For Your Consideration

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

This year we will be recording both of our Director’s Classes and offering them as part of our podcast through this newsletter. Each Wednesday, you will receive a recording of the Dr. Horner’s class, “Reading the Gospels: Distinctives, Contradictions, and Commonalities.” Then, on Thursdays, beginning tomorrow, you will receive a recording of Mike Sacasas’s class, “Displaced: Exploring the Moral and Theological Dimensions of Place.”We hope you enjoy the opportunity to listen in on these classes as the progress through the semester. Incidentally, there is still room in both the in-person and Zoom section 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. 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.For several years I worked as an academic dean for a small school central Florida. In this role, I often found myself talking about the school’s vision for eduction. And when I did so, I found it useful to ask the question, “What is an education for?” We take it for granted that an education is a good thing, of course. And it may seem, at first, that the question of purpose can be easily answered. But as I would get further along in the conversation, it would become apparent that the question was not as straightforward as it seemed. In these exchanges, it also became apparent to me that the tacit answer for most to the question of education’s purpose went something like this: the purpose of a good secondary education was to ensure acceptance into a solid college or university, the purpose of which was to ensure the best odds at landing a well-paying job in the marketplace. I had then, and have now, no intention of belittling the importance of preparing adequately for future employment, but it seemed to me that this was at best an inadequate view of the purpose of education. I would suggest that we’re probably not in the best position to address the question of education’s purpose until we’ve addressed an even more fundamental question: What are people for? By asking this question, we can take the broadest possible view of the meaning and purpose of education. For example, consider again the view of education described above. Should we think of education primarily in terms of preparing students for the labor market? Only if we also believe that we measure the meaning of a human life in terms of economic productivity. If people are more than workers, then it would seem that education should aim at something more than turning out men and women prepared to enter the workforce. As it turns out, this is an interesting moment to be thinking about the purpose of education. The Covid-19 crisis has upended the ordinary rhythms of schooling in America. Fierce intractable debates now rage on about whether or not schools should re-open and under what conditions. (I’d suggest that the debates are intractable, in part, precisely because deeper questions about the purpose of education remain are rarely addressed, much less answered.) Moreover, beginning last spring, alternative modes of learning and teaching have been deployed at an unprecedented scale as schools struggled to continue their work under quarantine and social distancing mandates. The experimentation has also unfolded beyond traditional institutions as parents have been forced to manufacture creative schooling options rather than risking the health of their families. As in so many other social spheres, the virus has in this way proved revelatory. It has revealed the true nature and health of many of our institutions and practices, perhaps especially education. Consider, for example, the degree to which the imperative to get children back to school has revolved around the need to get parents back to work, seemingly suggesting that this is, in fact, the more pertinent relationship between education and the economy. It would seem, then, that we are presented with an opportunity to re-examine our assumptions about education and to think again about its purpose and value. Allow me to offer a couple of thoughts in this regard. First, we would do well to consciously distinguish between education as a life-long task of self-development and education as the process of progressing through a series of curricular milestones in an institutional setting culminating with the attainment of a degree. While these two forms of education tend to overlap, they are not coterminous and we should avoid conflating the two. Relatedly, this distinction also implies distinctions among the sites where education happens. Only when the latter view of education as a fundamentally institutional process is in view is it also obvious that education happens at school. Second, if we think of education in the broadest terms as serving the larger purpose of helping men and women realize the fullness of their humanity, then education should not be too closely bound up with economic aims and outcomes. Some other ends and goals should animate the work of teaching and learning. What these other ends will be depend in large measure on one’s underlying moral, political, and metaphysical commitments. I would propose that we at least entertain the view that learning in the pursuit of truth and the good life is itself a sufficient good. The view is almost quaint if not archaic now, but it has a distinguished pedigree. Human beings, among all creatures, are endowed with unique intellectual, moral, and aesthetic capacities that answer to transcendental values of truth, goodness, and beauty, the pursuit of which is the natural end of the life of the mind and its own reward. In the ancient Christian tradition, it was understood that the pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty was, in fact, the pursuit of the God Who was their source. Or, as C. S. Lewis has put it, “the life of learning, humbly offered to God, was, in its own small way, one of the appointed approaches to the Divine reality and the Divine beauty.” From this perspective it worth considering the degree to which the life of learning in this sense is difficult to sustain in most of the contemporary institutions devoted to education. But, while this is unfortunate, it is hardly cause for despair once we remember that learning in the deepest sense is not coterminous with these institutions, indeed that these institutions, at their best, are merely preparing us to set out on the life-long calling of learning, thinking, contemplating, and, finally, celebrating and worshipping. I’ve been reflecting along these lines recently as I’ve thought about the current and future work of the study center. It has long seemed to me that study centers are uniquely positioned to be precisely the sorts of places that sustain the life of the mind, especially because they are unburdened by the institutional and economic pressures that bear upon traditional educational institutions. The study center offers no credits, no certificates, and no degrees. Instead, we strive to create opportunities for careful reading, deliberate thinking, and serious reflection. We are committed to the virtues of thoughtfulness and intellectual humility. We believe, with the Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper, that “truth lives in conversation,” so we aim to facilitate the sorts of conversations that will spur us on to seek not only what is true, but also what is good and beautiful. We do this because we believe that in so doing we are addressing a deeply felt and profound human need grounded in our creation in God’s image. Michael SacasasAssociate DirectorStudy Center ResourcesSeptember is around the corner and we are continuing to prepare for the launch of our fall program. Here are the highlights. We will be offering two director’s classes in two formats. Dr. Horner will be offering a class on the gospels and Mike Sacasas will be teaching on the moral and spiritual dimensions of place. Dr. Horner will offer an in-person version of the class on Tuesdays at 4:10 p.m. beginning September 15th. He will also offer a Zoom section on Wednesday at 11:45 a.m. beginning September 16th. Mike will be teaching an in-person section Wednesday the 16th at 4:10 p.m. and a Zoom section on Tuesday the 15th at 11:45 a.m. The in-person sections will meet on the second floor of Pascal’s. Registration is required and will open on Monday, August 24th. The in-person classes will be limited to ten participants while the Zoom sections will be limited to fifteen. Registration will initially be limited to undergraduate and graduate students. Audio of the classes will also be available to all through this newsletter. The Dante reading group will recommence on Wednesday, September 2nd at 1PM over Zoom. Participation is open to all. If you are interested in joining, please email Mike Sacasas at mike@christianstudycenter.org. Finally, with a view to promoting the life of the mind as discussed in the essay above, we will be hosting a Zoom reading group, Readings in the Christian Imagination. The group will meet on Monday evenings, twice-monthly, beginning September 14th at 8PM. Our first reading will be Zena Hitz’s Lost In Thought. In our first meeting we will discuss the first half the book. In our second, Prof. Hitz will join us for an interview and Q/A. 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.We certainly encourage you to pass along a link to the newsletter to those you know who would value the center’s work, especially as so many our offerings will be available to those beyond the Gainesville community.Recommended Reading— Historian Mark Noll take a long view of the pandemic as a turning point in history:Margaret MacMillan, a distinguished historian of British imperial history at the University of Toronto, has stated succinctly what many others have concluded when they look beyond daily demands: “France in 1789. Russia in 1917. The Europe of the 1930s. The pandemic of 2020. They are all junctures where the river of history changes direction.” Surely MacMillan is correct. But where is the river turning, how fast, and in what direction?— Zena Hitz, whose book Lost in Thought we will reading together at the study center, responds to some of the more fruitful criticism of her argument:Individuals must experience their learning as a mode of freedom and spontaneity, not a complex navigation of yet another structure of authority and achievement. Any fundamental question, or a practice that leads to one, is as good a place to begin as any other. There is hubris in imagining that human knowledge is well enough developed that we can confidently arrange for others what is first and what is last. We can develop our pedagogy as elaborately as we like, but no plan survives contact with the inner battlefield where an individual struggles to find happiness or truth.— Wheaton professor Esau McCaulley writes about giving children joy even during a pandemic with an emphasis on the unique pressures facing black parents: There are no easy answers as to how to parent Black children in America inside or outside a pandemic. It is not my job to tell someone how to do it.My wife and I have drifted to a bias toward joy. We tell our children about some major events; other burdens we carry ourselves. Our children know much of the history of this country, but the focus is on Black triumph over suffering, not the suffering itself. I immerse them in the soul, hip-hop and gospel music that has lifted many a weary soul even when they would rather listen to Kidz Bop.I have told them of Moses and the Israelites, of Mary Jesus’ mother and her dramatic yes to God. They know about Sojourner and her railroad and Martin and his dream of Mother Pollard and her rested feet. I remind them that God has looked upon their Black skin, hair and bodies and called it good.I am making deposit after deposit of Black joy and faith in the hope that it will be with them when the inevitable struggle comes. I do so because that is what my mother did for me. 