A cyber-friend asked If you could wave a magic wand and have Christians in the USA instantly and deeply understand a concept, mental model, biblical theme, theological topic, etc. etc., what would it be?
My reply: That the Church did not begin at Azusa Street, in a Second Great Awakening tent revival, during the First Great Awakening, or with Henry VIII, Menno Simons, John Calvin, Martin Luther, Johannes Gutenberg, Augustine of Hippo or even the first New Testament codex.
Pragmatic Xianity
Bryan assumed the truth of Christianity, but his defense of it was essentially pragmatic. Rather than arguing for its factuality, as Machen did, he argued the good it did for humankind. “There has not been a great reform in a thousand years that was not built about [Christ’s] teachings,” he proclaimed, and “there will not be in all the ages to come.”
I doubt that Bryan’s faith, as described, is “saving faith.” On the other hand, Christendom can always use allies.
The American Sense of Scripture
When Vice President Mike Pence delivered his speech at the Republican National Convention, it was like witnessing a Walker Percy satire. Pence remixed Hebrews 12:1-2 and 2 Corinthians 3:17, by replacing “Jesus” with “Old Glory,” the “saints” with “this land of heroes,” and even interjected his own biblical gloss—“that means freedom always wins.”
People rightly recoiled from Pence’s failed attempt at civic religion. How could the Vice President replace Jesus “the author and perfecter of our faith” with the American flag? Why would he substitute American heroes for the saints? And, what definition of freedom could Pence be using to conclude that “freedom always wins”? After all, the American sense of Scripture is not one of the classic senses of Scripture. Those would be the literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical senses.
If you have read Percy’s Love in the Ruins, which is about—as the subtitle tells you—“The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World,” then Pence’s speech would sound strangely familiar ….
I never understood the hatred of Hoosier liberals for Governor Mike Pence. But I cringed when he agreed to run as Trump’s Vice President, and I’ve never found his Christianish faith a great reassurance.
It’s harder than a camel passing through the eye of a needle
L’Oréal heiress Françoise Bettencourt Meyers’ fortune passed $100 billion this year. But here’s what I found intriguing (besides her black hair at age 70 — after all, she’s worth it):
Ms Bettencourt Meyers is said to favour privacy over attending social events frequented by many of the world’s wealthy.
She is known to play the piano for several hours a day and has written two books – a five-volume study of the Bible and a genealogy of the Greek gods.
“She really lives inside her own cocoon. She lives mainly within the confines of her own family,” said Tom Sancton, who authored the book The Bettencourt Affair.
“But all the same,” insisted the Savage, “it is natural to believe in God when you’re alone—quite alone, in the night, thinking about death . . .” “But people never are alone now,” said Mustapha Mond. “We make them hate solitude; and we arrange their lives so that it’s almost impossible for them ever to have it.”
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
My sorta kinda “life verse”
In my Evangelical boarding school, there was a little bit of pressure to identify your “life verse” — one snippet of Scripture that was your very own guiding light.
That’s asking a lot of immature kids, and I don’t recommend it.
But as a matter of fact, one verse did kind of grab me, and looking back 56+ years, I could even see it as my unexpected guiding light:
… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
That’s my other New Year’s Wish for my readers, though it’s more closely related to the first than you might think.
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.
Not that the replacement of our 2023 calendars with 2024 will necessarily make a difference, but a guy can hope, can’t he?
Legalia
New York Times vs. OpenAI
The New York Timesfiled a lawsuit on Wednesday against OpenAI and Microsoft over alleged copyright infringement, claiming that the companies exploited the newspaper’s content without permission or authorization to train their AI systems—including the chatbot ChatGPT—and “wrongfully benefited from” the Times’ journalism. “This action seeks to hold them responsible for the billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages that they owe for the unlawful copying and use of the Times’ uniquely valuable works,” the paper argued in the filing.
Non-lawyers may find puzzling the thought that the main job of law schools is to teach people to think like lawyers. What the heck does that mean?
Among other things, it means that I cannot read an item like this without thinking this is how the common law develops: gripes and competing analogies.
True example: Early in the days of petroleum, Defendant, seeing Plaintiff getting rich off oil wells, slant-drills and taps the same pool of crude oil under Plaintiff’s property. Plaintiff sues, saying he owns everything within his borders from the infernal depths to the furthest skies. Defendant says the crude oil is like a highly mobile animal (a “wild, fugacious mineral-animal” was my property law prof’s description) which is rightfully owned by whoever captures it.
Eventually, a body of law develops from the resolutions of multiple cases, each with some different nuances.
So, is OpenAI like a slant-driller? How did those slant-drilling cases resolve? If the answer were obvious, there’d be no lawsuits or they would quickly settle.
The way generative AI works by training on existing data and generating new creative content and text is something that intellectual property as a legal framework has not had to deal with. We’re going to have to litigate and get the ruling from the court.
So this is a very important case that I wouldn’t be surprised that if it doesn’t go all the way to the United States Supreme Court because this has to be settled for us to know what the framework is for generative AI.
That first paragraph describes classic common law development.
The second paragraph is dubious: the Supreme Court doesn’t take cases just because they’re important, and an important case filed in state court would likely not get SCOTUS to review it. But this is probably in Federal Court, since it’s under (federal) copyright law, so SCOTUS might take it if it doesn’t like the decision of the Court of Appeals that eventually reviews the District Court decision.
On whether Trump is disqualified
I detest Donald Trump. It would be a great relief to me, though I cannot bring myself to pray for it, were he (and Joe Biden too, for that matter) to drop dead, soon. Some of his followers would spin conspiracy theories, but nothing any of us can do will stop that whatever happens.
At this stage of our absurdly-long pre-election run-up, it would be terribly, terribly, terribly divisive to exclude Trump from the ballot. What could serve more deeply to delegitimize the whole Presidential election next year?
The legal arguments about the applicability of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment are nuanced, and it’s not just about “insurrection.” The intent of the section was mostly to keep the former Confederate States from sending bomb-throwing racists to the House or Senate, with little worry about a bomb-throwing President, The language of the section arguably sweeps more broadly; but it dances all around naming the Presidency. Did the Reconstruction Congress hide an elephant (the Presidency) in a mouse-hole?
Credible legal scholars deny that the Presidency is a “civil office” of the United States. For instance, Kurt Lash: “According to longstanding congressional precedent and legal authority, the phrase ‘civil office under the United States’ did not include the office of president of the United States. As Joseph Story explained in his influential ‘Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States,’ the congressional precedent known as ‘Blount’s Case’ established that the offices of president, senator and representative were not civil offices under the government of the United States — they were the government of the United States. The phrase ‘civil office under the United States” referred to appointed offices.’“
SCOTUS has tended to go with textual arguments rather than intent. I hope they either revert to intent or find a really persuasive textual reason to allow him on the ballot, and Joseph Story may be just the ticket. Some of Trump’s enemies would spin conspiracy theories or shit-talk SCOTUS, but nothing any of us can do will stop that whatever happens.
Then, if Trump is still disappointingly alive and kicking on Election Day, I hope we collectively kick him to the curb by a really convincing margin. (This would be more realistic if the Democrats would turn their attention away from knee-capping Trump and toward a compelling centrist or center-left vision for 2025-2029.)
Culture
Racism
Martin Luther King Jr.’s most famous speech would not meet Kendi’s definition of anti-racism, nor would the one Barack Obama made about there being too many fatherless Black families. Indeed, nearly everything that Americans have been taught about how to be anti-racist for the past several decades is, according to Kendi’s explicit definition, racist.
Subrena E. Smith, a person of color as such things are styled, proposes that since we invented race for nefarious reasons, it’s time to banish it.
If terrorists win, it will be the transphobes’ fault
Since January of this year, more than 400 anti-LGBTQ+ laws have been introduced at the state level … That number is rising and demonstrates a trend that could be dangerous for service members, their families, and the readiness of the force as a whole.
I’m reasonably confident that General Burt is highly educated, because only someone highly educated could believe such drivel:
You have to be educated into cant; it is a kind of stupidity that surpasses the capacity of unaided Nature to confer.
Anthony M. Esolen, Out of the Ashes. I call “Bullshit” and “Shame on you for trying to shame us, General.”
This is a quote that has stuck with me. Yes, it’s a variation on a populist theme, but there’s enough truth to that theme that The Emperor’s New Clothes has become beloved.
Jung versus Freud
Having felt his own seething unconscious erupt into the midst of normal daylight reality served Jung well in his treatment of schizophrenic patients, who in Freud’s judgment were too far gone to reach, but whose bizarre hallucinations and delusions Jung attempted to comprehend with respect and tenderness. Unlike Freud, who maintained a studied distance from his patients, sitting aloof and serene out of the supine sufferer’s sight, Jung would sit face to face with his charges, bumping knees, exhorting with vehement gestures.
In Jung’s estimation, what healed was not disinterested mind alone following a dogmatic trail through the vast wastes of one’s sexual history, but making contact, demonstrating sympathy, aiming at a comprehensive understanding, allowing the free play of humanity at its best. Jung could see that for patients above the age of thirty-five — life’s halfway mark, or what Dante callednel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita — their principal concern was not undoing childhood psychosexual knots that persisted into adulthood, but rather finding the authoritative spiritual truth that one could found a serious life upon.
That kind of explains Jungian Jordan Peterson’s style, doesn’t it?
Adult movies — and literature
I used to say that an adult movie was one where they kiss and then the lights go out (because the adults know what comes next).
I’ve now read Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and Home, truly adult novels. What child could understand? A rare treat, too rich to binge-read. I can’t even face wading into Lila or Jack immediately.
Journalists are so predictable
After dealing with reporters through many rounds of violence since coming to power in Gaza in 2007, Hamas understood that most can be co-opted or coerced, and that coverage of Gaza would reliably focus on civilian casualties, obscuring the cause of the war, portraying Israel’s military operations as atrocities, and thus pressuring Israel to stop fighting.
[B]ook critic Ron Charles … noted the publication of “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs,” by Senator Josh Hawley: “The book’s final cover contains just text, including the title so oversized that the word ‘Manhood’ can’t even fit on one line — like a dude whose shoulders are so broad that he has to turn sideways to flee through the doors of the Capitol.”
In The Los Angeles Times, Jessica Roy explained the stubborn refusal of plastic bags to stay put: “Because they’re so light, they defy proper waste management, floating off trash cans and sanitation trucks like they’re being raptured by a garbage god.”
Of Kevin McCarthy’s toppling as House speaker by Matt Gaetz and his fellow right-wing rebels: “It’s as if Julius Caesar were stabbed to death in the Forum by the Marx Brothers.” (Peggy Noonan)
Ron DeSantis, gives off the vibe “that he might unplug your life support to recharge his cellphone.” (Peggy Noonan)
Too many voters today are easily conned, deeply biased, impervious to fact and bereft of survival instincts. Contrary to myth, frogs leap out of heating pots. Stampeding cattle stop at a cliff edge. Lemmings don’t really commit mass suicide. We’ll find out about Americans in 2024. (Mort Rosenblum)
While I don’t systematically gather, grade, and keep records on such things, I rather liked two sentences from Daniel Henninger:
The most fraudulent word in higher education is “dialogue.” Real dialogue died years ago, replaced by a soft-pillow politics that envelops anything disagreeable and then smothers it.
