Category: Faith & Ideology

All Souls, 2026

This is not a day when the Orthodox Church remembers all saints, but I thought a reminder that Halloween is the eve of All Saints Day in the Latin Christian world would be timely.

What is Church for?

In the vast, overwhelming majority of places around the Western world that refer to themselves as a “Christian church,” the men and women who lead these assemblies frame themselves primarily as weekly teachers.

The pastor is expected to spend the week:

Studying Scripture.
Communicating various theological concepts.
Providing practical applications in their sermon for their congregants to take to heart.
Addressing various contemporary cultural and political issues of the day.
Delivering a stirring message that will leave congregants feeling like they “got something from the message.”

…

An Orthodox priest’s primary job is not to deliver a homily every week that ministers theology, inspiration, and a type of motivational message to his congregation that will stir the congregants to come back again week after week.

The two different traditions, Orthodox Christianity and modern Evangelical Protestantism, exist side by side with two entirely different assumptions:

The Sunday Divine Liturgy is not a lecture.
The priest is a spiritual father, not a professor.
Discipleship is experiential, not something I simply receive by way of a message.

…

If there is anything that I see differently than I did when I was a young man, it is this: being a Christian is primarily not about the theological information I learn; it is about learning to confess my sins before God and clothe myself in humility.

When I was a young man, I viewed my relationship with Jesus Christ primarily as one in which I amassed knowledge about God, the Bible, theology, etc.

However, the longer I am in the Orthodox Church, the more I begin to realize that a relationship with God begins and ends with humility.

Kenneth B., The 14-Hour Sermon: Have We Forgotten What Church is For? He wrote it, but I’ve experienced the same thing.

How are we to live in an AI Age?

In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”

In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors—anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.

This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.

C.S. Lewis via Martin Shaw

Wild and wasted virtues

The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.

G.K. Chesterton via Fr. Stephen Freeman, Hope: The Unashamed Virtue

Enabling lies, activating lies

The problem is that all too many Christians are in the grips of two sets of lies. We’ll call them the enabling lies and the activating lies. And unless you deal with the enabling lies, the activating lies will constantly pollute the body politic and continue to spawn violent unrest.

What’s the difference between the two kinds of lies? The enabling lie is the lie that makes you fertile ground for the activating lie that actually motivates a person to charge a thin blue line at the Capitol or take a rifle to a pizza parlor.

Here’s an enabling lie: America will end if Trump loses. That was the essence of the Flight 93 essay in 2016. That was the core of Eric Metaxas’s argument in our debates this spring and fall.

Here’s another enabling lie: The fate of the church is at stake if Joe Biden wins.

And here’s yet another: The left hates you (this sentence sometimes concludes with the phrase “and wants you dead.”)

I could go on, but the enabling lies that have rocketed through the church for years share important characteristics. They not only dramatically exaggerate the stakes of our political and legal disputes, they dramatically exaggerate the perfidy of your opponents. Moreover, when the stakes are deemed to be that high, the moral limitations on your response start to fall away.

David French

This may look political, but that’s not my intent. Believing those enabling lies corrodes your soul. Refusing to dwell on them is a matter of spiritual health.

Nice Summary

Their job is to be silent in a world that doesn’t stop talking.

Catherine Bauer, Director of Development and Marketing for the Carmelite Sisters of Fairfield, an Order that is building a stone monastery in Pennsylvania with a vision of it lasting a thousand years.

Not four bare walls and a lectern

… I had this kind of Protestant idea that one should beware of beauty ….

Dr. David Bradshaw in his account of why he became Orthodox

Beautiful church buildings respect the mysteries that occur within, chiefly the transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. If we have a high view of the Eucharist, then just as we will want to use a beautiful chalice to show respect to Christ’s sacrifice, we will also want to have a beautiful temple in which these sacred mysteries occur. By contrast, a low view of the Eucharist often finds expression in church buildings that proclaim a type of architectural Docetism: God is everywhere generally but nowhere in particular.

Robin Phillips, Rediscovering the Goodness of Creation: A Manual for Recovering Gnostics

Scholasticism

The more I studied, the more I saw the Scholastic tradition as an effort to cling to the god of the philosophers while somehow saying of God that which Christians know they must.

Nathan Jacobs, My Wild Ride to Orthodoxy (around the 21 minute mark)

I have just discovered Nathan Jacobs and I’m pretty enthusiastic about it.

The Crusades

The Crusades, for instance, could not have taken place in a world in which the principles of the Christian religion were fully understood: from the Christian point of view, the ‘events’ of Christ’s life are repeated wherever and whenever members of the Church participate in the Mysteries, and the notion that it was important to ‘liberate’ one particular place where they had occurred in one particular time could only have developed to the extent it did as a consequence of extraneous, or what one might call superstitious, influences.

Philip Sherrard, The Greek East and the Latin West

The Christian East did not participate in the Crusades, and in fact suffered particularly in 1205 A.D. from rampaging Crusaders. Some historians of Christianity mark that as the point beyond which the Great Schism of 1054, when the Pope severed the West from the rest of the Church, became permanent.

Really?!

Even though Pope Leo XIV is recovering well from lung cancer surgery and is going ahead with a big trip to Latin America next week, the diagnosis is “a bit of a game-changer” for the Vatican and Leo’s still-young papacy, a top Vatican official said Tuesday.

Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher, the Holy See’s foreign minister, said there had been a temptation to think that Leo was a “Superman, a Superpope” after he was elected in 2025 and “hit the ground running” following the drawn-out illness and death of Pope Francis.

“The fact that he has fallen ill with, in many ways, one of the most common illnesses of our age means that he is a poor mortal like the rest of us. And I think that that is going to change how we see him and possibly how he sees himself as well,” Gallagher told reporters at the Italian foreign press association.

Top Vatican official says pope’s cancer diagnosis a ‘game-changer’ for the papacy (emphasis added).

Is Abp. Gallagher a Protestant mole or something? Why would he think that Catholics, and the Pope himself, had such idiotic ideas?

My antidote to beating dead horses

Having left the Protestant religious world finally and officially 29 years ago this month, I nevertheless remain interested in its goings-on — sometimes horrified, sometimes filled with schadenfreude, occasionally pleasantly surprised — because America is deeply Protestant and I cannot entirely escape that fact short of getting me to an Orthodox monastery and forever eschewing news and political involvement.

But I’ve become increasingly aware that, in David Foster Wallace terms, because Protestantism is not the water I deliberately swim in, there not only are things about it that I’m better equipped to see than those in it but also important currents I’m oblivious to.

My version of Protestantism has scarcely been updated since 1997 and a lot of my version is shaped by my experiences in the 1960s and early 1970s, when I was caught in a backwater of Wheaton-style evangelicalism — a strongly dispensationalist milieu adjacent to a broader mainstream. So I’m still beating a dispensational premillennialist horse, though I see glimpses that it’s virtually dead.

That evangelical fads of my youth should be gone by my dotage, replaced by other fads, is a proof, I think, that Protestantism in general and Evangelicalism in particular are built on shifting sands, not solid rock, despite the gospel song to the contrary (which probably nobody under 50 even knows these days).

But mocking or gently critiquing the fads of my youth doesn’t do much good for people living today. So I’m updating my understanding of Protestantism through reading The Protestant Mind, a blog-like project of First Things with a grant from the John Templeton Foundation.

In this epoch when “Evangelical” is almost synonymous with “MAGA” in the popular press, The Protestant Mind’s principal author, Dale Coulter, helpfully provides a taxonomy of the Christian Right in America 2026 (“The Two Evangelical Rights”). The major rubrics are New Protestant Right” and “new evangelical populism.”

It helped me clarify a lot. I was tempted to speculate about which one I’d likely be in were I still Protestant, but that’s just a counterfactual too far.

The early Church had no Scripture of its own, and the Jews had no defined canon of Scripture; therefore, sola scriptura as the foundation for what Christians believed was absolutely impossible.

Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

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.

