It may come as news to some readers that the doctrines around “atonement” are fraught with controversy. I say that because thirty years ago, it would have come as news to me, and I was a fairly engaged Calvinist layman. But on atonement, I reflexively took the “penal substitutionary” view (the leading example of what the following table calls “Transactional View”).
As I was becoming Orthodox, supplementing formal catechesis with taped catechesis from a prominent priest (I can still remember listening to a discussion of atonement as I walked laps on the rubberized track at my health club), I learned that my view, shared by many besides Calvinists, presented some thorny problems.
I wish I’d had this table available. I think I’d have immediately felt my heart sing at the “Conciliar View” because it corresponded to what I perceived about my “problem” and about my desire to have my roots sink deep.
A bit of the introduction to the topic, from the source article, if you’re feeling very nerdy:
In the spring of 1157, the Patriarch-elect of Antioch, Soterichos Panteugenos, subjected the Divine Liturgy to Aristotelian scrutiny and found it wanting. The prayer addressed to Christ—”For it is Thou who offerest and art offered, who receivest and art Thyself distributed”—struck him as a logical contradiction. A true sacrifice requires a distinct payer and payee, he reasoned. To preserve the intelligibility of the Cross, Soterichos proposed a correction: the Son offers as High Priest, but the Father alone receives.
Soterichos was not entirely wrong: if the Atonement is a transaction, the Liturgy is incoherent—you cannot pay yourself. But the Council of Blachernae reversed his logic. Rather than correcting the Liturgy to fit the transaction, it denied the transaction to affirm the Liturgy. Guided by Nicholas of Methone, the Council affirmed that Christ is both the Offerer (ho prospheron) and the Receiver (ho prosdechomenos). The tension Soterichos identified was taken as a feature, not a bug—a safeguard against thinking of atonement as a transaction.
In place of transaction, the Council affirmed union: the Incarnation is not a mere precondition for the Cross but the same saving work. The Council’s anathemas speak of a single “mystery of the economy,” condemning those who “divide the indivisible.”
All but one of the autocephalous churches at the time participated in this Council and agreed ….
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Thesis: The Council held that Christ is both Offerer and Receiver of the sacrifice—”He who offers and is offered and receives.” This reflexivity precludes transactional models of atonement. A transaction requires a distinction between payer and payee; one cannot pay oneself. Soterichos saw this tension and attempted to resolve it by assigning the offering to the Son and the receiving to the Father alone. The Council reversed his logic: rather than correcting the Liturgy to fit the transaction, it denied the transaction to affirm the Liturgy.
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Once atonement is reduced to a transaction, a cascade of theological failures follows.
Although I didn’t have this table available, or the article from which it came, my heart similarly sang at this excerpt from the most characteristic Orthodox prayer:
Lord cleans us from our sins. Master pardon our transgressions. Holy One, visit and heal our infirmities for Thy Name’s sake.
My Evangelical/Calvinist milieu seemingly knew nothing of the shadings of sin, transgression, and infirmity. But my heart knew. And that’s why the “conciliar view” of atonement resonates.
Finally, since I’ve been thinking a lot about Iain McGilchrist, I note that the left hemisphere would not like, even a little, “a single mystery of the economy” and would very much want to “divide the indivisible.”
I often hear people say, “I don’t need religion to be a good person,” but rarely does anyone consider the question, “What does it mean to be a good person?” Usually the response to that question is, “I’ve never killed anyone; I don’t steal.” Well, that does not define a good person; it merely describes someone who is not extraordinarily bad. Furthermore, there are saints who have committed those sins, and not only did they not remain wicked, they became holy. So, for Christianity, to be good does not mean never to have done bad things. Rather, it means to come into union with God through repentance.
Vassilios Papavassiliou, Thirty Steps to Heaven
(Side note: When I posted on social media that I had finished Thirty Steps to Heaven, my brother quipped “How’s the view from up there?”).
One can hardly resent such a clean shot.
…the deep structures of modern intellectual life are shaped largely by the works of non- or anti-Christians. Nineteenth-century theorists like Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Freud established the intellectual conventions of the modern university. Their legacy, for good and for ill, provides the framework in which Christians do their advanced studies. The same is true for the principal theorists of the twentieth century — Milton Friedman, Ferdinand Saussure, Ferdinand Braudel, E. P. Thompson, Thomas Kuhn, Jacques Derrida — none of whom is concerned about the Christian implications of his work; yet they have set the agenda for what goes on throughout the academy.
Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.
Christianity as amusement
I believe that I am not mistaken in saying that Christianity is a demanding and serious religion. When it is delivered as easy and amusing, it is another kind of religion altogether.
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
The Beatitudes, tell us the way blessedness works. I’ll take that over political “strength,” “force,” or “power” any day of the week, not just Sundays.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
What are we doing here? We’re reminding how it’s done. We’re putting forward what it should look like when a president brings his nation to armed military action. He explains the history, offers the evidence, interprets its meaning, outlines the plan.
You can’t take a nation to war without this rhetorical predicate.
Mr. Trump has failed to provide it. Now and then he announces things behind a podium, and there are regular responses to questions in press gaggles, where he reacts off the cuff. But nothing thought-through, no serious document making the case. And the public is never reassured.
We don’t even know, a month into Iran, why now. Iran has been the world’s fanatic irritant for almost 50 years. What is the plan?
This absence of formal seriousness is part of why the president’s popularity is falling.
If Donald Trump can’t do this, and his vice president can’t do it sincerely, maybe the secretary of state should step in?
While we’re giving advice, one imagines the Vatican has many excitable monsignors running the pontiff’s social-media accounts, and one suspects they are hyped to show the pope is giving rizz. But homilies, speeches, papers and encyclicals are better suited to great statements at great moments than buzzy posts on X.
Don’t do it the cheap way. You are the throne of Peter. Do it the serious way.
With apologies to Emerson, why is the left hemisphere in the saddle, riding mankind?
I think [the left hemisphere’s] success can be attributed to several things. First, it makes you powerful, and power is very seductive. Second, it offers very simple explanations, that are in their own terms convincing, because what doesn’t fit the plan is simply declared to be meaningless. … Third, the left hemisphere is also … the Berlusconi of the brain – the political heavyweight that controls the media. It does the speaking, constructs the arguments in its own favour. And finally, since the Industrial Revolution, we have constructed a world around us externally that is the image of the world the left hemisphere has made internally.
Every of those four points distills hundreds of pages from McGilchrist’s very much larger works. But because of some other things I read recently that haunt me, the final one has created one of my exciting moments where I (silently) exult “Oh! That meshes with these other points! I’ve almost got it now: the grand unified theory of how everything works!”
Here’s one of the other thing I read:
We are discovering, for example, that AI is especially adept at displacing or, from the techno-optimist’s perspective, liberating us from human labour in contexts wherein humans had already conformed, willfully or otherwise, to the pattern of a machine. Build a techno-social system which demands that humans act like machines and it turns out that machines can eventually be made to displace humans with relative ease.
I read this less than a week ago, but it haunts me and keeps popping up in my head as I read things like, say, McGilchrist’s final point about “the image of the world the left hemisphere has made internally,”
The other thing I read (actually, heard and transcribed) was this:
Unfortunately, reason on its own will lead you astray very, very quickly …
People detect from what I wrote in The Master and His Emissary that I am not a huge admirer of the [left-hemisphere inspired] Reformation … Unfortunately, it brought with it a kind of headstrong view that ‘now we’re in the clear. Everything must be made explicit. The word triumphs over the image’ and so on. …
The trouble with the left hemisphere is … it tends to be headstrong. It tends to think it knows far more than it does.
My frustration with headstrong Protestants briefly led me off into thinking that, the Reformation having been midwifed by the left hemisphere, Protestants today remain too left-hemispheric.
I still think so, but then I realized that Protestantism never sits still — that the charismatic renewal of the 60s and 70s, and the happy-clappy guitar-and-drum assemblies of today, just might be human beings wittingly or unwittingly trying to counter-balance their left hemispheres.
I have learned to prefer icons, incense, fasting, feasting, eucharist and apophaticism generally to such ersatz, but à chacûn son gout.
More reasons to discipline yourself to spend more time attending to your world in a right-hemispheric way.
Learning to attend in an LLM world
Rules produce compliance. Distinctions produce discernment. Digital platforms are engineered to collapse that discernment. They optimize for engagement, for seamlessness, and for frictionless fulfillment. The tech arrives dressed as toys.