Speaking of higher education:
Acknowledging a few exceptions among conservative commentators and public officials, we can still say that universities are to Republicans what guns are to Democrats: an issue they are certain is at the root of great evils, but about which they face a massive knowledge gap that hampers their ability to do anything effective, even within the limited space our legal order allows.
Greg Conti, The Rise of the Sectarian University (Compact Mag) I’m seeing enough good stuff from Compact (which registered with me at its founding) to consider paying its pricey subscription price.
After all the hype, it turns out that “Trump without the crazy” is just an awkward, aggrieved, opportunistic, anti-charismatic, aspiring autocrat with a mile-wide cruel streak and the people skills of Mark Zuckerberg crossed with Richard Nixon.
Much of the social energy of the old internet has now retreated underground to the cozyweb. Except for a few old-fashioned blogs like this one, there’s not much of it left above-ground now. But there’s an odd sort of romance to holding down a public WordPress-based fortress in the grimdark bleakness, even as almost everything (including the bulk of what I do) retreats to various substacks, discords, and such.
I think you probably know who posted that on TruthSocial.
“Christians tend not to hope other people rot in hell on Christmas Day,” radio host Erick Erickson sniffed afterward, which read like a non sequitur in context. Why would Trump care whether people think he’s a good Christian? And how confident should we be at this point about which sentiments are and aren’t condoned by politically engaged members of the faith? Erickson’s grasp of what’s normal and what isn’t for American Christians may not be as firm as he, and I, might wish.
If Mr. Trump wins the Republican nomination for the third straight time and then prevails in the general election, he will have sealed the transformation of his party, given new energy to right-wing populism around the world, and called into question the principles that have shaped America’s security policy since World War II.
Voters will have ratified the outlook that Mr. Trump has advocated since the 1980s: opposition to immigration, multilateral trade treaties and globalization. They would give him the opportunity to enact more extreme proposals in his second term—including an all-out attack on the “deep state” federal bureaucracy and the use of the military to fight crime, immigration and domestic dissent. They would embrace his view of the press as the enemy of the people and agree to an all-out culture war led from the White House. After hearing Mr. Trump declare across the country that “for those of you who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution,” they will have replied, in effect, “Retribution is exactly what we want. Use the government to punish our enemies.”
Adults have a particular responsibility to model and set a template for the young. It is a primary job of the adults in the room, wherever the room is, to show every day, in dress, speech and comportment, what being adult looks like. At least two generations have come up with no idea. Our national style has grown crude and vulgar; this entered Washington some years back, and that only made it worse. It’s a little sad. Washington used to be so old-fashioned, it was one of its charms, it was a throwback. Decades ago you smiled because female members of Congress, in their suits and high-button blouses, dressed like aspiring librarians. Now some dress like aspiring whores. Can I get in trouble for saying that? Let’s find out.
… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
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.
On this eve of the The Nativity According to the Flesh of our Lord God and Savior Jesus Christ (that’s the official name in Orthodox Churches), I deviate somewhat both from my usual tone (because, as you may have noted, there was some fairly big religious news over the past week) and from much particular nativity piety.
What’s wrong with this plan?
The neighborhood will do the luminaries (sic) again this year on Christmas eve. Board member [name/phone omitted] will take point this year distributing the luminaries on Christmas Eve. Distribution will be from my house at [address omitted] beginning at 9:30am. If you would like to volunteer to help with the distribution, be at my house promptly at 9:30 Sunday morning.
Email from my HOA President. I could add emphasis, but I’ll let you ferret out the solecism on the grammar of Christian piety on your own.
Contemporary Pharisaism
The Pharisees of Christ’s time thought that Jews had lost God’s favor through transgressions of His law. To regain God’s favor, they were punctilious about keeping His law — and tried to force other Jews (Jesus, for instance) to do so as well.
I regret that Pharisaism in common parlance has come to connote hypocrisy, censoriousness and self-righteousness, because that sounds prissy and self-satisfied, whereas the real Pharisees were more like theocrats, more like our myths about grim-faced Puritans.
In my preferred sense, I would apply “Pharisaical” to Michael Cassidy, Ron DeSantis and Charlie Kirk:
On Dec. 14, a Christian veteran named Michael Cassidy walked into the Iowa State Capitol and destroyed a display erected by the Satanic Temple of Iowa. The display was an idol of Baphomet, a robed figure with a goat head. Cassidy told Fox News host Jesse Watters that he had destroyed the statue in an act of “Christian civil disobedience.”
…
But the right-wing response to the Baphomet vandalism was notable … Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, tweeted, “Satan has no place in our society and should not be recognized as a ‘religion’ by the federal government. I’ll chip in to contribute to this veteran’s legal defense fund. Good prevails over evil — that’s the American spirit.” The Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk said, “A Christian veteran just beheaded a monument to Satan in Iowa’s State Capitol. If this is Christian Nationalism, we need more of it. Hero.”
David French, who goes on to describe in his words the spirit that makes me (not him) want to call them “Pharisaical”:
To understand the moment, one has to understand the extent to which many religious activists believe that free speech itself is responsible for America’s ongoing secularization and alleged moral decline. They believe the doctrine of viewpoint neutrality — that is, the requirement that the government treat private speakers equally in their access to government facilities — is a proxy for “moral relativism.” …
This claim is a Christianized cousin of the secular idea that defending the free-speech rights of those with whom you vehemently disagree is, in essence, providing aid and comfort to racism, sexism, homophobia or transphobia. In this view, your role as a citizen is first to determine whether any given speech meets with your moral approval, and then — and only then — to rally to its defense.
I would add that at least some religious activists believe not just that we decline morally as a virtual synonym for acting badly, but that America’s plight is a direct judgment (i.e., not just a natural consequence) from a god who’s angry at us because of our collective sins.
Those are the clearest case of modern American Pharisaism.
Fiducia supplicans
Black holes (Rorschach proclamations)
In a by now familiar sequence of events, the Vatican released a document on Monday which caused instant confusion. “Pope says Roman Catholic priests can bless same-sex couples,” the headlines announced. Optimistic Catholic apologists said the media had misunderstood the document, which permitted no such thing. Pessimistic Catholic apologists said the headlines were, alas, correct, and that the pope had erred. Part-time ultramontanists said that the document could only be read in a conservative manner and that it was an outrageous insult to the pope to think otherwise. Full-time ultramontanists said that the document could only be read as a “development of doctrine” and that it was an outrageous insult to the pope to think otherwise. The liberals rejoiced, with a slight undertone of impatience. The world took a brief interest, concluded that the Church was at least making some slow progress, then yawned a little and moved on to the next headline.
I have spent what feels like years parsing these much-debated Vatican documents, checking the exact translation of Italian words, badgering learned canonists and theologians for comments, comparing one sentence with another. And to be honest, I am thinking of retiring from the game. Because in the era of Pope Francis, such “controversial” statements are generally less statements than black holes.
A black hole, according to NASA, is “a great amount of matter packed into a very small area—think of a star ten times more massive than the Sun squeezed into a sphere approximately the diameter of New York City.” That slightly exaggerates the density of Fiducia supplicans’ five-thousand-word text, but the point is the result—which, as NASA explains, “is a gravitational field so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape.”
This seems the perfect frame. I’m less experienced and less connected than Dan Hitchens when it comes to the Roman Church. If he can’t figure it out, I can’t.
But it seems fair to say that Pope Francis has, by Fiducia supplicans, at least given cover to those who have been clamoring for recognition of same-sex couples (and to a lesser extent, divorced and civilly remarried couples).
Fr. James Martin conveniently photographed and posted on social media his “spontaneous” blessing of one couple. (Yes, there is something oxymoronic about a social media photograph of a supposedly spontaneous encounter.)
Untenable tension
Of Monday’s extraordinary action by Pope Francis:
What does it mean to bless a couple without blessing that couple’s relationship? Millions of words will be expended in the coming months to try to explain this, but I can guarantee that none of them will make sense. … It’s hard to see how historic Catholic teaching on marriage and historic Catholic teaching on papal authority can emerge unscathed from this.
There has been speculations that Fiducia supplicans will produce a schism in Catholicism and/or drive orthodox Catholics to Orthodoxy.
The late Jaroslav Pelikan was a Church Historian at Yale. Somewhere in the 20-25 year-ago range, he left Lutheranism to embrace Orthodox Christianity, where his heart had been for some time already.
I emailed the news a Protestant friend who’d studied at Yale. He responded that the development would create a real buzz at Yale.
I followed up with the puzzled question about whether Yale was really so religious that this would be scandalous. “Au contraire,” he replied. “The scandal is that anyone at Yale should take religion seriously enough to change affiliations like that.”
In this situation, Catholics who take religion seriously enough to object to things like Fiducia supplicans probably have been those who in the past attended carefully to the words of Popes and defended the most lavish claims about the authority of the Pope. This is going to be a tough call for them.
… and not just them
[I]t is not a sufficient reason to come to the Orthodox Church if someone is dissatisfied with his own Church community, be it a Catholic Church or a Protestant community. There is something more in the Orthodox Church … and it is simply not enough to be a protester or to this like something happening in your own community in order to become Orthodox.
Metropolitan Hilarion. It will be tempting for some Orthodox priests to treat dissatisfaction with Catholicism over this shift of position as a sufficient basis for receiving them into Orthodoxy. Who doesn’t like “church growth”?
On greener grass
It is important that before any of you choose to abandon your declining church for a different communion, that you not have any false hope. This is true of Orthodoxy as well. It is not the case that all churches are the same, so it doesn’t matter which one you belong to. Nor is it the case that because all churches are dealing with corruption of one kind or another, you might as well stay put. I’m simply saying that one should try to be as realistic as possible, and not allow oneself to be swayed by one’s understandable hope that the grass is greener Over There, With Those People.
It might be greener than where you are, but I assure you there will be problems. As a Catholic priest once put it to me, discussing the decadence within all the churches today, “Churches are made of people, including the clergy. Whatever sins the people of a time and place have, they will bring them into the church.” His point was not that we should reconcile ourselves to sin, much less engage in woke mumbo-jumbo to declare sin to be a blessing. His point, rather, was that we should not allow our idealism to get the better of us, such that we become scandalized by the failures within ecclesial bodies.
I have loved this story before and I love it still:
I am reminded of leaving the RCIA (catechesis) program I had enrolled in at the LSU Catholic Student Center in 1991, under the naive assumption that though I was two years out of college, I would find a more intellectually challenging catechesis there. In fact, it was a liberal priest and a liberal nun leading us all on guided meditations. Zero teaching of what we would be required to believe as Catholics. When I realized at last that this wasn’t going to get any better, and that we were all going to end up being received into the Catholic Church without knowing anything about the Catholic faith, I left.
I found my way to Father Dermot Moloney, an elderly Irishman who pastored the Latin mass parish downtown. He took me on as a catechumen. He said to me on that first day, in his thick brogue, “Lad, by the time I get t’roo with ye, ye might not want to be a Catlick, but you’ll know what a Catlick is.” God bless that priest’s memory. I so respected him for that. The problem today is that a Catholic can be just about anything he or she wants to be, and the administrative class of the Church doesn’t care. If you care, the Pope considers you to be “rigid,” and part of the problem.
