Releasing Later This Week: Will Heaven Be Boring?

“Will Heaven Be Boring?” is my next pamphlet and will be out later this week through Amazon. It’s a long, meandering conversation between a teacher and student about the titular question which branches out into matters of art, romance, beauty, good taste, piety, knowledge, and freedom. Some of the same matters argued in Love What Lasts are present here, as well, but the pamphlet is meant to be read and discussed in high school classrooms, parent book clubs, and Sunday School classrooms.

In about a month, licensed PDF copies of the pamphlet will be available through Gibbs Classical. Until then, single copies for e-Readers will be available for purchase through Amazon. It should be available in the next three or four days.

So Close, Yet So Far Apart

Progressives think nothing from the past is worth saving, conservatives think almost nothing from the past is worth saving. That little almost is the hinge upon which the political world turns. If anything from the past is worth saving, the entire orientation of man must change.

Bad Romance

“The way Tod spoke of their relationship to his friends didn’t always seem entirely accurate to Jill. Tod was ambitious, of course, and perhaps this accounted for his tendency of wildly exaggerating how often they saw each other, or his descriptions of what they did when they were together. “We have this thing we do call Sunday Drives,” she heard him tell his friends. “On Sunday afternoons, we pick a random place on the map that’s about two hours away, a place neither of us have ever been. And then we just drive there and talk about our week—what we’ve been thinking about, what we’ve been listening to, what our hopes and fears are. We really just connect. When we get wherever we’re going, we pick some small café and just drink a cup of coffee and connect. No phones, no distractions. We both really enjoy it.” And he wasn’t exactly lying. At the time Tod said this, they had done exactly what he said in exactly the way he later described it to his friends. What’s more, it had been his idea, he had laid out exactly what he wanted to happen, Jill thought it sounded quite romantic, and in the end, it was. But the following Sunday, he went to the movies with his friends, and the Sunday after that he had been out of town, as was the case the Sunday after that. Many weeks later, Jill reminded Tod of the Sunday Drive they’d gone on and he said he was busy but encouraged her to make a Sunday Drive on her own and to tell him how it went when she got back. “You can do it the same way we always do it,” he said, “just by yourself. That way, you can listen to the music you like.” She had taken his advice and had a fine time after she quit feeling sorry for herself, though Tod never asked how it went and she never felt much compulsion to tell him. After that, she never brought up Sunday Drives again. Months later, when Tod told his friends about their Sunday Drives, Jill was surprised he even remembered. “They’re great. They’re such an important part of our relationship,” he told his friends.”

-from Bad Romance: On Changing Your Mind, my latest for CiRCE

Spring Sounds

I’ve been listening to this record for more than a decade, but I now firmly associate it with Spring. It was one of three or four records (along with A Soul Ascends and Brian Eno’s Neroli)I listened to every day right after the lockdown began. Tired Sounds of is a contemplative, chastened, immersive, immense, cautiously pessimistic sort of record… that I always feel deeply come March.