Category: Nominalism and Realism

Nominalism is rampant in Western Christendom

Father’s Day 2025

Secularism

A modern secularist quite often accepts the idea of God. What, however, he emphatically negates is precisely the sacramentality of man and world.

Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World

The prophet Stanley speaks

Atheism slips into the church where God really does not matter, as we go about building bigger and better congregations (church administration), confirming people’s self-esteem (worship), enabling people to adjust to their anxieties brought on by their materialism (pastoral care), and making Christ a worthy subject for poetic reflection (preaching). At every turn the church must ask itself, Does it really make any difference, in our life together, in what we do, that in Jesus Christ God is reconciling the world to himself?

Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens

Undermining Early Power

Israel seems to be the first instance in which the forgiveness of debt and the practice of Sabbatarian rest – for people, land, and animals, came to be written into the very fabric of life and given divine sanction. And, even in the non-Sabbath years, there was a prohibition against harvesting an entire field. A portion had to be left standing so that the poor could “glean” the fields for their needs. Maximum efficiency was forbidden. This way of life was not an effort to solidify earthly power, but to undermine it with a radical understanding of the purpose of human existence.

Fr. Stephen Freeman

Doing the next thing

I was very struck as a young man reading the fiction of Iris Murdoch, particularly her novel “The Bell.” At the end of that, you’re faced with a chapter about the experience of somebody who has been intensely involved in religious activity and has just had an absolutely traumatic shock to everything that he believes in and everything he holds dear.

He’s living next door to a convent, and all he can do is to go to Mass every morning. And I thought, “Yes, I see what’s going on there. He’s doing the next thing.” He’s treading water, you might say, but also he knows something can be done — not to keep the darkness at bay but to keep breathing, to keep moving, to keep open to something. I think that sense of wanting to keep open to something is probably quite near the center of what I believe about a spiritual life. You don’t pray or meditate or contemplate in order to get results, exactly.

Rowan Williams with Peter Wehner.

More:

I discovered Dostoyevsky as a teenager and read him fairly intensely as a student and as a graduate student. What struck me most was two things. One is he’s very good at depicting characters who are holy, who are in some sense transparent to the divine and also letting you see that they’re not going to have all the answers. They’re going to be the window that lets the light in. And I thought, “That tells me something about holiness. Don’t look for the leader, the controller, the problem solver. Look for where the light gets in.” In Leonard Cohen’s famous image, the persons who are part of the crack that lets the light in.

Hiding God’s word in our hearts

“Thy word have I hid in my heart, that I might not sin against Thee” (Ps. 119:11) does not, I think, mean “I’ve memorized a lot of proof-texts for my tribe’s view of things.” I even suspect that someone with very few proof-texts on the tip of their tongue may have more of God’s word hidden in their heart than, say, Jack Van Impe.

New Measures then, Standard Operating Procedure now

The most prominent evangelist of the [Second Great Awakening] was Charles Finney. Often painted as a religious salesman and professional revivalist, Finney believed that success as an evangelist was measured by the number of conversions one could elicit. When accused of using emotional manipulation to push people toward accepting Christ, Finney responded by saying,

“The results justify my methods. Thousands upon thousands of converts prove my methods are sound.”

What methods exactly did Finney utilize? In his evangelistic crusade, Finney implemented what he called the New Measures, which can more accurately be described as mood management. Finney often used hymns to emotionally prepare audiences for a religious experience, creating an atmosphere that was conducive to conversions. As the genesis of today’s altar call, Finney called unsaved men to come sit at the mourner’s bench, or mercy seat, in front of the crowd and receive a special prayer for salvation. Finney popularized the mourner’s bench, which led to it appearing more often in different churches. From the pulpit, Finney also occasionally called out non-Christians by name, increasing the pressure on them to make a conversion to Christianity. According to Finney, conversions would certainly occur if evangelists planned, advertised, utilized the emotional impact of music, and strategically managed emotions.

In many ways, it could be argued that modern evangelical megachurches operate in the same way as Finney’s SGA meetings.

Many megachurches seem to ascribe to Finney’s New Measures, using emotional music, lighting programs, and foggy haze to create an emotional atmosphere. Modern megachurch pastors rarely call out non-believers by name, but altar calls are common as an emotional culmination for a worship service.

Isaac Cullum, Megachurches: A Striking Resemblance to the Second Great Awakening? – Juicy Ecumenism (bold added).

I cannot vouch for altar calls being common in megachurches, but coincidentally, these techniques are another instance of the “man behind the curtain” I described last week.

On leaving a church

Yesterday I saw a man in his late thirties who recognized me, and approached to say he is a fellow convert to Orthodox Christianity. I asked him for his story. He said he was raised in a Protestant church (he didn’t specify which kind), but it left him cold. It was cold, formal, and devoid of any passion for the faith. He drifted away.

“When I attended my first Divine Liturgy, it was — I don’t know how to describe it,” he said, with tears coming to his eyes. “This was ten years ago, and I still get shivers. I didn’t understand the Old Church Slavonic language, but it didn’t matter. It was like I didn’t have to think of anything — God was so present.”

I mentioned to him a story of mine familiar to you readers: that during Covid, we began to see at my old parish an influx of younger people — married couples and single men, most of them from Evangelical megachurch backgrounds. They all had more or less the same stories: that Covid shook them to the core about the fragility of our civilization, and they concluded that their normie middle-class suburban churches were not forming them as Christians with the kind of spiritual depth that would allow them to endure a severe social crisis. They showed up seeking more.

He then said something profound: “In the old days, people left their churches because they didn’t believe in God. Now they leave them because they do.”

Rod Dreher (who I’m trying again after a sabbatical)

The guy can write every day more than I’m willing to read every day. I’ve got to learn to skim better.

Poetic Theodicy

The Knockdown Question

Why does God not spare the innocent?

The answer to that is not in
the same world as the question
so you would shrink from me
in terror if I could answer it.

