For Your Consideration

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

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.Perhaps to a greater degree than ever before, we are tempted to stay current with the unceasing stream of information inundating us from countless sources. Never before have we had access to so much information and rarely has it seemed so important for us to remain well-informed. The imperative to stay-informed is driven, in part, by the novelty of our situation and the older ideals of democratic citizenship. Unfortunately, the means by which we now seek to stay well-informed may defeat these very ideals by undermining our capacity to think. In times like these, social media demands something of us, but it is not thought. It demands a reaction, one that is swift, emotionally charged, and in 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.Even apart from crisis, controversies, and tragedies, however, the effect of our digital media ecosystems is consistent: the focus is inexorably on the fleeting present. The past has no hold, and the future does not come into play. Our time is now, our place is everywhere. Of course, social media has only heightened a tendency critics have noted since at least Kierkegaard’s time. To be well-informed—meaning up with current events—can undermine the possibility of serious thinking, mature emotional responses, sound judgment, and wise action.It is important to note, however, that this is not merely a problem of information overload. If it were only information we were dealing with, then we might be better able to recognize the nature of the problem and correct it. It is also an emotional overload problem. It is the emotional register of digital media that accounts for the Pavlovian alacrity with which we attend to our devices and the information flows for which they are a portal. These devices and platforms, then, become, in effect, Skinner boxes we willingly inhabit that condition our cognitive and emotional lives. Twitter says “feel this,” we say “how intensely?” Social media never invites us to step away, to think and reflect, to remain silent, to refuse a response for now or even indefinitely.Under these circumstances, there is no place for thought.For the sake of the world, thought must, at least for a time, take leave of the world, especially the world mediated to us by social media. We must, in other words, by deliberate action, make a place for thought.Hannah Arendt understood that an incapacity to think was a serious threat to our society. Arendt believed that thinking was somehow intimately related to our moral judgment and that the inability to think was a gateway to grave evils. Of course, it was a particular kind of thinking that Arendt had in mind—thinking, one might say, for thinking’s sake. Or, thinking that was not simply a variety of problem solving.Jennifer Stitt, for example, has drawn on Arendt to argue for the importance of solitude for thought and thought for conscience and conscience for politics. As Stitt notes, Arendt believed that “living together with others begins with living together with oneself.” Here is how Stitt concluded her reflections:But, Arendt reminds us, if we lose our capacity for solitude, our ability to be alone with ourselves, then we lose our very ability to think. We risk getting caught up in the crowd. We risk being ‘swept away’, as she put it, ‘by what everybody else does and believes in’ – no longer able, in the cage of thoughtless conformity, to distinguish ‘right from wrong, beautiful from ugly’. Solitude is not only a state of mind essential to the development of an individual’s consciousness – and conscience – but also a practice that prepares one for participation in social and political life.Solitude, then, is at least one practice that can help create a place for thought. Paradoxically, in a connected world it is challenging to find either solitude or companionship. If we submit to a regime of constant connectivity, we end up with hybrid versions of both, versions which fail to yield the full satisfactions of either.We would do well to consider, too, W. H. Auden’s admonition about the desire for knowledge. “We are quite prepared to admit,” Auden wrote, that, while food and sex are good in themselves, an uncontrolled pursuit of either is not, but it is difficult for us to believe that intellectual curiosity is a desire like any other, and to recognize that correct knowledge and truth are not identical. To apply a categorical imperative to knowing, so that, instead of asking, “What can I know?” we ask, “What, at this moment, am I meant to know?” — to entertain the possibility that the only knowledge which can be true for us is the knowledge that we can live up to — that seems to all of us crazy and almost immoral.Crazy or immoral as it may strike modern ears, it may be one of the most important truths we need to navigate the torrents of information threatening to overwhelm us and navigate these torrents wisely and faithfully. Study Center ResourcesIn next week’s Dante reading group, we will be covering cantos 26-28 of the Inferno. If you’d like to connect with group, please email Mike Sacasas at mike@christianstudycenter.org. Once we complete the Inferno in this month, we will begin Purgatorio after a couple of weeks off. 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— Joshua Hochschild on a posthumously published work by Walker Percy on significance of language. Percy the philosopher helps us understand the perversity of imagining human life without language. The same insights may also help explain why his scholarly philosophy book didn’t find a publisher, and why podcasts are more popular than philosophy classes. Even if you could mainline meaning and argument, they are more natural, significant, and joyfully fulfilling shared by the storyteller or poet. Percy the poet knew that communion isn’t “sentimental”; it is our distinctive mode of being.  