Sunday, October 25

Who’s at the center of everything?

[E]verything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

Please don’t worry that I’m getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being “well-adjusted”, which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

David Foster Wallace in his 2005 Kenyon College graduation speech, This Is Water

There is a way to undermine your deep belief that you are the absolute centre of the universe:

Wow! That was soooo not about me!

One woman’s reaction to her first experience of the Orthodox Divine Liturgy as reported by her host — Frederica Matthewes-Green, I believe.

The Liturgy, in a way I never remotely experienced in any Protestant worship service, puts God at the center of things.

I heard the “testimony” of a man about how he came to Orthodoxy from deep within Evangelicalism. Hearing that several of his children were attending Orthodox Churches, he read up on Orthodoxy, his hostility growing most of the time. Finally, he and his wife agreed to go to a Liturgy. He left Liturgy with his hostility fully intact, and arguing with his kids about it afterward, he turned to his wife for reinforcement: “What did you think about that service?” Hesitantly, she told the truth: “I feel like I just worshipped God for the first time in my life.”

Our self-centeredness goes all the way back, I think, to the Fall of Adam and Eve and it’s not quickly or easily shed. (I have more thoughts about that, but they’re not ready for prime time).

Liturgy as Combat

[U]sually when people first come to an Orthodox Church, they aren’t really able to articulate all of the emotions and ideas that are coursing through their minds; usually, they simply think something along the lines of, “I don’t understand what is going on here, but it is clearly different from anything I’ve ever experienced before.”⁠⁠

You see, ⁠⁠Orthodox worship at its heart, which is nothing less than the Biblical worship that stems from the religion of the Apostles, is designed to combat the very thing we have been doing our whole lives: worshipping our passions.⁠⁠

Orthodox worship, the Divine Liturgy, the Akathist services, the Paraklesis, and more, are intentional in every tone, phrase, and prose; where so much else in our life is designed to gratify our flesh and encourages us to worship our passions, ⁠⁠Orthodox Christianity provides a template for worshipping God alongside the Saints who are worshipping Him in heaven, and when this prescription is followed, we finally begin experiencing a release from the stranglehold our passions have on us.

Kenneth B⁠⁠

Speechless

I’ll never forget standing with family and friends around the deathbed of my father, moments after he breathed his last. We had all just seen something profound: a man’s soul leaving his body after a long life. What to say? None of us were Shakespeare. I began reciting a Psalm I had committed to memory. The ancient words of King David allowed us mourners to rest, to be carried by the sacred lines, to focus on the man who had just passed from our midst, instead of rifling through our own minds in search of the appropriate things to say — because who among us ordinary people could possibly spontaneously produce words adequate to the enormity of that moment? It’s like that every Sunday, with the liturgy.

…

When we discard prescribed ritual, thinking that making up our own ritual is more authentic, we make ourselves prisoner to our own thoughts and passions.

Rod Dreher, Byung-Chul Han On The Importance Of Ritual (emphasis added).

Years before I discovered Orthodox Christianity, I was sometimes called upon, as when we had a guest pastor, to lead the congregation in what we called the Pastoral Prayer. I sure wasn’t going to try that spontaneously, or without something to channel my prayer, so I consulted higher-church Prayer Books (probably the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer).

Eventually, I stumbled onto Orthodoxy which immediately corresponded to some inchoate sense I’d carried for decades. I fairly quickly realized that at least part of that correspondence was that I needed to be formed by the Liturgy more than I needed to get my emotional batteries recharged or my frontal lobe stimulated.

Something’s in the air

To love is not easy, and mankind has chosen not to return God’s love. Man has loved the world, but as an end in itself and not as transparent to God. He has done it so consistently that it has become something that is “in the air.” It seems natural for man to experience the world as opaque, and not shot through with the presence of God. It seems natural not to live a life of thanksgiving for God’s gift of a world. It seems natural not to be eucharistic. The world is a fallen world because it has fallen away from the awareness that God is all in all.

Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy

The disappearance of symbols

The disappearance of symbols points towards the increasing atomization of society. At the same time, society is becoming increasingly narcissistic. The narcissistic process of internalization develops an aversion to form. Objective forms are avoided in favour of subjective states. Rituals evade narcissistic interiority. The ego-libido cannot attach itself to them. Those who devote themselves to rituals must ignore themselves. Rituals produce a distance from the self, a self-transcendence. They depsychologize and de-internalize those enacting them.

Byung-Chul Han On The Importance Of Ritual via Rod Dreher.

Another advantage — or maybe more another way of describing the effect — of liturgical worship over attempts at spontaneity, contemporaneity, seeker-friendliness or the like.

Mystery

In the East, on the other hand, a mystery is an area where the human mind cannot go, where the heart alone makes sense—not by knowing, but by being. The Greek word mysterion leads you into a sense of “not-knowing” or “not-understanding” and leaves you there. Having arrived, all you can do is gaze and wonder; there is nothing to solve.

Fr. Meletios Webber, Bread & Water, Wine & Oil: An Orthodox Christian Experience of God

A popular poet, recently deceased, had her own version of this wisdom:

Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say
“Look!” and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.

Mary Oliver, Mysteries, Yes

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.

The Gospel for People battered by bad religion

A tonsured Reader in the Orthodox Church (i.e., the lowest Order of Clergy), I have from time to time been called on to lead a Sunday morning service in the absence of a Priest or Deacon.

Yesterday, our Priest had to travel to our Diocesan Sobor, being held today and tomorrow. Since we are one of the parishes in the hinterlands, a full-day drive from the Cathedral, he needed to travel during our normal Sunday worship time, so I was called into service once more.

Father asked me to deliver a homily on the Gospel. A Reader cannot roll his own sermons, though. We settled on a homily given by St. Nicolai Velimirovich, a Serbian-born saint who reposed in Pennsylvania in 1956, a refugee from his homeland.

The sermon was ten pages on the parable of the sower and the seed, Luke 8:5-15, and it was dense as well as long, so I had to trim it down. I decided to skip over his description of the wayside, and the rocks, and to focus instead, in USA 2026, on the thorns, which Christ explained:

[T]he ones that fell among thorns are those who, when they have heard, go out and are choked with cares, riches, and pleasures of life, and bring no fruit to maturity.

I chanted some preliminary services (3rd hour and 6th hour) alone, starting in an empty Nave.

But since my last Reader Service, our parish has exploded, and by the time of the homily, roughly an hour later, we were at half-capacity, including first-time visitors for whom I was serving a service, and giving a homily, that constituted their very first experience of Orthodox Christianity. Others are such recent arrivals that I don’t know their background stories.

That reality so unsettled me that I couldn’t take any food afterward until maybe 4 pm. And for much of the afternoon, my thoughts kept turning to some vivid words of Father Stephen DeYoung, like me a former Calvinist.

The most current version of a Father Stephen motif was an observation about how many people rule out Christianity because of the extremely skewed versions surrounding us in North America today, and for roughly the last two centuries, truth be told (before that, it was less skewed).

I would have so loved to have had the liberty to remark on that, which may be as needful for hesitant unchurched toe-dippers, or for visitors who find something a bit “off” about their current Church, as the “thorny soil” parable is needful for practicing Orthodox Christians in our land today.

The locus classicus of Fr. Stephen’s motif was the closing remarks to a podcast roughly eighteen months ago:

I know that what I’m about to talk about is something I’ve talked about probably even fairly recently on the show, but I find myself in real life — meaning as a priest dealing with a group of parishioners, and trying to help them and guide them and just family members and everybody in general — I find myself having to say this over and over and over again, which tells me that probably if I say it over this microphone to people, there’s probably at least some folks out there who need to hear it again, even if I have talked about it recently.

