Fullness
Orthodoxy holds that the fullness of the Faith was revealed to the Church at Pentecost, once and for all. The Greek Fathers utilized their education in the service of the Church to explain doctrine, not to find new truths, since the fullness of the truth was received at Pentecost.
Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox
Secularism
Secularism was not a neutral concept. The very word came trailing incense clouds of meaning that were irrevocably and venerably Christian.
Tom Holland, Dominion
Ring-lust
When people justify their voting choice by its outcome, I always think of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien emphasizes repeatedly that we cannot make decisions based on the hoped-for result. We can only control the means. If we validate our choice of voting for someone that may not be a good person in the hopes that he or she will use his power to our advantage, we succumb to the fallacy of Boromir, who assumed he too would use the Ring of Power for good. Power cannot be controlled; it enslaves you. To act freely is to acknowledge your limits, to see the journey as a long road that includes dozens of future elections, and to fight against the temptation for power.
Jessica Hooten Wilson, What ‘The Lord of the Rings’ Can Teach Us About U.S. Politics, Christianity and Power.
In the US, we decided, twice, that if we gave Sauron the ring, he’d use it for good. How’s that workin’ out for ya?
Conversion and cosmology
There is no point in converting people to Christ if they do not convert their vision of the world and of life, since Christ then becomes merely a symbol for all that we love and want already – without Him. This kind of Christianity is more terrifying than agnosticism or hedonism.
Fr. Alexander Schmemann. Again:
A modern secularist quite often accepts the idea of God. What, however, he emphatically negates is precisely the sacramentality of man and world.
Fr. Alexander Schmemann (different source).
Climbing the elite ladder
Here’s one way to think about it. An evangelical who climbs the elite ladder is more or less required, by the nature of the case, to shed vital elements of her evangelical identity. But a Catholic is not. And a Catholic is not for the same reason that, once upon a time, a liberal Protestant was not.
Brad East, Conversions, Protestantism, and a New Mainline. I would add that an Orthodox Christian need not shed identity either.
East’s post is target-rich with suggestions about questions that fascinate me.
Politically homeless
According to the Public Religion Research Institute’s annual census last year, upward of 80 percent of Republicans described themselves as Christian …
Ryan Burge. It might surprise you that I’m unimpressed and un-encouraged by that. I don’t even know what “Christian” means in common parlance any more if 80% of Republicans think of themselves as Christians.
Ain’t. No. Way.
… But the Democratic coalition is a very different spiritual universe. It is made up of a big mix of faiths — Christians of various kinds, Jews, Muslims — as well as somewhere between 30 percent and 40 percent of nones, or people who describe their faith as atheist, agnostic or nothing in particular.
Ryan Burge again. These figures are a surprise, but they may be correlated to the Democrat party positions that keep me politically homeless instead of joining the Dems.
Chicago archbishop Blase Cardinal Cupich, who has stirred some controversy recently, said one true thing that made my heart leap when it was misattributed to the new Pope by a commentator: that Christians (Cupich said “Catholics”) are now politically homeless in the US.
I have recognized my political homelessness for twenty years now.
On reading the Bible
Most North American Christians assume that they have a right, if not an obligation, to read the Bible. I challenge that assumption. No task is more important than for the Church to take the Bible out of the hands of individual Christians in North America. Let us no longer give the Bible to all children when they enter the third grade or whenever their assumed rise to Christian maturity is marked, such as eighth-grade commencements. Let us rather tell them and their parents that they are possessed by habits far too corrupt for them to be encouraged to read the Bible on their own ….
Stanley Hauerwas. Hauerwas wrote the book this quote comes from 32 years ago. It seems to me that those corrupt habits haven’t been reformed.
Get ready
You may have heard these famous lines from Cardinal Francis George, the late archbishop of Chicago …:
I expect to die in bed. My successor will die in prison. And his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history.
Kevin D. Williamson, The Totalitarian Tendency and the Confessional, reflecting on a new Oregon law requiring that Catholic priests report certain sexual crimes that might be communicated to them in the confessional.
Starving the beast
In our last episode, I wrote “I don’t think I frequent any websites that use algorithms to target my inferred vulnerabilities.” It may be worth noting that I also have unsubscribed from some blogs and Substacks that I felt were grinding out agitprop aimed at people like me.
Go thou and do likewise.
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
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 and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 