Two guys who know what’s going on in Evangelicalism these days sat down for a chat a few months ago: Russell Moore and David French. I only heard it this past week, and it’s really awfully good. It’s available as a podcast as well as the linked YouTube video.
I’m used to David French as a legal and political commentator, but he’s a pretty darned good observer of his religious milieu — as, of course, is Russell Moore whose life work is pervasively religious.
Sizing things up realistically
On the one hand, I trust in God’s providence.
On the other hand, there was a whole lot about the America I grew up in, and worked in, that I’m going to miss now that it’s gone. I’m reminded of the Brit who said of losing the war something like “I should not be able to number all the things I would miss.”
Here comes the acid test of “I have learned in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content.”
Reading the Riot Act to Social Media “Theologians”
You have to accept that if you only know English and you can only read the Church Fathers and the Bible in translation, you at some point are going to have to … find someone who actually knows the original languages who you trust, and just believe them about what it says.
You don’t have to go learn those languages, but if you’re not going to go and learn those languages, you’re not entitled to an opinion on this … Shut up. Shut up on social media. Stop causing trouble. Stop trying to cause factions in the Church. That’s a sin. That’s a grievous sin … You have to learn before you can teach.
This blunt quote is directed particularly at Orthodox laymen who argue for substitutionary atonement based on reading the Church Fathers translated, in most instances, by Philip Schaff, a Calvinist Protestant. Substitutionary atonement (Christ in place of me) is not the position of the Orthodox Church (more like Christ on behalf of me — setting aside our different view of “atonement” itself).
But I’m confident that Orthodox Christians aren’t the only autodidact “theologians” quoting Church Fathers from Schaff. I own Schaff’s translations (as I did before becoming Orthodox, I believe). I honor his monumental work in translating so much. Heck, I even honor, in relative terms, the Mercerburg Theology with which he is associated. But I dare not trust him very far.
The least you can do
The man and woman cannot utterly sink who on every seventh day is obliged to appear in decent apparel, and to join with all the standing and respectability of the community in a united act of worship.
David Hacket Fischer, Albion’s Seed. I don’t recall who, or when, or in what region of America, Fischer was quoting, and it doesn’t seem worth looking up.
How do you measure comfort care?
Gonzalez is troubled to learn that the nuns “consistently fail to provide statistics on the efficacy of their work.” But there is no ready yardstick to measure the success of outreach programs to lepers. And how does one measure the efficacy of programs designed to comfort the dying?
Bill Donohue, Unmasking Mother Teresa’s Critics.
There are swaths of reality that are not susceptible to meaningful metrics and statistics. It’s prudent to ask for statistics on some things, yes, but monstrously reductionist to treat as some kind of scam the inability to produce statistics on other things.
Ecumenical Winter
The foremost divides in Western Christendom for some time fell along Protestant and Roman Catholic dividing lines, from the sixteenth century well through the Troubles in Northern Ireland. But today all Christians with even the most basic (creedal) orthodox theology and shared vision of human sexuality, the sanctity of life, and more find themselves as co-belligerents in a struggle with an inhumane and secularizing Western society and progressivist religion. There is far greater good will towards one another for that reason alone than there was in the past five centuries, culminating in cooperation such as Evangelicals and Catholics Together. Gone with the vanishing Protestant Mainline is the milquetoast ecumenism wherein “doctrine divides, service unites.” Here to stay is an emerging ecumenism where the things held in common run to the core of one’s commitments in life and in death.
The first time I went to India, it was such a shock for me, the different culture, and everything was a new experience for me. I had so much to learn. The second time it was more like everyday life. The main thing I understood the second time was that I didn’t need as many things as I thought. Not at all. I could live with what I could carry in one backpack. With a family, I had thought I needed all that furniture and tables and kitchen equipment and washing machines and a vacuum cleaner. I realized I really can live simply. After that, I thought, I could live exactly this way anywhere.
Highly recommended for seeing how life could be different without being worse. Like the Tao Te Ching (directly and through Christ The Eternal Tao), this book helped me see some things more vividly because of the foreign setting.
As the White House tutors us about the “real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” I’m very glad to be in a church where every Sunday we sing the Beatitudes, which tell us the way blessedness works.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
The best thing about New Years Day 2026 is that it means 2025 is over. President Ozymandias really hit the ground running for his second term, having surrounded himself with evil, shrewd, and power-hungry operatives this time instead of Republican normies who muted his bellowing. It’s hard to imagine (knocks on wood) that the worst of the self-aggrandizing vandalism isn’t over now.
Wordplay
Aphorisms
A platitude is a placebo for the mind; an aphorism is a wake-up call. Aphorisms provoke debate; they don’t promote dogma. Though they’re short, aphorisms spur considered reflection, not Pavlovian partisanship. At a time when polarization is so amped up, aphorisms can serve as psychological circuit breakers, interrupting our comfortable assumptions and prodding us to open our minds, unclench our fists, and think for ourselves.
In The Washington Post, Dana Milbank responded to some Republicans’ suggestion that the D.C. Metro be renamed the “Trump Train”: “It’s a great idea. Qatar will donate the subway cars, which will be powered by coal. Passengers will pay for fares with cryptocurrency after first showing proof of citizenship. And the trains will reverse themselves regularly and without warning — never quite reaching their original destination.” (Mary Ellen Maher-Harkins, Orwigsburg, Pa.)
In The Atlantic, David A. Graham processed the addition of “Trump” to “Kennedy” in the moniker for Washington’s premier performing arts center: “He asks not what he can do for his country, but what his country can name for him.” (Darrell Ing, Honolulu)
In Esquire, Dave Holmes acknowledged that Senator Lindsey Graham was maybe joking that Trump should be the next pope — but maybe not: “You can’t be tongue-in-cheek when you are actively licking the boot. There is just not enough tongue for both jobs.” (Susan Fitzgerald, Las Cruces, N.M.)
In The Wall Street Journal, Jason Gay rued the effect of obsessive replays on the determination of what, in pro football, constitutes a catch. “It’s the affliction of overthinking: If it walks like a duck, and talks like a duck, wait, hold on, it must be a chandelier,” he wrote. “It’s further evidence humans can ruin the spirit of anything, if given the time and technology.” (Bill Sclafani, Rockport, Mass.)
\[I\]n The Washington Post, Ron Charles assessed “The Little Book of Bitcoin,” by the supremely self-confident pitchman Anthony Scaramucci: “In one passage, he touts the convenience of transporting $500 million in Bitcoin on a thumb drive, which is the best news I’ve heard since my yacht got a new helipad.” (Stephen S. Power, Maplewood, N.J., and Hannah Reich, Queens, among others)
Charles also observed that the scolds who ban books have taken issue with “Maurice Sendak’s ‘In the Night Kitchen,’ which has been proven in the state of Florida to turn straight white Christian boys into polygender Marxists who eat only quinoa.” (Jill Gaither, St. Louis, and John Jacoby, North Andover, Mass.)
In The Times, Kevin Roose worried that when it comes to regulations, the stately metabolism of institutions is no match for the velocity of A.I.: “It feels, at times, like watching policymakers on horseback, struggling to install seatbelts on a passing Lamborghini.” (Conrad Macina, Landing, N.J.)