In an operating room, no one bans scalpels. Nor does a surgeon treat them casually. Instead, there’s a ritual: scrubbing in. The scrub-in isn’t merely about hygiene. It’s a cognitive threshold. It marks a passage from ordinary space to consequential space by establishing the sterile field: a bounded space of deliberate intervention where carelessness is as much the enemy as contamination. It means recognizing that environments carry risks and risks require care ….
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[S]tudents don’t need prohibitions enforced by administrations, but disciplined practices modeled by adults; they need to learn to “scrub in” for the classroom. That means leaving things behind as well as bringing things in, not only in terms of the materials students bring to class but also the attitudes and sense of purpose as well.
In my own classes, this can be as simple as examining the threshold. At the start of a session, I might pull a trick from my meditation or yoga practice and say, as we’re opening our computers, that I know how tempting it is to check our carts, our socials, our text messages. I feel the pull, too. But for the next ninety minutes, we’re scrubbing in. Laptops are for notes and the text. Phones are face down. If your attention drifts, notice it. Bring yourself back. The drift isn’t failure. Noticing it is the lesson, and it’s what experts do.
My opening comments matter because they reframe distraction not as transgression but as training. Students begin to understand that governing their own attention is part of their education, not a prerequisite for it.
Neuman’s students are lucky to have such a thoughtful teacher, and he’s lucky to have students with the seriousness not to take governing their attention as a total joke.
Nick Catoggio suspects that Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance will both get straight-armed in 2028:
From monarchies to the mafia, outfits that follow preliberal norms place special value on familial relationships. For one thing, family members are (somewhat) less likely to betray each other than non-relations are, a valuable trait for those operating in cutthroat kill-or-be-killed cultures. And because preliberalism is all about leveraging power for one’s personal advantage, it stands to reason that those who rise to the top would want that power to be hereditary. If you can’t rule forever, the next best thing is ensuring that your gene pool does.
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You don’t need a complicated triple-bank-shot theory to explain why the president’s son has the inside track. It’s this simple: Because the Republican Party is a moronic personality cult, Donald Trump effectively has the power to pick his own successor. Whomever he endorses will be a prohibitive favorite among his slavishly loyal supporters.
Such is the power of the Trump name on the right, as Last notes, that Junior is already polling in second place in early 2028 primary polls, slightly ahead of Secretary of State Marco Rubio. It’s a distant second behind Vance, sure, but so what? The vice president is coasting on his high profile and the widespread assumption that he’s Donald Trump’s choice for heir apparent. If that were to change—if Junior were to take a more visible political role after the midterms and his father were to begin sounding iffy on Vance—the polling would change as well. Dramatically.
Nick Catoggio, The Son Also Rises, speculating about Donald Jr. in 2028.
Why would a smart young conservative work for Trump?
After January 6, after Trump’s endless threats of “retribution” during the campaign, after multiple federal indictments, there are only two reasons a smart young conservative should want to work for him.
One: Said conservative is a sociopath who will, in the name of getting ahead, light the Constitution on fire if Donald Trump tells him or her to. Two: Said conservative is a patriot who fears that others will light the Constitution on fire if Trump tells him or her to and they want to be in the room to stop it when it happens. Ethical Republicans must fill vacant positions if only to block unethical ones from filling them instead.
Why I’d like for the GOP to lose the Senate this Fall
In my first draft of this sub-post, I indulged in some political wool-gathering about my current personal political proclivities. I decided to spare the world from slop that doubtless is more fascinating to me than it’s likely to be to anyone else.
But one thing stood out as worthy of publication:
Of course, the Supreme Court poses the highest stakes of all. The two oldest justices are Trump’s most reliable stalwarts, Clarence Thomas, 77, and Samuel Alito, 76. CBS News reports that neither plans to retire in 2026, but that hasn’t stopped Trump from cajoling them to step aside.
I hope neither Alito nor Thomas succumbs to Trump’s cajoling. Next, I don’t want either justice to die between this Fall’s election and Inauguration Day 2028, but if that should happen, I’d want Democrats in control of the Senate to force Trump into nominating someone well-enough qualified to gain a few Democrat votes for confirmation.
I don’t think we have any political hacks on the Court currently — neither Republican nor Democrat — but with Republicans in control of the Senate, Trump could nominate Emil Bove or John Eastman or the winner of the Kentucky Derby (the equine, not the jockey) and the Senate would confirm him (the filibuster for SCOTUS justices having been abolished). Having already trashed the Department of Justice with political hacks, putting political hacks on SCOTUS would set us back years further in the steps to post-Trump recovery.
Will Trump shoot himself in the foot again?
[I]t was strange to watch a man of Musk’s capacities burn political capital and the energy of his apprentices just to discover that the real money is in big popular entitlements that can’t be cut by presidential fiat.
Then, in a different key, Musk decided to do it again with the SAVE America Act, embracing (and hyping, with a strong dose of paranoia) the conceit that elections are rigged against Republicans because some vast number of noncitizens are casting illegal votes.
We have years of investigations by Republicanadministrations and years of evidence from voter ID laws to indicate that this is not the case. There are sound reasons to think that ID requirements don’t have the dramatic vote-suppressing effects alleged by left-wing critics. But neither do they have the election-protecting effects promised by their conservative champions. Voter fraud is just not an important reason that Republicans lose elections. (Moreover, now that the Republican coalition includes more low-propensity and downscale voters, any effect of ID requirements might actually cut against conservative turnout.)
Be honest. Do not say anything about yourself or others that you know is false. Absolutely refuse to let your mind be colonized. The first crazy thing someone asks you to believe or to profess, refuse. If you can, do so out loud. There is a good chance it will inspire others to speak up, too.
Jonathan Dupiton, host of the Rich and Unemployed podcast, was sentenced to seven years in federal prison for a $3.8 million unemployment fraud scheme. Turns out the secret to being rich and unemployed is crime. (TMD)
All material culture is an instantiation of ideas. But it’s easier to see ideas-in-things with a knowing, irony-laden look at the past. Putting babies on display in incubators, especially because they were ones unlikely to survive, now strikes us as abhorrent. We feel confident in seeing its errors and therefore reassured by our good judgment. It’s much harder to see what’s unfolding right in front of us. (Sara Hendren, Pattern Recognition)
Be it noted, please!, that NATO nations pledge to help defend countries attacked from outside NATO. It does not oblige anyone to help Donald Trump prosecute an offensive war against Iran.
No need to spend any money on a hot water heater, as hot water doesn’t need heating. Now, if we’re talking a water heater, different story (yes, I’m THAT GUY). (Social media poster, name withheld by me.)
A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves. (Edward Murrow)
I confess, however, that I am not myself very much concerned with the question of influence, or with those publicists who have impressed their names upon the public by catching the morning tide and rowing very fast in the direction in which the current was flowing; but rather that there should always be a few writers preoccupied in penetrating to the core of the matter, in trying to arrive at the truth and to set it forth, without too much hope, without ambition to alter the immediate course of affairs, and without being downcast or defeated when nothing appears to ensue.
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.
Once we face the low level of Caesarism and how unchoiceworthy it is, we can begin to understand the danger that follows from normalizing public discussion of it as a possibility and option. Doing so “means encouraging dangerous men to confuse the issue by bringing about a state of affairs in which the common good requires the establishment of their absolute rule” (emphasis added). In other words, ambitious political actors will seek to create by their actions the very chaotic conditions that justify their own seizure of postconstitutional rule. This is a form of right-wing accelerationism.
I’m always looking for explanations for why 77 million Americans voted for Donald Trump even after January 6. (Sometimes, I hallucinate a reason, but when the fever breaks it goes away and the bafflement returns.)
I don’t think that the desirability of a “red Caesar” motivated voters consciously. I see it more as a way for MAGA intellectuals (e.g., Michael Anton, John Eastman and other Claremonsters), to try, try again to justify their support. It reminds me of how progressive intellectuals kept trying (and invariably failing), for almost five decades, to re-write Roe v. Wade so as to make it coherent.
As a disciple of Leo Strauss, the muse of Claremont, Damon Linker takes personal offense.
History Rhymes
They didn’t actively collaborate, but by declining to resist and going along with the government, they enabled the occupation. I have seen many examples, in the past decade, of journalists and historians using historical encounters with fascism and authoritarianism to comment on the present moment in the United States. Often, these parallels are forced; the situation in the U.S. is a far cry from Nazi-occupied Europe. But Ophuls’s film is illuminating precisely because its lessons about complicity apply to evil and corruption of all kinds.
