Announcing New Features!

Onward and upward.

Okay, okay, you can give me money if you really want to!

I didn’t mean to start a Substack, I swear. Ever since I started my translation of the Book of Isaiah back in grad school, I’ve been keeping in touch with any readers who wanted to open a line of communication. When my podcast started gaining steam, communication was largely transferred from my mailing list to Twitter. But since Twitter is…Twitter (or rather, I guess, isn’t Twitter, and is X, but plus ça change), I found myself looking for a lower-octane way of being in touch.

So I revived my little mailing list. But then it got bigger! Too big to host on its old platform. Good problem to have. I knew friends with Substacks, and I saw that it had the capacity to host larger lists, so I packed up my little bindle and hung out my shingle on the ’stack. And here we are.

But the other thing Substack lets you do is charge for content. Which I didn’t really plan on doing—except that some of you are such gluttons for punishment that you actually offered to pay! You know I do this for free, right? In seriousness, of course, I’m touched beyond measure and grateful that you want to support my work.

Those of you who pledged to do so will notice that I’ve turned on payments as of yesterday. There is now a subscriber tier. The Friday newsletter will remain free for everyone. You can still get into the Young Heretics mailbag for free. I am staggeringly fortunate and joyful to do what I do, and even more preposterously lucky that my other endeavors generate enough income to keep this one as mainly a lark. Don’t feel compelled to contribute—I’m just happy you’re here. But if you want to subscribe, come on in.

I will be adding a few occasional features for subscribers. I can’t promise they’ll come with any dependable regularity, and I won’t blame you in the slightest if you’re happy to stay in the land of the free posts. If you do subscribe, though, you’ll also get:

—Livestream Q&As where I answer your questions, probably over whisky, maybe with a cigar.

—Occasional translations and commentaries of ancient texts. These may be scriptural devotions that I write during a particular liturgical season, or they may be other things I find beautiful or urgent and want to share. I’ll also take requests.

—The comments section. It’s an iron law of the internet that you never read the comments. But there’s also an unspoken proviso: never read the comments *if they’re open to just anybody. Subscribers will be able to comment on posts, and I will actually read those—and try to respond to them.

—If you become a founding member (a larger contribution), you’ll also get a signed copy of my book How to Save the West: Ancient Wisdom for Five Modern Crises.

Again, in deepest sincerity, thank you—thank you for subscribing, thank you for engaging, and thanks especially to those of you crazy enough to contribute your hard-earned cash. If you’ve been here since the beginning, since the days of the Isaiah project when I was just an obscure weirdo out in the reaches of the internet—you mean a great deal to me, even now that I’m…a very-marginally-less-obscure weirdo out in the reaches of the internet.

More to come. Friday newsletters will continue as scheduled. For this week, in light of the horrors that unfolded in Israel, it seemed appropriate to offer a passage from my translation of Isaiah. It’s fitting in a number of ways, since that translation is how this whole adventure began, and since the defiant hope of the prophets is what has always given comfort and resolve to the Jewish people in the face of gruesome persecution.

In hope and in prayer, and in the face of it all, I say again to you:

Rejoice evermore,
Spencer

Isaiah 25:1-9
trans. S.A. Klavan

God! You are my god — I will exalt you; I will praise your name, because you have done miracles, given true guidance from long ago and far away, secure in truth:

You made what was once a town into a pile of rubble; made an armored city into a ruin; made a fortress filled with foreigners into nothing. For the rest of time it won’t be built.

And so a mighty nation will magnify you; a city of ruthless peoples will fear you,

Because you are power for the needy, power for beggars in their oppression; shelter from the deluge; shade from the scorching heat; when even the breath of the ruthless is like a deluge against the city ramparts.

You subdued the roar of foreign crowds like scorching heat in a desert, heat in the shade of a cloud. The song of the ruthless ones will be brought low.

And God with his Legions will make a feast,
For all the nations,
On this mountain,
Of fat things.
A feast of fine wine and fat cuts of meat. Fine, sophisticated wine.

He will devour, on this mountain,
The veil that veils over all nations —
The shroud spread across every race.

He will devour death forever, and my Master, God, will wipe tears off of every face.
As for the ignominy of his people: he will banish it from the earth —
For so God proclaimed.

And it will be said On That Day, ‘Look: our god. This is him, we put our high hopes in him, and he saved us. This is God; we put our high hopes in him — we will celebrate and rejoice in his salvation.