Your purpose in life, in all likelihood, is quotidian
I live in Phoenix, the home of Grand Canyon University that has become a fairly major player in the Christian college scene. They have billboards all along the I-17 freeway through town that market their programs as “finding your purpose”. And that in a nutshell, I think, is the “spirit of the age” of our cultural Christian spirituality. The concept that you are potentially a “Bible character level” servant of God is foundational to evangelical Christianity. … [I]t all boils down to this: You exist to be something and do something specific (and great) in the universe and apart from fulfilling that utility you are a failure (or sinner…).
…
I don’t know exactly when “God has a plan for your life” stopped making sense, or more like it stopped making sense to put any energy or investment into trying to make it make sense. I think it was around the time (almost 20 years ago) when I faced the reality I was never going to be ordained to the priesthood, something I “KNEW” was my calling and purpose since first grade. That thought drove my life and I had spent decades in churches, ministries, cultivating relationships, and making preparations of one form or another to prepare for its inevitable, providential fulfillment. It never happened. I’ve ended up being a construction worker for the past 40 years instead. But even so, I found ways to spiritualize my life as a common laborer and make it “significant”.
…
At 71, … [a]s simplistic and tritely “zen” as it sounds, there is some peace accepting the reality that if I hadn’t done what I did, I wouldn’t be where I am (for better or worse) and I just have to deal with my present moment.
…
There was a woman who asked God, “What do you want me to do, what is your will for my life?” His answer? She said, “He told me, do your dishes. What a let down!” But that’s really the answer for all of us. “Do what is in front of you, and then the next right thing.” Yes, even doing the dishes is spiritual warfare sometimes.
The Christian Way, as its first followers referred to it, is in other words a path of internal transformation — what the Orthodox call the “unseen warfare” that goes on in the heart every minute. The battle between the way of God and the way of the world: every religion I know of teaches some version of this.
Being human, though, we like to take these teachings and overlay them onto the world. In Christian history, this has often taken the form of crusading — sometimes literally — to transform the kingdom of Man into the kingdom of God by force …
Currently, this trend is manifesting most obviously in the form of a “cultural Christianity” promoted by anti-woke public figures on the Right. In this reading, the Christian Way is a weapon which can, in the words of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, writinghere as a recent convert, “fortify us against our menacing foes”. Ironically, this spiritual-warfare-as-civilisational-warfare attitude is most obvious at present in the rise of the violent Islamism which so frightens Hirsi Ali, and with good reason. The nervousness with which Europeans have been shopping in their Christmas markets this month is testament to the reality of the violence which some people think God will help them justify. The warning should be clear.
… Religion, despite the many calcified failures of its history, is not at root a weapon in anybody’s culture war. Religion and culture reign in separate domains. A faith wielded as a stick with which to beat the “cultural Marxists” will end up being as empty as the consumer void it seeks to challenge, and potentially as toxic. C. S. Lewis had already spotted the trap more than 60 years ago: “Religions devised for a social purpose, like Roman emperor-worship or modern attempts to ‘sell Christianity as a means of saving civilisation’, do not come to much. The little knots of Friends who turn their backs on the ‘World’ are those who really transform it.”
Both the fundamentalist and the higher critic assume that it is possible to understand the biblical text without training, without moral transformation, without the confession and forgiveness that come about within the church. Unconsciously, both means of interpretation try to make everyone religious (that is, able to understand and appropriate scripture) without everyone’s being a member of the community for which the Bible is Scripture.
Soon enough, Africa will be sending Christian missionaries to darkest America.
Orthodoxy
Anglophone Christians appropriating Orthodoxy
Fr. Stephen DeYoung’s podcast bible studies have brought me one revelation after another. Those on Galatians (from almost three years ago; I came to these podcasts late and have been listening in chronological order) have been particularly helpful for my understanding of how little I understand — and by extension a challenge before all who come to Orthodoxy from a Protestant millieu.
This exchange between Fr. Stephen and a parishioner “went meta” on the challenge:
C1: I have a question that may be a distraction, but… You read this in English, in this English translation.
Fr. Stephen: Yes.
C1: First of all, it makes almost no sense.
Fr. Stephen: Yeah.
C1: Second, if you live in the Western culture that we live in, and you try to make sense of it, you’re going to come to the wrong conclusion.
Fr. Stephen: Yes.
C1: What do we do about that?
C2: Well, we have a Fr. Stephen.
Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] We need… Honestly, we need an Orthodox translation of the New Testament in the English language. And we as English-speaking Orthodox Christians have not fully appropriated the Orthodox tradition and faith yet. We just haven’t. We’re still doing that. We’re still working on that.
C1: Our language is actually a barrier.
Fr. Stephen: Right, because the English language that we’re using, terms like “justification” and things, it’s the vocabulary of Protestant theology. So it’s not just a question of how do we express the Orthodox faith in English; it’s [that] we’re trying to express the Orthodox faith in Protestant terminology, and that’s kind of not going to work. So we have to continue—mostly we’re doing that just by using borrowed Greek words like apophatic theology and cataphatic theology and theosis. We’re just taking the Greek words and using them instead of the Latin ones like justification, to try and help with that, but that’s something we’re just going to have to continue to do.
But, yeah, any New Testament you’re going to pick up, including the New King James Version that you find in the Orthodox Study Bible is translated by a Protestant committee. So, number one, they’re coming at it from a Protestant perspective, but, number two, it’s a committee, so they’re also trying not to take sides, usually, in any internecine Protestant debates. So it’s not [just] that it’s Protestant; it’s that it’s vaguely Protestant, which is what makes it even harder to understand. Because if they just let a Calvinist translate it themselves, it would be skewed, toward Calvinism, obviously, but it would at least make sense. [Laughter] But because they’re trying not to do that, you end up with translating participles with a gerund, just “-ing,” going because we don’t want to interpret beyond that; or just putting “of”—“of faith,” “the hearing of faith.”
…
Fr. Stephen: We’ve got a lot of work to do. And you folks are just as responsible for doing your piece of it as I am for doing my piece of it. So that’s why it’s hard. That’s why it’s hard is that there’s this cyclical [Sic. I think he probably meant more like “recursive”] thing, where Protestantism has read these passages a certain way, and so the English translations all reflect that reading. So you could either go back and read the Greek— but even then, who put together the lexicon you’re using that tells you what the words mean? Yeah, some 19th-century German Protestant liberal. [Laughter] So that’s going to be skewed another way, too.
And again, I’m not saying any of this to bash Protestantism. It’s just we as Orthodox Christians are reading New Testaments that reflect the Protestant tradition of the people who translated it. Just like, if I translate something, it’s going to reflect my Orthodox Christian understanding of it. As humans, none of us is a robot, none of us is completely objective—there’s no way to do a completely objective translation anyway, because words in one language do not equal words in another language, so you can’t mathematically do a translation. You can’t have a computer do a… If you want to see how a computer does a translation, go use Google Translate and see how that works for you! [Laughter] I don’t want a Google translated Bible! That’s going to make a whole lot less sense than this, right? [Laughter]
C1: It also means that we have to struggle within our own minds to deal with thoughts that have been skewed in advance. I mean, you say “justification,” and my mind immediately says, “by faith,” and I know what that means. I’ve heard that in church; wait a minute.
Fr. Stephen: Right, or the word “faith.”
C1: Yeah, the word “faith” itself.
…
C1: So it’s a constant mental struggle.
…
Fr. Stephen: … But to a certain extent, that’s always been true. That’s why we have homilies and sermons. That’s why we don’t just stand up and read a text from the Bible and sit back down. It’s always required teaching and explanation and that kind of thing.
I’ll turn too soon to less edifying thoughts, but let’s start with two observations, the first of which I practice while I mostly aspire to the second.
A little humanity
When I fell in love with English on a college campus many years ago, it was precisely because studying John Milton and James Joyce and Octavia Butler was so intoxicatingly useless in market terms. It rejected the assumption that value and utility are synonyms. The humanities captivated me — and foiled the best-laid plans of mice and pre-med — because literature and philosophy seemed to begin from a quietly revolutionary premise: There is thinking that does not exist merely to become work, and knowledge that does not exist merely to become capital.
“The French seemed to take every meal in public, even breakfast, and whenever dining, showed not the slightest sign of hurry or impatience. It was as if they had nothing else to do but sit and chatter and savor what seemed to the Americans absurdly small portions. Or sip their wine ever so slowly. “The French dine to gratify, we to appease appetite,” observed John Sanderson. “We demolish dinner, they eat it.””
In the popular piety of the formerly-Christian West, Monday’s Feast is the equal of Easter, and it’s first runner-up to Pascha (Easter) in the Eastern Church.
So if you want don’t want it to be your “miserable fate to spend the holidays this year listening to people complain about ‘anti-democratic’ attempts to strike a presidential frontrunner from the ballot” and similar things, you might want to stop reading now.
Politics and law
Of Rudy’s $175 million judgment and bankruptcy
I genuinely am curious who Trump could even staff a cabinet with. Literally everyone who comes near him is either publicly humiliated or impoverished through lawsuits and then also. . . publicly humiliated.
January 6 qualifies as an “insurrection” even under a fairly narrow definition of the term that is limited to the use of force to take over the powers of government. We don’t need to rely on much broader definitions advocated by some legal scholars.
…
As our detailed recitation of the evidence shows, President Trump did not merely incite the insurrection. Even when the siege on the Capitol was fully under way, he continued to support it by repeatedly demanding that Vice President Pence refuse to perform his constitutional duty and by calling Senators to persuade them to stop the counting of electoral votes. These actions constituted overt, voluntary, and direct participation in the insurrection.
…
As I pointed out in a recent Bulwark article about the case, this goes beyond encouraging violence (as Trump did before the attack) or failing to try to stop it. It amounts to using the attack as leverage to try to force Congress to keep him in power. Using a violent insurrection in this way surely qualifies as “engaging in it,” even if Trump’s other actions fell short of doing so. Even if this somehow still falls short of “engagement,” this and Trump’s other actions surely at least gave “aid and comfort to the enemies” of the United States.
Ilya Somin, quoting the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling.
Don’t take the bait
You’ll find no shortage of arguments against the decision of the Colorado Supreme Court that Donald Trump is barred by Section 3 of the 14th Amendment from serving as President, and therefore will be barred from Colorado ballots.
I’ll not rehearse them here except to beg you: Don’t fall for the simplistic line that the decision is bad because it’s “anti-democratic.”
Section 3 of the 14th Amendment was intended to be anti-democratic. It assumes that voters might elect an insurrectionist and says, in effect, “We don’t care. Insurrectionists can’t serve. Period. Full stop.”
Oh, yes: One more thing. It may be politically embarrassing that all seven Colorado Justices were appointed by Democrat Governors, but courts shouldn’t let political appearances sway them.
Somebody filed a lawsuit.
A lower court decided it and one side appealed.
From what I hear, the opinions and dissents in 213 pages of Colorado show great effort to get things right, not to carry partisan water or reject the cup handed them.
