“Not too many years ago,” I read, “a young monastic aspirant went to Mount Athos. In talking with the venerable Abbot of the Monastery where he wished to stay, he told him, ‘Holy father! My heart burns for the spiritual life, for asceticism, for unceasing communion with God, for obedience to an elder. Instruct me, please, holy father that I may attain spiritual advancement.’ Going to the bookshelf, the Abbott pulled down a copy of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. “Read this, son,“ he said. “But father!“ objected the disturbed aspirant. ‘This is heterodox Victorian sentimentality, a product of the western captivity! This isn’t spiritual; it’s not even Orthodox! I need writings that will teach me spirituality!’ The Abbot smiled, saying, ‘Unless you first develop normal, human, Christian feelings and learn to view life as a little Davey did – with simplicity, kindness, warmth, and forgiveness – then all the Orthodox spirituality and patristic writings will not only be of no help to you – they will turn you into a spiritual monster and destroy your soul.’”
When I entered Orthodoxy, several years before Markides wrote this book and before I can recall hearing this (or similar) stories, I was intrigued by the teaching that theosis, deification, was the goal of the Christian life — even the very meaning of salvation. But somehow I discerned, and said, that my goal for the foreseeable future was the more modest one of becoming human. This story gives me hope that I was right.
Our questions were framed in the only language we knew: what does the Bible say? The questions and answers of that dialog were informative. With those questions in mind, we became aware of a steady stream of admonitions in the New Testament urging believers towards a life of asceticism. Fasting, vigils (praying through the whole of a night), sacrificial giving, radical forgiveness are all considered commonplace and normative. We had no tradition to draw on, and thus we practiced such things without guidance. We learned many things the hard way. There is now a long string of decades that separate me from those fervent years.
No one told us to do the things we did, and no one told us to read the Scriptures in the manner we undertook. What we did was to read the Scriptures with the question in mind, “What should we do?” That stands in stark contrast to the typical question, “What should we believe?” Had our study been primarily directed to matters of doctrine, I think we would have lost our way. Strangely, our instincts were correct.
The teachings of Christ are not, primarily, metaphysical pronouncements about the nature of things. Instead, they are commandments regarding what we should do – based on who God is. “Love your enemies – because God is kind to both the good and the evil.” This pattern holds throughout Christ’s teachings. It is a directive that intends to shape our lives such that our lives themselves become a “living theology,” a revelation of the nature of God made known in the shape of our actions.
It’s not about rules
Orthodoxy is not about following rules but about inner transformation. Extremists and schismatic Orthodox are not Orthodox, in spite of any Orthodox appearance and rigorous observances, because they lack an Orthodox phronema.
Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox
Going to the well and finding it shallow
What J. S. Bach gained from his Lutheranism to inform his music, what Jonathan Edwards took from the Reformed tradition to orient his philosophy, what A. H. Francke learned from German Pietism to inspire the University of Halle’s research into Sanskrit and Asian literatures, what Jacob van Ruisdael gained from his seventeenth-century Dutch Calvinism to shape his painting, what Thomas Chalmers took from Scottish Presbyterianism to inspire his books on astronomy and political economy, what Abraham Kuyper gained from pietistic Dutch Calvinism to back his educational, political, and communications labors of the late nineteenth century, what T. S. Eliot took from high-church Anglicanism as a basis for his cultural criticism, what Evelyn Waugh found for his novels in twentieth-century Catholicism, what Luci Shaw, Shirley Nelson, Harold Fickett, and Evangeline Paterson found to encourage creative writing from other forms of Christianity after they left dispensationalism behind — precious few fundamentalists or their evangelical successors have ever found in the theological insights of twentieth-century dispensationalism, Holiness, or Pentecostalism.
Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind
Humility
Shallow ideas can be assimilated; ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility. … Tolstoy: “I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.”
James Gleick, Chaos
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.
Writing in The Atlantic, Tyler Austin Harper argues that some secular A.I. skeptics have been drawn to religious thinkers like the pope for exactly this reason — because a secular language of harm seems inadequate to the perils A.I. creates for human beings, which are better identified by the language of sin.>
If that’s the case, though, the goal of the critic should be to identify the sin directly, not merely to lament the general advance of the technology nor to make excuses for individuals caught up in disruption.
Do not offer vague laments for the fate of higher education; say that students who use A.I. to cheat are doing something gravely wrong.
Do not merely bemoan the proliferation of Claude-inflected prose; say that the novelist or essayist who outsources a chapter to A.I. has committed what should be a career-ending literary crime.
Do not merely fret, as the pope’s encyclical does, that receiving “words of advice, empathy, friendship and even love” from a chatbot can be “misleading” for “less discerning users.” Tell Catholics and other Christians that treating an A.I. bot like your girlfriend or your boyfriend is a sin.
We’re very complicated critters cognitively. Douthat’s discomfort is a surprise, but seems to capture our dilemma.
Why would anyone prefer sleaze to morality? Because early-21st-century Americans are profoundly divided about what being moral means.
[O]nce you get beyond the theft-murder-adultery basics, we’re in a world of factional moralities and profound metaphysical divides, which separate Republicans from Democrats but also create deep fissures inside the two coalitions.
…
In this environment, the upright moralist becomes an inherently untrustworthy figure — not because he might be secretly a hypocrite but because he might be entirely sincere, and in his sincerity end up imposing a stringent morality that’s alien to to your own …
I feel a version of this impulse myself with Talarico and Platner. The Texas Democrat seems sincerely religious, even zealous, and having written frequently about the value of religion to liberalism, I should be very happy to have a Democratic politician making biblical arguments for his positions, even if they aren’t necessarily positions that I share.
But then I encounter Talarico’s concrete religious persona, the specific blend of piety and Peak Woke moralism … And my reaction is allergic, in a way that’s similar, I’m sure, to the reaction that a liberal Christian might have to a traditionalist Christian speaking the language of Trumpian populism. It’s a vision of political morality that I don’t share, and the piety makes it more threatening, not more congenial.
…
if you’re a swing voter who isn’t on board with either side’s zeal, someone like Platner, with his checkered past and dubious tattoo and Reddit indecency, might actually seem preferable to someone like Talarico. Imagine that you want to punish Trump Republicans but you don’t want the oppressive ideological climate of 2020 and 2021 to suddenly return. There’s a case that you’re better off with the guy who nobody would mistake for a moral exemplar than with the guy who might think that God is on the side of whatever mania progressivism thinks up next.
This is not a happy state of cultural affairs. But it’s hard to get back to a place where public virtue is rewarded and egregious vice is punished without forms of public morality that are more unifying than what’s on offer at the moment. This is why the quest for a religious center matters: Piety and probity will be rewarded only if they’re linked to a moral vision that seems reasonably unifying, a sacred canopy beneath which a majority of Americans can feel secure.
Two things Douthat said that sounded a bit off (but don’t undermine his argument):
“… having written frequently about the value of religion to liberalism ….” “Religion,” insofar as it is a coherent construct at all (see Brent Nongbri, Before Religion), is too varied to affirm its value to liberalism. One might think that that author of a book titled Bad Religion would get that.
“… a traditionalist Christian speaking the language of Trumpian populism ….” The thought boggles the mind. The Evangelical Trumpistas, Trump’s most notorious “Christian” supporters, are “traditionalist” or “traditional” only from the perspective of historic amnesiacs. The tradition in anything like its present form is maybe — if you hold your head just right and squint a bit — 300-ish years old, and by my lights is dated more accurately to the Second Great Awakening. I can only imagine a truly traditional Christian supporting Trump as a lesser evil, not as a good choice.
“Finishing the job” in Iran
I usually quote Nick Catoggio for sharp, biting invective, but Wednesday, he got serious about the undeclared Iran War from which Trump is trying to withdraw (would that he hadn’t started it!) while Israel continues to fight a serious threat:
We’ve arrived at the stage of this conflict where American and Israeli definitions of “the job” have plainly diverged.
And I do mean plainly. “You’re f—ing crazy,” an Axios source paraphrased the president as telling Netanyahu on Monday. “You’d be in prison if it weren’t for me. I’m saving your ass. Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this.” If you aren’t worried about Trump eventually scapegoating the Jewish state for the war, you should be.
The conflict began with the two nations’ interests aligned. Both sought nothing less than regime change in Iran, assessing correctly that Khomeinists will seek ways to threaten American and Israeli interests as long as they’re in power. Mossad believed they could be toppled; Trump agreed, letting his fantasies about another Venezuela-like capitulation override the skepticism of his own CIA director.