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.Some of you reading this know that one of the questions I like to ask is, “What frames what?” I ask this question in order to get at the often-unrecognized ideas, beliefs, and values in the background that shape the ways we think. Because we rarely think about them, we often refer to them as assumptions, and yet these framing ideas have tremendous consequences for how we talk and how we live. They are also typically embedded deep down in our practices. Lately, I’ve been asking myself this question again and find myself especially concerned about the ways that social media have come to frame our most important discussions about life, including important issues of race and justice.In recent newsletters, Mike Sacasas has been exploring our digital framework in his usual understated but insightful manner and raising good questions in the process. “What does it mean to speak and act responsibly in these times?” he asked a couple months ago. “How does one love one’s neighbor on a social media platform?” I know Mike well enough to know that this was not a rhetorical question. He meant it, and so do I. While it is easy to speak up on social media and easy to feel good about saying the right thing, it is much harder really to know how to love one’s neighbor. One hopes that the net effect of all our talk on social media will turn out to be positive, but I do wonder, and I am concerned. As Mike has taught me, digitized media encourage and reward certain behaviors, and inversely, they discourage and punish other behaviors. They reward the immediate, quick condemnation of what’s wrong in the world, and they encourage simplistic solutions. They discourage the thoughtful silence in which one might listen, learn, and reflect before speaking. As Mike observed, “social media demands something of us, but it is not thought. It demands a reaction, one that is swift, emotionally charged, andin keeping with the affective tenor of the platform. In many respects, this entails not only an absence of thought but conditions that are overtly hostile to thought.”Recently, one of our alumni made a similar observation about his own attempt to respond thoughtfully to the racial injustices that he was finding deeply troubling, “What I thought I was doing was trying to understand the problem in the deepest possible way,” he wrote, but “my reactions made me appear as though I didn’t care as much about racial problems as others did.” By daring to think before he spoke, hefound himself subject to the media watchdogs who are making their lists and posting them twice. In a way that curiously parallels the pharisaical tendency for Christians to distinguish themselves from “sinners” by making judgments based in appearance, the discourse of social media lures us into a shallow judgmentalism that allows us to condemn others and feel good about ourselves.The great danger here is that what might be called hash-tag culture tempts us to think that by saying the right things on our Facebook page or Instagram, we have fulfilled our responsibility and done our part. This is a serious problem. Our digitized world narrows our vision for seeking justice and doing good. It blinds us to the fact that genuine progress on any important issue requires quiet thoughtfulness, listening, learning, and patient, persistent action. As another of our alumni wrote me, “I, too, have struggled with how to respond during this time” because these issues are ones that “I have been thinking about and responding to for as long as I can remember. I’ve felt troubled that the influx of responses on social media might be another reason for people to quickly forget about the deep need for reconciliation in just a few months when the next thing arrives. I'm grateful that more attention has been brought to racial reconciliation in the past few months, but I’m concerned that it will pass away without many people finding their lives or perspectives much changed.” She concluded, “That’s deep, slow work.” It takes patience, persistence, and time.In Mike’s discussion of these issues, he has often focused on what he calls “the temporal structures of social media.” Noting that “the patterns of digitally mediated reality can overwhelm other modes of perception, temporality, and place,” he has encouraged us to extend our temporal horizon beyond the short-lived temporal frame assumed by social media. “The effect of our digital media ecosystems is consistent,” he writes. “The focus is inexorably on the fleeting present. The past has no hold, and the future does not come into play.” Elsewhere Mike has observed that “The element of time is an often unperceived factor in our anxiety about figuring out what should be done. At what temporal scale ought we to be thinking?” he asks. “Or, better, at what temporal scales, plural, ought we to be thinking? What are the proper temporal horizons framing our moment?” As Mike puts it, “Without minimizing the need … to act justly and responsibly in the moment, we should also consider expanding the temporal horizons within which our thinking and acting must unfold. We should consider not only what we must do