The Christianity that those of us, at least in the United States — and I can only speak about that experience because I haven’t had any others — the Christianity we grew up around came from one of two categories largely. And people who want to defend those types of Christianity will call this a caricature. I don’t care anymore. But what I’m about to say, even if you think it’s a caricature of what they’re trying to teach, this is what a lot of the people within these traditions have actually received. Right? So it’s very easy to defend some tradition based on what’s in the books, and what we would mean to say, right? But I’m talking about what the people who I encounter, the people who talk to me about spiritual things. come to me and give confessions, what they’ve received from the Christianity they’ve grew up around, how that has shaped them, how they think because of it. And if people, representatives of those groups want to say that’s not what they meant to teach, cool, but maybe some introspection on why that’s not what people are receiving.

Anyway, what people have received comes in two categories. One is sort of the smilin’ Bob Shuler School of, “God loves you just the way you are and you don’t have to do anything. Just don’t worry about it. Just smile and be happy and listen to the hymns of your choice that you enjoy.” … That worked really well with boomers. That seemed to answer something they needed to hear. Maybe they’re a generation who grew up with very dissatisfied perfectionist parents, and so just hearing you’re fine just the way you are was what they needed, right? But that doesn’t work on subsequent generations, because subsequent generations are more realistic or nihilistic depending on your point of view, and know there’s something deeply wrong with themselves and with the world around them. So just telling them over again, “No, no, you’re fine, everything’s fine,” it doesn’t work. That’s why those kind of churches are all empty now.

The other school of thought is pretty much the exact opposite. It’s God doesn’t really love you. Right. In fact He’s pretty angry with you and He’s getting ready to send you to hell. Right? And the only way to avoid that is, depending on your tradition, right, is, for you to love him nonetheless, really sincerely — and there’s a rabbit hole to go down. How sincere am I ever really? — and do that plus live your life at a certain way and follow certain rules. Which will differ based on tradition, and which you will inevitably fail at.

That second one is most of the people who I interact with on spiritual matters, and it’s almost like they’ve been taught and they’ve internalized that. Their life in this world is this sort of really horrible reality show, almost like Squid Games, and like God is about weeding out contestants and narrowing it down to this faithful few and everybody else goes to hell, goes to eternal punishment except for this faithful few who, again, depending on your tradition, he may just pick. Or, you know, they’re the ones who really did it right. They’re the ones who really loved him sincerely, or they’re the ones who really lived their life the right way.

And any way you slice those things, most people again are realistic enough that when they look at their life, they don’t see a lot of evidence in their life and their actions that they’re one of the people God picked, or they don’t see a lot of evidence of their life that they’re really sincere about following God, or they don’t see a lot of evidence of their life that they’re really toeing the line and living the life they know they should be living, meaning most people are walking around — like religious people — walking around thinking they’re probably going to end up in hell. That God is probably mad at the most of the time, and that He’s looking for them to make some missteps so, boom!, they can get nailed.

Also most atheists are walking around doing the same thing they’re protesting constantly that there is no God because they can’t deal with that guilt and stuff that they’ve internalized. They can’t live like that. No one can live like that their route to trying to live like that and deal with the cognitive dissonance is just to deny that any of it’s true, over and over and over again publicly, loudly to everyone who will listen. Right.

Whereas the religious people are just in this kind of quiet desperation of how do I figure this out. Right.

So let me reiterate …:

God loves you. Jesus said so. St. John’s Gospel, the Father Himself loves you. He is not angry at you. He does not want to destroy you for your sins. There is no power of justice that commands him to do so. No one commands him to do anything. He loves you. He wants you to find salvation, but salvation is a thing you have to actually do. He wants you to do it. The Bible says so. God wills that all men be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth. But you have to do it. He empowers you to do it. He forgives you when you mess up trying to do it. He heals you when you damage yourself trying to do it and failing. He is entirely on your side. The God who created the universe is entirely on your side and the saints are on your side and the church is on your side. Everyone is on your side. Christ is advocating for you. Everything is set up for us.

When Saint Paul says to us, continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling. You don’t stop them like Kierkegaard did. Read the next verse because it is God who is working in you to will and to do according to his pleasure. We continue on and we work out our salvation because we know that God is on our side and empowering us to do it and loving us and loving other people through us. We need to pray about that. We need to pray it. We need to repeat it. We need to kind of imitate what the atheists are doing. We need to say it out loud. We need to say it to each other. We need to say it to everyone who will listen right? That God loves you and wants you to find salvation, wants you to be healed, wants you to be set free from sin. He wants all these things for you. It doesn’t mean you have nothing to do. That doesn’t mean you’re fine just the way you are. You know you’re not fine just the way you are, right? But it means that He is there to help you to grow to be transformed into the person who you need to be and want to be. The person he created you to be for eternity. That’s the actual message of Christianity. Don’t accept any substitutes for that, ever at all for any reason.

That’s what I have to say.

And that’s what I wish I could have communicated to our first-timers yesterday — what I hope was communicated though those words were unspoken.

But at the same time, I’m glad I couldn’t. As someone said to her Orthodox friend decades ago after her first Liturgy, “Wow! That was so not about me!” That “not about me” focus itself communicates something important.

Sunday October 18

Genus and Species

The central and absolutely essential premise of Ross Douthat’s new book Believe, the point from which the whole argument begins, is this: There is a genus of human belief and practice called “religion,” of which Christianity is one of the species. My problem with regard to Ross’s book is that I have come quite seriously to doubt this premise. My larger problem is that I don’t know quite how to do without this premise, since it is so deeply embedded in almost all discourse on … well, I guess I have to say on religion.

…

Emile Durkheim’s definition is a useful one: “A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and surrounded by prohibitions — beliefs and practices that unite its adherents in single moral community called a church”

…

I am not at all convinced that a move from, say, atheism to Wicca is necessarily “a step in the right direction” — i.e., once you’ve entered the genus-town of “religion,” you’re closer to the species-house of Christianity than you were before. Indeed, I wonder whether many people might be less interested in Christianity as a result of such a move, since they might plausibly think that as long as they’re operating within the genus, does it really matter what species they prefer? (The “We all get to God in our own way” line has had a very long run and doesn’t show any signs of slowing down.)

Alan Jacobs, Douthat on Belief, quoting himself.

Thoughts about Greek Festival

Yesterday was the first day of our Greek Festival, and thus begins four straight days of talking with thousands upon thousands of people.

In the past, when people came for a tour of the inside of our Orthodox church, I could be sure that nearly 100% of the questions were related to the painting process regarding our church iconography:

“What kind of paint did they use to make all these pictures?” or “How long did it take the iconographer to finish this church?”

Yet, with this recent surge in Orthodoxy, our Greek Festival now brings in droves of people who are inquiring into the Orthodox Church, and the questions I got yesterday were a kaleidoscope of theological and historical inquiries:

“Does the Orthodox Church believe in penal substitutionary atonement?”

“Does the Orthodox Church believe in assurance of salvation?”

“Is the Orthodox Church Patriarchal?”

“Is the Orthodox Church anti-women?”

“Does the Orthodox Church believe in the Book of Jasher?”

One couple who came to my tour had been raised in a King James Version-only Baptist Church, and somewhere along their spiritual journey, they learned that Protestants had removed books from their Old Testament in the 1820s. He and his wife obtained a copy of the 1611 KJV, which predates the long-kept-quiet changing of the Protestant Bible.

Though the couple hadn’t yet read all of the books in their newly discovered Bible, they were very curious if the Orthodox Church was familiar with these books and what we believed about them.

Kenneth B, The Orthodox Church Is Growing in America. Two Holy Elders Predicted It Decades Ago.

If I may be permitted to quote a reasonably wise Evangelical apologist, that “kaleidoscope of theological and historical inquiries” requires a combination of “answering the question-behind-the-question” (e.g., “penal substitutionary atonement” presumes that the wages of sin is eternal torment) and asking for clarification of terms (e.g., what do you mean by “Patriarchal”?).

Ultimately, the inquirer needs a new frame, an altered paradigm, and I have no idea how to effectuate that with nothing more than words. It happened to me; I’ve never been able to induce it in anyone else.

That is why the all-purpose Orthodox answer is “Come and see.”