Yet, for obvious reasons of size, capabilities, and geography, the threat that the two countries face from Iran isn’t symmetrical.
Israel needs to worry about all forms of power projection by its regional neighbor, very much including conventional attacks like the ones being staged from Lebanon by Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah. Nothing will solve that problem short of cutting off the head of the snake. The United States, however, worries mainly about unconventional power projection, i.e. nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles. And that problem can be solved—or managed, for some period of time—without decapitation by degrading Iran’s nuclear program and missile arsenal.
That gives you an idea of how Israel and the U.S. diverge on what “the job” is. Catoggio also evaluates what “finishing” would mean.
Catoggio seems to me to give too much credit to Trump for trying to withdraw, since Trump and Netanyahu started the open hostilities, but his analysis of the falling out of Israel and the U.S. over Iran seemed notable.
Grotesque and terrifying and juvenile
“They walk among us.” The glowing green letters emerge ominously against a dark backdrop. Above them hover the words “aliens” and “declassified,” suggesting the release — long awaited in some corners of the internet — of secret government files concerning extraterrestrials. Slowly, tantalizingly, more text appears: “For 60 years, the U.S. government has kept a closely guarded secret.” Then the big reveal: It’s not the trailer for a horror film; it’s a White House web page, posted last Thursday. And scary creatures in question aren’t extraterrestrials; they’re the other kind of aliens — the immigrant kind, the kind hunted by ICE.
“Aliens have been walking among us, living in our neighborhoods, and interacting with us in our daily lives,” the page announces. “They’ve shopped in the same stores, attended the same classes as our children, and lived seemingly normal human existences.” That’s the joke: Human beings are described as nonhuman invaders. Fascism, but make it a troll.
…
With phrases like, “They do not belong here” and, “Deport them all,” the page struck me as an incitement for Americans to commit acts of violence against immigrants. But Benjamin Valentino, a professor of government at Dartmouth College, thinks that the purpose of the page is not to get Americans to do anything: It’s to get them to do nothing, while the government commits its campaign of cruelty against millions of people just trying to live in peace. “They want a majority of the population to turn their backs,” he said. “That’s all that’s necessary.”
… [T]he dehumanizing language of the sort used by the Trump administration is, he said, “a pretty standard indicator” of risk, a necessary if insufficient condition of mass violence directed at a particular group.
“It’s not that it turns normal people into murderers,” Valentino said. “It’s that it turns them into bystanders.”
I had the opportunity a few months ago to hear Dean Erwin Chemerinsky speak at Wabash College, not far from me. He’s quite an influential figure in the legal world.
Wednesday, he wrote about the “radical” Justice Clarence Thomas, opening with this salvo:
Thomas is the only justice that I can identify who has openly said that precedent deserves little weight in constitutional law. In a concurring opinion in 2019’s Gamble v. United States, Thomas said that the court should follow the text and the original meaning of the Constitution and not precedents that are inconsistent with them. He wrote: “In my view, the Court’s typical formulation of the stare decisis standard does not comport with our judicial duty under Article III because it elevates demonstrably erroneous decisions—meaning decisions outside the realm of permissible interpretation—over the text of the Constitution and other duly enacted federal law.” In a speech in Dallas, Thomas once remarked: “I always say that when someone uses stare decisis, that means they’re out of arguments. Now they’re just waving the white flag. And I just keep going.” He also said at another event: “We use stare decisis as a mantra when we don’t want to think.”
Call it radical, Professor, but the Oath the Justices take is to the Constitution, not to stare decisis. In my book, Justice Thomas is spot-on and the Dean is radical.
Now a decent human being will approach precedent with the attitude “they may be right, and I may be wrong.” But after wrestling with that, and giving the party of precedent a chance to persuade you, if you’re still convinced the precedent contradicts the Constitution, you should say so — likely in a dissent and, one hopes, with genuine respect for the predecessors who got it wrong and the contemporaries who are following them.
How much of what will focus your attention?
The character of a republic, like the character of an individual, is a matter of habit, of what we do, day by day, what we expect, what we tolerate, and what causes us to say, “No, no more of this.” What was done to E. Jean Carroll—what is being done—could be done to you. What was done to Renee Good or Alex Pretti could be done to you—or to someone you love.
But do you know what the average Republican with any power is thinking? I know. It is this: “What was done to John Cornyn could be done to me.”
I have no desire to tell girls that they should not be playing softball. I do desire to tell parents that they should not be pushing softball upon them. (Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes)
School … is a perfect system of regressive taxation, where the privileged graduates ride on the back of the entire paying public. (Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society)
… LinkedIn, the irritating social-media site for puffed-up “consultants” pretending not to be unemployed. (Kevin D. Williamson)
E. Jean Carroll is an 82-year-old woman who worked as a journalist and who was, for a time, pretty famous across a swath of about 60 blocks in Manhattan. (Kevin D. Williamson)
My grandparents were like most other Americans. They were Protestants, but you could never find out precisely what kind of Protestants they were. (Thomas Merton, The Seven-Story Mountain)
In the final moments of Aaron Bushnell’s life, officers rush to the site of his burning. One asks for a fire extinguisher, another points his gun at the flames. (Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. Hyperlink added.)
I eagerly anticipated the coming years, when we could get on with the important business of being friends with the Russians. That day never came, and I believe that to be largely our fault. (Terry Cowan)
He had, he said, never asked God for forgiveness, but that he felt “cleansed” when “I drink my little wine” . . . and “have my little cracker.” (Frances Fitzgerald, Epilogue to The Evangelicals)
Graham Platner is running to be a U.S. Senator from Maine. He has zipper issues. But why is the press shoving the story into the national news every day? And why have a felt compelled to read so many of those stories? And why does Ken Paxton feel different? And can I stop, exercising a little electoral federalism (i.e., it’s not my job to stop Maine or Texas from electing crooks and grifters with zipper problems)?
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?”
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.
I recently used AI to generate a title for a blog post. Today, none of its proffers seemed any better than my anodyne offering.
Sportsball
The greatest threat to ethical hooping, if the discourse is any indication, are the Oklahoma City Thunder. On the weaponized shoulders of their star and two-time MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the defending NBA champions have mastered a maximally efficient and spiritually corrosive style of basketball predicated, at least in part, on baiting credulous referees into calling fouls on the opposing team. One way they do this is by flopping, the umbrella term for the parade of pratfalls and head-jerks intended to exaggerate the appearance of defensive contact when shooting. The floppers of yore had the luxury of degrading the sport in an era of less intense scrutiny. Not so with SGA, whose antics have become the cause célèbre of basketball fans everywhere, from the court-side seats in San Antonio, where one Spurs fan was seen brandishing a miniature Academy Award, to the pick-up courts of China, where TikTokers are going viral with videos demonstrating their best SGA imitations.
I don’t watch the NBA much, but playoffs tend to get my attention. I watched the Thunder win the title last year and didn’t like them. I didn’t like SGA in particular, despite respecting his skills.
So when I saw that San Antonio and OKC were tied at three games each, I watched the end of game seven. I’d say Victor Wembanyama is an upgrade from SGA. Next, I’m keen to see how San Antonio stacks up against the Knicks.
And speaking of the Knicks, Brian Rivel has, over 35 years of his team’s struggles, upgraded his nose-bleed-section Knicks tickets into really choice seats, center-court. Now, he’s got some tough choices to make:
Due to a prior commitment, Rivel will sell his tickets to the Knicks’ first home Finals game. Tickets in his section for that game are going for more than $40,000 on resale markets. Although he plans to attend at least one game in the series with his wife — two, if the series goes to six games — Rivel conceded that the staggering prices might change his calculus. “I could list them at a very high number and get life-changing money, where I could send one of my daughters to college,” he said. “It just all depends on how much somebody is willing to offer for those tickets.”
For a potential game six, which may present a title-clinching scenario for the Knicks, some tickets in Rivel’s section have already been listed in the low six-figures. “I gotta go if there’s a game six, right?” he said, before considering some of the more lucrative scenarios. “Unless somebody offers me $100,000 a ticket. Then I have to make a serious decision.”
Of course, I would sell those tickets, but then again I never would have bought them in the first place, right?
