New Writing: Mine and Others
New Writing: Mine and Others
Some Things To Pay Attention To This Week
Some forthcoming writing, and some new writing to take note of.
New Writing
This past week, an essay of mine on the theological nature of bureaucracy came out. Now, there’s so much scholarship surrounding this question of how societies are organized, and a lot to be considered about whether bureaucracies are efficient. But my concern is largely what bureaucracies do for and to the people inhabiting them, prior to asking whether or not people are largely satisfied with their experiences with them1. Pushback is welcome, as this concern isn’t going anywhere.
Next week, my review of the Bonhoeffer movie for Christianity Today will be out, and I’ve never been more glad and more nervous for a piece of writing to be out. I continue to be really puzzled by the not-quite-bad reception the movie continues to get in some corners. I watched the movie twice. I took notes. I took quotes down. I read the relevant scholarship. It’s all in the review. It could very well be that I get things completely wrong, particularly when the actors, the studio head, and the director come out and say that the movie is being misappropriated. But something about the film and the public statements of the studio aren’t adding up: why so much interpretative defense of the movie if the movie is really so clear?
This week, with being gone Sunday through Tuesday, and having some major deadlines, the original writing here has been dormant. For that: mea culpa. But I’m hopeful to be back on track next week before Thanksgiving and Christmas travel destroy any hope of regular writing once again.
Other Writing For You To Enjoy
For what it’s worth, nothing here is directly election-related, or will be. If you’d like to give him the next four years of your mental energy, be my guest.
Kirsten Sanders writes about what a doctrine of sin is, and why it’s more than “there’s something wrong with me”.
Brad Littlejohn writes about an option for Christians, re: politics, the “Boethius Option”. I disagree with him on some of the particulars, but it’s worth your time.
A new story on the grief of would-be grandparents has struck many people as myopic, but is an underexplored dimension of the decline of child-birth: the loss of people being able to flourish as elders.
The popular AI apocalypse has stalled out, at least for the moment.
Currently, 4,000 miners are trapped in South Africa, by the government, for mining abandoned mines. Mammon has little patience for it being circulated with authority.
Thanks for reading, and see you next week.
One recent study found that there is a direct link between the satisfaction which people experience in accessing bureaucracies and the job satisfaction people within the bureaucracies experience. This is called the “satisfaction mirror”, but to my mind, this is a different question than whether or not the bureaucracy is good. Just because people don’t have to deal with something for very long and are happy about it doesn’t have particular bearing on whether the thing is particularly beneficial to us morally.
Big time bravo on the bureaucracy piece! You getting through that without quoting Illich mirrors the restraint of a Spin Doctor not inquiring the time. Good work.
This issue of bureaucracy, as you know, is the acid I'm refluxing in education. Standardized testing. Increased class caps. Data driven curriculum. Skills based literacy. "Common core." Automated grading. Online classes. It's all a means of managing numbers--even at preschool levels. Authentic education requires identity and story--the collision of actual beings in actual spaces with actual timelines containing memory and hope that create interpretations of both the material and the actors. We can no longer be so bothered. Rather, the intelligence presented by America's public education system, via means listed above, has already been an artificial one for decades. When we aim to make technology more sentient than the youth ("For bureaucracy to continue, further rules--but not further living people--are necessary."), we've surely tossed our offspring to the Baals.