I wonder how SCOTUS will reverse? I strongly suspect it will. But the rationale will matter.
Our miserable fate
It’s our miserable fate to spend the holidays this year listening to people complain about “anti-democratic” attempts to strike a presidential frontrunner from the ballot who were adamant about disqualifying Barack Obama in 2008 absent proof of his status as a natural-born citizen.
…
I am confident that this would have been a different conversation on January 6, 2021. On that day, right-wingers who now scoff at the left for using the word “insurrection” for political purposes were using the word “insurrection” themselves. An earnest effort in court at the time to disqualify Trump from any future candidacy would have been received enthusiastically on the left and probably not much worse than ambivalence on the right. He was done in politics anyway at that point, right? Who would care if some court made it official?
We didn’t have that conversation on January 6, though. Or during the rest of 2021. Or 2022. Only this year did it become a live issue, and by then it was too late.
Meritorious or not, challenging Trump on 14th Amendment grounds wasn’t tenable politically once he had reestablished himself as the frontrunner for the Republican nomination.
I bristle at criticism of the Colorado Supreme Court for having the temerity actually to decide a case presented to it without fear or favor.
But Nellie Bowles levels a different criticism, aimed at the people who brought the suit:
The only way to protect democracy is to end democracy: The Colorado Supreme Court decided this week that Trump is disqualified from holding the presidency and so cannot appear on the Republican primary ballot in the state. Meanwhile, California’s lieutenant governor ordered the state Supreme Court to “explore every legal option” to remove Trump from the ballot. In doing so, she said that the rules for the presidency are simple: “The constitution is clear: You must be 40 years old and not an insurrectionist.” Yet even there she is wrong: you only have to be 35. [Tipsy: You also have to be a natural-born citizen, Nellie.]
Anyway, for a long time the standard liberal take has been that Democracy Is Under Threat from Republicans. And Trump certainly tried schemes in Georgia and whatnot, like, the man gave it a shot. But I would say that banning the opposition party’s leading candidate. . . is pretty much the biggest threat to democracy you can do. It’s a classic one, really. Timeless. Oldie but Goodie. The American left was so committed to protecting democracy that they had to ban voting.
All I’ll say is that once you ban the opposition party’s top candidate, you can no longer, in fact, say you’re for democracy at all. You can say you like other things: power, control, the end of voting, choosing the president you want, rule by technocratic elites chosen by SAT score, all of which I personally agree with. But you can’t say you like democracy per se.
So Colorado, listen, I dream every day of being a dictator. I would seize the local golf course and turn it into a park on day one; day two, expand Austin breakfast taco territory to the whole country; day three, invade Canada. Day four, we ban zoos. My fellow fascists, we’re on the same page. Let’s just drop the democracy stuff and call it what it is.
I’ve become persuaded that somebody ideally should have brought this sort of lawsuit years ago, when Trump wasn’t the GOP POTUS favorite by a commanding margin. But then most of us thought he was politically dead after January 6, so why would anyone bother?
“Eugenicons”
If the eugenicons were without influence, they could safely be ignored. The problem is that the they have a large and apparently growing influence.
I spent a lot of time wading through Lind’s exposé of conservatives with eugenic sympathies, waiting for him to reveal the smoking gun. He never did.
I’m far from infallible on what’s going down in the world. I’m interested in what I’m interested in and within recent memory began consciously trying to forsake the fool’s errand of understanding everything.
That said, I’m not convinced that “eugenicons” (Lind’s failed attempt at coining a major concept) “have a large and apparently growing influence.” This felt like an article wherein the author got so invested in a theory that he couldn’t face up to its failure at his own hands.
Rank hypocrisy watch
House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana was once perfectly content to use the courts to overrule a democratic process, spearheading an effort in late 2020 to collect lawmakers’ signatures in support of a lawsuit in Texas challenging the results of the that year’s election—which, if successful, would have voided millions of votes in four other states. Tuesday, though, Johnson—who formally endorsed Trump’s reelection campaign last month—was impugning the decision in Colorado that, in his view, would short-circuit the democratic process. “Today’s ruling attempting to disqualify President Trump from the Colorado ballot is nothing but a thinly veiled partisan attack,” he said. “Regardless of political affiliation, every citizen registered to vote should not be denied the right to support our former president and the individual who is the leader in every poll of the Republican primary. We trust the U.S. Supreme Court will set aside this reckless decision and let the American people decide the next President of the United States.”
Let us assume for the sake of argument that there is an absolutely massive conspiracy of Democrats against Donald Trump.
Does that assumed fact make him fit for the Presidency? Are we going to elect a manifestly unfit candidate — one who either is ignorant of holocaust history or who consciously is mimicking Adolph Hitler — to punish the Democrats for some underhanded opposition to him?
I’m sorry that Americans are so well-conditioned that they won’t consider voting for third-party candidates, and that a vote against Trump effectively becomes a vote for Biden*, but I can’t vote for him and will probably vote for the American Solidarity Party slate.
(* A reminder that this common trope is sometimes false. We do not elect Presidents by national popular vote. I have several times now voted for third-party candidates when it was apparent from polling that, for instance, my state was going to deliver its electors to Donald Trump rather than Joe Biden, and my vote wasn’t going to change that.)
Culture
Real men, good men, violent men
Pearcey noted first that there is a sharp dissonance culturally between how we think of “real men” vs “good men.” The former are often moral abysses but they display a certain kind of chest-thumping bravado that many associate with masculinity. The latter is honorable, devoted, and principled, but often despised culturally for precisely those reasons, and this applies as much within many churches as it does the culture.
The other point she made: There is a sharp gap in behavior between self-identified evangelical men who don’t go to church (they are statistically the most likely group in most studies to engage in domestic abuse) and evangelical men who do attend church (statistically the least likely to be abusive). At a time when many in the young Christian right are making their peace with manosphere internet Nazis, those two facts fill me with dread. But we owe Pearcey a debt for helping to document not only these two points, but many others.
Jake Meador, * 23 Books for 2023*, recommending Nancy Pearcey’s * Toxic War on Masculinity*.
There are many, many wrong ideas out there right now about the place of religion in American life: The dominant driver of dechurching is abusive churches. The most common intellectual shift in people who dechurch is toward progressivism. American churches are basically doing fine and the noise about dechurching is largely just a digital artifact, not something tied to life on the ground in local churches.
All of those things are wrong.
The reality is that the biggest drivers of dechurching right now are changes of life, above all moving to a new place. More people dechurch into a secular right wing ideology than progressivism. And the current dechurching wave is the single biggest shift in churchgoing practice in American history.
Graham and Davis will walk you through the data from the study they did with Ryan Burge and then offer application to help call people back to church. And that’s another misconception, by the way: Most people who have stopped attending church are actually willing to come back.
The persistence of religion
A common critical fallacy among liberals of most stripes is the affirmation that reasoned debate is the currency of politics. We want to believe that one simple Rachel Maddow or Jon Stewart video will convince people that Pizzagate isn’t real or that Hilary Clinton doesn’t drink the blood of infants. The problem is pretending that logic, evidence, or reason have anything to do with such beliefs. The situation is much more dire, what we’re up against far more insidious; don’t expect to use logic when you’re at a Black Mass. “Everything may be religion,” I said, “but not all religions are good.” Irrationality, superstition, the numinous, and the transcendent—for both good and bad—can never be definitively pruned from our garden. You may as well pretend that language could be abolished as imagine the taming of the religious impulse, even when the aromatic censers of the church have been replaced by some weirdo’s keyboard.
Simon also referred to Chris Rufo as a “Svengali opportunist.” I liked that very much. I distrust Rufo and have distrusted him since I first encountered him waging dishonest war on critical race theory. (Honest war on CRT is fine, but Rufo once boasted something like:
We’re going to render this brand toxic. Essentially what we’re going to do is make you think, whenever you hear anything negative, you will think critical race theory.
Following up on this item, it occurs to me that mass disenthrallment with the automobile and a return to walking and cycling would be far better that reducing emissions from tailpipes or building overweight EVs that require a lot of mining of rare earths.
Exasperation speaking
“It’s part of this extreme right-wing attack on elite institutions,” said Charles Fried, a professor at Harvard Law School and a former solicitor general in the Reagan administration. “The obvious point is to make it look as if there is this ‘woke’ double standard at elite institutions.”
“If it came from some other quarter, I might be granting it some credence,” he said of the accusations. “But not from these people.”
I assume Prof. Fried understands that truth is true regardless of who bears it, so I can only attribute this logical lapse to exasperation at Svengali opportunist Christopher Rufo.
When did foul language become invisible?
I occasionally see glowing reviews of some streaming series or another and wonder “why am I not watching that?” Then I go to the appointed streaming service and recall “Oh, yeah. I watched the first episode. It was so full of foul language that I couldn’t bear it.”
This is not a way of claiming that my own vocabulary is free of expletives, scatology, and occasional profanity. I adopted some of that stuff in my late teens and early twenties to shock my elders into recognition of their folly. Fifty-plus years later, that proto-trolling has proven one of my own lifetime follies.
My point is that foul language is invisible to most critics. There is a prominent Evangelical pundit, generally sound, who I’m nevertheless unable fully to trust because of how he raved about Ted Lasso without noting that its landscape was blanketed with F-bombs.
Saints and Sinners
[O]ne of the first things they teach you is that in the act of reporting, you will inevitably have to depend on information acquired from dodgy people. Saints, being saintly, often don’t know what’s going on; you have to talk to the people who are great sinners.
To salvage what’s left of the right’s faith in elections and the judiciary, and frankly to prevent civil unrest encouraged by Trump, the justices will need to reach a certain outcome in this matter regardless of whether they sincerely believe the law supports it. The Colorado Supreme Court accordingly may have viewed its own ruling as an opportunity to rebuke Trump constitutionally in a way that the U.S. Supreme Court won’t be able to, even if it’s privately inclined to do so.
…
I am confident that this would have been a different conversation on January 6, 2021. On that day, right-wingers who now scoff at the left for using the word “insurrection” for political purposes were using the word “insurrection” themselves. An earnest effort in court at the time to disqualify Trump from any future candidacy would have been received enthusiastically on the left and probably not much worse than ambivalence on the right. He was done in politics anyway at that point, right? Who would care if some court made it official?
We didn’t have that conversation on January 6, though. Or during the rest of 2021. Or 2022. Only this year did it become a live issue, and by then it was too late.
… Why, then, did his opponents wait so long to pursue this legal avenue against him?
Ironically, I think the answer is that they gave Republican voters more credit than those voters deserve.
…
As I explained previously, those voters have argued at varying times that it’s improper to impeach and remove him from office over January 6 because the criminal courts would punish him; that it’s improper for the criminal courts to punish him because voters would punish him; and that it’s improper if voters punish him because in that case the election must have been “rigged.” That’s the accountability vacuum. Many critics of the new 14th Amendment challenge to Trump’s candidacy have added another facet to it, that it’s improper to use the Constitution itself to punish him because to do so would be “anti-democratic.”