The lecture-hall and library are more likely to become obsolete than the campfire.— Jay Tolson reviews a new book about the turn of the 20th century French thinker, Charles Péguy:Péguy believed that advocates of metaphysical hegemony on both the left and the right were foes of the liberal arts that were indispensable to republican democracy. Joined invisibly in their shared immanentism, these hegemonists embodied the deep intolerance of late modernity—and therefore were to be exposed and resisted for what they so dangerously espoused. Call it one of the great tragedies of modernity that the warnings of this clear and prophetic voice were lost not just to his time but to the century that has since unfolded.— Mark Boyle on what he learned living without the conveniences of many modern technologies:I wanted to put my finger on the pulse of life again. I wanted to feel the elements in their enormity, to strip away the nonsense and lick the bare bones of existence clean. I wanted to know intimacy, friendship, and community, and not just the things that pass for them. Instead of spending my life making a living, I wanted to make living my life. 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.You are listening to the weekly newsletter of the Christian Study Center of Gainesville. This first week of July, we’re reflecting on one of our most precious resources, our attention. If you are not already subscribed to the newsletter we encourage you to do so. You can find a link on our website at christianstudycenter.orgOne of the conditions of living in a world structured by digital media is that we are daily overwhelmed by an unremitting, uninterrupted, and relentless flood of information. Under these conditions, the capacity to rightly order our attention becomes an indispensable virtue. Disclaimer: attention is a topic that I’ve addressed on numerous occasions, including the first talk I ever gave at the study center in 2018. So I’m hesitant about taking up the theme again, but I remain convinced that it is a topic of immense importance and one we do well to revisit with some frequency. I won’t comment on digital distractedness or social media platforms designed for compulsive engagement or the inability to get through a block of text without checking your smartphone 16 times or endless doomscrolling, as it is now fashionable to call it, (really just a new form of the old vice acedia) or our self-loathing tweets about the same. These matter only to the degree that we believe our attention ought to be directed toward something else, that it is in these instances somehow being misdirected or squandered. Attention, like freedom, is an instrumental and penultimate good, valuable to the degree that it unites us to a higher and substantive good. Perfect attention in the abstract, just as perfect freedom in the abstract, is at best mere potentiality. They are the conditions of human flourishing rather than its fulfillment. In his famous Kenyon College commencement address, the novelist David Foster Wallace argued that we should understand attention as constituting a form of freedom. “The really important kind of freedom,” Wallace claimed, “involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom.” This at least gives a useful heuristic by which we might think about attention. Does it feel to you as if you are free in the deployment of your attention throughout any given day? I know that it often doesn’t feel that way to me. I frequently find myself attending to what I know I shouldn’t or unable to attend to what I should. This is not a function of external coercion, strictly speaking. I experience it chiefly as a failure of will, as a form of unfreedom stemming from a regime of conditioning to which I’ve submitted myself more or less willingly. And I feel the loss. The loss of focus, yes. The loss of productivity, yes. But also the loss the world and the loss of some version of myself to which I aspire. I find myself needing constantly to ask, “What is worthy of my attention?” or, better, “What is worthy of my attention given what I claim to love, what I aim to accomplish, and who I hope to become?” If by our attention we grant its object some non-trivial power over the course of our thoughts, feelings, and actions, then this may be one of the most important questions we can ask ourselves. Several years ago, reflecting on this very matter, I wrote about the need for what I called attentional austerity. Austerity is not a warm or appealing concept, of course. But Ivan Illich can help us better frame the matter. “Austerity,” he wrote in Tools for Conviviality, has also been degraded and has acquired a bitter taste, while for Aristotle or Aquinas it marked the foundation of friendship. In the Summa Theologica … Thomas deals with disciplined and creative playfulness. In his third response he defines “austerity” as a virtue which does not exclude all enjoyments, but only those which are distracting from or destructive of personal relatedness. For Thomas “austerity” is a complementary part of a more embracing virtue, which he calls friendship or joyfulness. It is the fruit of an apprehension that things or tools could destroy rather than enhance [graceful playfulness] in personal relations.From this perspective, then, austerity becomes a virtue in service of a greater good, a virtue we do well to recover. But it is not only a matter of consciously ordering one’s attention toward the good, of wresting it