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Restoring democracy required opponents of fascism—nationalists, republicans, and Communists—to work together despite serious misgivings about one another’s views. Purity tests had to wait until the war was over.
I’ve certainly made my opposition to Trump obvious in my writings, but I think it’s time to drop my purity tests and attend the next “No Kings” event in town.
Piling up hoards of money
I see no special heroism in accumulating money, particularly if, in addition, the person is foolish enough to not even try to derive any tangible benefit from the wealth (aside from the pleasure of regularly counting the beans). I have no large desire to sacrifice much of my personal habits, intellectual pleasures, and personal standards in order to become a billionaire like Warren Buffett, and I certainly do not see the point of becoming one if I were to adopt Spartan (even miserly) habits and live in my starter house. Something about the praise lavished upon him for living in austerity while being so rich escapes me; if austerity is the end, he should become a monk or a social worker—we should remember that becoming rich is a purely selfish act, not a social one.
No longer was it uncommon, as in the time of James Fenimore Cooper, to see a husband and wife come aboard with three or four young children, as well as a servant or two. Among the earliest of such couples were Robert and Katherine Cassatt of Pennsylvania, who in the summer of 1851 embarked on an extended sojourn abroad, stopping first in London before moving on to Paris with their three young children, Alexander, Lydia, and Mary. In Paris they settled in for an extended stay at the Hôtel Continental, and seven-year-old Mary was to remember the day of Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état the rest of her life. It would also be said that her interest in painting began then, which would appear to make her the youngest American thus far to have come under the spell of the arts in Paris.
Pizzagate lost relevance over time, usurped by marginally less insane conspiracy theories about rigged elections and the “deep state.” So it felt newsy when J.D. Vance told a Turning Point USA crowd last Tuesday that mentions of pizza and grape soda in some of the Jeffrey Epstein files had piqued his interest. “I remember it sounding like the Pizzagate conspiracy theory,” he marveled at the language. “We should absolutely investigate.”
That was interesting for two reasons.
First, at a moment when swing voters and even certain “America First” postliberals are experiencing buyer’s remorse, it was useful of the VP to remind the country that Donald Trump’s movement has always been powered by febrile cranks and grifting sociopaths keen to monetize their paranoia.
Second, Turning Point USA is becoming the Zelig of febrile crankery and grifting sociopathy in the 2020s. (And no, that was not Catoggio’s second reason.)
He has put down the mighty and exalted the humble
10. The veneer of Wall Street’s longstanding assertion — that A.I. will enhance human work not replace it — is rapidly peeling away, as evidenced by the current quarterly earnings season. JPMorgan Chase, Citi, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo racked up $47 billion in collective profits, up 18 percent, while shedding 15,000 employees. All of them credited A.I. to some degree with helping cut jobs and automate work in areas ranging from the so-called back office, where tens of thousands of employees fill out paperwork to comply with various laws and regulations, to the front office, where seven-figure salaried professionals put together complicated financial transactions for corporate clients. (Source: nytimes.com)
Digital Planet, my research center at Tufts University, recently released the American AI Jobs Risk Index, assessing vulnerabilities across 784 occupations. The economics are striking: 9.3 million jobs and $757 billion in annual income are at risk within five years, rising to 19.5 million jobs and $1.5 trillion if AI adoption accelerates. But the more consequential finding is the geography of the displacement. The occupations most at risk are concentrated in the “wired belts”: regions that have thrived on data, content and cognitive work. These areas may well become the new rust belts, stretching from the familiar tech hubs of Silicon Valley, Boston and New York to Philadelphia, Atlanta and Phoenix. Suburban knowledge corridors surrounding major US swing-state cities rank among America’s most vulnerable. (Sources: ft.com, digitalplanet.tufts.edu, fletcher.tufts.edu)
Tuesday, I groped for a half-remembered poem, and finally consulted the oracle, Claude AI:
I’m trying to recall a poem, with a woman author, that counsels against the party of certainty and for the party of awe. Can you help.
Claude went through iterative searches, fixated on my “party of certainty” and “party of awe” phrasings.
It came up dry but offered this:
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A few other possibilities worth considering:
Mary Oliver, who consistently urges readers toward wonder over certainty in the natural world Lisel Mueller, whose poem “Alive Together” meditates on contingency and astonishment Naomi Shihab Nye, who writes about wonder and humility
Mary Oliver rang a bell for me, and I told Claude so.
” Mysteries, Yes” seems like a very strong candidate — it’s directly about marveling at mystery rather than demanding answers. Let me fetch the full text.
(Me:) I believe this is the one
(Claude) — “Mysteries, Yes” by Mary Oliver. It maps perfectly onto what you described. The poem opens by declaring that we live with mysteries too marvelous to be understood, and closes with this counsel:
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.
Those were exactly the lines I half-remembered. I told Claude so.
Okay. This is why I don’t shun AI. But then Claude gave me strokes:
[Y]our summary of it — “the party of certainty versus the party of awe” — is honestly a more memorable distillation of its argument than most critical descriptions I’ve seen. It captures exactly what Oliver is doing in those final two stanzas.
I think Claude likes me! Is it any wonder that people anthropomorphize, and some even have AI girlfriends or boyfriends?
I liked “Project Hail Mary” until I didn’t, couldn’t, wanted to get on with my life, wanted to hit the men’s room, wanted to hit whoever had edited (or, rather, failed to edit) this needlessly epic adventure …
It’s as if Hollywood is punking us. How else to explain stretching a Tom Cruise stunt-a-thon to two hours and 43 minutes and then calling it “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One”? The italics are mine; read them as a primal scream. “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning” lasts two hours and 49 minutes. It’s supposedly the end of impossible missions, but nothing ends anymore. By the current illogic of interminable narratives, there will surely be a “Mission: Impossible — One More Reckoning for the Road,” and it will be longer than the audiobook of “Middlemarch.” Cruise’s first “Mission: Impossible,” from 1996, is one hour and 50 minutes.
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Explanations vary. Many Hollywood executives and moviemakers apparently believe that if you’re going to lure people out of their homes and away from their smaller screens to the communal experience of the multiplex — and if you’re also going to ask them to fork over roughly $30 for a ticket, popcorn and a soft drink — you better promise them a real event, even a spectacle, something with a sense of amplitude. That means three hours and one minute of “Avengers: Endgame,” three hours and 12 minutes of “Avatar: The Way of Water” and three hours and 17 minutes of “Avatar: Fire and Ash.” (Beware the colon movies — or at least make sure you haven’t planned anything else that day.)
Having just finished reading Middlemarch a few weeks ago, that line about Middlemarch busted me up.
Prequel
From today’s by Judge George C. Hanks, Jr. (S.D. Tex.) in Patel v. Figliuzzi, which stemmed from his exchange on MSNC’s Morning Joe with defendant Cesare Frank Figliuzzi, Jr., “the former assistant director for counterintelligence at the FBI”:
Host: “So, Frank, let’s turn to FBI Director Kash Patel, who has sort of taken a surprisingly backseat role—at least to this point, in the first 102 or 103 days, wherever we are right now. What do you make of that, that he’s just been a little less visible than I think a lot of people and Trump observers expected him to be?”
Figliuzzi: “Yeah, well, reportedly, he’s been visible at nightclubs far more than he has been on the seventh floor of the Hoover building. And there are reports that daily briefings to him have been changed from every day to maybe twice weekly. So this is both a blessing and a curse, because if he’s really trying to run things without any experience level, things could be bad. If he’s not plugged in, things could be bad, but he’s allowing agents to run things. So we don’t know where this is going.”
Patel claimed the “been visible at nightclubs far more than he has been on the seventh floor of the Hoover building” was actionable defamation, but the court found that it was nonactionable rhetorical hyperbole instead:
“Rhetorical hyperbole” is a subset of opinion, which Texas courts have “defined as extravagant exaggeration that is employed for rhetorical effect.” “Statements that would be perceived by the audience as ‘rhetorical hyperbole’ do not constitute defamation.” In this way, Texas law protects “statements that cannot reasonably be interpreted as stating actual facts about an individual.” “Whether an utterance is … rhetorical hyperbole turns not on what the speaker intended but what a reasonable person would believe and presents as a question of law for the court to decide.”
