Category: Culture

Contrariness

Correcting the Record

Over the weekend, I had coffee with a Hungarian friend who spent a lot of time in America as a kid and teenager, because his father is an academic. He has a critical view of the US system because of its tolerance for economic precarity for so many. He supports the Orban government, and agrees with me about how totally biased and distorting the news media are, based on the kinds of things that middle and upper middle class reporters care about. For example, said my friend, in the long wake of the 2008 global economic crash, Viktor Orban’s government passed a law forbidding banks from expelling people who had defaulted on their mortgages from their homes. “Barack Obama didn’t do that,” said my friend. And then we talked about how with the US left, as long as you fly the rainbow flag and say “Black Lives Matter,” you can do whatever you want with the economy, and you won’t hear a word of protest from the supposed champions of the little guy versus Capital.

Rod Dreher, Who Is Viktor Orban, Really? (emphasis added)

Assaulting Hades

[A] liturgical practice … in Orthodoxy … is a frontal assault on Hades.

The traditional name for these celebrations is “Soul Saturdays.” They are celebrations of the Divine Liturgy on Saturday mornings offered for the souls of the departed … They make a fitting prelude for Holy Week and Pascha. At Pascha, Christ Himself “tramples down death by death and upon those in the tombs bestows life.” This is the Great and Holy Sabbath – the true and Great Soul Saturday. This is the great theme of Pascha itself. Christ’s Resurrection is, strangely, not so much about Christ as it is about Christ’s action. Many modern Christians treat Pascha (Easter) as though it were a celebration of Jesus’ personal return after a tragic death. Orthodoxy views Christ’s Holy Week, Crucifixion, Descent into Hades and Resurrection as one unending, uninterrupted assault on Hades. This is the great mystery of Pascha – the destruction of death and Hades. Death is the “last enemy.” Those who forget this are like soldiers who have forgotten the purpose of the war in which they fight.

And so the battle forms a significant part of the liturgical effort of the Church. The boldness of the third prayer is quite striking …

I can recall the first time I offered this prayer in my priesthood. I had a copy in front of me, but had not read it before the service, nor had I ever heard it. I trembled as I offered the words … astounded by their boldness. I had never heard such boldness before the Throne of God within the walls of the Church itself. It is also a reminder of the weakness and infirmity of the legal imagery of salvation. The legal view requires of God that He be the enforcer of Hades. To such a prayer He could only reply: “I cannot grant such things because of my Justice!”

Fr. Stephen Freeman, Pentecost and the Liturgy of Hades (emphasis added).

Bait-and-Switch

If there are alternative solutions, like finding another baker, why force the point? Why take up arms to coerce someone when you can easily let him be—and still celebrate your wedding? That is particularly the case when much of the argument for marriage equality was that it would not force anyone outside that marriage to approve or disapprove of it …

One reason we won that debate is because many straight people simply said to themselves, "How does someone else’s marriage affect me?" and decided on those grounds to support or acquiesce to such a deep social change …

It seems grotesquely disingenuous now for the marriage-equality movement to bait and switch on that core "live and let live" argument. And it seems deeply insensitive and intolerant to force the clear losers in a culture war into not just defeat but personal humiliation.

Andrew Sullivan, quoted by William McGurn

CRT

An old friend we visited Saturday en route to our favorite vacation spot asked my thoughts on Critical Race Theory, and I think I shocked him with my mild dismissiveness, which I couldn’t explain all that well on the spot. "Well, the reported excesses, like telling white school kids that their skin tone makes them irredeemable oppressors, already constitute racial harassment or a racially hostile environment under Title VII, so why do we need new laws?" was the gist of my answer. Very lawyerly.

The incompleteness of that answer has bothered me, and I’ve surfaced two more reasons:

  • Laws banning ideas are a bad idea, especially when the ideas sought to be banned are ill-defined or mis-defined, which is the case with most or all of the anti-CRT laws. Similarly, the inability to define CRT suggests that much of the murmuring about it is mostly Shibboleth.
  • The reported excesses of CRT exemplify progressive overreach, which generates its own cultural backlash. I don’t need to enter that fray.

Reading Between the Lines

There were three kinds of evangelical leaders. The dumb or idealistic ones who really believed. The out-and-out charlatans. And the smart ones who still believed—sort of—but knew that the evangelical world was shit, but who couldn’t figure out any way to earn as good a living anywhere else. I was turning into one of those, having started out in the idealistic category.

Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God. I don’t really recommend Schaeffer, but it doesn’t take a whole lot of reading between the lines here to explain how Schaeffer became the equivocally-Christian author of kiss-and-tell Exvangelical books and Huffington Post columns.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

Right call, right reason (but punts the issue, really)

The Supreme Court today took the surprising tack of deciding a religious freedom case (Fulton v. City of Philadelphia) on the basis of a statutory provision I’d never heard mentioned in discussions of the case (and I was paying moderately close attention).

The majority opinion by Chief Justice Roberts, joined by Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, Kagan, Kavanaugh, and Barrett: When a legal rule allows for "entirely discretionary exceptions" (e.g., that a foster care evaluation provider "shall not reject … prospective foster or adoptive parents … based upon … their … sexual orientation … unless an exception is granted by the Commissioner or the Commissioner’s designee, in his/her sole discretion"), the government must generally provide such exceptions for religious objectors as well.

I’m not surprised at the outcome. I am surprised (and disappointed) that I hadn’t heard about this discretionary exemption clause in the law. It was an obvious way, it seems to me, to avoid having to overturn the 30-year-old ‌Employment Division v. Smith precedent — even though no exemptions have been extended to anyone.

But Justice Alito has a point, too:

[The majority] decision might as well be written on the dissolving paper sold in magic shops. The City has been adamant about pressuring CSS to give in, and if the City wants to get around today’s decision, it can simply eliminate the never-used exemption power. If it does that, then, voilà, today’s decision will vanish—and the parties will be back where they started. The City will claim that it is protected by Smith; CSS will argue that Smith should be overruled; the lower courts, bound by Smith, will reject that argument; and CSS will file a new petition in this Court challenging Smith. What is the point of going around in this circle?

(Both block-quotes from Eugene Volokh, with emphasis added.)

Paul Kingsnorth on the environmental movement (which he left):

What, exactly, was he leaving? A movement that had transformed itself into, as he memorably put it, “the catalytic converter on the silver SUV of the global economy.” … To him, this next-gen environmentalism was simply “business-as-usual: the expansive, colonizing, progressive human narrative, shorn only of carbon.”

Eric Miller, Out Walking (Current)

Glenn Greenwald, The Enduring False Narrative About the PULSE Massacre Shows the Power of Media Propaganda. I put this in the category of "Whenever Mrs. Kissel breaks wind we beat the dog.": Gay person murdered = homophobe murderer.

It’s ever so much easier than admitting that our endless wars of choice piss some people off around the world — especially if one is a Senator, but almost as much if one is a journalistic lapdog to the Beltway crowd.