(Les Murray, New Selected Poems)

Philistines

[T]rue Philistines are not people who are incapable of recognising beauty; they recognise it all too well; they detect its presence anywhere, immediately, and with a flair as infallible as that of the most sensitive aesthete—but for them, it is in order to be able better to pounce upon it at once and to destroy it before it can gain a foothold in their universal empire of ugliness. Ignorance is not simply the absence of knowledge, obscurantism does not result from a dearth of light, bad taste is not merely a lack of good taste, stupidity is not a simple want of intelligence: all these are fiercely active forces, that angrily assert themselves on every occasion; they tolerate no challenge to their omnipresent rule. In every department of human endeavour, inspired talent is an intolerable insult to mediocrity. If this is true in the realm of aesthetics, it is even more true in the world of ethics. More than artistic beauty, moral beauty seems to exasperate our sorry species. The need to bring down to our own wretched level, to deface, to deride and debunk any splendour that is towering above us, is probably the saddest urge of human nature.

Simon Leys, “An Empire of Ugliness,” which I gather is one essay in The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (via Brad East)

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.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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.

Pentecost 2025

AI at Prayer

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.

Alastair Roberts

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).

Addison Hodges Hart, How I wandered into Orthodoxy: an uncharacteristically personal reflection

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 Stephen Damick to Justin Brierly.

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].

Fr. Lawrence Farley

Creation

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.

David Brooks, The Shock of Faith: It’s Nothing Like I Thought It Would Be

Last Meal

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.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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.

Sunday, January 12, 2025

America’s Puritan-Lockean synthesis

A few months back, I decided once again to subscribe to Touchstone magazine, a subscription I had allowed to lapse for many years.

The first issue to arrive I found disappointing,, but the second included Carlo Lancelotti’s America verus Europe, which advances the idea that the:

notion of a “delayed” American secularization stands in contrast to the views of many prominent European thinkers of the last century. Curiously, they also thought that America was “special” but in the opposite sense. They deemed the United States to be far more advanced than Europe in terms of a scientistic, utilitarian, individualistic, and materialistic worldview. For example, as early as 1943, when Simone Weil returned from New York to London a few months before dying, she wrote that the great danger threatening European Christianity was “Americanization,” by which she meant detachment from the past, which was slowly killing people’s ability to perceive the supernatural. The “Western” spirit of the Enlightenment “is found in America in its pure state and to the second power, and we are in danger of being devoured by it. . . . the Americanization of Europe would lead to the Americanization of the whole world.”

This view rings true to me, as does the idea that this outcome was baked into our founding by a “Puritan-Lockean synthesis.” But I’m still chewing on it, especially the thought of that founding synthesis, which I’m unprepared to expound. The whole constellation of critique is likely to reappear here in the future. Meanwhile, it appears to me that the article already is unlocked for the curious.

Something to chew on

It is a strange yet incontrovertible fact that, when God did take flesh, He in many ways (though certainly not all) revealed himself to be closer in spirit to the Tao of Lao Tzu then to God as conceived by the Hebrews at that time, even though the Hebrews had the revelation of Moses. This might be difficult to accept by those who are accustomed to thinking of Christ as the fulfillment of the expectation specifically of the Hebrews. Ancient Christian tradition, however, holds that Christ satisfied the longing of all the nations.

Hieromonk Damascene, Christ the Eternal Tao

American Pharisaism

I have wondered much that Christianity is not practiced by the very people who vouch for that wonderful conception of exemplary living. It appears that they are anxious to pass on their religion to all other races, but keep little of it for themselves …

…

It is my personal belief, after thirty-five years experience of it, that there is no such thing as “Christian civilization.” I believe that Christianity and modern civilization are opposed and irreconcilable, and the spirit of Christianity and of our ancient religion is essentially the same.

Charles Alexander Eastman, whose American Indian name was Ohiyesa. Quoted by Paul Kingsnorth in his 2024 Erasmus Lecture.

More of Kingsnorth’s Lecture:

What, actually, is spiritually beneficial about this “Western civilization”—or any civilization? After all, Babylon and Babel, Sodom and Gomorrah, were as civilized as the ancient world got.

To find out, we might hold up the stated values of our civilization against the famous list of seven deadly sins. The list was compiled in the sixth century by Pope Gregory I. He based it on an earlier list of eight passions, compiled by the fourth-century monk Evagrius Ponticus, which is still current in the Eastern Church. How is Western civilization doing today at fending off these sins?

Pride is celebrated everywhere—pride in nation, status, wealth, ethnic group, identity, religion. We have a month-long festival named for it. Greed is the basis of our economy. Along with envy, it is the cornerstone of the idol of our time, the universally worshiped god known as “economic growth.” If we were neither greedy nor envious, the economy would collapse in five minutes. Wrath is the fuel beneath the culture wars and all of our political factions. As for lust—find me a billboard or a film or a song or a brand of shoes that doesn’t piggyback on this most primal human passion. It is perhaps behind only gluttony in its ubiquity. Even sloth has been monetized. How else could something as oxymoronic as a “leisure industry” even exist?

Macho-Man Orthodoxy

There seems to be a surge of interest in the secular and the heterodox press, blogosphere and podcast worlds in the distinctly masculine flavor of Orthodox Christianity’s growth in the USA.

I’m happy that my parish has seen a surge in attendance and people joining. Our growth does skew toward young men, but I have a God-daughter who came on her own, and we recently added a single mom with two kids. A godson, older than me, came with his wife at first from dissatisfaction with his United Methodist church coupled with the ethnic tag on our diocese, which matched his ancestry!

But one particular recent article, in “secular” press, about the male-skewed growth of Orthodox Christianity, rang false more often than it rang true.

False notes:

  • tougher form of Christianity (a Priest lamentably said that, so I can’t blame the author)
  • They must fast, too … (fast from many foods, but not from all food)
  • puts emphasis on denial and pushing yourself physically (superficial and misleading; a good priest likely would tell someone going to extremes to lighten up because they’re missing the point)
  • the strict church (nobody’s monitoring compliance)
  • pushes them physically and mentally
  • masculine

These snippets are not so much false factually as false to my experience of Orthodoxy.

It has been notable since I entered Orthodoxy (or earlier), long before the present growth surge, that converts skewed male, and that if a whole family came in, it likely was the dad who instigated and led the conversion. People puzzled over the reason for that, but the idea of men consciously motivated by “more masculine” wasn’t front and center.