back from an environment that has become a elaborate Skinner box, it is also the case that we would do well to cultivate a form of expectant attentiveness to what is, a form of attention that commits itself to seeing the world. The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz once observed that “In ancient China and Japan subject and object were understood not as categories of opposition but of identification.” “This is probably the source of the profoundly respectful descriptions of what surround us,” he speculated, “of flowers, trees, landscapes, for the things we can see are somehow a part of ourselves, but only by virtue of being themselves and preserving their suchness, to use a Zen Buddhist term.”Further on in the same essay he wrote about the wonder that arises when, as he put, “contemplating a tree or a rock or a man, we suddenly comprehend that it is, even though it might not have been.” This kind of wonder is perhaps its own reward as well as the gateway to the love of wisdom as the ancient philosophers believed. I hear in Milosz’s words an invitation, an invitation to step away from the patterns of digitally mediated reality, which while not without its modest if diminishing satisfactions, can overwhelm other modes of perception, temporality, and place. The question of attention in the age of digital media may ultimately come down to the question of limits, the acceptance of which may be, paradoxically given modern assumptions, the condition of a more enduring and satisfying life. What digital media promises on the other hand is an experience of limitlessness exemplified by the infinite scroll. There is always more and much of it may even seem urgent and critical. But we cannot attend to it all, nor should we. I know this, of course, but I need to remind myself more frequently than I’d care to admit. Michael SacasasAssociate DirectorStudy Center ResourcesPascal’s is closed from July 27th through July 5th and will re-open on Monday, July 7th.In next week’s Dante reading group, we will be covering cantos 22-25 of the Inferno. If you’d like to connect with group, please email Mike Sacasas at mike@christianstudycenter.org.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— Alan Jacobs’s 79 theses on attention, which will, in fact, repay your attention. Genuinely to attend is to give of oneself with intent; it is to say: For as long as I contemplate this person, or this experience, or even this thing, I grant it a degree of dominion over me. But I will choose where my attention goes; it is in my power to grant or withhold.Yet as soon as we think in this way, the way Simone Weil urges that we think, questions press insistently upon us: Do I really have the power to grant or withhold? If not, how might I acquire that power? And even if I possess it, on what grounds do I decide how to use it?— Brad Littlejohn on the importance of coming to a shared apprehension of reality:In other words, we must somehow learn to hold together passion and patience: a deep conviction that the truth matters, and that our differences on a matter so urgent are intolerable. And at the same time we must be willing to wait—to wait on the world for more clarity about what is actually going on, to wait on our friends through the long months and years it can take to come to a common mind, and to wait on the Lord for the strength to endure it all. For it will be painful—both passion and patience come from the same root meaning “to suffer.” — Ten years after publishing The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr talks to Ezra Klein about the book and its enduring relevance. 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 week 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. There are many features of Dante’s Divine Comedy that are likely to puzzle the modern reader. The poem, for example, is stuffed with references to now obscure characters in classical mythology, to arcane debates in medieval philosophy, and to otherwise forgotten players in the tumultuous world of Florentine politics. The Comedy also confronts readers with a vivid rendering of medieval cosmology, in which hell occupies the center of the the earth and the earth sits at the center of a series of concentric spheres, each occupied by one of the seven planets* known to the pre-modern world and emanating outwards until one reaches the realm of God beyond the farthest sphere. Stepping into the imaginative world of the Comedy can understandably feel like stepping into a strange and foreign land. While Christian readers might be in a slightly better position to make sense of Dante’s work, even they, depending to some degree on their theological background, will find any number of Dante’s choices rather odd. The best known portion of the Comedy, the Inferno, famously depicts Dante’s journey through the realm of the damned. Dante presents hell as a funnel-shaped structure leading down to the center of the earth. Hell is organized around a series of rings in each of which a particular sin is punished. It is clear that Dante is presenting his readers with a hierarchy of vice in which the gravity of the sins increases as Dante progresses downward. The more severe sins are punished in the lowest recesses of hell, while the upper circles punished sins Dante deemed less serious. Dante’s schema offers contemporary readers an opportunity to consider their own hierarchy of sin and vice. How do we distinguish among the various ways in which we violate the moral law? What sins do we consider more severe? Which sins do we, at least implicitly, treat as less severe? Odds are most of us have thought less about this than Dante has. Odds are, too, that modern readers will take issue