Dear Friends,
Autumn is, if not fully arrived, fast approaching. The air is crisp in the mornings, and the daylight is angled from a southerly direction. We are tilting away from the sun, destined to enter the winter months. The squirrels are busy running around with walnuts the size of their heads and finding places to bury them. The leaves are suddenly tinged with brown and yellow earth tones. It’s time for flannel shirts, fires in the chiminea on the deck, and playoff baseball. Yes, I know that for many people fall means football, but for me that hasn’t been true since the NFC Championship game of 1998 when, in total justified disgust, I divorced the Minnesota Vikings—and the game itself—for good. It’s all about the Minnesota Twins Baseball Club around here.
And the Twins are going to the playoffs this year, hopeful that this will be the year that we break the longest postseason losing streak of all time in any sport in all the world: 0 for our last eighteen games. This is the year. After a fairly lackluster first half, since the All-Star break the team has “clicked” and promises to be very dangerous. At very least, we will win a playoff game. At best, I envision a rematch of the 1991 World Series with the Atlanta Braves. These are not predictions; they are daydreams. Like ‘91, I see a seven game series, only with Rookie Royce Lewis taking the place of Kirby Puckett as the hero. Mark it down, for whatever little it’s worth.
Here is your read of the week. I hesitate to even write anything for this Quarter Inch because really you should just click over and give that a read. It is a bracing essay entitled, “We Are Repaganizing,” written by Louise Perry. I’ve been banging away on that theme pretty regularly over the history of The Square Inch Newsletter, so it is salutary to see others observing the same phenomenon.
Perry is an admitted agnostic. As attracted as she is to Christianity, she is not a believer. But she sees with crystal clarity the awful downsides of a post-Christian world. She is doubtful that we can smash the moral foundations of the house we live in and still keep the house. Citing Tom Holland and others (Steven Smith, one of my favorites), she observes that all our vaunted “Western values” are Christian values, and we abandon the Christian part to our peril. They are not separable.
Near the end, this metaphor arrested me:
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