Sunday, November 8

Lex orandi, lex credendi

In the fifth century, Prosper of Aquitaine gave Western Christianity a principle the Orthodox East would recognize as its own: The law of prayer establishes the law of belief. We usually shorten it to lex orandi, lex credendi. How the church worships both reveals and governs what she believes. Many theologians, especially Catholics and Anglicans, have since added a third term: lex vivendi, the law of life. What we pray and believe should become how we live …

…

At the altar, I say words I did not write, on a calendar I did not choose, in a rite designed to protect the congregation from my personality. Our celebration of the Eucharist, the Divine Liturgy is a prime example of a healthy institution: Its highly formal, ritualized structure and prescribed gestures leave no room for arbitrary innovation. But its anonymity is not cold. It forms us, because it puts the church’s common life ahead of anyone’s charisma.

Gregory Jensen

It feels like years since I cited the maxim lex orandi, lex credendi, but it’s a terribly important principle that I thought about a lot until, I guess, it sank into my bones.

In the most blunt and personal terms, if I want a faith that is sober and balanced, I should avail myself of worship that is sober and balanced. And I can’t imagine wanting to have the kind of faith that seems like the eventuality of loud, adrenaline-generating services. That feels crypto-pagan to me, a better build-up for copulating with a temple prostitute than for receiving the body and blood of Jesus Christ.

Like I said: blunt and personal. I am aware that there is non-Orthodox worship that doesn’t have that vibe, but there’s a lot that does.

Clanging gongs, crashing cymbals

Meekness is not a modern virtue. Our noisy world tends to notice the loudest and brashest voices, those whose demands are accompanied by whatever power can be leveraged. We value champions and winners, and, at best, offer pity to those who cannot overcome their meekness. I suspect that most people do not believe that God is meek. No doubt, some who are reading this are already preparing their challenges, citing the cleansing of the Temple or the plagues of Egypt. Such challenges are mere intellectual toys, not rooted in our actual experience of God.

…

It is clear that the presence of God seems obvious to some, while remaining “hidden” to others. What seems clear to me is that God seeks to draw us to Him through (first) our desire. Though He has utterly poured Himself out for us on the altar of the Cross (and continues to do so), He nevertheless waits patiently for us to seek Him in return.
More than this, in His patience, He invites us into a life of meekness as well.

…

When Christ cautioned the people not to make Him known (Matt. 12:17) it was, the gospel writer said, to fulfill the prophecy of Isaiah (42:1-3):

“Behold! My Servant whom I have chosen,
My Beloved in whom My soul is well pleased!
I will put My Spirit upon Him,
And He will declare justice to the Gentiles.
He will not quarrel nor cry out,
Nor will anyone hear His voice in the streets.
A bruised reed He will not break,
And a dimly burning wick He will not quench,
Till He sends forth justice to victory;
And in His name Gentiles will trust.” (Matt. 12:18-21)

He is still “not known” by the mighty – and the rich He sends away empty – until they find Him among the meek.

Fr. Stephen Freeman

“Pastors”

The Western World is quite literally dotted across it’s landscapes with a myriad of buildings that call themselves “church”, with pastor’s who preach from what they call the Bible, yet it is uncanny how few of these places actually know what their Bibles teach about discipleship and being a spiritual father.

Gentle reader, the vast majority of churches across the Western World look like classrooms; they have far more in common with a University lecture hall then they do with anything that Jesus and the Apostles were doing in the first century. They somehow think that by throwing in a few songs alongside their forty five minute lecture, they have somehow transformed themselves into a first century Christian church.

…

It is rather shocking in a way that mega-church preachers call themselves “pastor”. A word that any first year greek student knows is rooted in the idea of shepherding. When exactly or where exactly is the shepherding of the mega church pastor’s 10,000 member congregation taking place?

I have had countless protestant pastors tell me that the shepherding of their congregation takes place during the Sunday sermon. I’m not making this up; they have told me this to my face, sitting across from me at coffee.

Have you ever wondered why the Western World has this crisis of absentee dads that psychologists have been talking about for decades? You need look no further than the local church down the street from your house where the pastor believes he is being a good father to his children by simply preaching at them on Sunday.

Kenneth B

Why ecumenical dialog doesn’t quite work for us

[Fr. Alexander] Schmemann explains that the Orthodox representatives were continually forced to attach “separate Orthodox statements” to the “reports of virtually all major ecumenical conferences.” This illustrated the “often helpless” feeling they experienced “of being in a false position, which was almost always the feeling of the Orthodox delegates.” Non-Orthodox delegates at ecumenical dialogues never understood the Orthodox position, and the Orthodox could never clearly articulate their position because the foundational presuppositions and premises of Orthodoxy were never recognized. Instead, everything was framed in terms of the Catholic-Protestant dichotomy.

Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox: Understanding and Acquiring the Orthodox Christian Mind

Yearning for God

In the post-Christian world, people—especially young people—are not looking for powerful exegesis of papal encyclicals, erudite sermons about the mechanics of salvation, five killer apologetic arguments to use against atheists, or any other canned strategy. They want to know whether life has any meaning or this is all there is. They don’t want to know about God; they want to know God.

Rod Dreher, Living in Wonder

Within the last few days, I’ve heard some analysis that makes me think this may be right, though my first reaction was that it was too practiced. I guess “right” and “pat” aren’t necessarily incompatible.

Home

Close to home

It’s a big mistake to think of one’s church life as only receiving information about Jesus Christ and the Bible, and arranging your own thoughts and emotional reactions to it. Like I said, I was never Evangelical, but I pretty much lived that way as a Catholic — and I struggle not to live that way as an Orthodox. It’s the intellectual’s temptation: to live inside his head. The church is not the Disembodied Brain of Christ; we are the Body of Christ. Online church as a substitute for the gathering of the body forms Christian gnostics, whose minds are free from the prison of the body, from the “prison” of talking to their neighbors, from the “prison” of making an effort to get to church on Sunday morning, from the “prison” of coffee hour. Just you and Jesus, there on your sofa, with your coffee, and in your sweatpants. Download the sermon and listen to it in the afternoon, after you’ve gone golfing on Sunday morning. Optimize your consumer church experience.

Rod Dreher, The Disembodied Brain of Christ

Note my internet domain name: intellectualoid.com. What afflicts Rod afflicts me, too — which maybe is why I keep coming back to him despite a catastrophism I don’t share.

Far, far from home

Saint Gabriel’s First Warning

In the years of the Antichrist, people will expect salvation from space. This will be the devil’s greatest trick! Humanity will seek help from the aliens, not knowing that they are actually demons.

Saint Gabriel’s Second Warning

In the last days do not look at the sky — you may be lured with the miracles performed up there — you will believe them and perish. In antichristian times people will be waiting for salvation from outer space.

Saint Gabriel Urgebadze, Fool for Christ, Canonized Georgian Orthodox Saint († 1995). This is my proximate source, but I now acknowledge that this is the consensus of Orthodox Saints who have expressed a view.

It’s also the view of me, a sinner. I find it a more satisfying answer than conjectures about interstellar travel solutions and marginally more charitable than saying all the reporters of alien encounters are lunatics.

And now, having never experienced personal visitations from whatever they are, I have other business to take care of, thank you.

Debuted last Saturday, The Great Christian Divide: East & West:

I offer it really as a guide for the perplexed. For the Orthodox-curious, this provides an avenue for answering that question: What is this thing to which I am drawn? I’m curious about Orthodoxy, but what is it, and how does it differ from Christianity as I know it? I offer it also to the Orthodox convert, one who has said, “I’ve embraced Orthodoxy, but I’m not sure I fully understand it yet. I’m not convinced that I fully traded out my Western theology for a fully Orthodox worldview.” I also offer it to those who are on the outside and have no interest in Orthodoxy, but they are nonetheless perplexed because they’ve watched somebody else make this journey, and they want to understand: What is this thing that my son or my daughter, my husband or my wife has embraced? And so this offers a way of answering that question. And I even offer it to the apologist, the one who opposes Orthodoxy, in order that we might have more informed and fruitful dialogue about East-West differences.

Dr. Nathan Jacobs, explaining his purpose (should I say “target audiences”?) in creating The East West Series, now known as The Great Christian Divide: East & West (I guess it evolved during production, just as it grew from 24 episodes to 33).

Look at the “Episode Guide” and you’ll see why a long-ago convert with intellectual leanings found it irresistible, even at $199 (But wait! You also get a Turnip Twaddler and a Diaper Steamer!).

Dr. Jacobs has a very forbidding copyright notice on his material. As a retired lawyer, I think the law overrides such copyright claims insofar as someone makes “fair use” of material, but I respect the hundreds or thousands of hours that had to go into this series, so I’ll be quoting him rarely if at all.

But I suspect I’ll be reflecting what I learn from him from now until I cease blogging on matters of faith.

