Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
the loss of these small groups, in favor of nation-level organization of atomized individuals, has had serious consequences for human welfare and human agency. We are missing a layer of organization essential for our happiness.
Sarah Perry • Gardens Need Walls: On Boundaries, Ritual, and Beauty
If, after all, he looked like leading a whole town astray, then Deuteronomy 13:12–18 would come into play; it has been suggested that this was why several towns refused to countenance his teaching, since to do so would court disaster for them as well as for him.
N. T. Wright • Jesus Victory of God V2: Christian Origins And The Question Of God
Rituals are symbolic acts. They represent, and pass on, the values and orders on which a community is based. They bring forth a community without communication; today, however, communication without community prevails.
Byung-Chul Han • The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present
As I walked home down the steep slope of Fulton Street afterward, I thought: This is like a synagogue, but without Jews or Judaism. Like many things nowadays, the seculars have reinvented a religious concept to cope with the very barrenness that secularism bequeathed us.
Tablet Magazine • To Live and Die for the Network State
What I wanted was the part where people were asked to get together once a week to talk about how to be a good person and, like, hang out with their neighbors. It’s pretty amazing that apparently the only way to get people to do that is to invent an all-seeing, kindhearted sky dad who will be super disappointed/burn you for eternity if you don’t sho
... See moreHank Green • A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor: A Novel (The Carls Book 2)
Tim Urban • A Game of Giants — Wait but Why
On line at the bagel store, I see a “tournament director” (as it says on the back of his shirt) making chit-chat with Lori Ann (as he called her). It was something like a track-and-field-coach—student-parent acquaintanceship. Sounded like they were talking about TV shows. I paradoxically saw this in both lights: as the power of local community, and
... See moreOver the next few years, we took cues from Gidi's parents, brothers, and grandparents, and learned, as a community, to hold it all at once. We would have to reckon both with the great void created by his absence from this world, and with the sheer wonder of the short life he lived-adored and adoring from the moment he was born. The very embodiment
... See more