Jacob Henry Leveton

To see as Mary sees: Marian art in an age of distraction Marian art shows that distractability is itself a form of attention, one that is essential to living a Christian life.

Great Art History piece from Jonathan Malesic in America on images of Mary and the importance of attention

The Catholic stories Ken Burns left out of his new American revolution documentary Ken Burns's new documentary achieves a tone that is unmistakably Burns: measured, atmospheric, at times elegiac and always attentive to nuance.

The American Revolution's Catholic inheritance. Words from Fr. Anthony D. Andreassi in America: The Jesuit Review

your moment of calm: huddled least sandpipers on a floating log

‘Trump is inconsistent with Christian principles’: why the Democratic party is seeing a rise of white clergy candidates From Texas and Iowa to Arkansas, faith leaders are wading into politics to counter the rise of Christian nationalism

This line in today’s @theguardian.com hit hard:

“They used the Lord’s Prayer in a propaganda video for the new Department of War… Every evangelical should’ve heard alarms. This is sacrilegious.”

Faith isn’t meant to sanctify power.
It is meant to restrain it.

#PublicTheology

Wow, I didn't really expect Interpol to be such a hit with my (brilliant) Gen Z students.

And yet...they're locating Antics as a critcal zone to apply and revise Barthes's "Death of the Author." Go go go

a black and white photo of a grandfather clock with the words tick-tock below it Alt: a black and white photo of a grandfather clock with the words tick-tock below it

Mutual Aid Request
😮‍💨 Whew. Tired. Day 10 of begging for help to prepare for the SNAP shutdown. Standing at $345/$850. I have physical and mental health disabilities, I can't work. I would if I could. Please help. 💕💸 V: Annaleigh-Watts CA: $annaleighmaria PP: AnaleeWatts

And this is why the disinvestment from tenure-track lines (at best) is such a tendentious way to balance institutional budgets.

What students are paying for, they can only sometimes—and only on a good day, for everyone involved—access.

There has to be a better way. 4/4

This is precisely the quiet tragedy of the contemporary university:

Adjunct faculty have so few opportunities—and so little protected time—for the very kind of deep, transformative exchange students invest their lives (and life savings) to find. 3/

Moments like this are why the university should exist: for thinking and making that bridges history, faith, and form.

And yet—it’s pure chance that this conversation even happened. I had a spare hour. I wasn’t too exhausted. 2/

Just finished one of my most amazing office hours conversations—mentoring a student on travel for an artistic project exploring religious imagery, and how such symbols can be metabolized into a connective, contemporary practice. 1/

Feel better Manu!

Not enough sports commentators are speaking to the fact that even in the NIL professionalization of college football era—

Both Vandy and Northwestern have an outside shot at the College Football Playoff.

That’s what we’re seeing now:

limits of control revealed by the scale of refusal.

The machinery of fear can still grind—and destroy—but it can only grow so much.

And this to me is a reason for some optimism today 6/6

Every protest, and this is where #NoKings is particularly good, exposes these limits.

Authoritarianism depends on endless staffing & perfect coordination;

Dissent needs only presence.

When millions march, there's hope for larger horizon of constraint for the Trump administration's depredations/5

This is Late Fascism's probable limit: a nascent system trying to scale beyond its own capacity.

Pandemic management, global war, mass deportation—each repeats the 20th century’s scripts, but none can reach their old magnitude.

The contemporary world itself resists this scaling. /4

And here lies the limit.

To fully silence a population this large—to police every street, feed, & voice—would demand an expansion of labor it's very unlikely the state could ever supply.

There aren’t enough workers (esp ideologically committed to do the hard work) for repression at a full scale.

This is where late fascism differs from its 20th-century forms.

Old fascisms centralized power through spectacle.

Late Fascism distributes it through networks—outsourcing control to private platforms, police foundations, and data infrastructures.

But the machinery still runs on people. 2/

To my mind, what #NoKings is revealing isn’t just dissent—it’s a problem of scale for any attempt at authoritarian control.

Every regime that governs through fear runs on labor:
officers, analysts, contractors, censors, and algorithms working nonstop to contain dissent. 1/

Leo’s Ode to Latin American Theology Pope Leo XIV’s first exhortation, on love for the poor, is a tribute to Pope Francis and his predecessor’s namesake.

