Taking Stock
A look at the semester thus far
Even given the weirdness of pandemic time, it’s hard to believe that we are now well into the downhill slope of our fall program. Director’s classes will meet just three more times before breaking for the year, and our reading groups are beginning to wind down as well.
Instead of offering a new essay, we thought it would be worthwhile to recap some of what we’ve been up to and glance ahead at the spring semester, which will be here sooner than we imagine.
We’ve been pleased to offer two director’s classes this semester. Dr. Horner has been guiding students through a study of the gospels and I have been leading a class exploring the moral and spiritual dimensions of place. As subscribers to this newsletter know, we’ve been making audio of these classes available to the public. You can scroll through the archive to catch up on any of these classes.
This semester we’ve also been glad to host to online reading groups. Our Wednesday afternoon Dante group has been making its way through Purgatorio, and our Readings in the Christian Imagination group is currently reading through Alan Jacobs’s The Year of Our Lord 1943. The latter group began the semester reading Zena Hitz’s Lost In Thought, and we had the pleasure of hosting a discussion with Prof. Hitz last month, which you can listen to here.
Along the way, this newsletter has also hosted a series of essays by Dr. Horner and myself, which have attempted to offer thoughtful commentary on contemporary culture with recent installments beginning to focus on the conditions necessary for human flourishing, a theme that we will carry forward into the coming months. If you’ve missed some of these along the way, you might find it worthwhile to revisit Dr. Horner’s essay on restoring a counter-cultural humanist frame or my recent reflections on human needs.
We hope these resources have proved valuable to you over the past few months, and we look forward to announcing our offerings for the coming semester soon.
Peace,
Michael Sacasas
Associate Director
Recommended Reading
— Our board member Sarah Hamersma’s latest essay in Comment, “Uncertainty: The Beauty and Bedrock of Statistics”:
The work of statistical analysis in the world of policy is actually to help us do what can be hard to do on our own: identify trade-offs, recognize the uncertainty, and use (formal) inference to help make a prudent judgment. Let me be quick to say that it can’t do these for us, but is a tool, a source of counsel. Statistics is instead sometimes enlisted to predict the future, like a crystal ball. Turns out it’s not up to the task—but not because of any failing of its own. It is because predicting the future is not possible—even with numbers!
— “Story, Culture, and the Common Good: An interview with Marilynne Robinson” at Breaking Ground:
We need models. We need to figure out what reformers did when they created effective reforms. You have to look into the dark past to see that there were people in the dark past who were trying to make the world less dark. The fact that, for a while at any rate, with any luck, we are able to enjoy, by world standards and by historical standards, a humane civilization, granting all its faults—that was the work and thought of nameable people, nameable movements. And at this point, we absolutely need examples of humanizing influences that take hold and work. We’re losing the sense of that.
— Michael Wear offers some clarifying comments in “How Christians Should Think About Voting”:
Our vote should be intended toward the good of our neighbors, as best as we can see it, in consultation with scripture, Christian tradition, fellow Christians and our neighbors themselves. We take our vote seriously, but we also recognize we are part of a body politic, and we recognize voting for what it is. And we understand that in all but the rarest of circumstances, and we should be hesitant to suggest what the exceptions are in an unequivocal manner, there is no single Christian way to vote. My principal concern is that Christians vote with faithfulness in mind, with prayer that intends to expose their heart to God and themselves rather than cover it up, and with a moral burden that is rightly-sized and rightly-situated.
— An online conversation hosted by the Trinity Forum and Duke Divinity School with Luke Bretherton, Deondra Rose, and Anne Snyder, “Christianity & the Case for Democracy” [video]:
We were pleased to partner with Duke Divinity School for an Online Conversation with Luke Bretherton, Deondra Rose, and Anne Snyder discussing Bretherton’s recent work, Christ and the Common Life: Political Theology and the Case for Democracy. Bretherton describes political theology as “…an interpretive art for discovering faithful, hopeful, and loving judgements about how to act together in response to shared problems.” He argues that democracy itself is inherently relational—a form of love in action, built on a “set of relational practices [that] fosters forms of disciplined and active listening, and a way we can discover with and for others just and generous forms of common life.”