Andrew Wright

Dad of all trades, #HigherEd aficionado, occasional alpinist. Always thinking about Strategy, Mountains, and Religion. RTs are my archive.

[Pope Respecter @poperespecter1]

One of the most mind blowing 10 minutes of video Christianity has ever produced.

[Reid Wiseman @astro_reid]

Only one chance in this lifetime…

Like watching sunset at the beach from the most foreign seat in the cosmos, I couldn’t resist a cell phone video of Earthset. You can hear the shutter on the Nikon as @Astro_Christina is hammering away on 3-shot brackets and capturing those exceptional Earthset photos through the 400mm lens. @AstroVicGlover was in window 3 watching with @Astro_Jeremy next to him.

I could barely see the Moon through the docking hatch window but the iPhone was the perfect size to catch the view…this is uncropped, uncut with 8x zoom which is quite comparable to the view of the human eye. Enjoy.

[Ross Douthat @DouthatNYT]

This week's episode of "Interesting Times" is a conversation with Ben Sasse, who is dying in public:
https://t.co/MNMur4FB1V

[Fulham Football Club @FulhamFC]

Wishing a blessed and peaceful Good Friday to all those reflecting. 🤍

[Andrew Wright @peaktryst]

@wylfcen Still quite possible in 2026 to bleed blood and to breed a brood… but woop is due for a comeback, if I were to deem its doom.

[Tim Young @TimRunsHisMouth]

This is one of the best speeches against communism and pro-Western Civilization that I’ve ever heard..,

Marco Rubio is incredible here.

I started to pull quotes from it, but there are too many.

This is a must watch.

[Russell Crowe @russellcrowe]

Today my eldest received his Bachelor of the Arts (Latin)…
I’m going to have to build some more storage space to pack away all this fatherly pride.
He’s a little bit taller these days … and he’s got a beard and such … but, same wise before his years fella

[Anna Riedl @AnnaLeptikon]

Somehow it was learning how many people are fulltime employed to maintain the Golden Gate Bridge that flipped something inside of me in my understanding of the entropic force civilization has to constantly fight against. Before that moment I thought — I had not applied real conscious thought — you simply build a building or anything really and then you just … have it. After that I understood everything is constantly at the brink of being lost.

[🕊️ @lichthauch]

The father of seven has not finished a thought in four years. he is just moving. feeding. driving. wiping. his brain is soup and his back is finished and he has no opinions about civilization he is too tired for opinions. and meanwhile civilization is growing out of him like he is dirt and he doesnt even notice because there is milk on the floor again. the childfree man has read eleven books this year about the decline of the west and he is the decline and the books are the evidence and he will understand this at fifty eight in a room that is very clean and very quiet

[Ben Sasse @BenSasse]

Friends-

This is a tough note to write, but since a bunch of you have started to suspect something, I’ll cut to the chase: Last week I was diagnosed with metastasized, stage-four pancreatic cancer, and am gonna die.

Advanced pancreatic is nasty stuff; it’s a death sentence. But I already had a death sentence before last week too — we all do.

I’m blessed with amazing siblings and half-a-dozen buddies that are genuinely brothers. As one of them put it, “Sure, you’re on the clock, but we’re all on the clock.” Death is a wicked thief, and the bastard pursues us all.

Still, I’ve got less time than I’d prefer. This is hard for someone wired to work and build, but harder still as a husband and a dad. I can’t begin to describe how great my people are. During the past year, as we’d temporarily stepped back from public life and built new family rhythms, Melissa and I have grown even closer — and that on top of three decades of the best friend a man could ever have. Seven months ago, Corrie was commissioned into the Air Force and she’s off at instrument and multi-engine rounds of flight school. Last week, Alex kicked butt graduating from college a semester early even while teaching gen chem, organic, and physics (she’s a freak). This summer, 14-year-old Breck started learning to drive. (Okay, we’ve been driving off-book for six years — but now we’ve got paper to make it street-legal.) I couldn’t be more grateful to constantly get to bear-hug this motley crew of sinners and saints.

There’s not a good time to tell your peeps you’re now marching to the beat of a faster drummer — but the season of advent isn’t the worst. As a Christian, the weeks running up to Christmas are a time to orient our hearts toward the hope of what’s to come.

Not an abstract hope in fanciful human goodness; not hope in vague hallmark-sappy spirituality; not a bootstrapped hope in our own strength (what foolishness is the evaporating-muscle I once prided myself in). Nope — often we lazily say “hope” when what we mean is “optimism.” To be clear, optimism is great, and it’s absolutely necessary, but it’s insufficient. It’s not the kinda thing that holds up when you tell your daughters you’re not going to walk them down the aisle. Nor telling your mom and pops they’re gonna bury their son.

