Second Sunday of Lent, 2026

We are not alone

Paradise is closed (vs. 3:24) but God never forsakes mankind, providing us with a means of survival through birth, growth, and human labor (vs. 4:2). He exposes sin in all its vicious ugliness and deadliness – and yet, to prevent despair, God also discloses that His image remains within us. Despite sin, the grace of God abounds.

Dynamis devotional for March 2, reflecting on Genesis 3:21-4:7.

I mention this to contradict the (prevalent? After learning that dispensationalism is waning, I realize I’ve lost touch with America’s religious notions) idea that God cursed Adam, Eve and their descendants because of sin. It’s not humans God curses. You can look that up.

God does not withdraw His blessing from us despite our expulsion from Paradise, nor on account of our sinfulness and the consequent distortion of God’s likeness within us. We hear of God’s continuing love for us “while we were still sinners” (Rom 5:8) in this morning prayer to the Holy Trinity: “Because of the abundance of Thy goodness and long suffering, Thou was not wroth with us, slothful and sinful as we are; neither hast Thou destroyed us in our transgressions, but in Thy compassion raised us up as we lay in despair, that at dawn we might sing the glories of Thy Majesty.”

Dynamis devotional for 3/5/26.

Returning from Schism

I had quite lost track of this gem-of-a-blog:

I have come to see that the biggest difference of all—and for some the biggest hurdle to true interior conversion—was our different understandings of the Church itself.

Orthodoxy’s ecclesiology is dramatically different from that of everyone … in the Protestant world, and unless this difference is understood and embraced, conversions will be incomplete and half-baked at best. It is important, in other words, that the former erroneous ecclesiology of Protestant converts be decisively dismantled. If it is left intact the door of apostasy from Orthodoxy may be left invitingly ajar.

What is this erroneous ecclesiology? In a word Protestantism regards “the Church” as the conglomeration of all Trinitarian denominations.

…

Given the problems afflicting the western church in the medieval period following its schism from the Orthodox east, one understands the insistence of the Protestant Reformers that separation from the papal west was imperative. The early Reformers regarded the Pope as the eschatological Antichrist, and this could not help but make schism from the papal church an urgent necessity. Nonetheless the ultimate result was the acceptance of schism as a defining feature of the Protestant churches. That is, schism from the papal church was accepted as normal and necessary, for the papal church (they thought) was not the true Church, but Babylon the Great, the Mother of harlots and the abominations of the earth (Revelation 17:5). For them the choice seemed to be either schism or apostasy.

Protestantism thus gradually came to lose the primitive Christian horror of schism.

What the Fathers decried as schism is now regarded as normal church growth. So long as the new church does not make a point of denying the Trinity, it remains a part of the una sancta.

…

Orthodoxy regards the Protestant denominations (and, come to that, our Roman Catholic friends as well) as in schism from the one, united, and indivisible Church. The root ecumenical problem therefore is not simply difference of doctrine, but schism. The Orthodox believe that they are the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church confessed in the Creed. Converts to Orthodoxy are not only invited to agree with its teaching, but to join its family. In converting to Orthodoxy they are not simply joining a different denomination, but returning from schism.

Fr. Lawrence Farley, The Necessary Revolution.

(Yes, this means among other things that I detest the insouciant journalistic trope, when dealing with church history, that the Orthodox Church broke from the Roman Catholic Church.)

Liturgies of the Wild

(I finished Martin Shaw’s Liturgies of the Wild this week. At the request of a “friend” on my social medium, I summarized it and now share that with you. Nobody ever taught me how to write a proper book review, and this is a book that evokes as much or more than it tutors, so I hope I achieved an evocative portrait of a book full of evocation, if not a book review proper).

Shaw was raised as a Baptist in Great Britain, but wandered off and had no institutional or ideational connection to any kind of Christianity. He was converted/reverted roughly five years ago, ending up Eastern Orthodox.

There’s a fair amount in the book about his “reversion” (my word, not his) but very little about the distinctly Orthodox shape it took. To my relief, there’s no effort to tutor the reader in Christian doctrine:

After a few months he offers some advice: Stop reading for a bit. Orthodoxy is first for the body not the intellect. That’ll come quite naturally. Stay focused on the Encounter, not the theology. Stay focused on the Presence not the history. There’s nothing wrong with study, but don’t rush there too quickly.