I didn’t watch any of the beauty pageants he bought so he could talk to cute girls and they’d have to listen (and could walk through dressing rooms when they were half-naked).
I didn’t watch any of his reality TV or gladiator spectacles.
Because I hadn’t followed him at all, I didn’t know he was a sexual predator (serial adulterer, yes) or a chronic liar (I’m not going to soften it by calling it “bullshitting”). I was sort of aware that he was incompetent enough to have bankrupted a casino (!) and other businesses.
I was alarmed when my former major party gave him the nomination. (I wish we could go back to smoke-filled rooms instead of rage-filled primary voters.) I opposed him as soon as he started dehumanizing people on the campaign trail. I was incredulous when he won the 2016 general election. I was not reassured when he assumed office by forcing his press secretary, Sean Spicer, to begin the gaslighting immediately. I was mildly reassured when he surrounded himself with pros who became the grownups in his room. I was pleasantly surprised when he honored his pledge about SCOTUS nominees.
This narrative is getting tedious, so I’ll cut to the chase: I ream out Trump and the GOP because I once was a Republican, and I feel their betrayal even though I repudiated the party in 2005. I wish I could ignore Trump, a toxic narcissist, but he very deliberately commits daily outrages to keep attention on himself, and fool though he be, as POTUS he is a very consequential fool.
I rarely ream out the Democrats because I have no stake in them, present or historic.
I have never even been able to consider Trump the lesser evil candidate because the Democrats aren’t actually demons and with them I’d at least be confident that there would still be elections in four years. Nevertheless, I haven’t voted for a Democrat for President since 1972.
My state is very red, and my half-hearted blue vote won’t change that. So I vote for the Christian Democrats.
Trump’s damage to the nation (and to the GOP) will not be repaired in my lifetime, nor (probably) in my son’s lifetime. Maybe during my grandchildren’s lives.
I was a conscientious objector and I’m close to pacifist. I won’t take up arms. But I will protest in the ways my conscience allows, and this blog has been one of those ways.
Shorts
[T]he nuclear question had been resolved peacefully by the JCPOA before Trump tore it up, and any remaining serious nuclear threat had been “obliterated” last year …. (Andrew Sullivan)
President Trump has been rampaging around the globe like Grendel at dinner time, a rapacious, feral creature. Who could stand up to him? (Maureen Dowd. The answer is “Pope Bob.”)
Himmler quite aptly defined the SS member as the new type of man who under no circumstances will ever do “a thing for its own sake.” (Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism)
For a variety of reasons, in recent decades the rate of profit to be made by producing goods has fallen below the rate of profit to be made through finance. (William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry)
Books are for people who wish they were somewhere else. (Mark Twain)
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.
It seems odd to open a Sunday post with a quote from a neuroscientist philosopher who has not yet found himself able to profess forthrightly any active Christian faith. If and when he does, it almost certainly will be Orthodox, as I believe he himself once acknowledged.
I open with it nonetheless because it … well, I hope you’ll see:
Unfortunately, reason on its own will lead you astray very, very quickly …
People detect from what I wrote in The Master and His Emissary that I am not a huge admirer of the [left-hemisphere inspired] Reformation … Unfortunately, it brought with it a kind of headstrong view that ‘now we’re in the clear. Everything must be made explicit. The word triumphs over the image’ and so on. …
The trouble with the left hemisphere is … it tends to be headstrong. It tends to think it knows far more than it does.
I expect to chew on this for a long while, hoping to digest it and build some new intellectual tissue with it, so that I think by it rather than about it.
Attention is not just receptive, but actively creative of the world we inhabit. How we attend makes all the difference to the world we experience. And nowadays in the West we generally attend in a rather unusual way: governed by the narrowly focussed, target-driven left hemisphere of the brain.
Forget everything you thought you knew about the difference between the hemispheres, because it will be largely wrong. It is not what each hemisphere does – they are both involved in everything – but how it does it, that matters. And the prime difference between the brain hemispheres is the manner in which they attend. For reasons of survival we need one hemisphere (in humans and many animals, the left) to pay narrow attention to detail, to grab hold of things we need, while the other, the right, keeps an eye out for everything else. The result is that one hemisphere is good at utilising the world, the other better at understanding it.
Absent, present, detached, engaged, alienated, empathic, broad or narrow, sustained or piecemeal, attention has the power to alter whatever it meets. The play of attention can both create and destroy, but it never leaves its object unchanged. How you attend to something – or don’t attend to it – matters a very great deal. This book helps you to see what it is you may have been trained by our very unusual culture not to see.
The extent to which Protestantism neglects to “attend” to the Christian Gospel with the right hemisphere not only makes it “headstrong,” as McGilchrist has it, but oblivious to much that is precious and edifying.
Reductionism
Weber clearly thought that modern people are disenchanted because they believe that, in principle, a scientific explanation can be given for natural phenomena, with no need for recourse to magical means to invoke spirits or gods. As an explanation of the natural world, Weber thought that science was replacing religion, and empirical fact was replacing belief.
William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry.
(Note that “scientific explanation” is fundamentally a left-hemisphere explanation.)
Anti-Institutional
The American evangelical tradition may not be as “liberal,” in the nineteenth-century or classical meaning of the term, as it sounds, but the focus on individual action — sans church, sans family, sans social structures of whatever sort — has predominated since the days of Whitefield. The enduring contribution to evangelicalism of the republicanism of the Revolutionary era was the undermining of hereditary trust in institutions. The enduring contribution of the Great Awakenings in the colonial and early national periods was to substitute the voluntary society for the church.
Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.
Many Americans would read this and say “Damn right! Institutions just get between me-and-Jesus!”
I intend it as an indictment. One might define the offense as Headstrongness.
Institutional failures in my mind are outweighed by personal failures. An institutional Church (at least one of them, anyway) is a near-infinitely safer guide to spiritual health than oneself is.
Barmen Declaration
Jesus Christ, as he is attested for us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death. We reject the false doctrine, as though the Church could and would have to acknowledge as a source of its proclamation, apart from and besides this one Word of God, still other events and powers, figures and truths, as God’s revelation.
Karl Barth, The Barmen Declaration (Germany, 1934), quoted by Stanley Hauerwas in Resident Aliens.
The centuries succeeding that day in 1054 have yielded two very different visions of what it means to be truly Christian, what it means to be the Church. These differences are not only in terms of mindset and vision, but also in core doctrines that are regarded as central to salvation itself.
Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick, Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy, (“that day in 1054” being the conventional dating of the Great Schism, the separation of the Patriarch of Rome (i.e., now the modern Pope) from the rest of the Church).
Step in the right direction?
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.)
It is sinful to ascribe to God the characteristic features of fallen man by alleging, for example, that God is angry and vengeful, and therefore He must be propitiated and appeased. Such an attitude wants to make it appear that it is God Who needs curing, and not man. But this is sacrilegious. The sinful man, who is characterized by egoism and arrogance, is offended. We cannot say that God is offended. . . . Consequently, sin is not an insult to God, Who must be cured, but our own illness, and therefore we need to be cured
Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox
Everybody’s got their schtick
Today’s leading Christian personalities podcast, YouTube, Tweet/X, TikTok, Instagram and exert their presence through every form of social media. The audience is less national. There may never be another Billy Graham about whom everybody knows. Today’s influencers may have millions following them but are typically unknown outside their niche.
Everybody, Christian or not, is increasingly siloed. We self-collate, listen to and watch those who entertain us and typically tell us what we want to hear. Of course, the most popular influencers are usually provocative, outrageous, extremist, often hateful. The cerebral, thoughtful, reflective and courteous are less captivating.
[Megan] Basham, like all successful influencers, has her schtick. Her Shepherds for Sale targets evangelicals who supposedly have betrayed conservative Christianity in favor of leftist dollars or secular approval. Her tweets continue this theme and offer a robust MAGA Christian perspective, hammering non-MAGA Christians as weak sisters or worse. Every day is a new cosmic drama. In this regard, she is very talented.
Basham has obsessively targeted so many evangelicals for literally selling out, mostly implausibly, that I suspect projection of her own financial motivations.
Nominalism, Realism, Human Rights
Most menacing of all was the United Nations. Established in the aftermath of the Second World War, its delegates had proclaimed a Universal Declaration of Human Rights. To be a Muslim, though, was to know that humans did not have rights. There was no natural law in Islam. There were only laws authored by God.