In The Times, A.O. Scott sang a similar song: “Occam’s razor, the venerable philosophical principle that the truest explanation is likely to be the simplest, has been thrown away. We’re living in the age of Occam’s chain saw, when the preferred answer is the one that makes the loudest noise and generates the most debris.” (Charles Kelley, Merrimack, N.H., and Trisha Houser, Durham, N.C., among others)
I saved three of Bruni’s best as personal favorites:
Also in The Times, Matt Hongoltz-Hetling considered the importance of an annual communal feast to a Vermont town’s special fellowship: “Whether a vibrant community created the potluck or the potluck created a vibrant community is like asking which came first, the fried chicken or the deviled egg.” (Stacey Somppi, Cottonwood, Ariz., and Hillary Ellner, Durham, N.C., among others)
In The Times, James Hamblin parodied the typical message and script of a television drug ad: “You will frolic on the beach at sunset psoriasis-free, with a golden retriever, smiling into the distance. You also may experience sudden loss of cardiac function, seizures of the arms or intermittent explosive ear discharge. Talk to your doctor.” (Susan Casey, Palm City, Fla.)
In The Dispatch, Kevin D. Williamson gave thanks for academia, despite its flaws: “The American university system is the envy of the world, and we are burning it down because there’s a couple of nonbinary gender studies professors at Bryn Mawr who say crazy stuff from time to time and there is a brain-dead gaggle of Jew-hating weirdos at Columbia. Of course, there is room for reform. But you don’t have to love every feather on the goose when it is laying golden eggs.” (Dan Markovitz, Corte Madera, Calif.)
The first just feels perfect; “explosive ear discharge” in the second was the only thing in the list that made me laugh uncontrollably; Kevin Williamson captures perhaps the single most tragic thing about what “we” are doing, (purely by coincidence, of course, during the second reign of the orange barbarian).
Finally: “Some of you should walk a mile in my shoes, because then you would be a mile away from me. Keep the shoes.” (Encountered by my wife on Pinterest)
My 2025
Reading
As I always note in my footer, I blog and socialize at micro.blog in addition to here. One of my friendlies at MB, an uncommonly sane Evangelicalish pastor in Chicagoland (very keen on racial reconciliation is he), posted his 2025 reading list and inquired about what others read this year.
My response:
At 77, I feel the Grim Reaper breathing down my neck, and I already own more books than I’ll get read before he wins. Further, I’ve read many, many books in my life already, including multiple books on many perennial themes. And although I love poetry, I either had poor teachers or was too barbarian to learn how to read demanding examples.
So I don’t have much toleration for books that are cumulative of what I already understand, or are neither pleasurable nor (so far as I can tell after reading a bit) profitable, including ones that many good people were raving about.
To avoid performative listing, then (e.g., Geoffrey Hill poetry, which defeated me utterly), I’ve eliminated all the books I abandoned part way in. Finally, listing a volume of poetry doesn’t mean I’ve read it all yet.
Book
Author
Rings Trilogy
Tolkien
Albion’s Seed
David Hackett Fischer
The World After Liberalism
Matthew Rose
Coracle
Kenneth Steven
Table for Two
Amor Towles
Till We Have Faces
C.S. Lewis
Godric
Beuckner
Stalingrad
Anthony Beever
Small Is Beautiful
Schumacher
Rilke Poetry
Rilke
Apocrypha
Stephen De Young
The Greek East and the Latin West: A Study in the Christian Tradition
Philip Sherrard
A Time of Gifts
Patrick Leigh Fermor
The New Science of the Enchanted Universe
Marshall Sahlins
Bread & Water, Wine & Oil
Fr. Meletios Webber
Lost in the Cosmos
Walker Percy
Giovanni’s Room
James Baldwin
The Long Loneliness
Dorothy Day
The innocence of Father Brown
G.K. Chesterton
Against the Machine
Paul Kingsnorth
You Have Arrived at Your Destination
Amor Towles
The Air We Breathe: How We All Came to Believe in Freedom, Kindness, Progress, and Equality
Extra pills are piling up across America. Excessive refills by U.S. pharmacies cost Medicare and patients $3 billion between 2021 and 2023, according to a WSJ analysis of Medicare prescription data.
WSJ. Based on my own rigorous anecdata, this is 1000% true. Which means that although mail-order pharmacies may have started it, brick-and-mortar local pharmacies are in the game now, too.
I really would rather not manually refill every prescription, but my pharmacy seems incapable of waiting 90 days to refill a 90-day prescription, and when I get a text that a prescription is ready for pick-up, I go pick it up (with rare exceptions, like a post-op opioid painkiller I definitely did not need).
Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, said in a recent podcast he can see ways that seeking companionship from an AI chatbot could go wrong, but that the company plans to give adults leeway to decide for themselves.
Nothing in her political career before September inclined me to cut Marjorie Taylor Green any slack whatever, but something has happened since then.
Her political conversion story, if you can call it that (it’s not about changing from MAGA to progressive or any other political position), rings true.
It started at the Charlie Kirk Memorial service:
What stayed with Greene long afterward were the last two speakers who took the stage. First there was Kirk’s widow, Erika, who stood in white before the crowd filling the Arizona stadium, lifted her tear-filled eyes and said that she forgave her husband’s killer. And then there was President Trump. “He was a missionary with a noble spirit and a great, great purpose,” he said of Kirk. “He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them.”
“That was absolutely the worst statement,” Greene wrote to me in a text message months after the memorial service. And the contrast between Erika Kirk and the president was clarifying, she added. “It just shows where his heart is. And that’s the difference, with her having a sincere Christian faith, and proves that he does not have any faith.”
I thought at the time that should have been a wake-up call for every “Christian” Trump supporter in America. I still do. It speaks ominous things about our religious and political culture that it seems to have awoken so few.
But Marjorie Taylor Green, of all people, recognized it! And it appears that she has genuinely repented of her role in stoking hatred and division!
Time will tell; she’s been taking the potent MAGA pill for a long time, and withdrawal may prove too hard. But it’s looking good so far.
I wish her what I wished for Jimmy Carter on January 20, 1981: a long and happy and private life — plus a sustained repentance.
Paganism with worship music
We seem to be entering a pagan century. It’s not only Trump. It’s the whole phalanx of authoritarians, all those greatness-obsessed macho men like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. It’s the tech bros. It’s Christian nationalism, which is paganism with worship music. (If you ever doubt the seductive power of paganism, remember it has conquered many of the churches that were explicitly founded to reject it.)
“If you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post-religious right,” Ross Douthat warned presciently at the dawn of Trumpism in 2016. … What Douthat calls the “post-religious right” certainly is more obnoxious and morally degenerate than its Bush-era forebear was, but it’s not correct to call a movement that’s developed its own alternate morality “post-religious.” It’s not even correct to call it “post-Christian,”…
The modern right is boisterously Christian, but without Christ. It extols Christianity aggressively but has ditched most of the moral content …
…
The purest expression of Christianity without Christ came from Trump himself, not coincidentally. At Charlie Kirk’s memorial service, shortly after Kirk’s widow, Erika, moved viewers by publicly forgiving her husband’s killer, the president strode to the mic and said, “That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponents, and I don’t want the best for them. I’m sorry.” That’s the literal antithesis of Christian morality …
But there were no mass defections by Christians from the president’s camp after his heresy. Erika Kirk herself remains a loyal Trump ally in good standing. And why not? Hating one’s enemies is squarely in line with the three purposes of post-Christ right-wing Christianity. The first is establishing the right’s cultural hegemony over other American factions; the second is narrowing the parameters of the right-wing tribe to exclude undesirables; and the third is deemphasizing morality as a brake on ruthlessness toward one’s opponents.
