Not that I needed the encouragement to be weird, but I did enjoy stumbling upon this advice column on writing from Freddy deBoer. To the extent that eclectic interests are weird, I’ll try not to disappoint.
Sleeping and Praying
“It’s useless to rise early and go to bed late, and work your worried fingers to the bone. Don’t you know he enjoys giving rest to those he loves?” — The Message1
I grew up with a general belief that prayer and other spiritual disciplines should always be painful or uncomfortable (“give until it hurts,” kneeling prayer, all-night worship) and that any dislike for this only revealed me to be a terrible Christian. And while there is strong biblical warrant for these practices (see the widow’s mite, or Christ in Gethsemane), there is also scriptural warrant for practices of rest, enjoyment, and even profligacy (see God’s magnificent plans for His temple, Jesus in Cana, or Mary anointing Christ’s feet). In the Christian tradition, each of these postures is embraced in turn through seasons of fasting followed by seasons of feasting (Advent → Christmas; Lent → Easter). Or, to quote Pippin (riffing on Ecclesiastes 3), “everything has its season.”
Recently, I have learned to love praying again in a “feasting” kind of way: anytime that I can’t sleep or find myself awake before seven a.m. (pretty much daily) is for prayer in bed. If I fall back asleep—great!—God has shown me he loves me by giving me rest. If I stay awake—also great!—more time to pray. In this way, insomnia is not so much an affliction as an opportunity for more prayer, or God willing, more sleep.2
(I highly recommend “putting your phone to sleep” when you lie down in bed, as it makes this practice much less likely to devolve into doomscrolling. My wife and I pinched this practice from Andy Crouch’s The Tech-Wise Family and have loved it. Phones are charged inconveniently far away on the other side of the room so that any nighttime usage requires braving the cold and discomfort lurking beyond warm bedsheets.)
Summaries of Important Books
It’s ok to not read everything. There are plenty of important things you will never be able to get around to so sometimes it is simply necessary to read summaries. I can’t quite remember which Enlightenment thinker it was (perhaps Kant?) but one of the Big Brains we are all so impressed with was known to read abridged or Reader’s Digest-type version of classic works.3
Anyway, Alasdair Macintyre’s After Virtue (AV) and David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed (AS) are two ‘must-read’ books for understanding the world. AV was the single most clarifying work of philosophy I have ever read, which I have done now several times (it’s worth it!). AV is challengingly dense at times, and at 300 or so pages it’s not exactly a beach read. AS, however, is three times that length. Not only have I never read it but until this year I was too intimidated to even attempt the length summary of it I’m sharing below. What finally got me over the hump for attempting the summary was remembering my own booklet printing advice.
So, read the summaries below and absolve yourself of any guilt for not having the time to read the Thing Itself. Or, love the summaries and spring from them to the real deal (and let me know if you do; maybe it’ll inspire me to finally commit to AS!). Either way, you’re in good company of Kant or some other Enlightenment guy who we all think is smart.
“After Virtue Chapter Summary” by Ari Schulman (The New Atlantis)
TNA is an excellent publication for thinking deeply about science, technology, and culture. Just dig around and you’ll find something of interest.
“Book Review: Albion’s Seed” by Scott Alexander (Slate Star Codex)
SSC was published for the longest time under a pseudonym and discontinued in fear of the New York Times’ publishing of the author’s real name. It looks like Scott is blogging again at Astral Codex Ten.
Katelyn (that’s my wife!) and I are reading the Bible in a year with two twists: we’re following the historical order and using Eugene Peterson’s translation. It’s been awesome. For skeptics of The Message, it’s helpful to think of his rendition as a mini-sermon on the verse. As with all sermons, “chew the meat and spit out the bones.” Occasionally, I’ll think that Peterson has surely added things that weren’t there in “serious” translations but I am almost always wrong. Peterson’s words just strike you differently.
Certain ascetic disciplines are dangerous in a world that is deeply out of touch with the natural order. I do not think any wise person would counsel someone with anorexia to take up fasting unless a right relation to food and the stomach had first been restored, and for that same reason I wonder if it is unwise to counsel intentional sleep deprivation in an era in which the average person is already sleeping fewer hours every night than was the historic norm prior to the invention of coffee and the lightbulb.
Someone help me track this down—a shout-out in the next post for whoever unearths the thinker I’m struggling to remember here!
“You don’t have to read everything butttttt this challengingly dense work of philosophy? It’s a must-read.” 😂