about what is happening right now, we should also consider what we must do with a view to the next year, the next decade, perhaps even the next century…. Within this longer frame of time, more meaningful actions also come into view. If I am fixated on the moment, and my circumstances, as is often the case, afford me no obvious way of acting in the present crisis, then I might conclude there is nothing for me to do at all.” Even worse, I would add, if we allow our digitized world to frame our understanding of justice, we might think that by posting incessantly on our social media, we will have fulfilled our responsibility and done all we need do.Personally, I am far less interested in knowing what any of us posted on our social media in the days immediately after the death of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, or of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, or of George Floyd Jr. in Minneapolis, than I am in what initiatives we were taking six months or a year before Ahmaud’s death, or what any of us will be doing six months or a year from now. It is all too easy for us to jump in with “Pavlovian alacrity” and say something that will leave us feeling good aboutourselves. It is far more demanding to do something that will never get into the news and never be broadcast on social media but will actually do some good somehow—or at least have the potential to do so.When Richard Spencer visited the campus of the University of Florida a few years ago, I made the personal decision that it is not enough just to be right about what’s wrong. Being right about what is wrong is important, but I do want to encourage us not simply to join the chorus and think that we have done what needed to be done. Being right about what’s wrong is easy, and if that is all we care about, we need only keep on posting. If, however, we want to see hearts and minds and practices and structures changed, we will need to do more than what our social media asks of us. We will have to swim against the current and give a place to silence, to listening and learning, to thought and action and do so in ways that are marked by patience and persistence. Action will probably include words at some point, but social media may or may not provide the right platform for those words, and when it is time to utilize the internet, our digital media need not set the pace or dictate the terms of our engagement.Dr. Richard V. HornerExecutive DirectorStudy Center ResourcesPlanning for the fall semester at the study center has been underway for some time now, and, while the health crisis is posing formidable challenges, we are quite pleased with what we will be offering. Here’s a quick preview. You can be looking forward to two director’s classes, taught by Dr. Horner and Mike Sacasas respectively, and offered both in a limited in-person format and via Zoom. The Dante read group will resume, and we will be launching another reading group, Readings in the Christian Imagination, which will meet twice a month via Zoom. In addition, 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. We certainly encourage you to pass along a link to the newsletter to those you know who would value the center’s work, especially as so many our offerings will be available to those beyond the Gainesville community. Recommended Reading— Matt Stewart interviews Ken Myers on the occasion of the (near) 30th anniversary of the Mars Hill Audio Journal, an unparalleled resource for thoughtful Christian engagement with culture:As to conversation, there’s a lot of research to suggest that many habits of mediated communication diminish the capacity for immediate—and loving—communication. From the beginning, I’ve tried to provide a model for loving conversations (although I’m usually not face-to-face with my guests). I’ve come to appreciate—thanks largely to Oliver O’Donovan—the centrality of communication in all its forms to our social existence. I’d already been persuaded that love is at the heart of our lives, as it is in the life of God as Trinity. Communication and community and common good: all these things are intertwined. So “communications media” need to be attentive to that kinship.— Micah Latimer-Dennis presents ten theses on digitally mediated worship:As communities ease into gathering for worship again, for some churchgoers the risk will be too great. Alongside the traditional, in-person option churches will offer a “virtual” option for participating. It seems likely that when the last wave of infection has finally broken, many churches will maintain this option. It would benefit us to consider what that change will mean for worship. 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.Before I start to address an issue that has been much on my mind – and on yours, I want to thank Lauren Babb and Mike Sacasas for their faithful service to the Study Center and to the entire community in my absence. I especially want to thank them for leading the way in thinking about the challenges that have been on all our hearts and minds in recent weeks. I have been deeply appreciative of both Lauren’s statement on behalf of Pascal’s several weeks ago, and Mike’s constant, wise voice in recent newsletters. Part of what has been so hard about being gone for most of the past two months is that I feel like I abandoned these friends in a time of need and that I especially left Mike to bear the weight of being the voice of the center through very difficult times. It was hard for me to leave that burden on “the new guy.” But I am also so very thankful to have been able to lean on him as I have.Thank you, Lauren. Thank you, Mike.As Mike noted a few weeks ago, “As this year has unfolded, we have been confronted