Wet fall morning.
Coffee in Columbia
Thursday morning.
Dragons at the J-School.
Autumn In Columbia.
This too is real. The din ceases.
Memory closed down its dark waters.
And those, as if behind a glass, stare out, silent.
Czeslaw Milosz. Berkley, 1985
The Sun
All the colors come from the sun. And it does not have
Any particular color, it contains them all.
The whole Earth is like a poem
Well the sun above represents the artist.
Whoever wants to paint the very gated world
Let him never look straight up at the sun
Or she will lose the memory of things he has seen.
Only burning tears will stay in his eyes.
Let him kneel down, lower his face to the grass,
And look at light reflected by the ground.
There he will find everything we have lost:
The stars and the roses, The dusks in the dawns.
Czeslaw Milosz, 1943
Taking a break from apple picking for some quality control tasting.
In Book 1 of Politics, Aristotle remarks that man is born naturally with weapons, or arms, to be used by prudence on behalf of justice. He seems to suggest that the virtue of human reason must understand when persuasion is necessary, and when only force can defend of justice.
Philip Jenkins argues that social statistics should always be treated cautiously
There are things that we don’t know, but also things that we literally cannot know, and few social analyses accept that latter possibility.
h/t: @ayjay
Twilight of the Never Trumpers.
The central problem both parties face is not a matter of tone or rhetoric in the midst of the chaos and confusion—rhetorical and otherwise—caused by the fall of the old modes and orders. The salient fact of the moment is that the race is on to rethink and reground policy in light of our Republic’s founding principles.
Much wisdom here. I do not think many among the party elite have yet figured this out, but I do think this is an accurate diagnosis of our day. Or, at least, it is among the better attempts than I have seen elsewhere.
Not a vending a machine.
Delayed on arrival.
OâHare hallway
âHotel viewâ
Stuck at Chicago OâHare because a delay and @United policy wonât cover a hotel; and their âvoucherâ program was a joke. This is the window I next to my bench, er, bed for the night while I watch the rain and wait for it to quiet down enough to get some sleep.
Saturday morning at the farm
Magic Hour
Bus stop.
Show Me
Earlier this month I defended my dissertation and submitted all paperwork to complete my PhD. It has been a long time coming and I am obviously glad to be finished. My dissertation examined the development of international religious freedom and U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War. In it I make a very simple claim that efforts to promote religious freedom have been present in American national security strategy for much longer than most realize. I’m not the first to argue this. Anna Su ([Twitter](Exporting Freedom)) has argued something very similar in Exporting Freedom. (Indeed, when I first learned of her book my stomach sank because I thought my dissertation project had been scooped, as it were. Thankfully there are enough differences that my advisors and I agreed that I was good to go.) These are welcome developments in the IR scholarship. I am eager to add my voice to the scholarly discussion.
Shortly after defending—by which I mean the next day—my wife and I packed up our place. This fall I begin a two-year appointment as a postdoc fellow at Kinder Institute on Constituional Democracy. My primary duties will be working with undergraduates in some of Kinder’s very excellent programming for first and second year students. In the spring I am slated to teach a course on U.S. Foreign Policies. In addition to my book project, I have some other manuscripts in progress, but more on those later as they get closer to completion. For now, it is time to settle in and crank out my widgets.