Instead:

This is a book that rescues lost stories. Many come from the fairy-tale and mythic traditions of the world, relegated these last hundred years to children’s books or a therapist’s couch.

Shaw rescues those lost stories under 13 rubrics, each a chapter:

On Thrownaway Stories
On Bones
On Initiation.
On Death.
On Passivity.
On Passion.
On Prayer.
On Guilt.
On Envy
On Dream.
On Limit.
On Evil.
On Praise Making.

Then an epilogue: On the Ancient Good.

I can’t say I have “effable” takeaways because that doesn’t seem to be how stories and myths work:

It’s no good to go chasing after meaning as an abstraction; meaning comes in the doing of things … There are robbers stealing the horses of your imagination: Kick them out. This book has been full of hints as to how to do that. If I’m too explicit you will be left with a pamphlet not a story.

But I’m glad to have read it, and I think it’s the kind of book I may reread periodically, especially because we have thrown away so many stories and it’s not an easy job to get them back in a way that’s integral to our gut-level worldview.

Tradition

Protestant: Tradition X is wrong because nobody even mentions it until the Nth century.

Orthodox: How do you know that? Don’t you mean that we have no surviving written records of Tradition X until the Nth Century? That’s not the same thing, y’know.

Just sayin’.

Religion

If you pick up a translation of almost any ancient text of appreciable length, chances are you will find the term “religion” somewhere in the translation. There is also no shortage of books on the topic of this or that “ancient religion.” It is no wonder, then, that many people have the impression that the modern notion of religion is present in our ancient sources.

Brent Nongbri, Before Religion

Orthocardia

Put simply, if the primary American divide is between right and left, then [Texas Democrat U.S. Senate nominee James] Talarico isn’t that interesting. There’s a long history of progressive religious activism in the United States, just as there is a long history of conservative religious activism. White evangelicals might be overwhelmingly Republican, but American Christians are remarkably diverse politically, and we’ve been arguing with one another for a long time.

Yet if the primary American divide is between decent and indecent, then the equation changes. Talarico shines.

Or, to put it another way, Talarico is one of the few openly Christian politicians in the United States who acts like a Christian, and by acting like a Christian he reveals a profound contrast with so many members of the MAGA Christian movement that’s dominated American political life for 10 years.

…

It does really matter whether a politician is pro-life or pro-choice, but there is no spiritual or political scenario where you can abandon Christian virtue for the sake of the alleged greater good, and if a Christian politician abandons Christian virtue, then Christian believers should abandon him or her.

David French, James Talarico Is a Christian X-Ray (shared link because there’s a lot more stuff worth considering)

Ontology, not morality

The beatitudes have a single purpose, to help humans on their path to theosis. They are not about humanly conceived morality or about behaving properly. They have a deeper, ontological meaning.

Kyriacos C. Markides, The Mountain of Silence (hyperlink added).

This evokes one of my favorite aphorisms from Fr. Stephen Freeman: Christ did not come to make bad men good but to make dead men live.

Postscript

[W]e … live in a democratized world. We challenge walls of every sort and shout approvingly whenever they come tumbling down. In a strange manner of speaking, democracy is the maximization of narcissism. Where there are no walls, everything is me and mine.

Fr. Stephen Freeman

As the current national government explicitly exults in its “strength,” “force,” and “power,” I’m very glad to be in a church where every Sunday we sing the Beatitudes, which tell us the way blessedness works.

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.

Thursday, March 5

I seem to be publishing more frequently. That’s at least partly because I hate to write something and then have it obsoleted by, say, a 2 am Truth Social Administration reversal. Better obsoleted after I publish.

Truth and Facticity

I recall, as a High School Senior, giving a metaphorical side-eye to our English teacher, fresh out of college, barely 3 years older than us (because he flew through college), somehow distinguishing truth from fact.

I was having none of it, and began to suspect that he was unsound (this was, for those who don’t recall my life story, an evangelical Christian school). Squishy non-factual “truths” clearly were an oxymoronic slippery slope (though “slippery slope” wasn’t yet in common coinage so far as I can recall).