I doubt that it should be so today, but I’m not positive about that. My experience of the Orthodoxy faith is largely confined to one parish, which I’ve served as a tonsured Reader and de facto Cantor/Psaltis from my earliest days in the Church. In other words, I don’t get out much, but I wouldn’t agree that I need to get out more. Sampling other parishes is likely to prove superficial, and as they say “the plural of anecdote is not data.”

In that vein, these are the only two paragraphs that didn’t feel a bit “cringe”:

Father Timothy Pavlatos, who leads St Katherine Greek Orthodox Church in Chandler, Arizona, agrees that the “challenge” of the Orthodox church appeals to many young men.

“Orthodoxy is challenging in the physical sense too, and it requires a lot… they live in a world where it’s instant gratification and just take what you want, what you feel you want, what you think you need, Orthodoxy is the opposite of that, it’s denying yourself.”

The article emphasizes the sentiments of recent male converts, but Orthodoxy is capacious and somewhat disorienting for someone new to it. We (thinking back to myself 27 years ago) ask dumb questions and utter dumber opinions. To the degree that men are interested in Orthodoxy as a kind of spiritual testosterone, promoting distinctly masculine growth, I foresee them dropping out when the reality dawns on them.

We all, converts from other Christianities or not, bring baggage into the Church, and the doors shouldn’t be closed to those kinds of baggage but open to my kind. The important thing is whether a convert wants to conform his (or her) life to Christ through the life of the Church, and is prepared to renounce and repent of un-Christlike opinions along the way.

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.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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.

Sunday, 6/28/24

Are we all expressive individualists now?

Nor does this allow for any kind of Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox triumphalism, whereby the historical continuity and unity of the institutions can be presented as an antidote to Protestant fragmentation. To be a Roman Catholic today is to make a choice. Thoughtful Roman Catholics may object to this claim by pointing to the sacramental power that they ascribe to baptism. But that does not really address the matter of lived experience: every faithful cradle Catholic has still made a decision to live his or her Christian life as a Catholic amid a world of other possible options, from atheism to Islam to Bible churches and Pentecostalism. When it comes to how we think of ourselves, we are all expressive individualists now, and there is no way we can escape from this fact. It is the essence of the world in which we have to live and of which we are a part.

Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self

It has always seemed to me that this argument, which is important for someone to make, is missing some things: truth, historicity, holiness, apostolicity, catholicity. I’m only free to leave the Orthodox Church in the way Shem, Ham or Japheth would have been free to leave the ark on day 30 of The Deluge. We’ve been in a sort of Deluge — the last days — for 2000 years now.

For good reason, though I was nearly 50 years discovering it, I never felt that the Evangelical Covenant Church, Wheaton Bible Church, Lakewood Presbyterian Church in Dallas, First Baptist Church in Prescott, or the Christian Reformed Church in my hometown was the Ark of Salvation.

Western Modernity

It might not be too much of a stretch … to suggest that modernity in itself is primarily a war against religion – and that Western modernity is therefore primarily a war against our Christian heritage.

Paul Kingsnorth, God in the Age of Iron

Images flying around the internet, of a drag Last Supper tableau in the Olympic opening ceremonies, make the snippet more salient than when I first snipped it.

Kill your enemies, but not so much

Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

It is a very simple statement. However, when anyone begins to suggest what that might look like, critics quickly begin to offer egregious examples that would ask us to bear the unbearable, with the inevitable conclusion: “Kill your enemies.” What is suggested, in effect, is that Christians should respond in the same way as any tyrant would, only a little less so. “Kill your enemies, but not so much.”

…

The patriotic mythologies that came into existence together with modernity’s nationalisms are siren songs that seek to create loyalties that are essentially religious in nature. World War I, in the early 20th century, was deeply revealing of the 19th century’s false ideologies. There, in the fields of France, European Christians killed one another by the millions in the name of entities that, in some cases, had existed for less than 50 years (Germany was born, more or less, in 1871). The end of that war did nothing, apparently, to awaken Christians to the madness that had been born in their midst.

…

These passions are worth careful examination, particularly as they have long been married to America’s many denominational Christianities. I think it is noteworthy that one of the most prominent 19th century American inventions was Mormonism. There, we have the case of a religious inventor (Joseph Smith) literally writing America into the Scriptures and creating an alternative, specifically American, account of Christ and salvation. It was not an accident. He was, in fact, drawing on the spirit of the Age, only more blatantly and heretically. But there are many Christians whose Christianity is no less suffused with the same sentiments.

…

Asking questions of these things quickly sends some heads spinning. They wonder, “Are we not supposed to love our country?” As an abstraction, no. We love people; we love the land. We owe honor to honorable things and persons. The Church prays for persons: the President, civil authorities, the armed forces. We are commanded to pray and to obey the laws as we are able in good conscience. Nothing more.

Fr. Stephen Freeman

Universal Therapy

Late last week on his Substack Jemar Tisby shared with his readers some simple counsel:

You, presumably all of you, need to go to therapy:

You need to go to therapy. This is your gentle but firm reminder that mental health is part—perhaps the most crucial one—of your overall health. Physical exercise, a healthy diet, getting enough sleep–all of those matter and impact your mental health. But there is nothing quite like talking to someone who is trained in all the ways our mind can help and hinder us.

…

… It’s not that therapy is bad, of course. Tisby is correct that there can be value in talking to someone with a particular sort of expertise who will help you think through a problem, make better sense of a painful experience, or develop new ways of understanding or handling complicated relationships. That is certainly true.

Yet to suggest that everyone needs therapy is an excellent example … in which therapeutic concepts effectively become our doctrine of sin. … If you can’t think of anyone who does not need therapy or any time when someone might not need therapy, then you’ve elevated therapy to a place it oughtn’t occupy.

Jake Meador, Therapy and Bug Men

JD Vance’s journey

There is no doubt that the J. D. Vance of Hillbilly Elegy has changed. While news outlets will be tempted to tell this story of Vance’s transformation as a simple parable of power’s corrupting effects, there is a more illuminating account of what happened to Vance: namely, his own.