Shorts

  • [F]or every far-left proponent of “postcolonial” theologies who is attempting to evacuate the faith of its historic substance, there is a neo-Confederate apologist who styles himself as fighting the incursion of “cultural Marxism” in Baptist seminaries. (John Ehrett, Book Review: “Live Not By Lies” – Conciliar Post)
  • If you teach that sanctification consists of “letting go” and letting the Holy Spirit do all the work, then don’t blame me if you have no scholars! (Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind)
  • Theology is not a cerebral knowledge but a living knowledge that is directly relevant to man and sustains and possesses the whole man. A cold, cerebral man cannot know and discourse on divine things, even if his head contains an entire patristic library. He who is not moved by a sunset, a tree, or a bird cannot be stirred even by the Creator of these things. In order to grasp God and be able to talk about Him to others you must be a poetic soul. (Fr. Stephen Freeman)

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

Saturday November 7

We in the USA crossed some kind of rubicon this week, and we’re still digesting. I clipped and saved commentary starting Wednesday that felt banal by Saturday and got deleted. I’ve also picked up interesting tidbits, for sources I think are reliable, but for which I can’t provide specific corraboration in a reasonable amount of time. So buckle in and take some of the political stuff below with a grain of salt (and it’s not all political).

Character is destiny

At some point I suspect Mr. Trump is going to turn on his party. They didn’t deserve him, they let him down, he tried to help them but they wouldn’t let him. It’s going to be real bunker talk. It’s how he was probably always destined to wind up, swiveling around from the desk and telling the audience it’s fired.

We’re thinking of the scene from “A Face in the Crowd,” in which the charming and garrulous Lonesome Rhodes, a great network television star, signs off from his weekly show. The credits roll, and we see him talking in the background, silently. But he’s not sharing folksy wisdom, he’s telling an actor what he thinks of the audience. The sound is secretly switched on in the control room, and America hears it: “Good night, you stupid idiots. Good night, you miserable slobs.”

I suspect that kind of moment is coming. Another betrayal, another reason for Republicans to stand up straight and recover themselves.

Peggy Noonan, Trump is the Author of the Ruin

Voters don’t give a fig about being led by “nice” ethical people

I meant what I said on Wednesday, that this week’s tsunami shouldn’t cause us⁠⁠ to reconsider Americans’ tolerance for postliberalism. If the past 21 months had played out the same way except for the Iran war and the gas crisis it caused—the same corruption, the same presidential abuses of power, even the same tariffs—my guess is that only Crowley (and maybe Talarico) would have won among the Democrats I named. Voters don’t give a fig about being led by “nice” ethical people, we discovered two years ago. They care about prosperity, and if they’re convinced that a party led by abject scumbags is more likely to deliver it, that’s the party they’ll choose.

…

Off the top of my head, the only major Republican candidate this year who stood out as pleasant, relatable, and nonmalicious, i.e. “normal,” was Iowa’s Ashley Hinson. (Collins too, I suppose, if you want to call a five-term Senate incumbent “relatable.”) By and large, the party of Trump was, well, the party of Trump. From Vivek Ramaswamy’s infamous attack ad to J.D. Vance’s gay-baiting to the all-hands-on-deck demagoguery against El-Sayed to every single thing about Ken Paxton, the GOP campaign was a parade of vicious goblins offering sociopathy in lieu of the prosperity that voters had been promised in 2024.

Nick Catoggio, The Jerk Shop

Digital Doritos

Consider Doritos. What starts out as raw corn is processed into an irresistible snack by industrial machinery that dries, pulverizes, rehydrates, extrudes and deep-fries it — then adds salt, sugar and artificial flavorings and colorings. Most of us know that food products engineered for immediate pleasure rather than long-term nourishment should be no more than an occasional indulgence. But because instinct tells us that fat, sugar and salt mean escaping starvation and death, ultraprocessed foods now account for the majority of calories in the American diet.

…

“What is a TikTok video,” he asks, “if not a digital Dorito?”

…

It’s not just our food, then, that’s ultraprocessed. Altogether, these developments have warped our environment so significantly that we live in what could be called an “ultraprocessed world.”

Angela Duckworth, These Inventions Were Built to Trick Us

Shorts

  • Conflict is Mr. Trump’s jam. The nastier the better. For all his self-aggrandizing talk about building stuff, his true talents lie in combat and destruction. He long ago shattered the spine of the G.O.P., so humiliating its members now is a minor thrill at best. But facing off against Democratic majorities in both chambers still buzzing from their electoral win? Now that is something to live for. (Michelle Cottle)
  • … the broader tenor of this administration, which has utterly lacked any public-spirited vision or direction and has allowed itself to be defined by Trump’s own vapid impulsivity and thuggish narcissism, and to descend into shameless personal corruption … at this point, the president just seems to have grown tired of his job, seeking escape from its burdens in ridiculous vanity projects while real problems (often of his own creation) fester. (Yuval Levin)
  • 41 data center initiatives were on the ballot on Tuesday, and 40 of them went against AI. (Ted Gioia)
  • I have a different experience of what the human body is depending on whether the body is that of a patient, the victim in a crime I am investigating, my aunt, an artist’s model, or my lover. Each calls forth, and expects to receive, a different kind of attention, which governs what, in the end, it is that I experience. (Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World)
  • Progressives did worse in blue states than “normie” Democrats did in red states. (Jonah Goldberg)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” remark and Donald Trump’s “Fifth Avenue” remark amounted to the two of them saying the same thing about the same pigheaded rubes ….

Kevin D. Williamson

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

Wow! Uncharted territory!

The CrunchyCon Manifesto

  1. Conservatism should focus more on the character of society than on the material conditions of life found in consumerism.
  2. Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government.
  3. Culture is more important than politics and economics.
  4. A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship—especially of the natural world—is not fundamentally conservative.
  5. Small, local, old, and particular are almost always better than big, global, new, and abstract.
  6. Beauty is more important than efficiency.
  7. The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom.
  8. The institution most essential to conserve is the traditional family.

Arthur Hunt III, Live Not by Lies from Neither the Left nor Right (Front Porch Republic)

Blame them both

In case after case after case, the Department of Justice is targeting Trump opponents, making frivolous arguments and engaging in vindictive, meritless prosecutions.

I blame Trump, but I also blame [Attorney General Todd] Blanche. He doesn’t understand his own job.

We all know that Trump has an extreme view of executive power that renders him a virtual elected monarch. His administration’s actions extend well beyond conventional “unitary executive theory,” which puts a premium on presidential control over the executive branch. He treats the law as his plaything, deciding on his own whim which laws will be enforced and which ones will not.

It is true that the president is the boss of every cabinet official. He can fire them at will. But it is also true that the attorney general is different from every other member of the cabinet.

Unlike, say, Pete Hegseth, Blanche has three masters, not one. The attorney general and all the lawyers working for him also answer to the judiciary, which not only decides the cases he brings; it also governs the conduct of D.O.J. officials in court. And he also answers to the bar — rules of ethics are binding on every attorney, including government attorneys.

In addition, Trump may be Blanche’s boss, but he is not Blanche’s client. Blanche’s client is the government of the United States, including its various agencies. Blanche owes his fiduciary duty to the government (and, ultimately, the Constitution), not to the president.

In the criminal context, these additional obligations have profound meaning. In a 1935 case, Berger v. United States, the Supreme Court said, “The United States Attorney is the representative not of an ordinary party to a controversy, but of a sovereignty whose obligation to govern impartially is as compelling as its obligation to govern at all, and whose interest, therefore, in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done.”

Read those words, and then ask yourself — does that sound like Todd Blanche to you?

David French

One “first draft of history”

Lindsey Graham, taken by a heart condition at 71 just after returning to Washington from Ukraine, was one of the most effective Republican politicians of the Trump era. What that description means, and what kind of moral assessment it should yield, is something that historians will be arguing about for as long as our strange era is remembered.

Calling Graham effective may itself sound strange. Doesn’t a man who denounced Donald Trump in 2015 only to serve him and flatter him for a decade thereafter merit an adjective like “pathetic” or “supine” instead? … the reason to call Graham effective is that his long accommodation to Trump succeeded, sometimes modestly but often to a remarkable degree, in making Trump himself — the would-be isolationist, the scourge of neoconservatism, Mr. America First — into a hawk after Graham’s own heart.

Ross Douthat.

I greatly admired the leadership of Mitch McConnell in his prime (Pelosi, too, in her party). If Douthat’s right, Lindsey Graham exercised a very focused version of that, the focus being Trump, but I cannot admire hawkishness.

New York Times

Until recently, a New York Times subscriber could share 10 items per month with non-subscribers. Now it’s unlimited. I think the Times is bidding to become that national newspaper for a broad swath of — oh, let’s call them college-educated — readers.

Your subjective sense of fairness has no effect on the underlying economic reality

Because I have a very strong preference for boring government, let’s consider the case of taxes.

At the moment, the Democrats talk about taxes in almost exclusively moralistic—and punitive—terms. This is an exercise in pure magical thinking: “If we do the thing that makes us feel morally satisfied, then the math will take care of itself.” But the math never takes care of itself. The purpose of a tax policy is not to pursue fairness, morality, social justice, or anything like that: The purpose of tax policy is to raise sufficient revenue while minimizing the inevitable damage and distortion that all taxes impose on an economy. The discussion can be maddening, as I know, having been through it so many times. It goes like this:

⁠⁠Some nice progressive: “If only billionaires would pay their fair share, then we could have all the spending we want and balance the budget, too.”

Pointed-headed right-wing ideologue: “Nope. Here are the numbers.”