A well-lived life demands more reality — stiffer stuff. That’s why, during advent, even while still walking in darkness, we shout our hope — often properly with a gravelly voice soldiering through tears.

Such is the calling of the pilgrim. Those who know ourselves to need a Physician should dang well look forward to enduring beauty and eventual fulfillment. That is, we hope in a real Deliverer — a rescuing God, born at a real time, in a real place. But the eternal city — with foundations and without cancer — is not yet.

Remembering Isaiah’s prophecies of what’s to come doesn’t dull the pain of current sufferings. But it does put it in eternity’s perspective:
“When we've been there 10,000 years…We've no less days to sing God's praise.”

I’ll have more to say. I’m not going down without a fight. One sub-part of God’s grace is found in the jawdropping advances science has made the past few years in immunotherapy and more. Death and dying aren’t the same — the process of dying is still something to be lived. We’re zealously embracing a lot of gallows humor in our house, and I’ve pledged to do my part to run through the irreverent tape.

But for now, as our family faces the reality of treatments, but more importantly as we celebrate Christmas, we wish you peace: “The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned….For to us a son is given” (Isaiah 9).

With great gratitude, and with gravelly-but-hopeful voices,
Ben — and the Sasses

[Adrian Vermeule @Vermeullarmine]

FWIW, repeating my take on Game of Thrones vs Lord of the Rings, which I gave some years ago: Both are great in different ways. The merit of the latter is obvious; the former is valuable because it offers an extremely bleak vision of a fallen world in which the Incarnation never occurred, a world never redeemed. It is thus no accident that Martin can’t finish the story. A world without the Incarnation has no providential arc, in a sense no history, and thus can have no resolution; it’s just one damned thing after another.

[The White House @WhiteHouse]

A REVIVAL. A Celebration of Charlie Kirk. ❤️

[Bree Solstad @BreeSolstad]

Marco Rubio summoned his inner Father Mike Schmitz and explained the entire story of salvation history in under 90 seconds.

🙌❤️🔥✝️

[Jamie Bambrick @j_bambrick]

My dear American friends,

We British Christians would get excited when, once a year, Queen Elizabeth would make a mild but sincere reference to the love of Jesus Christ in her Christmas address.

In Charlie Kirks' Memorial service, watched by tens of millions, I just heard:
- Multiple clear presentations of the gospel from men like @robmccoyus and @DrFrankTurek with clear calls to repentance and faith
- Worship songs full of Scripture sung by tens of thousands live and millions at home
- Personal testimonies of lives transformed by the work of Christ and the witness of believers
- Demonstration and explanation of the value of marriage, child-rearing and family
- Calls to Romans 13 for the government to bear the sword for the protection of good and punishment of the wicked
- Declarations of spiritual warfare on the forces of evil and promises to endure no matter the cost
- Calls to be prophets and call the nation to repent
- More Scripture references and Bible readings than I can count
- And a widow publicly forgiving her husband's killer because Christ forgave his killers on the cross.

All of it done before, and by, the most powerful people in your nation and the world.

You guys should be on your knees thanking God for your country. It is a light to the world.

Never stop fighting for it.

[Jeremy Wayne Tate @JeremyTate41]

“Words are not violence, violence is violence.”

This is one of the best political speeches in American history.

[Sen. Bernie Sanders @SenSanders]

The murder of Charlie Kirk is part of a disturbing rise in political violence that threatens to hollow out our public life.

A free society relies on the premise that people can speak out without fear or humiliation.

No more political violence.

[John Podhoretz @jpodhoretz]

Here's the danger of social media. It allows people to publish their internal monologues. Our internal monologues and fantasies are often incredibly ugly. People go to therapists because they feel so guilty about them, and one of the tasks of a therapist is to explain that 1/

[Andrew Wright @peaktryst]

@newrepublic Disgusting. You’ve already cleaned up the article itself. Now delete this post. Find some decency.

[Andrew Wright @peaktryst]

@JamesAFurey *7m 🙄

[Andrew Wright @peaktryst]

@JamesAFurey A year in with my kids (9f&7b) right now. They love it. Am using Memoria Press curric, but bringing in daily short translation exercises relevant to their interests, and using ChatGPT to help me explain details I don’t get. Lots of progress made translating Xmas carols Dec/Jan.