In 2020, Vance wrote an essay about his conversion to the Catholic faith: “How I Joined the Resistance.” Hillbilly Elegy has often been hailed as essential reading for “anyone wanting to understand Trump’s rise.” Vance’s 2020 essay might be the same for anyone wanting to understand the shifting currents in conservative Christianity and politics. Vance’s journey toward religion—the first millennial on a major party ticket—is the same that is and will be trekked by many millennial and Gen Z Christians of a political orientation.

…

Some conservatives (even religious conservatives like myself) still hold to the same economic outlook Vance did in his 2016 memoir. Some of us even hold to that economic program of tax cuts, Social Security cuts, and a suspicion of even the best-intended of regulations for reasons we find consonant with the Christian faith. But it’s important to note that J. D. Vance abandoned that outlook for religious reasons. While Vance blasts his journey to atheism as “both conventional and boring,” the truth is that his journey to Catholicism and a certain set of politics is becoming increasingly conventional as well—in ways that students of both politics and religion would be foolish to ignore.

John Shelton, When The Resistance Comes To Rule: J. D. Vance and the Apotheosis of Postliberal Politics

Hauerwas on personal relationship with Jesus

Hauerwas also addressed his emphasis upon concern around self-deception and his disagreement with piety, which he sees as an invitation to setting oneself up as a self-exemplar.

The Duke theologian is a curiosity for his disavowal of theological liberalism and simultaneous extreme dislike for evangelicalism. “I’m not a follower of either, because, one, I don’t think you get to make Christianity up: you receive it through the exemplification of people who live in a way that scares you.”

… I just don’t know the Evangelical world, but what I know of it I dislike intensely. I mean, the last thing one should want is a personal relationship with Jesus – I mean, that’s letting yourself control who Jesus is.

Stanley Hauerwas

… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the 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 (NKJV)

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.

Sunday, 12/3/23

Personal Status Report

I’ve recently been challenged to think again through how the raw reality of divided Christianity should cash out in my life. I don’t think I’ve been getting that right, and I’m working on it (without for one second doubting the claims of Orthodox Christianity).

For one thing, viewed from the 30,000-foot level, my convictions combined with a propensity for polemics, may have led me to sin against Christian charity. I’ll leave it enigmatically there for now.

As I work through this, the tone of my posts may change.

Crypto-casuistry

Ken Myers: … Until the middle of the 20th century, Catholic moral theology and pastoral guidance were dominated by a series of moral manuals, which approached ethical decisions casuistically, lists of rules and authoritative citations. One of the mid-twentieth century critics of these manuals, a French Jesuit, judged that they were “far too negative and concerned chiefly with minimal obligations. Virtues were passed over in favor of commandments and law.” When I talk with Matthew Levering about his book. I asked whether he agreed with the judgment that the approach of these manuals was too minimalistic.

Matthew Levering: In terms of today’s morality, you wouldn’t call the moral manuals minimalist, but what you would do though is you would say they sort of encourage a minimalist perspective because because the idea was to exercise your… freedom up to the very limit of what was permissible and then allow law to have its place. So in other words, you could be constantly trying to figure out, you know, what’s the limit that I can get away with? Yeah. You know, that kind of thing. Like, what can I get away with while still acting as a Christian? And so you would be then always going up to the line and testing the line and trying to find different authorities that would give you permission to exceed the line. The moral life then becomes not this glorious thing of being in Christ and of charity and sort of this expansive sense of charity and then all the other virtues. But instead what happens is the more life becomes about trying to identify the minimum and trying to make sure you’re not crossing the line You know, but still getting it’s having as much freedom as you you can possibly get without crossing the line You know these type of these type of things you can see how in practice it led to a certain minimalism.

Matthew Levering on the role of conscience in moral life, Mars Hill Audio Journal volume 158, track 7.

My Evangelical boarding school experience was casuistic in this sense, including bright lines to be pushed against and neglect of positive virtues. The term we used was “legalism,” but it was not easy to entirely escape that mind-set. It left its mark on me. I particularly wish there had been an emphasis on chastity and not just on abstention from sex, which is a pale imitation of chastity.

Calvinball Christianity

I don’t join the local basketball league hoping to convert it to pickleball. That’s what pickleball leagues are for. Although at least switching from one sport to another would be intelligible. More often, the [biblicist] objection to [catholic] Christianity’s immutability assumes the only good sports league would be one that changed constantly, randomly, and according to no rhyme or reason. Such an objection does not actually like sports. Or rather, it likes one sport only: Calvinball. And every league should be Calvinball or be shut down.

Brad East, The great Christian divide

Community

… a concrete human community-not merely a de facto “society” of autonomous individuals who kept their private views to themselves and lived as they pleased within the state’s laws-was not only the social product but also the social producer of embodied Christian faith. It always had been. Without it, beyond the micro-social context of one’s family, it is unclear how one might learn to live as a Christian, as opposed simply to learning what to believe and how one should spend an hour or two each Sunday.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

To restore and preserve the faith in robust form, there must be community. I think even the biblicists understand this in practice, if not in theory.

Televangelists

Two or three of the ladies had pronounced views on points of doctrine, particularly sin and damnation, which they never learned from me. I blame the radio for sowing a good deal of confusion where theology is concerned. And television is worse. You can spend forty years teaching people to be awake to the fact of mystery and then some fellow with no more theological sense than a jackrabbit gets himself a radio ministry and all your work is forgotten. I do wonder where it will end.

John Ames, the protagonist pastor/narrator in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.

Losing savor

Liberal Christians no longer need theology to make their case. They can couch their argument entirely in terms of secular political rights … In fact, arguments based on rights were probably more convincing than theological arguments even to them. The mainline remains as committed as ever to the social causes of our day—to gay rights, immigration reform, and a stronger social safety net. They still decry racism and economic exploitation, too. They’ve hardly remained silent, but there’s a reason you can’t hear them anymore. They sound just like everybody else.

…

I suspect the twin movements of anti-intellectualism and anti-populism in the United States cannot adequately be told without reflecting on the split of mainline Protestantism into, on the one hand, de-institutionalized fundamentalist and evangelical movements and, on the other, a culturally elite yet increasingly faithless institutionalism.