These days, it feels as if I’m mostly interested in supra-factual truths: myths, poetry, tall tales generally. Before there was Iain McGillchrist, there was Michael Polanyi, and then, if not earlier but undetected, the spell of fact had been broken.

I’ve joked that my gravestone should read “Darn! Just when I almost had it all figured out!” I’m still reading as if I’ll figure it all out some day, but “it” is now rarely popularized treatments of science, or political polemics, or even “theology” in a cataphatic key.

Iran war

My spirit animal writes on Iran

Meanwhile, the best thing I’ve seen on our war on Iran so far is from center-left Damon Linker: Zero Cheers for Trump’s Regime Change War. That was true when I wrote it Monday or Tuesday and it’s still true.

Linker and I had similar breaks with the GOP, but he wised up 22 months or so before I did:

He broke with the GOP over the Iraq war, which he opposed from before the onset and ended center-left. I thought that Bush was under a regrettable political necessity, wrought by 9/11, to do something big and hostile in the Middle East.
I didn’t break until Dubya pledged in his second inaugural address to eradicate tyranny from the world. I ended on the center-right, if only because I’m very concerned about the insanity I’d be associated with if I were further right.

I find an awful lot of wisdom in what Linker has to say.

An explanation of the war

President Metamucillini can’t give a consistent account of our objectives in Iran, but our co-belligerent did:

A senior Israeli military official said Israel’s objective was to “dismantle the regime’s military infrastructure, including the IRGC” as well as Iranian nuclear sites, military production facilities and space and cyber capabilities. “We’re preparing for several long weeks,” the official said. They said the “third phase” of the war was under way. That followed a first phase that consisted of deadly opening strikes in Tehran on Saturday targeting the Iranian leadership, followed by a second phase of “100 hours” focused on destroying ballistic missile, drone and air-defence capabilities. A former senior Israeli official who is familiar with the current war plans warned that “this will take time . . . There is a lot of work to be done. Iran is huge.”

Financial Times via John Ellis News Items for March 5. Note that the Israeli official does not mention regime change, though dismantling the IRGC would come pretty close to that.

The Free Press and The Dispatch

I am a charter subscriber to both the Free Press and the Dispatch. I’m not giving up on either of them, but it seems to me, at least this morning after a weekend flurry of Free Press articles on our Israel-aligned attack on Iran, that the Free Press has a stableful of clever contributors with prominent names while the less prominent folks at the Dispatch not too infrequently achieve something wise or at least wisdom-adjacent.

We’ll see if that impression sticks. It may just be a side-effect of the Free Press covering so many things that do not interest me. It seems almost flighty, nerve-wracking. Maybe that’s because I’m trying to cut back on news consumption.

Sissy boys

As an adult, I vowed to help create a world where sissy boys like me could find space in society to be themselves, without any pressure to change—a goal that still feels urgent today. What I know now is that gender nonconformity didn’t disqualify me from being male. Effeminate boys, however atypical, are a natural variation of their own sex. The notion that they are really girls is anything but progressive.

My childhood experiences make me skeptical about pediatric gender medicine today. In many kids who grow up to be gay, gender nonconformity manifests long before overt same-sex attraction does. Yet from peers, from social media, and even from some school districts’ teaching material, kids learn simplistic lessons that equate gender nonconformity with gender dysphoria—in essence, If you act and dress like a girl, you are one. In recent years, many doctors and hospitals have been willing to provide puberty blockers and gender-related hormone treatments to minors after only the briefest evaluation of each patient’s circumstances, and LGBTQ activists have cheered the lack of gatekeeping.

Ben Appel. I highly recommend this article if you’re unsettled about “LGBT” issues. Appel has been through, and thought through, a lot, with a personal authority I lack. (That doesn’t mean I agree with everything he, a clever writer, says.)

Some of those gender nonconforming kids grow up to be gender nonconforming straight adults, too. Tomboys aren’t all lesbians; sissy boys aren’t all gay. It’s the flip side of the macho guy hidden in the closet.