En masse
The law of group polarization at work
In 2024, I taught an undergraduate class with a catchy title, “Why American Politics Went Insane.” At the risk of shortening a semester to a sentence, the devolution proceeded in three stages, from victory to separation to radicalization.
When the Cold War ended, the United States, for the first time since the wars against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, faced no external challenges to its prosperity and power. We were, in the words of the former French foreign minister Hubert Védrine, the “hyperpower.”
I began with “The End of History,” to borrow a term from Francis Fukuyama’s misunderstood book, but I began with his prescient warning near the end:
If men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.
That is exactly what we are doing. We are struggling against each other. Some of us are struggling against democracy itself. America is the only nation out of 25 comparable countries in which a majority of people believe that their fellow citizens are morally bad. It should be no surprise, then, that negative partisanship (when you support your party primarily because of your disdain for its opponents) is a central factor in American politics.
This drives us apart. Ever increasing numbers of American citizens live in one-party states or so-called blowout counties, where one side or the other wins presidential elections by 50 points or more.
And what happens when people of like mind gather together? The law of group polarization, first applied to political decision making by the law professor and author Cass Sunstein in 1999, teaches us that when like-minded people deliberate, they become more extreme.
Create a monoculture, and red becomes deep red. Blue becomes deep blue. And as the two sides move farther apart, both geographically and ideologically, we lose even the capacity to understand each other’s lives and thoughts.
If I taught the class over again, though, I’d add a fourth stage: amnesia. The problem isn’t just that we’re at each other’s throats; it’s that we’re turning to the worst of recent history’s alternative ideas in response.
It’s no coincidence that this is happening at a time when a generation of world leaders has no experience with world wars and rising millions of young people have no experience with real fascism and actual communism.
…
We have to know that the world as it is, with all its inefficiencies and injustices, is better than the world that was.
David French. I quoted so much I felt obliged to use one of June’s ten gift links for this one.
Plausible deniability
He knew how to dabble in race-baiting without quite ever going full George Wallace. He had the great skill of propounding absurd or evil things and adding “It’s what I’ve heard” or “People are saying,” so that there was always enough room for The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page to sigh wearily rather than face up to what his words meant.
Disagreeable contrarians who resisted gender fever are the real oddballs. Some combination of personality quirk and conviction that occasionally makes us obnoxious employees and intolerable cocktail-party guests also inoculated us against gender madness. There is no reforming us.
But we served a vital function: Together, a ragtag crew of truculent journalists and outcast researchers stopped the entire herd from running off the cliff. None of us ever expected to be welcomed back into the same elite circles that, only recently, had cheered or looked away as a generation of tormented girls took themselves apart.
Sex therapist Jackie Golob put it the way one most often hears it described: “Gender identity is how you feel about yourself and the ways you express your gender and biological sex. … Biological sex is physical, while gender is feeling.” That is a common view, and it seems to me that it gets it about right. But if gender is a feeling, then there are as many genders as there are people—human beings are unique, individualistic, and idiosyncratic in how they understand themselves as members of sexes—and, hence, meaningless: Words that describe everything describe nothing.
“[F]or longtime ultra conservative activists, CRT is the opportunity of a lifetime.” CRT, she explains, is not a threat at all, and there is no proof that it is even being taught. It’s “just a catch-all term repurposed as a conservative boogeyman.”
CRT is sooooo 2021! Don’t they know that DEI is the real threat to God, Mom, apple pie, the flag and the 4th of July? (Well, maybe Freedom 250 is the real threat to the 4th of July, but that’s a whole nuther kettle of fish.)
Yeah! That’s the ticket! Opposing DEI!
The real “corruption” of SCOTUS
Democrats are free to dislike the Court’s decisions, yet they aren’t helpless. If Democrats abhor gerrymandering, they can argue for a bill to limit how, or how often, states draw House maps. But what really angers Democrats is that the Supreme Court is no longer a second progressive legislature that can impose policies they can’t get through Congress.
Sorry, guys, but nothing is more important this Fall than breaking this corrupt — no, not Supreme Court — this corrupt MAGAfied Republican Party. I’m not going to let even the threat of court-packing deter me.
Where there is no vision, the people perish
What makes our culture modern is that despite the explicit beliefs by many citizens, our public institutions—education, government, the arts, entertainment, journalism, science and technology, commerce—all function without any necessary direction from any teleological vision. They operate without working toward any purpose beyond material benefit and the maximizing of choices for individuals.
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. (Stephen Jay Gould via Maria Popova)
In rural Texas pretty much everyone has a gun cabinet. Unless they’re gay. Then they have gun armoires. (Jenny Lawson, Let’s Pretend This Never Happened)
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?”
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.
Yes, in the Christian East, it’s Pentecost. It’s a long story.
Taking God more seriously than Caesar
The cross is not a symbol for general human suffering and oppression. Rather, the cross is a sign of what happens when one takes God’s account of reality more seriously than Caesar’s.
Orthodoxy has always known that attention is not neutral. What you repeatedly give your mind to begins to shape what you love. And what you love begins to shape who you become.
In the present age it is fashionable to lump Jesus with the prophets and the Buddha, with Confucius, Lao-tze, and Zen, with the mystics and Spinoza-sometimes even with the French Enlightenment and Freud-as if everybody who had been at all attractive must, of course, have been a humanist, and only Hitler, Stalin, Calvin, and the Catholic Church had been authoritarian.
Soren Kierkegaard, The Present Age
Start with a bad premise, end with confusion
A similar, but more sophisticated, complaint of monograph length came from John W. Nevin in 1849 when he rounded on what he called the sect system. According to Nevin, “This professed regard for the Bible” was what “distinguishes the sects in general.” But to Nevin the difficulty in that profession was as manifest as it was stupendous: “If the Bible be at once so clear and full as a formulary of Christian doctrine and practice, how does it come to pass that where men are left most free to use it in this way…they are flung asunder so perpetually…instead of being brought together?” This anomaly showed that the principle of “no creed but the Bible” was “absurd and impracticable”; it breathed “the spirit of hypocrisy and sham.”
I don’t know how I ignored this stupendous and manifest difficulty for almost 50 years, but I did. Others still do.
Insofar as such epiphanies are the reason for my conversion (and I periodically read very plausible suggestions that such rational observations are not how we humans roll our major life decisions), this one was foremost.
Is Evangelicalism really Protestant?
Reading James Davison Hunter’sDemocracy and Solidarity rekindled a feeling that I’ve had many times before in reading books like this. Every time I read a book that describes the religious history of America that talks about the nature of Protestantism in the country, it strikes me that the Protestantism of the American past is alien to today’s evangelicalism. They are different enough to raise the question as to whether or not American evangelicalism is actually Protestant in important ways.
Hunter writes in his book:
For most Americans—whether deist or Calvinist, rationalist and intellectual or revivalist and popular, high church establishmentarian or sectarian—there was a God more or less active in the universe and in human affairs. Indeed, this God was, for most, Christian and, even more, Protestant. Though hegemonic and certainly oppressive to those who dissented, this belief nevertheless provided a language and an ontology that framed understandings of both public and private life. And yet this was also a culture, following Weber and so many others, that was inner-worldly in its orientation and ascetic in its general ethical disposition, an ethic that shunned extravagance, opulence, and self-indulgence and prized hard work, discipline, and utility. In ethics it was individualistic, to be sure, but informed by biblical and republican traditions that tempered individual interest and moved it toward the public interest and common goods. [emphasis added]
It’s certainly hard to argue that contemporary American culture generally, or evangelicalism in particular, are ascetic and oriented towards a traditional disciplined WASP ethic. Undoubtedly, they are if not opulent, consumerist in orientation. I’d be lying if I said I were any different.
What follows isn’t Orthodox Christianity; it’s not orthodox Christianity; it’s not Christianity in any robust sense, nor is it Jewish in a robust sense.
But it is evidence that there are people in the AI world who are morally serious, and that it’s not all hubristic atheists thinking they literally are “building God.”
From outside San Francisco, the joke is sometimes heard as a reflection of spiritual lacking—that the pursuit of AGI (artificial general intelligence) is a stand-in for a God-shaped hole, that clever technologists who reasoned their way out of the old faith are now building an idol to fill the vacancy. I do not think that is quite what is happening. People need meaning, and intense, world-shaping work is one of the oldest ways to find it; that part is not new and often not sinister. What is different here is that this particular work sits so close to the old questions—what are we, where did this come from, what comes after—that you cannot do it long without staring into them. They are not building God because they miss Him. They are building something that has brought them, unexpectedly, to the edge of where He would be.
