The latest on the podcast network: on Creedal Catholic, Casey Chalk and I continued our five-part series on TULIP with a discussion on Limited Atonement, and on Vernacular Sally and I spoke with Dr. Jessica Hooten Wilson about Flannery O’Connor.
Good Monday!
Hopefully you’ve been able to catch a glimpse of NEOWISE, the generational comet that makes its closest approach to earth on July 23rd. I keep trying to catch a glimpse of it from my town (and have told my girls I will wake them up for the occasion) but unfortunately we’ve had overcast evening skies thus far.
BUT…amateur astrophotographer Thierry Legault last week captured one of the most impressive pictures I’ve ever seen: NEOWISE blazing through the sky just above Mont-Saint-Michel Abbey. Legault also captured another similar photo, this time with St. Michael silhouetted against the blazing comet. Follow Thierry on Twitter here.
This poem by Walt Whitman comes to mind:
When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
One Big Thing.
Readers of the newsletter a few weeks ago will recall my critique of Paul Elie’s How Racist was Flannery O’Connor? I linked to a response to Elie by Dr. Jessica Hooten Wilson (How Flannery Fought Racism), and this week on Vernacular Sally and I interviewed Dr. Hooten Wilson to learn more. We talk about the nature of race and grace in the work of O’Connor and some Flannery resources for the uninitiated. Listen in your favorite podcast app below!
Race and Grace in Flannery O’Connor (Vernacular Podcast)
One Changing Thing.
Thank you to those of you who have sent me positive feedback on the recent focus in this newsletter on the suppression of dissent within mainstream avenues of discourse. We continue that theme today…
This past week, Bari Weiss, a now-former opinion writer at The New York Times, wrote A.G Sulzberger a blistering resignation letter. Nota bene: Weiss was a signatory of the Harper’s Letter I wrote about last week.
Resignation Letter by Bari Weiss
Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor. As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space. Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions. . . Part of me wishes I could say that my experience was unique. But the truth is that intellectual curiosity—let alone risk-taking—is now a liability at The Times. Why edit something challenging to our readers, or write something bold only to go through the numbing process of making it ideologically kosher, when we can assure ourselves of job security (and clicks) by publishing our 4000th op-ed arguing that Donald Trump is a unique danger to the country and the world? And so self-censorship has become the norm.
It’s worth noting that Weiss is not a conservative. I think she’s best described as an independent-minded left-leaning centrist who holds strongly to a handful of views that the left views as abhorrent. This is Kevin Williamson’s point (below), which he makes in his usual provocative fashion in the pages of the New York Post, arguing that the left views moderates (like Weiss) rather than than conservatives (like Douthat) as the real threat.
Because, you see, conservatives can be cordoned off and safely observed from a distance. Moderates, on the other hand, freely trespass across ideological borders, exposing ensconced members of the left to ideas that are downright pathogenic and for which there is no vaccine.
For Left-Wing Purists, Moderates—Not Conservatives—Are the True Enemy by Kevin Williamson (New York Post)
Weiss was employed at the Times as a politically independent and curious editor, not as a conservative commentator. You can be a pretty happy conservative in the Times’ splendid conservative ghetto — a conservative under quarantine, gently offering the conservative take of the day, wearing a sandwich board reading “Danger: conservative.” What made Weiss indigestible to the Times wasn’t vicious right-wingery but the fact that she was not there as a member of the Times’ stable of house conservatives. Nobody is shocked to see animals at the zoo, as long as they stay in their cages.
For those interested, Williamson and Charles Cooke discussed this idea more on the most recent episode of their podcast, Mad Dogs and Englishmen. I thought it was a fair discussion.
Also: speaking of Williamson’s description of “the Times’ splendid conservative ghetto,” if you have a NYT subscription, Ross Douthat’s latest column is certainly worth your time.
🔐 The Real White Fragility by Ross Douthat (New York Times)
These stresses have exposed the thinness of meritocracy as a culture, a Hogwarts with SATs instead of magic, a secular substitute for older forms of community, tradition or religion. For instance, it was the frequent boast of Obama-era liberalism that it had restored certain bourgeois virtues — delayed childbearing, stable marriages — without requiring anything so anachronistic as Christianity or courtship rituals. But if your bourgeois order is built on a cycle of competition and reward, and the competition gets fiercer while the rewards diminish, then instead of young people hooking up safely on the way to a lucrative job and a dual-income marriage with 2.1 kids, you’ll get young people set adrift, unable to pair off, postponing marriage permanently while they wait for a stability that never comes.
One Sad Thing—an American hero passes.
Congressman John Lewis, civil rights hero and Selma legend, entered eternal rest this past week. Sally and I watched Selma a few weeks ago, and Congressman Lewis’ leading role in the protests features prominently. I’m ashamed to admit that I didn’t know his background until watching that film. He’s an icon. Just two weeks ago, the Congressman (or more likely his staff) mentioned the 59th anniversary of Lewis’ arrest in Jackson during the 1961 “Freedom Rides.”
David Remnick wrote a brief profile of Lewis in a 2009 New Yorker piece tellingly called “The President’s Hero.” In sum: it’s difficult to overstate Lewis’ influence on the last sixty years of U.S. history. He’s an icon.
The President’s Hero by David Remnick (The New Yorker)
Two years later, in Selma, Lewis led a march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge straight into a blockade set up by Alabama state troopers. The first nightstick came down on Lewis’s skull. The troopers used whips, horses, a hose wrapped in barbed wire. Along with Lewis, ninety demonstrators were injured. At the White House, Lyndon Johnson watched it all on television and deepened his resolve to push the Voting Rights Act. The day before Obama’s Inauguration, which marked what would have been King’s eightieth birthday, Lewis told a visitor at his office in the Cannon House Office Building, “Barack Obama is what comes at the end of that bridge in Selma.”
One Funny Thing.
Cancel culture claims another victim:
Famed Archaeology Professor Fired After Photos Surface Of Him Wearing Nazi Uniform (The Babylon Bee)
Professor of archaeology, expert in the occult, and obtainer of rare antiquities, Dr. Henry Jones Jr. has been suspended indefinitely from Marshall College after multiple photos have surfaced of him wearing Nazi uniforms.
Presented without comment.
🤔
It’s a real tweet. I promise.
The Afterword
Thanks to Mike H., Dave H., Nathan S., and Taylor Y. for their thoughtful comments this week! I always love hearing from subscribers, so if you have inputs, please let me know.
Have a great week!