Hi everyone,
We’ve officially reached that part of North Carolina summer when I pray for a thunderstorm all day long. Everything is dry. Sometimes we hear thunder in the distance, but the rain seems to stay to our south almost every time. This difficulty should have been in the real estate listing.
The Part Where There’s an Essay: Serious Joy
This week, I’ll connect you to my summer essay over at Cultivating Oaks. It’s a little bit serious and a little bit joyful:
The moment superiority enters the room, the moment one of us wants a leg up on another, we are not so much together anymore. We don’t have space for merriment anymore. We must protect ourselves; we are no longer free to laugh. “No flippancy,” says Lewis above, and “no superiority.” We must see one another as fellow partakers of the grace that has been offered to us. We must sit side by side at the table, coheirs. We must take each other seriously—then, and only then, we may rejoice together.
For the Anglophiles
Presenting my newest excuse to travel across the pond:
The Bayeux Tapestry is returning to the UK more than 900 years after its creation, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has confirmed.
The 70m-long masterpiece, which tells the story of the Norman conquest of England in 1066, will be loaned in a historic agreement to be signed between the French and British governments.
The huge embroidery - which is widely believed to have been created in Kent - will go on display at the British Museum in London next year.
Reads & Listens of the Week
In case you missed the disturbing roundup of just how bad AI is for our brains, it’s all here (and here is a summary). It’s very, very bad. I loved the bit about how teachers could just tell that something was off. "Close to perfect language while failing to give personal insights."
I was glad the Rabbit Room picked up this one from Alan Noble: The Prufrock Problem: We Are Alone Because We Can’t Speak. “The Prufrock Problem, if the thesis is correct, can only be solved by people exercising the virtue of courage to risk embarrassment, rejection, and betrayal for the sake of love. It can only be solved by speaking, by doing what Prufrock could not do: get out of his head, stop worrying about how other people judged him, and speak.”
In case you are also interested in such things, here are the most expensive sales from AbeBooks from January-March of this year. Check out that inscription of Charlotte’s Web!
I had some gardening to do over last (very very hot hot hot) weekend, and as I did, I blazed through the series from The Rest is History on recent Irish history, which I’ve always been a little fuzzy on. The first episode is right here.
It was pride that changed angels into devils; it is humility that makes men as angels. —Augustine
With the reminder of grace in your article"a little bit serious and a little bit joy", a song came to mind...Grace, grace, God's grace, grace that is greater than all our sin.🎵 Written by Juliette Harriet Johnston. As for weather, it is hot, humid, and a thunder storm is pending here. Feels like 96 degrees.