…
The reason the God-shaped-hole critique lands a glancing blow rather than a clean one is that the Bay Area’s irreligion is not quite the absence of religion. You cannot stand this close to questions of omniscience and immortality without being pulled toward the territory religion has always occupied.
Consider what people in this city expect AI to do, in roughly decreasing order of certitude and arrival time: cure all diseases, solve aging, widen science until we know how the universe began and whether we are alone in it . . . and also, potentially, cause cataclysms of various kinds. And so a community of materialists has ended up—without anyone intending it—inside something with many of the working parts of a faith.
It starts with conversion stories. Ask almost anyone when they got “AGI-pilled” and they will tell you the year, the paper, sometimes the conversation—if they have not already written a blog post on it.
…
When I tell people I am attending churches and synagogues, the response is almost always: “It’s great to have community.” But I do not go for the community. I want what happens when we are silent, or praying, or singing. I want communion with that greater, stranger thing—a transcendent sense of meaning, a call to be better than I am.
…
If Chesterton could see us now, I think he would feel vindicated, but the larger part would be sorrow. He said religion provided a frame that suited us as creatures. Many of us decided we could see more clearly without it. Now we are neither astonished at the world nor at home in it; perhaps the two came as a package, and we returned the package.
And in this city, we are building something unprecedented inside a spiritual and moral frame that many feel is inadequate to the weight. Many of the builders sense this. Few have the vocabulary for it. They try to rationalize it, to confine it to the map, and they go back to work, and they build.
Balwit is the Chief of Staff to the CEO of Anthropic, which is currently my chosen AI because it at least talks a reasonably good game of thinking deeply about what they’re doing, and how it affects humans.
Kudos to the Free Press for publishing it. I overlooked it until others cited it because I’ve generally ceased expecting very much from Free Press.
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.
I’m not feeling much joy as America’s semiquincentennial approaches, and that’s written all over this post (after this little apologetic). If you’re sick of politics or already feeling deeply depressed, skip it.
I’m on a social medium (I refuse to abuse the plural “media”) with an astonishing number of people, many of them decades younger than me, who manage, without coming across as idiots (au contraire: I’m struck by how many there make me feel unobservant and thick-skulled about what I do observe), to focus on positive, and personal, and local things. Kudos to its designer, who consciously designed it that way (I’m not sure how, except that one never knows how many people follow him or her, and there are no buttons to simply “like” a post).
I am blessed to be tolerated by that community because I seem to share a temperamental makeup with my most beloved uncle, who was denied ordination by the Presbyterian Church in America because he was “contentious.”
I really don’t think politics is the most important thing in the world, though I may be in this post revealing a preference to the contrary. I suspect that what’s bugging me, especially for the next few months, is the state of the American nation especially at 250. I came of age in the 60s, opposed the Vietnam War, and have never since been a jingoist.
But I apparently thought we were better than this. It’s rough learning how wrong I can be (along with unobservant and thick-skulled). I guess the aphorism “we get the leadership we deserve” was, all along, far truer than I gave it credit for.
Tomorrow’s post will be, as has become my Sunday custom, as politics-free as possible.
MAGA
White Trash Nation
But, in that moment, in the weird little interstice between the front yards of Eisenhower-era brick ranch houses built close enough together that you’d get a weird echo if you raised your voice while standing between them, something seems to have occurred to her. And she stopped, and turned, and fought, and, to her own surprise, even more than anybody else’s, beat the crap out of her second husband, there in the front yard as the neighbors popped their heads up out of their holes, prairie dog–style, to see what it was that family was up to now. Roy was on the ground by the end. I was pleased by the outcome, though I cannot say I was exactly proud of the scene.
Of course we had fights in the front yard—some of them incidents of domestic violence, some of them merely recreational. In almost exactly the same spot, our neighbor’s older son, who was younger than me and who had finally had enough of being bullied by my older brother, Darrell, gave him a richly deserved beating, taking a fence picket full of rusty nails to his ribs, which necessitated a tetanus shot and earned me a stern lecture for having advised the little boy on how best to deal with a remorseless bully. (It was excellent advice: Darrell never bothered him again. But I have spent a fair bit of my career getting in trouble for offering good advice.) In sixth grade, I fought another kid in the front yard of a different house on the same street (we had moved two doors down) for no other reason than that we were the two biggest kids in the class and somebody (I don’t know who) thought it was a good idea, maybe even necessary, that we should have a fight.
…
When the Trump administration announced that it was staging a UFC fight on the South Lawn of the White House, I knew what I was seeing. It is as familiar to me as the taste of canned Ranch Style Beans on cornbread or the smell of cigarette smoke soaking into Dacron-upholstered office furniture and slick tallowy well-yellowed linoleum in the grim waiting rooms outside those weepy Al-Anon meetings my mother dragged me to for a while because she couldn’t afford a babysitter. I know my people. My people know what they like. And they will have what they like even if it harelips the pope—especially if it harelips the pope.
It took 250 years, but you got here. All the way down here. From Greatest Generation to White Trash Nation in the space of one lifetime.
Some might find John Cornyn’s affirmation of partisan devotion amid intense humiliation by his party affecting. I find it pitiful.
He’s a voyager on a ship of Theseus. The modern Republican Party bears the same name as the vessel Cornyn boarded decades ago, but nearly all of its components—including the senator himself as of last night—have been replaced. Morally and ideologically, the ship must be unrecognizable to a crewman like him who enlisted to join the small-government “character counts” Reaganite armada.
Now that he’s been fired, why doesn’t he disembark already, for cripes’ sake?
…
Regular readers know my theory about why Republican voters are suddenly hellbent on purging incumbents in primaries: They’re in their Jonestown phase. Disappointed in Trump’s economic failures yet psychologically unable to hold him (or themselves) accountable, they’re coping by turning more radically cultish and flogging heretics like Cornyn, Thomas Massie, and Bill Cassidy instead.
Surely things in America will improve if the president faces even less resistance inside the GOP.
I quote Catoggio a lot, because he writes colorfully and almost always is directionally correct.
This “ship of Theseus” metaphor is intriguing, but probably doesn’t go far enough: might we all, Democrats, Republicans, independents, and third-party cranks, be sailing on the ship of Theseus? The United States of America is a whole lot different, with a lot of replacement parts, than the America of my birth year.
The engine of civic apathy is believing that America is still America and always will be, no matter how Americans or their government behave.
That just ain’t so, unless you also believe that Milli Vanilli is still Milli Vanilli as long as whoever’s on stage insists on calling themselves that.
This year of all years, it feels like a cosmic joke that Americans will mark a major anniversary of declaring their independence from monarchy. Many of us quite like having a monarch, we’ve discovered, provided that he’s on our side. But vestigial respect for the Founders will oblige us to trudge out to parades and whatnot on the Fourth of July and pretend that we’re celebrating what America is, not what it was.
We’re on a ship of Theseus whose most essential components we chose, needlessly, to replace. The most dignified thing we could do at this point is acknowledge that instead of retreating into patriotic delusions. And in fairness, many of us have: It’s not a coincidence that pride in being American hit a record low during year one of postliberalism’s return to power.
…
Trump-sanctioned “Freedom 250” events are the civic version of an atheist Christmas.
It’s not just MAGA that contributes to my Jeremiad.
Dr. Biden’s Book
Two things revealed this week how still hopelessly out-of-touch many Dems still are. Dr Jill Biden — you know she’s a doctor, right? — Dr Jill Biden decided that it was time to bring out a memoir. That fathomless Biden vanity strikes again. In a sane world, both Joe and Dr Jill Biden would never show themselves in public again. They did more to re-elect Donald Trump than anyone else — by their utter selfishness, power-lust, and Trump-level gaslighting about Joe’s health.
No one will buy that book, or should. We know it’s a pack of self-serving lies even before we open it up. Dr Jill actually thought she could get away with saying that on that fateful debate night, she thought her husband was “having a stroke.” Seriously. And yet everything we saw with our own eyes that night instantly disproves it. FFS.
She was, of course, also lying in a different way that evening as well. Of course she knew her husband was incapable of being president for another four years. Of course she knew he had had a predictable shambles of a performance. But she wanted to stay in power, with all its privileges, and so lied her ass off, excoriated honest people, and dug in, verging on senior abuse, ensuring the Dems had no time or space to find a successor who didn’t suck as bad as Harris. Hence Trump. And now Jill’s the victim?