Hudge and Gudge, or the governing class generally, will never fail for lack of some modern phrase to cover their ancient predominance. The great lords will refuse the English peasant his three acres and a cow on advanced grounds, if they cannot refuse it longer on reactionary grounds. They will deny him the three acres on grounds of State Ownership. They will forbid him the cow on grounds of humanitarianism.

G.K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World?

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

Paideia

I’m on the Board of Directors of a Classical Christian School, and I’ve been reading David V. Hicks, Norms & Nobility. Perhaps I’m an analytical kind of guy, because Chapter 10’s proposed list of assumptions for building a classical Christian School made my heart soar:

[1] The need to prepare students for future employment is overtaken by a liberal education. Cardinal Newman‘s description of liberal education remains, to this day, unimpeachable: that which teaches the student “to see things as they are, to go right to the point, to disentangle a skein of thought, to detect what is sophistical, and to disregard what is irrelevant. It prepares him to fill any post with credit, and to master any subject with facility.“

[2] Before he is 18, no one has time to do more than a few things well; therefore, better to teach a few subjects thoroughly then to force a child to be a mediocrity in many subjects, destroying his standards, obscuring the nature of mastery, and concealing the measure of his ignorance. The school is not predominantly a place where the child is exposed to a kaleidoscope of new ideas, but where he is given the direction, the discipline, and the method to master basic ideas and where art, science, and letters are studied with the intention of forming the student’s conscience and style.

[3] … Basic skills and ideas should be introduced very early in a child’s education and enlarged in subsequent years by re-introducing them at higher levels of complexity and abstraction.

[4] Any subject, no matter how potentially complex, can be taught to any student at any level. The secret is not in what is taught, but in how it is taught. The compromise to the students level of psychological development should be made by altering the teaching method rather than by substituting facile subject matter.

[5] … The curriculum of the effective school does not duck the issue of selectivity, but addresses it comprehensively and coherently. It is the folly of many modern schools to neglect to provide the focus necessary for disciplining it students minds and wills …

[6] … “Begin with the best” … students learn excellent through the excellence of their models. “Nothing — not all the knowledge in the world — educates like the vision of greatness and nothing can take its place.”

[9] Only the careless and unskilled teacher answers questions before they are asked. The teacher’s chief task is to provoke the question, not to answer it; to cultivate in his students an active curiosity, not to inundate them in factual information. The teacher’s answers will not stimulate the formation of conscience and style in his students, nor will they impart paideia, if they are not in response to the student’s own questions.

[10] The teacher’s true competence is not in his mastery of a subject, but in his ability to provoke the right questions and to get into a new subject quickly and incisively. Although this competence derives from the teachers understanding of the nature of mastery — having mastered at least one subject himself — it implies the teacher’s peculiar eagerness to explore new subjects and new ideas with his students. What students can most hope to learn from a good teacher is how to approach a new subject with the aim of mastering it.

[11] The normative approach to learning draws the analytical after it, whereas the analytical approach repels the normative. The fragmentation of arts and letters into academic disciplines (literature, history, philosophy, religion, social studies, and so forth) answers an analytical need that pushes normative inquiry into the interstices between disciplines. This is the strongest argument for reuniting the arts and letters.

[14] Much learning is misspent because it’s not placed within a thoughtfully structured pattern. This pattern not only assists memory, which is the result of having learned something properly, but it helps to motivate the student by unfolding to him the purposes of his education. (The runner runs best on a clearly marked course.) Thus does Jerome Bruner observe that “the more one has a sense of structure of a subject, the more densely packed and longer a learning episode one can get through without fatigue.“ This observation can be enlarged to include the entire curriculum.

[15] The craze for guidance counseling in the modern school is in large measure an unwitting acknowledgment that education is failing to make the strategic connection between what a student learns in the classroom and what choices he makes outside the classroom. The modern mode of instruction undercuts responsible learning because of its analytical attack on subject matter and because of its utilitarian self-justification. Learning has lost its normative age, and we need special guidance to make our students responsible, self-aware persons. But guidance counseling cannot begin to perform the morphosis of a healthy paideia — for students acquire a lively sense of values implicitly, not extrinsically, when normative inquiry is a part of every class and discipline, not the special study of one.

[16] “Religious truth is not only a portion but a condition of general knowledge,“ wrote Newman. The history of God‘s revelation in Christ and the progress of Christianity are too central to the development of western paideia to be isolated from the study of arts and letters. Such a separation emasculates the study of religion, as well as of the arts and letters.

[17] The school should not nurture and ape the attitudes and beliefs of popular culture – what Erasmus calls “the false options and vicious predilections of the masses“ – but it must call these in the question with the inherited wisdom of its lofty paideia, its vision of greatness, its ideals of conscience and style. The school best serves society when it establishes itself as the secondary aspect of contradiction in a dialectical relationship with the state and popular culture.

[19] Education as paideia is not preparation for life, for college, or for work; it is our inherited means of living fully in the present, while we grow in wisdom and in grace, in conscience and in style, entering gradually into “the good life.“

Numbers 1, 4 and 15 probably are my favorites, though I liked them all well enough to share.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

Poke them in the axioms

I seem to recall ProPublica doing some worthwhile muck-raking, but it wasn’t this week. But I guess if you’re in possession of stolen income tax returns of very, very rich men, you’ve got to say something even if it’s breathtakingly stupid.

Is the tide turning?

Last month the Spanish parliament voted against a bill that would allow people to determine their own gender. A day later Germany’s voted down two such bills. Few newspapers took any notice.

…

In May the Karolinska University hospital in Stockholm, which contains Sweden’s largest adolescent gender clinic, released new guidelines saying it would no longer prescribe blockers and hormones to children under 18 …

Research has had an impact. In a paper in 2015, a Finnish psychiatrist, Riittakerttu Kaltiala-Heino, found that more than 75% of adolescents applying for sex-reassignment surgery needed help for psychiatric problems other than gender dysphoria. (Another paper, published this year, found 88% needed such help.) Finland last year adopted strict guidelines prioritising therapy over hormones and surgery.

The Economist

The story also refers in the same paragraph to the "LGBT community" and to "LGB Alliance Deutschland." While I can no longer claim to understand the world’s increasing madness, it seems to me that "T" has distinct interests so diverging from, and sometimes contradicting, "LGB" interests that it’s a stretch to lump them into a notional "community."

Only the unwillingness of groups like Human Rights Campaign (inventors of the yellow-on-blue equal-sign logo) to declare victory (same-sex marriage surely was the end-game for LGB, right?) and go home (i.e., disband) keeps the four letters together. It’s not an uncommon story for an entity to think that it is what it’s about, and to expand the mission or pretend then war is continuing after they’ve decisively won.

Every time the culture decides through popular vote to ask for government penetration into the marketplace, it creates a climate that pushes the biggest players to curry concessionary privileges with the regulators. The little players don’t have the clout, manpower, or capital to arm-twist. The big players do. And that is why every time, every time, every time—should I say it once more?—every time the public asks for government oversight, it eventuates in the bigger players getting more power and the smaller players being kicked in the teeth.

Joel Salatin, Folks, This Ain’t Normal.

Salatin, a small, innovative farmer, knows whereof he writes.

