“Athletic performance is an instantiation of grace: something at once violent, unexpected, and terrifying, but always ordered toward an elegance that could not have been predicted yet nonetheless makes sense.”

“The kingdom of God isn’t built on legacy or good taste, and its visualization isn’t limited to one style or era. It opens outward.”

“Mystical quietude differs from aesthetic calm: past a literary technique, it is an existential practice, a schooling of desire and attention. The silence of the mystics baptizes speech, allowing language to be born of awe.”

“We speak often of institutional trauma, the wounds they inflict on us. But this year has revealed the other side of the coin, one that many of us have not quite seen before: institutions themselves in trauma, stripped of the very tissue that gives them life—the public’s trust.”

“Institutions do not simply organize work. At their best they cultivate the conditions for character, channelling power toward service and shaping desire toward the common good.”

“For those becoming allergic to good news or dabbling in despair, skepticism metastasizes quickly. We have too few riveting portraits of life to the full and conviction-led, justice-serious, costly self-risking.”

“Identity is not discovered or created; it is established. And as we are uprooted from day-to-day relational commitments, values, and practices, not only do we lose these networks of meaning, but we lose self-intelligibility too.”

“In Kyoto, the remnant flickers in those who remain at the table, not because they are certain, but because they find themselves on a stage of brief relevance, willing to outlast their own expectations in the quiet tension of those who just keep showing up.”

The silence of the mystics baptizes speech, allowing language to be born of awe: comment.org/silence-the-... @commentmagazine.bsky.social #meditation #writing #music #art

“Is there such a thing as a populism of solidarity? A populism that is less like wildfire and more like a construction crew?” Amber Lapp journeys to the Rural Revival festival.

“Silence is a human inheritance. It is the ground where thought clarifies, where prayer ripens, where friendship deepens. Even politics needs stillness: Václav Havel described the power of the powerless as a refusal to participate in lies, a silence that carried more truth than many speeches.”

“The very conditions that allow private museums to operate with disinterested aesthetic freedom, unconcerned with popularity or ticket sales, are themselves products of an unequal global economy.”

“The work quietude performs is subtle but steady: it threshes wheat from chaff, desire from distraction. It teaches us to speak more slowly, to choose words as though they mattered, to withhold judgment long enough for truth to ripen.”

“The most vital devotional art holds doctrine and presence together; its formal language and iconography express theological truth even as they invite us into divine encounter.”

“We flee into digital detox retreats, or into apps that sell quietude back to us as a subscription service. Noise is the religion of our age, demanding constant sacrifice of our attention.” @ysl.bsky.social on silence and the flourishing of life and art.

“Private museums may indeed provide a venue for the overlooked and the new, but they do so in a context defined by uneven access to resources.” Arthur Aghajanian on the fraught world of culture, capital, and creativity.

“I learned of the God who is mightier than the forces that threatened me, the God whose punctured hands had punctured the void.”

On a new episode of Conversing, biblical scholar Michael J. Gorman joins Mark Labberton to explore how Christians can read Revelation responsibly rather than with fear or sensationalism.

“We are still creatures who long to belong, who rejoice in finding our fragile dignity called forth into something noble and glorious, who long to join the work of being part of something that stretches behind us and before us.”

“The darkened room crackles with energy; I’d wager most attendees are under thirty, definitely under fifty. Photographers and videographers slink through the crowd. A choir sings, tech folks with glitter strands in their hair click through graphics.”

“The wars over history, empire, and colonialism that have flared up so viciously of late are about the future as much as the past.”

“Even though we may start by talking about systems and structures that implicate us, we all face many temptations to remove the shame from ourselves by pinpointing instead the transgressions of others, ostensibly using the shame of that transgression to persuade these others to reform.”

“Institutions are not just organizations but organizations imbued with special meaning. An institution, rightly understood, is a living tradition—a patterned form of human relationship that binds freedom to purpose, memory to responsibility.”