…

Evangelicalism is a populist movement in that it was founded on patterns of mass consumption; it’s a movement within which a person like Joel Osteen thrives, yet a publication like Books & Culture perishes.

Great art, culture, and learning has generally depended on the support of elite patrons and institutions, not least the church and the state (perhaps especially monarchies). In mass, populist, or highly democratic movements, such excellence receives much less support. The existence of a thriving “high culture” or academic elite requires non-democratic structures that are harder to develop in a mass society. Where mass culture prevails, there’s often a pressure to cater to less cultivated tastes or, alternatively, to rebel against them in dysfunctional ways that signal an elite status.

…

All this is one of the underlying reasons, seldom mentioned, why so many formerly conservative Protestant scholars and writers have gone in the direction of Rome. Conservative Protestantism has an impoverished elite, an unimpressive scholarly culture, and is poorly networked. With the rank apostasy of mainline Protestantism and the exodus of conservatives from such institutions, conservative Christian thinkers feel as though they have no intellectual home. What’s more, they operate in a culture that is more populist in orientation, which can stifle excellence rather than empower it.

Evangelicalism doesn’t produce intellectual and cultural elites like Rome and the mainline traditionally have. Nor do we have strong academic and higher cultural networks. Granting this, it’s no surprise Rome attracts some conservative scholars and writers who wish to make an difference.

Paul Gleason, quoted by Alastair Roberts

Remarriage in Orthodoxy

Q: I’ve heard that the Orthodox Church permits remarriage. Isn’t this a departure from the Lord’s teaching in scripture?

We should start by countering a common misconception that remarriage is allowed. It would be logical to ask the same question with a small variation: Why does the Orthodox Church allow robbery, rape, or murder? Each of these sins, with repentance and a period of separation from the sacraments, can be forgiven and the person restored to full Communion. That does not imply that the Church winks at these sins; rather it acknowledges that a person who makes harmful choices is not a lost cause; he is capable of restoration, and our goal is his repentance and healing, not his exclusion in order to maintain our imagined purity ….

Fr. Silouan Thompson

The human voice: That we can sing seems basis for conjecture that, despite our stupidities and our sinfulness, we might be the reason the universe exists.

Alexander Riley

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Wednesday, 8/9/23

Dumbest idea of the week

Reading more poetry? That’s a great thing. Reading a book of poetry a day? That’s a 100% guarantee that you will get almost nothing from your reading. Better: Read one lyric poem a day, but read it five times.

Alan Jacobs

It is a marker of impending doom that anyone could start a movement like reading a book of poetry per day as a tool of self-improvement. I guess being able to Tweet that or post a Facebook brag now passes for self-improvement.

Frankly, poetry bored me when I was young. Now that I know better, any tutoring I got in how to read poetry is long forgotten.

I now read poetry amateurishly almost every day, but I rarely read more than three pages in a row unless a single poem is longer than that. (Currently reading my first Geoffrey Hill, by the way.)

Nominal state, parastate redux

Related to my Tuesday post on “The nominal state and the parastate” is an extremely long post by N.S. Lyons at The Upheaval on how the U.S. and China are traveling separate paths to the common end of managerial totalitarianism. (H/T Rod Dreher). Unherd published a much-shortened version on the 9th.

It always hits me extra hard when two thinkers I respect spend hours and hours and hours writing long, thoughtful pieces, in much different ways, about a situation I’ve paid little attention to. Such are N.S. Lyons today and Matthew Crawford yesterday (as I write).

We need a law against debanking for thought crimes, and a constitutional right to use cash rather than digital short-cuts. I say that as one who uses those shortcuts a lot. But frictionless efficiency isn’t worth the downsides.

Put on your big boy pants and live with it

Yeah, sometimes you have imposter syndrome. And sometimes you feel like an imposter because you actually do suck at what you’re trying to do. Sometimes she’s not a narcissist, she just doesn’t love you the way you want her to, and she never will. Sometimes you don’t have ADHD, you just hate your job. Sometimes your boss isn’t a sociopath, he’s just correctly identified you as unqualified for a leadership position. Sometimes you really do have schizophrenia, only there’s nothing glamorous or exciting or romantic about it, and now you’re fat from meds and trying to hold down a steady job and going to support group to drink grainy coffee and hear people tell the same stories over and over again. And sometimes you’re just in pain because the world didn’t turn out the way you wanted it to, and you’re trying to scratch out a life you can live with, and you get overwhelmed with your mundane unhappiness on the subway home from work, and you think to yourself that it must be true that your suffering is something grander, something that calls out for medical attention and reasonable accommodation, something more that makes it easier. But it isn’t and it doesn’t and there isn’t and you’re just another good, deserving human being filled with the pain of being alive. I’m sorry. I am genuinely so sorry. You wanted things, and you didn’t get them, and it hurts. You wanted to be something else, and you’re what you are, and it hurts. You thought life would be more than it is, and it isn’t, and it hurts. Me too. All of it hurts. So let it hurt.

Freddie deBoer, concluding what Alan Jacobs considers one of his best columns ever.

I re-read C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce yesterday, and I’m struck by how closely many of Lewis’s “ghosts” fit the assumptions of Freddie’s “therapeutic/affirmational mode.”

The pander bear comes to NR

Andrew C. McCarthy of National Review has now twice published bullshitty misrepresentations of the latest Trump federal indictment. So says Ken White, a/k/a Popehat. I’ve haD to take Popehat’s word for it because my NR subscription lapsed and they won’t let me view diddly-squat there now. But now Johah Goldberg is having him on The Remnant podcast, so I can hear from the horse’s mouth.

So why might McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor like White, be doing a bad thing that looks like carrying water for Trump? Per White:

He’s not pro-Trump. But he’s anti-anti-Trump. He’s anti-Biden, anti-the-Department-of-Justice-pursuing-Republicans, anti-”deep state”) (well sort of), anti any application of the rule of law that might benefit Democrats. Plus, he’s very pro-the National Review being kept alive and relevant. The National Review is under siege from a frothingly crazy pro-Trump right, and if it’s not entirely willing to join the crowd, it’s certainly willing to indulge in deceitful critiques of anyone criticizing Trump.