SNP: “But that isn’t how I want it to be!”

P-HR-WI: “Your subjective sense of fairness has no effect on the underlying economic reality.”

SNP: “Jeff Bezos paid you to say that.”⁠⁠

It does not matter how many times you repeat the relevant facts—that we actually had slightly lower taxes (revenue as share of GDP) during the supposedly high-tax Eisenhower years than we have recently, that high-income people already pay a wildly disproportionate share of federal income tax, that the low notional rate on dividends is offset by the fact that these are paid out of business profits that already have been taxed at the much higher corporate rate, etc.—and people will cling to their superstitions and fictions and clichés as though their lives depended on it. Anything other than think.

Kevin D. Williamson

Shorts

  • Every American knows what it’s like to be governed by a regime whose agenda is foolish and whose ambitions are hubristic. What’s new is being governed by a regime whose intentions are, transparently, malign. (Nick Catoggio)
  • At this particular moment (and at some others in the past), the thing that bugs me most about Elon Musk is the insouciance with which he envisions an escape from earthly hellscape to some other planet. Oops! I just remembered him unilaterally throttling Sklink/Skynet for the Ukrainian forces. As a conservative, I distrust hugely-concentrated private power, too.
  • If the Democrats do have a big night, they will have a mandate, but only the most obvious one: The Democrats will have a mandate to not be Donald Trump. That is it. (Kevin D. Williamson)
  • [T]he vaunted Republican billionaire advantage gave them a huge pile of nothing. It turns out that it’s harder than one might think to purchase a win in races where name ID is very high and the public is already extremely energized. Elon Musk in particular wasted an enormous amount of money. / That’s quite encouraging for American democracy. The people are not so easily bought. (David French)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

All Souls, 2026

This is not a day when the Orthodox Church remembers all saints, but I thought a reminder that Halloween is the eve of All Saints Day in the Latin Christian world would be timely.

What is Church for?

In the vast, overwhelming majority of places around the Western world that refer to themselves as a “Christian church,” the men and women who lead these assemblies frame themselves primarily as weekly teachers.

The pastor is expected to spend the week:

Studying Scripture.
Communicating various theological concepts.
Providing practical applications in their sermon for their congregants to take to heart.
Addressing various contemporary cultural and political issues of the day.
Delivering a stirring message that will leave congregants feeling like they “got something from the message.”

…

An Orthodox priest’s primary job is not to deliver a homily every week that ministers theology, inspiration, and a type of motivational message to his congregation that will stir the congregants to come back again week after week.

The two different traditions, Orthodox Christianity and modern Evangelical Protestantism, exist side by side with two entirely different assumptions:

The Sunday Divine Liturgy is not a lecture.
The priest is a spiritual father, not a professor.
Discipleship is experiential, not something I simply receive by way of a message.

…

If there is anything that I see differently than I did when I was a young man, it is this: being a Christian is primarily not about the theological information I learn; it is about learning to confess my sins before God and clothe myself in humility.

When I was a young man, I viewed my relationship with Jesus Christ primarily as one in which I amassed knowledge about God, the Bible, theology, etc.

However, the longer I am in the Orthodox Church, the more I begin to realize that a relationship with God begins and ends with humility.

Kenneth B., The 14-Hour Sermon: Have We Forgotten What Church is For? He wrote it, but I’ve experienced the same thing.

How are we to live in an AI Age?

In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”

In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors—anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.

This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.

C.S. Lewis via Martin Shaw

Wild and wasted virtues

The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.

G.K. Chesterton via Fr. Stephen Freeman, Hope: The Unashamed Virtue

Enabling lies, activating lies

The problem is that all too many Christians are in the grips of two sets of lies. We’ll call them the enabling lies and the activating lies. And unless you deal with the enabling lies, the activating lies will constantly pollute the body politic and continue to spawn violent unrest.

What’s the difference between the two kinds of lies? The enabling lie is the lie that makes you fertile ground for the activating lie that actually motivates a person to charge a thin blue line at the Capitol or take a rifle to a pizza parlor.

Here’s an enabling lie: America will end if Trump loses. That was the essence of the Flight 93 essay in 2016. That was the core of Eric Metaxas’s argument in our debates this spring and fall.

Here’s another enabling lie: The fate of the church is at stake if Joe Biden wins.

And here’s yet another: The left hates you (this sentence sometimes concludes with the phrase “and wants you dead.”)

I could go on, but the enabling lies that have rocketed through the church for years share important characteristics. They not only dramatically exaggerate the stakes of our political and legal disputes, they dramatically exaggerate the perfidy of your opponents. Moreover, when the stakes are deemed to be that high, the moral limitations on your response start to fall away.

David French

This may look political, but that’s not my intent. Believing those enabling lies corrodes your soul. Refusing to dwell on them is a matter of spiritual health.

Nice Summary

Their job is to be silent in a world that doesn’t stop talking.

Catherine Bauer, Director of Development and Marketing for the Carmelite Sisters of Fairfield, an Order that is building a stone monastery in Pennsylvania with a vision of it lasting a thousand years.

Not four bare walls and a lectern

… I had this kind of Protestant idea that one should beware of beauty ….

Dr. David Bradshaw in his account of why he became Orthodox

Beautiful church buildings respect the mysteries that occur within, chiefly the transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. If we have a high view of the Eucharist, then just as we will want to use a beautiful chalice to show respect to Christ’s sacrifice, we will also want to have a beautiful temple in which these sacred mysteries occur. By contrast, a low view of the Eucharist often finds expression in church buildings that proclaim a type of architectural Docetism: God is everywhere generally but nowhere in particular.

Robin Phillips, Rediscovering the Goodness of Creation: A Manual for Recovering Gnostics

Scholasticism

The more I studied, the more I saw the Scholastic tradition as an effort to cling to the god of the philosophers while somehow saying of God that which Christians know they must.

Nathan Jacobs, My Wild Ride to Orthodoxy (around the 21 minute mark)

I have just discovered Nathan Jacobs and I’m pretty enthusiastic about it.

The Crusades

The Crusades, for instance, could not have taken place in a world in which the principles of the Christian religion were fully understood: from the Christian point of view, the ‘events’ of Christ’s life are repeated wherever and whenever members of the Church participate in the Mysteries, and the notion that it was important to ‘liberate’ one particular place where they had occurred in one particular time could only have developed to the extent it did as a consequence of extraneous, or what one might call superstitious, influences.

Philip Sherrard, The Greek East and the Latin West

The Christian East did not participate in the Crusades, and in fact suffered particularly in 1205 A.D. from rampaging Crusaders. Some historians of Christianity mark that as the point beyond which the Great Schism of 1054, when the Pope severed the West from the rest of the Church, became permanent.

Really?!

Even though Pope Leo XIV is recovering well from lung cancer surgery and is going ahead with a big trip to Latin America next week, the diagnosis is “a bit of a game-changer” for the Vatican and Leo’s still-young papacy, a top Vatican official said Tuesday.

Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher, the Holy See’s foreign minister, said there had been a temptation to think that Leo was a “Superman, a Superpope” after he was elected in 2025 and “hit the ground running” following the drawn-out illness and death of Pope Francis.

“The fact that he has fallen ill with, in many ways, one of the most common illnesses of our age means that he is a poor mortal like the rest of us. And I think that that is going to change how we see him and possibly how he sees himself as well,” Gallagher told reporters at the Italian foreign press association.

Top Vatican official says pope’s cancer diagnosis a ‘game-changer’ for the papacy (emphasis added).

Is Abp. Gallagher a Protestant mole or something? Why would he think that Catholics, and the Pope himself, had such idiotic ideas?

My antidote to beating dead horses

Having left the Protestant religious world finally and officially 29 years ago this month, I nevertheless remain interested in its goings-on — sometimes horrified, sometimes filled with schadenfreude, occasionally pleasantly surprised — because America is deeply Protestant and I cannot entirely escape that fact short of getting me to an Orthodox monastery and forever eschewing news and political involvement.

But I’ve become increasingly aware that, in David Foster Wallace terms, because Protestantism is not the water I deliberately swim in, there not only are things about it that I’m better equipped to see than those in it but also important currents I’m oblivious to.

My version of Protestantism has scarcely been updated since 1997 and a lot of my version is shaped by my experiences in the 1960s and early 1970s, when I was caught in a backwater of Wheaton-style evangelicalism — a strongly dispensationalist milieu adjacent to a broader mainstream. So I’m still beating a dispensational premillennialist horse, though I see glimpses that it’s virtually dead.

That evangelical fads of my youth should be gone by my dotage, replaced by other fads, is a proof, I think, that Protestantism in general and Evangelicalism in particular are built on shifting sands, not solid rock, despite the gospel song to the contrary (which probably nobody under 50 even knows these days).

But mocking or gently critiquing the fads of my youth doesn’t do much good for people living today. So I’m updating my understanding of Protestantism through reading The Protestant Mind, a blog-like project of First Things with a grant from the John Templeton Foundation.

In this epoch when “Evangelical” is almost synonymous with “MAGA” in the popular press, The Protestant Mind’s principal author, Dale Coulter, helpfully provides a taxonomy of the Christian Right in America 2026 (“The Two Evangelical Rights”). The major rubrics are New Protestant Right” and “new evangelical populism.”