Almost everything written about the “alternative right” has been wrong in one respect. The alt-right is not stupid; it is deep. Its ideas are not ridiculous; they are serious. To appreciate this fact, one needs to inquire beyond its presence on social media, where its obnoxious use of insult, obscenity, and racism has earned it a reputation for moral idiocy.
Matthew Rose, A World After Liberalism
At the outset of debate
If we are willing to grant, at the outset, that the people we’re debating agree about ends—that they want a healthy and prosperous society in which all people can flourish—then we can converse with them, we can see ourselves as genuine members of a community. And even if at the end of the day we have to conclude that we all do not want the same goods (which can, alas, happen), it is better that we learn it at the end of the day than decide it before sunrise.
Would we necessarily say that government, civic life, the media, or high finance work better now than in the mid-20th century? We can scorn the smug WASP blue bloods from Groton and Choate—and certainly their era’s retrograde views of race and gender—but their leadership helped produce the Progressive movement, the New Deal, victory in World War II, the Marshall Plan, NATO, and the postwar Pax Americana. After the meritocrats took over in the 1960s, we got quagmires in Vietnam and Afghanistan, needless carnage in Iraq, the 2008 financial crisis, the toxic rise of social media, and our current age of political dysfunction.
We are also offended by the contumely of allies as well as foes, who refuse to regard our prosperity as fruit and proof of our virtue but suggest that it may be the consequence of our vulgar Philistinism.
Reinhold Niehbur, The Irony of American History
Read the fine print
On the surface, it would seem that the assurances given in the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia were clear and unequivocal. But lurking in the shadowy annals of communist polemics there was a catch. To paraphrase, but not distort, Lenin’s position, nations have the right to self-determination, but only the proletariat has the right to decide. And, as if that were not enough, only the Communist Party can speak for the proletariat.
Jack Matlock, Autopsy on an Empire
Raising the bar for Tinhorn Dictators
Ramsey’s intolerance for dissent has created what former employees call a cultlike environment, where leaders proclaim their love for staff and then fire people at a moment’s notice.
A new crop of moderate Democrats is trying to counter both President Trump and progressive influence in their own party. (WSJ) May their tribe increase.
And so we have before us one of the characteristic political necessities of our time: to take seriously what we cannot respect. (Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America)
Conservative and mainstream media were drifting apart, not just ideologically but epistemically… (Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge) This epistemic drift (of the Right, I think, not the mainstream) tempts me to despair.
“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” … was a damned funny thing for Franklin Roosevelt to say in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power. (Kevin D. Williamson)
The face of my fear is not a new Hitler but the Old Adam. It is the face in the mirror. (Kevin D. Williamson)
One category I used to apply to some of my posts became obsolete almost overnight around 1/20/2017: Zombie Reaganism. You never see that any more, and I miss it more than I thought I would.
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.
Emily Ruddy was traveling the country with her new husband, Mike, when news reached them of Charlie Kirk’s shooting, then death:
Back in the car with Mike, approaching the Florida border, I’m looking at pictures of Charlie Kirk on my phone. He is staggeringly tall, taller than I ever realized, with a celebratory fist in the air. Reading his Wikipedia page, which has now been changed to past tense, I am reminded of a story I first read in middle school: Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron.” The story is set in the late twenty-first century, in a dystopian America where the authorities have taken it upon themselves to ensure no person is better than another, be it in athleticism, intelligence, or beauty. The strong citizens get weighed down with bags of bird shot. The attentive citizens are intermittently bombarded with hideous sounds through tiny radios in their ears. The most beautiful faces are concealed by hideous masks.
But it’s the title character, Harrison Bergeron—exceptionally tall, handsome, brilliant and outspoken—who is shackled most heavily. At the end of the story he breaks through the shackles, and as punishment he is shot down on live TV: a warning to whoever tries to pull a similar stunt. Or at least, it would be a warning, if the viewers’ memories weren’t instantly blasted away by the ear radio’s next awful sound.
If you haven’t read Harrison Bergeron, a (very) short story, by all means do. It’s freely available, like, for instance, here.
After Christian faith dies
The biggest confusion among my own students used to be rudderless moral relativism. Although there is still a lot of that, it seems to be on the decline. Now the problem is the explicit embrace of evil. The suggestion that one must never do what is intrinsically evil for the sake of a good result is a hard sell. Many of students are strongly attracted to “consequentialism,” the view that whether an act is right or wrong is determined only by the result. To say that the ends do not justify the means puzzles them.
The decline of faith has also produced changes in character. Young people who were raised in Christian homes, but then abandoned Christianity, often used to retain vestiges of their moral upbringing, and accepted such ideas as courtesy, love of neighbor, and the sacredness of innocent human life. Today, having grown up in faithless homes, many seem to think that courtesy is for fools, that no one with whom they disagree is their neighbor, and that they should hate those they consider wrong instead of praying for their repentance and restoration. As for the sacredness of innocent human life – for them, that idea went out when they embraced abortion.
…
I don’t spend much time asking what is going to happen, but I do ask what God would like me to do in my own place. He sees the whole shape of things. I can’t, but like a faithful bone, I can try to turn nimbly in the joint where I’m placed.
Budziszewski’s description of the decline of faith, as early as the second generation (the first generation of lapsed Christians lives on the vapors of the empty tank), is a description of devolution toward the “nasty, short and brutish” of pre-Christian antiquity.
If you think I’m just making a casual partisan slur, take a look at either of thesetwo books, the first lengthy, the second shorter and more focused.
Wordplay
Frank Bruni’s back with recent favorite sentences. (Do not read this with beverages or food in your mouth.):
Also in The New Yorker, Jessica Winter read the infamous Jeffrey Epstein birthday book so that you and I don’t have to: “Sometimes it’s like you’ve discovered a rich man’s contract with the devil, and next to his signature, he’s drawn a little penis cartoon.” (Matthew Ferraro, East Providence, R.I.)
And Kelefa Sanneh, reporting from a recent Bad Bunny concert, described an ecstatic fan who “danced so vigorously with a decorative plant that he seemed to be trying to pollinate it.” (Bob Marino, Paris)
In The Los Angeles Times, Christopher Goffard tried to make sense of a former Los Angeles County sheriff’s rambling: “As he sat down to face questions from the feds, his sentences traveled winding paths through vague precincts to fog-filled destinations.” (Robin April Dubner, Oakland, Calif.)
In The Guardian, Bryan Armen Graham commiserated with the polite subgroup of American fans at an annual Europe-versus-United States golf tournament, who were too often “drowned out by the performative tough guys in flag suits and plastic chains who treat the Ryder Cup like a tailgate with better lawn care.” (John LeBaron, Acton, Mass.)
In The Dispatch, Nick Catoggio regarded the marks that President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made to military leaders last week as “a case of two men who radiate neurosis about their own toughness lecturing a roomful of actual tough guys about how to be tough. It had the feel of Pop Warner players scolding a group of N.F.L. linebackers about the importance of hustle.” (Glen T. Oxton, Mamaroneck, N.Y., and John Sabine, Dallas)
And John McWhorter analyzed the president’s loopy language: “Even Trump’s most positive-sounding coinages are acts of a certain kind of verbal aggression. I sometimes stop to marvel that the House passed something with the actual official title the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act. That goofy bark of a name is a boisterous clap back against opposing views, an attempt to drown out inconvenient facts with braggadocio. It is a linguistic snap of the locker room towel.” (Matt Masiero, Richmond, Mass., and Sue Hudson, Simi Valley, Calif., among many others)
Anarchism
[T]he essential practices of anarchism — negotiation and collaboration among equals — are ones utterly neglected and desperately needed in a society in which the one and only strategy seems to be Get Management To Take My Side.
