In a recent article in the New York Review of Books, the Oxford historian Diarmaid MacCulloch described the source of the divergence in forms of art routinely displayed in Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant churches. The major Christian denominations disagree about a wide range of matters of doctrine and practice, about which they have argued for many centuries, and one area of dispute concerns the appropriateness of certain objects and images in places of worship. MacCulloch pointed out that the varieties of church practice with regard to the display of images stem from differences in the interpretation of Hebrew scripture, in particular disagreements about whether, in the Book of Exodus, the first commandment is really comprised of two commandments, or, to put the contrary view, whether the second in not really a commandment at all, but only a coda to the first.
On Kindness
Most Friday nights my wife and I eat dinner at the same place. We sit at the same table with the same waiter and order the same cocktails, the same entrees. We’ve been doing this long enough that they know us. They know our habits and have been known to call and ask if we’re coming if tables begin to run short. We’re not alone in this. There are many people who frequent this particular place regularly and have been doing so for years. And so, it came as a surprise on a recent evening when walking up to the front door we encountered another regular patron berating the manager for their policy requiring masks. This was not a reasoned argument for or against the effectiveness of wearing masks against the spread of coronavirus. This was closer to a toddler’s temper tantrum thrown by a grown man who, by all outward appearances is professionally successful if not well adjusted, verbally abusing a hospitality worker as if it was his God-given right.
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I’m on the first business trip since the Covid-19 thing began, back in Atlanta for a series of meetings, and I’ve been struck by the contrasts. The airports are quiet in a way I’ve never seen in my life, and I’ve been more or less constantly in the air since I was eighteen years old. There is less ambient noise but you can hear individual conversations much more readily because when people do talk with one another, they have to raise their voice to be heard through their masks. And everyone is in a mask once you enter the air travel zone: it’s not like out on the street in some places – Atlanta prime among them – where only a minority are wearing them in public.
The race for capital
The inequalities built into the United States have mystified me for a long time. I was born and raised in Maine, a poor state and, incidentally, the whitest state in the Union by a wide margin (well, maybe Vermont can compete). We were taught that black people had been – and continued to be – discriminated against by society from an early age; I can remember Mr. Casey in seventh grade – he had an amazing moustache, and the girls all had a crush on him – writing outlines on a transparency projector about Martin Luther King, and about equal opportunity, and about bias and Native American oppression and slavery and the Klan. I had good teachers: they told me that the story of America wasn’t a great one, even if it had some good moments, and that we all had a responsibility to make up for the evils of our past.
Imagined colloquies
As I was reading, my gaze wandered from the page of text and out through the upstairs window, where on a clear day I can watch the Atlantic sweeping in towards the beaches of County Donegal. That day, grey mist and drizzle blurred the horizon line, the sky and the sea lost in vaporous obscurity: not unusual for Ireland in July. My attention briefly returns to my book until my phone alerts me that a text has arrived. It is from my friend who, like me likes to read. We often talk books together.