Tom Holland, Dominion.
Preliminary research suggests that the absoluteness of Holland’s indictment is unwarranted — that things are a little more complicated than “humans [do] not have rights.” There’s also more than a grain of truth to it.
There are, sadly, sectarian Christianities who come close to this. You can get to that position from Christianish premises filtered through philosophical nominalism.
An hypothesis
I quoted a few days ago: Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion. (Francis Bacon via Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions).
Hypothesis: the works in the spiritual realm, too. Thus I, a Calvinist, was more open to Orthodoxy than some “spiritual-but-not-religious” addlepate.
IVF
One of my unpopular opinions is that there’s something dodgy about IVF. Thoughtful Protestant Matthew Lee Anderson makes The Biblical Case Against IVF.
I’m not going to try to anticipate and rebut any reaction that my position is cruel. I just wanted to drive a stake in the ground as a memorial against the Technological Imperative. Not all of us have decided that if something is inevitable, we should relax and enjoy it.
The Beatitudes, tell us the way blessedness works. I’ll take that over political “strength,” “force,” or “power” any day of the week, not just Sundays.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
This oughta go in Frank Bruni’s “Love of Sentences”
“I Feel So Sorry for My A.I. Sunglasses.” Sam Anderson writes a wonderful little review of his fancy Meta glasses: “Look, it would be easy to dunk on my very expensive, staggeringly incompetent sunglasses. Critiquing A.I. these days is like shooting fish in a barrel — and I mean poorly animated fish that keep sprouting human fingers inside a barrel that, as soon as you ask it a question or two, reveals itself to be a Nazi. Meta is investing heavily to promote its new product (a Super Bowl ad starring Spike Lee, a brick-and-mortar store on Fifth Avenue), which made me curious to take a peek through the eyes of the future. Yet A.I. glasses also feel so clearly unnecessary, so easily adaptable for malevolent ends. I was perfectly ready to hate them. Instead, very quickly, I started to feel sorry for my sunglasses. They were like a kid who hasn’t done any of the reading but keeps being called on in class — and who also can’t make friends, because all of his classmates think he’s a spy.”
It’s not so much that I’m obsessed with AI as it is that the people I read with pleasure currently are obsessed with it.
How very, very ABA
The Wall Street Journal reveals/reminds that the American Bar Association has a DEI requirement for accreditation (and that ABA Accreditation is all but mandatory for a law school’s success).
It wasn’t this issue that caused me to drop ABA membership early in my law practice, but another where the bien pensants “think” one way, I another. The power levers in the ABA are, and long have been, controlled by people who feel like space aliens to me, and who probably think I’m a troglodyte.
Populist lessons
The lesson, as I see it, is that populism can never deliver on its fantastic promises: to insulate a national economy from the global one, while maintaining prosperity; to represent the will of the people, while persecuting a large share of the people who oppose populist policies; to champion “democracy” through illiberal means; to pretend you’re speaking for the forgotten man as you grow fat, rich, and arrogant in power. By the way, that’s as true of left-wing populism as it is of the populism of the right. As someone with some family ties to Hungary, I’m just glad to see Orban gone.
Pope Leo is not likely to have the honor of going the way of my patron saint, Thomas Becket, that “turbulent priest” …
No, these are not those kinds of times. Pope Leo only has the American president, an illiterate and a degenerate, to snipe at him on social media. Trump is what you’d get if you’d given Benito Mussolini a frontal lobotomy and a double orchiectomy. He will order and exult in the mass murder of seagoing South Americans whose names nobody knows, but whatever else he may have in common with late-life King Henry VIII, the American president is not likely to make any martyrs in the classical sense.
…
One here recalls the famous words of Francis Cardinal George:
I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history.
Prophetic? I think so–properly understood.
The role of the prophet is one of the most misunderstood aspects of Christianity. A prophet may or may not foretell future events, but making predictions is not the prophet’s main business—his business very often is the here and now. The prophet is a kind of public prosecutor, speaking in an inspired way to the shortcomings of the people, of the state, and, especially, of government and religious leaders ….
I stumbled onto a piece by L.M. Sacasas (I think his intimates call him Michael; I’m not his intimate) that warrants many “shorts” of its own:
[T]he narrative of technological inevitability … frames the development of technology as a deterministic process to which human beings have no choice but to adapt, and to do so on the terms dictated by the emerging technological apparatus.
[T]he victors write the history, in technology as in war, and the technological “paths not taken” are often suppressed or ignored.
The narrative is useful precisely to the degree that it is the rhetorical equivalent of washing one’s hands in the face of events you have the power to sway but would rather not.
Anyone claiming to know the future is just trying to own it.
We must at least entertain the possibility that the appropriate response to certain technologies at certain times is simply outright refusal. We do not need to water down our conviction with a myriad of qualifiers about how there are undoubtedly good and proper uses.
AI in its present mode can be understood as a fundamentally conservative rather than radically disruptive force to the degree that its function is to preserve modernity’s core commitments to scale, efficiency, rationality, control, and prediction.
[W]e continue to reap the consequences of a failure to address the problems of growth and complexity in a manner that would serve the human person and human communities.
We are discovering … that AI is especially adept at displacing or, from the techno-optimist’s perspective, liberating us from human labour in contexts wherein humans had already conformed, willfully or otherwise, to the pattern of a machine. Build a techno-social system which demands that humans act like machines and it turns out that machines can eventually be made to displace humans with relative ease. (That last, bolded, sentence was a pull-quote and very apt.)
[W]e are operating with a “human of the gaps” model when we try to locate the essence of the human creature by pointing to what cannot yet be accomplished by a machine, whether these be matters of physical prowess, cognitive ability, or creativity. Such an approach to the human is misguided, just as it was when it was applied to God.
Without suggesting that this is an exhaustive and definitive account of the human person, I would invite us to consider the possibility that what is distinctive about the human should be sought in the quality of our capacity to respond to our Creator, the Alpha and Omega of our existence.
[O]ur flourishing is conditioned not so much on the accomplishment of certain feats or tasks, many of which, in any case, exclude the youngest and oldest and most vulnerable among us. Rather, it is conditioned on our capacity to respond to the call of God on us as unique individuals made in his image and thus made to resonate with his presence as it is manifest to us throughout creation.
“[S]tillness … is not mere soundlessness or a dead muteness; it means, rather, that the soul’s power, as real, of responding to the real … has not yet descended into words.” (Quoting Josef Pieper, Leisure As the Basis of Culture)
This is one to return to periodically until I’ve modified my DNA with it or found a fallacy and dumped it. I want to make sure I’m not acting like a machine.
Shorts (more generally)
Pride grows in the human heart like lard on a pig. (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)
It was once the useful role of conservatives to stand athwart declining moral standards, yelling “Stop”. They lost whatever right they had to play that role when they got behind Trump. (Bret Stephens)
The messianic iconography of Mr. Trump’s AI-generated image was more lavish than that which the North Korean regime uses to promote the cult of Kim Jong Un. (J Budziszewski)
I confess, however, that I am not myself very much concerned with the question of influence, or with those publicists who have impressed their names upon the public by catching the morning tide and rowing very fast in the direction in which the current was flowing; but rather that there should always be a few writers preoccupied in penetrating to the core of the matter, in trying to arrive at the truth and to set it forth, without too much hope, without ambition to alter the immediate course of affairs, and without being downcast or defeated when nothing appears to ensue.
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.
When you go see an argument, you’ve been on the opposite side, you know that this court is an extremely well-prepared court, that the justices have read the briefs, that the justices know the case. And I think our conversation in conference reflects that. It’s substantive. It’s a conversation that only people who have really done the reading and done the thinking could have. And again, I think if you were a fly on the wall, you would be pretty proud of the institution.
Yesterday was the release date of Sarah Isgur’s first book, Last Branch Standing.
Abandoning the modern altars
When Hurricane Hugo tore through Charleston in 1989, damaging 80% of the city’s homes and businesses, local leaders discovered that there were not enough traditional artisans in the nation, let alone the state, to make necessary repairs to historic properties. Industrialization, combined with a cultural shift toward white-collar work, had almost entirely erased the craft of building. As a result, efforts to reconstruct the city were delayed. Desperate homeowners commissioned tradesmen from outside the United States or otherwise relied on contractors who used modern construction methods that undermined the historic integrity of the buildings.