A Confessing Church today

Christians who vote for Republicans are called to be salt and light within the Republican Party. That means being a voice calling the Republican Party to obey the rule of law. Yours should be the loudest voice condemning Trump’s pardon for January 6 rioters and pushing against his challenge to the checks and balances that are supposed to constrain the executive . You should speak up in favor of the poor and powerless and against the culture of cruelty, spite, and vengefulness Trump cultivates. It corrodes our public square and demeans our shared citizenship even as it poses more specific dangers to those targeted by Trump’s weaponization of federal law enforcement. If you do not speak up, you are both credulous and culpable, complicit with the party’s sins—including those yet to come.

If you vote for Democrats, you are called to be salt and light within the Democratic Party. That means calling on the Democratic Party to heed “Nature and Nature’s God.” The secular left sometimes gives off an odor of being godless, rootless, power-hungry moral relativists. They deny transcendent truth one day; the next, they announce a new truth, and their online mob will bully and harass us for failing to jump on their latest cause de jour. Their lack of moral foundation is exactly why they turn into moral authoritarians, certain of their own newfound truths—about race, class, and gender—and impatient for their fellow citizens to catch up. Open, tolerant, classically liberal government cannot survive without foundations, and Thomas Jefferson was right to point to nature and nature’s God as the right ones when he penned the Declaration of Independence. Natural law is transcendent, but not sectarian; it is a shared foundation on which believers in any religion or none can stand together.

These are the sorts of lessons a Confessing Church today would preach from its pulpits and podcasts. American Christians need a robust theology of civic engagement that teaches the moral good of republican government, the rule of law, and constitutionalism. It would teach respect for pluralism, anti-utopianism, and the wisdom that comes from learning from the history of totalizing political religions and their fruit. It would teach critical detachment from parties coupled with selective and narrow cooperation with them.⁠⁠

Paul D. Miller: A Confessing Church for America’s Weimar Moment

Just in case you don’t understand that “Confessing Church” alludes to something in history, Wikipedia can help.

Truth vs. Practicality

American evangelicals never doubted that Christianity was the truth. They never doubted that Christian principles should illuminate every part of life. What they did do, however, in the years between the Revolution and the Civil War, was to make most questions of truth into questions of practicality. What message would be most effective? What do people most want to hear? What can we say that will both convert the people and draw them to our particular church? The heavy pressure for results meant that very little time or energy was available to think about God and nature, God and society, God and beauty, or God and the shape of the human mind.

Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

Christian Tradition and Slavery

  • The general course of the Christian church has been against slavery. This was undeniably true in the early history of the church. I know not that it has ever been alleged that any of the prominent defenders of the Christian faith among the “fathers” were advocates of slavery, or that any decree of synods or councils can be adduced in favour of the system.
  • Because abolitionists and antislavery theologians were forced to offer more complicated exegetical arguments, they were necessarily less persuasive. In other words, it appears that an untraditioned approach to theology was at least partially responsible for the failure of otherwise like-minded Christians to resolve the sectional crisis by any means other than war.

Paul J. Gutacker, The Old Faith in a New Nation

Fundamentalism is not ancient Christianity

… the same historical representatives of the Christian faith that Maher chose to ignore (or has never heard of) are the Church Fathers that evangelical/fundamentalists also ignore for their own ideological reasons. They ignore them (or even denounce them) because the very existence of the early representatives of a more enlightened thread of Christianity undermines the evangelical/fundamentalist claim that somehow only fundamentalism represents the original ancient Christian faith. It does not.

Frank Schaeffer, Patience With God. I don’t consider Frank Schaeffer a reliable source, but I agree with him fully here.

So Walker Percy wrote a dystopia

The parallels to today become even more acute when Percy turns to religion. Political divides in Love in the Ruins have penetrated the churches, mainline Protestants aligning with the left and evangelicals with the right. Meanwhile, orthodox Catholics are but a remnant, most believers having joined either the American Catholic Church––which only prays the Latin Mass and plays the national anthem during the elevation of the Eucharist––or a coalition of Germanic schismatics, who have done away with the vow of celibacy as a prerequisite for priesthood.

Collin Slowey, Walker Percy’s Prescient Dystopia

Insipid and Slightly Insane

At a street corner, I happened to look up and caught sight of an electric sign, on top of a two-storey building. It read: “Clown Cigarettes.” I turned and fled from the alien and lunatic street, and found my way into the nearby cathedral, and knelt, and prayed, and did the Stations of the Cross. Afraid of the spiritual pressure in that monastery? Was that what I had said the other day? How I longed to be back there now: everything here, in the world outside, was insipid and slightly insane. There was only one place I knew of where there was any true order.

Thomas Merton, The Seven Story Mountain

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.

Sunday of the Fathers of the Seventh Ecumenical Council

The mind of the Fathers

Western Christian theology is founded on the phronema of Augustine. The East did not acquire the mind of one Father, but the mind of the Fathers.

Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox: Understanding and Acquiring the Orthodox Christian Mind

There’s a lot more that could be said about this, but I’m not the guy to say it nor is this a good forum. That’s why I give you the link.

Redemptionist Theology

Christian horizons are limited by the drama played between God, who is infinitely offended by sin, and man, who is unable to satisfy the impossible demands of vindictive justice. The drama finds its resolution in the death of Christ, the Son of God who has become man in order to substitute Himself for us and pay our debt to divine justice. What becomes of the dispensation of the Holy Spirit here? His part is reduced to that of an auxiliary, an assistant in redemption, causing us to receive Christ’s expiated merit. . . . The price of our redemption having been paid in the death of Christ, the resurrection and the ascension are only a glorious happy end of his work, a kind of apotheosis without direct relationship to our human destiny. This redemptionist theology, placing all the emphasis on the passion, seems to take no interest in the triumph of Christ over death. The very work of the Christ-Redeemer, to which this theology is confined, seems to be truncated, impoverished, reduced to a change of the divine attitude toward fallen men, unrelated to the nature of humanity.

Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox: Understanding and Acquiring the Orthodox Christian Mind

No creed but the Bible

By the 1840s one analyst of American Protestantism concluded, after surveying fifty-three American sects, that the principle “No creed but the Bible” was the distinctive feature of American religion. John W. Nevin surmised that this emphasis grew out of a popular demand for “private judgment” and was “tacitly if not openly conditioned always by the assumption that every man is authorized and bound to get at this authority in a direct way for himself, through the medium simply of his own single mind.”48 Many felt the exhilarating hope that democracy had opened an immediate access to biblical truth for all persons of good will. Americans found it difficult to realize, however, that a commitment to private judgment could drive people apart, even as it raised beyond measure their hopes for unity.

Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity

John Wilson Nevin, Philip Schaff and Mercerburg Seminary are three names that bring a wistful smile to my face. American Protestantism would, I’m almost positive, be much healthier had it heeded these far-seeing voices.

Change and decay around me all I see

I Didn’t Leave Protestantism Because I Hated It. I Left Because It Kept Changing

Frankly, that’s not why I left Protestantism. My church was changing relatively slowly. But I agree with the author completely about the facts: Protestantism does keep changing, and the more thoughtful Protestants make a virtue of that necessity: “Isn’t it wonderful that everyone can find a church to suit them!”

No. It would be wonderful if we were all one. You can look that up.

Meaning

They were freed from worry about getting their souls into God’s heaven by the discovery that they had no souls and that God had no heaven. They were freed from the terror of devils and plagues by the knowledge that the thing that was making them scream and foam was not an imp but only their own inability to cope, and that the thing that was clawing out their entrails was not divine wrath but only cancer. Altogether, life became much more livable since it was clear that in fact nothing lay behind things. The age was called enlightened.

The myth sovereign in the old age was that everything means everything. The myth sovereign in the new is that nothing means anything.

Tom Howard, Chance or the Dance?

