amen, amen, in a time of perverse and wicked nationalisms, let the reader understand: if God by God’s own self does not compel our obedience by force, and our very own experience of our own freedom of conscience shows God does not, then neither can any group compel our obedience on God’s behalf.

it's a long way off but inside it there are quite different things going on:

my dad is home from the hospital and we are listening to Greg Bell call the high school football ball team on WWIC.

Our kids get to watch plenty of TV and play plenty of video games. But I’ve been a hard and unrepentant no on unsupervised YouTube for their entire lives.

We're open for pitches of any length! press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/se...

we used to publish books in this country. books.

this volume in my hand was published in New York in 1926 by The Macmillan Company. it has sewn signatures, and they lay flat. the typography is modest but elegantly spaced, and it is such a beautiful reading experience i can hardly stand it.

well, friends. a shocking Phenomenology Friday. my dad was in a bad car accident, he has six broken ribs, but, thank heaven, he is stable and alert. however. he is here to testify we are not merely minds.

“Whereas the hermeneutics of suspicion looks backward, thereby reducing claims to meaning to the economy or energies that function behind them, the hermeneutics of confidence is oriented in a forward direction, toward the world that presents us with meaning to be interpreted.”

shoutout to everyone who grew up knowing the gales of November come early.

good morning. happy warranted to be a pendleton wool weather to all who celebrate.

y’all.

out here in downtown Chattanooga with the truckers and the kickers and the cowboy angels for Mama’s Broke.

yes. quite a day.

More mail. And a shoutout to translator George Szirtes, a delightful poet in his own right.

me and the 14 yr old are sitting silently side by side, and we are both reading our fantasy novels. this dad has arrived.

@theverge.com @davidpierce.xyz @reckless.bsky.social my nominations to certify AGI: Annie Dillard, author. Dolly Parton, musician. M. Shawn Copeland, theologian. Judith Butler, philosopher. Cathy O'Neil, mathematician. Meghan O'Gieblyn, essayist. Joanna Stern, journalist. Simone Biles, athlete.

Good morning to every person of good will committed to a government of the people, by the people, for the people. If honor and wisdom and joy be not for me, let them be for others. Let such a city exist, though my own place be in hell. Let them show us how then we should live.

Mail. Backorders beginning to arrive.

Do not, under any circumstances, go short ontology.

eat your heart out, warren zevon.

lieutenant colonel kilgore, shirtless, surveying the horizon, adjusting his hat, talking to everyone, to no one: sandwiches, son. nothing else in the world smells like that. ... i love the smell of sandwiches in the morning. ... ... ... ... ... someday this war's gonna end.

can't you see the sun's settin down on our town, on our town. goodnight.

real gillian rose hours who up

i got a rock.

me, meandering through the party until i step up to the mic and carefully adjust my glasses: today on our show, we have stories of people caught in that kind of servile relationship with objects that they supposedly own. from wbez chicago, it's this american life. i'm slutty ira glass. stay with us.

someone listened to my halloween album and told three friends about it, and they lucked into a stash of magic anklets. someone else didn't listen or share and they were waylaid by skeleton warriors, died, and lost half their gold. just repeating what i heard

11 yr old, working on a presentation for class, asking for feedback, blinking at me as i make my suggestions: wow. you’re, like, really good at this.

"But it is not your own Shire, said Gildor. "Others dwelt here before hobbits were; and others will dwell here again when hobbits are no more. The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot for ever fence it out."

me, nodding off sometime in the 13th: … the ghost of art lafleur, shaking his head: could you not watch with us for even one game? me, this morning, bitterly: the spirit is willing. but the flesh is weak.

i been out here sayin

rain. my antique jeep xj dead in the driveway. so the whole family piles into the other vehicle, and i get to dj all my songs about the rain with the modern electronics while my wife drives us to all to our different schools. shine a different way. blow your wounded heart wide open.

11 yr old memorized the final brief monologue of Puck at the end of Midsummer Night’s Dream and Wind in Our Sail by Weezer for his audition for the middle school play.

poetry. breaks. the. syllogism.

"Now, human beings had long ago started to think that they were like packets of packets of data. And ChatGPT, being craftier than other applications, was actually packets of data." @mattdinan.bsky.social with an excellent word this morning:

i keep thinking about how, in undergrad, when i was assigned him in a course on the american novel, though i could see he was an astounding stylist, i did not at all care for how Pynchon depicted reality.

a poorly lit room, backstage, somewhere off, off, off broadway. two figures slump in badly rumpled formal dress, both drunk. they stir. sir toby belch: is't possible? fabian, slurringly, deadpanning for the camera: if this were played upon a stage now, i could condemn it as an improbable fiction.

my kingdom, my kingdom for a key and peele sketch about them hitting their heads against the wall trying to find a way to write how obama and luther might respond to a reporter asking about how the public should feel about the demolition of the east wing.

broad daylight, and a gray shape darts across the field. as he crosses the road, the silhouette of a fox. on the other side, he slows to skip and disappears into the scrub woods on the other side.

home again, home again, jiggety jig

Goodbye, Twin Cities. You are good people.

Friction is an invitation to the holy. — Tripp Fuller

Here in St Paul for my favorite conference: Theology Beer Camp with @trippfuller.bsky.social.

@lazenby.bsky.social @juskewitch.bsky.social @erikk38.bsky.social listening to the picnic and thinking about boredom while living dangerously by killing my battery as i wait for my airplane.

me, returning several books to the Sewanee library, looking at the student behind the circulation desk: please. i am an alumnus. i live 50 miles south of campus. don’t let me leave with any new books.

me, dismissing class after A Good Man is Hard to Find, already thinking ahead to email and other administrative tasks: a student, catching my eye, her hands spread above her open textbook as if she were trying to hold onto something: I am obsessed with this story.

our firstborn child is fourteen today. blink of an eye.

after a long weekend away, this morning the streets of my little town are covered in fog. all is grey. but as i cross the bridge, it gives way, the sun pours out, and even the meanest of the grasses on the roadside reach to the heavens with color, color, color. blow your wounded heart wide open. ⚓️

because we all have only one sentence, and we are looking for this sentence where we have some power to say something, for one sentence, in one life we have only one sentence and everybody in a bar or in a school or in a university or everywhere, in the street are looking for their own sentence

Pynchon sits down to a cup of coffee in an original Wassily B3 which is angled just so. He glances at the old Model 500 with its rotary dial sitting on the sidetable, and he remembers all the years Cormac called and how they laughed about Roth waiting by the phone. “Well, I guess I could call Bob.”