I don’t know if Nick’s a great sinner and I’m a saint, but I’d like to think that SCOTUS doesn’t think that way, because it would mean, in practical effect, that the 14th Amendment Section 3 becomes unenforceable precisely when it’s needed — on the rationale that an electorate poised to elect an insurrectionist is capable of civil unrest at a level that trumps the law.
So walk on air against your better judgement
(Seamus Heaney)
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.
I write here not as a teacher to students but rather as a reader to other readers, a citizen to other citizens. I write because I think I have learned a few things in my teaching life that are relevant to our common life. You will see what those are if you read on.
My approach here is anything but systematic. Of all the literary genres, I am fondest of the essay, with its meandering course that (we hope) faithfully represents the meanderings of the human mind … certain images in advance and people will recur throughout this book, returning perhaps when you think we’re done with them. I write this way because none of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.”
For the most part, my essay-writing days are over (you’ll find much more of my own musings in earlier blog posts), but my curation of attributed quotes and their frequent juxtaposition of quotes that seem kindred express, I think, the same spirit Jacobs articulates here.
Mea culpae
Harvard polls versus polls of Harvard
Last Saturday, I gently mocked the idea that a poll at Harvard University could be a reliable indicator of the leanings of 18-24 year-olds nationwide.
In my defense, the writer I was gently mocking very specifically said that it was “a representative survey at Harvard University.”
On the shocking substance of the poll, see the questions raised by Ilya Somin.
Absolutely immune
I confess that I too quickly dismissed Donald Trump’s claim of absolute immunity — a claim that was rebuffed by the trial court, which decision Special Prosecutor Jack Smith now asks the U.S. Supreme Court to affirm. (I don’t think I scoffed here, but I did scoff.)
This is the big question and it goes to the very heart of why we give immunity to some public officials. Judges, for example, enjoy absolute immunity from prosecution for their judicial acts—even if they acted corruptly or maliciously—because we don’t want every judicial act subject to meta-litigation. (We should note this doesn’t apply to actions outside legal decisions they make on the bench, which is why we see some judges prosecuted on bribery charges, for instance.) Legislators and prosecutors also enjoy absolute immunity for most of their official acts too. Why? Because we want these people to do their jobs without fear or favor. So how should we think about a president?
On one end of the spectrum, not many people would argue that a former president can’t be charged with murder for, let’s say, shooting someone on Fifth Avenue just because he was president at the time he pulled the trigger. On the other end, it would seem like a bad idea to allow a current president to bring fraud charges against his predecessor for overpromising and underdelivering on a policy proposal, such as “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it.”
And to make this discussion more concrete, one of the things that Trump is charged with is “attempt[ing] to use the power and authority of the Justice Department to conduct sham election crime investigations.” Where does that fall on our spectrum?
It’s hard to guess where each justice will fall on this question because it involves questions about executive power, separation of powers, and all the future hypotheticals about how someone might abuse their power. In one outcome, presidents could be afraid to perform basic parts of their job because they might be charged with a crime down the road. In the other, current presidents could break the law with impunity for four years without fear of any future consequences.
I’d expect the Supreme Court to decide whether to take the case just before the New Year.
Hard cases make bad law, and Donald Trump’s odious persona makes every case hard. Tread carefully — as I trust SCOTUS will if it takes the case.
Political follies
West Coast Big Mouths
Meanwhile on the West Coast it’s now looking nearly impossible to fund what would have been the country’s most expensive and unjust experiment in civic wokeness. Jose Martinez reports for CBS News in San Francisco:
The future of African-American reparations in San Francisco is facing an uncertain future after Mayor London Breed announced that a proposed office won’t be funded due to budget cuts.
The office would have been a precursor to attempting to redistribute money from people who never owned slaves to people who were never enslaved. It wasn’t just the principle of such a plan that was troubling, or the difficulty of trying to precisely define the level of ancestral guilt or victimhood within the great American melting pot. It was also the money. In March this column noted the work of a city-appointed reparations committee and asked:
How massive would this new race-based spending scheme end up being? “The committee hasn’t done an analysis of the cost of the proposals,” reported the AP at the time.
But Lee Ohanian, a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, examined the work of the committee and wrote in January:
I have analyzed some parts of this proposal and estimate that its cost, presented on a per-household basis, will be nearly $600,000 per non–African American San Francisco household.
He warned that “this estimate may be too low” but provided a ballpark number of recipients set to receive the proposed payouts:
Paying $5 million to 35,455 individuals totals about $175 billion. To put this in perspective, the city’s budget for the current fiscal year is $14 billion, while this proposed sum exceeds the current state budgets of all US states except for California, New York, and Texas.
Speaking of Texas, it would surely become the new home for much of San Francisco’s current population if this proposal is ever enacted.
I wouldn’t be too hasty about moving to Texas, though I’d surely move somewhere if my household was going to get hit so heavily for something nobody in it ever did. Texas has an Attorney General who should have been convicted on his impeachment plus a legislature that seemingly cannot pass intelligible and reasonable laws plus a vendetta against public education.
I think one could do better.
Book-burning
This week, I watched videos of people literally burning Harry Potter books, like latter-day Nazis, in the cause of transgender liberation. It’s safe to say, I think, that many of these people have lost their minds — just by staying online. And they not only think they’re perfectly sane; they think they’re heroes.
If you are skeptical about the transgender social contagion, you should read The secret life of gender clinicians (UnHerd) and bear in mind that most of “trans” kids, if not “transitioned,” turn out gay or lesbian, but recovered from dysphoria; in other words, they are no longer uncomfortable with their sexed bodies. That’s why there’s dark humor that the gender clinicians are killing off a generation of gay kids, and this perverse aspect is a perennial source of concern for Andrew Sullivan.
For my money, insofar as a physician refuses to exercise a “paternalistic” or “gatekeeper” function, he or she has ceased being a professional and might as well be taking orders at a burger joint (where it really is no concern whether the customer’s burger-craving conceals something deeper).
Giuliani, a genuinely tragic figure
The first thing you need to know about a MAGA Man like Giuliani is that he’s dishonest. Truthfulness is incompatible with Trumpism. Trump is a liar, and he demands fealty to his lies. So Giuliani’s task, as Trump’s lawyer, was to lie on his behalf, and lie he did. He even repeated his lies about Freeman and Moss — the same lies to which he’d already confessed — outside the courthouse during his trial.
A MAGA Man such as Giuliani supplements his lies with rage. To watch him pushing Trump’s election lies was to watch a man become unglued with anger. The rage merged with the lie. The rage helped make the lie stick. Why would a man like Giuliani, former prosecutor and hero mayor, be so angry if he hadn’t discovered true injustice? MAGA Men and Women are very good at using their credibility from the past to cover their lies in the present.
Amid the lies and rage, however, a MAGA Man like Giuliani also finds religion. But not in the way you might expect. No, MAGA Man is not sorry for what he’s done. Instead, he feels biblically persecuted. Freeman and Moss aren’t the real victims; he is. Moreover, he also knows that the base is religious and likes to hear its politicians talk about God.
Giuliani learned that lesson well. So during the trial, he compared himself to Christians in the Colosseum, battling the lions like the martyrs of old. He’s not alone in this, of course. Trump shared an image of Jesus sitting by his side as he stood trial. Stone got so religious that he claimed to see supernatural sights, including, he said, a “demonic portal” that’s “swirling like a cauldron” about the Biden White House.
We weren’t hallucinating when we admired Rudy’s mayoralty, were we? But some horrible flaw attached him to Donald J. Trump in a way that, as other Trump sycophants have learned, ruined him.
Crunchy Left Populist Conservatism
Dreher proposed the best way forward for the Republican Party when he wrote Crunchy Cons. In case anyone has forgotten the manifesto, here it is again in brief:
Conservatism should focus more on the character of society than on the material conditions of life found in consumerism.
Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government.
Culture is more important than politics and economics.
A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship—especially of the natural world—is not fundamentally conservative.
Small, local, old, and particular are almost always better than big, global, new, and abstract.
Beauty is more important than efficiency.
The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom.
The institution most essential to conserve is the traditional family.
Arthur Hunt III, Live Not by Lies From Neither the Left Nor Right How much is today’s “conservative” party, the GOP, interested in such values? If I hold my head just right and squint, I think they might be inchoately interested in several of them, but the way they express it is pretty off-putting.
His obituaries in the mainstream press were mostly judgment, no mercy. It’s not nice when malice gets a final, unanswered shot. On the conservative side, TV commentaries were cloying to the point of cultish. It gives a sense of horror to see people who are essentially cold enact warmth of feeling.
What made Rush Limbaugh’s show possible was the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, which, starting in 1949, mandated that holders of broadcast licenses must both give airtime to important issues and include opposing views. It asserted a real public-interest obligation from broadcasters.
By the 1980s it was being argued that the doctrine itself was hurting free speech: It was a governmental intrusion on the freedom of broadcasters, and, perversely, it inhibited the presentation of controversial issues. There were so many voices in the marketplace, and more were coming; fairness and balance would sort themselves out.
In 1987 the doctrine was abolished, a significant Reagan-era reform. But I don’t know. Let me be apostate again. Has anything in our political culture gotten better since it was removed? Aren’t things more polarized, more bitter, less stable?
I’m not sure it was good for America.
War and poetry
It has been said that the Second World War did not produce great poets like the First War did. The Second War did not produce a Wilfred Owen or even a Siegfried Sassoon.
But that is because the great poems of the Second World War were not written in English. They were written in German and in Russian.
Sometimes, it feels as if one of my roles in the world is to read Rod Dreher so others don’t have to. His hair is frequently on fire (or he’s gotten good at pretending it is; for the sake of his soul, it’s probably better that it be authentic, not feigned).
Why do I follow him? Well, I became a fan with his book Crunchy Cons (and see above, too), lo these seventeen years past. I’ve bought every book since, though some didn’t touch me and one made me cringe. I followed him at American Conservative, where his cultural catastrophizing enabled him to blog prolifically. I followed his departure from the Roman Catholic Church, gutted, and his prompt discovery of the Orthodox Church. I’ve attended a conference where he was a keynoter and chatted one-on-one. Now I’ve followed him through his divorce, the causes of which he has concealed beyond the generalities that both were at fault in some measure but neither was unfaithful, and which has left him, once again, gutted.
I’d call it “friendship” were it not that he almost certainly doesn’t remember me (he might say he’s met me before if he saw a picture). That, plus he so frequently puts his finger on something with pretty articulate analysis.
So it was twice this week. First (though second chronologically):
So: in the Church of Pope Francis, a priest can bless a gay couple who are engaged in sodomy, but that priest cannot say the Tridentine mass. This is where Catholicism in in 2023. When I became a Catholic, and after I left the Catholic Church, I have always believed that the health and stability of Christianity in the West depends on the health and stability of the Catholic Church, as the mother church of the West. This is not a day for any Protestant or Orthodox Christian living in the West to feel smug and superior. The loss of Rome to the Great Queering — and if you think Rome will stop here, you need to talk to some people who have lived through the queering of their Protestant communions — is going to be a massive blow to all Biblically faithful Christians living in Western civilization.
The next papal conclave — one of the most important in Church history — will determine if Francis was an aberration, or if his liberalizing is the new normal. And if the next pope reverses some or all of this, what kind of fight will he have on his hands?
