I’ve been a devotee for a long time. You can blame it on Sewanee. When we arrived there in 1994, just after Windows came out, Sewanee was an all Mac campus. I never recovered. I never got used to Windows and found keyboard commands and functionality on Macs more user-friendly, intuitive, and quicker.

But that’s as far as my brainwashing went. Others are more deeply inducted into the cult. There’s Andy Crouch, who argues Steve Jobs has offered hope in an increasingly despairing world. The Ipod appeared in October 2001, just after 9-11 and the Ipad was introduced in January of 2010, in the depths of the recession and in a month when unemployment hit 10%.

On Jobs, Crouch writes:

But the genius of Steve Jobs has been to persuade us, at least for a little while, that cold comfort is enough. The world—at least the part of the world in our laptop bags and our pockets, the devices that display our unique lives to others and reflect them to ourselves—will get better. This is the sense in which the tired old cliché of “the Apple faithful” and the “cult of the Mac” is true. It is a religion of hope in a hopeless world, hope that your ordinary and mortal life can be elegant and meaningful, even if it will soon be dated, dusty, and discarded like a 2001 iPod.

But Andrew Sullivan goes even further:

This is certainly why my own conversion to Apple, and my deep loyalty to the company and its products, somehow felt comforting in the last decade. Their style elevates me, their power and reliability I have come to take for granted. Their stores have the innovation and beauty that a renewed Christianity would muster in its churches, if it hadn’t collapsed in a welter of dogma and politics.

While I appreciate the convenience of the Apple Store and am deeply indepted to their knowledgeable staff, entering one gives me the willies. It’s especially scary at the tables set up for little children where you can see kids barely able to walk punching buttons, mesmerized by video screens. There may be innovation there, but I see no beauty, and nothing of the sacred.

Lord, make us instruments of your peace.

Where there is hatred, let us sow love.

Where there is injury, pardon.

Where there is doubt, faith.

Where there is despair, hope.

Where there is darkness, light.

Where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master,

grant that we may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console;

to be understood, as to understand;

to be loved, as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive.

It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.

–a prayer attributed to St. Francis (though unattested before the twentieth century)

Beautifully-written reflections on thinking in winter.

There is something profound about the weather in January in the north. I went back through sermons I wrote for the season after Epiphany, and every year, I had something to say about it. After thirty-five years in the north, the move south was a cultural shift, not least because in the south, one doesn’t have to get ready for winter. In South Carolina, one rarely needs to “get ready” to go outside in January, other than throwing on the closest jacket. I’ve always linked that to other cultural patterns, including patterns of thought. If Simic can’t name a cold-weather philosopher, how about one from temperate climes?

It only took me one year living in Germany, though, to suspect that one possible explanation for Kierkegaard was that he lived even further north, and in grayer skies in Denmark.

Simic concludes:

“No philosopher has ever influenced the attitudes of even the street he lived on,” Voltaire was reputed to have said. That’s not what I believe. With deep winter upon us and the weather growing colder, even the wood smoke out of the neighbors’ chimneys could be described as philosophizing. I can see it move its lips as it rises, telling the indifferent sky about our loneliness, the torment of our minds and passions which we keep secret from each other, and the wonder and pain of our mortality and of our eventual vanishing from this earth. It’s a kind of deep, cathedral-like quiet that precedes a snowfall. One looks with amazement at the bare trees, the gray daylight making its slow retreat across the bare fields, and inevitably recalls that Emily Dickinson poem in which she speaks of just such a winter afternoon—windless and cold, when an otherworldly light falls and shadows hold their breath—and of the hurt that it gives us for which we can find no scar, only a closer peek inside ourselves where the meanings and all the unanswered questions are.

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Fresher than ever.

Crunchy numbers

The average container ship can carry about 4,500 containers. This blog was viewed about 14,000 times in 2010. If each view were a shipping container, your blog would have filled about 3 fully loaded ships.

In 2010, there were 236 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 422 posts. There were 34 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 3mb. That’s about 3 pictures per month.

The busiest day of the year was April 19th with 113 views. The most popular post that day was The Conversion of St. Paul (or another excuse for posting a Caravaggio image).

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were graceec.org, facebook.com, blogger.com, en.wordpress.com, and thedailypage.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for caravaggio, bible verse tattoos, bible tattoo verses, conversion of st. paul, and conversion of st paul.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

The Conversion of St. Paul (or another excuse for posting a Caravaggio image) January 2010
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Caravaggio’s “Madonna of the Loreto” January 2010

The Prodigal Son–A Sermon for the 4th Sunday in Lent March 2010

Martha, Mary, and the Better Part: A Sermon for the 8th Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 11, Year C) July 2010

Sermon for the Third Sunday in Lent, March 7, 2010 March 2010