Ancient Presbyterian mistrust

What she disapproves is not that I am doing public penance. No, what bothers her is an ancient Presbyterian mistrust of things, things getting mixed up in religion. The black sweater and the ashes scandalize her. Her eyelid lowers—she almost winks. What have these things, articles, to do with doing right?

Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins

… and worst of all

This is so cringe.

  1. It misrepresents (I’m pretty sure) Catholic teaching on the relationship of works and righteousness.
  2. It cherry-picks and decontextualizes an Orthodox source who would disagree with its conclusions.
  3. Worst of all, it reminds me of something equally cringe I wrote, and Christianity Today published, when I was young and foolish.

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.

Barbarism proudly paraded

A Barbaric Spectacle, Courtesy Of Hegseth

War Secretary Pete Hegseth says they’re going to livestream the December 3 execution by firing squad of Nidal Malik Hasan, the Muslim terrorist who murdered 13 fellow soldiers at Fort Hood for Allah. This is wrong. I am at peace with Hasan getting what he deserves for his crimes, but it is barbaric to turn it into a spectacle. It is disgraceful. Hegseth keeps trying to be manly, but this comes off as merely macho.

You know Hasan is in a wheelchair, right? Is it really good for us to take pleasure in watching a man in a wheelchair, even a vile criminal like Hasan, shot to death? Really?

Remember the story from St. Augustine’s “Confessions” about his Christian friend Alypius? He had accepted an invitation to go to the gladiatorial games, but vowed to himself to shield his eyes when one man slaughtered another. Yet moved by the roar of the bloodthirsty crowd, Alypius uncovered his eyes and looked. He was possessed by a spirit of bloodlust after that, and took years to overcome it.

If justice, and maintaining law and order, requires the execution of Hasan, then let it be done dutifully, without passion. We should not grow fond of seeing men executed, even if they deserve it. In ages past — and not too long ago either — excited crowds would gather to watch men hanged, or in France, guillotined. Did this do their souls, or their moral senses, any good?

In the Orthodox Church, there is a tradition that requires soldiers returning from combat to go to confession, even if their war was just. The idea is that taking the life of another man, even if morally necessary, still stains one’s soul. It is a good tradition, a humane one. I see in that AP story I linked in the first paragraph that an academic who opposes the death penalty thinks that people seeing Hasan shot to death will have their consciences shocked into rejecting capital punishment. I doubt that very much. I would bet rather that it will increase their bloodlust.

Putting executions of prisoners on video and streaming them over the Internet is what Muslim terrorists do. We are not them. We must not become them.

Rod Dreher, who then turns to the grifting and whorishness of our Ambassador to Greece.

Maybe one day, under the accumulation of crap like Hegseth’s stunt and Kimberly Guilfoyle financial corruption, Rod will figure out that the Republicans are no less an existential threat than the Democrats:

I think it is a drastic mistake to think that the deadly influences of a leader come only through his policies and not also through his person.

This is true not only because flagrant boastfulness, vulgarity, immorality, and factiousness are self-incriminating, but also because they are nation-corrupting. They move out from centers of influence to infect whole cultures. The last five years bear vivid witness to this infection at almost every level of society.

This truth is not uniquely Christian: “A little leaven leavens the whole lump” (1 Corinthians 5:6). “Bad company ruins good morals” (1 Corinthians 15:33). Whether you embrace that company in your house or on social media, it corrupts. There are sins that “lead people into more and more ungodliness” as “their talk [spreads] like gangrene” (2 Timothy 2:16–17).

There is a character connection between rulers and subjects. When the Bible describes a king by saying, “He sinned and made Israel to sin” (1 Kings 14:16), it does not mean he twisted their arm. It means his influence shaped the people. That’s the calling of a leader. Take the lead in giving shape to the character of your people. So it happens. For good or for ill.

John Piper (expanding on a quote from my last post).

Marco Rubio … took a real swing at defining a new political philosophy for the American right. And it was, well, weird. On the plus side, it was great to hear a Western politician speak of the unique glories of our inheritance, and stare down the relativists and globalists. But to single out thymos — “the fire of passion, strength, courage, pride” — as the core Greek virtue, and therefore ours, is more than odd.

For the ancients, thymos always had to cede to reason to be exercised properly, and always, as for every virtue, in moderation. The consequences of unrestrained thymos could be disastrous, as Socrates taught, and Alcibiades, who rashly got Athens into a war it could not win, proved. So no, the West is not defined by ambition, nor by “the unapologetic pursuit of national power.” For most of the last two thousand years, after all, “national power” did not exist. Christendom did. The West is defined by reason allied with Christianity, which eventually gave us the liberal order. Rubio wants to replace that with unconstrained passion allied with the will to power. God help us.

But that just reveals how virulently anti-Christian the American right has now become. Fame and glory are the great goods, achieved by a constant, manly struggle to be the best: more Sparta than Athens, let alone Jesus. Rubio seemed to say that power is valuable for its own sake; and that “fighting for dominance” is the purpose of the state. You will not find one word in Rubio’s speech about the benefits of peace, or freedom, or Christian virtue. This is nihilist and it is pagan: an attempt to plunder, misread, and cherry-pick Greek thought to defend Trump’s sociopathy.

And so it’s fitting in this context, is it not, that the barbarians claiming to be conservatives who run this country are now planning to hold a live-streamed public execution of a paraplegic old man by firing squad — a practice the church itself regards as a grotesque betrayal of human dignity. Killing a disabled Muslim is, in fact, a great illustration of the core principle of the Trump era. Not the mere assertion of power: the convicted prisoner is utterly under state control and will face death anyway. But the brandishing of power for its own sake, the enforcement of not just punishment but humiliation, a public celebration of cruelty and revenge. With a tinge of religious bigotry thrown in.

Andrew Sullivan. Damon Linker, below, also comments on Rubio’s misbegotten speech.

Trump and Hegseth want you to watch [the execution of Nidal Hasan] because they think you’ll enjoy it. They want you to enjoy it. And more importantly, they want you to feel comfortable enjoying it.

I joked with colleagues this morning that my daily challenge with this newsletter is having to find newish ways to make the point that postliberalism is all about normalizing ruthlessness. Whenever the president and his fans bump up against some law or norm that’s keeping them from sating their tribal appetites, inevitably their impulse is to sweep it aside and indulge. It’s the ur-narrative of this entire era.

Trumpism is more an alternate morality than it is a political program, as regular readers have seen me say a good two dozen times. Has there ever been a clearer example than Hegseth wanting to stream an enemy’s death live on the internet?

Nick Catoggio. I suffer from excessive fear of mission out (a/k/a FOMO), but from this I will avert my eyes for sure.

Trusting media

There are respected pollster types who assess public trust in mainstream media. They have measured some unexpected friends, such as Democrat, trust of media trending downward, while Republican trust of media trends upward. Nick Catoggio speculates about the reasons:

The tricky part in trying to interpret data like this when you’re a news junkie is to avoid imputing your own freakishly high degree of media literacy to the general population.⁠⁠

…

⁠⁠Maybe populist right-wing media has grown so grotesque and self-parodying that it’s begun to inspire Strange New Respect for outlets like the New York Times in some conservatives.⁠⁠

…

[T]he hard truth is that ⁠⁠what used to be known as “conservative media” now consists almost exclusively of brain-dead Trumpist house organs on the one hand and unspeakably repellent postliberal goblins on the other. Your choice as a right-wing media consumer in 2026 is between Fox News propagandizing on behalf of the president and podcasters propagandizing on behalf of Hitler.⁠⁠

I find this plausible because I, a conservative, cannot bear most “conservative” media these days. Even the Free Press was on the chopping block because, in an apparent effort to be all things from center-left to fairly far-right, they’re publishing a lot of crap; but then the introduced Ross Douthat as a weekly columnist.

