Sunday, 1/11/26

Quitting First Things

I think I’m a charter subscriber to First Things. I was following Richard John Neuhaus’s publication from the Rockford Institute before he started First Things and was on board soon if not immediately. I’ve been a subscriber ever since.

But I’m quitting. Part of it is that the magazine has too much MAGA in its leadership these days. Time may prove Rusty Reno right and me wrong, but I’m not going to wait for it or subordinate my judgment to his..

I think another part is that I’ve moved on. I was Reformed when First Things started; I’ve been Orthodox now for 28+ years. When I was Reformed, the catholicity of First Things was a sort of tonic; now, it varies from “Yawn!” to too Latin Catholic. (The MAGA these days is less tonic, more burr-under-the-saddle.)

The renewal form went in the bin just before I typed this paragraph.

I suspect I’ll get more from Plough, which has been pretty ascendant these days. Maybe even more catholic, which if true of an Anabaptist-grounded publication, would be an interesting twist.

Enchantment in Religion

Taylor says that enchantment is essential to some forms of religion, but not to others, such as Christianity that has gone through Reform, in both its Protestant and Catholic varieties. Such kinds of religion have gone from being more embodied to being more in the mind; they have changed but not disappeared.

William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry

Bodiless Angels

It is not therefore a contradiction that Orthodox Tradition often calls the angels “bodiless,” but we should understand bodiless to be in comparison to human beings. In comparison to God, they are embodied. While we do not understand what angelic bodies are or how they work, nor can we see them as they truly are, angels nevertheless have form, limitation, and location, which are known to God.

Frs. Andrew Stephen Damick and Stephen DeYoung, The Lord of Spirits

Confession

When I became a Catholic in 1993, I was frightened about confession. After the first one, though, I loved it. I tend to be a man who perseverates on his sins. I wouldn’t say that I’m guilty of what Catholics call “scrupulosity” — a pathological obsession with one’s sins — but I do think a lot about my moral failures. After I had come to believe in Christ, but before I was a Catholic, I would ask God for forgiveness, but would torment myself with “How do you really know you were forgiven?”

It is possible that God forgave me the moment I asked, seeing the sincerity in my heart. But I couldn’t know that, and me being me, I worried about this all the time. What the rite of confession did, on a purely psychological level, was free me of that worry. When I would go to confession, as I did every two or three weeks, I could leave the confessional certain that I had been forgiven. That is so, so powerful — the deed, which has sacramental power, released me at a purely psychological level.

I carried this over with me into Orthodoxy, which I joined twenty years ago. It turns out that Orthodoxy today takes confession more seriously than contemporary Catholicism does ….

Rod Dreher.

We converts to liturgical Christianity, it seems, come at things from different directions. I wondered about whether I was forgiven because habitual sinning suggested that my episodic repentance was mostly an effort to avoid consequences, lacking meaningful resolve to stop. The resolve to stop finally came early in my pilgrimage to Orthodoxy, proximately caused by an epiphany upon re-reading C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce, not some canonical Orthodox source.

Apophasis Today

Five years ago today, I was baptised. It was an icy cold day, the ground covered in hoar frost, and I was due to walk in to the River Shannon to be reborn. The covid pandemic was raging, and officially we probably shouldn’t even have been outside, but one reason I chose to enter the Orthodox church is that they have their priorities right. Christ comes first: everything else then falls into place.

So I went under the water three times, and when I came out I was an Orthodox Christian, swimming in a stream of wisdom and truth that is two millennia old. I came out unable to speak, for reasons both spiritual and physical. A dip in the Shannon in January will generally do that to you.

I could say a lot about what has happened since then – I have said a lot on this Substack – but I could also say nothing and it would perhaps mean as much. Words have their uses and their limits. God is not heard in whirlwind or thunder, but as a still, small voice.

Paul Kingsnorth.

I love “I could … say nothing and it would perhaps mean as much.”

Occasionally, I envy pagan converts a teensy-weensy bit because of the vividness of their experience. The fact is, I remember nothing significant from before “I asked Jesus into my heart” as a very young child (maybe 5, but younger I think), after however few years of living with parents who had something more like Kingsnorth’s experience between the War and my birth.

Chinese Evangelicals becoming Orthodox

Theme	Description
Intellectual Search	Academic study leads to discovery of early church history and theological depth missing in evangelicalism.
Spiritual Habits	Emphasis on habitual prayer and spiritual discipline over emotional spontaneity.
Historical Continuity	Desire for connection to a faith rooted in the first millennium of Christianity.
Ecclesial Fragmentation	Concern about diversity and lack of unity in Protestantism leads some to seek Orthodoxy’s consistency.
Personal Transformation	Conversion results in deeper spiritual formation rather than rejection of previous faith.
Social Challenges	Converts face varying responses within their communities, including misunderstanding.

I can’t personally say that’s how it’s happening in China, but it’s similar to my own experience, converting from Evangelical-adjacency to Orthodoxy, and the source of the article the chart summarizes is Christianity Today, which isn’t exactly carrying water for Eastern Orthodoxy.