The assumption that they are all LGBs of some sort is a subset of stereotyping. Stereotypes arise for a reason, but they’re not infallible guides. We probably can’t function without them, but they can do a lot of harm, too. Being a sometimes-thoughtful American, I’m thinking foremost of racial stereotypes in the harmful category, but sexual stereotypes are in the frame, too.

I haven’t sorted through that beyond musing that (1) we must resist unjust stereotypes and (2) our inevitable failures are part of why we need grace — from God and between one another.

That’s right, I’m not from Texas

I lived in Texas briefly, and I liked it. My inlaws lived in Texas briefly. I have a brother and some of his descendants settled in Texas, not briefly.

But I’m glad I don’t live in Texas now:

“The correct strategy for any candidate is to tie yourself as closely to President Trump as possible,”Rice University political science professor Mark Jones told TMD. “We can expect the Paxton campaign to really hit him [Cornyn] hard on this … that he’s insufficiently conservative, and that his track record has not always been nearly as supportive of President Trump as Ken Paxton’s record.”

Jones told TMD that while “Paxton has been a die-hard Trump supporter from the very beginning, Cornyn has ebbed and flowed” in his support for Trump. The Cornyn campaign has taken steps to address this, such as flagging that he votes in line with the White House 99 percent of the time. But Paxton—who appealed the 2020 election results to the Supreme Court, seeking to throw out electoral votes from Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, based on Trump’s spurious claims of voter fraud—has worked to position himself as the authentic MAGA option.

…

“Republican primary voters are very much aware of his legal baggage,” but they “discount it pretty heavily as partisan,” Southern Methodist University political science professor Cal Jillison told TMD. “They know that he has ethical and legal baggage, but they see him as a knife fighter, and that’s what they want.”

Peter Gattuso, James P. Sutton, Ross Anderson, The Texas Primaries.

So why does this make me glad I don’t live in Texas?

It sounds like Texans don’t know there’s a difference between following Trump and being a conservative.
Although Paxton and Cornyn will have a runoff election in May, in a sane state a corrupt knife-fighting Trumpist would not have come close enough to a proven conservative to force a runoff.

But what do I know? I’m not from Texas.

Thumbnail Geek autobiography

For a guy of my advance years, I’m a bit of a geek. Oh, I long ago gave us being my lawfirm’s tech guy, and left the Microsoft cosmos at the office when I retired to my cozy Appleworld.

But as I typed a Markdown file recently, I had a flashback to my former bafflement with the idea of hyperlinks, and trying to figure out what they’d be useful for (versus a cute useless parlor trick).

I remember, earlier, standing slack-jawed at the Novell booth at the ABA’s Technology in the Practice of Law show/conference in Boston, in 1988, wondering why in the world anyone would need to connect computers to one another. (I went to Boston that year with a TRS0-80 Model 100 for daytime note-taking and a 16-pound NEC Multispeed HD luggable for evening processing — which ironically required a primitive connection between computers).

Now it’s AI I don’t understand, only this time I’m reassured that nobody understands it, and bummed that everybody’s fearful about it.

When you believe in things
You don’t understand
Then you suffer
Superstition ain’t the way

(Wonder, Stevie, Superstition, 1972)

What ultimately made me back off may have been that questions arose faster than I could find answers and I decided to leave it to guys who figured out those things for a living, focusing on what I did for a living.

I still have impulses, like glancing longingly at Linux, but I’ve learned to stop at loving glances most of the time.

Now, I’ve got to go figure out some more of the settings on my new Android-based e-reader. It’s not like iOS you know.

Unitary Executives

Listening to the March 3 Advisory Opinions podcast, I agree with Sarah and David that the current occupant of the White House doesn’t justify altering “Unitary Executive Theory,” but the occupant being Donald J. Trump instead of George Washington (the president when Article II Section 1 was adopted) does focus the mind on a question:

Was and is the strong Unitary Executive Theory wrong?; or
Is the strong Unitary Executive Theory right, and we must simply rely on impeachment if we continue electing, ummmm, less than optimally stable and conscientious Presidents?

