Robbie Rambles | February 11, 2024
Hi friends,
Hope February is finding you well. Things are well within the Sap household for the most part. I recently began a new job with Redflag AI after a mercifully short job hunt. This is being published on Super Bowl Sunday, so if you happen to read this before the game, we'll be doing live sentiment analysis of online chatter around the game. I personally have no horse in this race, so...go ads?
I've been messing with Obsidian's Daily Note feature and trying to jot down random thoughts that come to me and links to things I like, in hopes of incorporating them into this newsletter. Here are some salient bullet points:
I'm reading Forde's Christ and the Christian Life, two essays that have been extracted into a book of their own. Forde argues that the atonement is not something that can be distilled to a "theory", which he calls "putting roses on the cross". Instead, it is an eschatological event that actually accomplishes something. The cross is not a payment that makes God merciful, but an expression of his mercy. It is what happens when he is merciful — he is run over roughshod by sin, death, the devil, and the law. The second half of the book focuses on what justification means for the Christian life. Sanctification is not a matter of progression, of inherent righteousness on our part increasingly obviating what God has done in Christ. Instead, good works are expressions of genuine goodness that spring forth spontaneously from the event of justification itself. Sanctification is not something that proves justification either — that would effectively be the same as justification by works, a return to the legalistic scheme that the cross effectively ends.
" Division, disrespect, hatred, and vengeance are the Anti-Christ." - Ronald Rolheiser
"Like a man in a cupboard with a raccoon and a live wire." — The Quietus on new J Mascis
Jenoa and I are now watching Reacher after finishing Slow Horses. If Slow Horses is a filet mignon from Morton's, Reacher is a ribeye from Texas Roadhouse. I love both things.
This from Jordan Castro at Harper's really connected with my experience with F3.
I finally have started leveraging generative AI for small tasks at work (both ChatGPT and Github Copilot) and I'm really enjoying the results for certain tasks. I feel like I have a complicated relationship to AI in general, and plan to write more about my ambivalent thoughts in the future.
Currently reading/recently read:
Christ and the Christian Life — Gerhard Forde
Master of Change — Brad Stulberg
Words of Radiance — Brandon Sanderson
Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair — Christian Wiman
Meditations — Marcus Aurelius