Trump’s remarks on the night of Kirk’s murder redefined violent incitement to include harsh criticism of judges. (“My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law-enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.”) Now [aide Stephen] Miller himself is going after judges.
To call this “hypocrisy” is to engage Miller’s reasoning at a level upon which it does not operate. The essence of post-liberalism is the rejection of the notion that some neutral standards of conduct apply to all parties. Miller, like Trump, appears to believe his side stands for what is right and good, and his opponents stand for what is evil. Any methods used by Trump are ipso facto justified, and any methods used against him illegitimate.
A couple of weeks ago, Miller claimed that a disturbed gunman shooting Charlie Kirk impelled the government to crack down on the left. Now he says a handful of activists protesting ICE impel the government to crack down on the left.
Violence is not the cause of Trump and Miller’s desire to use state power to crush their opposition. It is the pretext for which they transparently long.
You can and should worry about American leaders at any level viewing their opponents as the enemy within, whether it’s the president of the United States or a random [Democratic] candidate for state AG. But if you’re more vocal about the latter than the former, forgive me for thinking you’re more interested in contriving a “both sides” equivalency to minimize what the White House is up to than you are about addressing the problem of incitement.
…
Two things are remarkable about [continuing troop deployments in “blue cities”]. One, which almost goes without saying, is that it’s another case of the Trump administration aiming to normalize unprecedented authoritarian shows of force. But the other is underappreciated: It’s all being done in bad faith, as a provocation, and quite plainly. There’s barely a pretense anymore of a colorable emergency like a riot that might justify the president deploying troops. He’s doing it unbidden and enthusiastically, looking for excuses to intimidate Democrats by symbolically occupying their cities with troops yanked from duty [and civilian jobs] in other states.
…
Needless to say, this is why the Trump White House didn’t get the benefit of the doubt from Judge Immergut on the Portland deployment, or from Judge Waverly Crenshaw on whether Kilmar Abrego Garcia was vindictively prosecuted. It’s also why the case against James Comey will end up in the toilet sooner rather than later. Courts have traditionally given the president and the Justice Department wide discretion in commanding the military and choosing whom to prosecute, but that’s because presidents traditionally haven’t given courts good reason to think they’re acting in bad faith.
I look forward to the day when judges cease giving a “presumption of regularity,” of good faith, to the actions and legal arguments of this Administration. They have forfeited it because so much of what they do plainly is done in bad faith.
On keeping an impossible promise
Anyone with brown skin and the wrong kind of tattoo is therefore now at risk of being carted off to torture by the US government, with absolutely no safeguards that they have gotten the right people. Or do you think that an administration that confuses billions with millions, and puts classified intelligence on a Signal app, is incapable of making an error?
I will give Trump “credit” for trying to keep his deportation campaign promise. The problems is, it’s impossible even for competent, non-malicious government workers to keep it (it included luridly-high numbers) without wholesale errors and ubiquitous denials of due process (i.e., in context, the process by which we assure that a person truly is subject to deportation under the law).
Your tax dollars at work
Short Circuits is a punchy weekly summary of notable Federal Court of Appeals decision, like this summary of activities by an ICE goon:
ICE agent escorting passenger from Dallas to Miami takes upskirt pictures and videos of flight attendant. He’s convicted of interfering with her flight-crew duties, sentenced to two years’ probation. Agent: I didn’t know that she was aware of my “clandestine video voyeurism,” and that’s an element of the crime. Eleventh Circuit (unpublished): It is not.
Divine retribution in Dallas
The covert operations of the Kennedys haunted Lyndon Johnson all his life. He said over and over that Dallas was divine retribution for Diem. “We all got together and got a goddamn bunch of thugs and we went in and assassinated him,” he lamented. In his first year in office, coup after coup wracked Saigon, a shadowy insurgency started killing Americans in Vietnam, and his fear that the CIA was an instrument of political murder festered and grew.
There are certain unwritten rules in American life, and one of them is that before your face is featured on the nation’s currency you are first obliged to die. There is no constitutional provision that mandates this, nor any law written tightly enough to guarantee it. But, as a general matter, we have shied away from putting living figures on our notes and coins, on the grounds that it is monarchical behavior and that the United States is not a monarchy. Unsurprisingly, this salutary tradition is not of great interest to the Trump administration, which intends to put an image of Trump on both sides of a commemorative $1 coin that will be produced for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. On one side, Trump will appear in profile. On the other, he will appear pumping his fist, with the words “Fight Fight Fight” lining the coin’s perimeter. Answering questions about the plan, Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said that she was unsure if Trump had seen it, but that she was “sure he’ll love it.” He will. But that’s not really the important point, is it?
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?”
[A] critical mass of the American people … no longer want[s] to govern themselves, … are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise.
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.
[W]e’re well past canon wars at this point. The question isn’t what people are going to read on the other side of the bottleneck; it’s whether they’re going to read anything at all. If you want a perfect example of not getting it, consider the conservatives complaining about books assigned in K-12 schools, and the liberals complaining about book-bans. How can either side keep pretending that the problem is with what students are reading? The world in which that debate made sense no longer exists. Even at elite universities, nobody reads books anymore.
…
If we are indeed entering a “new dark age” – one full of “shining devices” and for that reason mostly empty of literate persons – then Christian institutions today may have a similar mission to fulfill: saving the best of the secular world from the new bottleneck of technological “progress.” Maybe in the future it will only be students at Christian universities who read Freud and Marx and Nietzche and all the other great anti-Christian thinkers, because it will only be students at Christian universities who still read anything at all.
When readers interact imaginatively with a book, they are still following the book’s lead, attempting to answer the book’s questions, responding to the book’s challenges and therefore putting their own convictions at risk.
When we interact with A.I., on the other hand, it is we who are driving the conversation. We formulate the questions, we drive the inquiry according to our own interests and we search, all too often, for answers that simply reinforce what we already think we know. In my own interactions with ChatGPT, it has often responded, with patently insincere flattery: “That’s a great question.” It has never responded: “That’s the wrong question.” It has never challenged my moral convictions or asked me to justify myself.
To update an old aphorism, any lawyer who relies on AI has a client who has a fool for a lawyer.
Judeo-Christian anthropology
I’ve learned a lot from reading some serious religious thinkers down through the years: Augustine, Pascal, Franz Rosenzweig, Reinhold Niebuhr, TS Eliot, Walker Percy, the encyclicals of Pope John Paul II, Stanley Hauerwas, Peter Lawler, Alan Jacobs, David Bentley Hart …
The thing I most appreciate about the authors I’ve listed is how they expand my understanding of human nature. Judeo-Christian anthropology really does have a different shape than ancient Greek philosophical accounts of it, no less than modern scientific-reductionistic construals.
The country is more secular than it was 20 years ago; the Republican coalition is more secular than it was then, too; and the parts of that coalition that describe themselves as evangelicals are, on average, less likely to attend church and read the Bible regularly than their counterparts a generation ago. Their faith has evolved into an identity marker: They call themselves Christians or evangelicals because those labels convey that they’re the good Americans, as opposed to those bad Americans on the other side of the partisan and culture-war divide.
