Goldilocks Protestantism
Second, mere evangelical churches will not easily adopt magisterial identities. It is, for one thing, a matter of conviction: They believe in populist biblicism … The lack of tradition is a feature, not a bug.
Brad East, Goldilocks Protestantism.
Brad East, a Protestant of, I think, evangelicalish leanings, wasn’t even on my radar two years or so ago. Now I look forward to reading just about anything with his byline, listening to any podcast in which he’s dialoging.
For all my reactivity to Evangelical tomfoolery, East, the lads (and a few ladies) at Mere Orthodoxy, and the panels on the Mere Fidelity podcast are mesmerizing to watch flirting with traditions “mere evangelicals” would contemn. I wish them better success than their Mercerburg spiritual kin, Philip Schaff and John Williamson Nevin.
Infallibility
At its base, papal infallibility stems from a need for epistemological certainty (absolute mental surety) and is another symptom of the legalism of Roman Catholic theology—the institution of the papacy is bolstered by a Western psychological desire for absolute assurance.
Fr Andrew Stephen Damick , Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy
No “off” switch
Unlike a computer, the mind does not have an “off” switch. When we are not actually using it, it carries on under its own power, behaving as if it were in charge and issuing a constant stream of comments and challenges, almost all of which are of a negative character. As we have seen, the Fathers call this activity logismoi, and although these thoughts are not evil of themselves (most of them start as simple speculations of the “what if” variety), the spiritual experts maintain that all sin has its roots in this stream of thought. The stream of thoughts is negative because the mind dwells in a land of unrelenting desire and boundless fear, and it attempts to influence us to experience these two areas as our rightful home. Almost anyone who has ever lain awake at four in the morning listening to the workings of the mind knows what this feels like.
Fr. Meletios Webber, Bread & Water, Wine & Oil
Paradox
…the Marxists, the I.W.W.’s who looked upon religion as the opiate of the people, who thought they had only this one life to live and then oblivion—they were the ones who were eager to sacrifice themselves here and now, thus doing without now and for all eternity the good things of the world which they were fighting to obtain for their brothers. It was then, and still is, a paradox that confounds me. God love them! And God pity the lukewarm of whom St. John said harshly (though he was the disciple of love) that God would spew them out of His mouth.
Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness
Bad Religion
- [B]ad religion: the slow-motion collapse of traditional Christianity and the rise of a variety of destructive pseudo-Christianities in its place.
- Mysteries abide at the heart of every religious faith, but the Christian tradition is uniquely comfortable preaching dogmas that can seem like riddles, offering answers that swiftly lead to further questions, and confronting believers with the possibility that the truth about God passes all our understanding.
- The goal of the great heresies … has often been to extract from the tensions of the gospel narratives a more consistent, streamlined, and noncontradictory Jesus.
- “Religious man was born to be saved,” [Phillip Rieff] wrote, but “psychological man is born to be pleased.” This new man would be interested in neither political utopianisms nor moral idealisms. All existing orders would be equally acceptable to him, “so long as the powers that be preserve social order and manage an economy of abundance.”
Ross Douthat, Bad Religion. Ross also said something about the Nicene Creed, but I thought it was too skewed to publish without a critique that I didn’t have time to write.
Going to the gym
Worship is the arena in which God recalibrates our hearts, reforms our desires, and rehabituates our loves. Worship isn’t just something we do; it is where God does something to us. Worship is the heart of discipleship because it is the gymnasium in which God retrains our hearts.
James K.A. Smith, You Are What You Love
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
[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.
Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 