Every word of that rings true. (Be it noted that I didn’t drop NR the better to pursue “frothingly crazy pro-Trump right” stuff, but rather to exit a kaleidescope of mostly-mediocre writing with no theme except pandering a little bit to every kind of conservative they recognize.)

Anthropologists in flyover country

[Walter] Kirn, for different reasons, worked the … territory for Time, GQ, and Esquire. “Knowing that I had grown up in Minnesota and then moved to Montana, my editors decided I would be their American correspondent,” he says. “I kept being asked to do these stories, which I started to feel were setups, in which I was supposed to make the safari into deepest, darkest America and come back with tales of how bizarre and ridiculous people were. And often they were bizarre and ridiculous, but not for the reason my editors thought.” Now, he says, “I don’t have to be defensive anymore, and I can actually, probably with a good clear conscience, show how bizarre everything is because I don’t feel I’m being asked to.”

Ash Carter, David Samuels and Walter Kirn Talk “County Highway,” Their New Magazine

Slitting our throats with Occam’s Razor

It is no accident, says [Iain] McGilchrist, that the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution came along at more or less the same time. These are manifestations of a more disembodied, left-brain way of seeing the world. The entire modern history of Western culture—through the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and all that has followed—is what you get from an intellect that values quantity over quality, that knows the price of everything, but the value of nothing.

It is hard to summarize a book as complex as The Matter With Things, a book of popular science and cultural analysis that is intimidatingly long … The argument goes like this: the picture of reality taken as objectively true by the modern mind, under the tyranny of the left brain, is, in fact, seriously distorted—and is killing us. This is something we all feel.

… The book is a powerful refutation of ‘nothing-buttery’—of the idea that reality is nothing but the sum total of its parts. It contends brilliantly that Occam’s Razor—the claim that the simplest explanation of a phenomenon is probably the best one—is a cognitive tool with which the modern world is slitting its throat.

Rod Dreher, praising Dr. McGilchrist in the European Conservative

Wordplay

Democracy

Forgive my sarcasm, but it seems U.S. leaders just ignore the will of the people when they are so busy spreading democracy.

Hal Freeman, who I always take with a grain of salt, but who seems on-the-nose here about aspects of our involvement in Ukraine.

Augment

“These are not additional forces,” said Lt. Gen. Douglas Sims, the director of operations for the Joint Staff. “These are forces that will augment what we already have there.”

TMD

transitive verb
1: to make greater, more numerous, larger, or more intense
The impact of the report was augmented by its timing.
2: supplement
She took a second job to augment her income

(Merriam-Webster)

Beautiful minds

Dot-connectors and beautiful minds will use the deep state as a conceptual crutch to explain great national traumas.

Eli Lake, Hunter Biden and the ‘Deep State’.

I watched the movie A Beautiful Mind completely unaware of the plot arc, so it left a big impression when, shall we say, the plot turned. So “beautiful minds” strikes me as a great deprecatory coinage.

Jeremiah 5:19

Because you served foreign gods in your land, so you shall serve foreigners in a land not yours.

Jeremiah 5:19 (Orthodox Study Bible)

Luxury beliefs

I cannot help but feel grateful to Rob Henderson for his 2019 ’Luxury beliefs’ are latest status symbol for rich Americans.

Groomers

Rightwing commentators seem to have realized that they won’t have George Soros to demonize forever, so they’ve started grooming Bill Gates to take his place.

Political ethics

[The Dispatch is] one of the last few right-wing media outlets in America that doesn’t celebrate ruthlessness as a political ethic.

Nick Cattogio

Seeking continuity and stability

[M]an was not made to tread water endlessly in a liquid world.

R.R. Reno

On behalf of my Catholic friends, I object!

Out of the two dozen homesteaders I spoke with, most were religious—either Catholic or Christian ….

Home Is Where the Revolution Is | The Free Press.

Crooked

You shall love your crooked neighbor
With your crooked heart.

W.H. Auden

out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made

Kant

Both quotes via L. M. Sacasas

Phubbing

Ignoring a partner in favor of your smartphone,

What Is ‘Phubbing,’ and How May It Hurt Your Relationship? – The New York Times

Peremalyvat

“To grind through”. The Russian verb is being invoked by forces on both sides of the war in Ukraine.

(Via The Economist)

Believing blue, living red

Yes, on a number of fronts Americans have more culturally progressive beliefs than they did, say, in 1990, yet by the tens of millions, they have more culturally conservative lifestyles than the generation before. It’s a phenomenon somewhat clumsily called “believing blue and living red.”

David French.

This clearly is related to the phenomenon of “luxury beliefs.”

Conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership

… it’s tough to own any of this when it’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.

A Senior Trump Campaign Advisor explaining why they were 0-32 on court challenges of state presidential tallies. (Paragraph 25 of the August 1 indictment.)

Enormity

Before the 2020 Election, I thought Trump would leave the White House voluntarily if he lost. Anything else would be an enormity.

Caste privilege

History is a graveyard of classes which have preferred caste privileges to leadership.

Sociologist E. Digby Baltzell, writing decades ago, via David Brooks.

We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.

R.R. Reno

The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it. I’m even playing around a bit here, but uncertain whether I’ll persist.

Sunday, 6/25/23

What if we thought Christianity was about reality?

If it were seriously imagined that the teachings of Christianity or other religions constituted a vital and irreplaceable knowledge of reality, there would be no more talk of the separation of church and state than there is of the separation of chemistry or economics and state.

Dallas Willard (1935–2013) via Francis Beckwith, Taking Rites Seriously.

That word “irreplaceable” is a key; it challenges me in my approach to public affairs, which tends toward Rawlsian public reason even though I’ve read no Rawls.

Maybe I tend that direction because I’ve so rarely heard Christian voices in the public square seasoning the discussion subtly, like salt in a recipe, rather than waving the Bible (sometimes literally) and declaiming what they perceive as God’s “rules” rather than persuading about “reality.”

Or put more philosophically, most of the putatively Christian voices seem to be think that something is good because God commanded it rather than God commanding it because it’s good.

