested in joining the class, please contact Mike Sacasas at mike@christianstudycenter.org.Please note that that this week only as we adjust our recording schedule, we are posting the audio from both classes on Thursday. Ordinarily, Mike’s class will be posted on Wednesdays. Thanks for listening and please feel free to share! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

This year we are recording both of our Director’s Classes and offering them as part of our podcast through this newsletter.In this installment, you can listen to the second week of Dr. Horner’s class, “Reading the Gospels: Distinctives, Contradictions, and Commonalities,” in which Dr. Horner walks his class through the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke. Should you be interested in joining the class, please contact Mike Sacasas at mike@christianstudycenter.org. Please note that as we’ve changed which of the two sections we’re recording, the audio for this class will now ordinarily go out on Thursdays. Thanks for listening! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

You can listen to the newsletter by clicking the play button above or you can click the “Listen in Podcast app” link and follow the directions to open this feed in your podcast app. Currently, you may find the feed on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and Spotify.In this week’s podcast, Dr. Horner and Mike Sacasas highlight the study center’s offerings after the first full week of fall programming. As Mike and Richard noted, there is still space available in all but Dr. Horner’s in-person director’s class. Please feel free to join in on any of our offerings. You can email Mike directly with any questions about the program: mike@christianstudycenter.org. Study Center ResourcesThe full fall program is now underway. This week, both Mike and Richard taught in-person and Zoom sections of their director’s classes. As you’ve already noted, audio of those classes will be made available through this newsletter/podcast feed. The Dante reading group is seven cantos into Purgatorio. Participation is open to all, near and far. If you are interested in joining, please email Mike Sacasas at mike@christianstudycenter.org.We enjoyed our first discussion of Zena Hitz’s Lost In Thought. In our next meeting on Tuesday, September 29th, Prof. Hitz will join us for an interview and Q/A. Please feel free to join in even if you have not read the book, although, of course, we do encourage you to read Hitz’s powerful testimony to the value of the life of the mind. This newsletter will be a hub for our digital presence. Along with twice-monthly essays you can expect twice monthly conversations with Dr. Horner and Mike Sacasas, audio of the director’s classes, and occasional interviews with scholars and writers of interest to our community.Dr. Esau McCaulley Book LaunchPlease note as well that the study center is co-sponsoring the book launch for Dr. Esau McCaulley’s Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope hosted by the North Carolina Study Center on Wednesday September 23 at 8PM. Dr. McCaulley is assistant professor of New Testament at Wheaton College and a priest in the Anglican Church in North America You can visit the event page for more details and you can register here. Recommended Reading— From “The Cassiodorus Necessity: Keeping the Faith Alive through Christian Education” by Richard Hughes Gibson:Yet in periods of crisis like our own, our intellectual supply lines become visible. We are reminded that they are fragile like us, and that their maintenance demands investment – of money certainly, but equally importantly of space and time, the space and time of learning. In The Year of Our Lord 1943, Alan Jacobs reminds us that in the midst of World War II a number of leading Christian intellectuals – Jacques Maritain, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, W. H. Auden, and Simone Weil – dedicated themselves to the task of imagining education’s future. They wondered: What kind of schooling will the citizens of postwar Western societies require? What role might the Christian tradition play in their education? They, too, were asking how “what has been received” might be passed on to the rising generation. The pandemic has made this question a pressing one once again, given its massive disruption of the business of education, Christian or otherwise. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

This year we are recording both of our Director’s Classes and offering them as part of our podcast through this newsletter.Here you can listen to the first session of Mike Sacasas’s class, “Displaced: Exploring the Moral and Theological Dimensions of Place.” Please note, the audio is not especially clear when students are talking during this class. We will work on improving this aspect of the audio quality. Each Wednesday, you will also receive a recording of the Dr. Horner’s class, “Reading the Gospels: Distinctives, Contradictions, and Commonalities.” The first class went out yesterday. We hope you enjoy the opportunity to listen in on these classes as they progress through the semester.There is still room in both the in-person and Zoom sections of Mike’s class on place, and there is at least one open slot for Dr. Horner’s zoom section. Please email Mike (mike@christianstudycenter.org) or reply to this email if you are interested in joining either class. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com