(See section III of this for background; it’s very fresh news)
It is worth thinking about, though, why homosexuality has become the pre-eminent wedge issue across Christian churches. Church progressives have this dishonest strategy of pretending that it’s a minor issue, except for the fact that they won’t give it up and reach a compromise with conservatives. I suppose if I believed what progressives do about homosexuality and transgenderism, I would be bound to think that this is an issue on which compromise is impossible, for the same reason I would find it impossible to compromise with Christians inside my ecclesial body who believed that (say) black people were living in a state of sin by being black.
I do not believe what progressives do on the point, however. I do not believe that homosexuality and/or transgenderism is a characteristic like race. I won’t argue the point here and now, but I simply want to highlight the profundity of the disagreement with Christian progressives here. If you believe that LGBT status is in the same moral category as race, then everything else follows. It becomes incomprehensible, outside of raw bigotry, why conservatives within the church object.
The reason why homosexuality, and human sexuality in general, is the pre-eminent wedge issue is because of Christian anthropology. That is to say, the Bible gives us a clear idea of what it means to be a being made in the image of God. We know from direct Scriptural teaching, as well as from reasoning from revealed first principles, that homosexuality runs contrary to bedrock Christian teaching. That homosexuality is, to use the language of the Roman catechism, “intrinsically disordered” — meaning that by its very nature it cannot be reconciled to the Logos. I am unaware that the Bible has anything to say about transgenderism, but if that’s not intrinsically disordered, nothing is.
In contemporary times, many, perhaps most, people do not see either homosexuality or, increasingly, transgenderism as disordered, in part because they do not recognize an intrinsic order, at least not one that excludes either phenomenon.
That “homosexuality runs contrary to bedrock Christian teaching” is a hard teaching in this age, and obviously there are progressives in the Church of England (and elsewhere) that think otherwise. But when one sees Christianity as a way of life suited to the salvation of human persons rather than a checklist of doctrines to affirm, anthropology because pretty central.
I’m increasingly inclined to renew Dreher’sRod’s Substack at annual renewal time in a few months, despite how I felt a few months ago.
As they say, something can be so obvious that it becomes invisible.
The old saw that “courts decide cases” is not accurate when the subject is the United States Supreme Court. It decides issues that it thinks important.
That said, I think Ben Johnson, The Supreme Court Doesn’t Just Decide Cases, gets a lot wrong (I don’t see, and Johnson doesn’t try to show, how picking issues turns the court into a legislature), though I’m (we’re?) indebted to him for pointing out the novelty (a mere 80 years) of abstracting issues from the case context, and the shaky legal basis for doing so.
Shorts
Donald Trump dishonors America in so many ways that it isn’t possible to keep them all in mind and still remember to brush your teeth.
A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.
Fredrik Pohl
* * *
… an age which advances progressively backwards …
T.S. Eliot, Choruses from The Rock
* * *
Over 280 million electric mopeds, scooters, motorcycles, and three-wheelers are displacing four times as much demand for oil as all the world’s electric cars at present.
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.
As we close in on the Feast, artifacts of Western Christendom loom larger. I’ll spend this morning singing in my Orthodox Church, this afternoon singing two more-or-less traditional Lessons & Carols. (I’ll spend this evening and tomorrow resting my voice.)
Too obvious
Two young fish are swimming along when they are passed by an older fish. He says, “Good morning, boys. How’s the water?” And one of the younger fishes asks the other, “What’s water?”
Exceedingly sad is the blindness of the sons of men, who do not see the power and glory of the Lord. A bird lives in the forest, and does not see the forest. A fish swims in the water, and does not see the water. A mole lives in the earth, and does not see the earth. In truth, the similarity of man to birds, fish, and moles is exceedingly sad.
People, like animals, do not pay attention to what exists in excessive abundance, but only open their eyes before what is rare or exceptional.
There is too much of You, O Lord, my breath, therefore people do not see You. You are too obvious, O Lord, my sighing, therefore the attention of people is diverted from You and directed toward polar bears, toward rarities in the distance.
Endless doctrinal controversies and formidable erudition
Most competing Protestant protagonists in the sixteenth century did not draw from their disagreements the conclusion that the Reformation’s foundational principle or its adjuncts were themselves the source of the new problem. (Those who did so tended to return to the Roman church. Rather, they usually reasserted—and argued, in endless doctrinal controversies and sometimes with formidable erudition—that they were right and their rivals wrong.
If there’s one thing I learned in all my research on religious enchantment, it’s that mankind’s religions emerge from a primal experience of awe; everything else is commentary. A highly intellectualized religion diminishes the experience of awe, and turns it into a moral and ethical system. Don’t misunderstand: morality and ethics are important, and should not be set in opposition to primal religious experience. But the point of religion is the encounter with God; anything less than that is a diminution of true religion. The way we in the West approach religion since the Enlightenment is an outlier on human experience — and, as we now see everywhere around us, a dead end.
A new Protestant friend here in Hungary asked to go with me to the Orthodox liturgy recently … He told me that after a lifetime in Protestantism, he has grown weary of church-as-academic-lecture. He explained that he appreciates the intelligence and the teaching of the kind of sermons he has become used to, but as he gets older, his soul craves “enchantment” (the word he used) in faith. A learned discussion of theology and morality leave him thirsting for more — which is why he approached me to ask me about Orthodoxy.
In medieval England, just prior to the Reformation, there were between 40 and 50 days of the calendar (apart from Sundays) that were feasts of the Church on which little to no work was done … By the end of the Reformation period, such days had largely disappeared, with Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost (Whitsunday), alone remaining – with only Christmas being a possible weekday celebration …
It is possible to think about this shift in Christian thought in economic terms. Fifty days in the year on which work is interrupted can have an enormous impact on productivity and efficiency … The shift itself can be seen in the very use of economics to measure what is good and salutary in a society. … Strictly speaking, the modern world has not been disenchanted. Rather, it is now enchanted with money and the “invisible hand” of the market.
Religious energy once so animated cultures that massive wars were fought over interpretations of holy writ. Where did this energy go? I might get annoyed with excesses of other faiths, but I’m mostly in the “you do you” camp. Perhaps the energy has been sublimated into other areas, other arenas of focused attention. Its apparent dissipation must be accounted for.
This energy has found a home in sports and politics
These are the arenas in which we wage holy war. The war has jumped out of the arena and entered the stands. We are caught in our symbols, our totems, our liturgies. Can these energies be tamed and contained?
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.
By the time I post this, America’s chattering class probably will have moved on to new clickbait [Note: I was wrong about that; they’re still writing about it.], but I thought David French was solid on the Ivy League Presidents’ notorious testimony to Congress:
So if the university presidents were largely (though clumsily) correct about the legal balance, why the outrage? To quote the presidents back to themselves, context matters. For decades now, we’ve watched as campus administrators from coast to coast have constructed a comprehensive web of policies and practices intended to suppress so-called hate speech and to support students who find themselves distressed by speech they find offensive.
The result has been a network of speech codes, bias response teams, safe spaces and glossaries of microaggressions that are all designed to protect students from alleged emotional harm. But not all students …
[E]ach of the schools represented at the hearing has itsowncheckeredpast on freespeech. Harvard is the worst-rated school for free expression in America, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. (I served as the group’s president in 2004 and 2005.) So even if the presidents’ lawyerly answers were correct, it’s more than fair to ask: Where was this commitment to free expression in the past?
…
That said, some of the responses to campus outrages have been just as distressing as the hypocrisy shown by the school presidents. With all due apology to Homer Simpson and his legendary theory of alcohol, it’s as if many campus critics view censorship as the “cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.”
Universities have censored conservatives? Then censor progressives, too. Declare the extreme slogans of pro-Palestinian protesters to be harassment and pursue them vigorously. Give them the same treatment you’ve given other groups that hold offensive views ….
[W]hen journalists discovered that [Harvard President Claudine Gay] had plagiarized heavily (even as she published very little before getting the job), Harvard hired a high-powered lawyer to bully those reporters. Several of the academics she plagiarized are not happy about it. And it does bring up questions of her actual credentials here—her biggest success before her appointment as president of Harvard seems to be as part of the mob that tried to smear Roland Fryer, a black professor there who poked some holes in common police racism narratives.
I didn’t want to believe it was possible that a representative survey at Harvard University would show that 51 percent of Americans between ages 18 and 24 found that the attacks by Hamas can be justified by the grievance of Palestinians.
This is but one of a list of Döpfner’s “I didn’t want to believes,” but its fallacy smacked me in the face. Isn’t “a representative survey at Harvard University” an oxymoron? Isn’t any survey at Harvard incapable of showing what Americans generally between ages 18 and 24 believe?
I think the author knows that:
And, more than anything else, I didn’t want to believe it was possible that some of the most renowned and influential elite universities in the world would capitulate to the cultural struggle carried out in the name of a woke agenda pushed by students that are increasingly demonstrating a blatantly antisemitic mindset ….
The ongoing treason of the intellectuals
For nearly ten years, rather like Benda, I have marveled at the treason of my fellow intellectuals. I have also witnessed the willingness of trustees, donors, and alumni to tolerate the politicization of American universities by an illiberal coalition of “woke” progressives, adherents of “critical race theory,” and apologists for Islamist extremism.
Throughout that period, friends assured me that I was exaggerating. Who could possibly object to more diversity, equity, and inclusion on campus? In any case, weren’t American universities always left-leaning? Were my concerns perhaps just another sign that I was the kind of conservative who had no real future in the academy?
Such arguments fell apart after October 7, as the response of “radical” students and professors to the Hamas atrocities against Israel revealed the realities of contemporary campus life. That hostility to Israeli policy in Gaza regularly slides into antisemitism is now impossible to deny.
Rod Dreher, who went to LSU instead of an Ivy League school, has a more “meta” view of the débâcle:
What my European friend, who arrived at Harvard dazzled by its global brand, discovered in his time there was the real secret to the most elite university in the world: that it is less about scholarship than it is about networking and credentialing its students to thrive within a system of power.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. Every society has elites, and needs them to keep things running. What my European friend saw was that America’s elites are not fit for purpose.
Dispossession
Stewardship as affront
Superficially, litter and the rusting carcasses of salvaged cars are both an affront to the eye. But while litter exemplifies that lack of stewardship that is the ethical core of a throwaway society, the visible presence of old cars represents quite the opposite. Yet these are easily conflated under the environmentalist aesthetic, and the result has been to impart a heightened moral status to Americans’ prejudice against the old, now dignified as an expression of civic responsibility.
…
Among the sacrifices demanded by the new gods may be your ten year old car that gets 35 MPG, requires zero new manufacturing (with its associated environmental costs), and may be good for another ten years. As Rene Girard points out, ritual violence is usually directed against a scapegoat who is in fact innocent, onto whom the sins of the community are transferred. In our pagan society of progress, it seems anything old and serviceable can serve this role.
Even many places that are inclined to be chill about private acts between adults balk at how far America is taking things. In America, tens of thousands of people cut off their breasts or genitals every year trying to change their sex. Judges tell parents they will lose custody if they don’t let their children be castrated. Rising STD rates among gay men have led the CDC to approve the continuous use of antibiotics as a prophylactic (DoxyPEP), even though this will surely result in antibiotic-resistant superbugs. Our birthrates are collapsing, and almost half of the children we do have are out of wedlock. There are lots of reasons other countries might look at us and think maybe we don’t have our sexual norms exactly right.
