Steven Vanderlip

“At 70, I realized I wasn’t a lunatic, I was a moron.”

[Steven Vanderlip @SVanDerLippe]

@cath_cov I think you missed the “…strained, apprehensive tradition…” part of the quotation.

[Steven Vanderlip @SVanDerLippe]

DBH’s esotericism and sometimes blunderingly-bombastic pooh-poohing is all worth it simply for his writing on baseball
https://t.co/7kFxDVerEn

[Matthew Schmitz @matthewschmitz]

.@jdfmccann on R. R. Reno and @juliadyost

[Steven Vanderlip @SVanDerLippe]

“There was a great deal of simplicity about Pop. It was a simplicity, an ingenuousness that belonged to his nature: and it was peculiarly American… this kind and warm-hearted and vast and universal optimism.” -Merton

[Steven Vanderlip @SVanDerLippe]

@IVMiles into their affairs (i.e. race relations). And in the Americana scheme of all things progress and novelty, I suppose it can go a fair way towards explaining a certain strain of conservatism, though, in the end, the frontier spirit is a bit liberal on its own.

[Steven Vanderlip @SVanDerLippe]

@IVMiles Purely anecdotal but many of the Southern Evangelicals I know seem to have a basic disposition of "don't tell me what to do"- that's the frontier spirit alive and well. That goes a fair way towards explaining why Southerners as a class didn't take well to outsider intrusions...

[Matthew Schmitz @matthewschmitz]

“At the present time, more than in any preceding one, Roman Catholics are seen to lapse into infidelity, and Protestants to be converted to Roman Catholicism”

Tocqueville, “Democracy in America”
https://t.co/gSTfiNaD1G

[Steven Vanderlip @SVanDerLippe]

“The church had been fitted into the landscape in such a way as to become the keystone of its intelligibility… Oh what a thing it is to live in a place that is so constructed that you are forced, in spite of yourself, to be at least a virtual contemplative!” -Merton

[Steven Vanderlip @SVanDerLippe]

Plot for new Dan Brown novel just dropped.

[Daniel Strand @DDFStrand]

If a Catholic went to Westminster Seminary to study Calvin I would not be surprised if they converted to Presbyterianism. In fact, I would expect it.

[Steven Vanderlip @SVanDerLippe]

“We don’t need other worlds. We need a mirror.”

Tarkovsky > Thiel

[Jawwwn @jawwwn_]

Peter Thiel on how the psychedelics revolution changed introspection:

“We stopped going to outer space because we started going to inner space.”

“We landed on the Moon in July, 1969.”

“Three weeks later, Woodstock started— and that’s when the hippies took over the country.”

[Steven Vanderlip @SVanDerLippe]

@ggraham Maybe the root of American positivity is the kind of frontiersmen-rah-rah-do-it-myself spirit, in which case maybe a few works would fit the bill as the great American novel. Doubtfully Blood Meridian though- McCarthy is too much a Catholic impaled on the wrong end of revelation.

[Steven Vanderlip @SVanDerLippe]

@ggraham I think this is true, as far as it goes. But the positivity strain of Americana doesn’t make for great literature- it makes for great self-help, therapeutic books. So either we accept that category as our magnum opus or…

[Vintage Maps @vintagemapstore]

Seven Deadly Sins as US Maps.

In the Kansas State study, Pride was calculated as the sum of the other six sins - because in the 6th century, Pope Gregory I (Gregory the Great) defined pride as the "root of all sin." Following this logic, the South ended up with the highest overall sin score.

Via Las Vegas Sun / Kansas State University Geography Department

[Steven Vanderlip @SVanDerLippe]

“…The Titian nude neither provokes nor excites, but retains a detached serenity- the serenity of a person, whose thoughts and desires are not ours but hers.” -Scruton

[Steven Vanderlip @SVanDerLippe]

“… the reclining Venus marks a break with antiquity, when the goddess was never shown in a horizontal position. The reclining nude shows the body not as a statue to be worshipped but as a woman to be desired…”

[Steven Vanderlip @SVanDerLippe]

“…Even in the Venus Urbino- that most provocative of Titian’s female nudes- the lady draws our eyes to her face, which tells us that this body is on offer only in the way that the woman herself is on offer, to the lover who can honestly meet her gaze.”

[Steven Vanderlip @SVanDerLippe]

@CharlestonArchi This aggression will not stand, man.

[Edward Feser @FeserEdward]

As @nfergus argues, the correct analogy to understand Trump is not fascism but a mash-up of 19th century Jacksonian populism and P. T. Barnum-style showmanship, and the political consensus Trump challenged was indeed broken and unsustainable. The trouble is that it does not follow (and is not true) either that Jackson/Barnum style populism really is the cure for what ails us, or that Trump could ever have been the instrument to implement the proper cure. And part of the problem lies in two further American analogies to Trump that Ferguson neglects, viz. a Charles Foster Kane-style egotism coupled with Roy Cohn-style thuggery.

As a friend of mine aptly put it in 2016, “Trump is an enema,” useful at the time to flush out some of the rot in the system. But he was never going to be an actual cure or the builder of a positive alternative, and he should never have been nominated again after Jan 2021. The serious worry now is that the good causes some naively hoped he could further (border control, rolling back woke insanity, a postliberal approach to economics and culture, etc.) will have been so discredited by their association with him that the net result will be a massive setback for them rather than an advance.

[Tyler Jones @TylerMJones]

Seems like a good a day to re-up this South Carolina historical treasure from the former Senator from Clarendon about liquor, “the oil of conversation.”

[Steven Vanderlip @SVanDerLippe]

“… no longer knows ‘of those other and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won.” -Pieper

[Steven Vanderlip @SVanDerLippe]

“…the age-old human dream of a life free of toil is on the verge of being uncannily fulfilled and, ‘like the fulfillment of wishes in fairy-tales, comes at a moment when it can only be self-defeating’ because the ‘laboring society’…”