{"version":"https://jsonfeed.org/version/1.1","title":"Republic of Letters","home_page_url":"https://this-republic-of-letters.fly.dev","feed_url":"https://this-republic-of-letters.fly.dev/feed/json","items":[{"id":"9","url":"https://this-republic-of-letters.fly.dev/posts/9/station-identification.html","title":"Station identification","content_html":"

The bean plants in the garden are dead, dead, dead—killed by a frost I should have seen coming. This is This Republic of Letters, ready to replant until spring will stick.

\n","date_published":"2026-04-22T11:29:25.000Z","date_modified":"2026-04-22T11:29:25.000Z","tags":["station identification"]},{"id":"8","url":"https://this-republic-of-letters.fly.dev/posts/8/delicious-death-and-humble-humiliation.html","title":"Delicious death and humble humiliation","content_html":"

\"St.\nSt. Teresa of Ávila.

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One more quotation from James K.A. Smith's Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark:

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In contrast, the mystics describe an experience of unknowing that rocks the very foundations of confidence in knowledge. What follows is a humility that St. John of the Cross describes as a “humiliation.” St. Teresa describes it as an experience of “annihilation.” In describing “the Prayer of Union,” [St. Teresa of Ávila] cautions: “Don’t think that this union is some kind of dreamy state.” It is, rather, an experience of utter vexation. It is a kind of death. “Even if she is able to love, she does not understand in the midst of her loving how or what it is she loves. She doesn’t know what she wants. She has died completely to this world so that she can fully live in God. This is a delicious death.”

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\n","date_published":"2026-04-22T11:27:31.000Z","date_modified":"2026-04-22T11:27:36.000Z","tags":[]},{"id":"7","url":"https://this-republic-of-letters.fly.dev/posts/7/drawing-a-larger-circle.html","title":"Drawing a larger circle","content_html":"

\"Hudson\n"Hudson River Scene" by John Frederick Kensett, here.

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Speaking of theology and James K.A. Smith's book, Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark, he writes:

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To think with a philosopher like Hegal is, in a sense, to wade into a luminous dark. I see the difficulty of his philosophy now as the fruit of someone wrestling with complexity that eludes analysis. I love it even more for its inscrutability, in that sense.

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I'm reminded of the Richard Rorty, who writes in Philosophy as Poetry:

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Hegel, Heidegger, and their admirers hope to change not only your intuitions but your sense of who you are, and your notion of what it is most important to think about. To use Emerson's language, they are trying to draw a larger circle—trying to lure their readers out into as yet uncharted spaces. … If you stop at each sentence and pause to ask yourself whether it has been backed up with a sound argument, you will never finish their books. To get through their books, you must temporarily suspend disbelief, get into the swing of the story that is being told, pick up the jargon as you go along, and then decide, after having given the entire book the most sympathetic reading you can, whether to move out into uncharted space.

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I think Smith—or at least the mystics he writes about—would push us beyond uncharted space, into the thing that isn't even space, something beyond knowing. But Smith also discusses those a-rational logics that Rorty is pointing at here—the kind that live, un-ruled, in our experiences rather than our intellects.

\n","date_published":"2026-04-21T23:34:20.000Z","date_modified":"2026-04-22T00:13:58.000Z","tags":["god etc."]},{"id":"6","url":"https://this-republic-of-letters.fly.dev/posts/6/the-beautiful-face-of-hunger.html","title":"The beautiful face of hunger","content_html":"

In his new book on, among other things, Christian mysticism, Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark, James K.A. Smith gives us this quotation from Natalie Carnes's book, Beauty, where she summarizes Gregory of Nyssa thusly:

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What is the difference between a person who sees the beauty of a flower or a statue and the person who can also see beauty on the face of the hungry? ... Only the one wounded by love can see the beauty of the Wounded one who chose to be bound to the wounded of this world ... To see the beauty of the wounded is to see the beauty of our own wounded selves and to see the way the Wounded one is healing those wounds by turning them into openings for greater dependence on one another and on Christ, which is to say, on Love.

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\n","date_published":"2026-04-21T23:24:25.000Z","date_modified":"2026-04-21T23:24:47.000Z","tags":["god etc."]},{"id":"5","url":"https://this-republic-of-letters.fly.dev/posts/5/together-in-our-aloneness.html","title":"Together in our aloneness","content_html":"

\"Anna\n"Anna Dwight Weir Reading a Letter" by Julian Alden Weir, here.

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I read, often, that digital life is a return to orality. Behind this thought stands the towering figure of Walter Ong, a brilliant thinker—and a mentor to high priest of media studies, Marshall McLuhan. (But don't take my word for it.)

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But in the oral cultures Ong wrote about, stories are shared efforts. So I've never quite understood the notion that our "post-literate" digital life, mediated as it is by "just-for-you" algorithms represents any kind of return. (Something Ong himself recognized in his discussion of so-called secondary orality.)

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In a dispatch for The Drift, Sam Adler-Bell gives this thought better words:

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Of course, the modern world has not returned to a pre-Gutenberg state. Our dismal expressive present resembles a peculiar synthesis of spoken and textual cultures, reacquiring certain features of pre-literate life without shedding the individualism, acquisitiveness, and introversion characteristic of the print era. We get tribe without community, emotional cathexis without sociality, balladeers without poetry. We’re alone together.

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These days, the only thing we're together in, it sometimes seems, is our aloneness. Perhaps that can be an opportunity.