You can have power over people as long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything, he’s no longer in your power.
[T]he Times is becoming the publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist.
James Bennet, former New York Times Opinion Editor, in the Economist. This is a 16,000-word essay on what has gone wrong at the Times — and how it went wrong.
A big factor is the intrinsic incentives of modern narrowcasting. The New York Times is prospering immensely, after a near-death experience, but it is prospering by telling liberals and progressives what they want to hear while pretending that it’s still an honest, unbiased source. So profitable is the new scam that the Times is unlikely to repent and go back to the old ways.
My decision to skip the Times “news” coverage and go straight to the Opinion pages — where I know I’m getting opinion and am unseduced by it — is vindicated.
Sundry madness
Barbara Furlow-Smiles, the woman whose title was Lead Strategist, Global Head of Employee Resource Groups and Diversity Engagement (i.e., head of DEI) at Facebook, pleaded guilty this week to defrauding the company of $4 million. A perfect symbol of these programs that literally the leader of it was very, very busy coming up with ways to steal millions from Mark Zuckerberg. Sometimes it was just simple: she had Facebook pay $18,000 to a preschool for tuition, which, I love that, you don’t get what you don’t ask for. Other times, her scams were more elaborate. She hired friends for fake jobs and had them pay her kickbacks (dream of dreams). She submitted fake expense reports and such (oldie but goody). The kickbacks often came in cash, sometimes wrapped in t-shirts, according to the Feds (secure).
The Biden administration has decided to go after a random moving company for the crime of hiring too many muscular young men. Yes, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has sued Meathead Movers, alleging age discrimination. There was no complaint that kicked this off, no elderly man who was turned out. The EEOC just decided to bankrupt this random company. The investigation started in 2017, but September 2023 was the moment to strike. Six years of investigating Meathead Movers. Maybe the CEO didn’t tweet enough nice things about Kamala Harris. Who knows. But moving companies beware: Are you hiring strong young men to carry things? Illegal! Go to a retirement home, find the tiniest elderly lady, and force her to haul a piano. That’s justice. That’s the EEOC. No one tell them about the NBA.
The warning Cheney issues is clear and persuasive: A second presidential term for Donald Trump would pose great risks to the nation’s democratic practices and identity. A retribution-minded, Constitution-terminating leader buttressed by unscrupulous advisers and ethically impaired lawyers could, she argues, “dismantle our republic.” As both a witness and a target of the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol and as a leader of the House committee that investigated the attack, Cheney recognizes the power of the mob that Trump commands. She also understands the cowardice of his enablers in the Republican Party, the same kind of loyalists who would populate — or at least seek to justify — a second Trump administration.
I’ve endured many presidential candidates who had me reaching for a cocktail. Ramaswamy is the first who has me looking for Dramamine.
Frank Bruni. Bruni also gives a shout-out to Sarah Isgur:
[I]n The Times, Sarah Isgur defined the challenge of discussing Vivek Ramaswamy: “I think I speak for the entire pundit class when I tell you that we’re all running out of synonyms for ‘jerk.’”
The funny thing is, Isgur did not say that. What she said was “I think I speak for the entire pundit class when I tell you that we’re all running out of synonyms for ‘asshole.’” The Times censored it.
So walk on air against your better judgement
(Seamus Heaney)
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.
I was listening this afternoon to a choral composition by Eric Whitacre, who probably came onto my radar with this a few years ago.
The unfamiliar composition was playing softly, and I was multi-tasking, paying little heed to the words (though a few caught my attention a bit).
Then suddenly I heard something that jolted me. I’d never heard a chorus do anything like that before, and no wonder: it sounded unbelievably difficult.
It was in a setting of this short poem:
Listening to your labored breath, Your struggle ends as mine begins. You rise; I fall.
Fading, yet already gone; What calls you I cannot provide. You rise; I fall.
Broken, with a heavy hand I reach to you, and close your eyes. You rise; I fall.
The piece is titled You Rise, I Fall, and it’s part of the larger piece The Sacred Veil, Whitacre’s setting of a poem by Charles Anthony Silvestri. The poet describes it:
This work features a series of poems written about my relationship with my late wife Julie, her battle with ovarian cancer, and the grief I experienced as a result of her passing in 2005. This is the most intensely personal poetry I have ever written, and it evoked exquisite and heart-breaking music from composer Eric Whitacre.
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.
I’ve very frequently been quite harsh toward Evangelical Christians — “Why can’t you stupid people see that you need to be Orthodox!!!” has been the gist. So to anyone who has felt hectored, I apologize. If you’re still here, forgive me — and thanks for bearing with me in my chronic (26 year) convertitis.
I should know from my own experience that it’s not illegitimate to settle into a religious tradition and not be looking for the location of the exits immediately; that was my demeanor toward Calvinism for 20 years or so, and toward Evangelicalism for nearly 30 years before that. Both times, I was sort of blind-sided into recognizing the need to change.
Further, phenomenology and theology sometimes co-exist awkwardly. For instance, I now thoroughly believe that Baptism is not just a symbol, but is one’s initiation in the Church — a very important matter (theology). But I can’t help but feel that my Christian life began, in a non-trivial sense, 12 or so years before my Baptism when I realized (after being caught in flagrante delicto) that beating up on my brother to take away a toy was disappointing to Jesus and I needed Him to forgive me — and to “come into my heart,” as my then-tribe put it (phenomenology).
Bereft though they were of sacrament, Liturgy, incense, Church Fathers, icons, beauty and so forth, that realization and my response were important. But I’ve concluded that Evangelical Is Not Enough.
But I’ve tried to hector others into recognizing that it’s not enough. I wouldn’t have put it that way, but that’s what it amounted to.
I could say more about why I felt driven to hectoring people, but for reasons I need not share, I won’t.
Anyway: I need to reconcile myself to the reality of divided Christianity — that not all sincere Christians have entered the Ark, the one holy catholic and apostolic church of the Nicene Creed, and almost certainly some never will. The most I can do under my own power is to produce discontent with where they are — unholy discontent, which could lead them out of Christianity entirely. I don’t intend that.
But if you ever do feel any holy discontent, be sure to give Orthodoxy a look.
And I’ll probably be unable to completely eliminate critiques because Orthodoxy and Evangelicalism differ in important regards (more about that below), and where they do differ, I believe Orthodoxly.
The Main Act
Two kinds of believers
I sometimes think that the modern world’s true cultural divide is not between believers and unbelievers but between those who think life is a puzzle that is capable of being solved and those who believe it’s a mystery that ought to be approached by way of silence and humility. I am a problem solver by disposition, but in my heart I am strongly on the side of the mysterians.
…
It’s a mistake to treat [the tradition of Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, and Karl Rahner] as a watered-down version of the more certain expressions of faith typically associated with organized religion. The most sincere believers I’ve known have also been the most humble, the most perplexed. It may be that those who feel most powerfully the presence of God in their lives likewise feel most powerfully the impossibility of adequately capturing that presence in words. And it may be that those for whom God is not a symbol or a cudgel but a lived reality find this reality most mysterious.
I’m with Beha: “I am a problem solver by disposition, but in my heart I am strongly on the side of the mysterians.” I’ve been trying to solve the puzzle for many decades now, and I probably see more open questions than when I started.
So I now plan, after some fear that it was being over-hyped, to read Jon Fosse’s Septology.
This is not unrelated to the preceding item.
Why intellectuals don’t convert to Evangelical Christianity
But there’s one area that Brad doesn’t mention. And I think this reason keeps many intellectuals away from many Protestant traditions. Catholicism and Orthodoxy don’t have crazies. There may be a few here or there, but when you hear about a Christian group making fools of themselves publicly, you can be fairly certain that they are Protestant—and probably evangelical. Our low-church, anti-institutional biases breed these types. If you are an intellectual considering Christianity, you will not naturally move toward Christian groups that oppose science or higher education. But evangelical Protestants have groups that oppose both.
Kyle has distilled this aspect better than I ever had.
Certainty, Ferocity and Solidarity
[T]he true distinction between fundamentalism and mainstream beliefs isn’t what fundamentalists believe but how fundamentalists believe. As Richard Land, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, once told me, “Fundamentalism is far more a psychology than a theology.”
…
I’ve never encountered a fundamentalist culture that didn’t combine three key traits: certainty, ferocity and solidarity.
Certainty is the key building block. The fundamentalist mind isn’t clouded by doubt. In fact, when people are fully captured by the fundamentalist mind-set, they often can’t even conceive of good-faith disagreement …
That certainty breeds ferocity. Indeed, ferocity — not piety — is a principal trait of every truly fundamentalist movement I’ve ever encountered. Ferocity is so valuable to fundamentalism that it can cover a multitude of conventional Christian sins. Defending Trump in 2016, Robert Jeffress, the pastor of First Baptist Dallas, an evangelical megachurch, explained, “Frankly, I want the meanest, toughest son of a gun I can find. And I think that’s the feeling of a lot of evangelicals.”
…
Yet certainty and ferocity are nothing without solidarity … I’m reminded of an infamous quote by Mike Huckabee, a former Baptist pastor, regarding the necessity of loyalty. Explaining Trump’s hostility toward Ron DeSantis, Huckabee said, “I think there are two virtues — loyalty and confidentiality. Be loyal to the people who helped you and learn how to keep your mouth shut.”
I appreciate this dissection of what makes “fundamentalism” fundamentalist, and it rings true to my 75 years’ experience. That’s even more interesting to me than why fundamentalists love Florida Man.
Note three things, though:
So described, fundamentalism is not merely distinct from “mainstream” beliefs, if by mainstream one means the Seven Sisters of American Protestantism, but also distinguishes it from non-fundamentalist evangelicalism. Indeed, there’s no major difference between Christian evangelicals and fundamentalists in theology (see J.I. Packer, ”Fundamentalism” and the Word of God), but there are evangelicals who are blessedly low on certainty, ferocity and solidarity.
So described, it becomes clearer how there can be Islamic as well as Christian fundamentalists — even Orthodox Christian fundamentalists (though I strongly believe that such Orthodox fundamentalism is not very good Orthodoxy).
[Fundamentalists] “can have a steamrolling effect in institutions because their opponents — almost by definition — have less certainty, less ferocity and less solidarity” (French again).
Not a Freudian slip
Victor I. Masters, the head of Home Missions from 1909 to 1921, reflected and influenced denominational thinking when he argued that the North had lost its religion to Romanism and rationalism, and that the SBC’s divine mission was to spread “the Anglo-Saxon evangelical faith.”
Quantum physics: Electrons moving, but photographing them affects path and speed. Why? How? Quantum theology: God’s mind doesn’t change, but he tells us to pray, and somehow our prayers affect the outcome.
The classic Orthodox definition of a theologian is well known and frequently repeated in Orthodox circles: “A true theologian is one who prays,” or “One who prays is a true theologian.” This legendary saying reflects the Orthodox phronema and stands in stark contrast to the Western Christian phronema, which strongly emphasizes use of the mind for comprehension of theological truths and rational deduction as a theological method.
