mattlawyue

Is there anything, apart from a really good chocolate cream pie and receiving a large unexpected check in the mail, to beat finding yourself at large in a foreign city on a fair spring evening, loafing along unfamiliar streets in the long shadows of a lazy sunset, pausing to gaze in shop windows or at some church or lovely square or tranquil stretch of quayside, hesitating at street corners to decide whether that cheerful and homey restaurant you will remember fondly for years is likely to lie down this street or that one? I just love it. I could spend my life arriving each evening in a new city.

Because … what the hell has Kim Kardashian ever done besides the X-rated roll-around and moronic, naval-gazing reality shows? Last week, according to a breathless US Weekly report, Kim was in Dallas with sister Khloe, the wife of Mavericks forward Lamar Odom (a story of vacuity for another time), ‘doing a little retail therapy at a local mall before visiting the Dallas Aquarium,’ where, as Kim writes on her blog, they took photos of all the ‘fab animals.’ The magazine reported, apparently without irony, that Kim had to ‘cut her trip short due to work commitments.’

I used to tell your sister when she was a kid that if she didn’t study hard and get good grades in school, I would leave her in Harlem.

But theology is only in part social commentary. Crucially it has to do with the authority of a vision, of a world that is only like this world in essence.