[S]in goes underground when it’s not socially acceptable. No one watches porn in the pews at church or beats their wife at the grocery store. Why would we expect post-1965 racism to remain out in the open?

Bob Stevenson and Josh Fenska, Thin Discipleship

I have noted, through the years, that the patriotism that inhabits the thoughts of many is a deeply protected notion, treated as a virtue in many circles. This often gives it an unexamined character, a set of feelings that do not come under scrutiny …

Asking questions of these things quickly sends some heads spinning. They wonder, “Are we not supposed to love our country?” As an abstraction, no. We love people; we love the land. We owe honor to honorable things and persons. The Church prays for persons: the President, civil authorities, the armed forces. We are commanded to pray and to obey the laws as we are able in good conscience. Nothing more. St. Paul goes so far as to say that our “citizenship [politeia] is in heaven.” The assumption of many is that so long as the citizenship of earth does not conflict with the citizenship of heaven, all is fine. I would suggest that the two are always in conflict for the simple reason that one is “from above” while the other is “from below,” in the sense captured in Christ’s “my kingdom is not of this world.”

Fr. Stephen Freeman, Overcome Evil By Doing Good

But maybe he shouldn’t say that:

People get unbelievably upset when you poke them in the axioms.

Jordan Peterson, Biblical Series I: Introduction to the Idea of God (Transcript)

[T]here is a widely-shared impression that the kind of regional or mid-major papers that were once so essential have not had anything like the same success in transitioning to subscription-dominant financial models. The internet was already disproportionately concentrating power into the hands of a few major newspapers before digital subscriptions deepened, and of course three or four of them already enjoyed national influence even before we entered the online era. Concentrating greater power and influence into a few publications is detrimental to my basic philosophy for media, which is that you want a diversity of voices not so much for diversity itself but so that many different viewpoints can, perhaps, triangulate on something like the truth. What you get now is that, despite the vast number of competing shops and options compared to the past, the NYT in some ways is perversely even more the Official Voice than it once was.

Which means that the Official Voice is a haughty bloodless affluent educated socially liberal voice. Many have suggested that its increasing reliance on subscription sales makes the NYT even more dependent on an explicitly liberal Democratic audience.

If newsgathering becomes too expensive for almost every publication, then the few papers that can continue to do it will control the narrative of truth …

Freddie deBoer, Can News Survive Being Unbundled? (paywall).

Wondering how to decide what to read? Here’s a simple but effective heuristic to cut down the choices significantly. Ask yourself one question: Does this writer make bank when we hate one another? And if the answer is yes, don’t read that writer.

Alan Jacobs, Snakes and Ladders

The same heuristic could be applied to whole news sources.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

Reflections on America

Having largely lost our religion(s), modernity has seen fit to create new ones. If we wonder what constitutes a modern religion (or efforts to create one) we need look no further than our public liturgies. Various months of the year are now designated as holy seasons set-aside to honor various oppressed groups or causes. It is an effort to liturgize the nation as the bringer and guardian of justice in the world, an effort that seeks to renew our sense of mission and to portray our nation as something that we believe in. It must be noted that as a nation, we have not been content to be one among many. We have found it necessary to “believe” in our country. It is a symptom of religious bankruptcy. As often as not, major sports events (Super Bowls) are pressed into duty as bearers of significance and meaning. The pious liturgies that surround them have become pathetic as they try ever-harder to say things that simply are not true or do not matter. This game is not important – it’s just a game.

Fr. Stephen Freeman, When America Got Sick

Rod Dreher spent a few days in Bucharest and gave a talk where they hoped to have maybe 100 people and to sell maybe 50 copies of the Romanian translation of Live Not By Lies. They had more like 500 (some traveled 12 hours by train), sold 400 books, and Rod spent a long time signing books and chatting with people:

As I was preparing my remarks, I reflected on something I have picked up on a lot in my nearly two months here in Central Europe. The peoples of this part of the world looked to the West for hope and direction when they suffered under Communist dictatorship. They still hold the West in high esteem. Yet they also experience a great deal of Western arrogance, mostly from western Europeans, but also Americans — liberal elites who treat them like primitive children who need to be taught how to be proper moderns. Perhaps the main source today of Western contempt has to do with the natural conservatism in this part of the world vis-à-vis LGBT rights. Billionaire George Soros, among others, has poured money into countries like Romania via his NGOs to try to undermine traditions on the family, and religious authority. I had heard on my first night in Romania, and in various conversations throughout the day, that political elites in Bucharest routinely mock social and religious conservatives, in particular over their views on family and sexuality.

Well, in my talk, I told the audience that they may hear from the West, and from their Western-oriented elites, that they should be ashamed of their faith, of their traditions, and of their moral beliefs. This is one of the big lies that they must reject with all their heart, soul, and mind, I said. You have looked up to America for so long, but look at us now: we are destroying ourselves, because we have forgotten God. With this woke ideology, we have nothing to offer you but destruction. You don’t need to learn anything from us; we Americans need to learn from you, and your saints.

I worried for a moment that I might be flattering the crowd, but I actually believe every word of this, one hundred percent. I felt the anger rising inside me — anger at American and EU elites, their NGO agents, and progressives within institutions and political life here, all doing their best to make these people ashamed of themselves, their history, and their traditions. I’m truly beginning to understand what Ryszard Legutko meant in his great book The Demon in Democracy, about how the Communist nomenklatura did an about-face after Communism’s fall, and easily re-invented themselves as Eurocrats. They already shared a common faith in materialist modernity, and a contempt for religion and tradition. The Western left is eager to condemn 19th century colonialism, but it hasn’t the faintest sense that what it’s doing now is a 21st century cultural version of the same. No, it considers what it’s up to today as liberation from ignorance and the chains of the past.

(‌What I Saw In Bucharest)

If I could sum up the message [Romanians in Bucharest] gave me, in comment after comments, it’s this:

“Thank you for telling us that we don’t have to be ashamed of our faith and our traditions to be decent democratic people. We hear all the time from Western Europeans and our own elites that there is something wrong with us, and that we have to throw away our inheritance to join the civilized world. You have reminded us who we are, and that we have nothing to be ashamed of.”

I’m not exaggerating here. When I was checking in at the airport for the flight back to Budapest yesterday, the young woman behind the counter saw my passport and said, “Oh, you’re the guy who had the conference this weekend.” We talked briefly about it, and I signed a copy of my book for her as a gift. She thanked me, and said, “They always try to make us feel ashamed.”

I can scarcely express how angry that makes me as an American, knowing that my country — its government, its NGOs, and its corporations — are behind all this. Over and over I heard that the political and cultural leaders of contemporary Romania, the ones seeking to curry favor with the West, look down on the Christians as backwards barbarians — “relic-kissers,” they call them.

Rod Dreher, The Wild Men of Romania

“Behind all this” and also behind sometimes-nefarious population-control efforts. It’s things like this that confirm my impression that we’re not a force for unmitigated good in the world. Perhaps it’s even a net negative, more evil than good — but there’s no objective measure of that, and my suspicions are probably a matter of temperament (I did come of age in the 60s, after all).

