A Good Friday reflection.

It's been a while since I've attended a church service. Usually this isn't something that I think about but today it weighs a bit more heavily. My reasons for distancing myself from the structural church are complicated. They're also not special. I respect those who stay in it as much as I understand those who leave and I don't think either choice makes someone better or worse. My feelings about it are my own and I also don't claim any sort of finality to them.

What I can say is that my convictions and my faith have tended to lead me on the path of societal progressive change. I try to follow that, wherever it leads—and for the moment that has led me outside the church(†). Christianity has always rung most true for me as a socio-economic and political project working in solidarity with the poor and oppressed. And I guess this is the thing for me. The church is a political structure and it's naive to suggest it isn't. Attempts to try and frame it as a-political or somehow existing outside of that are lazy at best and disingenuous at worst, perpetuating the suffering we should be working against. What I see in the church (at least in much of the current North American expression of it) has been a commitment to a politic I simply do not find resonance with.

So today, as the Church gathers to remember and reflect upon the death of Jesus, I call to mind the writing of Tissa Balasuriya, a Sri Lanken priest and theologian who struggled deeply with the role of the church in relation to the suffering of people.

"The Eucharist is spiritual food insofar as it leads to greater love, self-unity, and communion among persons and groups. Today this requires love among persons and effective action for justice. The Eucharist must also lead us to a response to the suffering of the masses, often caused by people who take a prominent part in the Eucharist. Unless there is this twofold dimension of personal love and societal action, the Eucharist can be a sacrilege."

(from the Eucharist and Human Liberation)

† I am talking about being outside the structural or institutional church as opposed to the traditions and community.

"Eating beef without care for its effects on the environment in [North America] in 2025 is functionally climate denialism." (source)

I've long been fascinated with the tension that can exist between someone's belief or ideology and their actions. You could call it hypocrisy but I don't think that's exactly right. Hypocrisy is more explicit, saying you believe something that you actually don't. This is more subtle, closer to cognitive dissonance. Perhaps even bordering on ignorance. People can absolutely believe, whole-heartedly, in something and yet act in ways that entirely undermine those beliefs. Most often I think this is because individual actions are not seen as a part of a larger whole. They are framed in a self-contained vacuum and rarely given any deeper consideration.

For example, I could hold a belief that sharing what I have with someone who is in need is the right thing to do. Practically, if I ordered a whole pizza and ate that pizza in front of my kids who have had nothing to eat, that would be a clear contradiction and I think most people would choose to share. However, the systems have been setup so as to cut us off from seeing how our individual patterns of consumption are depriving others of having their fair share. Plus we ourselves are often geographically removed from those who have less than us so it's not as blatant. Add in all our notions of hard work and deservedness and that tension gap just keeps getting wider and more murky.

I guess my point is that there are a lot of different shades in this and each one is a different opportunity for learning and self-reflection. We all contain these tensions within us and the only way forward is to be open to learning more about how our own lives may contain functional denial of some the beliefs we hold and a willingness to change once we know.

Just picked up Donald Fagan's 'The Nightfly' on vinyl and I love everything about it.

If you've never heard it, check out I.GY. It's the kind of song I imagine myself playing as a DJ at some smokey, neon-saturated club.

Oh, I used to DJ. Just weddings and the odd work event, but it was fun nonetheless. I remember one time playing a Donna Summer song while a lone older woman danced unashamedly, arms out, cocktail in one hand. That's the sorta vibe this song gives me.

I just finished the final book in Tana French's body of work (so far) and I don't think I've ever so voraciously enjoyed a bunch of novels before.

If you haven't read (or heard of) Tana French, she writes murder mysteries set in Ireland. At times they even flirt with horror. The mysteries are compelling, but her character writing is even better. She writes in the first person and is particularly skilled at writing an unreliable narrator. The book I saved for last, the Witch Elm, did this in a way I will be thinking about for a while. It was a takedown of white, male privilege that unfolds in a slow burn throughout the book. It had me questioning my own life at times in some real introspective ways.

The book confronts you with questions of whether or not you can trust your own memory on how certain events played out, especially when it comes to assumptions of how those events may have affected other people. My own adolescence is somewhat wrapped up in a haze of generalizations and a certain degree of distance or detachment. Like the narrator, at times a lot of my memories feel unmemorable. This book challenges the assumption that others, particularly people less inoculated by privilege, experienced things the same way.

I've been thinking quite a bit about how we discover and engage with media over the last few days (see my previous thoughts on this here), and it got me reflecting about my personal collection of books that is scattered, with varying degrees of intentionality, around my home. I'm pretty sure every room contains a small (or large) assortment of books in some corner, cabinet, shelf, or carefully stacked atop surfaces to catch the interest of someone sitting nearby. As I took some time to pay attention to these piles, I realized just how strange my book collection really has become.

There's the shelf in my bedroom that holds everything from fantasy series to Russian classics to short story anthologies to folklore. There's the pile on my subwoofer of deep dives into specific albums I like (including one on Celine Dion's Let's Talk About Love). There's a bookshelf in my living room with bird and animal studies, oral histories, essay collections, and bordering on what might be considered too many books on mushrooms and foraging. My office (which is only about the size of a large closet) contains all my so-called higher interest books (read: boring), ranging from history, theology, sociology, tech-criticism, economics, urbanism, design, and more. There's even a small collection of various editions/translations of The Hobbit sitting above my record player.

My tastes in books are wide and eccentric, and they have arrived here in all manner of ways. I have haphazardly picked up books from places I have visited and deliberately tracked down certain books because they piqued my interest at a certain time. Friends and family members have gifted me books they thought seemed like something I'd like. Other books hold sentimental value in some way (like a couple I was given from a professor who made an impact on me).

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I don't think an algorithm can ever really capture this sort of collecting. While it can distill all of this into suggestions for me to buy something else, it can never replicate the various motivations behind the acquiring of those books. It can't replace human thoughtfulness.