David Decosimo

The Great Books trend of the past 5 years has been a total catastrophe. The simple fact is that Plutarch and Homer and Virgil et al. do have radical insights buried in there, but at the same time most of these books are truly boring and lame and most people pretend to like them, cannot really digest anything, and get absolutely nothing from them! The trend is overwhelmingly powered by these books' aspirational quality; it's like a luxury heritage brand that conveniently only costs $15 a pop. The people on social media who've made brands around how great all these books are, often they are trying to *express* something about *themselves*, which is nice, but does not change how lame and boring the lion's share of these books are! You don't have to pretend to love them! If you're teaching undergrads that's great, or doing real research, fine. But this in no way means that everyone should read these books; it does not even mean that the smartest and most educated adults today need to read these books. The bits of radical alpha in them are great to find, explore, and write about if you are in the .01% of people who are called to do such things, but there is really zero reason why anybody else should read any of these books. Frankly, many of these authors are even somewhat primitive and infantile compared to the best thinkers of modernity. Plato and Aristotle have tons of provocative alpha worth getting, but also they were retarded on many topics, especially religion. The Romans were even worse in many ways. But all of this gets shrouded in the cult of Great Books. There have never been more people professing to love the Great Books, and mass public culture has never been lower brow than it is today. A ton of larping and precious little education, virtually zero novel insight, has come out of this movement.

This is Augustine's view I think (and mine). The City of Man is the basin described below, the City of God is exactly the same kind of basin (but good). People can move between but history is the accelerating divergence between the two, and the end times is just the long-run equilibrium.

Here's my revised working definition: "An Anglican is a Christian whose spirituality is defined in large part by the Book of Common Prayer, belonging to a community of faith governed by episcopal polity.” By “Christian” I mean someone who believes in the creeds, (or at least knows that they should, counting someone who struggles with belief in good faith as a "Christian.") By “defined in large part by the Book of Common Prayer,” I mean broadly someone who, because their faith is shaped by it in some way, regularly prays prayers that are distinct to it (Prayer of Humble Access, the General Thanksgiving, the General Confession, particular translations of Collects like that for Purity, for Peace, for Aid Against Perils, etc.) By “community of faith governed by episcopal polity,” I do not mean “there are pastors and every pastor is understood to be a bishop,” like how some American Lutherans seem to talk about the episcopacy, but something more like “there is one principal pastor who oversees other pastors who are themselves based in different places.” I’m trying to reduce the role of bishop here to a functional definition, distinct from the usual Catholic one.

Universities don't need to "teach students to use AI well." The whole point of AI is that it doesn't require any skill. Universities *should* teach students how to write and research on their own, and foster an ethic of shaming people who outsource their basic ability to think.

South Korea's first humanoid robot monk made its debut at Jogye Temple in Seoul, ahead of Buddha's birthday. Gabi, the 130-centimeter-tall robot, wore a traditional grey-and-brown Buddhist robe and stood before monks as it pledged to devote itself to Buddhism

Today we are celebrating the Feast of the Martyrs of England and Wales. Frst to be executed was St John Houghton, Carthusian and Prior of the London Charterhouse. He was martyred in 1535 for refusing the Oath of Supremacy which declared Henry VIII Head of the Church in England