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.

After The LinkedIn TED Talk Bros Came to Classical Education

“You attend a classical education conference this summer and, while perusing the speaker biographies in the conference program, you come across the following:

“Harge Manning is the founder of the Diluvian Consortium, a group of Christian thought leaders who specialize in dynamic vision forwarding, cognitive missional flexibility, core value development, servant viral marketing ethics, and integrated ethno-mindful solution differentials. Under Harge’s leadership, the Diluvian Consortium has helped church ecosystems across the globe reposition themselves for optimal market/Gospel outreach. Harge owes his success to his ability to be comfortable being uncomfortable and his confidence in the Church’s antifragile entrepreneurship. He enjoys equipping tomorrow’s leaders today, energizing today’s leaders for tomorrow, and tomorrowing today’s energy for leaders. Harge is a member of many boards, groups, councils, panels, committees, and clubs. He is married to Desiree, who is the executive director of the Cross Wellness Initiative. They live in a heavily gentrified Houston neighborhood.”

You flip over a few pages to see what Harge is lecturing on. It’s a plenary session.

“Futureproofing the Dynamics of Your Vision’s Marketability by Harge Manning. Is your vision outfitted for the dynamics of marketability in a post-COVID world? In this engaging lecture, Manning offers strategies for vision-outfitting your institution so you can optimize the Kingdom’s next steps.”

There was a time when classical Christian education laughed at guys like Harge Manning—and yet I’d swear that guys like Harge have become an increasingly regular feature of the classical Christian world over the last ten years or so. Maybe Harge wasn’t interested in the movement when it was small, maybe we couldn’t afford Harge’s services when the movement was small, but by this point, I think it’s fair to say Harge has settled in. And not just at conferences.”

-from my latest for CiRCE

The Worst Super Bowl Halftime Show Of All Time

“The badness of the show is easy to see twenty-four years later, and yet it’s not exactly true that it has “aged poorly.” Raw meat ages poorly, but the 2000 Halftime Show was quite, quite rancid on the day it aired—and this was obvious at the time to anyone who had even a modicum of good taste.  The passage of time makes it easy for everyone to see the stupidity of stupid things, but a wise man can see that foolish things are foolish immediately. A fool judges a foolish thing foolish only after it becomes popular opinion. By the point a foolish thing is commonly thought foolish, though, it has already done its harm. The people who needed twenty-four years to see the 2000 Halftime Show was stupid are going to need another twenty-four years to see the stuff they like today is stupid.

The question, then, is this: how do you acquire the ability to see things here and now with the perspective that twenty-four additional years grants? How about the perspective which fifty more years grants? How about a hundred?”

-from my latest for CiRCE