I’m handy (or at least used to be) at fixing things, but not “artistic,” so I don’t know what a young me would have made of the ACBA, which seems to require artistry in many or most of the crafts it teaches. Old me can hardly get enough of it. Maybe we’re repenting after a long haul of worshipping at the altars of growth and efficiency.
It’s over
Damon Linker, “raised as a secular Jew deeply attached to the state of Israel,” thinks that the “days when a unification of American and Israeli interests was even partially convincing are over and done”:
On Twitter/X, I’ve taken to calling events over the past five weeks Israel’s fantasy war. What I mean is that Israel appears to have concluded that the best (or only) way for it to protect itself (“re-establish deterrence”) is to “settle all family business” in the manner of Michael Corleone knocking off the heads of the competing mafia crime families in a series of bloody assassinations, even if those actions kill a bunch of innocent bystanders as collateral damage. So they spent roughly two years flattening much of Gaza, killing untold tens of thousands of civilians in the process, with the goal of ending Hamas’ control of the territory. (Measured by that standard, the operation has been a failure, since a greatly weakened Hamas continues to govern those parts of the strip Israel does not directly occupy.) It pulled off an impressive operation in September 2024, simultaneously blowing up thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies used by members of Hezbollah across Lebanon. (Twelve people died and thousands were injured, but since then missiles have continued to bombard the north of Israel.) In the so-called 12-Day War between Israel and Iran last June, the U.S. contributed to bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities. (This was so unsuccessful, or insufficient, that the current, longer, and vastly more ruinous war apparently became necessary just eight months later. Or so the Netanyahu government insisted.)
This war—or this succession of wars—is a fantasy because it seeks to enact the longstanding dream of securing the conditions for Jewish safety and security through brute force and the infliction of suffering alone …
…
Israel today is a country lashing out in multiple directions in often murderous rage at its enemies.
That even includes the largely powerless Palestinians of the West Bank, who increasingly endure pogroms at the hands of settlers apparently intent on enacting a barbaric policy of slow-motion ethnic cleansing that will eventually make it possible to establish Greater Israel stretching from the river to the sea. (Yes, that’s the slogan advocates for a Palestinian state recite when they want to express a desire to wipe Israel off the map. When Israeli settlers direct it at Palestinians, the intent is no less genocidal.)
I have no particular horse in this race — yet, but I’m not sure my “having an opinion” matters much — but when someone like Linker counsels “divorce,” it carries some weight as an sort of declaration against interest.
The true scholar
Greek and Latin should not be taught in all schools; but it is important that those who by their natural disposition or their fortune are destined to cultivate letters or prepared to relish them, should find schools where a complete knowledge of ancient literature may be acquired, and where the true scholar may be formed.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Abandoned (not banned) Books
Christine Norvell at Front Porch Republic writes about Why We Abandon Books. It may be worth your while, but my abandonment tends these days to involve just one decision:
You are 77 years old, sir, with no guarantee of hitting even 78 let alone getting through hundreds of backlogged books. Forget sunk costs. Is this book really worth the X days it looks as if it will take, or should you cut your losses and move on?
I slogged through Middlemarch for 22 days because of the voice of the narrator (though I did like Dorothea and eventually decided that Will and Fred were okay; I never did figure out the Doctor).
I abandoned A Box of Matches, even though it was 2-3 days tops.
If I still have an unread David Bentley Hart, I’ll give it to the library “used” book sale without cracking it. Fool me once (The Beauty of the Infinite), shame on you. Fool me twice, nah.
I may get back to The Matter With Things, of which I’ve finished one major section, but I kinda feel like I’ve either gotten McGilchrist’s gist or else I need more time to digest what I’ve gotten.
Introducing the Gentlemanosphere
As noted, I’m a geezer, feeling the cold breath on my neck all too often. I tend to reject some new things, especially if they remind me somehow of fads in my lifetime, like, for a non-random instance, “servant leadership.”
And the Gentlemanosphere is new to me. And it did evoke a sigh of “oh, servant leadership again!” But I guess there probably is a need in every generation to counter idjits Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes with something more wholesome. So here’s a table and a link if you’re interested. I’m probably too old for this.
Aspect
Manosphere
Gentlemanosphere
Core Beliefs
Men should dominate socially and control women; traditional gender roles enforced strictly.
Men should protect, provide, procreate with kindness and strength; masculinity is positive and diverse.
View on Women
Women belong in traditional roles (e.g., kitchen); often hostile or dismissive toward women’s advancement.
Women’s advancement and men’s well-being are mutually reinforcing; equality supported alongside healthy masculinity.
Ideological Tone
Often aggressive, hostile, sometimes racist, antisemitic, and exclusionary.
Empathetic, inclusive, encourages emotional expression and community building.
Political Alignment
Far-right, reactionary, anti-feminist.
Centrist or mainstream; bipartisan engagement, policy-driven advocacy.
Prominent Figures
Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes, Myron Gaines
Scott Galloway, Richard Reeves, David French, Arthur Brooks, Chris Williamson, Jocko Willink
Approach to Masculinity
Defined by dominance signals: physical strength, control, aggression.
Defined by responsibility, emotional openness, personal growth, and legacy-building.
Communication Style
Provocative, confrontational, uses social media to spread ideology rapidly.
Thoughtful, gentle messaging; uses podcasts, books, mainstream media for nuanced discussion.
Target Audience
Young men attracted to clear dominance narratives and rebellion against modern social norms.
Boys and men seeking practical advice, emotional support, and sustainable self-improvement.
View on Male Struggles
Often blames external forces (feminism, society) but offers simplistic “take back control” solutions.
Recognizes complex causes of male struggles; advocates for empathy, new solutions beyond blame or pathologizing masculinity.
Gender Politics
Zero-sum: men’s gain seen as women’s loss; often opposes feminist progress.
Non-zero-sum: advancing men’s well-being promotes stronger families and societies benefiting all genders.
Cultural Impact
Polarizing; often results in backlash and social division.
Gaining mainstream attention; influencing policymakers and public discourse constructively.
Criticism Faced
Accused of promoting toxic masculinity, misogyny, extremism.
Criticized for being vague or “soft,” sometimes accused unfairly of aligning with far-right views.
Mental and Emotional Health
Often dismissive of emotional vulnerability; promotes toughness at all costs.
Encourages emotional expression and seeking help; supports mental health awareness for men.
Economic and Social Advice
Focuses on reclaiming traditional male roles; sometimes promotes controversial or harmful behavior (e.g., pickup artistry).
Emphasizes economic security, community building, responsible fatherhood, and healthy relationships.
Shorts
Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion. (Francis Bacon via Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions).
[I]t’s just not true that destroying a lot of Iranian bridges and power plants would kill Iranian civilization. It would do enormous economic and physical damage, to be sure. But it takes a real estate guy to think a civilization is no more than a collection of bridges and buildings. (Jonah Goldberg)
“I don’t know about you,” he wrote earlier this week, “but I think that if one of our war aims is to literally erase a civilization from the face of planet Earth, it probably qualifies as a ‘war,’ and that Congress, which has already signaled its willingness to spend lots of money on this, should have the decency to call it such, and give that dignity to our soldiers, sailors, and airmen. The people dying in this are dying in a war.” (Michael Brendan Dougherty via Jonah Goldberg)
I don’t play with betting markets, but if I did, I’d bet a tidy sum that Trump (with the help of J.D. Vance’s negotiating acumen) will deliver us a souped-up version of the Obama administration’s nuclear deal by a different name. Sort of like how Trump basically kept NAFTA in his first term but gave it a new name, we might get the JCPOA but rebranded as the MIRGA (Make Iran Great Again) deal. (Jonah Goldberg)
This post is kinda late because I was feasting until 7 hours ago and slept until after 8 am.
What do we know about God?
I believe that Christians make a serious mistake when we begin to speak first about God rather than first about Christ and His death on the Cross and resurrection from the dead. It is a mistake because it presumes we know something about God that is somehow “prior” to those events. We do not, or, if we think we do, we are mistaken. The death and resurrection of Christ are the alpha and the omega of God’s self-revelation to the world. Nothing in all of creation is extraneous or irrelevant to those events.
No one may mock another’s form of prayer. Extempore prayers and set prayers both reach the Throne if there is any spark of desire in the one praying that they do so. God is not a literary critic or a speech teacher. He does not grade our prayers. But it is for us to realize that there is great help available for us in our prayers. Spontaneity is impossible sooner or later; there only remains for us to choose which set of phrases we will make our own. The prayers of the church lead us into regions that, left to our own resources, we might never have imagined. Also, in this connection, it is worthwhile remembering that prayer is as much a matter of our learning to pray what we ought to pray, as it is expressing what we feel at given moments. The prayer of the church gives us great help here.
