Friday Links
August 29, 2025
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Augustine of Hippo, Gerard Seghers
The Machine Sessions: Caroline Ross
Carmelite Quotes
Learning to Love Someone Besides Yourself: A Reading of Augustine’s Confessions
Who Forgot About Beauty? And Why?
Charles Camosy: We’ve seen ‘designer babies’ before
Talk to Me In Long Lines: A Journal of ("Long) Narrative Verse and Dramatic Monologues
Buc-ee’s and The Infinite American Spirit
The Machine Sessions: Caroline Ross
“As soon as you have a limitless palette, you have slop…”
Carmelite Quotes
If you aren’t following the Substack Carmelite Quotes, please do. It’s exactly what it proclaims to be: quotes from the Carmelites, everyday in your inbox, to help you get through the day.
Learning to Love Someone Besides Yourself: A Reading of Augustine’s Confessions
An Augustinian anthropology is always really about love. We spend our loves running around loving. I used to be frustrated by the profligate use of the word love. It bothered me that we use the word love to describe our relationship to pizza, America, our parents, and God. We should not use the same word for our relationship to beer as we should to God, I griped. For an Augustinian, we should use the same word for loving beer and loving God. There is no sharp divide between the lower loving and the higher such that we must use a different word for the action. There is just loving more and loving less, loving rightly or loving wrongly. Augustine is quite comfortable interchanging words for love, noting that he wished to show that Scripture “makes no distinction between amor, dilectio, and caritas.” Not just love God and do what you will but choose whatever word for love and then love.
Who Forgot About Beauty? And Why?
I’ll begin with the personal factor: my wife and I have young children. It is a peculiar time of life: on the one hand, a parent is forced to be very practical (nothing is as unsentimentally practical as wiping a child’s bum); on the other hand, a parent tends to an open furnace of human experience which will expose facet after facet of humanity while it is still on factory settings. In other words, I’ve been taking a refresher course in human nature, and one of the lessons was on how early, and easily, children begin responding to beauty.
Charles Camosy: We’ve seen ‘designer babies’ before
As the historian Nadya Williams has shown, Greece and Rome offer proof that the parental quest for quality control over offspring is anything but new. Indeed, the popular stories of the era vigorously affirmed such practices. From Thetis dipping Achilles into the river Styx to render him invulnerable, to Hera throwing her newborn baby, Hephaestus, off Mount Olympus because he was so ugly and deformed — ancient pagans were taught by their culture to pursue biological optimization. In the realm of philosophy, thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, and Seneca lent moral support to parents’ refusal to raise newborns with disabilities.
Talk to Me In Long Lines: A Journal of ("Long) Narrative Verse and Dramatic Monologues
The inaugural issue of this new journal for long form poetry begins with Steve Knepper’s “Preserves.”
Things got so bad that year we ate the cleanings when heifers dropped their calves. Just boiled them. That kind of hunger changes how you look at empty cupboard shelves—at people too.
Buc-ee’s and The Infinite American Spirit
For my Tech Support teammates! Next week, pantoums!