[L]ess than six months out from the 2026 midterm elections, I think you’d need to be blind not to have noticed that Democratic voters (far more so than Democratic officeholders) have been undergoing their own shifts. They’re frustrated, angry, and appalled—about pretty much everything the second Trump administration is doing, and about how little the Democratic establishment can do to stop it. And that frustration, anger, and disgust is translating into a willingness, and even an eagerness, to go toe-to-toe with the Trumpified GOP on political tactics.
…
I don’t care if it “works,” in the sense of getting the angry Democratic base revved up so its members go vote en masse and thereby kick the Republicans from power. That would be good, in the short term. But allow me to make a rather blunt prediction: A political system in which disputes are adjudicated at the level of “the Democratic Senate candidate (who is clearly not trans) is trans” and “shut up you ugly fuck” will not remain a free and democratic system for long.
…
It may feel good to scream vulgar insults in the face of your opponent. But it will not feel good to live in a country in which people regularly scream insults into the faces of their opponents. It will feel like what it will be—and already to a considerable extent it is—which is living in a country slouching toward some unstable blend of dysfunction and dictatorship.
I was furious at the Texas GOP Thursday night for starting in on James Talarico as a “gay vegan pagan.” Then Friday morning I started smirkily devouring this.
(I give myself partial credit for pulling myself up short when I saw the parallel.)
Shorts
[Utterly corrupt Texas Senate primary winner Ken] Paxton’s unfortunate ascent in state politics is a good reminder of why parties tend to become dangerous to themselves when they go for years without facing meaningful political opposition from the other party. (Bret Stephens)
[Name omitted (because it’s a distraction from my point) is] one of these internet-era candidates surfing big swells of rancor. Big swells of rancor are not serving America well. You could even say they’re capsizing it. (Frank Bruni)
You’re free to belong to a ruthlessly tribal movement that aims to dominate and punish rival tribes, but in that case don’t demand that everyone “come together” for a party hosted by the tribal chieftain so that he isn’t embarrassed by poor turnout. That invitation will be treated with precisely the amount of respect it deserves. (Nick Catoggio)
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?”
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.
First, it has been an impossibly long time since the missus and I tied the knot, and it shows no signs of slipping. Though I did discover this morning that poetry I consider brilliantly realistic about our human foibles can strike her as depressing.
Second:
Miller Lite is not a great beer. It’s not even an okay beer. Miller Lite is a bad beer but an incredible beverage. It is neither complicated nor offensive, and it derives its magic from this bland alchemy, this delicate equipoise of fizzy nothingness. Miller Lite does not demand your attention. It does not slap you in the face with flavor; in fact, you’d be hard-pressed to identify any flavor at all. Gun to my head, I’d say it vaguely recalls … sandwich bread? Frozen corn? Off-brand Cheerios, maybe? The tasting notes provided by the Miller Brewing Company include such descriptors as “light to medium body,” “clean,” and “crisp,” all of which are not tastes but textures, as if the most flattering thing the manufacturer has to say about its own beer is that “you will notice it in your mouth.” A review on the brew-rating website Beeradvocate notes that Miller “is a beer best observed in bunches”—a beverage whose most favorable quality is quantity.
This is a beer that provides you with absolutely nothing to think about. It offers a break from the quest to find novel gustatory experience that has come to substitute for culture among much of the American professional class. To drink Miller Lite is to declare that you are a well-adjusted adult—that you do not require excitement at every juncture, that you are capable of sitting with your thoughts, that you have the patience and strength of character to build a buzz slowly.
Tyler Austin Harper, The Bad Beer That’s an Incredible Beverage. I just liked Harper’s deft touch. The negligible amount of beer I drink is invariably the kind that demands your attention.
Digital sackcloth and ashes
I well remember the magnificent tall ships sailing into New York Harbor for America’s bicentennial, which the wife and I watched on a little black & white TV in our apartment in Watonga, OK, with a four-month-old baby nearby.
For the 250th, we’re getting UFC on the White House lawn. I expect to avert my eyes, or blog about it again (based on news reports, not firsthand observation) — digital sackcloth and ashes.
I heard this week about a mature American couple that is expatriating without expectation of return — to the People’s Republic of China, which they have visited often. (Full disclosure: the wife is Chinese, and from a wealthy family, so there’s that.)
I daydream of expatriating (today’s post reflects the dream at several points), but for a number of reasons I know it won’t happen unless I literally must flee as a refugee. I’m having a very hard time internalizing the new American reality, so diminished from what appeared to be true for most of my life.
Would that The Donald had forced himself on us, as he has forced himself on women in the past. But no, 77 million of my countrymen voted for him. By the rules of the game, he owns us fair and square.
Still timely
From the time before Il Duce returned to the Oval Office:
I worry about my country. I wish my fellow Democrats were not so abysmally naïve about the world as so many of us are. I wish the country were united behind our founding principles, but I don’t know that we are. I have a feeling that if Putin launched missiles that wiped out the blue states, Fox America would be happy to cut a deal with him.
No politician in the primary era has been as aggressive as Trump has in boosting electoral challenges to members of his party who buck him. Until 2016, it would have been regarded as somewhere between a faux pas and downright reckless for a sitting president to weaken a congressional incumbent by calling for his or her ouster in a primary. Trump does it regularly now, sometimes out of petty revenge.
That’s why Bill Cassidy went wobbly on Gabbard, Kennedy, and (soon) Patel, of course. He’s up for reelection next year, has drawn a serious primary challenger, and has two strikes against him already by dint of having voted to convict Trump in 2021. Had he opposed one of the president’s Cabinet nominees, any slim chance of him receiving Trump’s endorsement—and salvaging his career—would have evaporated. Cassidy will spend the rest of his life receiving sporadic death threats from populist Republicans either as a sitting senator or as a private citizen; when you frame the choice before him on Trump’s nominees that way, is it any is it any wonder that he chose the way he did?
So now Cassidy, defeated in his primary by Trump’s toady, gets to endure death threats as a private citizen, because MAGA doesn’t forget.
I’m troubled at the outbursts of violence from the left toward Trump and the Right, but (perhaps it’s the way news gets covered) I fear more the menace of MAGA, from whose hands guns, and from whose lips death threats, are never far.
Speaking of retribution
So Trump has knocked off two, and in a few days probably will have bagged a third, Republican Senators in retributive primary challenges.
So now that they’re lame ducks, just how compliant will they be with his will? This much, I hope.
[N.B.: Trump did indeed bag his third. May they team up and bedevil him through the rest of their terms.]
Farewell, Party; Hello Tribe
Something I hadn’t really noticed is the death of political parties.
Oh, we still have “Republicans” and “Democrats,” but those are names of opposing tribes now, not actual parties.
Principal proof: Any sleazy real estate developer from Queens can run for President as a Republican in primary elections, regardless of his past positions, his [how many?] cameos in porn flicks, his divorces, his misogyny. Heck, the Republicans didn’t even bother with a platform one quadrennium: Whatever The Donald wants today is what we want.
It hasn’t happened on the D side yet, unless you count Fetterman or Platner — neither one a clear R, but sure a poor fit as Deez.
Must we always overshoot?
A nice symbol of this difficulty in the policy of even “just” nations is the ironic embarrassment in which the victorious democracies became involved in their program of “demilitarizing” the vanquished “militaristic” nations. In Japan they encouraged a ridiculous article in the new constitution which committed the nation to a perpetual pacifist defenselessness. In less than half a decade they were forced to ask their “demilitarized” former foes to rearm, and become allies in a common defense against a new foe, who had recently been their victorious ally.
Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History.
And as long as we’re on Niebuhr:
The fact that the European nations, more accustomed to the tragic vicissitudes of history, still have a measure of misgiving about our leadership in the world community is due to their fear that our “technocratic” tendency to equate the mastery of nature with the mastery of history could tempt us to lose patience with the tortuous course of history.
Id.
Institutions versus platforms
By 2020, people had stopped seeing institutions as places they entered to be morally formed, Levin argued. Instead, they see institutions as stages on which they can perform, can display their splendid selves. People run for Congress not so they can legislate, but so they can get on TV. People work in companies so they can build their personal brand. The result is a world in which institutions not only fail to serve their social function and keep us safe, they also fail to form trustworthy people. The rot in our structures spreads to a rot in ourselves.