Simile of the week

If we can see that the pre-Christian philosophers did seek the truth, and that they did catch glimpses of it, it only stands to reason that their teachings should bear some similarities, like a broken reflection of the moon in water, to the fullness of truth in Jesus Christ. Therefore, these similarities need not appear as a threat to Christianity; instead, they offer one more proof of Christ as universal truth.

Hieromonk Damascene, Christ the Eternal Tao

I love that “like a broken reflection of the moon in water.”

Parable of the week

A certain man went down from Athens to Atlanta and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment and wounded him and departed, leaving him half dead. And by chance there came down a certain conservative megachurch head pastor that way. Now, this pastor had 14,000 sheep, and 6,000 camels, and a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand she-asses, and a 10,000-person auditorium, and much gyms. He had also seven sons and three daughters, for unto him was a smokin’ hot wife named Cyndi. She did teach yoga, but she sinned not for she called the class Stretching Our Faith and never used Sanskrit words.

And when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side and he said unto himself, “This is what comes with woke politicians, slimy, dirty people everywhere. A decent person can’t even ride the bus. The Uber drivers always want a tip.” And he passed by on the other side.

And came then two Duke Divinity School post-liberals, for there was in those days in that city a theology conference. And they saw him and were moved to pity. And one went to help him. But his friend said unto him, “Ho, consider and be sure. Art thou moved by the charity that is from the Lord? Or doth thou proceed from the superficial liberal humanitarianism of the Enlightenment?”

And the other paused and did bethink himself, for he did not want to proceed from the superficial liberal humanitarianism of the Enlightenment lest the Lord wax wroth with him. And at last, he did say to his friend, “Look, this man suffereth! and would thou be treated thus? Consider that if thou were this man, thou would swap the most of for the least of these.” And his friend replied, “Whoa, buddy, thou soundeth like Rawls.” And they did argue, and growing distracted, did pass by on the other side.

But a certain disenchanted liberal technocrat, as he journeyed, came to where he was. And when he saw him, he had compassion on him and went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine and set him on his own beast and brought him to an inn and took care of him and did exchange with him Reddit handles.

And on the morrow when he departed, he took out two pence and gave them to the host and said unto him, “Take care of him. And whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee.” And the host did say, “The doctors say he needeth a new kidney.” And the man was sore afraid, but he was an effective altruist. And he said, “Lo, I have an extra one that I’m not using. And hoarding it would be irrational under the circumstances.” And he gave the man his kidney. And being recovered, he went back to his job as a consultant and great was his reward in the kingdom of God, if he would allow himself to know it.

Phil Christman, The Effective Samaritan, quoted here.

Religious liberalism

Ross Douthat has a fine column on why he’s not a liberal Catholic. With a little effort, you can translate it to liberal versus conservative in other churches, too.

Excerpt:

If liberal forms of Catholicism claimed to be comfortable as a remnant out of step with the spirit of the age, then diminished numbers wouldn’t necessarily demand a self-critique. But again, liberals are the ones most likely to insist that the signs of the times should compel the church to shift in their direction, as an alternative to marginalization or extinction. And there is just no serious or compelling proof of concept here, after so many decades of experiments. “Join or die” is just not a compelling argument if your own movement seems to be dying even faster.

A Christendom vision

Accessing things that are extremely bad for you, like marijuana, gambling, and porn, should be harder than it is. Being able to get married, buy a house (or just afford good housing), and have children should be easier than it is. A great many of our problems, I think, exist because we’ve made a world in which it is desperately difficult to be good, far more difficult than it needs to be. When I envision a Christian society, the ideas near the forefront of my mind mostly have to do with protecting and preserving family life, promoting organized labor so that workers can command better wages and more easily build and form families, and taking some reasonable steps to limit access to some especially dangerous vices, such as gambling and porn, for starters.

Jake Meador’s vision of Christendom.

Baptizing sin

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

Fr. Lawrence Farley, The Necessary Revolution

Christian Anthropologies contrasted

Basil, a consistent witness to the Eastern principle of deification, wrote about free will in a way that contrasted sharply with that of Augustine: “Good action arising from free choice,” he insisted, “is . . . present in us by nature.”

Fr. John Strickland, The Age of Paradise

The clash of cultures

Several scholars distinguish a separate Orthodox civilization, centered in Russia and separate from Western Christendom as a result of its Byzantine parentage, distinct religion, 200 years of Tatar rule, bureaucratic despotism, and limited exposure to the Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, and other central Western experiences.

Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations.

Short of constituting a separate civilization, it seems to me that American Orthodox converts are building at least a distinct subculture.

One hundred years of platitudes

Then Almata cried, Why is he called The Prophet? And Gibran spoke, It is a misprint for The Profit. For that is what I have made of the Gullible’s insatiable desire for Platitudes.

John Crace quoted by Giles Fraser, One hundred years of platitudes

The late ‘60s and early ’70s felt like Peak Gibran, but I managed to avoid both Gibran and weed.

Lucky me.

Why do I read anything but poetry …?

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.

T.S. Eliot, Choruses from “The Rock”

We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.

R.R. Reno

The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it. I’m even playing around a bit here, but uncertain whether I’ll persist.

American Christianity Today

Affiliation versus Faith

As Bullivant notes in his book, the fall of communism meant that “talk of ‘a final, all-out battle between communist atheism and Christianity’ was much less a part of the cultural background.” Now only the oldest millennials have the faintest recollection of what it meant to fear the destruction of our civilization at the hands of a hostile imperial aggressor.

Instead, millennials faced something else entirely. “Very soon,” writes Bullivant, “the most pressing geopolitical threat to baseball, Mom, and apple pie was not from those without religion but those with rather too much of the wrong kind of it.” The 9/11 attacks introduced Americans to Islamic fundamentalism, and “religious extremism, in the form of radical Islamic terrorists, usurped the place in American nightmares that communist infiltrators used to occupy.”

…

Where does this leave us? Bullivant’s book is a reminder that culture and context matter. While any given individual may resist the tides of the times, at scale religious affiliation is more malleable than we might think. The malleability of religious affiliation is one reason why it’s important to think of affiliation and faith as perhaps distinct and different concepts.