by one crisis after another with barely a chance to catch our breath.” And as he went on to say, “A crisis can simultaneously call for thinking and make it difficult to think.” This has been especially true given the fact that these crises and our responses are playing out on what we call “news” media and on social media platforms. Mike is very insightful in exposing the reductive and counterproductive impact that these social technologies often have, and I want very much to return to some of these issues in weeks to come, but at present, I want to push past these issues and move on to the issue that has been much on my mind and heart not only in recent weeks but for over five decades. That is the issue of race in our country—the inequities, unfairness, injustice, misunderstandings, distance, and more that fall along racial lines. There are numerous lines of racial and ethnic diversity in our country today, and numerous stories that need to be told for everyone from native Americans to immigrants who continue to come to our country from a wide variety of nations. Sadly, these stories typically include hard issues. There are stories of inequities and unfairness in every direction. I will confess, however, that for me personally the question of how a light-skinned race, of European origin, has treated a dark-skinned race, of African origin, over nearly four centuries of our country’s history has always been a central concern. I trust I care about all people and that I act on behalf of minorities and the underserved or disadvantaged of any race or ethnicity, but black/white relations have played a crucial role in the American story from the beginning and have always been of particular importance to me personally. Just to be clear, I am a sixty-eight-year old white male. I was not born yesterday, so I did not just get “woke” in the past several months. I do fear and fight my sad tendency to “doze off,” but I first got woke back in middle school. I am old enough to remember water fountains and restrooms in stores in Lakeland, Florida, marked “colored” and “white.” I remember the infuriating way that white Christians pronounced the word “negro,” and while I did not throw stones through windows, nor did I think it was ultimately the best way forward, I remember being pretty sympathetic with those who did. I also recall quite vividly numerous eye-opening experiences that came with what was called “forced integration.” In my case, it occurred during my high school days, and I have always been thankful that it did. Virtually everyone complained about it, but it was a good thing and had good consequences for many of us. These experiences played a tremendous role in awakening me, educating me, and motivating me to participate actively in seeking to see integration be the good thing that many of us knew it to be, even as we – white and black – struggled with what we didn’t like about it. Partly because these issues mean what they do to me, I chose not to jump when social media said “jump” two months ago, but please do not interpret my choice not to participate in the social media frenzy as some indifference on my part. To the contrary, it is because I see these issues as the sort of important, enduring human issues that they are that I have waited before addressing the issue explicitly. Thank you, then, for allowing me to share a couple simple lessons that have been formative for me and that continue to serve me as I seek the sort of healing to which I pointed a month ago. I offer these thoughts quite meekly and with no pretense about having gotten something right, but only in the hope of being helpful as we seek to engage important issues together.  The bedrock for my own thinking about racial and ethnic injustice and inequity lies in the rich Humanism that Scripture teaches. Using the word “Humanism” here may puzzle you, but it is exactly the right word, and it is desperately needed today. I was raised on a biblical understanding of human beings by parents who loved God and therefore loved their neighbors—all their neighbors. I won’t pretend that I grew up in a racially mixed neighborhood, school, or church, but I grew up with a concern for all people—for Jew and Gentile, for people of every race and ethnicity, for Kenyans, Peruvians, and Indians. Because we were Christians, respect and love for all people was a given. Humans are made in the image of God – all humans, and “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.” This was all we needed to know. This is what I mean by biblical Humanism, and it laid the foundation for my life both through my parents’ teaching and through their example. A second, important contribution to my own thinking about race came by studying history. It has taken many forms over the years, but it began with my Social Studies teacher in high school – a white man who grew up in the rural South. He was perfect for the job. He had learned the history, and it had changed him. He was perfect for teaching a bunch of naïve, mostly white kids. He shared honestly, stayed vulnerable, spoke boldly, and helped us learn the history of our country and face the sad and often horrifying story of how one race of humans came to think of another race of humans not simply as inferior but as property that could be bought, sold, and enslaved. He helped us confront the inhumanity of our own history and recognize that we had dug a hole so deep that we were and are still very much working our way out of it and will be for a long time. A society does not recover from such a history easily or quickly.All of us would do well to keep studying history, and as we study the history of our own country, we would be wise to study well beyond our own