with at least some of Dante’s judgments. Among the more curious and puzzling aspects of Dante’s hierarchy, for example, strikes the reader when they realize that they have made their way through one half of the Inferno and Dante has already dispensed with all but one of the categories of sin. The Inferno composed of 34 cantos, which we can think of as chapters. By the time a reader finishes canto 17, a full half of the text of the Inferno remains but it will be devoted to entirely to the vice of fraud. A surprising development, to be sure. (Dante Before the City of Florence by Domenico di Michelino, 1465)We may be surprised, first, by the fact that Dante judges fraud to be a more severe sin than violence, which is the vice dealt with in the preceding ring. We may also be surprised by the fact that Dante devotes so much time to the vice of fraud. He manages to do by dividing fraud into two categories: fraud against those who have no particular reason to trust you and fraud against those who do. The former counts as a rupture of the bonds of common trust among all people, and the latter counts as a rupture of the special trust that forms among those who have established more personal bonds. Dante then divides the ring in which the former kind of fraud is punished into ten separate ditches, allowing him to distinguish among a variety of forms of fraud. Why does Dante devote so much time to the vice of fraud? Why does he consider it to be the most serious of sins, more serious even than murder? Why does he make such fine distinctions among the varieties of fraud?Part of the answer lies in how Dante thinks about sin in general. Following a Christianized Aristotelianism, Dante first distinguishes between sins of incontinence and sins of malice. The first several sins in Dante’s schema involve an inability to control oneself. They are sins characterized by a lack of will power and the sudden loss of self-discipline. They are the sorts of sins we may want to resist, but find we ourselves to weak-willed to do so. Sins of malice, however, are what we might think of as pre-meditated sins. They do not involve a failure of willpower but rather an active willing to do harm. Sins of malice include violence against neighbor, violence against self, and violence against God. But Dante judges these sins to be less severe than the sin of fraud because fraud involves and corrupts what distinguishes human beings from the rest of creation. “Fraud is man’s peculiar vice,” Dante writes, “God finds it more displeasing-and therefore, / the fraudulent are lower, suffering more.” One way to think about this is to recognize that intentional acts of fraud involve the uniquely human capacities of reason and speech. Any animal can become violent, but only the human animal is capable of defrauding another. In the Bible, the first act attributed to the human creature is the naming of animals. While we are tempted to read this as a merely endearing episode, especially for children, it suggests to us a profound truth. The truthful deployment of language is at the root of all distinctively human cultural activity. Before we do anything of consequence in the world, we must name it and thus employ our most remarkable tool, the gift of language. In doing so, we are also directly reflecting the God in whose image we have been made, the God whose first recorded act is also the use of language to speak the world into existence. So because it corrupts what is most essentially human, and thus most divine, in the person, Dante judges that fraud displeases God more and is worthy of greater punishment. It’s worth noting, too, that Dante’s work is informed not only by his vast learning, but also by his experience. Dante’s life revolved around his poetry and his civic service to his beloved Florence, from which he was exiled when an opposing political faction came to power. The Comedy dwells on both matters theological and political. Contemporary readers are perhaps especially inclined to skim over the various discussions of Florentine politics, but these same sections now seem to take on a striking urgency. As Dante makes his way through the Inferno, one of the characters he encounters speaks of Florence as a “riven city,” and so too might we describe our own city and country. The disastrous consequences of deep and acrimonious factionalism haunted Dante’s imagination, and they should trouble us, too. So it is not only the case that fraud is the gravest of sins, in Dante’s view, because it corrupts our uniquely human capacities, it is the gravest of sins, too, because it corrupts the foundations of a just and peaceful civic order. Fraud destroys trust among people. Fraud strikes at the credibility and authority of vital public institutions. Fraud undermines the power of speech to order human relationship, in the absence of which we are left only with various forms of coercion. It should come as no surprise, then, that the record of the primeval history presented to us in Genesis 1-11 begins with the fruitful use of language to bring about what is good and culminates with the corruption of speech as an act of judgment for humanity’s recalcitrant sinfulness.Trust is a precondition of meaningful communication and fruitful public discourse, it is an essential component of a well-ordered society. Dante understood that pervasive fraud, in its various personal and institutional manifestations, erodes the foundations of civil society by engendering distrust and the presumption of bad faith. If at first we are perplexed by Dante’s judgment, exploring his reasoning should make us a touch more sympathetic. And if we ponder Dante’s choice at greater length, we may even come to see that he is on to something important, something vital, which we ignore at our peril. —————* The medieval planets did not include Neptune or Uranus, which were not visible to the naked eye. They also included the moon and the stars, which we today do not count as planets. For a fascinating discussion of medieval cosmology, see C. S. Lewis’s The Discarded Image. Study Center ResourcesPascal’s will be closed from July 27th through July 5th. We’ll be open again on Monday, July 7th. In next week’s Dante reading group, we will be covering cantos 20-22 of the Inferno. If you’d like to connect with group, please email Mike Sacasas at mike@christianstudycenter.org.