Well, October was quite a month! I’m posting this early because my internet is out at home and depending on when the outage is resolved, I might not be online again until Monday. I began the month with four goals: make progress in re: the Science Survey, knock out a couple of presidents, and make gentle nods towards German history and horror. Then an older friend of mine started his annual re-read of LOTR and I realized “I haven’t done that in a while” and committed to a BBC series based on the story, and people on substack announced it was Kirktober because it was Russell Kirk’s birthday on October 19th. Meanwhile, Dr. Birzer (who has written a biography of Russell Kirk and maintains a website based on Kirkian principles) is launching his Tolkien seminar, so suddenly I’m listening to an audio version of LOTR and then lectures on Fellowship—the road goes ever on and on! The month proved to be an interesting mix of delightful cold fall moving in after a hurricane, and then gusts of dead presidents. I also leveled up in Unclery, as my godsister safely delivered. I also checked out a new indie bookstore, Parchment and Potions. It’s steeped heavily in fantasy and horror, but there was a small SF section I admired, and they intend on hosting events like game nights and stuff. The owners appear to be involved in Prattville’s bookish community — the Silent Book Club, the Fountain City Litcon (which I missed, alas), etc — so I’m eager to see how they grow. Check out their interior shots! This was especially welcome news given that my local bookstore, Fairoaks Books, is closing up shop by the end of the month. Now where am I going to sit around and gossip on Saturday afternoons?
America at 250
I read one, two, three, four, five, SIX! presidents. Ah, ah, ah. And now I have read a biography for every single dead president, which I said at the beginning of the year I would not do because “that’s like, thirty dudes.” I’m working on a post called “41 Thoughts about Having Read 41 Presidents”, so look forward to that next week.
Science Survey
I read science books! Specifically, I knocked out Human Errors and To Infinity and Beyond, and got a good start on Into the Planet, taking care of biology, cosmology, and (soon) geology.
Bible in a Year
Unfortunately, the amount of Brad Birzer lectures I’ve listened to in the last few weeks have unseated my Bible in a Year podcast, and now I’m a few weeks behind. Father Mike would not be pleased. (Neither would Dr. Birzer, I don’t think, being a devout Catholic.)
Kirktober
I started reading The Surly Sunken Bell and other Stories by Russell Kirk, which I’m assuming is a collection of “ghost” stories — though I suspect as with Ancestral Shadows that description does not quite hit the mark.
Lectures and Podcasts
“Tolkien and Beowulf“, Dr. Brad Birzer. Tolkien Seminar. A lecture that covers the Christianization of the Germans and the influence that had on Christianity, too — between the absorption of the warrior ethos and some moral codes that were even more severe in their consequences than Roman Christianity. (i.e. adulterers being beheaded.)
“The Fellowship of the Ring, Chapters 1 and 2“, Dr. Brad Birzer. Tolkien Seminar.
“The Ring is Sin. The first time we do it, it’s hard — but then it gets easy. With every sin we commit, we become less than we are meant to be. It’s almost like alcoholism — it starts slow, a drink here or there, but a year in there are bottles under the sink and you’ve become more and more distant from everything. We become less. Bilbo is becoming LESS Bilbo because of the Ring.”
“Beren and Luthien“, Dr. Brad Birzer, Tolkien Seminar. On the Silmarillion’s great love story and its connection to Arwen and Aragorn in LOTR.
“John Calhoun: A Quick Primer“, Dr. Brad Birzer, Jacksonian America series. I’m glad I listened to a prior lecture by him on Calhoun for his Jacksonian America class last semester, because it was longer and went into more depth. Reviewed the five points of Calhoun’s philosophy very briefly.
“The Fellowship of the Ring, Chapters 3-10“. Dr. Brad Birzer, Tolkien Seminar.
“John C. Calhoun“, American Heritage class during coronamania. Dr. Brad Birzer. His dog is named Chesterton.
“Me and Chesterton are going to go for a walk. Maybe we’ll be arrested!”
“Knife in the Dark, and the Council of Elrond“, Dr. Brad Birzer, Tolkien Seminar. Learning that Sam absorbed a lot of poetry and song from Bilbo, and being called to the Council of Elrond by…well, let’s ask Elrond. (“You are called here, but I did not summon you.“
In this world, we live in what Tolkien calls the Long Defeat, in which evil keeps decaying good, over and over and over again. Again, we know it will end in Victory for God, but that’s not for this world. This world is still very damaged. Even if we conquer evil at one point, it will arise again: we never fully conquer evil. God will conquer evil, but we do not. We just keep fighting — we fight it as much as we can, with all the energy and grace we have. We fight it, knowing it assumes new shapes, new forms. So even though Morgoth is gone, Sauron is not — and when Sauron is gone, there is still the remnant of the Orcs and other things Sauron had damaged. There is no point that we can rest and say ‘Evil is done.’ Not in this world.” – Dr. B
“Christian Humanism: Why Science Fiction?”, Dr. Brad Birzer. Christian Humanism class. Listening to Birzer talk about science fiction and politics is how I found him, and I’ve read a couple of his books that play with the topic, so I knew I was in for a good time here. This particular lecture was filmed in late March 2020 (“The day that Frodo left the Shire to destroy the Ring,” Brad announces), so the intro has some musing about that. The lecture mostly examines Ray Bradbury’s essay “Why Science Fiction” and then begins exploring Canticle for Leibowitz.
