Going to church
Festive events like rock concerts, Taylor says, are “plainly ‘non-religious’; and yet they also sit uneasily in the secular, disenchanted world. . . . The festive remains a niche in our world, where the (putatively) transcendent can erupt into our lives, however well we have organized them around immanent understandings of order.”
William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry
I’m not so sure rock concerts aren’t religious in a world where churches imitate rock concerts.
On the other hand,
Taylor notes that not all expressions of Christianity have adopted excarnation, but in general, it is true that our church services (especially in evangelicalism) involve less liturgy, less focus on bodily participation, and greater emphasis on disengaged reason.
Alan Noble, Disruptive Witness
We have only ever lived in the Negative World
I recently re-subscribed to Touchstone. I’m not entirely sure why I did, and when my first copy arrived, I skimmed it, snorted ruefully, and set it aside.
I picked it up again weeks later, and was pleased at the lead editorial:
We wish the Republican Party hadn’t altered its platform, and we wish it hadn’t invited Amber Rose to speak as a representative of what the party now endorses (and let’s not kid ourselves; she represents what the party now believes). But in the Negative World, American Christians should no longer expect to find safe sanctuary in the GOP.
The reality is that we have only ever lived in the Negative World. Even though Christians knew long before any of us was born that our nation was drifting away from the church, we lived for a time under the Positive-World illusion that Christian notions of right and wrong would endure, if not in the world, then at least in the West, and if not in the West, then at least in the United States. And if not even in the United States, then in the Republican Party at the very least of all.
Now that we can see the world for what the Bible tells us it has always been, we may all soon see what the Venerable Fulton Sheen saw more than a half-century ago, when he looked upon our Negative World and announced the “end of Christendom” yet affirmed that:
these are great and wonderful days in which to be alive. . . . It is not a gloomy picture—it is a picture of the Church in the midst of increasing opposition from the world. And therefore live your lives in the full consciousness of this hour of testing, and rally close to the heart of Christ.
Douglas Johnson, Great and Wonderful Days (emphasis added).
If a nontrivial portion of the rest of Touchstone is that good, I’ll hang around a while.
Science and Magic
The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse … There is something that unites magic and applied science while separating both from the wisdom of earlier ages. For the wise men of old, the cardinal problem was how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution was knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike, the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men, and the solution is technique. Both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious, such as digging up and mutilating the dead.
C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
Of proposals to legalize euthanasia:
This exists in bleak meme form in millennial jokes about “Day of the Pillow”, a proposed mass-smothering event conducted against their over-numerous Boomer elders … [E]very polity where the demographic pinch prevails is making the same proposals. For example, since 2020 the call has been raised in China, Japan, and India as well as the West.
From a perspective that views human life as sacred, this looks horrific. But it is a logical endpoint for a technological order whose inorganic growth is in important ways parasitic on the organic kind: exploiting the natural world, for instance, or instrumentalising “human resources” even as it affords women more social status for literally anything other than creating and nurturing those “resources”. And when no effort to rein in this exploitative, anti-life nature seems to have succeeded yet, perhaps the only way out is through. So we can maybe take a crumb of comfort from the likelihood that whatever society survives this now self-devouring culture of death will have done so by refusing its paradigm, and choosing life instead.
Mary Harrington, Why assisted dying is now inevitable
What Christ gave us before He ascended
Before Christ ascended, He did not give us Scriptures, canons, doctrines, rules, or definitions. He bestowed the Holy Spirit on the Eleven in the Upper Room (John 20:22) and later sent the Holy Spirit to the entire Church at Pentecost (Acts 2)”
Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox
Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.
George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 