borders. The stories of human beings mistreating other human beings across a variety of lines of difference are many, and they are global. There is something about us that is sadly bent, and we do well to recognize it as the deeply human tendency that it is. Our prejudices run deep, and this is just one of many reasons why it is so important that our efforts be rooted in a biblical Humanism and framed ultimately by Jesus’ declaration that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.The third great contribution to my thinking about race has come through relationships that cross racial and ethnic lines of difference. As simple as this is, it has made all the difference. I am convinced that the single most important social contribution to making progress where racial inequity, unfairness, injustice, animosity, and misunderstanding are involved is for us to be in life together—simply to have meaningful relationships that cross racial divides. This was why “forced integration” was a good thing. No matter how much everyone complained, it at least opened up the possibility for us to get beyond caricatures and get to know each other as actual human beings. With that experience came knowledge, with that knowledge came changed attitudes, and with changed attitudes came meaningful action. One thing led to another—not because someone condemned me on social media and demanded that I say the right thing, but because I got the chance to interact with fellow human beings from which my history had separated me. It gave me the chance, for instance, to get to know my friend Willie well enough for him, in turn, to trust me well enough to give him a ride home after band practice. With that experience came knowledge—knowledge, among other things, of the fact that there were unpaved streets and small frame shacks not far from my own home; and knowledge, in turn, changed my attitude and motivated me to action – to a commitment to see integration work, to address hard issues, to keep listening and learning, to speak up. Without going into any deep analysis, I fear that a re-segregation has taken place over the past few decades, and it has hurt us all. We are all the poorer for it. I am convinced that racial and ethnic integration remains key, and when we are blessed with it, we do well to celebrate it and be thankful.I recognize that in offering just a small glimpse into my own story, I am not offering anything profound, but I offer it nonetheless – especially to my young friends who find themselves caught in the world as they encounter it on their cell phones and laptops. That is an especially difficult place to live these days, but all the more reason to be well founded in biblical wisdom; informed by historians, sociologists, and others; and committed to cultivating relationships across lines of racial difference – and across other lines of difference as well. I trust you know that I offer these thoughts haltingly and humbly in the hope of the gospel and of healing for all.Dr. Richard HornerExecutive DirectorStudy Center ResourcesThis coming week we will be discussing the last section of the Inferno. The Dante reading group will pause during the month of August, but will resume with Purgatorio in September. This would be a great time to jump in if you weren’t able to join us for our reading of the Inferno. Contact Mike Sacasas at mike@christianstudycenter.org, if you’d like to be on the email list for the reading group. Come September, we will also be kicking off our fall program. We’ll be featuring two Director’s Classes, an additional online reading group alongside the Dante group, and more. Stay tuned for more details in the coming weeks.Be sure to check out the archive of resources available online from the study center. Classes and lectures are available at our audio archive. You can also peruse back issues of Reconsiderations here.Recommended Reading— Philosopher Jennifer Frey reviews Zena Hitz's recent book, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life. We will be reading Lost in Thought this fall at the Study Center and look forward to hosting an online interview and Q/A with Prof. Hitz.Hitz notes that what is intrinsically valuable for a human being is grounded in what a human being is—what it needs in order to flourish as a member of its kind. Even more boldly, Hitz frames her argument in terms of ancient Greek thought about the highest good. Such a good was understood by Plato and Aristotle as that sort of human activity we have a natural affinity for above all others and would be something “in which one’s whole life would culminate.” For Hitz, the highest good structures all of our choices and reveals something about the sort of person we are. It is the good for which, at the end of the day, we will sacrifice all else.— Michael Wear offers his theologically informed reflections on “a politics worse than death”:Our political problem is not simply a function of those who haven’t thought about their own death, but of those who aren’t motivated by the death of others. Our political problem is that we have a system that requires tremendous energy to be heard, and a citizenry that cannot find the energy, resources, and will to be heard. At some point, we must question the conventional wisdom that the stratification and sophistication of media, including social media, has been a neutral democratizing force, and instead ask whether it has empowered and incentivized unrepresentative voices at the cost of a representative politics. We should ask the question now, while we still can, before we become so limited by the extremes in our politics that we can’t imagine there are any other options. 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