Tom Howard, Evangelical is Not Enough.
When, as a Reformed Elder, I occasionally had to lead worship in the Pastor’s absence, I unfailingly went to the Book of Common Prayer to structure the “Pastoral Prayer” for the morning. I did so because I didn’t want to lapse into “Father we just” (this) and “Father we just” (that), the faux fervency I heard too often.
I don’t know why it never occurred to me to use prayer books in my private prayers, but as I approached Orthodoxy, the Church’s prayers, in its Prayer Books, indeed taught me how to pray.
Gnosticism is insidious
Abigail Rine Favale echoed Mohler when she published an article in First Things in 2018 titled “Evangelical Gnosticism.” I teach in a great books program at an Evangelical university. Almost all students in the program are born-and-bred Christians of the nondenominational variety. A number of them have been both thoroughly churched and educated through Christian schools or home-schooling curricula. Yet an overwhelming majority of these students do not believe in a bodily resurrection. While they trust in an afterlife of eternal bliss with God, most of them assume this will be disembodied bliss, in which the soul is finally free of its “meat suit” (a term they fondly use). Upon reading Favale’s article, a Grove City professor said on Twitter, “I did not believe this was true of my students,” so he decided to poll them during class. He then announced, “I was floored (and dismayed) to discover the vast majority don’t believe in the bodily resurrection.”
Robin Phillips and Fr. Stephen De Young, Rediscovering the Good of Creation
Young, restless and …
Interesting observation from Julia Yost in the Washington Post: the blogosphere gave a relative edge to discursive Protestantism; TikTok and Instagram to liturgical Christianity. “Young, Restless and Reformed” giving way to “Young, Restless and Roman.”
Via the grapevine, I understand the Parish associated with the Roman Catholic chaplaincy at University of Illinois received 130 at Easter. My little Orthodox parish baptized five and chrismated three more. We have added the Paschal Troparion (Hymn) in Spanish as a result.
These dogs don’t hunt
Other influential myths also invite reevaluation: the memory of medieval Christendom as the “Dark Ages,” the decline narrative of the church’s “Constantinian fall,” or the dismissal of Christian orthodoxy as “Hellenized” by alien Greek philosophy.7 More work can and should be done on the legacy of these flawed narratives—notably, all reflecting anti-Catholic and antimedieval biases—in American history.
Paul Gutaker, The Old Faith in a New Nation (Epilogue)
Conundrum
Many evangelicals knew the Christian right had become deeply unpopular with most Americans and that evangelicals had become thoroughly identified with the Christian right.
Frances Fitzgerald, The Evangelicals.
The Beatitudes, tell us the way blessedness works. I’ll take that over political “strength,” “force,” or “power” any day of the week, not just Sundays.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
“You want to leave a place better than you found it,” he told me. And for a long time, he felt like he had.
But that was before LifePoint Health, one of the biggest rural-hospital chains in the country, saw his hospital as a distressed asset in need of saving through a ruthless search for efficiencies, and before executives at Apollo Global Management, a private-equity firm whose headquarters looms above the Plaza Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, began calling the shots. That was before Gose realized that, in the private-equity world, hospitals were just another widget, a tool to make money and nothing more.
These claims to lawless space are remarkably similar to those of the robber barons of an earlier century. Like the men at Google, the late-nineteenth-century titans claimed undefended territory for their own interests, declared the righteousness of their self-authorizing prerogatives, and defended their new capitalism from democracy at any cost. At least in the US case, we have been here before. Economic historians describe the dedication to lawlessness among the Gilded Age “robber barons” for whom Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism played the same role that Hayek, Jensen, and even Ayn Rand play for today’s digital barons.
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
Legalia
The hills worth dying on
Like any of its predecessors, the Trump administration appeals only a small number of losses in the lower courts and then takes an even smaller share—the cases it thinks it is most likely to win—to the Supreme Court. And how is that going? The Supreme Court has rejected Trump on tariffs and on domestic deployment of the National Guard, and it seems almost certain to reject the administration on birthright citizenship. The court has stymied the president’s efforts to purge the Federal Reserve and to deport people without due process under the Alien Enemies Act. Where the Trump administration’s top policy preferences have been in conflict with the law—as they often will be in a lawless administration—the Supreme Court has reliably sided with the law.
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The court has, indeed, emerged as the federal government’s preeminent conservative institution. That is not to say conservative in the sense of politically right-wing—the American right, currently in revolutionist mode, has ceased to be conservative in any meaningful sense, and the high court’s conservatism can be seen in its limiting of Donald Trump’s abuses and pretenses as clearly as anywhere. The Supreme Court, rather, is conservative in the sense of defending and fortifying the American constitutional order, which is what it is there to do. In anno Domini 2026, a branch of government that is content to simply try its best to do its job is as great a display of conservatism as a realistic American could hope to see.
The ramifications of the boldface observation above seems lost on the nihilists who want to tear down the courts as no more than political hacks in robes.
But I’m starting to think that “the cases it thinks it is most likely to win” misses something. Unless Trump has no competent legal advisers, I’m inclined to modify that to “the cases it thinks it is most likely to win or the hills it’s willing to die on.”
The stupid ideas that Trump is willing to defend all the way to SCOTUS probably have some kind of coherent common impulse behind them. If you connected the dots, I don’t think the picture would look much like the American I grew up in. We owe more to SCOTUS than the nihilists are willing to acknowledge.
An Aha! moment
I just learned, in the Advisory Opinions podcast’s discussion about the Supreme Court’s Chiles v. Salazar decision, that the legislative and other advocates of banning “conversion therapy” do not really have categorical “mounting evidence that conversion therapy is associated with increased depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, and suicide attempts.” Rather, “the lawyer for the state had to acknowledge that all of the studies that they were basing this on were aversive therapy, you know, electroshock therapy or other types of behavioral therapy, um, that were quite different.”
There was no evidence that mere counseling (“talk therapy”) about sexual orientation was harmful, and it likely contributed to Ms. Chiles’ SCOTUS victory that talk therapy was all she did.
I’m starting to get the feeling that someone with an agenda is just making this stuff up.
Legal abuse
Though vexing in this situation, it probably is for the best that we do not have a law under which the prosecution of Pam Bondi would be convenient—if Bondi’s career as attorney general shows us anything at all, it is that in our current debased political environment the DOJ could not be entrusted with a statute containing provisions flexible enough to treat as a criminal matter such abuses of power as Bondi’s. A law meant to curtail such abuses of power would, ironically, almost certainly facilitate new ones.
Delta Airlines, you might have noticed, does not run negative TV ads about USAir. It does not show pictures of the crash of USAir Flight 427, with a voice-over saying: “USAir, airline of death. Going to Pittsburgh? Fly Delta instead.”
And McDonald’s, you might also have noticed, does not run ads reminding viewers that Jack in the Box hamburgers once killed two customers. Why? Because Delta and McDonald’s know that if the airline and fast-food industries put on that kind of advertising, America would soon be riding trains and eating box-lunch tuna sandwiches.
Yet every two years the American politics industry fills the airwaves with the most virulent, scurrilous, wall-to-wall character assassination of nearly every political practitioner in the country and then declares itself puzzled that America has lost trust in its politicians.
Charles Krauthammer, Things that Matter.
Trump Needs Smarter Sycophants
The former secretary of homeland security, the jettisoned attorney general and the embattled secretary of defense have often seemed like President Trump’s ideal cabinet officials: selected for televisual looks and energy, lacking any political constituency apart from Trump himself, serving without qualm as pure conduits of his will. So their struggles offer a lesson for Republicans contemplating service in this administration’s 33 (but who’s counting?) remaining months: What Trump appears to want and what he actually wants are not exactly the same thing.
The seeming desire of the president is for loyalty, sycophancy and TV-ready swagger. He wants to turn on Fox News and see his top officials performing like reality-show characters in the drama of his administration. He wants to sit in a cabinet meeting and listen to a litany of his accomplishments. He wants the decisions made in the West Wing or at Mar-a-Lago to be simply rubber-stamped in his departmental fiefs.