It helped me clarify a lot. I was tempted to speculate about which one I’d likely be in were I still Protestant, but that’s just a counterfactual too far.

The early Church had no Scripture of its own, and the Jews had no defined canon of Scripture; therefore, sola scriptura as the foundation for what Christians believed was absolutely impossible.

Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

Almost all Politics, but not too nasty

With our off-year election so close, everyone seems to be waxing political. But there’s politics and then there elevated politics, like maybe at the 20,000-foot level if not 30,000 feet. I’m shooting for elevated politics or clever writing.

Politics

The politics of candor

Mr. Carter’s words were easy political pickings.

Mr. Reagan used Mr. Carter’s call for moderation as a kind of anvil to define the sitting president. “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” Mr. Reagan asked. “Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the stores than it was four years ago?”

As Jonathan Alter wrote in “His Very Best,” his excellent biography of Mr. Carter, “The politics of candor were terrible.”

Mr. Carter’s wise counsel made him an easy mark for anyone inclined to criticize him as a finger-wagging scold.

“If you have concerns about consumption in society, it’s very difficult not to sound moralizing and patronizing,” said Alison Hulme, associate professor of social and cultural change at the University of Northampton in England and the author of “A Brief History of Thrift.”

And so we got the opposite of what Mr. Carter wished for. Yuppies arrived in the 1980s, and the 1990s brought us Hummers to guzzle the gas that people had waited in line for 15 years earlier. In 2001, President George W. Bush wanted us to get back to our daily routines and fly to Disney World after the Sept. 11 attacks. And the Obama administration couldn’t bear to slice away at a whopping tax break that makes it much easier for affluent families to spend $400,000 per child on college.

Ron Lieber, Jimmy Carter Was Right About Materialism but, Alas, Wrong About Us

On the future of third parties in America

I haven’t voted R or D for President since 2012, but for the American Solidarity Party candidate. If we don’t stop eating the shit sandwiches, they’ll keep serving them.

Coke versus Pepsi once seemed permanent. Today, Dr Pepper is second. In 1965, General Motors, Ford and Chrysler together had 92 percent of domestic auto sales. Then Toyota, Volkswagen and others arrived. By 2024, the “big three” had 38 percent. But foreign competition had improved their products.

George Will, calling the “Lincoln Party” candidacy of Greg Ballard for Indiana Secretary of State a promising debut.

George Will again:

A two-party system is best for producing broad, temperate coalitions. And when one of the parties fragments over an issue, or becomes strange by internal dynamics, it can be replaced in the duopoly. The Republican Party was born as a third party in 1854, as the slavery issue shattered the Whig Party, and six years later a Republican was elected president.

Today’s Republican Party has become weird, and most of its congressional members are embarrassingly incapable of embarrassment. A small Indiana event, unnoticed elsewhere, might someday be remembered as portentous.

Samuel Sey, chudbait

Here’s a thumbnail about Samuel Sey, in case you hadn’t heard of him and his situation.

His deportation by team Trump has been something of an apocalypse, in the historic sense.

“If you know Samuel, you know what a good man of character he is,” former Babylon Bee editor Joel Berry tweeted last week while setting up a crowdfunding page for the Seys to help pay for their legal battle with the administration. Last year the same Joel Berry sniffed that “the only due process owed to an illegal alien is deportation.”

…

Sey is a Christian, and that’s what matters to some right-wingers. Berry explicitly used the language of tribalism to defend his friend on those grounds, in fact. “I do have a tribe. I am tribal. It’s a tribe Jesus described,” he wrote on Monday, going on to quote several passages from the gospels. “I just don’t classify my tribe by melanin count. Samuel Sey is in my tribe, and he is my brother. And he would make an excellent American.”

⁠⁠For other MAGA devotees, Sey’s faith isn’t enough to earn tribal membership. Race trumps religion in this case: He’s black, African-born, married to a white woman, and “spent much of the past year feuding with a set of conservative pastors who promote antisemitic and pro-segregation theology,” per Salon. To a chud obsessed with the consequences of “importing the third world,” that’s all one needs to know to believe ICE did the right thing in moving to remove Sey from the United States. If the Somalis don’t belong here, surely the Ghanaians don’t either.

Berry sounded earnestly shocked this week to discover how many of those chuds are inside his tent. “This has been probably the darkest 24 hours I’ve ever experienced on social media in my life,” he remarked about the vicious backlash to his agitation on Sey’s behalf. “The things being said about Samuel, his wife, and his small children are unthinkably evil. There is a segment of the so-called ‘Christian’ nationalist crowd that has given itself completely over to Satan. I’ve never had more resolve to defeat these subversive demons invading the Right and invading Christianity.”⁠⁠

A political movement that openly celebrates ruthlessness toward undesirables has given itself over to Satan? The things you learn in the year of our lord 2026.

⁠⁠I wish Sey’s supporters luck in exorcising the demons 10 years too late, but two points shouldn’t be lost here. One is that their plea for mercy on his behalf seems conditioned on tribal membership. If Sey were merely a “good man of character” who would “make an excellent American,” presumably that wouldn’t suffice for immigration restrictionists like Berry to justify allowing him to remain legally in the U.S. After all, many illegal immigrants meet those criteria. Sey is worthy of mercy, it seems, because he’s a member of the “tribe Jesus described.” Berry doesn’t appear to disagree with the chuds that laws should apply differently to one’s “friends,” that is, only about who qualifies and who doesn’t.⁠⁠

Nick Catoggio (bold added)

Shorts

  • Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty charged right-wing activist James O’Keefe and content creator Cam Higby with felony unlawful voting and identity theft over a video filmed at a Minneapolis polling place during Minnesota’s August 11 primary.
  • Utah’s attorney general charged the prediction market Kalshi with 14 criminal counts, accusing it of illegally promoting online gambling, and named its co-founders, Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara, as defendants.
  • Any discussion of power is now, ultimately, a conversation about attention and how we extract it, wield it, waste it, abuse it, sell it, lose it and profit from it. (Charlie Warzel, Michael Goldhaber, the Cassandra of the Internet Age)
  • I think that if you put guns to their heads and told them to spell Machiavelli, you’d have to shoot a whole bunch of top campaign managers, many of whom are people who peaked in high school debate but don’t know it. (Kevin D. Williamson, on the dirty Democrat trickery in the Alaska Senate race.)
  • Americans do not have a great deal of republican self-respect, and some of them seem to enjoy being manipulated (it never seems to occur to anybody that Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” remark and Donald Trump’s “Fifth Avenue” remark amounted to the two of them saying the same thing about the same pigheaded rubes) …. (Kevin D. Williamson, ibid.)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

Settle in: this one’s pretty long.

Hooboy! Did I ever let time get away from me as I collected items.

We’ve been getting it backward

I love this formulation: We’re not facing a blue wave on November 3; we’re facing a red undertow.

My own instinct is revulsion with Republican corruption, not enthusiasm for Democrats, who are pretty directionless. When Democrats do manifest a sense of direction, I’m generally inclined to disagree with them. I suspect I’m not alone. But I’ll be voting for a lot of them in five days.

The corruption of the Republicans needs a response outside the polls, too. Congresswoman Slotkin is directionally right about us needing deterring prosecutions (probably impeachments to avoid Trump’s pardons), but mustn’t make that our singular focus. Sarah Isgur suggests that a Democrat President in 2029 could help heal the land by naming a Republican Attorney General to focus on the worst of the worst corruption in the second Trump administration without the partisan taint.

If you think impeaching a Trump minion who’s no longer in power is a pointless gesture, you’re wrong: “conviction upon impeachment has an important prophylactic effect that not even a felony conviction possesses — it can ban a convicted person from ‘any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States.’” (David French)

Now, like Diogenes, we need to find among the Republicans, a man — a genuinely honest and virtuous person, to fill that role.

AI as God

[W]hat we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man.

Public-facing, our AI Titans spin stories of endless pleasurable leisure as our AI underlings do all the work for us. In their digital smoke-filled rooms, they wonder what to do with all us useless eaters in their tech paradise.

Meanwhile, with the Lewis quote in mind, I think about the crypto-religious devotion to, and the totalizing potential of, Artificial General Intelligence. If it is achieved. It bodes to make Sam Altman and/or Dario Amodei richer and more powerful than Bezos and Musk (he who already meddles in war policy and is also into the AI game with Grok).

Therefore, be it resolved that listening to or reading the transcript of The Zealousness of the New Tech Right, Charlie Warzel’s podcast with the authors of End-Times Fascism, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, be highly recommended.

(If you need more incentive, be advised that when I went to save End-Times Fascism to my wish list, the Amazon algorithm suggested that I consider also If Nobody Builds It, Everybody Dies: Why Pausing AI is the Real Existential Threat. The Author? Grok 4.2, Elon Musk’s AI platform.)

Killer of thousands of the poorest children in the world

We don’t know the extent of the damage Musk did to one of the most efficient aid programs in history, PEPFAR, but we can say with full certainty that the richest man in the world is directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of the poorest children in the world — almost certainly more than those killed in Gaza. And he carries the weight of this like all sociopaths. He feels it not at all.