To treat the poor not just as equal but greater than ourselves:

David Lantigua writing for Commonweal 🕯️

Find a Chapter A list of AAUP chapters, both unionized and nonunionized. (You can also see a list of just union chapters.)

AAUP holds a day of action this Friday Oct 17

nationwide teach in against the loyalty oaths us06web.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

the original 9 persecuted campuses have in-person events

find your chapter www.aaup.org/chapters/fin...

A red monochrome image fills the slide. Centered near the bottom, a blurred figure bends forward in motion, one hand touching the floor and one leg extended, as if caught mid-movement or transformation. The background glows in deep crimson, evoking heat, passion, and creation. Above the image, black and white text reads: “FIRE — A Study in Vision, Form, & Catharsis” and “Theodore Artist Visit.” The lower text identifies the course, FNAR 199: Art & Visual Culture · Loyola University Chicago, and the album artwork credit: “Theodore, FIRE. Album cover (detail). Athens: United We Fly, 2025.”

A cream-colored slide with red and black text. The header reads: “BREATHE INTO ME — Pneuma, Prophecy, and the Invocation of the Muses.” The text recounts musician Theodore’s reflection on his song “Breathe Into Me,” describing it as an invocation of the twelve Muses and a modern reimagining of Hesiod’s poetics. The body of text explores breath as a creative and divine force—human and more-than-human—rising from exhaustion toward illumination, and concludes with the image of waiting for inspiration as the cycle of breath giving life to song, and song to breath.

A nighttime image of a neoclassical building, the Hermoupolis Town Hall on the Greek island of Syros, bathed in bright linear lights and rising smoke. Musicians perform on its steps under beams of white light forming geometric patterns on the façade. The text above reads “Light, Place, & The Sacred Trace,” with reflections on Theodore’s discussion of performance in Greek public spaces. The text below explains how his lighting design honors the sacred lineage of Greek architecture, treating each performance as an act of memory and renewal.

A classroom photo shows a projected Zoom image of musician Theodore speaking from a softly lit studio. The slide background is a muted gold, with black and red text. The title reads: “Reckoner — Influence, Originality, & the Sound of Return.” The text below explains that the class listened to Radiohead’s “Reckoner” from In Rainbows and discussed artistic influence. Theodore reminded students that influence is never repetition, but the discovery of one’s own voice within another’s horizon—translating inspiration into new forms.

Still vibing on Monday's conversation students from Art & Visual Culture had as part of the semester's virtual artist visit with the recording artist Theodore.

Turns out: "Breathe into Me" from his new album FIRE is less about romantic ❤️ than an invocation of the 9 Muses.

#VisualCulture #Pedagogy

What Is To Be Done about the Radical Far-Right? Hegel, Lenin, Bannon, and the Trump Revolution: On the Dialectics of Smashing the State

Brilliant piece by @bernardharcourt.bsky.social this morning on Critique & Praxis.

Throws down a gauntlet for an American progressive left that must reclaim revolutionary radicalism against the far right’s bourgeois counter-revolution.

substack.com/home/post/p-...

Please sign the ally petition here:

act.seiu.org/a/loyola1

New on the Loyola AAUP Blog:

Loyola AAUP stands with SEIU Local 73 as negotiations stall.

Faculty working without contracts deserve solidarity, not silence.

#LoyolaChicago #AAUP #SEIULocal73 #AcademicFreedom #Solidarity

Don't write for Substack while it platforms Neo-Nazis;

Write for the non-standard, instead.

Two months after launch, it is still Instagram's only weekly gazette newspaper 💅

www.instagram.com/the.nonstand...

Bells and Cannons - Announcements - e-flux Bells and Cannons, Contemporary Art in the Face of Militarisation // October 16, 2025–March 1, 2026

Critical exhibition opening Oct. 16 at Contemporary Art Vilnius

www.e-flux.com/announcement...

#ContemporaryArt #Militarization

Orca Whales 🤝 Me

"Coho salmon fishes are a delicious autumn treat"

Doing good thinking & strong work today on how interdisciplinarity was absorbed into exchange value.

Truly readymade for Adorno-driven critique of the language of (research) administration.

The better way—interdisciplinarity as pure use value—is the only path forward for #HigherEd

Jane Goodall's work insisting, with evidence from her brilliant and tenacious fieldwork, that we were not so separate from animals, and they were much more like us than the Eurocentric theorists asserted, was so important.