Winter Arc 2025

I know it gets cold in Texas, but come on

Generated with Grok AI, ‘wintery scene of the Austin skyline from a drone's view’.

Hi friends,

Greetings from Austin, TX, where even we are not immune from the frigid temperatures hitting much of our country.

It’s been a couple of months since my last essay, so I thought I would check in here and update you on what’s going on in the Sap household.

Isaac Gerhard Sapunarich

A big thing happened at the start of this month — we welcomed Isaac Gerhard Sapunarich into the world at 12:57pm on January 2, 2025.

After a slightly extended hospital stay (4 days total) due to elevated bilirubin levels that required phototherapy, Isaac came home to our current residence in Austin where we’ve been adjusting to life with a newborn and a toddler. He’s a pretty chill baby, and interrupted sleep notwithstanding, this transition has been less disruptive than Etta’s arrival. Paternity leave for me has consisted of lots of cozy days on the couch reading, watching movies, and getting outside to parks with the kiddos any time the sun breaks through.

Isaac’s name means “son of laughter”, which makes complete sense if you know his mother at all. It was fortuitous that I was reading Isaac Asimov’s Foundation when he arrived. Also, how cool is the vintage paperback copy that Jenoa bought me for my birthday?

His middle name, Gerhard, was something that we vacillated about in the days leading up to his birth, but it’s a continuation of the pattern we began with his sister (”Etta” is short for “Henrietta”, in honor of Henri Nouwen). Isaac Gerhard is named for the Lutheran theologian Gerhard Forde, whose impact on Jenoa and me is hard to overstate. His book, *On Being a Theologian of the Cross,* is a short but dense read that I like to say began my theological “red-pilling”. I remember it being passed around years ago at the now defunct Mars Hill Church, where a “theology of glory” was more formative than a “theology of the cross”. I have my theories of how and why this book began making the rounds in that community, which are too speculative for publication, but I will say that if its message of God’s radical grace hadn’t seeded itself in my mind back then, I’m not sure my life would have taken the trajectory it has. And I don’t mean this in the “this book saved my faith” sense — though perhaps it hard a part in that — I mean it impacted my life in very concrete ways. Without Forde’s seeding influence and the crop of theologians that occupied the same milieu, I don’t think I would have been exposed to Mockingbird Ministries, which took Jenoa and me to Charlottesville years ago. But all that notwithstanding, I think Forde is an underappreciated theologian who understood the undconditionality of the gospel — God loves you, God forgives you, and there is nothing you can do about it. If nominative determinism is a thing, I can’t think of a better message for my son to bear with him.

Forde lives!

2025 Reading and Writing Plans

I still plan to write about “faith and futures” here, broadly considered. I have some thoughts brewing about work in the software space. But I also plan to orient my reading this year towards literature, philosophy, theology, and the humanities. So expect a lot of that. Here’s a taste of my planned reading for this year.

• The Story of Philosophy – Will Durant

• Plato’s Republic

• A Canticle for Leibowitz — Walter M. Miller, Jr.

• Foundation trilogy — Isaac Asimov (some interesting thematic overlap between these and Leibowitz)

• The Beginning of Infinity — David Deutsch

• The Complete Father Brown — G.K. Chesterton

• Paradise Lost — John Milton

Of course, I’m a big fan of Alan Jacobs dictum to “read on a whim”, so all of this is subject to change, but I am trying to be a bit more deliberate in what I read and think about this year.

That’s it for this edition. I return to work in February, where I’m looking forward to seeing my colleagues again and hope my sleep deprivation doesn’t lead to too much technical debt. Thanks for reading, here’s to new things in 2025.

Cheers,

Robbie