A variety of choice thoughts from my internet reading the past two weeks:
From Peggy Noonan's scathing article about the Bush Adminstration's treatment of Conservatives:
Now conservatives and Republicans are going to have to win back their party. They are going to have to break from those who have already broken from them. This will require courage, serious thinking and an ability to do what psychologists used to call letting go. This will be painful, but it's time. It's more than time.
The olfactory glands, it turns out, may be more important than you think. From a book review by Lauren Winner:
Some of Harvey's most revelatory insights come when she connects Christian discourses about olfactory piety with politics. It's no coincidence, she argues, that both a lavishly olfactory piety and an ascetical discourse filled with warnings about sensory knowing emerged in the Constantinian era. The impulse to ground an epistemology in smell, and the impulse to caution against sensory excess, were both, in part, responses to Christianity's new political position. Christians' increasing comfort with extravagantly sensory liturgical practices reflected not simply an innocent embrace of God's good creation but also a theological and ideological commitment to "a public and imperial order that saw the Empire as God's earthly kingdom." Likewise, the ascetic's cautionary note destabilized the cozy relationship between church and empire: asceticism warned Christians against getting too comfortable in this world of political power and social prestige. Harvey's astute reading of the intertwining of politics and piety at the interstices of empire is not without resonance for American Christians today.
You've seen it everywhere, but probably haven't noticed. It's the icon of the modern world: Helvetica.
Ultimately, Helvetica is a cipher--and this is the key to its success. It can be authoritative or ironic, sober or idealistic, corporate or cozy. It's the tofu of typefaces: bland in itself but ready to absorb whatever flavors you add to it. It's clean, legible, and well-designed, but its real power lies in its uncanny mutability.
And finally, for the broken hearted among us comes this gem by Dawn Eden:
Really, the most obvious reason for why one would have to go through a breakup, as with any pain, is to be better able to console others. As to why such pain should exist in the first place, well, there's the first few chapters of Genesis to explain that one. Better yet, there's the non-explanation given by the Book of Job, of which G.K. Chesterton said, "The refusal of God to explain His design is itself a burning hint of His design. The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man."
Matthew Lee Anderson
Matthew Lee Anderson is an Associate Professor of Ethics and Theology in Baylor University's Honors College. He has a D.Phil. in Christian Ethics from Oxford University, and is a Perpetual Member of Biola University's Torrey Honors College. In 2005, he founded Mere Orthodoxy.
