I have lots of small-essay ideas, but I'm dedicating what writing energy I have right now to my classes, and to a couple larger projects, so I'm not able to give it here.  Instead, these small links with a thought from me is all you get.  Sorry (probably it's better for you to be exposed to less of me anyway).  (Is anyone reading this at all?  Sometimes I wonder...Who'm I kidding, I wonder this all the time.)

It’s a list of 15 campus novels from the past ten years.  Some of them are probably ok; I can vouch for Schumacher’s Dear Committee Members, anyway.

This is a canny analysis of one of the US’s most interesting senate races, with Rev Raphael Warnock in Georgia:

Warnock’s role in the Black-church world may complicate his attempt to build a coalition of voters. His scholarly work focused in part on the flaws of the prosperity gospel, a theological tradition popular in both Black and white churches that emphasizes individual salvation and health over the collective liberation and the activism that Warnock advocates.…What makes Warnock’s candidacy so unusual is that his critique of America indicts not only his enemies, but his potential voter base. Religious leaders who prefer a prophetic vision of the gospel typically gravitate toward the margins of society, calling out all who are content with the systemic injustices of everyday life. Warnock is attempting the opposite, vying to win widespread support with a distinctly progressive message in a state where Democrats already have difficulty getting elected.  

It’s going to be fascinating to watch this.

Van Gogh got caught up in a twitter cancel fight.  Damn Realists.  

Ooh this is fun: Augustine’s Confessions as “quit lit.”    

Nice little piece on Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings in a blog dedicated to “Around the world in 80 books”.  This blog looks interesting, and has a ton of books I do not know; I’ll read through it.

Paul Valéry looks more and more relevant the further we get from his life.  We do need a good edition--maybe a ruthless selection—of his notebooks, in English.

Well this is cheerful, NOT: “”As introduced species spread around the world, the complex networks of interactions between plants and animals within ecosystems are becoming increasingly similar, a process likely to reinforce globalization's imprint on nature and increase risks of sweeping ecological disruption.  

Immigration, pluralism, Religious switching: Kamala Harris’s religious story is very telling for the future of American religion 

A nice piece on “the reflexivity trap,” “the implicit, and sometimes explicit, idea that professing awareness of a fault absolves you of that fault—that lip service equals resistance.”  In fact I’m not sure what I think about this idea:

There’s a glib joke to be made about how this approach, far from interrogating capitalism, actually mirrors it. But I’m reminded more of Calvinism, its vision of the sainted and the damned, and of the scrabbling for signifiers that mark one out as elect. What does it mean to write a coming-of-age novel when a character’s life is predestined? These books, so reluctant to engage with change, agency, and suffering, turn instead to awareness, which they frame as atonement. 

Perhaps the problem is that the authors are trying to report on the acquisition of a wisdom that they have rendered themselves incapable of self-consciously possessing?

A somewhat snarky review by Wendy Lesser of my friend Alan Jacobs’s good new book.