Join The Underlines // The Best Of What I Read
A batch of the best highlights from what Joshua's read, .
All we have to do when reading Bleak House is to relax and let our spines take over. Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle. Let us be proud of our being vertebrates, for we are vertebrates tipped at the head with a divine flame. The brain only continues the spine: the wick really goes through the whole length of the candle. If we are not capable of enjoying that shiver, if we cannot enjoy literature, then let us give up the whole thing and concentrate on our comics, our videos, our books-of-the-week. But I think Dickens will prove stronger. (Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature [New York: Harvest, 2002], 56)
Desiring the Kingdom
James K. A. Smith
while both St. Augustine’s and St. Benedict’s rule have all kinds of tiny habits that we might either consider too inane to matter or too strict to be appropriate, we should notice that both of them had the same goal in mind: love. Both were obsessed with taking the small patterns of life and organizing them towards the big goal of life: to love God and neighbor. St. Augustine’s rule began with this sentence: “Before all things, most dear brothers, we must love God and after Him our neighbor; for these are the principal commands which have been given to us.” St. Benedict’s rule opens declaring that it means to establish “nothing harsh, nothing burdensome,” but goes on to describe walking in God’s commandments as being in the “ineffable sweetness of love.”
The Common Rule
Justin Whitmel Earley
So we invert the purpose of work. Instead of working as a way to love and serve others, we turn work into a way to be loved and served by others. Instead of longing to hear the “Tov!” of God, we work for the “Tov!” of people. And this is only the beginning of our brokenness; sometimes we actively labor to hurt people. Not only is the world complex and hard to manage, but evil abounds. Whether it’s a competent bookkeeper working in the field of sex trafficking or an otherwise talented manager writing an email specifically intended to produce guilt and shame in an employee, often human work actively cultivates evil instead of love.
The Common Rule
Justin Whitmel Earley
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