A dinner here does not oppress one. The wine neither intoxicates nor heats, and the frame of mind and body, in which one is left, is precisely that best suited to intellectual and social pleasures. I make no doubt that one of the chief causes of the French being so agreeable as companions is, in a considerable degree, owing to the admirable qualities of their table. A national character may emanate from a kitchen. Roast beef, bacon, pudding, and beer and port, will make a different man in time from Château Margaux, côtelettes, consommés and soufflés. The very name vol-au-vent is enough to make one walk on air!
I debated whether this should be in Sunday’s faith-focused post, but I think it belongs here as a glimpse into how the Russian state got so thick with the Russian Orthodox Patriarch (leading to things like the Patriarch scandalously backing the war on Ukraine):
After the fall of Constantinople, an obscure monk named Filofey wrote a treatise arguing that the Greeks had been conquered because they were apostate. Three Romes now marked the history of Christendom, he claimed: the first had fallen away in 1054 [i.e., the Great Schism – Tipsy]; the second had done so in 1439 [i.e., the Council of Ferrara-Florence]; and the third, Moscow, would and could never fall until the end of time. This Third Rome doctrine, as it came to be known, was never officially endorsed. But it did illustrate the isolated mentality of Russia as she entered the sixteenth century.
Remember CCM? Well now we have CCAI, Contemporary Christian Artificial Intelligence, or as they seem to prefer, Gloo.
It’s “Values-Aligned AI for Faith & Ministry.”
Ummmm … Whatever.
Shorts
Evangelicals have not promoted a faith of word and sacrament, but one of word preached, word studied, and word shared. (Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind)
By economic standards the country gets richer and richer. By death-accounting standards the nation goes on winning its war forever. And by school standards the population becomes increasingly educated. (Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society)
Evil does not want to be tolerated. It needs to be vindicated. It demands to be seen as right. (Charles J. Chaput, Strangers in a Strange Land)
The modern West is said to be Christian, but this is untrue: the modern outlook is anti-Christian, because it is essentially anti-religious; and it is anti-religious because, still more generally, it is anti-traditional; this is its distinguishing characteristic and this is what makes it what it is. (René Guénon Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World)
States, particularly liberal democracies, are heavily dependent on wars for moral coherence. (Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens)
J.D. Vance is more than content to be in harness, happier than a dung beetle at Trump’s all-you-can-eat raw-sewage buffet. (Kevin D. Williamson, who called Vance “coprophagic” in his preceding column. Is there a theme emerging?)
Trump is, indeed, dedicated to running the government like a business—la Cosa Nostra. (Kevin D. Williamson)
In order to avoid believing in just one God we are now asked to believe in an infinite number of universes, all of them unobservable just because they are not part of ours. The principle of inference seems to be not Occam’s Razor but Occam’s Beard: “Multiply entities unnecessarily.” (J Budziszewski, What We Can’t Not Know)
I love my country, but I fit [in Europe]. In part it’s because I love history so much, and Europe has history like Idaho has potatoes. (Rod Dreher)
This takes us to what I think is the most important lesson my time in Europe taught me. It deepened my tragic sense of life, which is a deeply un-American thing, but an important thing to know. (Rod Dreher)
Mr. Paxton represents the serrated edge of the Texas GOP, for which “owning the libs” is the highest political value. (WSJ)
Everything mysterious and marvellous is proscribed
The Reformation is the first great expression of the search for certainty in modern times. As Schleiermacher put it, the Reformation and the Enlightenment have this in common, that ‘everything mysterious and marvellous is proscribed. Imagination is not to be filled with [what are now thought of as] airy images.’ In their search for the one truth, both movements attempted to do away with the visual image, the vehicle par excellence of the right hemisphere, particularly in its mythical and metaphoric function, in favour of the word, the stronghold of the left hemisphere, in pursuit of unambiguous certainty. … What is so compelling here is that the motive force behind the Reformation was the urge to regain authenticity, with which one can only be profoundly sympathetic. The path it soon took was that of the destruction of all means whereby the authentic could have been recaptured.
Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary. (For related thoughts, though I didn’t plan a sequence on this general topic.)
Conscientious objector to arbitrary binaries
An Irish teacher at my grammar school used to tell this joke: A rabbi was wandering the streets of Belfast late one night and was confronted by an armed member of one of the local paramilitary organizations. “Are you a Catholic or a Protestant?” the armed man demanded. “I’m a Jew,” the rabbi replied. “Well, are you a Catholic Jew or a Protestant Jew?” came the response. Now, this may not be that amusing as a joke, but it makes an important point: societies have categories for thinking about people and identity, and a real problem occurs when those categories are simply not adequate or appropriate.
Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self
Only one sacrament?
How many sacraments does the Orthodox Church have? This is a question that an inquiring 16th century European might have posed. The Catholics had seven, while the Lutherans (and some other Protestants) said there were only two. “Of course,” thought the Orthodox in struggling to answer a question that had never been spoken in the Orthodox world, “We surely can’t have fewer than the Catholics.” So, “Seven.” Someone else in the Orthodox world thought, “But we’re more excellent.” So, the answer came back, “Nine.” Then, in the modern world of flourishing Orthodox thought a patriarch said, “The whole world’s a sacrament.” The counting of sacraments risks reducing them to moments of ritual, the concern of priests and churchly events: “We need to get the baby done…” I once heard as an Anglican. However, to say that “the whole world is a sacrament” runs the risk of saying nothing at all.
At its core, all of these statements beg the question: what is a sacrament? In the Orthodox world of the past, the term “sacrament” is missing from its vocabulary. Instead, Orthodoxy speaks of a “mystery.” It is well spoken, in that what is described is something hidden that is being made manifest. What we find, I think, is the very life of Christ being given to us. That is the mystery hidden from before the ages.
…
[R]ather than saying that the “whole world is a sacrament,” it is more accurate to say that there is only one sacrament – that of union with the death and resurrection of Christ.
At this point, it might be objected that the problem of evil casts doubt on this claim; for if God is good, why hasn’t he eliminated the evil that obviously exists in the world? But there are several problems with this objection. First of all, it could only undermine Aquinas’s argument for God’s goodness if we assumed that a good being could not possibly have a reason to allow evil. But it is notoriously difficult to show that such a being could not possibly have such a reason, and even most contemporary atheist philosophers would not make such a strong claim.
From the outset of his brief political career, Trump has viewed right-wing evangelical leaders as a kind of special-interest group to be schmoozed, conned, or bought off, former aides told me. Though he faced Republican primary opponents in 2016 with deeper religious roots—Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee—Trump was confident that his wealth and celebrity would attract high-profile Christian surrogates to vouch for him.
Mackay Coppins. The photo illustration to the article vindicates Trump’s cynicism about “high-profile Christian surrogates.”
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.
Congressmen and Senators reveal their real preference …
O beautiful for heroes proved In liberating strife, Who more than self their country love And mercy more than life!
Not one of the Republican Congressmen and Senators who sit mute before the most open and flagrant act of Presidential corruption in the nation’s history can claim to love country more than self. Cowardly throne-sniffers! Shameful!
… and a South Carolina state Senator reveals his
First, our system wasn’t designed only to divide power between the different branches of the federal government, but also between the federal government and the sovereign states. Trump should not dominate the federal government, and he should not dominate the state of South Carolina.
“The separation of powers may actually be the most important governmental doctrine that has been created in the history of man,” Massey said. “It is that important. And what the Congress has done to relinquish their authority to the executive is terrible. And we all see the results of that.”
As for South Carolina, there is “another brilliant creation, and that is of federalism and the sovereignty of the states. I don’t want to be a participant in further eroding federalism and further diminishing the essential role of states.”
Republican majority leader of the South Carolina Senate, Shane Massey, on why he won’t vote for or lead his state in redisctricting out its sole safe Democrat Congressional District, via David French (gift link). I’m glad David highlighted this (there’s much more, too, and worth reading). It gives me a glimmer of hope for a return of political normalcy.
A new phase in MAGA loyalty to Il Duce
When NPR interviewed a group of voters recently and asked them to grade the president’s term so far, one awarded him an A++. Aren’t gas prices hurting you, though, NPR wondered? Absolutely, the voter said, but he’s figured out a way to cope.
“Me and my wife have been fasting,” he told the outlet, “and there’s a lot of benefits, including one of those benefits is saving money on groceries.”