And now it appears he deliberately exposed Ukraine to Russian aggression by secretly hobbling Starlink, the satellite system critical to Ukraine’s defenses. That’s a direct intervention in a hot war to benefit America’s enemy in Moscow. According to the WSJ, he ran it by Trump first, who agreed, but not Zelensky, further destroying what little trust the US has in world affairs. This week, Trump said it was back to normal but the Ukrainians insist the slowdown is still in place. Worse: there’s a real lack of accountability in how this decision was made and who exactly can reverse it.

But let’s just say that delegating military strategy to a private individual is a new low for our increasingly banana republic. The Dems should not be discouraged from getting to the bottom of these scandals as soon as they are able.

Andrew Sullivan, My Musk Problem And Ours

“Teaching you how to think”

Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.”

David Foster Wallace in his 2005 Kenyon College graduation speech, This Is Water

Unprecedented institutional threat

Hundreds of US lawyers have agreed to work for free on efforts to monitor next month’s midterm elections in what voting rights groups say is the biggest effort of its kind to prevent meddling at the polls. “I’ve been involved in election protection since 2004 [and] I’ve never seen anything remotely like this in the midterms before,” Seth Waxman, co-chair of WilmerHale’s Supreme Court practice and the former US solicitor-general, told the FT. “In the past there . . . wasn’t a widespread institutional threat. This year is categorically different.” (Source: ft.com)

John Ellis News Items citing and quoting Financial Times.

The threat, in my opinion, is mostly from Trump’s minions, who have internalized his bogus election fraud rhetoric by trying (and failing, I hope) to counterprogram some even bigger fraud.

I’ve read enough about election security to think that the most plausible way for Trump to sow distrust in the election is something like a declaration, ipse dixit, that there’s some lefty attack on some blue state elections and sending in goons to demand protective custody of the voting machines. (Oops! Apparently, Team MAGA has been thinking much harder than I about how to screw up an election).

If he doesn’t get them, MAGA America will say the election was corrupt and untrustworthy. If he does get them, sane America will say the election was corrupted by him and sub-optimal. Since he thrives on chaos, he wins either way.

What are they giving themselves permission to do?

I’m not convinced the people who need to undergo what Plato called a “turning around of the soul” (periagōgē) are reachable by moralistic appeals to Right and Wrong. In that respect, I think MAGA already resides far beyond good and evil, in a world of might makes right—and where the end (victory over the Enemy) justifies an ever-lengthening list of morally repulsive means.

…

The threat of imminent doom can excuse even the inexcusable.

That’s the logic of the end justifies any means. And that logic is a perennial aspect of politics. There are certain rare and extreme situations in which the end of bare survival (facing a genuine existential threat) does justify anything that can be done to protect against that threat being fulfilled. But what about engaging during an ordinary election campaign in absurd hyperbole, exaggeration, and outright lies to justify the judgment that we face an existential threat from them, which in turn is what justifies the anything-goes mentality? The Claremont faction has been engaged in just such threat inflation or expansion ever since Michael Anton published the “Flight 93 Election” essay (in September 2016), and now the entire leadership of the right, as well as its media echo chamber, is in on the game, giving itself one concocted extreme self-justification after another for a decade.

…

What are they giving themselves permission to do? The answer: Anything and everything necessary to protect themselves from suffering utter destruction at the hands of their mortal enemies (aka, losing an upcoming election).

Damon Linker

Are to classics too white?

One of the more eye-opening documents you can find online is Martin Luther King Jr’s hand-written syllabus for a seminar he was teaching at Morehouse College in 1962. It’s a glimpse of what King believed an educated black man should know. It’s a challenging list: Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Augustine’s City of God, all the way to Bentham and Mill. There’s also a copy of the exam questions he set. Among them: “List and evaluate the radical ideas presented in Plato’s Republic”; “State and evaluate Aristotle’s view of slavery.”…

Andrew Sullivan, The Unbearable Whiteness of the Classics

If James Howard Kunstler didn’t exist …

… I’d have to invent him to make my own inclinations feel moderate. From one of his classics:

Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built in the last fifty years, and most of it is depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading—the jive-plastic commuter tract home wastelands, the Potemkin village shopping plazas with their vast parking lagoons, the Lego-block hotel complexes, the “gourmet mansardic” junk-food joints, the Orwellian office “parks” featuring buildings sheathed in the same reflective glass as the sunglasses worn by chain-gang guards, the particle-board garden apartments rising up in every meadow and cornfield, the freeway loops around every big and little city with their clusters of discount merchandise marts, the whole destructive, wasteful, toxic, agoraphobia-inducing spectacle that politicians proudly call “growth.”

James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere

Flat-out fake polling

[B]efore you dye your hair blue, you should know that tons and tons of polling you read is fake. Like, literally just fake. The latest here is a public opinion polling shop called Wedgewood Polling, which was cited on MS NOW and in The New York Times (places that would never lead us astray). Wedgewood made this statement on their now-terminated X account:

WEDGEWOOD POLLING, an experimental project to demonstrate the vulnerabilities, lack of oversight, and overall low barrier to entry in the modern political polling industry, makes this public statement. . . . Despite having no history, formal credentials, or real data behind the vast majority of our releases, Wedgewood Polling was added to major polling aggregators, including The New York Times, FiftyPlusOne, and VoteHub, and repeatedly treated as a legitimate data source.

Ha ha. Cool. You got us, Wedgewood! Why do I increasingly feel like we’re all a part of a YouTube prank show?

Nellie Bowles

Wish fulfilled

We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains … We want to put them in trauma.

Russell Vought, 2023

A hacking group leaked the names, phone numbers, and addresses of more than 40,000 Department of Homeland Security employees and associates, including about 10,000 linked to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its investigative arm, some of them involved in undercover operations. DHS said it was aware of a “potential breach.”

TMD

Postliberalism

Readwise seems to have decided one recent day to give me a couple of postliberal-leaning “Daily Highlights” from my past reading:

Liberal democracy is more restrictive, being strongly correlated with egalitarian principles that are quite wrongly believed to generate diversity. The opposite is true: egalitarianism does not tolerate aristocratic and monarchical tendencies, not only in the political structures of the state (which might be understandable), but in any other area of public life. And yet liberal democracy, being the single most homogenizing force in the modern world, creates the illusion that it alone stands for social differentiation.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies

Aristotle’s Ethics and Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae are alike efforts to delineate the limits that nature—natural law—places upon human beings. Each seeks to educate man about how best to live within those limits through the practice of virtues, to achieve a condition of human flourishing. Liberal philosophy rejected this requirement of human self-limitation.

Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed

I am quite dubious about the concept of American exceptionalism. Don’t get me wrong, we really are an exceptional nation; that’s even clearer to me from living abroad. But there’s a lot of hubris in that. We really believe somehow that we can defy the laws of history, that as long as we work hard and mean well, goodness will prevail.

Rod Dreher, Farewell to Hungary, And to Europe

For the record, I remain unconvinced that any of the postliberal or illiberal alternatives to liberal democracy would be an improvement. Insert your own criteria for the desiderata in relation to which “improvement” is measured. Mine are that Christians “may lead a calm and peaceful life in all godliness and sanctity.” But I’m trying to learn in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content..

October

How privileged you are, to be passionately
clinging to what you love;
the forfeit of hope has not destroyed you.

Maestoso, doloroso:

This is the light of autumn; it has turned on us.
Surely it is a privilege to approach the end
still believing in something.

Louise Gluck, October

Shorts

  • If the weirdest thing about you is that your booty turned Donald Trump gay, you’re doing well for yourself by GOP standards. (Nick Catoggio of Sen. Jon Husted)
  • It’s not that I’m observant; it’s just that I talk too much. Otherwise, especially in a strange place, I’ll never know what’s happening. Like a blind man at the ball game, I need a radio. (The late Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)
  • I also am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness. (Simone Weil, Love in the Void)
  • Of course, the Department of Homeland Security, when it was created in the wake of 9/11, was meant to function in opaque ways and with broad authority; it was designed to be a secret-police force. (M. Gessen, Unmarked Vans. Secret Lists. Public Denunciations. America’s Police State Has Arrived)
  • [I]f you see a man in skinny jeans and long necklaces leaping around with a light show behind him, well, that’s a man who wants to have sex with a lot of random people. It doesn’t matter if he’s in a rock band or talking about God. These are ancient mating dances. These are ancient male archetypes. (Nellie Bowles)
  • The Republicans have successfully persuaded much of the public that they are the party of Joe Sixpack and Democrats are the party of Jessica Yogamat. (Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal)
  • Fundamentalist intellectual habits … have been more resilient than fundamentalism itself. (Mark Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind)
  • Despite sociological evidence to the contrary, it remains to all appearances virtually axiomatic that the acquisition of consumer goods is the presumptive means to human happiness-and the more and better the goods, the better one’s life and the happier one will be. (Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation)
  • America’s wedded couples are far less likely to stay together than Sweden’s cohabiting couples are. (Gracy Olmstead, Markets and the Strangulation of the American Family)
  • We could easily all be putting in a twenty- or even fifteen-hour workweek. Yet for some reason, we as a society have collectively decided it’s better to have millions of human beings spending years of their lives pretending to type into spreadsheets or preparing mind maps for PR meetings than freeing them to knit sweaters, play with their dogs, start a garage band, experiment with new recipes, or sit in cafés arguing about politics, and gossiping about their friends’ complex polyamorous love affairs. (David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

Sunday, October 25

Who’s at the center of everything?

