“A Farm Winter, with Jerry Apps” What a wonderful storyteller! Well worth your time. I hadn’t heard of him before but turns out he’s a known Wisconsin treasure. His books can be found here.
Posts in: Short posts
Despite being a good speller, I can never, never, never remember how to spell Cincinnati. Cincinatti. Ciinncciinnaattii. Sensenattea.
They should have kept the name
According to Steven Nolt in A History of the Amish, the split between the tradition-minded Old Order Amish and the change-minded Amish Mennonites happened around 1865, though gradually and not due to any single event. Among the Amish Mennonites there was a bishop named Henry Egly who had a powerful conversion experience during an illness in the 1840s. Whether the influence of American evangelicalism and revivalism on him came before or after this experience is not clear from the text.
Matt Stansberry asks, “What does success look like in this situation?” For me, one measure will be that I do not close my heart to the suffering around me in a vain attempt at self-preservation. I will neither bathe myself in it, nor turn away from it. I will keep pursuing the hard path of love.
One of the southern Indiana electric companies asked people to conserve energy over the next couple of days to prevent outages. The comments are full of people telling them to turn off the data centers and I love it.
Grown in the Hoosier hill country
There’s a turn of phrase in Colter Wall’s “1800 Miles”: “we don’t got these kinds of cliques where I was grown.” We don’t normally talk about humans being “grown.” Maybe we should? Tell me about your terroir. Because I have never separated myself from my home neighborhood, I cannot identify myself to myself apart from it. I am fairly literally flesh of its flesh. It is present in me, and to me, wherever I go.
I deleted a quick, frivolous post this morning when I realized why it bugged me after posting it: it was another example of the tedious irony that is the lingua franca of social media. Like “gotcha” political argumentation, it’s laziness that mistakes itself for cleverness.
After @ReaderJohn linked this excellent piece by Teddy Macker, I went in search for more. This on Walt Whitman and the problem of American politics is challenging and hopeful. Maybe impossible. As Fox Mulder would say, I want to believe.
This is cool: a device for stirring natural nut butters.
Donny quotes William E. Pannell discussing his crisis of conscience after the 1963 Birmingham church bombing. It strikes me that now such young deaths are common—barely newsworthy, and certainly don’t cause any crises of conscience. Doing nothing after Sandy Hook was a turning point for us.