On the Common 202

No Quality Time Without Quantity Time.

Jul 16, 2026

Hey all,

I don’t have much to say about celebrity weddings, but I wanted to mention that if I had more money than the Rockefellers and I lived within spitting distance of the Newport, RI, mansions, I would simply use one of those as a wedding venue. Their entire reason for existence was hosting large formal summer parties for the rich and famous.

But hey! Some people make different decisions with their money, and that’s ok.

The Part Where There’s an Essay: Charity Made Manifest

This week I’ll direct your attention to the most recent issue of Cultivating magazine, with the topic of “Charity.” My essay is entitled “Charity Made Manifest.” Here’s an excerpt…

We live in an age now when the word “charity” most often refers to a nonprofit organization, founded for a specific cause, kept afloat by the monetary donations of people who may or may not know anything about the cause itself. The proximity of participants to a charity usually varies from the highly involved, devoted volunteer to the distant donor who made a deposit for the sake of a tax write-off. Ideally, everyone involved ought to be familiar and attached to the cause at hand, but reality is quite different.

Often when the word “charity” is used in the Vulgate translation of the Bible, it’s in place of the Greek agape, referring to a self-sacrificing type of love. One definition has charity as “Christian love in its highest manifestation.” Far from thinking of charity as a synonym for giving money, charity was once a hefty word, carrying with it the full meaning of the highest form of love.

Love of this kind demands nothing of the recipient and everything of the giver. The Latin carries the meaning of “dear, beloved.” This is not casual philanthropy from a distance, or money thrown at a “problem.” Instead, it is an up-close interest in another’s welfare; it is a willingness to give until it hurts— to be with the person and relieve their pain. At the very least, it would suggest a close proximity to the recipient. There is no distance here. There is no assumed benefit (like the tax write-off) to the giver.

If Covid lockdowns taught us anything, it is that no amount of virtual settings can make up for being physically near one another. The representation of someone’s face, sent through the magical internet signals, can be a nice placeholder for a visit, but it’s not a true substitute for the real thing.

Read the rest of the post here.

For the Anglophiles

While I was on my break, a trailer for a new Jane Austen adaptation dropped. What do we think, Janeites?

The nineties film version of this book is one of my very favorite movies, but I think this looks promising.

Reads & Listens of the Week

Alan Noble wonders What Happens When No One is Curious? “As people grow more comfortable with AI, people will turn to Claude and ChatGPT with their search questions instead of Google, and we will have the same problem: answers instead of exploration.”

This is a fun tool that doesn’t work where I live, but maybe it will where you are: Bookpile. If you enter a book title or ISBN, it will tell you the closest bookshop or library where you can get a copy of that book. It’s supposed to be growing, so here’s hoping it comes to North Carolina one day.

I don’t post links to political material that often, but I appreciated this one from The Dispatch. “It’s about the state of our affections. It’s about what we’ll abide. How do people I love look at all of this and call it good?”

A nice short piece on How to Read Dickens. “Dickens is prophetic in the way he illuminates the distinctions we of a modern, increasingly secular world often fail to make between real guilt and false shame, between true repentance and cheap substitutions.”