Friday Links

Saint Dionysius of Mt. Athos

November 29, 2024

Clare Coffey: Skip the Cocktails This Thanksgiving

Steven Knepper: When Wonder Strikes: William Desmond's Metaphysics of Excess

Manifesto! A Podcast: Is America Ready for a Religious Revival?

The Bobbie Sandwich

Tongues of Men and Angels: Jazz, Sacred Music, & Creative Collaboration with J. J. Wright & Dana Gioia

Ryan Ruby on Why We Need Alexander Pope’s Wild, Weird Poetry Today


Skip the Cocktails This Thanksgiving

A cocktail is an amuse-bouche. A cocktail is a cupcake. It exists as part of nothing and as a precursor to nothing. It exists out of time and season. It is a fussy and frivolous demonstration of luxury and technique for its own sake, like a niche perfume aimed at conjuring up a specific moment in a butterfly garden. You do not serve a cocktail at seven o’clock with braised chuck roast. You duck into a cocktail bar (ideally during working hours) to meet a friend for a glorious, stolen hour of dishing over delicate stems and frothy finishes.

Steven Knepper: When Wonder Strikes: William Desmond's Metaphysics of Excess

It is easy to think of spring or summer as seasons that inspire wonder at the natural world, but like so many others, I’ve always found that the fall and winter stir this kind of wonder within me. Maybe the stripping down allows us to see the details of creation more intimately and clearly, maybe it’s the way these seasons remind us of our own deaths and so heighten our attention, maybe the cooler weather allows a kind of focus. I do think, though, that the stripping down is not an impoverishment, but rather an exemplification of the abundance of creation. In my backyard, the trees, now leafless and stark, allow me to see, unimpeded, all of the birds that are still here—the bluejay’s patterned wings are no longer just a flash of color, the sparrow no longer swallowed by the brown and green of leaves and bark, and the cardinal’s brilliant red becomes shocking and strange as if an angel has landed on a bare branch. Steven Knepper’s fine essay in Church Life Journal reminded me of all of this, and the mysterious fact that we, the birds, the backyard, all of it, any of it, exist.

This essay is adapted from the preface of Steve’s new book on the philosophy of William Desmond, Wonder Strikes: Approaching Aesthetics and Literature with William Desmond, which looks fantastic and is available from SUNY Press.

Desmond’s philosophy describes being’s abundance and affirms its worth. He moves beyond the modern tendency to focus on the determinate, on what can be pinned down in propositions. Many philosophers, for instance, dismiss wonder at the strangeness of anything existing at all. They treat such wonder at the mystery of being as philosophical nonsense, subjective mysticism, or mere superfluity precisely because it cannot yield a determinate answer. Desmond, on the other hand, thinks that our thought must be continually renewed in such astonished wonder. Otherwise, it will be prone to false closure or bone-dry rationalism. Still, Desmond does not wish to trade a (modern) focus on the univocal and the determinate for a (postmodern) focus on the equivocal and the indeterminate, which when taken to an extreme seems to allow for no determinations at all.

Manifesto! A Podcast: Is America Ready for a Religious Revival?

Manifesto! is one of my favorite podcasts. If you’ve never listened to it, I highly recommend you drop everything, grab a drink (you could also fold some laundry, if you need to feel “productive”), and listen. In this episode, Ross Douthat joins Jake and Phil discuss Douthat’s essay “Is the World Ready for a Religious Comeback” and Christian Wiman’s 2008 essay in the American Scholar, “My Bright Abyss.”

The Bobbie Sandwich

If you have leftover turkey, here’s a recipe for a delish, if completely unnecessary and overwhelming, sandwich. If you’ve only recently awakened from your Thanksgiving food coma, this will nicely bring on another. Don’t waste time on the Black Friday shopping scam, spend the day with family, friends, a good book, maybe a short walk, a nap or two (which this sandwich will induce).

Tongues of Men and Angels: Jazz, Sacred Music, & Creative Collaboration with J. J. Wright & Dana Gioia

Here’s the video of another amazing event at the ND Fall/CIC Conference that took place a few weeks ago in South Bend.

Ryan Ruby on Why We Need Alexander Pope’s Wild, Weird Poetry Today

Once considered the gold standard of formal elegance, Pope’s poetry now seems totally bizarre. That is precisely what I like about it. To read The Dunciad in the twenty-first century is ask oneself: why on earth would anyone write like this? And to ask that question is to be immediately confronted by another: why don’t we write this way anymore?

Mary R. Finnegan

After several years working as a registered nurse in various settings including the operating room and the neonatal ICU, Mary works as a freelance editor and writer. Mary earned a BA in English, a BS in Nursing, and is currently pursuing her MFA in creative Writing at the University of St. Thomas, Houston. Mary’s poetry, essays, and stories can be found in Ekstasis, Lydwine Journal, American Journal of Nursing, Catholic Digest, Amethyst Review, and elsewhere. She is Deputy Editor at Wiseblood Books.

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