Rattling in my brain-pan

Some pieces what’s got me cogitatin’ this week:

RIP Peter Green.

• “It’s strange that we now see America threatened by a plague. Because without plague, America, as we know it, would not exist.” Thus begins Andrew Sullivan’s survey of the plagues that shaped human history, over at New York magazine.
• “What good is it to speak of leaps of religious faith without first speaking of leaps into more immediate paradoxes, into the uncertainties of story and human subjectivity?” At The American Interest Mike St. Thomas reviews a book I very much look forward to reading, Christopher Beha’s new novel, The Index Of Self-Destructive Acts.
• “The so-called Culture Wars are less a war against Christianity than a civil war between Christian factions.” Ed Simon considers the scope and penetration of Christendom while reviewing How The Christian Revolution Remade The World by Tom Holland, at LARB.
• “While Galloway and others see mass delivery of content through online platforms as the solution to the real problems of overpriced and underperforming institutions, Hitz sees such platforms as the catalysts of opinionization and anti-intellectualism. Indeed, the metamorphosis of college education into an enormous Zoom meeting is incompatible with Hitz’s brand of intimate thoughtfulness, for in her eyes the internet is ‘a cesspool for the love of spectacle’ and a ‘bottomless temple of lurid fascination.’” Charles McNamara reviews Lost In Thought by Zena Hitz over at Commonweal. Say, you’ve already dropped in on Michial Farmer’s spritely chat with Hitz, have you not?
• And finally: “No wonder, then, that the dominant online mood is one of resentment that spills over into bitter conflict. The game is signalling to most of us that we are losing.” Hey, any tip o’ the hat to René Girard is the sort of confirmation bias I will affirmationally and biasedly confirm! Geoff Shullenberger at The Tablet.