Pentecost 2023

Anticipating Paul Kingsnorth?

I knew that C.S. Lewis was prescient (less so that Ken Myers was), but this was Copyright 1989.

Blinded by Might

Cal Thomas and Ed Dobson, who had been Falwell’s chief lieutenants in the Moral Majority, published a book questioning not just the efficacy of political action but the righteousness of the enterprise. In Blinded by Might they argued that in the process of trying to win elections conservative Christians had been seduced by the lure of power. What had begun as an effort to restore Christian values to the nation had degenerated into an unbridled partisan struggle, creating an atmosphere in which it was assumed that Democrats could not be Christians and that Bill and Hillary Clinton were the Antichrist.

Frances Fitzgerald, The Evangelicals

I never read Blinded by Might, but this characterization of it, which is consistent with the books title, seems prescient.

Is Tim Kellerism outdated?

Some Christian critics say that the “Tim Keller model” of engagement, his winsome, gentle approach to those with whom he disagreed, is outdated. They say that increased secularization and progressive hostility toward traditional Christianity requires the faithful to hit back, respond in kind, dominate or humiliate those who oppose us. But Tim wasn’t kind, gentle and loving to others as some sort of strategy to win the culture wars, grow his church or achieve a particular result. Tim loved his neighbors, even across deep differences, simply because he was a man who had been transformed by the grace of Jesus. As he wrote in The Times, he believed and lived as if “the Gospel gives us the resources to love people who reject both our beliefs and us personally.”

The Christian Scriptures describe “the fruit of the Spirit” — what grows in us as we walk with God — as love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Tim’s life was marked by these things. And these dispositions are not a political strategy. They are not a part of a brand. They are not a way to sell books, gain power, win culture wars or “take back America for Christ.” Tim inhabited these ways of being, not as a means to any end, but as a response to his relationship with God and love for his neighbor. The last 10 years or so have been hard on orthodox or traditional Christians who are wary of Christian nationalism, hyperpartisanship and the politics of bitterness or resentment. “Keller’s passing leaves a void in the nascent movement to reform evangelicalism,” wrote Michael Luo in The New Yorker, “and today’s social and political currents make the prospects for change seem dim.”)

Tish Harrison Warren

Just one little oversight

Why Antonio García Martínez became Zebulon ben Abraham. Except for the little matter of Christ’s resurrection, he’d have a pretty convincing case against Western Christendom.

Religious, not Spiritual

Occasional strong posts like Why I’m religious, and not spiritual are why I follow Fr. Silouan Thompson. But now I’ve got another book to buy: Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept — a “modern concept” as in “Procrustean bed,” that variously cuts or stretches reality.

Protestant scholars of religion continually try to find in ancient writings the kind of pietistic interiority, feelings, or personal experience of the Numinous, that to these scholars is “true religion.” This underpins practically all modern study of religion and much of interfaith activity. But the sources don’t point to any such thing in the ancient mind; ancient religion is a creation of modern scholarship.

Why I’m religious, and not spiritual

The Religious Right (and more frank and candid atheists)

A motley crew of white evangelicals and traditional Catholics locked arms on some social issues, started voting in large numbers for Republican candidates, and changed American politics forever.

But I think that era of religion and politics is rapidly coming to a close. The Religious Right is no longer a primarily religious movement — from my point of view it’s one about cultural conservatism and nearly blind support for the GOP with few trappings of any real religiosity behind it.

Here’s what I believe to be the emerging narrative of the next several decades: the rise of atheism and their unbelievably high level of political engagement in recent electoral politics.

Ryan Burge, Religious Right? Those true believers are nowhere near as politically active as atheists.

Unfortunately, some of the Christianists on the “Religious Right” will take this as a call to go big-footing into politics at higher intensity because, as Burge observes, the Religious Right is no longer a primarily religious movement.

As for me, I find this result unsurprising. If you have no hope beyond this life, you’ll be apt to grab for all the temporal gusto you can get. If you’re getting close to the end of life, you look for the resurrection of the dead and the life everlasting, and you’re trying to get ready for all that — heck, you might not even save Burge’s article after reading it and passing along this clip, if you know what I mean.

What it takes for a Tradition to endure

When I first encountered Orthodoxy fourteen years ago, my first thought was, “This is what I thought Catholicism would be when I converted back in the 1990s.” This was BEFORE I knew much of anything about Orthodox theology. This was from what I learned by worshiping liturgically with the Orthodox, and discovering the role of asceticism and related practices in Orthodox life. Years later, as I was writing The Benedict Option, I discovered in anthropological texts why some version of monastic practices is necessary for lay Christian life today, and also why Orthodox Christianity is UNIQUELY SUITED for the Benedict Option.

Rod Dreher, Healing Humanity: Confronting our Moral Crisis (emphases in original). Co-authors include Frederica Mathewes-Green, David Ford, Alfred Kentigern Siewers and Alexander F. C. Webster.

---

For all its piety and fervor, today’s United States needs to be recognized for what it really is: not a Christian country, but a nation of heretics.

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.

R.R. Reno

The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.