He wants all that, but at the same time he also wants victory rather than defeat, and he definitely doesn’t want embarrassment. His metrics for success are unusual by normal presidential standards: He has a high tolerance for unpopularity, to put it mildly, and a remarkable shamelessness around corruption. But there is a point at which, even inside his cocoon, Trump senses that things aren’t going well for him. And then sycophancy doesn’t work, and it doesn’t matter if you were acting on his orders; you will be punished for that unsuccessful service just as surely as if you’d tried to thwart his aims.
I’m all for protests, it’s our right as Americans. But nailing down the reason for No Kings is more like spinning the Wheel of Defeatists Complaints. Signs noted fascism, wars, school funding, billionaires, LGBT issues, allowing illegal immigration, even the Epstein files. And really, the rallies are mostly about Donald Trump’s winning the election. Forget protests, they’re more of a massive primal scream therapy session.
This jumped out as a bit of sanity amid a column that otherwise made me want to cancel my WSJ subscription.
I haven’t gone to a No Kings March for this reason. The soup lacks a worthy theme.
Miscellany
Gay versus Queer
I was gay, I had faced discrimination, and I had fought for my rights. But now that gay rights had become “LGBTQ” rights, I found myself force-teamed with a lot of people whose values were nothing like mine. I didn’t experience my life as a rebellion against reality. I didn’t want to be an identity insurgent. I wanted to participate in the world as a normal person.
The most important thing I learned at Columbia was this: I am gay, but I am not queer. My sexuality doesn’t obligate me to embrace a particular ideology or to reject the moral inheritance of the society that made my life possible. Progress happens by acknowledging shared human values and working within our reality rather than declaring war on it.
(Andrew Sullivan has often made the same point, with less emphasis on the “critical theory” aspect.)
So what’s the new “learn to program”?
I’ve been on the faculty at Duke University for five years now, and this past one has been the most challenging and the strangest by far.
That’s not about Duke. It’s about higher education. It’s about America. It’s about dynamics — chiefly, this country’s tilt toward authoritarianism and the rapidly accelerating advances of A.I. — that render our tomorrows even hazier than usual. None of us knows what we’re in for and up against, and that confusion crystallizes on college campuses, which are by definition gateways to the future. They’re supposed to leave students with maps, routes, a destination. Not with compasses whose needles gyrate this way and that.
For much of the past decade, college students flocked to computer science, wagering that few majors were surer on-ramps to employment. A.I. has exploded that roadway. I teach in Duke’s school of public policy, where many students point themselves toward jobs in government or nonprofit groups. The ax that fell in the first months of Trump’s present term deforested that landscape.
Those are just examples, and this is hardly the first generation of young people to face disruption and major economic shifts. I can’t say just how unusual, in a historic sense, the unease that I feel around me is.
But I can tell you that my previous nine semesters at Duke are no rival for this one when it comes to the number of students who initiate conversations about what they should do next, what they should expect after that, where the country is headed, whether they’ll have any real say in that.
There are all kinds of ideas and policies that would have bad effects if implemented. But there is a special class of bad ideas and policies that proliferate in good part because those who hold them, being insulated from their effects, have never seriously thought about the consequences that would ensue from their implementation. The reason why the concept of luxury beliefs has resonated so widely is that it gives a name to people who treat as a parlor game questions that potentially have very serious consequences—just not for themselves.
I was thinking this week that Mr. Trump’s vision of himself as primarily a dealmaker is unsuited to a necessity of presidential leadership, which involves laying out the logic of a difficult case. Deal makers gain advantage through strategies that don’t necessarily involve transparency and forthrightness. (Peggy Noonan)
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth uses language the way an adolescent boy uses Axe body spray — subtlety’s for wimps. (John McWhorter)
If four out of ten Americans cannot see how truly awful this is, how vast and long-lasting the domestic and global damage this president is inflicting on this country is, our 250 years really are up. (Andrew Sullivan).
In The Times, Yonatan Touval stressed the limits of the spycraft and technology behind Israel’s development of strike coordinates in Iran: “That is an extraordinary achievement of surveillance and targeting. Yet never has so much been seen, so precisely, by so many people who understand so little of what they are seeing. A system can tell you where a man is. It cannot tell you what his death will mean for a nation.” (via Frank Bruni)
The moment you step into the world of facts, you step into a world of limits. You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature. You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes. Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump: you may be freeing him from being a camel. Do not go about as a demagogue, encouraging triangles to break out of the prison of their three sides. If a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end. (G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy)
I confess, however, that I am not myself very much concerned with the question of influence, or with those publicists who have impressed their names upon the public by catching the morning tide and rowing very fast in the direction in which the current was flowing; but rather that there should always be a few writers preoccupied in penetrating to the core of the matter, in trying to arrive at the truth and to set it forth, without too much hope, without ambition to alter the immediate course of affairs, and without being downcast or defeated when nothing appears to ensue.
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.
A blessed Easter to readers in Western Christian traditions like the wife sitting four feet from me as I type (who, to the best of my knowledge, doesn’t read this blog). Blessed is He that comes in the Name of the Lord to readers in Eastern Christian traditions.
Mystical pilgrimage
There is a deeper pilgrimage that the Church encourages and is available to all. It has no commercialism, nor is it fraught with temptation. It is quite simple:
The whole world is Passover in Jerusalem in 33 A.D. Everywhere we go, we are there. In the liturgical life of the Church, the details of that city, at that time, are drawn out in careful detail in the services of Holy Week. Every celebration of the Divine Liturgy is a making-present of that time and that place.
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This pilgrimage is not an act of imagination. That which is truly “mystical” is not imaginary – it is real and true.
The Orthodox Church is entering Holy Week, and I feared that this post was too oblivious to that. Then Fr. Stephen came through for me. If you read nothing else, click the link to read his thoughts on pilgrimage.
On the construct of “religion”
To ask a census-taker how many Chinese are Buddhist is rather like asking one how many Westerners are Aristotelian or pragmatist.
William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence
Why might a doctrinal conservative be an Episcopalian?
The reader will reasonably ask why I became an Episcopalian when I don’t like progressive theology. One reason is, of course, family. Another is my longstanding love of Anglican choral music and of the cadences in the Book of Common Prayer (even in most post-1662 versions), neither of which can, in my view, be matched by any other Christian tradition in English.
I, self-confessed homo adorans, cannot despise that position. I wonder how many Episcopalians quietly reject the progressive theology, staying for the worship. I have even seen retired conservative protestant pastor who moved to the Episcopal Church.
Religion and Politics
Q: So how would you respond to one of those editors responsible for hiring and firing who says “Look: the big story here is obviously the big decline of Christianity in terms of participation. Why do I spend money on a Religion Beat desk when it’s a subject that’s declining in relevance?
A: Well, see, the problem is that relevance then is defined primarily in terms of politics. “Name me some big headlines out of this.” Well, by definition a big headline is something related to Donald Trump. Politics. The mid-term elections. “Will Latino Evangelicals help Republicans again?” If your religion is politics, you’re not going to be able to justify a reporter spending six months digging deep, diving into, the statistics on confession, marriages, baptisms … what congregations are producing priests, nuns, pastors, clergy, etc. …?” That’s not going to get you big headline about American politics.
This touches a recurring theme of their podcast series (named after the admission by a New York Times editor that his paper “just doesn’t get religion”): religion is a guise for politics according to essentially every newsroom in America. Politics is real, religion not so much.
But I have a complementary theory: religion is a guise for politics according to the revealed preferences of hundreds of thousands of churches, too. This feels like one of those things I just can’t un-see, having seen it once.
The Orthodox Church has people with strong political preferences — but not remotely homogenous, in my limited experience, and their obsessions are not the Church’s devotions.
None of this undermines the truth of the Christian Gospel, but corruptio optima pessima.
Another thing I cannot un-see
Because of the way Reformed and literal interpretations of the Bible had empowered ordinary people and their leaders in creating a Christian civilization, that hermeneutic enjoyed immense implicit authority. An obvious problem by the late 1850s, however, was that this wonderfully energizing use of Scripture had created multiple, conflicting Christian civilizations. … The Reformed, literal hermeneutic had helped build a biblical civilization—actually, two biblical civilizations. But the hermeneutic itself could not reconcile the divergent interpretations it had produced.
Mark A. Noll, America’s God
The Beatitudes, tell us the way blessedness works. I’ll take that over political “strength,” “force,” or “power” any day of the week, not just Sundays.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 