“Fahrenheit 451: People Without a Story“, The Feral Historian
Even communism, which frames itself as a rational, materialistic system, has its mythology –its grand evil to overcome, its heroes, its world to come. These people [in Bradbury] don’t have any of that. They have no story, not even a shit one. They just produce and consume.
“Council of Elrond through Gandalf’s Fall in Moria“, Dr. Brad Birzer. Tolkien Seminar.
Paganism always focuses on willpower; Christianity focuses on Grace.
Elrond, not Boromir, is right. We cannot wield this Thing. Notice the danger: it’s not just evil tyranny, it’s turning a good man into a tyrant. Yes, we don’t want tyranny, but in large part we don’t want tyranny because it turns good men into tyrants. This is John Quincy Adams’ argument against slavery!
This is so important to reading Tolkien: the only power that is Good is God’s power. ALl other power is evil in and of itself. And notice that debate — what is with the other rings? Those who made them did not desire strength or hoarded wealth, but for understanding. To preserve all things, unstained. Tolkien is giving us a choice, There are only two options: you either love Beauty, or you love Power. And notice the very destruction of Power will come not through a counter-power, but through sacrifice. Is this Romantic? Utterly. Tolkien is standing against the entire tide of western civilization and yelling “stop”: he is an Old Western man, not a new western man. His West is that of Socrates and Jesus Christ, not Machiavelli and Napoleon.
The West has been defined by two things: the liberty of conscience, and our willingness to use that liberty to sacrifice for one another. That’s history. History is not conquest. It is sacrifice.
Nonbook Commonplace Entries
“We are called to serve the world, not to control it.” – The Reverend Amy George. (A very Berrian thought!)
“You know the saying of St. Maximus, that God has three wills: the good will, the will when he’s trying to help you solve things, and the third will is when he’s leaving you alone. That’s terrible, because you are there with your will all alone. God somehow put me in front of a mirror and said, ‘OK, that’s how you are.'” – Father Chrysostom, as quoted in Rod Dreher’s “Rummaging through the Wonder Files“.
“[T]here is no normal now. Everything is turning in strange directions and very little makes sense. Here I am typing words onto a screen and wondering how many non-human entities will be reading them. Normal is over, I think, and for quite some time to come. On the plus side, it’s been a great year for tomatoes.” – Paul Kingsnorth, Abbey of Misrule
“Solomon did the exceptional things exceptionally — but he didn’t do the small things.” – Fr. Mike Schmitz, as guest on the Exorcism Files episode, “These are the Lies We Need to Overcome“.
“We offer you our failures, we offer you attempts,
The gifts not fully given, the dreams not fully dreamt,
Give our stumblings direction, give our visions wider view,
An offering of ashes, an offering to you..” – “We Rise Again from Ashes“.
This was the opening hymn at a Cursillo closing, which at first I thought was odd — I associate Cursillo closings with joy, not repentance — but which I was then overwhelmed by. Some phrases, like ‘dreams not fully dreamt’, reminded me of Lewis’s quote from Weight of Glory:
Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.
It reminded me of the true work of Cursillo, which often involves a breaking of ego and pride through sheer love. The bishop observed in his sermon that Cursillo often forces people to travel the greatest distance in the world, between the head and the heart. Personally, pride is my easiest and greatest sin to fall into, aside perhaps from acedia. Attending a Cursillo closing was…a moment of grace, I think.
Love is that liquor sweet and most divine,
Which my God feels as blood; but I, as wine.– “The Agony”, George Herbert. Quoted by Malcolm Guite in re: Arthurian legend
We exist in the world, says McGilchrist, but we no longer belong in it. We have unmade the world. This is entirely new in the history of humanity, and it’s impossible to exaggerate its significance. The way out of this problem, he says, and I agree, is to reclaim the right hemisphere’s dominance over the left, to learn to see again the full picture rather than just the details, to treat the earth as an organism rather than a mechanism. How do you do that? By changing your quality of attention; seeing differently. He says attention changes the world. How you attend to it changes what you find there. – “AGAINST THE MACHINE“, Paul Kingsnorth. Touchstone Magazine.
So maybe, if we are Christians and we are thinking this way, what we need to do is remember to trust God and get on with the business of repentance, of seeing differently, of repairing our own relationship to this world that God created. And we can do that, robots or no robots, starting right now. We can change our way of seeing. We can live differently. We can apprehend differently. We can look at our phones differently. We can look at our lives differently. We can ask ourselves where this information is coming from, who is manipulating us. We can reject technological tyranny in our own lives, which is the only place we have any power to do anything. We can refuse the values of a system that, to my mind, is ever more openly satanic. As much as we can, we can refuse to participate in it if we want to. We can say no. We can set limits. We can draw lines. – IBID
“Actually I would suggest that it’s the only way to stay sane. If we don’t define our and our children’s relationship with the machine, the machine will define it for us, and we’ll just keep being sucked along down the river toward the singularity.” – IBID
Coming up in November
Two things: one, SciFi Month 2026. More deets to follow. Two, I usually spend some time with CS Lewis in late November during his deathday-birthday week, which I have sometimes called “A Week with Jack”. Spending time with him and posting about him are two different subjects, however. I do anticipate reading Through the Shadowlands, a joint biography of Jack and Joy. Currently, I’m reading Delta-V by Daniel Suarez, In Defense of Andrew Jackson by Brad Birzer, Heirs to the Founders by HW Brands (on Clay, Calhoun, and Webster), and Into the Planet, a cave-diving memoir. Actually, Delta -V is about a cave diver sent to space to mine asteroids, so I might try to review them back to back for fun.