[E]verything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

Please don’t worry that I’m getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being “well-adjusted”, which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

David Foster Wallace in his 2005 Kenyon College graduation speech, This Is Water

There is a way to undermine your deep belief that you are the absolute centre of the universe:

Wow! That was soooo not about me!

One woman’s reaction to her first experience of the Orthodox Divine Liturgy as reported by her host — Frederica Matthewes-Green, I believe.

The Liturgy, in a way I never remotely experienced in any Protestant worship service, puts God at the center of things.

I heard the “testimony” of a man about how he came to Orthodoxy from deep within Evangelicalism. Hearing that several of his children were attending Orthodox Churches, he read up on Orthodoxy, his hostility growing most of the time. Finally, he and his wife agreed to go to a Liturgy. He left Liturgy with his hostility fully intact, and arguing with his kids about it afterward, he turned to his wife for reinforcement: “What did you think about that service?” Hesitantly, she told the truth: “I feel like I just worshipped God for the first time in my life.”

Our self-centeredness goes all the way back, I think, to the Fall of Adam and Eve and it’s not quickly or easily shed. (I have more thoughts about that, but they’re not ready for prime time).

Liturgy as Combat

[U]sually when people first come to an Orthodox Church, they aren’t really able to articulate all of the emotions and ideas that are coursing through their minds; usually, they simply think something along the lines of, “I don’t understand what is going on here, but it is clearly different from anything I’ve ever experienced before.”⁠⁠

You see, ⁠⁠Orthodox worship at its heart, which is nothing less than the Biblical worship that stems from the religion of the Apostles, is designed to combat the very thing we have been doing our whole lives: worshipping our passions.⁠⁠

Orthodox worship, the Divine Liturgy, the Akathist services, the Paraklesis, and more, are intentional in every tone, phrase, and prose; where so much else in our life is designed to gratify our flesh and encourages us to worship our passions, ⁠⁠Orthodox Christianity provides a template for worshipping God alongside the Saints who are worshipping Him in heaven, and when this prescription is followed, we finally begin experiencing a release from the stranglehold our passions have on us.

Kenneth B⁠⁠

Speechless

I’ll never forget standing with family and friends around the deathbed of my father, moments after he breathed his last. We had all just seen something profound: a man’s soul leaving his body after a long life. What to say? None of us were Shakespeare. I began reciting a Psalm I had committed to memory. The ancient words of King David allowed us mourners to rest, to be carried by the sacred lines, to focus on the man who had just passed from our midst, instead of rifling through our own minds in search of the appropriate things to say — because who among us ordinary people could possibly spontaneously produce words adequate to the enormity of that moment? It’s like that every Sunday, with the liturgy.

…

When we discard prescribed ritual, thinking that making up our own ritual is more authentic, we make ourselves prisoner to our own thoughts and passions.

Rod Dreher, Byung-Chul Han On The Importance Of Ritual (emphasis added).

Years before I discovered Orthodox Christianity, I was sometimes called upon, as when we had a guest pastor, to lead the congregation in what we called the Pastoral Prayer. I sure wasn’t going to try that spontaneously, or without something to channel my prayer, so I consulted higher-church Prayer Books (probably the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer).

Eventually, I stumbled onto Orthodoxy which immediately corresponded to some inchoate sense I’d carried for decades. I fairly quickly realized that at least part of that correspondence was that I needed to be formed by the Liturgy more than I needed to get my emotional batteries recharged or my frontal lobe stimulated.

Something’s in the air

To love is not easy, and mankind has chosen not to return God’s love. Man has loved the world, but as an end in itself and not as transparent to God. He has done it so consistently that it has become something that is “in the air.” It seems natural for man to experience the world as opaque, and not shot through with the presence of God. It seems natural not to live a life of thanksgiving for God’s gift of a world. It seems natural not to be eucharistic. The world is a fallen world because it has fallen away from the awareness that God is all in all.

Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy

The disappearance of symbols

The disappearance of symbols points towards the increasing atomization of society. At the same time, society is becoming increasingly narcissistic. The narcissistic process of internalization develops an aversion to form. Objective forms are avoided in favour of subjective states. Rituals evade narcissistic interiority. The ego-libido cannot attach itself to them. Those who devote themselves to rituals must ignore themselves. Rituals produce a distance from the self, a self-transcendence. They depsychologize and de-internalize those enacting them.

Byung-Chul Han On The Importance Of Ritual via Rod Dreher.

Another advantage — or maybe more another way of describing the effect — of liturgical worship over attempts at spontaneity, contemporaneity, seeker-friendliness or the like.

Mystery

In the East, on the other hand, a mystery is an area where the human mind cannot go, where the heart alone makes sense—not by knowing, but by being. The Greek word mysterion leads you into a sense of “not-knowing” or “not-understanding” and leaves you there. Having arrived, all you can do is gaze and wonder; there is nothing to solve.

Fr. Meletios Webber, Bread & Water, Wine & Oil: An Orthodox Christian Experience of God

A popular poet, recently deceased, had her own version of this wisdom:

Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say
“Look!” and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.

Mary Oliver, Mysteries, Yes

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

Keeping the United States united

The Goose that Lays the Golden Eggs is a very dubious human

If Barack Obama or any other prominent black participant in the big leagues of American politics had 13 CHILDREN OUT OF WEDLOCK with 4 DIFFERENT WOMEN, it would be all anyone could ever talk about. Most conservatives seem not even to know this about [Elon] Musk.

Thomas Chatterton Williams

Keeping the United States united

The thing that will keep the United States united is nothing more and nothing less than the ability and willingness of Americans to consciously impose restraints on themselves and restraints on how far they will go, rhetorically and otherwise, to express their disagreements with their fellow Americans. You have to start from the position “no American is my enemy.” I don’t have to like him, I don’t have to agree with him, but no American is my enemy and I will impose restraints on myself.

…

Not much matters. The things that matter matter hugely, but not much actually matters.

Jeffrey Goldberg, interviewed by David Brooks.

Corruption then and now

In aristocratic governments the individuals who are placed at the head of affairs are rich men, who are solely desirous of power. In democracies statesmen are poor, and they have their fortunes to make. The consequence is that in aristocratic States the rulers are rarely accessible to corruption, and have very little craving for money; whilst the reverse is the case in democratic nations.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Tocqueville’s observation may be reaching its expiration date, with avarice having become, in some quarters, insatiable.

More and less respectable conspiracy theories

⁠⁠If your view is that the world is the way it is because of bad people doing bad things behind closed doors—and that is what James Talarico says he believes—then your Weltanschauung has more in common with the imbecilic trash that despicable lowlifes … traffic in than you might be comfortable admitting. What you have is simply a more respectable conspiracy theory.

To try to liberate ourselves from such things is part of the hard work of responsible citizenship. If the Almighty Nonbinary blesses his efforts and Talarico is successful in seeing off the contemptible Ken Paxton, then I hope he will take the opportunity—being useless, senators have a good deal of leisure time—to do the work.⁠⁠

Kevin D. Williamson

Attention

Attention is an indicator of love.
Not attending to what merits our love is indifference.
Attending to what does not merit our love is idolatry.
When businesses work hard to commodify our attention, we should consider who and what actually deserves it.

David O’Hara (who disclaims both originality and remembering where it all came from).

Can you recite a 7-digit phone number backward?

As we get older, we’re all going to lose a few of our marbles. As the word gets out that Parkinson’s disease is not just a movement disorder, there will be people whose careers will be destroyed because, on a particular day at a particular time, they can’t recite a seven-digit telephone number backward. Allowing someone’s fate to depend on performance on some test that has nothing to do with the job in question is just the reductio ad absurdum of the meritocratic machinery that has been pretty good to me (and to you, I suspect) over most of a lifetime.

Michael E. Kinsley, For Those Who Grow Old (originally titled Old Age)

Readwise

I’m a highlighter, a clipper, a curator. Digital life is very congenial to me. My blog posts here are full of digital clippings from my storehouses.

The trick is knowing how to manage highlights, and also to be reminded of things I once thought worthy of curation.

I’ve tried a lot of tools over the years. There was a flat-file database manager for Mac, from the makers of Filemaker. I can’t even remember its name as I write. There was (and still is, I think) Evernote, which I suspect is a database manager with a diversionary user interface. Then there was DevonThink, another database manager. None of them gave me reminders of what I’d saved; nothing serendipitous ever happened. And then DevonThink crashed and made proprietary hash of much of my work.

I decided that I needed to keep things in plain text, or at least in Markdown (through which the target text would remain readily discernible in a worst-case app meltdown). On top of that text could live various tools. That led me to Obsidian, with which I’m pretty happy. I was on the path to Plaintextistan, I thought. But again, Obsidian didn’t give me surprising reminders of what I’d saved.

But darn it, a non-plaintext tool I had almost forgotten emerged from the mists: Readwise. Even worse, it’s web-based.