Bad precedent

I had a conversation with one of the fired generals not long ago, and this person pointed out that, in essence, they were fired for following orders. In other words, the Biden administration handed down some edicts and some orders regarding D.E.I. — diversity, equity, inclusion and other things — and as loyal soldiers, whether they agreed or not, they saluted and they carried out those orders. And Hegseth comes in and essentially says: Well, if you were carrying out the orders that were the priority of the previous administration, you’re woke, you’re weak, whatever, and you’re gone.

And one of the fears that was expressed to me by this former general was that, well, does that then set a precedent that if you are a general officer and you follow the orders of an administration, that the next administration will come in and purge you, replace you with general officers who have to then follow their orders, who will then only be purged by the next administration?

It strikes me that the Trump administration is setting a precedent here that if actually carried out by other presidents would be catastrophic for the integrity of the military. And it’s setting a precedent that, given enough time under the current administration, could be catastrophic for the idea that merit matters as much as political fidelity. But it was very chilling to me to hear the general essentially say, “I was fired for following a lawful order.”

David French

Civitas profunda

There is no substitute, it turns out, for actual leadership at the top. Even so, when the adults are gone, the next line of defense is bureaucratic heroism. A civil service is one reason entities as large as the Roman empire—or the British or American one—have had staying power. Watch the behavior of imperial functionaries in the fifth century, when much of the Roman world was falling apart, and you see the ability of bureaucratic procedure and administrative competence—food goes here, gold goes there—to hold bits of the rickety scaffolding together when no one seems to be in charge. I’m not aware of ancient references to a civitas profunda, but the “deep state” is neither a modern nor a malevolent invention.

Cullen Murphy, The Fall of Rome All Over Again?

Marco Rubio on thumos

You gotta hand it to Marco Rubio: Not only did he deliver a powerful speech in defense of Western civilization on Wednesday afternoon (which also just so happened to be the third anniversary of Hamas’ terrorist invasion of southern Israel on October 7, 2023). He also did it in Athens, Greece with a sunset-drenched Acropolis glowing behind him. As props go, that’s about as good as it gets …

…

[T]here is something else in the speech that’s perhaps even more worthy of criticism. Or rather, not something in the speech so much as something surrounding the speech—and that is the commander in chief Rubio serves. There is something faintly absurd, even insulting, about listening to a man praise excellence and the greatest achievements of Western civilization while representing an administration led by a president who exemplifies tackiness, cruelty, ignorance, corruption, and incompetence. My thumos—my love of my own country and culture—inspires me to respond to this man with disgust and contempt. I find him utterly loathsome and consider it indisputable that he has had an atrocious influence on American public life, pulling it continuously down to his own low level that always, somehow, manages to sink ever lower.

In this respect, Rubio’s speech is very much exemplary of our cultural moment in the sense that it feels like a virtual reality facsimile of the world we all live in—one that’s been tidied up and transformed by technological gimmicks into an airbrushed version of the real thing, a world in which (in Mark Lilla’s words) this country chose, for the second time in a decade, “a dim Caesar to sit at the pinnacle of institutional power.”

Who does Rubio think he’s fooling? Achilles, Pericles, Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch—his speech is filled with references to people, places, and events that were all touched by a greatness he wants us to reach for again. Sounds good! If Rubio himself were president, or any number of other Republicans prior to the past several years, then maybe this could be a serious conversation, a serious proposal for national, cultural, and civilizational renewal, with rhetoric and policies to match and reinforce it.

But under this president? Who starts a war without reasons and declares victory dozens of times while the fighting goes on—and who repeatedly issues threats to annihilate whole civilizations if he doesn’t get his way? Who stands before the United Nations and declares he took Venezuela’s oil because he could (because might makes right)? Who regularly calls the country’s other party the Dumbocrats? Who starts trade wars with allies and rivals on the basis of whims and personal pique? Who profits from his own policies by buying and selling investments before public announcements are made? Who seeks to rule by decree because he can’t be bothered to make use of a legislature his own party controls? Who deports immigrants to tinpot dictatorships where they have no ties of family or language?

I could go on for thousands of additional words listing Trump’s offenses against reason and virtue and good governance and basic human decency. But what would be the point? We all know the litany. We see it in the news every single degrading, obscene day. The United States during the second Trump administration is many things, but a champion or exemplification of excellence it most emphatically is not. It certainly has plenty of thumos, or at least well-acted public displays of thumos among members of the president’s paid and amateur cheerleading section in public office, the media, and online. But this is the kind of thumos that troubled Plato’s Socrates—the kind that’s deaf to reason, and that attaches itself to demagogues and false saviors cloaking their petty self-interested ambitions in lofty appeals to honor and glory.

I’m not convinced Rubio has identified a major malady that requires the country’s leading diplomat to propose a diagnosis and a cure. But I am convinced that if the illness is a real one, a representative of the second Trump administration may well be the least fit person on the planet to lead the charge to combat it.

Damon Linker

Shorts

  • ⁠⁠A postliberal political party will always campaign as the lesser of two evils because it is evil, and unapologetically so.⁠⁠ (Nick Catoggio)
  • ⁠⁠“Can you feel the thymos?” – Damon Linker on Hegseth announcing the public execution of Nidal Hasan.⁠⁠ (Via Andrew Sullivan)
  • “Rightists will scream ‘Colorblind meritocracy!’ right up until the point where Indian people start doing well, at which point every rightist turns into Ibram Kendi,” – Noah Smith. (Via Andrew Sullivan)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg

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.

Sunday, 10/4/26

An oddly busy last week leaves me a little short-handed today: just two items.

No room for racism

I didn’t know or didn’t remember this statement:

The Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of the United States of America stands with all people of good will in condemning the hateful violence and lamenting the loss of life that resulted from the ⁠⁠shameful efforts to promote racial bigotry and white supremacist ideology in Charlottesville, Virginia.⁠⁠

⁠⁠The Orthodox Church emphatically declares that it does not promote, protect or sanction participation in such reprehensible acts of hatred, racism, and discrimination, and proclaims that such beliefs and behaviors have no place in any community based in respect for the law and faith in a loving God.⁠⁠

The essence of the Christian Gospel and the spirit of the Orthodox Tradition are entirely and self-evidently incompatible with ideologies that declare the superiority of any race over another. Our God shows no partiality or favoritism (Deuteronomy 10:17, Romans 2:11). Our Lord Jesus Christ broke down the dividing wall of hostility that had separated God from humans and humans from each other (Ephesians 2:14). In Christ Jesus, the Church proclaims, there can be neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male or female, but all are one (Galatians 3:28). Furthermore, we call on one another to have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather to expose them (Ephesians 5:11). And what is darkness if not hatred? The one who hates his brother is in the darkness and walks in the darkness (1 John 2:11)!

Furthermore, in 1872, Hierarchs from around the world assembled in Constantinople and denounced all forms of xenophobia and chauvinism (phyletism). They agreed that the promotion of racial or national supremacy and ethnic bias or dissension in the Church of Christ is to be censured as contrary to the sacred teachings of the Christian Gospel and the holy canons of the Church. It is formally condemned as heresy, the strongest category of false teaching.

Finally, such actions as we have witnessed in recent days, by self-proclaimed white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and various racists and fascists, betray the core human values of love and solidarity. In this, we pray wholeheartedly for the families of those who lost their lives or suffered in these tragic events. In like manner, we cannot condone any form of revenge or retaliation by any group or individual. Therefore, we fervently appeal to every person of good will, and especially the leaders of our great nation, to consider and adopt ways of reconciling differences in order to rise above any and all discrimination in our history, our present, and our future.

My point in quoting this is that unrepentant racists do not have a natural home in the Orthodox Church. No Orthodox country was involved in the kidnapping of Africans, the slave trade, or the building of an American slave economy.

I’m old, firmly attached by clerical responsibilities to a single healthy parish, and out of first-hand touch with what’s happening elsewhere. But I read suggestions that some mostly-young mostly-men are flirting with or entering the Orthodox Church under the impression that its Holy Tradition is congruent with their unholy racial obsessions and with white nationalism.

