Against Accompaniment

Welcome to any new subscribers! In this newsletter I share a few things that I think provide a taste of truth, goodness, or beauty. Sharing something doesn't mean I agree with it, just that I think it's worth some of your attention. I love to learn from quite disparate sources, and I'm sure that will come across in what I share. Was this forwarded to you? Subscribe here.

For my birthday cake this year I made my first Victoria Sandwich. Simple and delicious.

On big tech platforms:

Each tool is about creating a rule, not inculcating a virtue. The companies are coming up with ways to make certain behaviors impossible or to let users escape bad behavior. But they aren’t thinking about what in their platform encourages people to behave badly. The sites act as though they are neutral—if people behave badly online, they are revealing their self. They might have behaved badly anywhere; it just happened to be on Facebook.

However, it’s clearer and clearer that the choices sites make can encourage or discourage virtuous behavior, and the sites know it. Facebook knows that Instagram is bad for young women. Twitter knows that their site makes sending a death threat feel casual and normal, when many of those users would probably never have posted a letter expressing the same thoughts.

Great perspective from Leah Libresco Sargeant exploring the difference between avoidance of harm and cultivation of virtue.

Theopolis Institute has been creating some great content on a theology of music, something well worth preserving in the contemporary church.

Sneak peek at what I'm studying and thinking about as I write my next video:

We live in a death-denying world that seems determined to develop technologies that will enable us to get out of life alive. Yet the more we strive to be free of death the more our lives are shaped by the death-determined means we create to try to free ourselves of death. Even more paradoxical, the means we use to free ourselves from death only serve to increase our isolation from one another.

—Stanley Hauerwas

This reflection on piety by Alan Jacobs is a much-needed reorientation for our problematic approaches to discourse.

Some of my philosophical friends are horrified by Browne’s argument and remind me of St. Peter’s exhortation: “Always [be] prepared to make a defence to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you” (1 Peter 3:15). But I would reply by noting two things: there is more than one kind of preparation, and there is more than one kind of defence. All too often Christians think of preparation for “making a defence” as a matter of gathering information and training themselves in dialectical agility: anticipating arguments and coming up with clever responses to them. But the example of Joseph Knecht suggests that prayer—and contemplative prayer even more than the petitionary variety—is at least as important a mode of preparation. Indeed, I would claim that it’s more important, because in my experience it’s far less common for debating Christians to be uninformed than it is for them to be angry, truculent, and uncharitable—and to the degree that they are, they reflect a lack of preparation, a lack of piety.

God bless,

Ralph

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Ralph Roberts

Against Accompaniment

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