George Packer, The Four Americas is a very broad-brush look at America’s current divisions, worth reading, but not so good I expect to buy his book.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

Potpourri 6/6/21

Russell Moore and the Southern Baptists

I will not comply with another secret task force meant to silence me about issues I believe are issues of obedience to Christ. I will not sign another “unity” statement meant to “call off the dogs” of scrutiny so that the beatings may begin again in private. If the Southern Baptist Convention wants to be part of a house of prayer for all peoples, then that’s what I signed up for. If the Southern Baptist Convention wants to be one big retirement home for a furious royal family, then, that’s not what I signed up for.

…

When God called me to himself in Jesus, and when he called me to serve him in ministry, he called me to stand for the truth, to point the way to the kingdom, to die to self, and to carry the cross. He did not call me to provide cover for racial bigotry and child molestation.

Russell Moore, to the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Freedom Trustees, February 2020. And now they’ve lost him — forced him to resign or formed another secret task force or something. He not only left his position; he left the Southern Baptist Convention entirely.

The knives are out already, but it sounds as if the knives were out before he left the SBC, too.

David French is quite interested in all this:

Late last month, Religion News reported that the SBC has lost a stunning 435,632 members since its 2020 annual report. Some of those individuals have left for other churches. Some have left the faith entirely.

Why? It’s not hard to analyze. A tolerance for predation and corruption demonstrates no fear of God. A pervasive fear of the world (or “the left”) demonstrates no faith in God. Brazen abusers disregard God’s justice. Fearful believers behave as if the Maker of the heavens and earth needs corrupt politicians or corrupt pastors to preserve his people’s presence in this land.

I can’t put it better than Russell Moore. Writing in April, shortly before his departure from the SBC, Moore said young Evangelicals are “walking away from evangelicalism not because they do not believe what the church teaches, but because they believe the church itself does not believe what the church teaches.” In other words, young Americans are saying to church leaders, “Why should I believe when you so obviously do not?”

One last point. It’s hard to overemphasize how much the church’s defensiveness is at odds with the imperative of repentance. Standing in front of the world, when undeniable scandals rock so many of our most important institutions, and declaring, “We’re better than you think” is the opposite of a penitent spirit.

David French, Russell Moore’s Warnings Should Bring a Reckoning

I probably — no, almost certainly — still spend too much time wallowing in the news despite a very great and intentional reduction of news consumption. Clickbait is effective more often than I like to admit. I really should be more like Gary:

I am going to focus on what I hear directly from people I know. I know two women who recently gave birth to their first babies and are joyful and so are their men and that is real news. A grandson is starting college. A daughter is moving. A friend has finished a novel. A widowed friend, marrying again at 84, writes to say he is well and adds, “And it’s none of your business but the sex is great.” A cousin attended a graduation ceremony at a school for intellectually disabled children and one poor graduate stammered through a speech of which little could be understood and the crowd clapped all the harder for him.

Life Goes On. That’s the news …

I believe in a fraction of what I was taught, my faith wavers … But I do believe that when Jesus, surrounded by the sick and impoverished and oppressed, the blind and demon-possessed, said to his disciples, “Whatsoever you do for the least of these, you do for me and your Father in heaven,” he spoke the truth, and if you wish for some truth in your life, along with your interesting attitudes and opinions, this is the one to go for.

Garrison Keillor

With the benefit of hindsight, I see that much of Evangelicalism was (is?) about ginning up emotions, and affirming happiness as if saying it could make it true, and recruitment of others ("evangelism") as a kind of MLM buttress to one’s own faith. These days, I’ll take a humble faith like Garrison Keillor expresses here over any of that.

It’s not that my own faith is quite as weak as his — if he has a mustard seed, I’ve maybe got a corn kernel — but that all that emotional jag brought me no closer to God and distracted me from things that might.

It feels as if it could be a good time for Orthodox Churches to start advertising:

Sick of Evangelicalism but can’t shake Jesus? Come and see.

("Come and see" isn’t just for "exvangelicals," but I think, perhaps naïvely, that they have a relatively high proportion of "can’t shake Jesus" folks.)

TFPOTUS

1

In my reflections on Donald Trump when he was running for President in 2016, I made one significant error: I didn’t think he would nominate responsible judges and Justices. I thought he would hand out judicial appointments like candy to friends and toadies. But it turned out that the judiciary couldn’t capture his attention, so he farmed out the decisions to others who acted on sound conservative principles. (Given how many of the very judges he appointed ruled against his recent frivolous lawsuits, precisely because they were honest conservative jurists rather than toadies, I wonder if he’s belatedly reassessing his priorities.)

Alan Jacobs

I, too, did not trust Trump to fulfill any campaign promise, however explicit and solemn.

2

Just how far out there is Trump’s theory? Consider that, even if it were true that the 2020 election had been stolen — which it is absolutely not — his belief would still be absurd. It could be confirmed tomorrow that agents working for a combination of al-Qaeda, Venezuela, and George Soros had hacked into every single voting machine in the country and altered the totals by tens of millions, and it would remain the case there is no mechanism within the American legal order for a do-over of any sort. In such an eventuality, there would be indictments, an impeachment drive, and a constitutional crisis. But, however bad it got, Donald Trump would not be “reinstated” to the presidency. That is not how America works, how America has ever worked, or how America can ever work. American politicians do not lose their reelection races only to be reinstalled later on, as might the second-place horse in a race whose winner was disqualified. The idea is otherworldly and obscene.

There is nothing to be gained for conservatism by pretending otherwise. To acknowledge that Trump is living in a fantasy world does not wipe out his achievements or render anything else he has said incorrect. It does not endorse Joe Biden or hand the Republican Party over to Bill Kristol or knock down an inch of the wall on the border. It merely demands that Donald Trump be treated like any other person: subject to gravity, open to rebuttal, and liable to be laughed at when he becomes so unmoored from the real world that it is hard to know where to begin in attempting to explain him.

Charles C. W. Cooke, National Review

3

On August 13, 2015, I predicted in my blog that Donald Trump had a 98 percent chance of winning the presidency based on his persuasion skills. A week earlier, the most respected political forecaster in the United States—Nate Silver—had put Trump’s odds of winning the Republican nomination at 2 percent in his FiveThirtyEight.com blog.

Scott Adams, Win Bigly

"… based on his persuasion skills"?! Trump is to persuasion as a rapist is to seduction.

Undermined democracy

I … consider the GOP’s efforts to use various institutional tricks to win maximal power while failing to win popular majorities or even pluralities to be civically corrosive — and its Trump-inspired flirtation with outright defiance of the results of free and fair elections genuinely dangerous.

But in truth, I don’t simply, or even mainly, fear these developments because I see authoritarianism on the horizon (to paraphrase the headlines of countless opinion columns over the past few months). I fear them far more because such efforts are an expression of political desperation — the actions of a party that considers losing unacceptable. I also fear them because they will drive Democrats to their own acts of desperation, which will justify more Republican panic which will justify more Democratic alarm — with all of it, on both sides, motivated by the intensifying conviction that the only legitimate outcome is for one’s own party to rule uncontested.

