unfamiliarize.

slowly unfamiliarizing myself with the world.

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Your generation faces a temptation no generation has ever faced: the temptation to perform for everyone and belong to no one. To be globally visible, and locally invisible. To have thousands of followers, and no one knows actually where you live. Resist this. Plant yourself somewhere. Put down roots with the full intention of growing there. Learn the actual names, not usernames, of the people around you. Volunteer. Coach the team. Build the thing your community needs, even if the internet will never see it. Generosity is not something you do after you make it, it’s how you make it.

— Eric Church at UNC Commencement 2026

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Here the whole world (stars, water, air, And field, and forest, as they were Reflected in a single mind) Like cast off clothes was left behind In ashes yet with hope that she, Re-born from holy poverty, In lenten lands, hereafter may Resume them on her Easter Day.

— Joy Davidman's epitaph, written by her husband, C.S. Lewis (via The Poetry of Grief)

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“I think if you don’t have the Lord in your life, you’re always going to be trying to fill that hole with something. It’s either going to be drugs, or Ferraris, or drugs, or houses, or wives, or this, or that, or fame. And you’re never going to achieve it, because there’s that inner thing of us, that when we’re born, of reconnecting with God, that’s there and even if you’re denying it, that’s what you’re searching for. So they’ll go to, oh, the new fad is this, I’m now going to be a Buddhist, I’m now going to be a vegetarian goat yoga person. And they go through everything and still don’t find it, and the last place they look is the Lord. Because once you say ‘God, your’e my God, you’re my savior,’ now you have to answer to him. People do not want to give up their god-self, the self that they control. ‘I control my life.’ Even people who go to church (I go to church!). But you haven’t given yourself fully. And that’s where the fulfillment comes from. … The most miserable people I knew were billionaires, because they had everything and they still didn’t have that fulfillment yet.”

— Alice Cooper

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Religious language isn’t the measure of faith—fruit over time is (character > charisma). - Nicole Unice

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A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again. — Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Criticism“ (1709)

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Emotionally charged and often graphic content now spreads rapidly across social media—frequently stripped of context or lacking verification—amplifying visceral reactions and shaping siloed public sentiment in real time. In these moments, the role of news media is understood by practitioners not as fact-checking or sense-making, but as amplifying and validating slogans and propaganda lines presented by the virtuous parties. The job of the media is not to separate fact from fiction: Rather, it is to draw halos on the virtuous parties and then mobilize the public on their behalf and against their oppressors.

How the Media Manufactured a ‘Genocide’ - Tablet Magazine

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The Shape of Lack

I am not one of those people who says "I live without regrets." Maybe you are too. And I think we're OK.

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Shannon Thrace on Substack

I'm starting to believe that activism is a performative substitute for rising to the difficult, mundane, everyday acts that garner no attent

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Michell C. Clark on Substack

We weren't designed to process global tragedy at breakfast, respond to work emergencies at dinner, and fall asleep to doom-scrolling at nigh

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Painted in the most idealized strokes, medical aid in dying (which is becoming legal in more and more countries across the globe and is currently under consideration in New York) allows a terminally ill person to choose the time and manner of death—supposedly—freely, without pain, and without external pressures.  Such an ideal does not really exist, however. To be dying is to be constrained. It is to experience pain, and in so doing even cause others pain. Even seemingly self-imposed pressures are contingent upon one’s relationships with others and circumstances in the world and therefore come, at least in part, from outside ourselves. No man (or woman) is an island, as John Donne reminds us. By expanding safety nets, options for palliative care, and support for carers, we can greatly expand the opportunities for the dying to exert agency and make choices freely that stop short of the intentional taking of life.

Protecting Life Means Protecting Death - The Dispatch

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Such a partition of thinking from doing has bequeathed us the dichotomy of ‘white collar’ vs. ‘blue collar,’ corresponding to ‘mental’ vs. ‘manual.’ These seem to be the categories that inform the educational landscape even now, and this entails two big errors: first, it assumes that all blue collar work is as mindless as assembly line work, and second, that white collar work is still recognizably mental in character. Yet there is evidence to suggest that the new frontier of capitalism lies in doing to office work what was previously done to factory work: draining it of its cognitive elements. Paradoxically, educators who would steer students toward cognitively rich work might do this best by rehabilitating the manual trades based on a firmer grasp of what such work is really like. This would take courage. Any high school principal who doesn’t claim as his goal ‘100% college attendance’ is likely to be accused as harboring ‘low expectations’ and run out of town by indignant parents. This indignation is hard to stand against, since it carries all the moral weight of egalitarianism. Yet it is also snobbish, since it evidently regards the trades as something low. The best sort of democratic education is neither snobbish nor egalitarian, rather, it accords a place of honor in our common life to whatever is best. At this weird moment of growing passivity and dependence, let us publicly recognize a yeoman aristocracy. Those who gain real knowledge of real things, the sort we all depend on every day. — Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class As Soulcraft

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It’s true—some people fail to turn off a manual faucet. With its blanket presumption of irresponsibility, the infrared faucet doesn’t merely respond to this fact—it installs it, giving it the status of normalcy. There is a kind of infantilization at work, and it offends the spirited personality. — Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class As Soulcraft

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I believe the mechanical arts have a special significance for our time because they cultivate not creativity, but the less glamorous virtue of attentiveness. Things need fixing and tending, no less than creating. — Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class As Soulcraft

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Struggle is a part of faith, not the thing keeping you from faith. - Nicole Unice

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The Influencer Era

Everywhere I look there’s someone with a strongly held opinion. They are in the comment sections. They are on TV. On podcasts. And, of course, on social media platforms.

Influencer culture makes quick, sensationalized opinions seem more valuable than those that are researched, nuanced, and grounded in facts. A quick catchy post or a TikTok video with a compelling narrative can easily attract millions of views. We are used to that easy-to-digest format now, and nuanced, length, data-filled takes just don’t hold our attention much…if they even manage to grab it. There’s a blurred line between entertainment and truly informative takes.

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What if Paul is saying there is not one identity that renders all others moot, but rather that in the very giving up of all of our identities, we identify directly with Christ? Here Christianity is not another positive worldview mythology that can be placed alongside all others, but is rather the name we give to the act of laying these down. The Christian community is not, then, distinct because it embraced yet another identity, but is rather is unique in the way that its members lay down the other identities that would otherwise define them. ... Paul saw the cross as the event that opened up a way of living that was an alternative to the dominant principles of this world. — Peter Rollins, Insurrection