I doubt that this is any true trend. But Orthodoxy is exploding in the U.S. (along with Roman Catholicism, I’m told), and I knew that when that happened, when Orthodoxy finally “got on America’s radar,” the calumnies would begin. Orthodoxy’s resistance to novelties (“stagnant” is what critics who knew about us tended to say) is a nice, big target for misrepresentation.

Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven.

There is no room for racism in Orthodoxy; there is always room for repentant sinners of all sorts, including repentant racists.

Transgressive Art

I’ve come to think of art that requires a willingness to transgress, not (to be clear) morality, or convention per se, but the limits of our understanding. And I think that one of the ways that art can bring us closer to ultimate Reality, or even to God, is by helping us see where our narratives of ourselves and of the world around us have become stale and rote … I think that engaging with art in this way requires a leap of faith. For things that break me open not to break me totally, I have to believe that not everything is broken.

Tara Isabella Burton

The early Church had no Scripture of its own, and the Jews had no defined canon of Scripture; therefore, sola scriptura as the foundation for what Christians believed was absolutely impossible.

Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

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.

Gnosticism rears its head – again and again and again

Gnosticism rears its head

As I delved into the world of psychology and the behavioral sciences, I encountered a hostility to the physical body that resembled that of the ancient Gnostics. Utopian ideas about technology often animate such hostility. One very common narrative says that our materiality represents a type of fall from which our machines can liberate us. The most obvious manifestation of this Gnostic-like hostility toward the body is the Silicon Valley futurists working on the next phase of human evolution, one in which machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, and in the process liberate us from the constraints of an embodied existence.

Robin Phillips and Stephen De Young, Rediscovering the Goodness of Creation: A Manual for Recovering Gnostics. Robin Phillips has been a gnosticism-hunter for rather a long time now, extending back to his pre-Orthodox days. He wasn’t and isn’t wrong.

My wife and I listened to That Hideous Strength on audiobook while traveling. It was a delight to hear an old favorite skillfully narrated.

The villains in That Hideous Strength think that humans have served their purpose by giving rise to intelligence, which they now intend to take and further develop, eventually phasing out human life. Meanwhile, subterfuge and gaslighting the masses are the orders of the day.

There’s no doubt in my mind that some, maybe most, of AI industry bigwigs have a similar attitude. Ray Kurzweil is their spiritual forebearer. Whether their hubristic fantasies so taint the whole project that I’m complicit in evil by typing instructions/questions into Claude (a pretty primitive AI use, further than which I may not go) is the question I’ve been chewing on.

The Master and His Emissary

I believe that Iain McGilchrist ranks among our half dozen most important living thinkers. His ability to bring together science, humanities, history, and philosophy at such a granular (but interconnected) level is impressive—and about a hundred steps ahead of the empty postures of all those pop technology books about macrotrends or life hacks.

McGilchrist grasps the risks to society from the left-brain obsession with calculating, controlling, and dehumanizing that pervades the dominant worldview. This book was filled with insights when it was published fifteen years ago, but it actually gets more important with each passing year.

His followup work The Matter with Things (2021) pushes his critique even further. It’s a massive undertaking—the bibliography alone is almost 200 pages! But McGilchrist has big goals—he is taking on an entire dysfunctional system. We do well to pay attention.

Ted Gioia, My Alternative Tech Canon: 26 Mind-Expanding Books

Sex-obsession

Religious conservatives today can seem obsessed with sex for the same reason that someone just poked in the eye can’t seem to change the subject: they are being attacked on a particular front and are struggling to defend themselves. They are not the ones who made sexuality the center of the culture wars. Social liberals have for the most part picked these fights because orthodox views about sexual morality (which insist on fundamental limits to the scope of personal choice) strike them as uniquely oppressive and backward, and they cannot abide their persistence.

Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic (2016)

One thing that has changed since Levin wrote this (I’ll leave it to others to argue Trump’s role should they wish) is that religious conservatives seem to me to have tacitly acknowledged that they’ve lost the sexuality wars. Maybe we can keep our kids relatively chaste (is that an oxymoron?), but apart from a few marginal uprisings (e.g., biological males competing against females in many sports), the issue has largely lost political salience.

Perhaps the madness will burn itself out, but for that I can only hope and pray (and I do). If you can think of a way to keep fighting that has religious integrity and some prospect of making things better, well you do you; I don’t want to dampen your ardour.

Solidarity against the petty tyrant

The TV press pool has said it will not turn its cameras back on until the White House allows CNN back into the pool ….

Kudos on the solidarity, press pool, which hits Trump where he hurts (denial of limelight). And good luck on the frivolous antitrust case the DoJ is now probably drafting.

Casualties

For every war America has fought for which we have data, we have sustained far more psychological casualties than physical casualties. … Gone now is the old notion that because a war is “just” it is somehow not going to hurt you. No serious person in the psychotherapeutic or American military community accepts that at this point.

Timothy Patisas, The Ethics of Beauty

This is why the Orthodox Church has from time immemorial taken steps to heal (not to punish) military veterans, especially those who have killed, and probably is why an Orthodox Navy Chaplain of my acquaintance came from the ranks of Navy Seals.

Why I remain politically homeless

It has long been clear that the rise of Donald J. Trump meant the end of the Republican Party as we once knew it.

It has belatedly become clear that his rise may have meant the end of the Democratic Party as we knew it as well.

Nate Cohn

Left/Right, value/values

A case could be made that the great historical difference between what we call the Left and the Right largely turns on the relation between “value” and “values.” The Left has always been about trying to collapse the gulf between the domain dominated by pure self-interest and the domain traditionally dominated by high-minded principles; the Right has always been about prising them even farther apart, and then claiming ownership of both. They stand for both greed and charity. Hence, the otherwise inexplicable alliance in the Republican Party between the free market libertarians and the “values voters” of the Christian Right. What this comes down to in practice has usually been the political equivalent of a strategy of good-cop-bad-cop: first unleash the chaos of the market to destabilize lives and all existing verities alike; then, offer yourself up as the last bastion of the authority of church and fatherhood against the barbarians they have themselves unleashed.

David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

Shorts

  • Burke, could he see our century, never would concede that a consumption-society, so near to suicide, is the end for which Providence has prepared man. If a conservative order is indeed to return, we ought to know the tradition which is attached to it, so that we may rebuild society; if it is not to be restored, still we ought to understand conservative ideas so that we may rake from the ashes what scorched fragments of civilization escape the conflagration of unchecked will and appetite. (Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind)
  • Hegseth’s paradox: The more boorishly a man postures as Achilles, the more likely he is to be some more powerful man’s political concubine. (Nick Catoggio)
  • Whenever an organization says “There is no place for XYZ in this organization” or “We have zero tolerance for XYZ” the proper translation is: “Making this statement is all we’re going to do about XYZ, and you’ll just have to deal with it.” (Alan Jacobs)
  • I thought the land was going to change me, I mumbled. / Oh, honestly, she said. (Paul Kingsnorth, Savage Gods)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg

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.

Sunday, 9/27/26

Beauty and truth

I would never have set out upon the journey that led me to the The Ethics of Beauty had I not read Jonathan Shay’s observation in his Achilles in Vietnam that contemporary analytical psychotherapy has been largely unable to heal the suffering of the soldiers afflicted most severely with post-traumatic stress disorder. I have slowly come to see that another way to read Shay would be to say that the initial focus of soul-healing must be on Beauty rather than on truth, on a living vision of a loving and crucified God, rather than on an autopsy of the broken self. … The fatal flaw of soul-therapy since Freud, by contrast, has been its insistence that truth and not beauty be our first concern; the repellant aspect of today’s political ideologies is rooted in a similar insistence.

Timothy G. Patitsas

Is “mere Christianity” Protestant?

It is not really possible for a Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox Christian to separate belief in “mere Christianity” from membership in and submission to the ecclesial life of Rome or Constantinople. To imagine that there is a set of cardinal doctrines that transcends ecclesial divisions and unites all people as “Christian” is inherently to speak and think as a Protestant.