Partisan disagreement over policy and even zero-sum cultural disputes are one thing. But liberal democracy — self-government, the system itself — only works if the rules for the alternation of political power are considered legitimate by everyone. What just a few years ago was a sharply polarized partisan environment is now rapidly becoming a battle over these common rules, with the two parties no longer able to reach or maintain consensus about what those rules should be, about what should be considered legitimate.

Damon Linker

If you don’t like the Religious Right …

America is a lonely place. When you hold to a conspiracy theory, you join a community. You’re suddenly part of something. You have new friends you can talk to on the internet to whom you’re joined at the brain. They see the world the way you do; it is a very intimate connection.

Church affiliation and practice have been falling for decades, but people always have a spiritual hole inside, and if God can’t fill it, Q will do.

Peggy Noonan, What Drives Conspiracism (no pay wall)

Never forget the memorable saying: "If you don’t like the Religious Right, just wait ’till you see the Irreligious Right."

Cruelty is here to stay

I promise you that every single day high school students are absolutely savage to each other. What’s more, human nature being what it is, I’m sure that they now do so explicitly utilizing the politicized and therapeutic language that proponents of social justice norms foolishly assume is an antidote to that bad behavior. Because interpersonal cruelty is a universal aspect of the human condition and any philosophy can be bent to its use. This condition can perhaps at times be ameliorated but it can never be eliminated and learning this reality is an important part of growing up. Cruelty is here to stay.

Freddie deBoer, At the Heart of It All

I left the GOP when Dubya delusionally declared it our national policy to eradicate tyranny from the world. One of many reasons why I haven’t become Democrat is that they’re just as delusional about hate, cruelty, bullying and such.

As others see us

We had great conversation about the political and cultural situation here, and in the world. I heard some of the same sadness about America’s self-destruction that I’ve been hearing in Budapest. One of my dining companions said, “Maybe I’m cynical, but I don’t really care if America destroys itself. I worry that it’s going to destroy us too.”

“Yes,” said the man across the table. “Everything that starts in America eventually comes here.”

Rod Dreher, reporting from Bucharest

Invisible Revolution

I always thought that if you lived through a revolution it would be obvious to everyone. As it turns out, that’s not true. Revolutions can be bloodless, incremental and subtle. And they don’t require a strongman. They just require a sufficient number of well-positioned true believers and cowards, like those sitting in the C-suite of nearly every major institution in American life.

That’s one of the lessons I have learned over the past few years as the institutions that have upheld the liberal order — our publishing houses, our universities, our schools, our non-profits, our tech companies — have embraced a Manichean ideology that divides people by identity and punishes anyone that doesn’t adhere to every aspect of that orthodoxy.

Bari Weiss, introducing a long guest essay on Manichean medicine by Katie Herzog.

We must do something. Scapegoating is something.

"What we have to do is make these attacks so costly and painful for the bad guys that they decide the rewards aren’t worth it,” [AEI’s Klon] Kitchen continued. “And specifically, we have to change the political calculus of government leaders like [Russian President Vladimir] Putin."

The Morning Dispatch

Whenever Mrs. Kissel breaks wind we beat the dog.

The Vicar in the movie 10‌.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

Potpourri 5/27/21

For what it’s worth, today is my 49th anniversary. I hope the 50th starts with something better than a trip to the Emergency Room for a nosebleed that wouldn’t quit (the third in the last 2-3 years after decades with nary a leak). I shall follow up with my Primary Care Doc.

Separated at Birth

Compare:

[P]eople … hate my media criticism. Hate hate hate it. You would not believe the number of people who write to me saying “I almost/might/did cancel my subscription because I don’t want to hear pointless media gossip anymore!” Do the other stuff, they always say, the good stuff, the probing, researched stuff. But this media stuff, it’s too personal. That’s always the claim: that when I write about media, I’m necessarily attacking individuals rather than structures. That it’s personal. Then I go back and read what I wrote and inevitably I see myself critiquing structures and find nothing particularly personal. There’s a real incommensurability here. People are free not to like whatever they want, but I think deciding that criticism designed to reflect on an industry rather than individuals is too personal forecloses on important conversations.

Freddie deBoer, ‌You (Still) Can’t Sit with Us

with:

Expressing concern about insufficiently careful diagnostic practices for TGNC youth is not an attack on this group. This is like saying that the sentence “I believe psychiatrists should establish confidence an antidepressant will help a depressed person before prescribing it to them” is an attack on depressed people. It’s just a plainly ludicrous position, and a dangerous one given the extent to which it pathologizes normal, important clinical work.

Jesse Singal

Do the people who try to turn legitimate concerns into offensive personal attacks actually believe it?

What’s not cancel culture

Perhaps no one’s juvenilia should disqualify her from a job—and the reason isn’t merely that most of us said idiotic things in adolescence—but because that’s as it should be. If we are ever going to test out an extreme idea or hurtful comment, adolescence is the time to do it—a period of identity formation when we require all the feedback we can get. We demand adults behave themselves precisely because we assume this was preceded by beta-testing, a period of adaptive idiocy, when they tore through adolescence’s maze, hungering for affection, altering behavior in response to every dead end, registering each shock of pain. It seems compassionate—perhaps even necessary—to place a black box around statements made in high school and college, particularly where a young person has later disavowed them.

But is there no public statement predating one’s employment so vile as to render someone an obviously bad hire? (The emphasis on public statement seems critical because all social life might end if we did not retain the freedom to explore half-baked or foolish ideas in private with intimates.) …

Abigail Shrier, in a post on what is not “cancel culture.”

Fauci lied, people died

Okay, the causation between Fauci’s lie (that masks don’t help is the one that most offends me) and people dying is pretty convoluted, and I’m not furious with Fauci or obsessed with him. But fourteen months ago, our Masters desperately wanted to move the Overton Window to disallow — nay, to excoriate and anathematize! — any questions about a nexus between the Wuhan emergence of a novel and deadly coronavirus and the Wuhan Institute of Virology (or a sister facility in Wuhan).

  • Washington Post: “repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked” (“debunked,” by the way, is becoming a journalistic weasel-word. It means that the hive has decided the narrative.)
  • New York Times: “Fringe Theory of Coronavirus Origins”
  • The former President of the United States (“TFPOTUS” or “45”) repeatedly praised China for its “efforts and transparency” in containing the virus, going out of his way to thank Chinese President Xi Jinping “on behalf of the American People.”

That’s definitely changing. F’rinstance …. I could write more, but my knowledge is what you can get by reading a variety of responsible new sources, neither (a) following conspiracy-oriented websites nor (b) living within an entirely monocultural information silo.

And, in full-disclosure mode, the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin and former New York Times science reporter Donald McNeil (chased out of the Times in an unrelated cancel-culture incident) were among those conspicuously giving deeply-reported and establishment-tinged cover for respecting the lab-leak theory of the pandemic. And of course, TFPOTUS went into full blame-shifting mode, with racial overtones, as soon as buddy-buddying with China became a political liability. (The last seemed to persuade nobody sensible.)