I am a millionaire. My bedroom is full of gold light, of the sun’s jewellery. What shall I do with this wealth? Buy happiness, buy gladness, the wisdom that grows with the giving of thanks?
Orthodox Teaching does not merely differ from Western Christianity in content, but the reason for the difference is equally important. After reading this book, Western Christians still may not understand our mentality, but perhaps they will begin to realize that the difference between Orthodoxy and Western Christianity is significant and more far-reaching than a few doctrines, ancient rituals, and a refusal to submit to the pope. The variance is deeper than appears on the surface, extending to how theology is conceived, conceptualized, taught, and approached. To complicate matters, often the same terminology is used in East and West, but basic terms or concepts do not have the same meaning at all. What is sin? What is salvation? What is forgiveness?
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.
I hope I’ll have enough voice to sing this evening’s Lafayette Chamber Singers concert, Pastyme With Good Companye. I’ve been fighting a cold since Tuesday.
Culture
Pizzagate is nothing new
In the summer of 1705, an unusually extravagant rumor horrified the citizenry. The Tsar, it was said, had forbidden Russian men to marry for seven years so that Russian women might be married to foreigners being imported by the shipload. To preserve their young women, Astrachaners arranged a mass marriage before the foreigners could arrive, and on a single day, July 30, 1705, a hundred women were married.
I once asked the best teacher I ever had why she no longer taught her favorite novel, and she said that she stopped teaching a book when she found she was no longer curious about it. The humanistic spirit is, fundamentally, an inquisitive one.
…
If the study of literature or philosophy helps to fight sexism and racism or to promote democracy and free speech — and everyone agrees that sexism and racism are bad and democracy and free speech are good — then you have your answer as to why we shouldn’t cut funding for the study of literature or philosophy. Politicization is a way of arming the humanities for its political battles, but it comes at an intellectual cost. Why are sexism and racism so bad? Why is democracy so good? Politicization silences these and other questions, whereas the function of the humanities is to raise them.
Agnes Callard. These are but a few snippets from a rich article defending the humanities, though the author cannot tell you the “value” of them.
Seeing obscurely
The mind is a camera obscura constantly trying to render an image of reality on the back wall of consciousness through the pinhole of awareness, its aperture narrowed by our selective attention, honed on our hopes and fears.
Modern science, arising from an arbitrary limitation of knowledge to a particular order—the lowest of all orders, that of material or sensible reality—has lost, through this limitation and the consequences it immediately entails, all intellectual value; as long, that is, as one gives to the word ‘intellectuality’ the fullness of its real meaning, and refuses to share the ‘rationalist’ error of assimilating pure intelligence to reason, or, what amount to the same thing, of completely denying intellectual intuition.
René Guénon Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World
Terror Profiteers
We’re had war profiteers for a very long time. Now we have terrorism profiteers:
Money from terror: Is it possible that Hamas terrorists made a profit on the October 7 massacre? It is. On Monday, two law professors, Robert J. Jackson Jr. of NYU and Joshua Mitts of Columbia, released the draft of a paper that makes the case. There was “a significant spike in short selling in the principal Israeli-company EFT [exchange traded fund] days before the October 7 Hamas attack. . . . Similarly, we identify increases in short selling before the attack in dozens of Israeli companies traded in Tel Aviv,” they write. Translation? There were people who, knowing the attack was coming, bet that the stocks of Israeli companies would fall. (H/T Joe Nocera for this guest item.)
In The Atlantic’s January/February 2024 special issue, 24 writers imagine what a second Trump term would look like.
After noticing that the top X articles on the Atlantic webpage Monday were about how horrible a second Trump term would be, I noted they were all from a January/February 2024 “special issue, and that the block-quote was the banner at the top of the page.
How do we deal with Trump? Indictments boost him. An Atlantic special issue full of warnings (probably ranging from sober to highly speculative) may add as much support as it peels off. Yet how dare we remain mute?
I said when Trump won in 2016 that it marked a major political realignment. I think I underestimated it.
The extent of support for Donald Trump strikes me as an apocalypse:
“Apocalypse” has come to be used popularly as a synonym for catastrophe, but the Greek word apokálypsis, from which it is derived, means a revelation.
(Wikipedia) You could also say “unveiling.” That’s why I say that support for him is an apocalypse, not (just) that a second term would be a catastrophe.
What that apocalypse reveals, I’m starting to think, is that roughly half of Americans are finished with liberal democracy and want a populist strong man. And I suspect that half would say, in essence, “Why shouldn’t we be finished with it? That procedural fetish has not done well for me and mine.”
It might be prudent to “shut up and keep your head down,” but that’s never been advice I was inclined to take.
Reform the Insurrection Act!
The Insurrection Act, which dates back to 1792 but has since been amended, is not, however, well drafted. And its flaws would give Trump enormous latitude to wield the staggering power of the state against his domestic political enemies.
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When you read misguided laws like the Insurrection Act, you realize that the long survival of the American republic is partly a result of good fortune. Congress, acting over decades, has gradually granted presidents far too much power, foolishly trusting them to act with at least a minimal level of integrity and decency.
Trump has demonstrated that trust is no longer a luxury we can afford.
George Santos was, for now at least, the ultimate Novelty Con:
I’m a college-educated white woman/black man/gay man/Latina/[some combination of the previous] under 40, and I am ready to repeat today’s GOP talking points!” That is the entire value proposition, but it works.
Republicans have long been starved for novelty. From its founding in the Little White Schoolhouse in 1854 until 2016, the Republican Party was fundamentally the same thing the whole time: the party of heartland businessmen’s conservatism. …
There is a kind of devolutionary force at work among the Novelty Cons. Ann Coulter may play a crazy person on television, but she is smart and did real work as a real lawyer before she started doing … whatever it is she does now. Ben Carson is a brain surgeon. Michael Steele didn’t just wander in off the street and get made head of the Republican National Committee.
George Santos, on the other hand, is pretty much a guy who wandered in off the street into the House of Representatives, saying, “Let’s put on a show!” Marjorie Taylor Greene is a QAnon kook who wandered in off Facebook. Lauren Boebert is a general-purpose incompetent who wandered in after accidentally poisoning people with bad pork sliders at a county fair in Colorado. Matt Gaetz’s grandfather died of a heart attack at the North Dakota GOP convention, being at that time a minor public official and, apparently, a clairvoyant. This gang represents what you might call the immaculate grift: grift liberated from the burden of trying to carry forward a real political program or philosophy, grift for grift’s sake, ars (of a sort) gratia pecuniae. Putting these people into Congress is like mashing up Carmina Burana with the Ghostbusters theme—yeah, you can do that, there’s no law against it as far as I know, but … why_?_
Santos was—is?—whatever anybody needed him to be, the ultimate Novelty Con: Gay! Jewish! (or “Jew-ish.”) Latino! Whatever! He is the epitome of what the Republican Party stands for (“stands for”) in 2023: the willingness to say anything, however transparently dishonest, absurd, or self-abasing, in the hope of winning an election. He mustered some half-formed talk-radio grunts about inflation and crime and the like, but Santos was a pretty straightforward product: a gay Latino willing to put an “R” next to his name, the political version of whatever the opposite of a beard is. That Rep. Santos finally embarrassed the party of Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, and Lauren Boebert enough to get him expelled from the House is his only actual achievement in life.
I can’t say I’m proud of the GOP, but that enough Republicans joined Democrats to expel Santos makes me despise it a hair less.
Bespoke realities
There is a fundamental difference between, on the one hand, someone who lives in the real world but also has questions about the moon landing, and on the other, a person who believes the Covid vaccine is responsible for a vast number of American deaths and Jan. 6 was an inside job and the American elite is trying to replace the electorate with new immigrant voters and the 2020 election was rigged and Donald Trump is God’s divine choice to save America.
Such individuals don’t simply believe in a conspiracy theory, or theories. They live in a “bespoke reality.” That brilliant term comes from my friend Renée DiResta, the technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, and it refers to the effects of what DiResta calls a “Cambrian explosion of bubble realities,” communities “that operate with their own norms, media, trusted authorities and frameworks of facts.”
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Combine vast choice with algorithmic sorting, and we now possess a remarkable ability to become arguably the most comprehensively, voluntarily and cooperatively misinformed generation of people ever to walk the earth. The terms “voluntarily” and “cooperatively” are key. We don’t live in North Korea, Russia or the People’s Republic of China. We’re drunk on freedom by comparison. We’re misinformed not because the government is systematically lying or suppressing the truth. We’re misinformed because we like the misinformation we receive and are eager for more.
Meanwhile, pro-Palestinian protesters showed up to scream at Rosalynn Carter’s funeral this week. They also showed up to scream during New York’s Rockefeller Center Christmas tree lighting, which is up there alongside blocking highways at rush hour when it comes to winning over normal people. As the writer Josh Kraushaar put it: these guys are becoming the Westboro Baptist Church of the left.
In the hearings, [Harvard] President Gay actually said, with a straight face, that “we embrace a commitment to free expression even of views that are objectionable, offensive, hateful.” This is the president whose university mandates all students attend a Title IX training session where they are told that “fatphobia” and “cisheterosexism” are forms of “violence,” and that “using the wrong pronouns” constitutes “abuse.” This is the same president who engineered the ouster of a law professor, Ronald Sullivan, simply because he represented a client, of whom Gay and students (rightly but irrelevantly) disapproved, Harvey Weinstein.
This is the same president who watched a brilliant and popular professor, Carole Hooven, be effectively hounded out of her position after a public shaming campaign by one of her department’s DEI enforcers, and a mob of teaching fellows, because Hooven dared to state on television that biological sex is binary. This is the president of a university where a grand total of 1.46 percent of faculty call themselves “conservative” and 82 percent call themselves “liberal” or “very liberal.” This is the president of a university which ranked 248th out of 248 colleges this year on free speech (and Penn was the 247th), according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Harvard is a place where free expression goes to die.
The critics who keep pointing out “double standards” when it comes to the inflammatory speech of pro-Palestinian students miss the point. These are not double standards. There is a single standard: It is fine to malign, abuse and denigrate “oppressors” and forbidden to do so against the “oppressed.”
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If a member of an oppressor class says something edgy, it is a form of violence. If a member of an oppressed class commits actual violence, it’s speech. That’s why many Harvard students instantly supported a fundamentalist terror cult that killed, tortured, systematically raped and kidnapped Jews just for being Jews in their own country.
Jordan Peterson made the same point, in a different context, that Sullivan makes in the penultimate paragraph: “It isn’t hypocrisy, it’s hierarchy.” Oppressed are higher status than oppressors; Jews are definitionally oppressors because they are coded “white.”
This is called “progressive.” I don’t care to protect the reputation of progressivism, so I’m not going to concern-troll on its behalf. Fly your freaky flags, progressive America! Let your offensiveness be stand in stark relief to sanity!
It’s times like this when I understand (not to say “agree with”) the rightwing insistence that every presidential election is existential, and that the Ds are far worse than the Rs.
So walk on air against your better judgement
(Seamus Heaney)
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 