Tabitha

In the idolatrous worship of Mammon and Molech, there can be no room for beauty. The old gods of greed and consumption do not give us beauty to behold. They attempt to turn all that is beautiful into all that can be objectified and consumed. In the place of wonder, they give us lust. This is because they know what the ancient Christian saints and

I reminded him of a story from an ancient Chinese Zen master, of the Buddha coming upon some people who had just been robbed while picnicking. They were racing around, enraged, asking him to help them. But Buddha asks, “Who would you rather find, the burglars or yourself?”

Tim nodded, and then said, “The burglars.”

“Same.”

— Anne Lamott, Somehow

“The world is suited to human enjoyment—”out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sign”—in anticipation of human pleasure, which the Lord presumably shares. This is an extremely elegant detail. The beauty of the trees is noted before the fact that they yield food. It is a rich goodness that the Lord intended

“After 9/11, people were afraid that we were going to live in an America where the local grocery stores were constantly getting bombed and we had to fight the terrorists in the streets, where nothing would ever be the same. They were afraid, but there was such yearning in that fear. I think AI hype comes from the same place.”

— Freddie DeBoer on

“For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs." (George Eliot, Middlemarch)