I’ve taken a little time to explore its nooks and crannies, and in recent months, it has become an integral part of my daily websurfing as well as a smart reminder of things I once noted but might forget. I’m pretty sure it has integrated AI so that the 15 daily highlights I’ve requested increasingly have a sort of theme woven through them (Tocqueville appeared in two of 15 items today). I find myself spending more time daily pondering the 15 items Readwise has surfaced and offered. My plain text commitment has faltered.

Readwise is not an instant panacea, but it’s not too time-consuming to set up.

  1. If you’ve highlighted your Kindle books and Apple Books, or if you’ve saved things to Instapaper (or maybe Pocket – I don’t recall if Pocket integrated), you’ve got a jump-start because it will import all that on request. It’s got a lot of other integrations.
  2. It also will do Optical Character Recognition on highlights from your paper books and put them in the system. This is through its smartphone app.
  3. It offers browser plugins to save web content; it’s gotten to the point that I put every interesting web item into it and read it there; if it seems upon reading to be ephemeral, I delete it then to avoid clutter; if it’s worthy, I’ll have highlighted along the way and can add tags quickly for future retrieval.

You might want to give it a look. Not surprisingly, Readwise describes itself better than my little endorsement.

Shorts

  • A society whose members know what is enough might be poor, but its members would be equally free. (Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality)
  • Drugs: the alteration of consciousness or the anesthetizing of the unspeakability of self. (Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos)
  • What I called “the master wish” in this religion of wishful thinking went something like this: Please, Lord, let us keep driving to Walmart forever. (James Howard Kunstler, Living in the Long Emergency)
  • Nationalists, populists, identitarians, futurists, and religious traditionalists are vying to define conservatism in ways previously unimaginable. Matthew Rose, A World After Liberalism Sometimes, I think Wendell Berry and his agrarian friends were 21st Century America’s only true conservatives — and although they have my admiration, through long habit I don’t live like them.
  • The worst jingoes do not love England, but a theory of England. If we love England for being an empire, we may overrate the success with which we rule the Hindoos. But if we love it only for being a nation, we can face all events: for it would be a nation even if the Hindoos ruled us. (G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy)
  • The kind of people who think that the Great Library of Alexandria contained “exabytes worth of information” rather than the collected fruits of hard-won wisdom are lost before they ever sit down to their datasets. (Paul Kingsnorth, via Brady Bowman)
  • Money can buy the megaphone, but it really can’t buy the mood that we see in the country. (Henrik Schatzinger, a political scientist at Ripon College, about the massive spending on next month’s election)
  • Rien ne le justifie, rien ne l’explique, rien ne l’excuse. (Emmanuel Macron on the French riots)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

If you wanted to have a meaningful impact, you didn’t want to waste your vote on the weak and incompetent center. The Social Democrats were not enough to hold back the communist menace. Only the Nazis proved capable of reversing the leftward slide. If you believed the communists were the greater evil, you felt a moral duty to vote for the Nazis.

Paul D. Miller, A Confessing Church for America’s Weimar Moment

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

The Gospel for People battered by bad religion

A tonsured Reader in the Orthodox Church (i.e., the lowest Order of Clergy), I have from time to time been called on to lead a Sunday morning service in the absence of a Priest or Deacon.

Yesterday, our Priest had to travel to our Diocesan Sobor, being held today and tomorrow. Since we are one of the parishes in the hinterlands, a full-day drive from the Cathedral, he needed to travel during our normal Sunday worship time, so I was called into service once more.

Father asked me to deliver a homily on the Gospel. A Reader cannot roll his own sermons, though. We settled on a homily given by St. Nicolai Velimirovich, a Serbian-born saint who reposed in Pennsylvania in 1956, a refugee from his homeland.

The sermon was ten pages on the parable of the sower and the seed, Luke 8:5-15, and it was dense as well as long, so I had to trim it down. I decided to skip over his description of the wayside, and the rocks, and to focus instead, in USA 2026, on the thorns, which Christ explained:

[T]he ones that fell among thorns are those who, when they have heard, go out and are choked with cares, riches, and pleasures of life, and bring no fruit to maturity.

I chanted some preliminary services (3rd hour and 6th hour) alone, starting in an empty Nave.

But since my last Reader Service, our parish has exploded, and by the time of the homily, roughly an hour later, we were at half-capacity, including first-time visitors for whom I was serving a service, and giving a homily, that constituted their very first experience of Orthodox Christianity. Others are such recent arrivals that I don’t know their background stories.

That reality so unsettled me that I couldn’t take any food afterward until maybe 4 pm. And for much of the afternoon, my thoughts kept turning to some vivid words of Father Stephen DeYoung, like me a former Calvinist.

The most current version of a Father Stephen motif was an observation about how many people rule out Christianity because of the extremely skewed versions surrounding us in North America today, and for roughly the last two centuries, truth be told (before that, it was less skewed).

I would have so loved to have had the liberty to remark on that, which may be as needful for hesitant unchurched toe-dippers, or for visitors who find something a bit “off” about their current Church, as the “thorny soil” parable is needful for practicing Orthodox Christians in our land today.

The locus classicus of Fr. Stephen’s motif was the closing remarks to a podcast roughly eighteen months ago:

I know that what I’m about to talk about is something I’ve talked about probably even fairly recently on the show, but I find myself in real life — meaning as a priest dealing with a group of parishioners, and trying to help them and guide them and just family members and everybody in general — I find myself having to say this over and over and over again, which tells me that probably if I say it over this microphone to people, there’s probably at least some folks out there who need to hear it again, even if I have talked about it recently.

The Christianity that those of us, at least in the United States — and I can only speak about that experience because I haven’t had any others — the Christianity we grew up around came from one of two categories largely. And people who want to defend those types of Christianity will call this a caricature. I don’t care anymore. But what I’m about to say, even if you think it’s a caricature of what they’re trying to teach, this is what a lot of the people within these traditions have actually received. Right? So it’s very easy to defend some tradition based on what’s in the books, and what we would mean to say, right? But I’m talking about what the people who I encounter, the people who talk to me about spiritual things. come to me and give confessions, what they’ve received from the Christianity they’ve grew up around, how that has shaped them, how they think because of it. And if people, representatives of those groups want to say that’s not what they meant to teach, cool, but maybe some introspection on why that’s not what people are receiving.

Anyway, what people have received comes in two categories. One is sort of the smilin’ Bob Shuler School of, “God loves you just the way you are and you don’t have to do anything. Just don’t worry about it. Just smile and be happy and listen to the hymns of your choice that you enjoy.” … That worked really well with boomers. That seemed to answer something they needed to hear. Maybe they’re a generation who grew up with very dissatisfied perfectionist parents, and so just hearing you’re fine just the way you are was what they needed, right? But that doesn’t work on subsequent generations, because subsequent generations are more realistic or nihilistic depending on your point of view, and know there’s something deeply wrong with themselves and with the world around them. So just telling them over again, “No, no, you’re fine, everything’s fine,” it doesn’t work. That’s why those kind of churches are all empty now.

The other school of thought is pretty much the exact opposite. It’s God doesn’t really love you. Right. In fact He’s pretty angry with you and He’s getting ready to send you to hell. Right? And the only way to avoid that is, depending on your tradition, right, is, for you to love him nonetheless, really sincerely — and there’s a rabbit hole to go down. How sincere am I ever really? — and do that plus live your life at a certain way and follow certain rules. Which will differ based on tradition, and which you will inevitably fail at.

That second one is most of the people who I interact with on spiritual matters, and it’s almost like they’ve been taught and they’ve internalized that. Their life in this world is this sort of really horrible reality show, almost like Squid Games, and like God is about weeding out contestants and narrowing it down to this faithful few and everybody else goes to hell, goes to eternal punishment except for this faithful few who, again, depending on your tradition, he may just pick. Or, you know, they’re the ones who really did it right. They’re the ones who really loved him sincerely, or they’re the ones who really lived their life the right way.

And any way you slice those things, most people again are realistic enough that when they look at their life, they don’t see a lot of evidence in their life and their actions that they’re one of the people God picked, or they don’t see a lot of evidence of their life that they’re really sincere about following God, or they don’t see a lot of evidence of their life that they’re really toeing the line and living the life they know they should be living, meaning most people are walking around — like religious people — walking around thinking they’re probably going to end up in hell. That God is probably mad at the most of the time, and that He’s looking for them to make some missteps so, boom!, they can get nailed.

Also most atheists are walking around doing the same thing they’re protesting constantly that there is no God because they can’t deal with that guilt and stuff that they’ve internalized. They can’t live like that. No one can live like that their route to trying to live like that and deal with the cognitive dissonance is just to deny that any of it’s true, over and over and over again publicly, loudly to everyone who will listen. Right.

Whereas the religious people are just in this kind of quiet desperation of how do I figure this out. Right.

So let me reiterate …:

God loves you. Jesus said so. St. John’s Gospel, the Father Himself loves you. He is not angry at you. He does not want to destroy you for your sins. There is no power of justice that commands him to do so. No one commands him to do anything. He loves you. He wants you to find salvation, but salvation is a thing you have to actually do. He wants you to do it. The Bible says so. God wills that all men be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth. But you have to do it. He empowers you to do it. He forgives you when you mess up trying to do it. He heals you when you damage yourself trying to do it and failing. He is entirely on your side. The God who created the universe is entirely on your side and the saints are on your side and the church is on your side. Everyone is on your side. Christ is advocating for you. Everything is set up for us.