Mark Edmundson also grew up in a working-class family, in Medford, Massachusetts. He got into college, something no one else in his family had done, and told his father that he might study prelaw, because you could make a decent living as a lawyer. His father, who had barely graduated high school, “detonated,” Edmundson later recalled. You only go to college once, his father roared, you better study what genuinely interests you. The rich kids get to study what they want, and you are just as good as any rich kids.
Edmundson soon encountered Sigmund Freud and Ralph Waldo Emerson. “They gave words to thoughts and feelings that I had never been able to render myself,” he wrote in his book, Why Teach? “They shone a light onto the world, and what they saw, suddenly I saw, too.” Edmundson now teaches poetry and literature at the University of Virginia.
Then went the Pharisees, and took counsel how they might entangle him in his talk.
When asked by Senate Democrats about “the outcome of the 2020 election,” some of President Donald Trump’s judicial nominees are turning to a potentially surprising source as inspiration for their answers: Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. Recent nominees have cited Jackson’s statement that it “wasn’t proper for her to comment on political matters” when she was asked about the 2020 election results during her 2022 confirmation vetting to explain why they, too, are declining to address that election, according to Bloomberg Law. “I think the answer that Justice Jackson gave is the only legally and ethically correct one,” said Matthew Schwartz, whom Trump nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, during his confirmation hearing on Wednesday.
“We shall conquer,“ we were told, “because we are the strongest, because we are the richest. We shall conquer because we have the will to do so.“ As if bons d’armement in themselves could bring about victory. As if war were nothing other than a vast industrial undertaking, a mere matter of capital. Such a war – a war of equipment and weaponry, inhuman, materialistic – yes, we have no doubt lost such a war. We must have the courage to say so. What is more, France could never have won such a war. Otherwise, she would no longer have been France, preeminently humane. If she had won such a war – one without a human face, a war of equipment (the kind of war being presented to us) – she would have lost the most precious thing she possesses, the essential characteristic of her very being. She would have lost that which makes her France, that which differentiates her from every other country on earth.
Nancy French, David French’s wife, had a solid reputation as a political ghostwriter.
In my mind, however, I made a vow: I would not bear false witness against my liberal neighbor. That one decision was the beginning of the end of my political ghostwriting career.
About a year ago, I asked ChatGPT to write a poem “in the style of Katha Pollitt.” The result was fairly ridiculous: more like a greeting-card jingle than a poem by anyone over the age of 10. Whew! I tested ChatGPT again just now. Apparently it has been taking poetry workshops. Singsong rhyme and meter are out; free verse and wistfulness are in. . . .
[The poem] has all the tics of contemporary mediocre poetry: the knowing nudge (“as meetings do”), the look out the window (“Outside, the city”), the careless mixed metaphors. . . . There is nothing fresh or original here, no wit or zing, no pressure on language or form or voice or thought. It’s full of decorative phrases like “the stubborn verb of living” that sound “poetic” but do no work. It’s boring and generic and there are probably dozens of magazines that would publish it. But do you know what bothered me the most? The thought that this is what ChatGPT “thinks” my poems are like: obedient, saddish, “feminist” but defeated (get that woman a dishwasher!). Please believe me, reader: That is not how I write.
Someone strongly recommended a Rod Dreher Substack post and I ended up with a one-week free trial. What follows is a direct, verbatim copy of one item in his Thursday post. I can only offer my 100% endorsement, adding that Warren worried about succession at Eighth Day Books. I hope he got it sorted. There is a fine group of thoughtful and voracious Christian readers in Wichita, organized loosely around the Eighth Day Institute, several of whom would be plausible proprietors of maybe the greatest Christian bookstore in the World. (When I told my wife, who never met him, that he had died, my eyes and nose started running for some reason. And Rod’s not kidding about Warren’s second wife.)
Warren Farha, RIP
Woke up this morning to devastating news: the great Warren Farha has died of pancreatic cancer. Warren was the owner of Eighth Day Books, probably the greatest Christian bookstore in the English-speaking world. If you’ve been, you know I’m telling the truth. He was not only an unparalleled genius at curating books, he was also one of the most humble human beings in the world. Everybody who knew Warren loved him. Here’s a link to a 2015 NYT piece about this special man and his bookstore, which he founded with money paid out after he lost his wife to a drunk driver.
Warren leaves behind three kids, a widow (his wonderful second wife, Chris), countless friends and admirers, and a legacy that will never be matched. Of course I’ll pray for his soul, because that’s what we do, but I am confident that all of us have gained a great intercessor in heaven. I hope Eighth Day Books will survive. If there’s any doubt about that, I will do everything in my power to make it happen, and I know that I am not alone in that.
God, what a fine man Warren Farha was. The best of us.
Shorts
The fundamental obligation of a humanities teacher is to try to develop in students an allergy to ideology and certainty. To acknowledge self-doubt. (Columbia University’s Andrew Delbanco via David Brooks)
The West is an imperial culture. The idea of “world-domination” is the spiritual basis and goal of all its achievements. (Matthew Rose, A World After Liberalism)
I’m a left-handed gay Jew. I’ve never felt, automatically, a member of any majority. (The late Barney Frank)
Continuing the saga of Republican norm-breaking, a decent lady from a nearby county is learning the lesson “lie down with dogs, rise up with fleas.”
Indiana State senator Spencer Deery was one of the most eloquent opponents of Indiana redistricting mid-decade, thereby painting a target on his back. So MAGA endorsed and supported, to the tune of millions of dollars, a lady named Paula Copenhaver, who had run and lost against Deery previously.
Copenhaver seems like a decent lady, albeit with some caution flags like her current employment by Indiana’s lieutenant governor, Micah Beckwith, an unqualified rightwing pastor and shit-stirrer foisted on governor Mike Braun as his running-mate by a rightwing-packed GOP State Convention.
Despite the millions of dollars of MAGA support, part of Trump’s nationwide revenge program on Republicans who don’t knee-walk to tongue-shine his shoes, Copenhaver lost to Deery by three votes out of a total count in the 12,000 range. She predictably asked for a recount, which is fine and good. What isn’t fine or good are the methods she/they (for here, I suspect, is where MAGA enters the recount room) are trying to insinuate into the recount process.
Indiana does not register voters by political party, but it has some arcane rules intended to avoid mischievous crossover voting: basically, you are not entitled to vote in a party’s primary unless you voted for a majority of its candidates in the last election or intend to vote for a majority of its candidates in the upcoming election.
Now I have some principled problems with the state carrying water for the partisan duopoly by running partisan primaries. Those problems are heightened when the state by its election laws tries to enforce party discipline by preventing crossover voting. In short, I think that if the Republicans want to limit primary voting to Republicans, they should run their own primary elections, or select their candidates by party convention. Ditto with the Democrats.
Instead, we have a bastardized system, whereby the state not only conducts parties‘ primaries at state expense but tries to enforce the purity of those primaries by excluding crossover voting. I suggest that even if the state facilitates this corrupt duopoly, enforcing who can pull a particular partisan ballot should be beyond its ken.
But let’s take the obnoxious system for what it is. Mischievous crossover voting is supposed to be eliminable by the arcane rules alluded to. But the way to enforce those arcane rules, normally, is to have partisan poll-watchers to challenge voters they think are not qualified to vote in the parties’ primaries.
Copenhaver and her supporters did not recruit such poll-watchers, but waited confidently for the election results and then, shocked by the results, went combing desperately through social media for people who boasted (truthfully or falsely — you know how social media roll) that they took crossover ballots to vote for Spencer Deery but intend to vote for the Democrat in the General Election.
Now they have filed, under seal, a list of 14 such people whose depositions they apparently intend to take in order to reduce Deery’s vote count, after the fact, instead of the normal course of challenging those voters upfront. So much for ballot secrecy and norms.
I like to think that Copenhaver is mortified by this process, but I venture a guess, having some experience in the ways of the world, that having accepted millions of dollars of support from MAGA normbreakers, she is powerless now to object. It’s out of her control, though it’s being done in her name
Like I said: lie down with dogs, rise up with fleas.
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?”
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.
What if the Furies came for America? What does the karma of an entire nation look like in anthropomorphic form?
If Trump is ushering us toward some sort of critical defining moment, perhaps even an apocalypse as so many seem to believe, it’s worth remembering that the definition of an apocalypse is a revealing of previously hidden truths. If we look at President Trump through a symbolic lens, what previously hidden truths are being revealed about America? What does his particular character tell us about our collective character?