\n","date_published":"2026-04-21T10:59:37.000Z","date_modified":"2026-04-21T11:03:58.000Z","tags":["post-literacy"]},{"id":"4","url":"https://this-republic-of-letters.fly.dev/posts/4/station-identification.html","title":"Station identification","content_html":"

\"El\n"El Jaleo" by John Singer Sargent, here.

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The frost might have killed the garden my daughter and I put in, and I'll have to warm up the car before taking her to school. This is This Republic of Letters, annoyed that stubborn winter is making a grab for the weather.

\n","date_published":"2026-04-21T10:38:41.000Z","date_modified":"2026-04-21T10:39:10.000Z","tags":["station identification"]},{"id":"3","url":"https://this-republic-of-letters.fly.dev/posts/3/we-should-check-our-emails-they-shouldn-t-check-us.html","title":"We should check our emails; they shouldn't check us.","content_html":"

\"The\n"The Public Viewing David's 'Coronation' at the Louvre by Louis Léopold Boilly, here.

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In the late aughts and early teens, a cup of coffee beside me, light tepid when I woke, I'd fire up my computer and navigate to Google Reader. Though unimaginatively named for an RSS Reader, it seemed like magic—a portal through which I could walk and enter the thick words of so many other writers, boughs bending under the weight of conversation.

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It's dead now. (For more on why, check out David Pierce's excellent piece for the Verge, here.)

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I’ve tried to replace it. I've tried Feedly. I've tried rolling my own. I've even tried Substack—which despite its claims to openness, is little more than a hijacking of one of the last (though diminished) relics of the open internet: email. As Anil Dash writes over at his blog:

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Links are powerful — that's why Instagram and Twitter and Threads punish and limit them, and why Substack tries to take credit for them. And that's why "wherever you get your podcasts" is such a radical concept — like email, it's a medium that the tech tycoons don't, and can't, own. People can read your writing "wherever they get their email".

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(Bonus points for checking out Dash’s excellent piece on RSS and blogging.)

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You might say that email inboxes remain powered by human algorithms as opposed to platform algorithms. That is, we check them; they don’t check us. And despite Substack’s attempt to mediate that relationship, email—much maligned—remains a deeply human-powered technology.

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As I write in my forthcoming book, The Internet Will Die, and So Will You:

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Human algorithms, which technology enables, which allow a person to choose what and when they want to read, empower us. Our platforms’ algorithms, which prey upon human attention, which rely upon computers doing sophisticated statistics to predict what will rile you up enough to keep you glued to your screen, empower the platforms.

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But Google Reader is dead now. So is the blogosphere I remember, despite the walled-off facsimile of it Substack is trying to create. One is distribution problem: Who even checks blogs anymore? One is a supply problem: Why check blogs when there are so few to read?

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This blog is an attempt to put my money (or at least my time) where my mouth is. But it will only work if people are willing to check it and not be checked by it. We’ve grown accustomed to TikTok, Twitter, Facebook and all the rest checking us. Let’s try something different.

\n","date_published":"2026-04-20T14:24:29.000Z","date_modified":"2026-04-20T17:36:29.000Z","tags":["rss","navel-gazing","the internet and its discontents"]},{"id":"2","url":"https://this-republic-of-letters.fly.dev/posts/2/glistening-and-very-wet.html","title":"Glistening and very wet","content_html":"

\"Garden\n"Garden Study of the Vickers Children" by John Singer Sargent.

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Every so often, I re-read Marilynne Robinson's perfect 2004 novel, Gilead:

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There was a young couple strolling along half a block ahead of me. The sun had come up brilliantly after a heavy rain, and the trees were glistening and very wet. On some impulse, plain exuberance, I suppose, the fellow jumped up and caught hold of a branch, and a storm of luminous water came pouring down on the two of them, and they laughed and took off running, the girl sweeping water off her hair and dress as if she were a little bit disgusted, but she wasn't. It was a beautiful thing to see, like something from a myth. I don't know why I thought of that now, except perhaps because it is easy to believe in such moments that water was made primarily for blessing, and only secondarily for growing vegetables or doing the wash.

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Somehow, the phrase "and the trees were glistening and very wet" is stuck in my head. In less-capable hands, "glistening and very wet" would seem duplicative, unnecessary. In Robinson's, they flow effortlessly out of the protagonist's mind.

\n","date_published":"2026-04-20T13:38:42.000Z","date_modified":"2026-04-20T13:43:41.000Z","tags":["quotes"]},{"id":"1","url":"https://this-republic-of-letters.fly.dev/posts/1/station-identification.html","title":"Station identification","content_html":"

\"Self-Portrait\n"Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat," by Vincent van Gogh, here.

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I've decided to give blogging another shot. If you don't know me, I'm John West, a writer and technologist, currently reporting the news with code at the Wall Street Journal, where my work has received multiple awards including two Pulitzer Prizes.

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I've written a few books: a book-length personal essay called Lessons and Carols (Eerdmans, 2023), a reported book called The Internet Will Die, and So Will You (Here Below, September, 2026), and The Psalmist (Union Square, Hachette, January, 2027). I'm hoping this will help me write my next.

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Welcome to This Republic of Letters. Don't change that dial.

\n","date_published":"2026-04-20T13:30:31.000Z","date_modified":"2026-04-20T13:30:51.000Z","tags":["station identification"]}]}