It's time for an (official) extended blogging break - with the lack of posts over the past few months, you wouldn't be too far off if you thought it had already begun...

With the ubiquity of social media, this blog isn't as important as it once was for staying connected. And, as has been obvious, my zeal for blogging has dramatically diminished. On top of this, we're coming to the end of another academic year, and some substantial life changes are around the corner. It just feels right to shut it down for a while.

So, we're staying connected; just using different mediums for the next while. Thanks for reading, and we'll see you when we see you...

Elections are on in Ireland today, and I got to take part for the first time, voting in the local races. Anyway, just wanted a pretext for showing this photo from the Independent today of voting on the island of Inishfree. You can't make this stuff up...

This article by Wendell Berry was published in Harpers a little over a year ago. It's extremely relevant, and, as always, thought provoking. If there is any prophet in our time, it's Berry. Snippet:

The general reaction to the apparent end of the era of cheap fossil fuel, as to other readily foreseeable curtailments, has been to delay any sort of reckoning. The strategies of delay, so far, have been a sort of willed oblivion, or visions of large profits to the manufacturers of such “biofuels” as ethanol from corn or switchgrass, or the familiar unscientific faith that “science will find an answer.” The dominant response, in short, is a dogged belief that what we call the American Way of Life will prove somehow indestructible. We will keep on consuming, spending, wasting, and driving, as before, at any cost to anything and everybody but ourselves.

This belief was always indefensible—the real names of global warming are Waste and Greed—and by now it is manifestly foolish. But foolishness on this scale looks disturbingly like a sort of national insanity. We seem to have come to a collective delusion of grandeur, insisting that all of us are “free” to be as conspicuously greedy and wasteful as the most corrupt of kings and queens. (Perhaps by devoting more and more of our already abused cropland to fuel production we will at last cure ourselves of obesity and become fashionably skeletal, hungry but—thank God!—still driving.)

The problem with us is not only prodigal extravagance but also an assumed limitlessness. We have obscured the issue by refusing to see that limitlessness is a godly trait. We have insistently, and with relief, defined ourselves as animals or as “higher animals.” But to define ourselves as animals, given our specifically human powers and desires, is to define ourselves as limitless animals—which of course is a contradiction in terms. Any definition is a limit, which is why the God of Exodus refuses to define Himself: “I am that I am.”

Read the whole thing. It's well worth the time.

Great article by Matthew B. Crawford in the NYTimes magazine on working with your hands. Paragraph that caught my eye (for obvious reasons):

After finishing a Ph.D. in political philosophy at the University of Chicago in 2000, I managed to stay on with a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at the university’s Committee on Social Thought. The academic job market was utterly bleak. In a state of professional panic, I retreated to a makeshift workshop I set up in the basement of a Hyde Park apartment building, where I spent the winter tearing down an old Honda motorcycle and rebuilding it.

Motorcycle repair, here I come!

Really, though, the article is great, and well worth a read. The older I get, the more I wish I had trained in a hands-on vocation of some sort. Never too late I guess...

(HT: culture making)

Some nice visualization from Toby Ng on what the world would look like if it were a village of 100 people. A couple of examples below....

(HT: Andrew Sullivan)

a few shots from the past month:

If you have to see the images of Saturn from the Cassini mission, it's worth a few minutes of your time. Simply astounding...

This looks interesting - I wonder if something like this might affect publishing as much as digitization?

(HT: Kester, who, by the way, I'm delighted is back on the interwebs!)

Gary Anderson, Old Testament professor at Notre Dame, has a really interesting article at First Things on the relationship of faith and finance, and how this relates to people of faith. It's well worth the read. Random quote:

Practicing random acts of kindness, for the believer, is not really random. It is the act of tapping into the deep ontological structure of the universe.