I’m increasingly leaning toward strong Unitary Executive Theory being wrong, neat and tidy though it be. I also confess that if someone sane were in the White House exercising strong Unitary Executive Theory, fewer articles would have been written revisiting it (here, for instance) and I would have been less eager to read them.

Routed

Speaking of unstable and unfaithful Presidents, Team Trump has fled the federal courts, tail between its legs, on one of its earliest and most egregious outrages: the effort to intimidate the entire legal profession by punishing firms who employ lawyers who sometime or other were adverse to Donald J. Trump (shared link).

The judge overseeing Perkins Coie’s case, Beryl Howell, said the executive order “sends little chills down my spine,” later writing that the administration had sent a clear message, “Lawyers must stick to the party line, or else.” The orders, she wrote, were “an unprecedented attack” on foundational constitutional principles.

And this from the New York Times Editorial Board:

The larger goal of the executive orders was chilling. The president attacked a bedrock principle of the law, which is that everybody deserves legal representation. He sought to frighten lawyers from representing people who had the temerity to criticize him. By extension, he sought to frighten any Americans who might criticize him.

Fighting the executive orders took courage, and the four firms deserve praise and gratitude for standing up to the president. They all risked losing clients and even having their firms collapse. Nine other firms folded and struck deals intended to mollify the president.

Pre-publication “update”: maybe not.

Shorts

Peace means the ascent from simple coexistence to co-operation and common creativity among countries and nations. (Mikhail Gorbachev via Economist World in Brief)
SOTU
- Most of the people I know declined to watch Trump’s State of the Union remarks. They’re not living in denial. They’re preserving their sanity for better days. (Frank Bruni)
- I agreed wholeheartedly with a few of Trump’s [SOTU]comments. “What a difference a president makes.” Truest words he has ever spoken. “Nobody can believe what they’re watching.” I nodded so hard I’m pretty sure I fractured one of my cervical vertebrae. (Frank Bruni)
I have been thinking about existence lately. In fact, I have been so full of admiration for existence that I have hardly been able to enjoy it properly. (Marilynne Robinson)
The tide has so turned on adolescent “gender confirmation” hormones and surgeries, a madness and abdication of adult responsibility that long horrified me, that I don’t even read all the latest news items and commentary about the return to sanity.
There is no great performance — not even a theatrical one whose surface is, by design, artifice — that doesn’t have truthfulness at its core. The search for truth is an artist’s life’s work. (Jonathan Biss, Music, at Least, Doesn’t Lie)
There were planning Ghosts who implored them to dam the river, cut down the trees, kill the animals, build a mountain railway, smooth out the horrible grass and moss and heather with asphalt. (C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce. The “Ghosts” were hell-dwellers on a day trip to heaven.)
They took paradise and put up a parking lot. (Joni Mitchell)
Beauty will save the world. (Dostoevsky)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

I confess, however, that I am not myself very much concerned with the question of influence, or with those publicists who have impressed their names upon the public by catching the morning tide and rowing very fast in the direction in which the current was flowing; but rather that there should always be a few writers preoccupied in penetrating to the core of the matter, in trying to arrive at the truth and to set it forth, without too much hope, without ambition to alter the immediate course of affairs, and without being downcast or defeated when nothing appears to ensue.

T.S. Eliot

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

Monday March 2

A keeper

Damon Linker discusses (shared link) the debates among Right illiberals, not nut-picking but citing scholars and a Notre Dame Republican student group.

Then he puts his finger on the key question they disagree about:

The question is whether the country today is actually facing a threat dire enough to justify or excuse otherwise unjustifiable or inexcusable acts. Are we facing a genuine threat to our continued existence as a country? Determining the answer boils down to judgment.

Starting at least with Michael Anton’s 2016 “Flight 93 Election” essay, there are plenty on the right excusing unjustifiable or inexcusable acts on the premise that the Democrats are an “existential threat.” I don’t believe them, and if I did it’s no longer clear to me that I would take the illiberal Right’s side in the fight. There’s a lot of evidence that they’re a bigger threat than the Democrats.

I plan to revisit Linker’s essay at least once; I’m not sure I’ve sucked all the juice from it yet.

