Month: December 2025

A busy year! Lots of community theatre. Oldest daughter getting married. Oldest son starting college. Second daughter finishing high school. A decent amount of music finished, but almost no books. I read a lot of newsletters on Substack this year though, which felt a bit like the days of old-school blogging.

Books Read
Faith, Hope, and Carnage, Nick Cave and Seán O’Hagan
What Art Does, Brian Eno and Bette A.
The Soul of the World, Roger Scruton

Music Finished

For the (now finished) Dante 1981 Inferno Album:
Stone Giants of Jotunheimr
Behringer
Motherland

For the Simple Brass Hymns brass quartet album:
Be Thou My Vision
All Creatures of Our God and King
Before the Throne of God Above
Holy, Holy, Holy
For the Beauty of the Earth
Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing
Just as I Am
Praise to the Lord, The Almighty
Take My Life and Let It Be
In Christ Alone
It is Well With My Soul
O For a Thousand Tongues
Holy God We Praise Thy Name
Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence
My Song is Love Unknown
All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name
Come Ye Sinners Poor and Needy
Crown Him with Many Crowns

There is a widespread habit of declaring emergent realities to be “nothing but” the things in which we perceive them. The human person is “nothing but” the human animal; law is “nothing but” relations of social power; sexual love is “nothing but” the urge to procreation; altruism is “nothing but” the dominant genetic strategy..; the Mona Lisa is “nothing but” a spread of pigments on a canvas, the Ninth Symphony is “nothing but” a sequence of pitches sounds of varying timbre. And so on. Getting rid of this habit is, to my mind, the true goal of philosophy. And if we get rid of it when dealing with the small things – symphonies, pictures, people – we might get rid of it when dealing with the large things too: notably, when dealing with the world as a whole. And then we might conclude that it is just as absurd to say that the world is nothing but the order of nature, as physics describes it, as to say that the Mona Lisa is nothing but a smear of pigments. Drawing that conclusion is the first step in the search for God.

-Roger Scruton, The Soul of the World, p. 39