There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity.

It has been the better part of a decade since I was sufficiently dialed into new stuff that I could make convincing lists of the best movies of the year, the best television shows, and so forth. Instead, here’s a list of what made my year good, some of it new, some of it old.

Ripley on Netflix: It wouldn’t be possible to outdo Anthony Minghella’s jazzy, sumptuous, sun-soaked 1999 version of Patricia Highsmith’s novel, so Steven Zaillian completely reimagined every single character, the mood, the look, the music, the themes. Nonetheless, it’s somehow still Highsmith’s story. One of the decade’s great triumphs of adaptation.

Merely & Malibu’s Essential Mixtape: The pretensions of ambient music are softened by the goofiness of new age in this absolutely beautiful snooze fest.

Trust by Domenico Starnone: I was hooked after I heard the premise: boyfriend and girlfriend don’t want to get married, but they do want to be deeply indebted to one another, so they tell one another about the absolute worst thing they’ve ever done. Then break up a few days later.

Easy Does It by Julie London: For the first time in five years, my top Wrapped artist wasn’t Harold Budd, but Julie London. This 1968 record has a blue, gin-soaked tone that typifies my favorite Julie London recordings.

Black Magenta by D.S. & Durga: The only 2024 release I picked up this year: “City at night in bold colorful fumes—pineapple glow, magenta dianthus, iris twilight, tobacco, and black amber. Pair with loud music.”

Laughter in the Dark by Vladimir Nabokov: I picked this up at the Mall of America while marooned in Minneapolis after the Delta Meltdown last summer. This is Nabokov’s most readable book, and his most horrifying.

The Princess on HBO: While I’m an unapologetic Lady Di fan, this 2022 documentary is so elegantly assembled, it might win over a few who are generally indifferent to celebrities.

Good Pop, Bad Pop by Jarvis Cocker: I’ve loved Pulp since I was sixteen. This memoir from Jarvis Cocker was delightful, humane, and I was regularly surprised by how much of his childhood seemed like my own.

A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh: I love a novel that ends very, very, very, very far from what you’re initially expecting.

Baby Reindeer on Netflix: I got Magnolia vibes.

Adarra in Richmond, Virginia: Richmond’s best restaurant, which I only discovered four months before moving. Of the three times I ate there, nothing was less than perfect.

“With the terrible place we’re at historically and with climate change and all that, I don’t know, do you really think it’s ethical to bring another cat into the world?”

“Say It Right” is the latest episode of “In the Trenches,” and this time we’re talking about classical Christian cliches: what they are, where they come from, how they take over, why they make us weak, and what to do about it.

It’s inevitable that a strong movement or institution will create cliches. In this episode, I argue that cliches are basically “intellectual repetitive motion injuries,” they emerge apart from our best intentions, but that once we realize we’ve created cliches, we must work to repair the damage they cause. I would love for flourish, thrive, and wonder to become potent terms again–but we have got to put a moratorium on those terms for a few years.

Listen to the latest episode of “In the Trenches” here.

Given the way the terms are presently used, Eastern Orthodoxy is more “low church” than “high church.”

If you walked into a 90 member Baptist church in Podunk, Kentucky on a Sunday morning and told a long-time member named Tina, “So, your liturgy is pretty low church, huh?” she wouldn’t have a clue what you were talking about. She’d say, “I don’t know what you mean, but we’ve been doing it this way for as long as I remember.”

But that’s the same thing a little Greek grandmother in Santorini would tell you if you said, “So, the liturgy here is pretty high church, huh?”

“High church” and “low church” have relatively little to do with the complexity of worship and quite a lot to do with the naivete of the worshiper–though I’m using the word “naivete” according to Donald Kagan’s usage of the term.

While I think Steve Coogan is the cleverest man alive, I think Chilly Gonzales is a close second.

“The progressive Christian’s error lies in believing that Christianity’s perennial polemic against the rich is an implicit defense of socialist programs. What concerns the Christ of the Gospels is not the economic situation of the poor man, but the moral condition of the rich man.”

― Nicolás Gómez Dávila

Student: What exactly is a strong reading of a book? 

Teacher: A clearly articulated understanding of the spirit of a book. It’s a reader’s ability to delve below appearances and describe how all the disparate elements of a book coalesce into a singular moral vision. A strong reading is an interpretation of all the characters, arguments, images, and themes that brings the moral and spiritual weight of a book to bear on the audience. It is an act of deference to reality. It translates the substance of a text into the light by which we can view our own lives clearly.   

Student: In other words, a strong reading explains the author’s purpose.  

Teacher: No. A strong reading may reference the biography of the author, the historical era in which the author lived, and numerous facts or data points about the tradition in which the author worked—but the strong reading of a text sits well beyond all that. A strong reading isn’t fundamentally grounded in science, but in wisdom, charity, and gratitude for life itself. Weak writing cannot produce strong reading. A strong reading only emerges as a response to strong writing, but this is because a strong reader co-creates the meaning of a strong writer’s work. Very few of the books you’ve read can support a strong reading, which is why a strong reading seems strange to you.  

Student: What do you mean “co-creates”?  

Teacher: I mean that a book which goes uninterpreted isn’t really a book. It’s just an object, a doorstop. A reader plays a role in making a book a book. Likewise, a good reader is part of what makes a good book a good book.  

Student: Prove it.  

Teacher: Nah. Look, a little while ago, you suggested that anyone who had lived in the modern world “for more than ten minutes” would understand that a store which represented itself with a pink ice cream cone might sell many things that weren’t pink ice cream cones. In other words, understanding the range of meanings suggested by a pink ice cream cone doesn’t come through linear rational proofs. It comes from living in the world that respects such a sign and learning “how they do things here.” Of course, some of the reasons a people “do things that way” can be reasonably explained, but some can’t. Your world—the world that primarily informs the way you think, feel, assign meaning; the world that dictates what you want, what you fear—is the modern world. The modern world isn’t the only world there is, though. There is another world and it is at play right now—it’s a world behind the modern world, beneath it, beyond it—and you might need to walk around in this world “for more than ten minutes” in order to understand how things work there. Frankenstein is an artifact from this other world, and the way I’m interpreting it for you is a skill born of this other world. Every day during class, I do my best to present this world to you—to create entrances into it, so you can spend a little time there and see “how they do things there.” But, it’s difficult.  

Student: Why? 

Teacher: Because it’s not a physical place and I can’t force you to go there. It’s an intellectual place, a spiritual place, and the only way to enter this place is to genuinely want to be there—and you have to want to be there before you fully understand what it is.  

Student: I’ve never heard anyone say anything like this before.

-my latest for The Classical Teaching Institute blog can be read in full here

I’ve lately seen that a conversation has already quietly begun about dropping the word “classical” from the term “classical education.”