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— In Comment, Tara Isabella Burton reflects on a more thoroughly Christian epistemology:Finally, we must preserve a faith in imperfect, but nevertheless useful, human communication: language as a site where something real, albeit never something total or complete, can be meaningfully conveyed. The danger that the social-justice model is most susceptible to is a kind of relational nihilism—our experiences are so distinct that we can never really understand one another; the irreducibility of persons becomes mass unintelligibility. Yet, in light of a theology predicated on the Word made flesh, we are called to understand, however humbly, conversation and dialogue as meaningful sites of operation.— Philip Porter explores a Christian understanding of death, lament, and hope in “Not As Others Who Have No Hope”:Death is not natural. It’s an interruption of the natural, a waylaying of plans and friendships and desires. This is true even of the holy dead who see the Lord face-to-face now as souls separated from their bodies. Though in heaven, they too remain in a state unnatural to humans. To be a human is to be a body-soul—not one and the other, but both together, at once. A human soul, even in heaven, if it’s not united to a human body, is not a human being. It instead remains in expectation of being so again, of reunion with its body at the general resurrection. But the unnaturalness of death isn’t obvious to most. In fact, it’s likely you’ve heard someone, perhaps many people, tell you, “Death is just a part of life.” But for Christians this can’t be true. Christians are instead confronted by death as an irruption, a festering wound, a ghastly mark on the beautiful handiwork of the Lord’s cosmos. — Lyman Stone examines the data on police violence for the Witherspoon Institute. “Above the Law: The Data Are In on Police, Killing, and Race”:Police violence in America is extraordinary in its intensity. It is disproportionate to the actual threats facing police officers, and it has risen significantly in recent years without apparent justification. Its effects are felt across all racial groups, with non-Hispanic whites making up half of all people killed by police officers, even as African Americans are killed at disproportionately high rates compared to any reasonable baseline. 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

Please note that this week we are launching a new feature for the newsletter. You may now choose to listen to the opening essay by clicking play above. Next week it will also be possible to find the audio in your favorite podcast apps. In 1934, T. S. Eliot published Choruses from “The Rock,” a collection of choruses Eliot composed for a play he wrote called “The Rock,” which explored the history of the church and its plight in the modern world. Although the work is relatively obscure compared to many of Eliot’s better known works, it yielded some rather well known lines. It is in the first chorus, for example, that we read, The endless cycle of idea and action,Endless invention, endless experiment,Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,But nearness to death no nearer to God.Where is the Life we have lost in living?Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuriesBring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.These lines, best remembered for the distinctions they make among information, knowledge, and wisdom, would repay our careful attention. But it is to another set of lines that we will turn. In the sixth chorus, Eliot wrote, Why should men love the Church? Why should they love her laws?She tells them of Life and Death, and of all that they would forget.She is tender where they would be hard, and hard where they like to be soft.She tells them of Evil and Sin, and other unpleasant facts.They constantly try to escapeFrom the darkness outside and withinBy dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.But the man that is will shadowThe man that pretends to be.Once again, Eliot gives us much we could reflect upon in these few lines, but let us focus on his claim that, in the modern world, human beings “constantly try to escape / From the darkness outside and within / By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.” These lines aptly capture what we might think of as the technocratic impulse in western society, the idea that it is possible to engineer an ideal society independently of how human beings act. Or, worse yet, that human action itself can and ought to be engineered by the application of social techniques. Such an impulse can take on an obviously totalitarian quality, but it is present in subtler forms as well. Most notably, it is evident in mid-twentieth century theories of behaviorism and in the more recent nudging approach to design and policy popularized by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler and championed by many in the tech industry. In this approach, small and often subtle interventions in the form of automated positive reinforcements or