We’re Babylon
I don’t feel “patriotic” if patriotism means expressing confidence in the country as it is today. Living overseas for the past two years, in a conservative country that’s in America’s ideological crosshairs, has taught me a painful lesson about what my country stands for today, and how it uses its power in the world. “We’re Babylon,” a visiting US pastor said to me recently. He’s right. … Seriously, you have to get out of America for some time to grasp how much cultural influence we have in the world, and how bad that is.
The idea that America is “Babylon” has intrigued me for more than 50 years, after I first read Edward Tracy’s book The United States in Prophecy.
I do not recommend that book, written as it was by some manner of Evangelical or Dispensationalist. But I bought it at a time when I was Evangelical and the Evangelical Book market was flooded with crap like The Late, Great Planet Earth, which fed Evangelicals Americanism and cold war Russophobia (which differed from today’s Russophobia). The idea that the United States might be an equivocal, or even a negative, player in Bible prophecy was just irresistibly transgressive to me.
I thoroughly enjoyed the irony of using Hal Lindseyish exegesis to reach Jim Wallisish conclusions.
Still, the possibility of Tracy being at least adjacent to the truth lingered and lingers, partly because I have a much different view of Bible prophecy these days. I don’t use it to predict the future (I never really did), but I think that figures like “Babylon” can echo typologically down through the ages. In that sense “We’re Babylon” fits Edward Tracy’s exegesis awfully well (see Jeremiah 51:7-8, Revelation 14:8).
Note that “the United States as Babylon” in the constellation of my thinking antedates Trumpism by four decades or more. This is one thing I don’t blame on our current President. Indeed, events of the last 7 months or so have so debased us that it’s hard to imagine the world uniformly mourning if our instantiation of Babylon fell.
Erotica
Much later, Playboy magazine came along, in which girls removed their underwear and a boy could drive to a drugstore in a part of town where he was not known and tuck a copy into a Wall Street Journal and peruse it And later came Tropic of Cancer and Portnoy’s Complaint and now porn is freely available online though to me it has all the erotic allure of watching oil well pumps pumping in North Dakota.
Those who draw gerrymanders can get too greedy. They maximize seats by cutting their party’s margins in each seat. If 2026 is a particularly bad year for Republicans in Texas, they could lose ground from this gerrymander.
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 social medium.
At a recent Gospel Coalition conference, celebrity pastor John Piper told his audience about a task he had given ChatGPT: Write a prayer informed by the theology of Don Carson. He proceeded to read the resulting text. ChatGPT’s “prayer” seemed to tick all the theological boxes; the crowd murmured, seemingly impressed. But John Piper was not. He declared that such a “prayer” was not a prayer at all, being the product of a soulless machine rather than the expression of a worshipful human heart.
…
Machine-generated prayers really can sound just like human-generated ones, prone as we are to fall back on generic formulations and common clichés. If an AI prayer isn’t truly prayer, what implications might that have for our own praise and petition, which too often evince our programming in Christianese and other habitual forms?
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus warns his disciples not to “heap up empty phrases [“use vain repetitions,” in other translations] as the Gentiles do” (Matt. 6:7, ESV throughout). He then proceeds to teach the disciples the specific words of the Lord’s Prayer.
…
In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus addressed the problem of “vain repetitions” not by extolling the authenticity of spontaneous and personally composed—or generated?—prayers but by giving his hearers a specific prayer, with petitions whose depths his followers have meditated on for around 2,000 years.
…
[Jesus Christ] is forming people as living words. In 2 Corinthians 3:3, the apostle Paul described the Corinthian Christians as a “letter from Christ delivered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.” Elsewhere, in Colossians 3:16, he spoke of “the word of Christ dwell[ing] in you richly” in the singing of psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. The church is a living message of Christ, a people who are formed as word bearers as Holy Scripture is metabolized into us through memorization, meditation, song, prayer, sermons, reading, and praise.
This, of course, is the purpose of something like the Lord’s Prayer: that in constantly returning to these words, we might be formed by them, becoming the sort of people who can pray them fully. Spontaneity and originality can be worthwhile in their place, but far more important than the words that we produce are the words that go down into our bones and are treasured in our hearts.
It has been a very long time now since I ascribed any value to the “spontaneous” part of “spontaneous prayer” because I long ago picked up on the generic formulations, clichés, and faux fervency.
Contrariwise, when I found the Orthodox faith, the exalted words of its prayer books immediately struck me as (a) better than my own and (b) something that would form me if I continued praying them. They still are the backbone of my daily prayers.
Knowing for the first time
People in American think they know what Christianity is. Some of them intensely dislike it. Some of them dislike it for what it truly is (it was ever so), some for what they mistakenly imagine that it is.
The first of my daily prayers for America is:
Prosper your one holy, catholic and apostolic Church in America, drawing all to your Church and to true repentance and faith in You. May we remember You once more, “knowing You for the first time” in an Orthodox manner.
The quote is from T.S. Eliot’s Little Gidding, part of his famous Four Quartets:
We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.
I came across it Saturday as the epigraph for Addison Hart’s Orthodox “conversion story.” He nearly became Orthodox in 1982, but settled for a halfway measure:
Since my “first” conversion during my early twenties, these convictions have remained in me like bedrock, though they were briefly obscured. That earlier conversion consisted in a turn to a richly liturgical, mystically inclined, patristically informed, uncompromisingly traditional Anglo-Catholicism, from out of an anemic liberal Protestant Episcopalianism – a sort of “in-house” conversion since both were nominally Anglican.
…
Wildernesses don’t come with marked directions, and in recent years my intellectual religious life likewise seemed directionless. I had tried to “come home” to Anglicanism, but it wasn’t home anymore. For one thing, its sheer unrelieved blandness left me at times feeling stultified.
…
I’m not Orthodox with any other goal than to be within the historical Church (and I emphatically do not believe in an “invisible church” where affiliation is of no matter).
One of the causes I’ve consciously taken on in my 27+ years as an Orthodox Christian is to entice people who are mistaken about Christianity to take a look at Orthodox Christianity. Part of that is to help them see things they “can’t unsee” about other traditions that I think I’m competent to comment on. Another part is to feature winsome things from Orthodoxy — winsome enough to entice them into exposure to the Orthodox Faith.
“I’m the man behind the curtain”
When I first started looking into the Orthodox Church, I was still working as a stagehand. So I worked in theaters. I did big concerts, all this kind of stuff, and I was going, as I said, to the beginnings of a megachurch, and there was one point on Sunday morning that as I looked around me and I saw the people lifting up their hands and clearly having, you know, some kind of experience, I thought to myself — and it was a very cynical thought, but this was the thought that I had — “I can, through my professional skills, make them have this experience — whether I believe in it or not, through the technique of the music and the lights and so forth.”
I went to, professionally, I went to a few Dave Matthews band concerts. And so Dave Matthews band, they had this song called Ants Marching, and there’s this one moment in the song when they always turn on this huge bank of lights towards the audience, and I watched this happens three times. The audience gets very excited, goes crazy, has a big emotional experience. That is pure technique, and you can absolutely press a button and they’re suddenly having an experience. And I realized at that moment, I said to myself, “I’m the man behind the curtain. I can do this.”