But do not forget that the questioners fourteen months ago were right, and our masters were either ignorant or lying for some ulterior motives (which might even have been honorable).

Speaking of which,

Some of the biggest cases of mistaken identity are among intellectuals who have trouble remembering that they are not God.

Thomas Sowell, quoted in On Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell, by Jason L. Riley.

And some of our Masters at the NYT still don’t want us to discuss the lab-leak theory because of its (supposedly) “racist roots.”

The Big Lie

The intellectual arrogance of clever people, intolerable though it often is, is nothing to the intellectual arrogance of ignorant people.

Anthony Powell (in his notebook). (Via Alan Jacobs.

I cannot help but think of Election 2020 and its aftermath when I read that.

The Late, Not-So-Great “God Bless the USA Bible” project

There are 66 books in the Bible.  Some streams of Christian faith include 14 others, known as the “apocrypha.”  But no version of orthodox faith has an American apocrypha.  Including the founding documents of America and the theology of American nationalism in the Bible is offensive.

Shane Claiborne, Doug Pagitt, Lisa Sharon Harper, Jemar Tisby and Soong-Chan Rah, welcoming news of the abandonment of a “God Bless the USA Bible” project at Zondervan, a division of Harper-Collins.

I, too, welcome the abandonment, though the proposal itself is a sort of apokálypsis (as if we needed any more) of the sorry state of American Christianity.

But let me correct the authors about something: the 14 books omitted from most Protestant Bibles are only called “apocrypha” by those Protestants. To me and other Orthodox Christians, they’re called “Bible.” And there is at least one additional book, Enoch, recognized as “Bible” by Ethiopian Orthodox.

Art is the one medium in which one cannot lie successfully lie

When we build, say, a business area in which all (or practically all) are engaged in earning their living, or a residential area in which everyone is deep in the demands of domesticity, or a shopping area dedicated to the exchange of cash and commodities – in short, where the pattern of human activity contains only one element, it is impossible for the architecture to achieve a convincing variety – convincing of the known facts of human variation. The designer may vary color, texture and form, until his drawing instruments buckle under the strain, proving once more that art is the one medium in which one cannot lie successfully lie.

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (quoting John Raskin)

What is the purpose of life?

[W]e Americans will hardly need to ponder a mystery that has troubled men for millennia: what is the purpose of life? For us, the answer will be clear, established and for all practical purposes indisputable: the purpose of life is to produce and consume automobiles.

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

A Christian Man in Embryo

Paul Kingsnorth’s recent (January) conversion to Orthodox Christianity, from a non-Christian prior adult life, has fascinated me partly because I was vaguely aware of the Dark Mountain Project and the “dark ecology” it represented and partly because, frankly, my personal experience of adult converts to Orthodox Christianity is almost entirely of people coming from Roman Catholicism or one of the innumerable Protestant denominations or “independent” churches (scare-quotes because independent churches seem invariably small-b baptists, whether they want to admit it or not).

I nevertheless don’t recall ever reading Kingsnorth’s blog post titled dark ecology until today.

Even if I had read it, it would merit re-reading, long though it be, and I personally read it as the musings of a man developing a sane and sober mind some years before discovering, to his surprise, probably the most sane and sober Christian tradition, which we now share.

Excerpts:

  • This is the progress trap. Each improvement in our knowledge or in our technology will create new problems which require new improvements. Each of these improvements tends to make society bigger, more complex, less human-scale, more destructive of non-human life and more likely to collapse under its own weight.
  • ‘Romanticising the past’ is a familiar accusation, made mostly by people who think it is more grown-up to romanticise the future.
  • Progress is a ratchet, every turn forcing us more tightly into the gears of a machine we were forced to create to solve the problems created by progress. It is far too late to think about dismantling this machine in a rational manner – and in any case who wants to? We can’t deny that it brings benefits to us, even as it chokes us and our world by degrees.
  • The neo-environmentalists have a great advantage over the old greens, with their threatening talk about limits to growth, behaviour change and other such against-the-grain stuff: they are telling this civilisation what it wants to hear. What it wants to hear is that the progress trap which our civilisation is caught in can be escaped from by inflating a green tech bubble on which we can sail merrily into the future, happy as gods and equally in control.

Another foreshadowing in the pre-Christian life of Paul Kingsnorth:

Finally, we put in a small plantation of birch. I love birch groves. Ours is only a few metres square, but I’ve made a fire pit in the middle of it, and maybe in ten years I’ll be able to sit around it and pretend I’m on the Russian steppe. I don’t know why I would want to pretend that, but I do.

This second article also is full of hubristic techno-narcissists, who get little sympathy from PK.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

Curated gems

The rest of the story

This has always been a staggering irony of the Snowden story: the primary attack on him by U.S. officials to impugn his motives and patriotism is that he lives in Russia and thus likely cooperated with Russian authorities (a claim for which no evidence has ever been presented), when the reality is that Snowden would have left Russia eight years ago after a 30-minute stay in its airport had U.S. officials not used a series of maneuvers that barred him from leaving.

Glenn Greenwald, ‌As Anger Toward Belarus Mounts, Recall the 2013 Forced Landing of Bolivia’s Plane to Find Snowden. Indeed, in 2013, the U.S. used another series of maneuvers to divert Bolivia’s presidential jet and force its landing in Austria, with the President aboard it, on the basis of false suspicions that Edward Snowden was on it.

  • “France has apologised to Bolivia after Paris admitted barring the Bolivian president’s plane from entering French air space because of rumors Edward Snowden was on board.”
  • Spain also ended up apologizing to Bolivia. Its then-Foreign Minister cryptically admitted: "They told us they were sure… that he was on board.” Though the Spanish official refused to specify who the "they” was — as if there were any doubts — he acknowledged that the assurances they got that Snowden was on board Morales’ plane was the only reason they took the actions they did to force the plane of the Bolivian leader to land.
  • Given that it was only the U.S. which was so desperate to get their hands on Snowden — they had already used Vice President Biden to lead a highly coercive effort to threaten countries with punishment if they gave him asylum — few doubted where this false intelligence originated and who was behind the unprecedented act of forcing a presidential plane to land. Indeed, all of this was so glaringly obvious that not even the U.S. government was willing to deny it.

So you might want to modulate the outrage at Belarus — or ramp up the skepticism about our own purity.

Parachute efficacy randomized control trial

Parachute use did not significantly reduce death or major injury (0% for parachute v 0% for control; P>0.9). This finding was consistent across multiple subgroups. Compared with individuals screened but not enrolled, participants included in the study were on aircraft at significantly lower altitude (mean of 0.6 m for participants v mean of 9146 m for non-participants; P<0.001) and lower velocity (mean of 0 km/h v mean of 800 km/h; P<0.001).

Conclusions Parachute use did not reduce death or major traumatic injury when jumping from aircraft in the first randomized evaluation of this intervention. However, the trial was only able to enroll participants on small stationary aircraft on the ground, suggesting cautious extrapolation to high altitude jumps.

Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma when jumping from aircraft: randomized controlled trial | The BMJ. For possible applications, see Slate Star Codex.