Receiving the Scriptures as God's good gift means opening our minds to be changed by them; it does not mean relinquishing the right to disagree with some of what we encounter there - even the necessity of disagreeing on some significant points of faith and practice - since the biblical writers disagree among themselves, even within each Testament. Indeed, the very fact of internal disagreement is crucial for our understanding of scriptural authority and how the Bible itself fosters a critical consciousness. The canon offers us a model for how established religious convictions, even those established by authoritative texts, may be challenged and debated within the community of faith. Every biblical writer who departs from the tradition does so by highlighting other neglected elements of the tradition; every innovation is established on an older foundation. From this precedent I take the principle that if we disagree with a certain text on a given point, then it must be in obedience to what we, in community with other Christians, discern to be the larger or more fundamental message of the Scriptures. In other words, disagreement represents a critical judgment, based on keen awareness of the complexity of Scripture and reached in the context of the church's ongoing worship, prayer and study. Therefore, it seems to me that members of the church, or the church as a whole, should come to such a judgment slowly and to a degree reluctantly - with the reluctance any of us might feel, as we begin to realize that on a given point we cannot accept the view of a revered elder, a parent, or a beloved mentor. Further, in this matter, self-suspicion is a sign of spiritual maturity. We should continue to study and examine the ramifications of our new position critically, checking to see whether it can indeed be brought into full conversation with Scripture and the Christian traditions. Doing that would be to love the Bible as we love ourselves. If we aspire to that kind of charity toward the Bible, then it follows that we must also show charity toward those who read the text differently than we do.

-- Ellen Davis, 'The Soil That Is Scripture', in Engaging Biblical Authority, 39-40

Most people now are looking for 'a better place,' which means that a lot of them will end up in a worse one. I think this is what Nathan learned from his time in the army and the war. He saw a lot of places, and he came home. I think he gave up the idea that there is a better place somewhere else. There is no 'better place' than this, not in this world. And it is by the place we've got, and our love for it and our keeping of it, that this world is joined to Heaven.

-- Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter

A couple of interesting religion-related book reviews at the NY Times today:

One review looks at the book God is Back, on the surprising role of religion in our modern world.

The second looks at Losing My Religion, William Lobdell's personal story of finding faith and losing it.

Interesting juxtaposition of faith and religion in our contemporary world.

We've had some glorious weather here the past few days in Ireland, and we took the opportunity to get out and enjoy it while we had it. Here are a few photos from a walk up Bray Head (OK, not all the way!) and a trip to Powerscourt Waterfall.

Larry Hurtado has an article at Slate looking at the historical reasons behind the death of Jesus. Snippet:

A central statement in traditional Christian creeds is that Jesus was crucified "under Pontius Pilate." But the majority of Christians have only the vaguest sense what the phrase represents, and most non-Christians probably can't imagine why it's such an integral part of Christian faith. "Crucified under Pontius Pilate" provides the Jesus story with its most obvious link to larger human history. Pilate was a historical figure, the Roman procurator of Judea; he was referred to in other sources of the time and even mentioned in an inscription found at the site of ancient Caesarea in Israel. Linking Jesus' death with Pilate represents the insistence that Jesus was a real person, not merely a figure of myth or legend. More than this, the phrase also communicates concisely some pretty important specifics of that historical event.

Read the whole thing; it's worth a few minutes on this day.

My parents hit an age landmark this year (the specifics of which shall not be mentioned), and we decided to celebrate by taking them to the west of Ireland for a few days. Here are a few shots from our time in Castlebar, Co Mayo, Croagh Patrick, Achill Island, and Sligo.

Light posting the past few days, and the next few, as my parents are here visiting. As usual, we're having a great time. A few pics...

A fascinating article from The Times last week on the religion of John Rawls, the twentieth century political philosopher. It draws largely from Rawls's senior thesis at Princeton, which focused on the individual and the community in Christian faith, and which seems to contain some startlingly mature theology for a 21 year old. The piece is excerpted from a book, but is a good (and worthwhile) read on its own.

(HT: Russ Douthat)

This is truly amazing (HT: Andrew Sullivan):

This made me laugh. Via culture making, a quote from a book called X Saves the World: How Generation X Got the Shaft but Can Still Keep Everything From Sucking:

The first question on the GXAT [Generation X Aptitude Test, better known as the G-zat] is this:

1. Do you want to change the world?

A. Yes, and I’m proud to say we did it, man. We changed the world. Just look around you!

B. Yes, absolutely, and I promise I will get back to doing that just as soon as interest rates return to where they’re supposed to be.

C. Omigod, omigod, changing the world and helping people is, like, totally important to me! I worked in a soup kitchen once and it was so sad but the poor people there had so much dignity!

D. The way you phrase that question is so . . . cheesy and absurd that I am not even sure I want to continue with this pointless exercise.

That’s the only question on the GXAT.

This piece - aptly titled 'we're all gonna die' - is an amazing piece of people watching. Such wonderful uniqueness in humanity...