So in that sense the best way to read what Scrivener calls the era of “mere christianity” is probably to regard it as a period of deficient Protestantism in which people presupposed Protestant conceptions of the church without understanding that they were doing that. They mistook their implicitly Protestant commitments for a kind of broadly Christian and ecclesially indifferent set of commitments. That is never what Lewis was trying to do in his own work, but it is how his work was received by highly democratic and anti-institutional American readers.

Jake Meador, a Protestant.

This reflects my own experience going from lower Protestant traditions to fully ecclesial Christianity. The late Richard John Neuhaus puts it this way:

An ecclesial Christian is one who understands with mind and heart, and even feels with his fingertips, that Christ and his Church, head and body, are inseparable. For the ecclesial Christian, the act of faith in Christ and the act of faith in the Church are not two acts of faith but one. In the words of the third-century St. Cyprian, martyr bishop of Carthage, “He who would have God as his Father must have the Church as his mother.”

In defense of Origen (and against spurious interpolations)

After Paul, there is no single Christian figure to whom the whole tradition is more indebted. It was Origen who taught the church how to read scripture as a living mirror of Christ, who evolved the principles of later Trinitarian theology and Christology, who majestically set the standard for Christian apologetics, who produced the first and richest expositions of contemplative spirituality, and who—simply said—laid the foundation of the whole edifice of developed Christian thought. Moreover, he was not only a man of extraordinary personal holiness, piety, and charity, but a martyr as well: Brutally tortured during the Decian persecution at the age of 69, he never recovered, but slowly withered away over a period of three years. He was, in short, among the greatest of the church fathers and the most illustrious of the saints and yet, disgracefully, official church tradition—East and West—commemorates him as neither.⁠

David Bentley Hart, putting more flesh on the bones of a story I’ve known for quite some time: somewhere along the line, after he was dead and gone, Origen got a bum rap.

What I didn’t know was that it wasn’t a Church Council that did it:

⁠I cannot really say what irks me more, though: that it happened or that, in fact, it really never did. The oldest records of the council (which was convened to deal solely with certain Antiochian theologians) make it clear that those fifteen anathemas were never even discussed by the assembled bishops, let alone ratified, published, or promulgated.⁠⁠ And ⁠⁠since the late nineteenth century various scholars have convincingly established that neither Origen nor “Origenism” was ever the subject of any condemnation pronounced by the “holy fathers” in 553. The best modern critical edition of the Seven Councils—Norman Tanner’s—simply omits the anathemas as spurious interpolations.

Compare and Contrast

American Religion

The result is a religious landscape dominated by popular Christian ideas that have “gone mad,” as G.K. Chesterton once put it, “because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.” This America has a church of self-love, with prophets like Oprah Winfrey preaching a gospel of the divine self, a “God Within” spirituality that risks making selfishness a virtue. It has a church of prosperity, with figures like Joel Osteen as its bishops, that insists that God desires nothing more for his elect than American prosperity, capitalist success. And it has churches of politics, preaching redemption through political activism — a Christian nationalism on the right, by turns messianic and apocalyptic, and a progressive utopianism on the left, convinced that history’s arc bends always in its favor.

These heresies, I argued, are more important to understanding the true influence of religion in America than anything that comes out of the Roman Catholic Church or the Southern Baptist Convention. You can understand our spiritual situation more completely by reading “The Da Vinci Code,” “Eat, Pray, Love” and “Your Best Life Now” than by browsing a papal encyclical (or for that matter an atheist polemic). And you can see more of Christianity’s enduring but now deformed influence in will.i.am’s celebrity hymns to Barack Obama in 2008, or Glenn Beck’s right-wing revivals a couple of years later, than in whatever cultural authority still attaches to the New Testament or the Nicene Creed.

Ross Douthat, The Americanization of Religion

Christianity

Father Maximos then went on to say how surprised he was to learn that there were so many people today that become victims of … charlatans. The most troublesome development, he mentioned, was the fact that many people considered him to be some kind of magician. “They come here at the monastery to find out whether someone has cast a spell on them, why they were abandoned by their lover or their husband and so on. At first I couldn’t figure out why they would come to me with such problems. Then I realize that they thought of me as some kind of sorcerer capable of undoing spells.“ Father Maximos shook his head and chuckled in his characteristic way.

“What do you tell them in such cases?“ I asked.

“What do you think? I tell them that there is no magic to resolve their problems, that they need to do spiritual work. I tell them that if they have a problem with demonic energies then they can follow the prescriptions the Ecclesia to heal themselves: confession, participation in the mysteries, fasting, charity, prayer, and askesis in general. That’s the way to do it.”

“So, there you are. You offer them a recipe on how to cast out the spell,” I pointed out in a light tone. “But are they receptive?”

“Hardly. Most people crave a quick fix. They are too lazy or unwilling to invest any effort of their own. They assume that if I read some magic formula over their heads, their problems will disappear. No need for them to change their ways. No need for them to engage in systematic prayer and askesis. Of course, some to follow the therapeutic guidelines of the Ecclesia and see results.”

Kyriacos C. Markides, The Mountain of Silence

The unity of the Church

Dietrich Bonhoeffer once commented that it had been granted to America, less than to any nation on earth, to realize the visible unity of the church of God.

Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Religion

The early Church had no Scripture of its own, and the Jews had no defined canon of Scripture; therefore, *sola scriptura* as the foundation for what Christians believed was absolutely impossible.

Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

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](http://rwb.intellectualoid.com/). (b) I also post [some things](https://microblog.intellectualoid.com/) on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

Sunday, September 20, 2026

Atheism

I am convinced that the case for belief in God is inductively so much stronger than the case for unbelief that true philosophical atheism must be regarded as a superstition, often nurtured by an infantile wish to live in a world proportionate to one’s own hopes or conceptual limitations.

David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God

Sola Scriptura in practice

Champions of sola scriptura thought they would set Christian theology and experiential knowledge on firm ground by liberating the rock of God’s word from papal tyranny. In fact, despite themselves they precipitated literally endless contestation about the Bible’s meaning, entangled faith with biblical scholarship in new ways, and unavoidably had respective and rival recourse to their own preferred, putative hermeneutic authorities amid competing claims about the meaning of God’s word.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

The problem, be it noted, is not “scriptura” but “sola.”

By the end of the 1570s, whatever the instincts and nostalgia of their seniors, a generation was growing up which had known nothing else, which believed the Pope to be Antichrist, the Mass a mummery, which did not look back to the Catholic past as their own, but another country, another world.

Eamon Duffey, The Stripping of the Altars

However differently they defined the essence of “New Testament” Christianity, the Holiness movement, Fundamentalists, and Pentecostals shared a passion for recovering the “pure fountain” and were equally dismissive of the church’s legacy over twenty centuries.

Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Religion

[T]he dispensationalist attack on the institutional church was an argument more likely to find a favorable audience in the United States, where evangelical churchmanship was relatively weak, than in Great Britain, where members of the state churches of England and Scotland exerted great influence in the evangelical movement.

Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

(I acknowledge evidence that dispensationalism is waning in influence in America; my point here is historic.)

For the world? Counter to the world?

The problem I see in the idea of the Church as the catalyst for cultural and/or civilizational renewal — even if it should become that in our time — is the erroneous implication that the Church exists for the sake of the world. She doesn’t. She stands more often than not — as the Bride of Christ, wedded to one Bridegroom — as a counter to the world, marked as the world order is by transient powers, constant instability, “freedoms” that aren’t true freedom, dubious ethics (“For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, is not of the Father but is of the world”; 1 John 2:16), “wars and rumors of wars,” and all the rest.

Addison Hodges Hart, How I Wandered Into Orthodoxy: An Uncharacteristically Personal Reflection.

I tend strongly to agree with Hart on this.

The early Church had no Scripture of its own, and the Jews had no defined canon of Scripture; therefore, sola scriptura as the foundation for what Christians believed was absolutely impossible.

Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

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.