Mammon
Last Sunday, I shared this quote from Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation:
Despite sociological evidence to the contrary, it remains to all appearances virtually axiomatic that the acquisition of consumer goods is the presumptive means to human happiness-and the more and better the goods, the better one’s life and the happier one will be.
No sooner had I posted than I found related thoughts:
One of the key moments in the creation of modernity occurs when production moves outside the household. So long as productive work occurs within the structure of households, it is easy and right to understand that work as part of the sustaining of the community of the household and of those wider forms of community which the household in turn sustains. As, and to the extent that, work moves outside the household and is put to the service of impersonal capital, the realm of work tends to become separated from everything but the service of biological survival and the reproduction of the labor force, on the one hand, and that of institutionalized acquisitiveness, on the other. Pleonexia, a vice in the Aristotelian scheme, is now the driving force of modern productive work.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue
Given the destructive fruitlessness of religio-political conflicts in the Reformation era, Catholics and Protestants alike built on trends that antedated the Reformation and decided to go shopping instead of continuing to fight about religion, thus permitting their self-colonization by capitalism in the industrious revolution. In combination with the exercise of power by hegemonic, liberal states, a symbiosis of capitalism and consumerism is today more than anything else the cultural glue that holds together the heterogeneity of Western hyperpluralism.
Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation
These observations dismiss the popular belief that the Amish reject all new technologies. So what’s really going on here? The Amish, it turns out, do something that’s both shockingly radical and simple in our age of impulsive and complicated consumerism: they start with the things they value most, then work backward to ask whether a given new technology performs more harm than good with respect to these values.
Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism
MacIntyre acknowledges that such a society would not make the kind of material progress that our society has. But then again, to believe that wealth is the only significant measure of the worth of an individual, a family, or a community is to reject the teaching of nearly every religion and wisdom tradition that ever was.
Mark Mitchell and Nathan Schlueter, The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry
The peace heard ‘round the world
The Coptic Church was brought onto the world stage more recently through the terrible act of violence carried out by ISIS against twenty-one migrant workers on a Libyan beach in February 2015. How did this incident help to demonstrate the importance of loving one’s enemies?
That was a pivotal point, I think, that impacted many people around the world, religious and nonreligious. It was an act of such inhumanity that it crossed a line that many were not ready to cross. The impact the executions made had two sources. The first was the men themselves, the twenty Coptic Christians and their Ghanaian friend. Their resilience, their strength, their utterance of the name of Christ to the very end was a real display of grace.
Just as in the Book of Daniel the three young men in the fiery furnace had a fourth with them, I am sure there was a twenty-second man on that beach. Christ must have been in their midst because their peace was visible on their faces.
The second reason the execution made such an impact was the reaction of the victims’ families. The German novelist Martin Mosebach was so moved by the story that he traveled to Egypt to write his book The 21: A Journey into the Land of Coptic Martyrs (Plough, 2019). He went to live with the families, expecting to see people broken by an act that had taken away their men, but he found them celebrating their witness and forgiving the perpetrators. I think that was an eye opener.
When word of the executions first reached Britain, I had over thirty interviews in the twenty-four hours following the announcement. And all the interviewers asked me, “How can you possibly forgive?” Because in my first interview I had spoken about forgiving the perpetrators. It was such a countercultural, counterintuitive sentiment. And I think it was another display of grace. It is the grace of God in us that allows us to love as he loves and to forgive as he forgives.
Forgiveness is tied into loving God – which includes loving ourselves as the image and likeness of God. Because it is in seeing that image and likeness within us and within everybody else, including our enemies, that we are then led to love and to forgive everybody. Not forgiving the action itself but the person committing the action; never justifying or accepting the hostility itself, but recognizing human brokenness and realizing that we’re all broken and we all need God’s forgiveness. In recognizing that, we can begin to love the image and likeness of God in the perpetrators, forgive them, and pray for them that their broken humanity could one day be restored.
Archbishop Angaelos, Just Doing What Christians Do (emphasis added)
I blush at “Christian” America’s failure to live up to this. Maybe the worst example is the practice of admitting “victim impact statements” at criminal sentencing hearings, where victims and their families are, basically, invited into court to vilify, rail on, and expressly refuse to forgive their victimizers.
“Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.”
Then his master, after he had called him, said to him, “You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you begged me. Should you not also have had compassion on your fellow servant, just as I had pity on you?” And his master was angry, and delivered him to the torturers until he should pay all that was due to him. So My heavenly Father also will do to you if each of you, from his heart, does not forgive his brother his trespasses.
Mount Athos
I watched a YouTube on Mt. Athos Friday evening.
It’s striking how people can be blown away by Mr. Athos’ antiquity and seeming immutability without (apparently) considering the possibility that those traits form a fairly compelling case for Orthodox Christianity.
I must have brought some premises they’re not bringing (though my experience was of an American parish, not of the Holy Mountain, which I won’t visit until October).
Thwarted
One of the strangest expressions of Julian [The Apostate]’s cultural program was a project to rebuild the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. As a former Christian, he was aware that the destruction of the temple by the Romans had been prophesied by Jesus. By rebuilding it, he believed he could undermine the Christian faith and bolster Judaism as an alternative to it. The project was a complete failure. Even non-Christian sources from the time reported that efforts to restore the foundation were met with setbacks so perplexing and mysterious as to appear divinely ordained.
John Strickland, The Age of Paradise
Can you conjugate “Anglican”?
Ultimately, the future of Anglo-Catholicism lies with Orthodoxy or a reconstituted Old Catholicism because they have held to the reformed catholic identity within Anglicanism whilst rejecting its doctrinal Protestantism. The neo-Evangelicals ultimately have more in common with the Holiness and Pentecostal churches through the Convergence Movement than they do with wider Anglicanism because they share the same sort of spirituality, albeit in a moderated form. This leaves the Confessional Anglicans who share more in common with moderate Lutheran and Reformed Christians than they do the Anglo-Catholics and the Neo-Evangelicals.
Peter D. Robinson, The Greater Church via Commonplace Letters
Teasing aside, I think I get what he’s saying.
What’s not for sale?
Christian nationalism
I put this last because I doubt that any of my readers are tempted by this:
Christian nationalism cannot turn back secularism, because it is just another form of it.
Russell Moore, quoted here. More Moore:
Christian nationalisms and civil religions are a kind of Great Commission in the reverse, in which the nations seek to make disciples of themselves, using the authority of Jesus to baptize their national identity in the name of the blood and of the soil and of the political order. The gospel is not a means to any end, except for the end of union with the crucified and resurrected Christ who transcends, and stands in judgment over, every group, every identity, every nationality, every culture.
I always appreciate reviews of Russell Moore’s books because, despite my liking the guy and thinking he’s part of the solution rather than part of the problem, I rarely enjoy his books themselves, and I rarely finish them. I think my problem with them is a combination of:
- Thoughtful as he is generally, Moore reflexively equates Evangelicalism and “the Church.”
- Articulate as he is generally, Moore’s native language is Evangelicalese.
- Maybe most of all, I have the icky feeling that I’m voyeuristically watching a family feud.
When I write those down, I can’t help but notice that he’s an Evangelical writing for Evangelicals. That’s a perfectly legitimate role for him, but small wonder then that his writing isn’t always my cup of tea.
We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.
The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 