When Saint Paul says to us, continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling. You don’t stop them like Kierkegaard did. Read the next verse because it is God who is working in you to will and to do according to his pleasure. We continue on and we work out our salvation because we know that God is on our side and empowering us to do it and loving us and loving other people through us. We need to pray about that. We need to pray it. We need to repeat it. We need to kind of imitate what the atheists are doing. We need to say it out loud. We need to say it to each other. We need to say it to everyone who will listen right? That God loves you and wants you to find salvation, wants you to be healed, wants you to be set free from sin. He wants all these things for you. It doesn’t mean you have nothing to do. That doesn’t mean you’re fine just the way you are. You know you’re not fine just the way you are, right? But it means that He is there to help you to grow to be transformed into the person who you need to be and want to be. The person he created you to be for eternity. That’s the actual message of Christianity. Don’t accept any substitutes for that, ever at all for any reason.

That’s what I have to say.

And that’s what I wish I could have communicated to our first-timers yesterday — what I hope was communicated though those words were unspoken.

But at the same time, I’m glad I couldn’t. As someone said to her Orthodox friend decades ago after her first Liturgy, “Wow! That was so not about me!” That “not about me” focus itself communicates something important.

Sunday October 18

Genus and Species

The central and absolutely essential premise of Ross Douthat’s new book Believe, the point from which the whole argument begins, is this: There is a genus of human belief and practice called “religion,” of which Christianity is one of the species. My problem with regard to Ross’s book is that I have come quite seriously to doubt this premise. My larger problem is that I don’t know quite how to do without this premise, since it is so deeply embedded in almost all discourse on … well, I guess I have to say on religion.

…

Emile Durkheim’s definition is a useful one: “A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and surrounded by prohibitions — beliefs and practices that unite its adherents in single moral community called a church”

…

I am not at all convinced that a move from, say, atheism to Wicca is necessarily “a step in the right direction” — i.e., once you’ve entered the genus-town of “religion,” you’re closer to the species-house of Christianity than you were before. Indeed, I wonder whether many people might be less interested in Christianity as a result of such a move, since they might plausibly think that as long as they’re operating within the genus, does it really matter what species they prefer? (The “We all get to God in our own way” line has had a very long run and doesn’t show any signs of slowing down.)

Alan Jacobs, Douthat on Belief, quoting himself.

Thoughts about Greek Festival

Yesterday was the first day of our Greek Festival, and thus begins four straight days of talking with thousands upon thousands of people.

In the past, when people came for a tour of the inside of our Orthodox church, I could be sure that nearly 100% of the questions were related to the painting process regarding our church iconography:

“What kind of paint did they use to make all these pictures?” or “How long did it take the iconographer to finish this church?”

Yet, with this recent surge in Orthodoxy, our Greek Festival now brings in droves of people who are inquiring into the Orthodox Church, and the questions I got yesterday were a kaleidoscope of theological and historical inquiries:

“Does the Orthodox Church believe in penal substitutionary atonement?”

“Does the Orthodox Church believe in assurance of salvation?”

“Is the Orthodox Church Patriarchal?”

“Is the Orthodox Church anti-women?”

“Does the Orthodox Church believe in the Book of Jasher?”

One couple who came to my tour had been raised in a King James Version-only Baptist Church, and somewhere along their spiritual journey, they learned that Protestants had removed books from their Old Testament in the 1820s. He and his wife obtained a copy of the 1611 KJV, which predates the long-kept-quiet changing of the Protestant Bible.

Though the couple hadn’t yet read all of the books in their newly discovered Bible, they were very curious if the Orthodox Church was familiar with these books and what we believed about them.

Kenneth B, The Orthodox Church Is Growing in America. Two Holy Elders Predicted It Decades Ago.

If I may be permitted to quote a reasonably wise Evangelical apologist, that “kaleidoscope of theological and historical inquiries” requires a combination of “answering the question-behind-the-question” (e.g., “penal substitutionary atonement” presumes that the wages of sin is eternal torment) and asking for clarification of terms (e.g., what do you mean by “Patriarchal”?).

Ultimately, the inquirer needs a new frame, an altered paradigm, and I have no idea how to effectuate that with nothing more than words. It happened to me; I’ve never been able to induce it in anyone else.

That is why the all-purpose Orthodox answer is “Come and see.”

A Confessing Church today

Christians who vote for Republicans are called to be salt and light within the Republican Party. That means being a voice calling the Republican Party to obey the rule of law. Yours should be the loudest voice condemning Trump’s pardon for January 6 rioters and pushing against his challenge to the checks and balances that are supposed to constrain the executive . You should speak up in favor of the poor and powerless and against the culture of cruelty, spite, and vengefulness Trump cultivates. It corrodes our public square and demeans our shared citizenship even as it poses more specific dangers to those targeted by Trump’s weaponization of federal law enforcement. If you do not speak up, you are both credulous and culpable, complicit with the party’s sins—including those yet to come.

If you vote for Democrats, you are called to be salt and light within the Democratic Party. That means calling on the Democratic Party to heed “Nature and Nature’s God.” The secular left sometimes gives off an odor of being godless, rootless, power-hungry moral relativists. They deny transcendent truth one day; the next, they announce a new truth, and their online mob will bully and harass us for failing to jump on their latest cause de jour. Their lack of moral foundation is exactly why they turn into moral authoritarians, certain of their own newfound truths—about race, class, and gender—and impatient for their fellow citizens to catch up. Open, tolerant, classically liberal government cannot survive without foundations, and Thomas Jefferson was right to point to nature and nature’s God as the right ones when he penned the Declaration of Independence. Natural law is transcendent, but not sectarian; it is a shared foundation on which believers in any religion or none can stand together.

These are the sorts of lessons a Confessing Church today would preach from its pulpits and podcasts. American Christians need a robust theology of civic engagement that teaches the moral good of republican government, the rule of law, and constitutionalism. It would teach respect for pluralism, anti-utopianism, and the wisdom that comes from learning from the history of totalizing political religions and their fruit. It would teach critical detachment from parties coupled with selective and narrow cooperation with them.⁠⁠

Paul D. Miller: A Confessing Church for America’s Weimar Moment

Just in case you don’t understand that “Confessing Church” alludes to something in history, Wikipedia can help.

Truth vs. Practicality

American evangelicals never doubted that Christianity was the truth. They never doubted that Christian principles should illuminate every part of life. What they did do, however, in the years between the Revolution and the Civil War, was to make most questions of truth into questions of practicality. What message would be most effective? What do people most want to hear? What can we say that will both convert the people and draw them to our particular church? The heavy pressure for results meant that very little time or energy was available to think about God and nature, God and society, God and beauty, or God and the shape of the human mind.

Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

Christian Tradition and Slavery

  • The general course of the Christian church has been against slavery. This was undeniably true in the early history of the church. I know not that it has ever been alleged that any of the prominent defenders of the Christian faith among the “fathers” were advocates of slavery, or that any decree of synods or councils can be adduced in favour of the system.
  • Because abolitionists and antislavery theologians were forced to offer more complicated exegetical arguments, they were necessarily less persuasive. In other words, it appears that an untraditioned approach to theology was at least partially responsible for the failure of otherwise like-minded Christians to resolve the sectional crisis by any means other than war.

Paul J. Gutacker, The Old Faith in a New Nation

Fundamentalism is not ancient Christianity

… the same historical representatives of the Christian faith that Maher chose to ignore (or has never heard of) are the Church Fathers that evangelical/fundamentalists also ignore for their own ideological reasons. They ignore them (or even denounce them) because the very existence of the early representatives of a more enlightened thread of Christianity undermines the evangelical/fundamentalist claim that somehow only fundamentalism represents the original ancient Christian faith. It does not.

Frank Schaeffer, Patience With God. I don’t consider Frank Schaeffer a reliable source, but I agree with him fully here.

So Walker Percy wrote a dystopia

The parallels to today become even more acute when Percy turns to religion. Political divides in Love in the Ruins have penetrated the churches, mainline Protestants aligning with the left and evangelicals with the right. Meanwhile, orthodox Catholics are but a remnant, most believers having joined either the American Catholic Church––which only prays the Latin Mass and plays the national anthem during the elevation of the Eucharist––or a coalition of Germanic schismatics, who have done away with the vow of celibacy as a prerequisite for priesthood.

Collin Slowey, Walker Percy’s Prescient Dystopia

Insipid and Slightly Insane

At a street corner, I happened to look up and caught sight of an electric sign, on top of a two-storey building. It read: “Clown Cigarettes.” I turned and fled from the alien and lunatic street, and found my way into the nearby cathedral, and knelt, and prayed, and did the Stations of the Cross. Afraid of the spiritual pressure in that monastery? Was that what I had said the other day? How I longed to be back there now: everything here, in the world outside, was insipid and slightly insane. There was only one place I knew of where there was any true order.

Thomas Merton, The Seven Story Mountain

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.