Friday Links
January 24, 2025
Pieter Brueghel, The Bird Trap
The Lessons of Fr. Paul Mankowski
Oíche na Gaoithe Móire
A Crisis of Seriousness by Jon Bishop
Christians against AI art from Catholic Culture Podcast with Susannah Black Roberts
Jordan Castro on Recovering from Heroin and Fiction
Weep, Shudder, Die: The Secret of Opera Revealed with Dana Gioia
The Lessons of Fr. Paul Mankowski
He was an ardent Jesuit who nonetheless spent most of his life being disciplined, even silenced, within his religious order. He was among the best stylists alive of the world’s reigning living language, English, yet he was also, in his day job, a master of ancient tongues, some long vanished from the earth. Renowned among the Catholic cognoscenti for his intellect, he was first and foremost a humble priest; one of my favorite emails from him was a diary he kept during a summer spent touring orphanages in Romania with the Missionaries of Charity.
Oíche na Gaoithe Móire
For all of those in the mouth of a winter storm, here’s “The Night of the Big Storm,” in the Irish. The recording is from the RTE programme Siúlach Scéalach:
Oíche na Gaoithe Móire (The Night of the Big Wind) was a hurricane which struck Ireland on January 6th, 1839. The ferocity of the storm and the damage it caused lived long in the folk memory of the people. Here in a recording made in 1957, Éamonn Mac Aoidh from Oileán Acla, County Mayo recites verses from a poem originally composed by Michael Burke of Esker, near Athenry, Co. Galway, reputedly on the day after the storm.
A Crisis of Seriousness by Jon Bishop
We’re all talking around the real problem here, which is this: we don’t take education seriously anymore. It’s seen as a lengthy path to a job. Everything is about what’s called “career-readiness.” So that means anything that doesn’t align with the mission needs to go. Why teach students to write well, for instance, when they’re going to use a computer in the workplace? Better yet, with AI technologies, they can put their ideas into an algorithmic chatbot and have it organize their thinking for them.
Christians against AI art from Catholic Culture Podcast with Susannah Black Roberts
Yes, please, let’s all stand against AI art!
Jordan Castro on Recovering from Heroin and Fiction
In order to read, the reader must die. Realist novels in particular, Yi-Ping Ong writes, create “a situation in which lived experience is made known from the point of view of a participant without the … reader … thereby being burdened by the responsibility that she would normally take up by claiming this knowledge.” The reader adopts a new consciousness, one which does not involve her own self-interested will. She is born again as the fictional narrator or protagonist in front of her, a “consciousness” in a pre-plotted life – which feels alive – created by a distant author. Here, free will is an illusion. We submit ourselves to something other than ourselves, yet this submission can also be an eschewal of responsibility – responsibility to weigh options, to discern, to choose – and this can turn into compulsive escapism or worse. “Literature,” Fernando Pessoa wrote, “is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”
Weep, Shudder, Die: The Secret of Opera Revealed with Dana Gioia
How can opera, with words we rarely understand, make us cry? Why does opera, filled with melodrama, move us? Listen as poet and librettist Dana Gioia explains to EconTalk’s Russ Roberts why words matter more than we think, in both opera and on Broadway.