The first thing the communists do when they take over is to systematize snitching

When I was living, fairly briefly, in Oklahoma 50 years ago, we heard not only the usual “first thing the communists do when they take over is,” but an interesting variant.

The usual, of course, was “outlaw guns.” The variant was “outlaw cock-fighting.” I’m not kidding. I do not claim that the variant was common or held by a substantial number of Okies, but it was there.

The marks of authoritarianism and totalitarianism are debated, but I suggest that one of them is recruiting people to snitch on each other even about trivial deviations from the government’s line. Kids reporting to teachers naughty things their parents or siblings said, for instance.

Making due allowance for his youth at the time and signs of subsequent growth, it nevertheless is an authoritarian blot on the late Charlie Kirk’s legacy that one of his early Turning Point USA initiatives was Professor Watch, a website for student to snitch on their professors.

If I were more obsessive about the dangers from MAGAworld, I would keep a list of the dubious stuff TPUSA has done since Kirk’s death, like the All-American Halftime Show in 2026. (That, at least, was not clearly authoritarian, but it was petty as hell.)

For now, suffice that one of TPUSA’s earliest initiatives was a tool of authoritarian wannabes.

Beating a dead(ish) horse

Wokeness is often thought to be a form of virtue signalling. This is subtly wrong, for it is more often a kind of status signalling. The wokist wants to be seen as belonging to “the right kind of people.” He drapes himself with wokeness the same way that in another day and age people paraded their memberships in prestigious clubs, or that today they flaunt the brands and styles of shoes and clothing that they wear. If ethics comes into the matter at all, it comes in not via the thought “I would never do that,” but via the thought “I’m not the kind of person who would do that.” You know, the deplorables.

I am not suggesting that such a person is aware of his craving for status. Very few people are fully aware of their own motives. In a society which professes to believe in equality, and pretends to despise snobbery, it is hard for a snob who knows he is a snob to think well of himself; therefore he has to convince himself that he isn’t a snob. With its faux concern for The People (most of whom have no interest whatsoever in the cause of woke), wokeness is a convenient way to do that. My very expensive jeans must have holes in them.

J Budziszewski

Budziszewski’s not wrong, but a parallel takedown of MAGA vice-signallers couldn’t be all that hard. I’m not a pas d’ennemis á droite kind of guy, but I’m not going to take the time to write it — only to point out that the Right has unclean hands of its own. Do you have eyes to see that or are you blinkered?

We need to “get out” more

A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.

C.S. Lewis, Learning in War-Time, from Weight of Glory

Incommensurable

[O]ne is compelled to admire a man of such verbal agility as not only to conceal from his readers and audiences the shallowness of his own thought, but to persuade them that in admiring his work they were giving evidence of their own intelligence as well. I do not say that Shaw could have succeeded alone, without the more plodding and laborious minds with which he associated himself; but by persuading lowbrows that they were high-brows and that high-brows must be Socialist, he contributed greatly to the prestige of Socialism. But between the influence of a Bernard Shaw or an H.G. Wells, and the influence of a Coleridge or a Newman, I can conceive no common scale of measurement.

I confess, however, that I am not myself very much concerned with the question of influence, or with those publicists who have impressed their names upon the public by catching the morning tide and rowing very fast in the direction in which the current was flowing; but rather that there should always be a few writers preoccupied in penetrating to the core of the matter, in trying to arrive at the truth and to set it forth, without too much hope, without ambition to alter the immediate course of affairs, and without being downcast or defeated when nothing appears to ensue.

T.S. Eliot on George Bernard Shaw, inter alia.

Manipulation in a good cause

Ten years in, and Democrats still don’t know how to handle Donald Trump. He used them as foils and they allowed it, sitting there snarling, at points screaming. Part of how to handle him is if he tries to manipulate you into doing the right thing—if, for instance, he challenges you to stand in respect for a mother mourning the murder of her daughter—you put aside that you’re being manipulated and stand. Because it is right to show human sympathy and regard. The thing to do is look better than Mr. Trump, not worse. You say: My base demands coldness. Then get a new base. If you can’t, leave before you are reduced to a soulless husk of the eager, happy person who walked into that chamber a decade ago.

Peggy Noonan, The Oprah State of the Union.