Is the Vice-President "Asian"?

If you work in a massage parlor, you likely come from, and are in, a very different economic situation from the one Kamala Harris has inhabited most of her life … What does Harris’s life have to do with theirs, when it comes to any of the stuff that matters? …

In theory, of course, the connection is that Harris is part-Asian, and the victims (well, the ones mentioned in the Politico story), were Asian. But I feel like I should be putting that term — ‘Asian’ — in scare quotes. These particular victims were mostly Korean. So on paper Harris, like the victims, has “Asian heritage.” But I ask you in good faith: What the hell does this mean? The distance from the part of India where Harris’ mother is from to Seoul is about 3,300 miles. These are entirely different civilizations. Even the most racially ignorant rube would be unlikely to mistake someone of Indian descent with someone of Korean descent. And of course even here the language is extremely slippery, because India, in particular, is quite ethnically and linguistically complicated, as one would expect of a gargantuan country of almost 1.4 billion people.

…

I’m just not sure there’s any way to conceive of a concept of ‘Asianness’ that 1) includes both Kamala Harris and the victims of the massage-parlor murders and 2) doesn’t horseshoe into something redolent of old-school racism or Orientalism.

Jesse Singal, On Kamala Harris’s Privileged Upbringing And Why It Matters

He’s right. I, too, have been bothered by the inclusion of Indians as "Asian." Not in common parlance, they’re not.

I’ll second what the self-loathing woman said

Keira Bell was a troubled fourteen-year-old living in England. Daughter of an unemployed, alcoholic mother, she was distressed by the physical changes brought on by puberty. Her mother and others suggested that perhaps she really wanted to be a boy. Keira adopted their idea. At age fifteen, she was referred by a government psychologist to the Gender Identity Development Service. By age sixteen, she was being given a drug regimen of puberty blockers. The National Health Service continued its ministrations with a double mastectomy at twenty. After that surgery, Bell came to some realizations: “I recognized that gender dysphoria was a symptom of my overall misery, not its cause.” Looking back, she says, “I had so many issues that it was comforting to think I really had only one that needed solving: I was a male in a female body. But it was the job of the professionals to consider all my co-morbidities, not just to affirm my naive hope that everything could be solved with hormones and surgery.” Bell sums up: “I was an unhappy girl who needed help. Instead, I was treated like an experiment.”

Some years ago, I asked Paul McHugh, former chief of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, what could stop the medical profession’s adoption of the monstrously destructive transgender ideology. He replied, “When these kids grow up and realize what has been done to them, the lawsuits will be ruinous.” Bell did exactly that. In 2020, a panel of High Court judges issued a unanimous verdict to the effect that Bell’s treatment amounted to an unscientific experiment with life-altering consequences. The Court severely restricted the use of puberty blockers and hormone treatments for children under sixteen. The clinic is appealing the ruling.

It is my hope that people like Keira Bell find the right malpractice lawyers and win billions of dollars in damages. For those severely harmed by the transgender mania, this would be a good start toward something like justice.

R.R. Reno (emphasis added).

Everyone other than "desisters" are labeled "transphobic" for hesistancy about the trans mania, but perhaps desisters can escape with nothing worse than "self-loathing."

Diary this one for a month from now

France, Debray notes, has obligingly assimilated such anglicisms as gender studies, Gay Pride, revenge porn, and #MeToo, along with the collective self-loathing they are meant to carry with them. Since Debray has always been attentive to the role of privilege and guilt in his own early revolutionary enthusiasms, this is a subject that interests him greatly. “The stigma of being a bourgeois oppressor was not irremediable,” he recalls. “You could join the Communist party, a trade union, or a guerrilla commando in Mozambique. But white privilege? Where do you go to get over that? The dermatologist?”

Christopher Caldwell, ‌Régis Debray, Radical Conservative

As I read this fascinating profile (probably paywalled for another month or so), I kept thinking "ironic distancing" of Debray from his revolutionary past, and Caldwell himself eventually so characterized it.

If Debray carries a lesson for his twentieth-century readers, perhaps it is that the French radical tradition really is a tradition, as dedicated to rules, rituals, and reverence as any other.

The sure-fire short-cut to Heaven

My favorite part of Matins may be what I call martyr wordplay. Example:

On this day the holy Martyr Seleucus, having been sawn asunder, was perfected in martyrdom.
Verse: Without a groan, Seleucus bears the sawing
And so saw the saw as a short cut to Heaven.

I’m not kidding. Many of the Martys, while not seeking out martyrdom, welcomed it when it sought them out. I’m just following their lead — in enjoying the wordplay.

Like Mother, Like Daughter

England truly, and enduringly, is "the Mother Country." It’s like — wow! — a parallel universe!

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

Essentially unrelated

My dear Socrates … you know why they are putting you to death? It is because you make people feel stupid for blindly following habits, instincts, and traditions. You may be occasionally right. But you may confuse them about things they’ve been doing just fine without getting in trouble. You are destroying people’s illusions about themselves. You are taking the joy of ignorance out of the things we don’t understand. And you have no answer; you have no answer to offer them.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile

Most poets in the West believe that some sort of democracy is preferable to any sort of totalitarian state and accept certain political obligations, to pay taxes, to vote for the best man or programme, to serve as jurymen, to write letters of protest against this or that act of injustice or vandalism, but I cannot think of a single poet of consequence whose work does not, either directly or by implication, condemn modern civilisation as an irremediable mistake, a bad world which we have to endure because it is there and no one knows how it could be made into a better one, but in which we can only retain our humanity in the degree to which we resist its pressures.

W.H. Auden in Encounter (April 1954), via Alan Jacobs

The term civil religion was introduced by Rousseau in the eighteenth century. In the last chapter of The Social Contract, Rousseau proposes an explicit civil religion as a cure for the divisive influence of Christianity, which had divided people’s loyalties between church and state. Rousseau does not wish to erase Christianity entirely, but to reduce it to a “religion of man” that “has to do with the purely inward worship of Almighty God and the eternal obligations of morality, and nothing more.”

William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence

Oh. Only "inward" worship and yada, yada, yada. Nothing to see here. Move along now.

On so many topics, the legacy press has forcibly limited the scope of legitimate discussion. The downstream effect of this is is as obvious as it is alarming: It denigrates trust in institutions that are meant to be in the business of pursuing the truth. And it drives curious people to dark corners of the Web, where conversations about the origins of the virus mix easily with those about the Rothschilds.

Bari Weiss, ‌Did Covid Come From the Lab? Mike Pompeo says Yes.

Dr. Russell Moore is leaving the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. A lot of Southern Baptists considered him a liberal for deny 45’s suitability for the office of POTUS and for answers like this one, which forever endeared him to me.

Russell Moore isn’t the only Evangelical who warned against 45:

The day after his inauguration, I wrote, “A man with illiberal tendencies, a volatile personality and no internal checks is now president. This isn’t going to end well.” And it didn’t.

Peter Wehner, arguing that we’re not out of the violent woods yet.

I often think that the famous Orthodox answer to certain questions, “It’s a mystery,” … is not a statement that means, “I do not know,” but, rather, “I know, but there are no words for it.”

