Catholicism

A bust of Srinivasa Ramanujan in Kolkata. Asking for Signs # A fallen-away Catholic friend once told me that he wished the Bible predicted modern science. “If Jesus said, ‘Oh, by the way, matter is made up of atoms,’ then I would also believe him when he says he’s God,” he said. I don’t think we should expect Jesus to have said things like that. First, it wouldn’t have helped anyone in the centuries before it could be verified.

Tree of Jesse by Absolon Stumme. There’s a tradition in many Catholic families to make a Jesse tree in Advent. This means doing a reading from the Old Testament each day, and pinning a leaf with an associated symbol on it to a cloth tree on the wall. The name comes from Isaiah 11:1: There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.

Dear Sebastian, I read your open letter on your economics curriculum. I happen to be thinking a lot about career advice at the moment, so the advice you include from 80000hours was interesting to me. I love the idea of including career advice in an economics class, and situating it right when the curriculum has caused that sort of angst in your students is perceptive. But I have mixed feelings about what I found at 80000hours, and it provides a useful framework for talking about the thoughts I already had brewing.

A Windhover. I recently joined Leah Libresco Sargeant’s Tiny Book Club Substack after several months of lurking. Last month’s topic was the 19th century British Jesuit and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, so let’s bring that conversation here too. Poetry is my preferred art form. There are at least a dozen poems that bring me to tears every time I read them. I love the language, I love the sound, I love the ideas, and I love the challenge of memorizing them.

The Cathedral Basilica of Saint Louis. How do we make Catholic churches more welcoming? I’m especially conscious of the problem as it relates to family seating. When I was single, I was easily distracted by seeing a family all in a pew together; I jumped to thinking of them as closed in on themselves, unapproachable. Now that I sit with my family, I still feel exactly the same thing, but from the other side: I feel closed in on my own pew, less able to approach the people around me.