The same advice could and should be given to Republicans when their one-man “base” in the White House demands dishonor of them.

Regime Change

As Americans, we do not need regime change abroad; we need it at home. We must escape the ghastly bloodlust and other demonic impulses of the Democratic and Republican parties. Men and women of goodwill must unite in solidarity to build an alternative to evil.

Jack Ternan, Chair of the National Committee of the American Solidarity Party

Shorts

Two tongue-in-cheek descriptions of The Bulwark: “Pro market, anti-polio”; “The capitalist wing of Antifa.”
“…preposterously self-satisfied, preternaturally nasty and profoundly delusional …” (Frank Bruni’s top-line characterization of Trump’s 2026 SOTU)
I don’t know who coined the expression “Don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining,” but it fits the overall tone of the speech. (Bret Stephens’ top-line characterization of Trump’s 2026 SOTU)
That’s what’s nice about politics, Yevgeny: anything that makes people believe in power actually increases that power. (Giuliano da Empoli and Willard Wood, The Wizard of the Kremlin.)
No, it’s not a conspiracy. It’s much worse—it’s a consensus. (R.R. Reno on “the progressive takeover of higher education … or DEI’s reign over corporate America”)

I had another few items, but after the USA and Israel attached Iran, they could have been too easily misunderstood.

Sunday, March 1

Heresies

Dispensationism declining

By embedding [John Nelson] Darby’s complex [dispensationalist] eschatology directly into the margins of the biblical text, Cyrus Scofield effectively imposed an ahistorical and not-traditional interpretation on the Bible, an irony given that the work has appeal to nuda scriptura Christians who see the Bible alone as authoritative and exclude tradition.

Albert Russell Thompson.

That irony was lost on me as a 15-year-old, when I asked for, and got, the ultimate pious kid’s Christmas gift (short of a KLH compact stereo system, of course): a Scofield Reference Bible (looseleaf for inserting note pages) with my name embossed on the leatherette cover.

But the irony finally hit me in my late 20s, when I used those loose-leafs for typed-up Calvinist-oriented notes repudiating the dispensationalist heresies of that Bible version. (I still have that Bible with my Calvinist notes. I have not superseded the Calvinist notes with Orthodox rebuttals.)

Thompson’s overall point, though, seems to be that dispensationalism is losing its grip on the evangelical imagination:

The dominance of dispensationalism is currently being hollowed out by a dual-front migration. First, some younger evangelicals are abandoning the religious innovations of the 20th century in favor of older, more rooted forms of Christian worship. Central to this is a burgeoning interest in Anglicanism, framed not as a liberal departure, but as a return to a foundational, traditionalist, and robust Anglo-American Protestant tradition. Similarly, the move toward Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism represents a rejection of the “rapture culture” in favor of a sacramental worldview that is fundamentally non-dispensational.

Also, many evangelicals of all ages have moved beyond dispensationalism. There were no successors to Pat Robertson, Hal Lindsey, and Tim LaHaye. Dallas Theological Seminary, once a headquarters of dispensationalist theology, has largely moved on. And Christian commentators are no longer anxious to relate contemporary events to biblical prophecy ….

I’m stunned that dispensationalism held that grip as long as it did after failures like predictions of Christ’s “Second Coming” no later than 1988 based on the 1948 establishment of the modern state of Israel starting a prophetic clock that would go off no later than the “generation” that saw that.

All else being equal, evangelicalism sans dispensationalism is an improvement, less likely to distract folks from the real business of following Christ.

(Although he acknowledges that dispensationalism is not required for support of Israel and the Jews, Thompson suggests, not implausibly, that the American upswing in antisemitism and the waning of support for Israel is linked to dispensationalism falling out of favor.)

“Merely to enumerate them would be impossible”

In 1832 Achille Murat, an exiled Bonapartist, whose religious ideal was a unitary society with an established church, nonetheless could not help but be impressed by “the thousand and one sects which divide the people of the United States. Merely to enumerate them would be impossible, for they change every day, appear, disappear, unite, separate, and evince nothing stable but their instability…. Yet, with all this liberty, there is no country in which the people are so religious as in the United States.”

Mark A. Noll, America’s God.