Fr. Stephen Freeman, ‌The Verbal Icon of Christ

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

Actual ruminations

I’m aware of my tendency to blog like a mere aggregator or curator, but today, for whatever reason, I slowed down and thought.

Living consciously within limits

On the 15th of each month, a reminder pops up to read my maxims (they actually come from two American Orthodox Priests, one living, one reposed). Sometimes I don’t get around to it until, say, the 17th.

As I read them today, it occurred to me that they give a decent idea of how an Orthodox mindset should cash out in “practical” life (if only we weren’t always missing the mark).

I do try to live by them (that’s why I review them monthly). Even falling short, it’s a much saner way to live than not trying at all.

On a closely-related note, I read an article just now (as I write) that I thought good enough to save and index: Dedication: In Praise of the Long-Haulers. It uses the term "stickers," in contrast to "boomers," a contrast I’d seen before.

But this time, in conjunction with indexing, I decided to make "sticker" a tag in my system and to look for like articles. My system was crawling with them. For instance:

Granted, my system (a kind of database) is kind of young, after a computer crash garbled its predecessor. So I may have just been on a "making-a-virtue-of-Covidtide-necessity" binge of rootedness ruminations. But I think these really are the kinds of people I most admire, and that I’m gradually become more stickerlike myself.

Maybe this just means I’m getting too old to fight or rally in the streets.

Abortion back on the docket

The [U.S. Supreme] court said Monday it would review next term whether all state laws that ban pre-viability abortions are unconstitutional. The court’s 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade declared that a woman has a constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy in the first six months of her pregnancy when the fetus is incapable of surviving outside the womb.

The test case is from Mississippi, which bans most abortions after 15 weeks, significantly before fetal viability. A panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, one of the most conservative in the country, blocked enforcement of the law, finding it in conflict with Roe v. Wade and subsequent abortion decisions.

NPR

The news, you may have noticed, is often over-hyped. This story really isn’t, whatever the ultimate outcome, because SCOTUS took the case even though there is no "Circuit split."

There is no Circuit split (inconsistent results from different U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeal) because under existing precedent, laws like Mississippi’s are clearly unconstitutional as unduly burdensome on the (court-created) right to abortion. The Supreme Court seldom takes discretionary review of issues on which all the Circuit Courts are agreed, and when it does, it’s thought to be likely that the court itself is doubting its precedents (or universal Circuit Court interpretation of those precedents).

So this case, more than any other since Planned Parenthood v. Casey thirty years ago, really could be the Big One. And if you think that a major change in the Supreme Court’s view on abortion would not be a bit deal, you haven’t thought it through or you have a crazy-high threshold for "big deal."

For more detail, including the already-diminished relevance of Roe v. Wade, see The Morning Dispatch for Tuesday or listen to Monday’s Advisory Opinions podcast.

While we’re on the topic, this item:

During a congressional hearing last week, … Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, repeatedly denied the existence of a federal ban on barbaric partial-birth abortions that has been law for 18 years …

… In his confirmation hearings, Becerra dodged questions about his stance on partial-birth abortion, deflecting with repeated claims that he would “follow the law” as head of HHS. Now Becerra outright denies the existence of a statute that has been around for nearly two decades.

… Becerra can hardly plead ignorance on this topic. As a freshman congressman, he voted against the ban …

National Reviews (incendiary partisanship elided)

So what’s with Becerra’s denial? Is he just hair-splitting because he doesn’t like the "partial-birth abortion" label? The author anticipated that:

As for Becerra’s parroting of the abortion lobby talking point that partial-birth abortion “is not a medical term,” neither is a heart attack, but almost everyone understands what one is.

An entertaining bootleggers-and-Baptists moment

Mr. Sanders has become the chief obstacle to his party leaders’ hopes of restoring the full federal tax deduction for state and local taxes, known as SALT, capped at $10,000 by the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco calls the loss of that deduction “devastating.” Likewise New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, who vowed that “one of the first things” he would do as majority leader would be to see that the SALT cap is “dead, gone and buried.”

But not Bernie. Asked directly on “Axios on HBO” last week whether he supports this effort, Mr. Sanders proudly raised his progressive colors: “You can’t be on the side of the wealthy and powerful if you are going to really fight for working families.”

It’s making for an entertaining bootleggers-and-Baptists moment, with two opposing camps—low-tax Republicans and the leader of the Democratic Party’s progressive wing—finding themselves in the same foxhole. Each wants to keep the SALT cap, but for very different reasons.

WSJ

I had forgotten the delightful colloquialism "bootleggers-and-Baptists" moment.

Congresslechers and Cicadas

Joel Greenberg, a former county tax collector with strong ties to Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, pleaded guilty Monday to federal crimes including sex trafficking a minor. The New York Times reported last month that Gaetz himself is under federal investigation for possible sex trafficking crimes.

The Morning Dispatch. Joel Greenburg "pleaded guilty" and agreed to cooperate. If Matt Gaetz is guilty and not too sociopathic to know it, he should be getting very, very uncomfortable.

But if his goal is getting laid by as many undiscriminating women as possible, he’s had a relatively good run — as has Garrison Keillor:

[C]ompared to the male cicada who, after seventeen years underground, has one sexual experience, dies, and never gets to see his progeny, my life is a fairy tale.

The cicadas are out for survival of their species — survival is victory. Father David touched on this in his homily on Sunday and quoted the verse in 2nd Corinthians: We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. “Struck down but not destroyed” describes cicada existence pretty well. As for being “persecuted,” we Episcopalians have it pretty easy. Flocks of cicadas are carried by the wind over Manhattan and a few land in Central Park and some in flower pots on terraces and our persecution, believe me, is minimal.

Then I went forward for Communion and saw slight movement on Father David’s vestment sleeve as he held out the wafer to me and said, “The body of our Lord,” and I saw an insect on his extended thumb, perhaps a dying male, and he said, “Hang on,” which he’s never said before during Communion and I flicked the cicada away. “Thank you,” he said. “And also to you,” I said.

At my age, I no longer worry about Noah and the Ark and all those folks knocking on the door begging to be let in. I haven’t read Job in years. The city is noisy, the numerosity is staggering, crazy people yell at you, I don’t belong here but then neither do most of the others. And there have been times on the uptown C train, packed into a car with people on all sides standing within inches of each other and still not touching, avoiding eye contact, when I’ve thought, “We are all one in God and He loves us dearly,” and known it is true. It’s hard to explain this to Midwesterners. You have to be there.

Garrison Keillor, The impending crisis of exploding cicada data

And one clip without comment

Top Republicans on the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors blasted fellow Republicans pushing additional audits of the 2020 election results as conspiracy theorists and grifters. “We ran a bipartisan, fair election. That’s every piece of evidence that I’ve ever seen put in front of us,” said Clint Hickman, a Republican supervisor. “We are operating on facts and evidence presented to this board.” The county’s top election official, Stephen Richer, also a Republican, called new claims of irregularities from former President Donald Trump “unhinged.”

The Morning Dispatch

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