I’m in Oxford for a day for the nineteenth Oxford Patristics Conference. I’ll read a short paper on Augustine in an hour. This morning I was up early enough to explore a bit.

It’s my second OPC. Last time I explored north a bit, got a glimpse of the room in the pub where the Inklings met, and walked past Tolkien’s church. This time I went south. I don’t want to see the place where they did their best work this time. This time, I want to see some of the same beauty that renewed and inspired them to do that work.

Stephen Meyer is the author of Return of the God Hypothesis and the director of the Discovery Institute. James Tour is a synthetic organic chemist and professor at Rice University, renowned for his work in nanotechnology and his skepticism toward the current scientific models explaining the origin of life. 

A hillside burned by a wildfire in 2017 has collapsed into the Chilcotin River, creating a temporary lake some 11km long. The Chilcotin River empties into the Fraser, which runs through Vancouver, BC on its way to the Pacific Ocean. There are concerns that if the landslide-created dam gets washed away, the temporary lake could rush downstream creating flooding risks down to the Fraser Valley.

Minneapolis burns in 2020 (Justin Berken/Shutterstock)

They say a presidential candidate’s first major decision in their VP pick. Kamala Harris’ first decision, choosing Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, could be seen as caving to her party’s embrace of anti-Semitism.

Louis Daniel Armstrong (August 4, 1901 – July 6, 1971), nicknamed “Satchmo,” “Satch,” and “Pops,” was an American trumpeter and vocalist. He was among the most influential figures in Jazz. His career spanned five decades and several eras in the history of jazz.

Armstrong was born and raised in New Orleans. Coming to prominence in the 1920s as an inventive trumpet and cornet player, he was a foundational influence in the distinctive genre, shifting the focus of the music from collective improvisation to solo performance. By the 1950s, Armstrong was a national musical icon, appearing regularly in radio and television broadcasts and on film. (Source: Wikipedia)

Happy Birthday, sir, and thank you.

I have written before of Alexandre Solzhenitsyn and I have written before about Douglas Murray and his weekly Things Worth Remembering column in the online publication, The Free Press. This past Sunday Murray focused on Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 address to the graduating class of Harvard University. As Murray relates, it was not a comfortable message:

One might have expected Solzhenitsyn to lavish the Americans with praise, to talk about the splendor of America, the generosity of spirit, the freedom, the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, all that. And one might have expected Solzhenitsyn to contrast this idealized America with his homeland—to turn his penetrating gaze, once again, on the Soviet Union.

I was watching the Olympics with my wife the other night. Our eight-year-old was already in bed. We had subscribed to the Peacock streaming service for the sole purpose of watching the Olympic sporting extravaganza. We subscribed well prior to the anti-Christian opening ceremonies debacle. I’m not going to unpack all that was wrong with the open ceremonies, but I will observe that there is a purpose behind exposing us, not only to the explicitly offensive message, but to the ugliness inherent in the imagery. C.S. Lewis observed, in his prescient novel, That Hideous Strength, that there is malevolence involved when someone presents the patina of beauty, but withholds actual beauty upon closer inspection. “The peculiar ugliness consisted in the very fact that they kept on suggesting it and then frustrating the expectation thus aroused.” In the novel, the protagonist is being forced to occupy a room whose construction is slightly off-kilter. Arches over doorways that don’t quite line up. Odd proportions between room size and ceiling height. The walls are covered in pictures which, on close inspection, are hideous and bizarre. The protagonist notices the pictures. He is “surprised at the predominance of scriptural themes. It was only at the second or third glance that one discovered certain unaccountable details – something odd about the positions of the figures’ feet or the arrangement of their fingers or the grouping. And who was the person standing between the Christ and Lazarus? And why were there so many beetles under the table at the Last Supper?” If you were already familiar with Lewis’ novel, you might have found the Olympic opening ceremonies to be a kind of deja vu experience.

From Vasilyev Alexandr, via Shutterstock

Today just a quote and a question. (And a short bio of the man who gave us the quote.)

A quote from Dwight L. Moody* – “A man can no more take in a supply of grace for the future than he can eat enough for the next six months, or take sufficient air into his lungs at one time to sustain life for a week. We must draw upon God’s boundless store of grace from day to day as we need it.”

Our federal system is aptly called the laboratory of democracy. Rather than learning everything from the school of hard knocks, states can look to the experience of others with initiatives like charter schools, right-to-work laws and taxation levels. Unfortunately, there are some slow learners out there.

The IRS recently released its annual report of the net migration of people and money between states. Once again, the high tax-and-spend states lost out. California was the biggest income loser ($23.8 billion) in 2022, followed by New York (14.2), Illinois (9.8), New Jersey (5.3) and Massachusetts (3.9).