periodic reminders are seen as the path toward managing and shaping human behavior. Similarly, in their 2018 book, Reengineering Humanity, philosopher Evan Selinger and legal scholar Brett Frischmann documented the countless ways in which modern digital technology aims at what they called “engineered determinism.”Historically, the technocratic impulse is evident in the evolution of the rhetoric of progress throughout the course of the 18th and 19th centuries. The earlier Enlightenment notion of progress viewed technology as a necessary, but not sufficient cause of progress which was understood as a movement toward a more just, democratic society. This political vision was gradually replaced by a technocratic notion which measured progress by just one metric: technological innovation. The cultural historian Leo Marx put it this way: “the simple [small-r] republican formula for generating progress by directing improved technical means to societal ends was imperceptibly transformed into a quite different technocratic commitment to improving ‘technology’ as the basis and the measure of — as all but constituting — the progress of society.” Accordingly, technological innovation becomes a substitute for genuine political, economic, and social progress. Underlying this view is the accompanying desire for freedom without responsibility, or what, riffing on philosopher Albert Borgmann, we have called regardless freedom. To dream of systems so perfect no one will need to be good, as Eliot put it, is to dream of systems that underwrite irresponsibility. Such systems would function whether or not human beings act virtuously and responsibly, but such systems do not exist. They remain a dream, or, better, a nightmare. Virtue, as we will always re-discover, is an irreducible component of any rightly ordered society. If we are indeed in a moment that affords the possibility of reimagining and reforming our social structures, then we must resist the temptation to offload the necessary intellectual and moral labor to technical systems and solutions.To be clear, personal virtue is a necessary rather than sufficient cause of a just society. Modern societies do, in fact, require systems, institutions, and bureaucracies of varying scale and power. And it is possible that such systems not only fail due to a lack of virtue, but that they actively sustain and encourage vice and injustice. The well ordered society requires both virtue and a just social infrastructure. The classical or cardinal virtues of temperance, prudence, fortitude, and justice have long offered a foundation for civic order. These virtues encourage restraint, sound judgment, moral courage, and the desire for an equitable social order. To cultivate such virtues is to assume personal responsibility for the functioning of society. Beyond these cardinal virtues, the Church has always recognized the theological virtues: faith, hope, and love. These remain indispensable for the church, and, while they cannot, in their explicitly theological character, be expected or demanded of the wider public, Christians can, by their participation, leaven the civic order with these virtues. But it can do so only to the degree that it cultivates these virtues in her people. Study Center ResourcesPascal’s is open for both online ordering and dine-in service. Please do feel free to spread the word that we are open and ready to serve.In this week’s Dante reading group, we will be covering cantos 17-19 of the Inferno. If you’d like to connect with group, please email Mike Sacasas at mike@christianstudycenter.org.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— Adam Elkus on the emergence of the “omni-cris”:When social constraints are weakened, the aggregate predictability of human behavior diminishes. Why? The weakening of constraints generates confusion. Things have always worked until they suddenly break. Things have always been decided for you until you have to suddenly decide on your own. Another way of thinking about social constraints – with a very long history in social science – posits them as involuntarily assigned expectations about the future. Prolonged and severe disruption of expectations without immediate prospect of relief accordingly should create greater variance in potential outcomes. The simplest way to understand the omni-crisis is as the sustained breaking of expectations and disruption of the ability to simulate the future forward using assumed constraints.— Taylor Dotson on “Radiation Politics in a Pandemic”:The inherent uncertainties in the science of impending dangers complicates government officials’ ability to achieve public buy-in. Because empirical evidence is almost always incomplete or not totally convincing, officials must rely on trust, on their own legitimacy. The trouble […] is that trust is gained in drops but lost in buckets. Storming in to save the day with science is great — until some of the facts turn out wrong. British radiation scientists could have instead worked alongside sheep farmers in finding the pertinent scientific facts, recognizing that the farmers had something to contribute. Instead of expecting the farmers’ deference, this approach would have gone a long way toward earning their trust in the scientists’ own areas of expertise.— Venkatesh Rao on “Pandemic Time: A Distributed Doomsday Clock”:Whether or not the stars foretold our present condition, we will be living for the foreseeable future in a distorted temporality shaped by the progress of COVID-19 across the globe. Like the distorted time around a supergiant star going supernova and collapsing into a black hole, “pandemic time” is anything but normal. 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