St. Patrick’s Day
St. Patrick, a Saint of the first millennium, is recognized as a Saint in the Orthodox Church as well as in the Christian West.
I, in my old age, strive after that which I was hindered from learning in my youth.
Also attributed to St. Patrick is the gist of this imagined conversation, long a favorite of mine.
Restorationists
I posed a passing question recently about whether Restorationists — a blanket term for the denominations and heretical movements arising around the Second Great Awakening — are properly called Protestant. I encountered this distillation in trying to answer it:
The restorationists are usually totally ignorant of what the early Church was really like. They assume that it was congregational, not hierarchical. They assume it was non-liturgical and non-sacramental. They assume it was Bible-based. They assume there was no clergy and that the congregation met in people’s homes. They don’t have any evidence for these assumptions, and all of these assumptions are simply not true, or if they were true in some isolated places they are not the whole truth …
The reason the primitivists are ignorant of what the primitive Church was really like is because they are largely unaware of the writings of the early Church Fathers. Most of them do not know that we have documents telling us just what the early Christians believed, how they worshipped, and how the Church was structured.
Fr. Dwight Longnecker (Roman Catholic), The Problems with Primitivism.
As we agree on the sanctity of Patrick, Enlightener of Ireland, so I agree about this. That still leaves a lot unsaid and unanswered.
Contra today’s restorationists
It is a mere cavil that objects that this sort of thing is “highbrow.” It has nothing to do with brows, or with taste, or anything else. Only a sorry provincialism actually insists on camp-meeting songs, folk songs, or songs of personal testimony over the Te Deum because these songs are somehow more “relevant.” Relevance itself, in this light, becomes a pitiable thing. What is the touchstone of relevance: subjective sentiments or seventeen centuries of Christian worship?
Tom Howard, Evangelical Is Not Enough
Wordplay: Reality Observers
Authors who are not Christian but are looking around at the world, recognizing what is real, what is happening to what is real, and are trying to do something to address it.
(Via Jake Meador. His proximate example was Mary Harrington (Feminism Against Progress), but I would add Jesse Singal, Freddie deBoer, Matthew Crawford (although he fairly recently became Christian), Bari Weiss, and doubtless several others I can’t immediately bring to mind. Many of these folks are fairly young, and they may find their observations of reality eventually leading to Christian faith.)
… 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.
Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 