To say that an America fractured into innumerable, shape-shifting sects is extremely “religious” is damning by faint praise, as I see it.

The heresy litmus test

What defines this consensus, above all—what distinguishes orthodoxy from heresy, the central river from the delta—is a commitment to mystery and paradox. 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.

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

The way of the Protestant world today

The local Church I grew up in has changed its name to “The Grove” to de-emphasize its denominational affiliation (well, officially “God wanted to give us a name that better reflected and communicated what he has been doing in our midst over the past few years”).

Growth in the unequivocally Protestant world these days seems to be in (1) nondenominational thingies and (2) denominational churches that function like nondenominational thingies. I guess my childhood church has decided to be the second sort of thingy.

(Then there’s the Anglicans – think “conservative dissidents from the Episcopal Church USA” – apt to think of themselves as lower-case catholics. I think they’re growing, too, though I wouldn’t bet anything on that unless I could afford to lose it.)

The Mercenary Love of God

Those wary of commending Christianity for its capacity to deliver rewards, benefits, and consolations have a point. Belief for the sake of avoiding hell, saving Western civilization, or just finding something to hold onto in a cold, meaningless world is not the same as the disposition of faith, properly understood, which is rooted in love of God, not fear of damnation, civilizational collapse, or soul-destroying nihilism. Nonetheless, count me among those who are not quick to dismiss appeals to the usefulness of Christianity. What is different is not necessarily contradictory. St. Catherine of Siena recognizes that a “mercenary love” of God is imperfect; nevertheless, it can spur us toward a pure and selfless love.

R.R. Reno, Dilbert’s Wager

Orthodoxy

Planting a seed

My name-changing childhood Church (see The way of the Protestant world today, above) made passing reference in the rationale for their name change to a favorite Bible passage from my teen years:

And I pray that Christ will be more and more at home in your hearts, living within you as you trust in him. May your roots go down deep into the soil of God’s marvelous love; and may you be able to feel and understand, as all God’s children should, how long, how wide, how deep, and how high his love really is; and to experience this love for yourselves, though it is so great that you will never see the end of it or fully know or understand it. And so at last you will be filled up with God himself.

I still think that’s lovely and apt. In fact, I now see that I was longing for Orthodoxy over one-and-done conversionism. I was an outlier, with my evangelical classmates preferring verses like “God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.“

The way back to The Garden

The state of questless ease that was our birthright is gone. We chose knowledge over communion; we chose power over humility. The Earth is our home now. … These are the consequences of our pursuit of knowledge and power, but we keep pursuing them because we know no other means to escape from our exile. We keep building towers and cities and forgetting where we came from. Outside the garden, we are homeless and can never be still. We forget the creator and worship ourselves. All of this happens inside us every day. … The path back to the garden can only be found by giving up the vainglory, the search for power and the unearned knowledge which got us exiled in the first place. The path is the path of renunciation, of love and of sacrifice. To get back to the garden, we have to go through the cross.

Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine

Rome, viewed from Patmos

In the years leading up to the Schism, it would have been hard for the Eastern patriarchs to have taken seriously the claim that the popes of Rome were the vicars of Christ on earth and had inherited his sanctity and authority. The papacy had been in the gift of the German emperor since King Otto I had had himself crowned emperor by the pope on February 2, 962. He then decreed that all future popes should take the oath of allegiance to his office. In the following century, twenty-one out of twenty-five popes were handpicked by the German crown. They did not do a good job. Simony flourished; popes had their mistresses; and they were poisoned, strangled or just mutilated by their rivals. By 1045, only nine years before the Great Schism, there was no pope. Instead, there were three rival claimants to the papacy, each with his own army.

Peter France, A Place of Healing for the Soul

I confess, however, that I am not myself very much concerned with the question of influence, or with those publicists who have impressed their names upon the public by catching the morning tide and rowing very fast in the direction in which the current was flowing; but rather that there should always be a few writers preoccupied in penetrating to the core of the matter, in trying to arrive at the truth and to set it forth, without too much hope, without ambition to alter the immediate course of affairs, and without being downcast or defeated when nothing appears to ensue.

T.S. Eliot