A joy to meander through all of these threads gathered in one place. Thanks for writing this, DBB.
I’m not usually a fan of the ‘we’ statement, but this one will live with me: ‘We are now obliged to become awe-philic once again.’ Oof.
It doesn’t feel entirely instinctive to sit alongside a technologist when re-centralising awe, but McLuhan wasn’t your average technologist, was he? “Sometimes I think he doesn't mean so much as he probes. He rolls things down the hill to see what happens. The meaning is in the curiosity.”
And you’re not the average recipient - “I don't wish to advocate or resist so much as to describe and understand.”
As someone not connected with a particular religious tradition, it wouldn’t be my instinct to sit alongside theologians either, but your gentle, Venn diagram of where Bonhoeffer and Benjamin meet and diverge is an accessible meeting point for all sorts of thinking, doing and being.
Between the four of you not just ideas and theories, but the methods of getting there, are softened, humanised and queered. And something in THAT feels very hopeful to me.
I'm always surprised by how much I love McLuhan, because I have much less curiosity about technologies than most. I suppose he's really interested in what they do to us, the human beings. I'm not interested in space travel, but I am interested in what it did to us when we saw the whole planet in a photograph. He's also endlessly funny and strange. Very more-ish.
And yes, the great softening: maybe it's natural that everything composts into everything and becomes porous at the end of an era (is "the man" composting?), which is a recipe for awe in some places and all out panic in others. Maybe occasionally both at once
This rings sweet in the belltower, hunchbacked and deaf to any owned certainty. Yitzak would be proud, Yaakov. And that denial unto life while the cocks grow of Jack's? That is some post-Moriah liturgy there. Salut that shaking voice dark time song to Everything-that-is-no-thing.
A joy to meander through all of these threads gathered in one place. Thanks for writing this, DBB.
I’m not usually a fan of the ‘we’ statement, but this one will live with me: ‘We are now obliged to become awe-philic once again.’ Oof.
It doesn’t feel entirely instinctive to sit alongside a technologist when re-centralising awe, but McLuhan wasn’t your average technologist, was he? “Sometimes I think he doesn't mean so much as he probes. He rolls things down the hill to see what happens. The meaning is in the curiosity.”
And you’re not the average recipient - “I don't wish to advocate or resist so much as to describe and understand.”
As someone not connected with a particular religious tradition, it wouldn’t be my instinct to sit alongside theologians either, but your gentle, Venn diagram of where Bonhoeffer and Benjamin meet and diverge is an accessible meeting point for all sorts of thinking, doing and being.
Between the four of you not just ideas and theories, but the methods of getting there, are softened, humanised and queered. And something in THAT feels very hopeful to me.
Thank you so much LC.
I'm always surprised by how much I love McLuhan, because I have much less curiosity about technologies than most. I suppose he's really interested in what they do to us, the human beings. I'm not interested in space travel, but I am interested in what it did to us when we saw the whole planet in a photograph. He's also endlessly funny and strange. Very more-ish.
And yes, the great softening: maybe it's natural that everything composts into everything and becomes porous at the end of an era (is "the man" composting?), which is a recipe for awe in some places and all out panic in others. Maybe occasionally both at once
.
This rings sweet in the belltower, hunchbacked and deaf to any owned certainty. Yitzak would be proud, Yaakov. And that denial unto life while the cocks grow of Jack's? That is some post-Moriah liturgy there. Salut that shaking voice dark time song to Everything-that-is-no-thing.
🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