Now, I don’t doubt the sincerity of those people. I grew up with those people. They’re my family. Absolutely, and I believe in their sincerity. I believe in their love for God. But at the same time, knowing that I could make that happen myself, and … that disillusioned me in a very real way.
And then my experience of orthodox worship, even a very poor version of it in terms of its its wealth, was the thing that actually overwhelmed me and not in like an emotional way like I didn’t have big emotions there was something there was a sense of being of connecting another world.
Fr. Andrew wasn’t wrong that he could use rock concert techniques to induce “spiritual” ecstasies. My experiences in Evangelicalism were fairly low-tech, but not low on technique. Tone of voice, shouting and then dropping to a whisper; “Now every head bowed and every eye closed … I see that hand; is there another” when there was no hand raised in the first place (to signify that the sermon had landed, and the fruit was ready for harvest).
I was lucky enough not to be quite good enough to be in the proto- “Praise Band,” on stage, watching the manipulation first-hand. Had I actually participated in such, I might well have lost my faith — as some who did participate lost theirs.
One of those was a friend of mine. He was good enough to be in the band. He saw that there were no hands raised when the bandleader/evangelist asked if there were others. He questioned the bandleader, who shot back angrily “I learned that from Thurlow Spurr! Don’t you dare question it!”
When the genuineness of Christian conversion is gauged by a “born-again experience,” and that experience can be produced on demand by manipulative techniques, how can you keep believing?
As it was, I (who heard the Thurlow Spurr story second-hand) only lost the kind of faith you can gin up with trickery. Instead of losing Christianity, I eventually found what Fr. Andrew found.
Come and see.
Filled with all the fullness of God
For this reason I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, from whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man, that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the width and length and depth and height—to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God ….
Ephesians 3:17-19 (emphasis added).
This has been a favorite passage of mine for almost 60 years now( I believe I even signed high school yearbooks with the citation). My love of that last phrase in particular, it seems to me, is an anticipation of my almost instant love Orthodox Christianity once I encountered it.
A very, very low bar
What the Fathers decried as schism is now regarded as normal church growth. So long as the new church does not make a point of denying the Trinity, it remains a part of the [one holy church].
As Peter Geach puts it, for Aquinas the claim that God made the world “is more like ‘the minstrel made music’ than ‘the blacksmith made a shoe’”; that is to say, creation is an ongoing activity rather than a once-and-for-all event. While the shoe might continue to exist even if the blacksmith dies, the music necessarily stops when the minstrel stops playing, and the world would necessarily go out of existence if God stopped creating it.
Edward Feser, Aquinas
Team Christian
Sometimes people hear about my religious journey and ask me about my “conversion,” but that word is a relic from the rationalist mentality — as if I traded one belief system for another. The process felt more like an inspiration, like someone had breathed life into those old biblical stories so that they now appeared true.
Today, I feel more Jewish than ever, but as I once told some friends, I can’t unread Matthew. For me, the Beatitudes are the part of the Bible where the celestial grandeur most dazzlingly shines through. So these days I’m enchanted by both Judaism and Christianity. I assent to the whole shebang. My Jewish friends, who have been universally generous and forbearing, point out that when you believe in both the Old and New Testaments, you’ve crossed over to Team Christian, which is a fair point.
I frequent a health club where they post a question on the corkboard daily. A few weeks back, one went like this:
You’re on death row. You’re to be executed tomorrow. What do you want your last meal to be?
I said “the Eucharist.”* It gratified me to hear that my Missouri Synod Lutheran friend who trains in the slot ahead of me had said the same.
I dare say that not one in ten white American evangelical would say that in 2025.
I confess that I struggle to see how “Christian” can meaningfully cover both wanting a last meal of prime rib and wanting a last meal of the body and blood of Christ.
* Confession: “Lobster” flickered in my imagination for about a half-second.
Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.
George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs
[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
I’m situated geographically in a place so sports- and Indy500-obsessed that in my former Church, men would disappear en masse on “Race Day.” Granted, I lived away from here 20-ish years, but it’s still a point of sinful pride that I’ve never been. Not to the race, not to the trials, not to carburation day.
(I apologize for some funky formatting today. After all these years, I still have trouble dealing with numbered or bulleted lists within block quotes.)
Filioque
As a protestant, I had no idea that the filioque (the words “and from the Son” in the Nicean Creed concerning the procession of the Holy Spirit) was added to the Creed hundreds of years later, nor that it was rejected from the beginning by Christians outside the jurisdiction of the Roman Patriarch, nor even (very distinctly at least) that there were catholic Christians outside the jurisdiction of the Roman Patriarch.
Since becoming Orthodox, I have taken it as a matter of high importance to reject the filioque, but I don’t recall previously seeing all of these reasons for the rejection:
Eastern Europe was converted to Christianity by Byzantine missionaries, the most prominent of whom are Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius. These bonds of religion created a deep sympathy between Bulgar to Byzantine. The Franks attempted to sever these bonds by sending missionaries into Eastern Europe, claiming that the Byzantines had taught them a heterodox version of Christianity and encouraging them to use the filioque.
I know Catholics are tired of Orthodox apologists going on about the Franks. But this really is an important test-case, for the following reasons:
1. The threat of Arianism was resolved 300 years before the Schism. So, adding the filioque served no pastoral function. On the contrary, it was deeply divisive.
2. The underlying theology of the filioque was hotly disputed, especially by the Eastern patriarchs. So, adding the filioque did not express the mind of the universal Church.
3. The original Creed had been drafted in Council for a reason: it was supposed to express the *consent* and *concensus* of the orthodox, catholic bishops. So, adding the filioque defeated the whole purpose of the Creed.
4. For about six hundred years, Popes had taught the dangers of inserting the filioque into the Creed. So, adding the filioque violated even Rome’s local customs.
5. The Ecumenical Councils had ruled that the Creed should not be modified. So, adding the filiioque violated the Holy Canons.
6. Rome was advancing the *filioque* for worldly reasons only. So, adding the filioque would have allowed a single bishop to advance his own political and economic interests at the whole Church’s expense.
The Eastern Patriarchs had every reason to reject the insertion of the filioque, and no reason to accept it—none except, “The pope said so, and we have to do whatever the pope says.”
To anyone who has had, be it only once, the true experience of worship, all this is revealed immediately as the ersatz it is. He knows that the secularist’s worship of relevance is simply incompatible with the true relevance of worship. And it is here, in this miserable liturgical failure, whose appalling results we are only beginning to see, that secularism reveals its ultimate religious emptiness and, I will not hesitate to say, its utterly anti-Christian essence.
Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World
Protestant, Catholic, Non-Denom
As my readers know, I’ve been an Orthodox Christian ever since I began blogging. The more attentive readers may know that before that I was Reformed (i.e., Calvinist, and specifically Christian Reformed) and before that, I was a generic Wheaton-College type evangelical.
Or maybe I should say “a generic Wheaton-College type evangelical as evangelicalism was configured in the 1950s through the mid-1970s.” Because it has come to my attention more forcefully, and in a way that more painfully implicates and pronounces doom on the kinds of Christian I once was, that things are changing. The evangelicalism I knew is not as powerful as it once was; evangelical denominations are shrinking and dying. So are Calvinist denominations. The Protestantism I knew most closely is increasingly nondenominational, and doesn’t care much about doctrine or sacraments, and increasingly doesn’t even want to be called “evangelical” or even “Protestant.”
