The Lord’s table is our sacrifice of praise. Yet even our gratitude is made possible only by God. “Of thine own we have given thee” which is another way of saying “we love him because he first loved us.” The Gift is the water we swim in.

New curated issue! read.dukeupress.edu/french-histo...

Jüngel, GMW

Someone or something just made a loud sound in the inaccessible part of the crawlspace. I looked to the cat for his input, but he has nothing but disdain for those particular Terres Inconnues.

Got this beautiful baby on pre-order for later this month 😍

From Tillich, “The Eternal Now”

I can assure you that the coup by which Louis Bonaparte went from elected president of France to Emperor Napoleon III involved no tanks. But he did have the support of the trumpenproletariat

The Nazis, Japanese, & Soviets all pursued centralized programs of industrialization in a bid to break free from the US-British world-system. American military keynesian industrialization responded to the threat of these "late industrializers" & took inspo from the Nazi & Soviet examples.

The craft of public speaking can allow you to remove barriers to the congregation’s hearing of God’s Word proclaimed. As a speech coach I care a lot about that. But there is no technique and no skill that can force God to take up your words in another person’s soul as though they are God’s Own Word.

Ross posting Hendrickson edition CD on main is the only content I really want to see on the internet. You can delete the rest of it tbh.

For Lacan, hatred is not an imaginary aggressivity (the rivalry with the semblable, the mirror-double, which is transient and specular). Hatred is lucid, it is durable, it aims at the *being* of the other.

Some of my favorite art books from my library in Los Angeles. The Vermeer bio is a recent addition, which I’m very excited to read.

I recognize the hypocrisy and the irony of posting this on “social” media, but I think it’s worth saying: our inability to be alone, to be truly alone - devoid even of the presence of the Spirit - seems to be a negative consequence of relatively recent cultural/social shifts.

Goodreads is absolutely unusable. Perhaps one of the worst apps on the market today. Bezos ruined it, of course. What are the alternatives?

I think Trump has mentioned “communism” more times in the past week than I’ve said “the being of God is the event of his self-disclosure,” which, if you know me, is both impressive and also very concerning.

“I have no modesty. Modesty is dangerous. It’s a learned affectation. As soon as a modest person gets slammed against the wall by life, modesty will drop off faster than a g-string from a stripper. I hope to be humble. Humility is from within. That keeps you honest.” – Maya Angelou

We spend so much time talking about trauma that I think the banal, daily suffering and pain of life that is more or less an existential condition is perhaps overlooked, eclipsed by the shocking and profane violence of extraordinary cruelty. We forget that the cruelty of everyday life takes its toll.

🙁

What the jealous person cannot bear is less the rival as a person than the jouissance the rival appears to possess, an enjoyment imagined as complete and as stolen from oneself. The subject wants to be what the Other desires, to be the object that would complete the Other and be completed in return.

There is a difference between aristocratic indifference and existential pessimism.

From Cioran, “The Trouble with Being Born”

Let me but hear my Saviour say, / Strength shall be equal to thy day, / Then I rejoice in deep distress, / Leaning on all-sufficient Grace. I glory in infirmity, / That Christ’s own power may rest on me; / When I am weak, then am I strong, / Grace is my shield, and Christ my song. – Watts, Hymn 15

You can always tell what kind of historian someone is by which section of a Wikipedia page they read first: “Personal Life” or “Ideas.”

Trying to figure some stuff out now that I have free time.

The late Lacan of the mathemes turns out to share far more with the Churchlands’ eliminative materialism than I had recognized. Formalization against folk reason. If the future is to be humane, it will have to be so throughly anti-humanist as to kill the author entirely.

My defense draft has been submitted. I wish to apologize if my sigh of relief disturbed you; I’m sure it was heard around the world.

Many people are saying!

“I have doubts! I have such doubts!”

Annie is curious about, yet unimpressed by, the local fireworks. #blackcat #caturday

So excited to attend my favorite TEC parish tomorrow in Santa Monica. Definitely a God-nod for me that the Gospel lection for tomorrow, Proper 9, is from Matthew 11: "Come to me, all you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest."

A juicy archival image that I'm using in chapter six.

The real reason I am a Lacanian is because I am not intuitively in touch with my feelings. In analysis, I finally realized the fictive/creative process that is coming to terms with how I actually feel about things. I experience a profound disjunction between experience and affect.

I think the six body chapters are basically done for the defense draft. Just need to do a final, quick proofread. Intro + Conclusion need some minor polishing, too. Fitting that I’ll submit the damn thing tomorrow; it’ll be my own Independence Day.

"Conscience chases humankind away from God into its secure hiding place. Here, far away from God [in der Gottesferne], humankind itself plays the role of being judge and in this way seeks to evade God’s judgment." – Bonhoeffer

pres-outlook.org/2026/07/pcus... 👏🏻👏🏻

All of us lately.

Read the interactive NYT article. Have to say that the consistent efforts of the press to frame the U.S. as a "nation of immigrants" are incredibly disingenuous & misleading. It isn't really "political" to acknowledge that American "roots" are Indigenous genocide/dispossession and slavery.

Good news & bad news. Good news: I've rediscovered ~500 pages of EXTREMELY relevant CISNU declarations in Persian that I scanned when I did my archival trip to the IISH in Amsterdam that will positively reshape chs. 5 & 6. Bad news: defense draft is basically done and I'm sending it on Sat.

Most useful words to consider before you dig in to something of questionable importance: is my interlocutor willing to be proven wrong? Am I willing to be proven wrong?

One of my favorite songs of all time.

This is my lane. I went through the 194 Trump v Barbara opinion from yesterday section by section, noting what they got right about US migration and citizenship history, and what the dissents get wrong. Please share if you think it is helpful to others.

I am coming back to @richardckeller.bsky.social's essential book, "Fatal Isolation: The Devastating Paris Heat Wave of 2003," to help put the unfolding climate catastrophe in Paris, and Europe more broadly, in historical context. I recommend others do the same.

The dove has torn her wing So no more songs of love We are not here to sing We’re here to kill the dove

full of secrets.

Daily I grow further away from anything resembling sacerdotal sacramentalism. I just don’t have the wherewithal to deal with the Drama of the Story of the Catholic Church. I’m delighted when it works for people, but it’s much too stressful for me. I’d rather be wrong than mentally ill.

My disagreement with the Vines piece is that I think the drop in support for gay marriage among conservatives is not caused by us. It is algorithmic. You cannot have the same manicured and message disciplined PR machine that gay marriage activism had in the '90s - '10s anymore because of algorithms.

I am upset that I don’t have the time to write something in response to Matthew Vines’ article in the NYT. There is so much to say and so much to deconstruct. Perhaps the best place to start would be to ask people to reconsider how they are defining queerness. In that regard, see below.