“To think institutionally is to remember that we inherit before we innovate, that we hold something in trust.” Anne Snyder on the institutions of tomorrow.

“Part of why this moment of institutional precarity feels painful—but also interesting—is that many of the institutions now being battered were already down for the count.”

“This issue takes you into the disposition of distrust that has mushroomed in recent years—the tangled legacy of our institutions’ uneven embrace of who matters and who doesn’t—and provides a sense of what it will take to rebuild trust.”

“We are still creatures who long to belong, who rejoice in finding our fragile dignity called forth into something noble and glorious, who long to join the work of being part of something that stretches behind us and before us.” Anne Snyder on the institutions of tomorrow.

Highly recommend. Really thinking about this line through the lens of Habermas’ communal meaning making: “This is the work at hand: to tend to cultural memory not as something to manipulate for power but to steward for healing.”

“For Capon, the world—the gratuitously teeming, verdant, and fructifying world—was neither a resource to be exploited nor a prison to be escaped, but a gift to be received with delight and lifted up with joy.”

“If the rest of the world values vice, then the good person must choose not to be their king.” Jessica Hooten Wilson with a call to be obscurely good.

“It has never been easy to resist lies, when they are so pervasive and ready off the shelf for immediate use.” Erin Plunkett on the heretical truths of Jan Patočka.

“Music’s unique power is perhaps most evident in how those in charge attempt to control it.”

“The void I encountered now sees my confidence in Christ and has obediently retreated.”

“Is there such a thing as a populism of solidarity? A populism that is less like wildfire and more like a construction crew?”

“If we have the eyes for it, we may see the strong beauty of the divine nature shining through athletic struggle.”

“For those becoming allergic to good news or dabbling in despair, skepticism metastasizes quickly. We have too few riveting portraits of life to the full and conviction-led, justice-serious, costly self-risking.”

“Failing young men does not benefit young women. The young women I know tell me they are worse off because of malformed young men, not more empowered.”

“If we are to learn to speak a common language of virtue once more, we will need to better understand the workings of shame in and through our societies.”

“With a goal to strive for together, partisan lines, ideological divisions, and other barriers crumble.” John Hatzis on why boys need to see models of responsibility.

“The athlete—the one who combines force with skill—is an ideal image for the fully integrated, catholic human being, a bodily manifestation of grace, suggesting to us something about the nature of man.” Aaron James Weisel on the grace of sport.

“Half of me was shaped by the evangelicalism that had taught me the gospel, and the other half was enticed by the counterculture, which seemed to me the only cure to the bland and barren aesthetic of evangelicalism.”

“There in the desert, in the darkness, I was face to face—if it can be said to have a face—with the void.”

The October Material Mysticism at @commentmagazine.bsky.social is a descent through the maw of despair into a hell of mercy. comment.org/salvation-by...

“Christ has reconciled me to the nothingness that nearly destroyed me.” @millinerd.bsky.social on a reckoning at Chaco Canyon.

“Despite the impressive imperial machinery that fuelled Christendom’s spread to new lands, the old pagan stories proved surprisingly durable. They remained lodged in the memory—and music—of conquered peoples, existing precariously in the shadow of the empire.”

“How does one move from “I truly believed that I was at the point of death” to “All will be well”? The answer, for Julian, was a transformative contemplative encounter with a loving God present among the deathworks of the world.”

“A modern approach to identity associates self-discovery with self-creation: we don’t have a narrative; we create our narrative.” Kevin Brown on why rooted obligations forge our most stable sense of self.

“For every big revival, there are a thousand smaller stories—individuals freed from addictions or illnesses on any random Thursday, souls saved outside of mass movements.”

“Music’s unique power is perhaps most evident in how those in charge attempt to control it.” Victor Clemente on music, fundamentalism, and Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners.”

“Generational critique focuses so much on the differences between one group’s youth and another’s that it is often blind to the ways experiences overlap across lifetimes.”