This affects me closely because my wife remains Christian Reformed, and I consider it a pretty good penultimate tradition for an Orthodox Christian. And there is a very strong trend toward those denominational Churches dying out in favor of non-denoms.
And it worries me because those nondenominational Churches tend far too much to be personality cults and hotbeds of rampant sexual and other clergy abuse. And God only knows what they’re teaching, insofar as they’re teaching anything other than a mooshy-gooshy relationship with Jesus and a firm commitment to the GOP as a way of gaining power.
Yeah, this means I’ve gained some fresh respect even for the progressive Protestant denominations (which are also dying, even faster than the conservatives). At least there’s some accountability to hierarchies less likely than local parishioners to be mesmerized by Mr. Charisma. And some of them retain a liturgy that will expose worshippers to more scripture and doctrine than Joel Osteen can even imagine.
In any event, I say all that to introduce you to four of the thought-provoking articles (presented in the order in which I encountered them) that brought to my attention how much things are changing in my former haunts. A common thread is that denominational Protestantism is in deep, deep trouble; one goes so far as to suggest that nondenominational Churches are not really Protestant, but a whole new tradition:
Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.
George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs
[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
I didn’t anticipate blogging much about the new American Pope, but I’ve come across several surprisingly good and insightful (i.e., they fit my biases) commentaries.
Nick Catoggio
Nick Catoggio doesn’t entirely fall into the fallacy of reducing religion to crypto-politics (see Ross Douthat, below), but he does write for a politically-oriented Dispatch. So it’s no surprise to see him muse about political implications among other things:
The last thing Leo wants for his papacy, I’m sure, is to see it sucked into the sleazy reality show that is Trump-era American politics, a black hole of shame and nihilism from which no dignity can escape.
In fact, my guess is that he’s less likely to comment on policy in the United States than the other candidates to succeed Francis would have been. Doing so might tempt Catholics here to choose between their loyalty to an American-led church and their loyalty to Trumpism, and not all would choose the church. It would also demean the pontificate, as surely the Holy Father has more exalted business to attend to than serving as the president’s latest foil in America’s degenerate “politics as pro wrestling” populist spectacle.
Most of all, it would show a world that’s been dominated by the United States for 80 years that even the papacy can’t prevent an American from parochially and narcissistically prioritizing his own country’s affairs. In an age of “America First,” where Uncle Sam unapologetically cares only about himself, the so-called Ugly American has never looked uglier. If Leo really does mean to prove that he “cares about the entire world,” the easiest way to do it is to reject that narcissism by ignoring the United States as completely as possible.
Jonathan Last
Catoggio pointed me to another article that’s spicier than his summary:
I expected to see an African pope in my lifetime. I never expected to see an American pope.
Why?
Because the Vatican is dominated by Europeans and they are deeply suspicious of America and American Catholics. To them, we are toddlers with shotguns.
Cardinal George of Chicago, of happy memory, was one of my great mentors, and he said: ‘Look, until America goes into political decline, there won’t be an American pope.’ And his point was, if America is kind of running the world politically, culturally, economically, they don’t want America running the world religiously. So, I think there’s some truth to that, that we’re such a superpower and so dominant, they don’t wanna give us, also, control over the church.
Barron is one of America’s MAGA priests, so naturally he could not imagine that anyone else in the world might view America as being in decline.
But we are and it’s obvious.
It’s obvious to the people of Canada, who just elected a prime minister exclusively on the grounds that the American century was over.
It’s obvious to the Chinese, who are planning to step into the vacuum and establish their own world order.
It’s obvious to our European allies, who are now making plans for a future in which America is toothless, lazy, and impotent.
And maybe—just maybe—this reality was obvious the College of Cardinals, too.
Maybe they looked at America and realized that it was no longer a colossus bestriding the globe. No longer exceptional. Not just in decline, but deluded about its reality.
Maybe Robert Prevost was elected pope because the Church realized they no longer needed to be concerned about America power.
I hoped that someone who doesn’t focus on the crypto-politics of religions would write about Pope Leo.
Ross Douthat stepped up: What the World Needs From Pope Leo (shared link). If I could put it in a nutshell, I wouldn’t share the link, but this jumped out at me:
This is a much weirder landscape than the one in which liberal and conservative Catholics clashed over contraception or gay marriage, and it’s likely to get weirder still as we move deeper into a digital and virtual and artificial-intelligence-mediated existence.
Catholicism has had little of note to say thus far about what it means to be Christian and human under these conditions or how Catholics should think morally and spiritually about their relationships to these technologies. But if Leo XIV reigns as long as Leo XIII did, no issue may be more important to the faithful — or the world.
Why should I care?
My fascination with the Pope (and his precedessors since John Paul II) has a couple of sources:
He is seen as the very Vicar of Christ by 1.4 billion of my separated brethren.
He is one of a handful of distilled symbols of Christianity for my countrymen. (The MAGA response confirms that MAGA hates any remotely authentic Christianity because there’s too little hate in it. “Men loved darkness rather than light” and all that.)
UPDATE: Therefore, the only way to be an inconsequential Pope is to die quickly after elevation.
What he cannot yet undo are barriers to healing the Great Schism, but Popes can undermine (and have undermined) those barriers so that they may someday collapse.
Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.
George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs
[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
In the Orthodox Churches they preserve that pristine liturgy. So beautiful. We have lost a bit the sense of adoration. They preserve it. They praise God, they adore God, singing. Time stops. The center is God. . . . Once, speaking about the western Church, of western Europe, above all the grown-up Church, they told me this phrase: Lux ex oriente, ex occidente luxus. [“Light comes from the East, luxury from the West.”] Consumerism, well-being, have done much harm. Instead, you preserve this beauty of God at the center, the point of reference. When reading Dostoyevsky, I believe that for all of us he must be an author to read and reread, because he has wisdom. One perceives the Russian soul, the Eastern soul. It is something that will do us all good. We need this renewal, this fresh air from the East, of this light from the Orient. . . . Too often, the luxus of the West causes us to lose the horizon. I don’t know. This is what I’m moved to say.
During the first millennium, the universal communion of the Churches in the ordinary course of events was maintained through fraternal relations between the bishops.
The bishop of Rome did not exercise canonical authority over the churches of the East.
These are important concessions by a Pope. Much more remains to be done to heal the Great Schism. Meanwhile, against my initial gut reaction, I now pray for the soul of God’s servant, Francis.
The worst of all possible Christian worlds
Not everyone feels as kindly toward Francis as does Michael Warren Davis:
Francis was thus my own worst Protestant nightmare: an authoritarian Roman pope driving a liberal Protestant agenda, a leader who embodied the worst of all possible Christian worlds.
Time will tell whether the next pope will follow in Francis’s footstep and permit the continuation of liberal Protestant policies. It’s up to the men who will be gathering in the Sistine Chapel in the coming weeks. As a Catholic friend once said to me about the last papal election, the Holy Spirit never errs. But, he added, the same cannot be said for the College of Cardinals.
I’m not claiming to be a good Catholic. I’m far from it. I’m a terrible one in many ways. I honestly, sincerely believe the church is wrong in some — but by no means all — of its teachings on sexuality. Lust has undoubtedly mastered me at times the way it has many men, and always will. But I also know my soul has far deeper problems than my love for other men, however muddied with desire; and that the world has lost its way so much more profoundly in other parts of life: in our materialism, our selfishness, our wealth and comfort, our smugness and distraction, and our abuse of our sacred planet.