Trump, in his crude way, is forcing us to confront the false stories we have told ourselves about who we are.
This hit me harder, again and again, than anything I’ve read in a long while on the political state of the world. It’s chock-full of quotable stuff (some of which you’ll be seeing in due course), but the quote above is could be an epigraph.
If you think these days are our nadir, remember that Trump is more the eventuality than the cause of our flaws. 77 million voted for him.
I began saying almost a decade ago that “Trump v. Clinton has God’s judgment written all over it.” I wan’t wrong, but if you prefer “furies” or “Karma incarnate,” well you do you.
There’s only one sour note I noticed in this piece: Vandiver tries to shame Christians out of supporting Trump, which is well and good, but he comes across as a guy who was raised in a mainline Church that taught “be nice” as the heart of the Gospel. So I take his Christian bona fides with a grain of salt. With his makeweight “Christian” argument gone, it’s still a very solid piece.
Sophomoric trickery
[Congressman Don] Bacon recalls that his great-great-great-grandfather John lived near Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. John’s uncle helped maintain it while Jefferson was away being president. John moved to Illinois and in 1861 enlisted in the Union Army. So, in 2020 it seemed like familial piety for Bacon to be a one of two prime movers of legislation to remove from Army bases (Forts Bragg, Hill, Pickett, Hood, Benning and others) the names of Confederate soldiers who did their damnedest to dismember the nation.
The legislation, which included a stipulation that no base would ever again have a Confederate’s name, inspired a provision in the 2021 defense authorization bill that became law over President Donald Trump’s veto. In 2025, however, the second Trump administration, practicing what it evidently considers sophisticated trickery, restored the names. Sort of.
Fort Bragg, which briefly was Fort Liberty, is now renamed back to Fort Bragg. Not, however, for Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg, but for Pfc. Roland L. Bragg, who won a Silver Star in World War II. Fort Pickett, which briefly became Fort Barfoot, is again Fort Pickett. This time, however, the name (we are supposed to believe) honors not the Virginian who led Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, but Vernon W. Pickett, a lieutenant who in World War II won a Distinguished Service Cross.
This sophomoric trickery — the cleverness of the dim-witted — by the commander in chief is intended to mock the law. This is what now passes for fulfilling the president’s constitutional duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”
We still have teams that we call Republican and Democrat, but that’s not what a political party actually was, or used to be, at least. It used to be a cohesive group around some policies and principles that would support candidates that supported those policies or principles, and the party existed separate from its candidates. Because of campaign finance reform and the law that was passed in 2002, we basically ended having separate political parties. And so, instead, again, it’s actually increased partisanship. But it’s vibes-based. It’s this sense that you belong to, like, you know, the Starbucks, Trader Joe’s tote bag, matcha latte group. Or you belong to the pickup truck, “Yellowstone”-watching, Walmart group. And it’s not policy based.
Speaking of political parties, I’m really, really missing the days when they assembled in smoke-filled rooms and came up with candidates who they thought could win elections to advance their ideas. Now we have primary elections wherein the President of the United States sends out his zombie voters to politically assassinate distinguished incumbents who did something that made him mad, as GOP Senators shrug and say, in effect, “Well, it’s his party; he can kick out whoever he wants to.”. The Republican party and incumbency mean nothing to Trump.
Trump took revenge on Senator Bill Cassidy over the weekend and will unseat Thomas Massie on Tuesday. May the instruments of his revenge go down in flames in November.
And may we once again discover the importance of functioning political parties.
Thucydides trap
[On Thursday,] Xi Jinping warned Donald Trump to his face about a “Thucydides trap” potentially unfolding between our two countries.
Like everyone else, my first thought when I heard the news was, “There’s no way Trump knows what a Thucydides trap is.”
A “Thucydides trap” refers to the rising probability of war when a long-dominant power is at risk of being usurped by a rising one. America is in decline and everyone knows it, Xi was implying, and the White House should take care not to let its anxiety about that lead it to foolishly assert itself in defense of Taiwan.
Someone must have explained that to the president following the summit. “When President Xi very elegantly referred to the United States as perhaps being a declining nation, he was referring to the tremendous damage we suffered during the four years of Sleepy Joe Biden and the Biden Administration,” Trump clarified afterward on Truth Social, not at all defensively.
That was cute spin, but it ain’t Joe Biden whom Chinese nationalists have been moved to publicly thank for destroying U.S. global supremacy. Trump’s “tariffs, attacks on allies, anti-immigration policies and assaults on the American political establishment had inadvertently strengthened China while weakening the United States,” the New York Times reported earlier this week, summarizing the analysis of one Beijing think tank.
“You do know that the party has two kinds of functionaries, right?” “Yes, Father, you’ve told me before.” “The good-for-nothings and the stop-at-nothings. So which are you, Alyosha?”
Giuliano da Empoli and Willard Wood, The Wizard of the Kremlin
Outside the political sphere
Tech just blows my mind sometimes
China has unveiled its latest photonic quantum computer, Jiuzhang 4.0, with researchers saying it can outperform the world’s fastest classical supercomputer by a vast margin … The results, published on May 13 in the peer-reviewed journal Nature, mark the latest milestone in China’s rapidly advancing quantum program led by a team of scientists at the University of Science and Technology of China headed by Chinese quantum physicist Pan Jianwei. Jiuzhang 4.0 completed a Gaussian boson sampling task in just 25 microseconds – a calculation they estimated would take the world’s most powerful supercomputer, El Capitan in the United States, more than 10⁴² years to finish, according to the university in the eastern city of Hefei.
Classical music is now a special taste, like Greek language or pre-Columbian archeology, not a common culture of reciprocal communication and psychological shorthand. Thirty years ago, most middle-class families made some of the old European music a part of the home, partly because they liked it, partly because they thought it was good for the kids. University students usually had some early emotive association with Beethoven, Chopin and Brahms, which was a permanent part of their makeup and to which they were likely to respond throughout their lives. This was probably the only regularly recognizable class distinction between educated and uneducated in America.
In America, the land of the free, you can earn a billion bucks and then live however you’d like so long as you wouldn’t like to live as humanely as a middle-class Parisian.
I’m not, alas, in Paris right now. But I can certainly imagine myself in a Parisian cafe, enjoying some steak frites and a glass of wine while taking in the glorious streetscape. What’s harder to imagine is soaking in all that ambiance and thinking, “Yeah, this place is definitely poorer than Mississippi.”
… Ethical Capital Partners, the private equity firm that owns Pornhub. (The Morning Dispatch)
“Once somebody’s proven they’re too frightened of being called ‘bigot’ to defend the most vulnerable, they’ve shown who they are,” – JK Rowling via Andrew Sullivan.
“I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all,” – Donald Trump, who “obliterated” the nuclear sites last year via Andrew Sullivan.
“[Biden] has one ability I don’t have: he sleeps. … He has an ability to fall asleep while on camera. … You’ll never see me sleeping in front of a camera,” – Trump in 2024 via Andrew Sullivan.
“2019: Donald Trump calls on China to investigate Joe Biden for having son Hunter fly to China on Air Force Two as he sought business in China. 2026: Donald Trump flies son Eric to China on Air Force One as company linked to him explores a deal with a Chinese chipmaker,” – Matt Viser via Andrew Sullivan.
“One of the enduring Two Americas truisms of the decade: Repubs convinced Obama is behind every tree and Dems wishing he would show up in the forest at all,” – Jonathan Martin via Andrew Sullivan.
Pressure on journalists has risen exponentially since the turn of the century. Many media companies require their journalists to produce up to a dozen stories a day – all in pursuit of clicks and likes. Maintaining high standards is impossible. (Rolf Dobelli, Stop Reading the News)
Never have I witnessed a White House so devoted to surfaces. Surfaces caked with makeup. Surfaces puffed up with hair spray. Surfaces glossed with gold. Surfaces that glitter blue — or someday might, if the over-budget overhaul of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool ever works out as promised. (Frank Bruni)
In The Hollywood Reporter, Daniel Fienberg surveyed television shows inspired by a classic William Golding novel: “It’s easy to recognize that ‘The White Lotus’ has always been ‘Lord of the Flies,’ with turndown service.” (Via Frank Bruni)
Microsoft has rebranded its famed gaming division, Xbox. It will now be called XBOX. We salute the marketing team for their risk-taking, creativity, and awareness of the caps lock key. The Morning Dispatch
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 