The italicized portion of the block-quote bespeaks a genuine Christian faith, and I don’t have to agree with the rest to view it so.
A bitter pill
for every advance, there was an asterisk, and for every proclamation of love, a delineation of limits, so that Francis — who died on Monday at the age of 88 — personified the indelible tension in the church’s official teaching about homosexuality, which he never squarely renounced. That teaching holds that being gay isn’t a sin but that acting on those feelings is “intrinsically disordered.”
That’s tough to get your head around in the abstract. It’s even more difficult if you’ve spent much time in the church and with its clergy ….
I’ve never seen how Rome’s position is all that tough to get your head around. “A bitter pill to swallow” is what I think Bruni may intend.
Be it remembered
What’s church good for?
[O]ur religious institutions are most important not for reasons of civic utility, such as running soup kitchens or cleaning up after natural disasters. No, their highest function is offering us access to the fullest truth about our world.
Yuval Levin via Joshua T. Katz. I encountered this quote for the first time this week, and I love it because it defies every effort to instrumentalize Church (or Synagogue, as in Levin’s case, or Mosque).
God does not have an anger problem
It is sinful to ascribe to God the characteristic features of fallen man by alleging, for example, that God is angry and vengeful, and therefore He must be propitiated and appeased. Such an attitude wants to make it appear that it is God Who needs curing, and not man. But this is sacrilegious. The sinful man, who is characterized by egoism and arrogance, is offended. We cannot say that God is offended. . . . Consequently, sin is not an insult to God, Who must be cured, but our own illness, and therefore we need to be cured
Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox
That’s not necessarily a mike-drop observation. We have an overabundance of Gramscians trying to march through our institutions these days, but few who are Gramscian as part of an explicitly “religious” movement.
Orthodox hagiographies are full of Saints who had to be dragged kicking and screaming (as it were) to accept ordination to the Priesthood, or elevation to a Bishopric. I’ll drive my stake in the ground here: A Christian may legitimatly be led to office, but hunger for power over others is anti-Christian.
An old truth that we keep forgetting
Reason is an absolute—all is in ruins. Yet those who ask me to believe this world picture also ask me to believe that Reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of mindless matter at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. Here is flat contradiction. They ask me at the same moment to accept a conclusion and to discredit the only testimony on which that conclusion can be based. The difficulty is to me a fatal one; and the fact that when you put it to many scientists, far from having an answer, they seem not even to understand what the difficulty is, assures me that I have not found a mare’s nest but detected a radical disease in their whole mode of thought from the very beginning.
C.S. Lewis, Weight of Glory
A surprising possibility
What’s driving young people to Christianity? In UnHerd, Niall Gooch argued the answer may lie in the strict moral demands of modern secularism. “At its best, Christianity is not a moralistic religion — in other words, it does not place the expectation of perfect behaviour at its core. It is repentance and reconciliation, not respectability, that are central to the internal logic of the faith. The Christian moral system is also coherent and predictable,” he wrote. “Modern secular morality, by contrast, is extremely censorious and has a strongly arbitrary element, as we have seen in the last decade or so of ‘cancel culture.’ People have been subjected to storms of anonymous criticism, resulting in lost jobs and lost livelihoods, with no clear limiting principle and no real interest in proportionality. To make matters worse, this is all highly impersonal and offers no clear pathway for restoration and forgiveness.”
To call the unknown “random” is to plant the flag by which to colonize and exploit the known. . . . To call the unknown by its right name, “mystery,” is to suggest that we had better respect the possibility of a larger, unseen pattern that can be damaged or destroyed and, with it, the smaller patterns. . . . But if we are up against mystery, then knowledge is relatively small, and the ancient program is the right one: Act on the basis of ignorance.
Mark Mitchell and Nathan Schlueter , The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry
Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.
George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs
[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
From early adolescence to age forty-nine, my life as a Christian (which started when I was very young) was very American, in Evangelical and Calvinist modes. I got into it pretty deeply, as I have a compulsion to figure things out, and that involved reading lots of stern explanations (“theology”).
Then, twenty-eight or so years ago, I stumbled into an Orthodox Christian Church:
Having settled in for a few decades, what have I found uniquely true about the Orthodox Church?
It’s hard to put into words. That’s why Orthodox evangelism tends to consist of “come and see.”
Harder still for me personally, I need to find words for feelings and tendencies that an intellectualoid has trouble trusting — things that may be true but approach ineffability. I have a Dostoyevsky “Beauty Will Save the World” sticker on my office window, but long habit and self-image keep pulling me back toward “Spock-like logic … will save the world.”
Yesterday, though, I heard something that can serve as a decent summary that I suspect that a lot of American Christians need to hear:
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 there 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 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.
Just as the Bishop of Oxford refused to consider that he might be descended from an ape, so now are many in the West reluctant to contemplate that their values, and even their very lack of belief, might be traceable back to Christian origins.
Tom Holland, Dominion
The virtue of essays
I write here not as a teacher to students but rather as a reader to other readers, a citizen to other citizens. I write because I think I have learned a few things in my teaching life that are relevant to our common life. You will see what those are if you read on.
My approach here is anything but systematic. Of all the literary genres, I am fondest of the essay, with its meandering course that (we hope) faithfully represents the meanderings of the human mind … certain images in advance and people will recur throughout this book, returning perhaps when you think we’re done with them. I write this way because none of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.
Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread with the Dead. That last sentence is a gem.
Notional Evangelical Bibicism
As a public relations stunt, Trump’s Bible photo might seem unserious, but the president certainly understood the importance of Christian scripture to a significant voting bloc. Evangelicals are biblicists, and the extent to which American religiosity has been dominated by evangelical Protestantism correlates to the degree to which American culture has been shaped by the Bible.
When I try to explain to people why we need to recover patristic interpretation, the biggest obstacle I face is the desire of my interlocutors to establish the one, true meaning of the text. When I assert that there is no such thing, I provoke raised eyebrows: I must be playing fast and loose with the biblical text, making it echo my preconceptions. My insistence that biblical texts have multiple, even innumerable meanings contradicts our modern objectivism. My defense of patristic allegorizing likewise elicits fears of arbitrariness and subjectivism.
Nearly two decades ago, Bruce McCormack, professor of systematic theology at Princeton Seminary, wrote: “The situation in which Christian theology is done in the United States today is shaped most dramatically by the slow death of the Protestant churches.” He went on:
if current rates of decline in membership continue, all that will be left by mid-century will be Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and non-denominational evangelical churches. . . . The churches of the Reformation will have passed from the scene—and with their demise, there will be no obvious institutional bearers of the message of the Reformation. What all of this means in practice is that it will become more and more necessary, for the sake of the future of Christianity, to establish stronger ecumenical relations with the Catholics and the Orthodox.
This is a grave prediction, but its sobriety makes it not just prescient but practical. Non-catholic varieties of Christendom are here for good, but Goldilocks Protestantism was always doomed to fail. It presumed too much, relying on a common inheritance—patristic, medieval, and cultural—that was bound to be called into question by future reformers in search of their own style of biblical renewal.
In any case, McCormack is right: Whether, in the coming decades, magisterial Christians look “up” or “down” for friendship and cooperation, they will be living in a world without Protestantism. In truth, they already are.
Many a man will live and die upon a dogma: no man will be a martyr for a conclusion.
John Henry Newman
Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.
George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 