David French, mulling over what he’s read so far in Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America

Americanized religion

When I saw that Ross Douthat had written on The Americanization of Religion, I knew it would be good.

I was right.

By the way, The Americanization of Religion is not a good thing, just in case you were wondering.

Douthat’s column is so rich that I highlighted most of it and cannot find a satisfactory representative quote. Reading it will take you about 6 minutes if you don’t compulsively highlight and index it.

Religious “secularism”

Along the same lines:

On a daily basis, I have become increasingly aware of the “religious” nature of almost the whole of modern life. That might seem to be an odd observation when the culture in which we live largely describes itself as “secular.” That designation, however, only has meaning in saying that the culture does not give allegiance or preference to any particular, organized religious body. It is sadly the case, however, that this self-conception makes the culture particularly blind to just how “religious” it is in almost everything it does. I suspect that the more removed we are from true communion with God, the more “religious” we become.

Fr. Stephen Freeman, The Religious Nature of Modern Life

All of today’s observations echo one of the most illuminating books I’ve ever read, Nathan Hatch’s The Democratization of American Christianity. I can’t recommend it too highly if you have any interest in the history of religion — or if you think American popular religion is simply New Testament Christianity.

[S]ubordinating truth to politics is a game which tyrants and bullies always win.

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge

To believe that wealth is the only significant measure of the worth of an individual, a family, or a community is to reject the teaching of nearly every religion and wisdom tradition that ever was.

Mark Mitchell and Nathan Schlueter, The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry

The Orthodox "phronema" [roughly, mind-set] cannot be programmitized or reduced to shibboleths.

Fr. Jonathan Tobias

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Sunday, 12/11/22

Big day today for the vocal chords. Church, then warmups, then a Chamber Singers concert.

Let my prayer arise …

Incense

Sermon on the Mount

Those Sermon on the Mount Virtues …

… just don’t work any more

Pastors have spoken to [Russell] Moore about getting blowback from their congregants for preaching biblical ideas about mercy, with people saying, “That doesn’t work anymore, in a culture as hostile as this.”

Michelle Goldberg.

So mercy (and other Sermon on the Mount virtues) are just some kind of jujitsu? A tactic rather than a principle?

Pathetic! Any pastor with integrity will recognize that it’s time to preach the whole Gospel until those who don’t like it repent or leave.

Worldview

Can a place be holy?

Rod Dreher is doing tons and tons of research and thinking for a forthcoming book on the re-enchantment of imagination (my version of his project, not his). Preparation includes visiting ancient Christian sites — presumably to try to recapture the context in which a more expansive view of reality than ours prevailed.

He’s been going back and forth with another American on the tour:

Pat and I got into another argument on the bus. I mentioned that the holiest place on earth for Christians is Jerusalem, especially inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which takes in the spot where Jesus died, and the place where he rose from the dead. “You can’t say that,” said Pat. “I’m a Christian, and I don’t necessarily agree with you.” And then we were off. Pat’s view — a thoroughly nominalist one — is that when you say a place is “holy,” you are offering an opinion about the emotions it evokes within you. To Pat, there is no intrinsic holiness to a place, or an object. If the Prayer Tower at Oral Roberts University makes you feel closer to God than the Holy Sepulchre, well, then it is holier for you. Nobody can say that one place is more sacred than another.

You can imagine how I reacted to that line of argument. But again, I think it was important for me to hear it — I mean, to encounter someone who believes these things, and who thinks this way. Remember, Pat is not a liberal; in fact, Pat complained at one point on the trip about how the cultural climate in the city requires non-progressive Christians like him to be closeted. I never could really figure Pat out, to be honest, but he seems to sincerely believe that true Christianity can only be disembodied. He deflected every challenge from me with some form of, “That’s your perspective.” My guess is that he has only lived and dwelled among fellow Pentecostals, and assumes that Pentecostalism is normative. He had no awareness how very, very modern his take on Christianity is. I said to him at one point that if the early church had thought and lived as he does, it would not have survived. I got the sense that he regards me as a nut who worships Tradition, not God.

Again: it’s really useful for me to know as I write this book. Pat — who is a nice guy, actually — and I are at two extremes of the Christian spectrum, but I suspect that most contemporary American Christians are a lot closer to Pat’s end than mine.

Rod Dreher

So at which end, or where along the spectrum, do you stand? My reasoning as an ecclesial Christian puts me with Rod; my culture — and I cannot deny being its creature to a substantial extent — sides with Pat.

So I wouldn’t argue against Rod’s project, but my visceral reactions might not be consistently welcoming.

An older system of values

David French had a very powerful Sunday column last week, Remembering What Repentance Looks Like.

He leads with the story of Johnny Hunt, a big-name Southern Baptist pastor (and former national President) who in May, after finding that his lies about sexually assaulting another pastor’s wife weren’t fooling anybody, was forced out of ministry.

Now a self-appointed committee of four lackies/pastors declare that he’s ready to be restored — less than seven months after removal, and despite a recent SBC resolution (toothless, like all SBC resolutions, because each local church is entirely autonomous) that “any person who has committed sexual abuse is permanently disqualified from holding the office of pastor.”

Lots of juicy stuff in that story, including a cameo appearance by Herschel Walker, whose “repentance” looks more like intransigence. But I want to note two un-juicy things:

  1. Southern Baptist scripture-twisting. Johnny Hunt never confessed his sin to his congregation, citing Psalm 51:4, which states, “against You and You only have I sinned and done this evil in Your sight.” Further, one of the four lackeys justified his whitewashing of Hunt with the story of the Good Samaritan — which should have led him to run to the aid of the low-status victim pastor’s wife who’d been assaulted by Hunt, not to Hunt, the high-status perpetrator.
  2. The contrast with disgraced John Profumo, the backstory to which I personally recall: “the dignity, discretion, restraint, and repentance with which Profumo lived his life after his fall were the last gasp of an old system of values. His honorable conduct—continued for years, away from the blaze of publicity—would now be almost inconceivable among the political elite.”

We first of all need more men to keep their zippers up, but among those who fail, we need more John Profumos and fewer Johnny Hunts.

Freddie demolishes a straw man

For what it’s worth, I recognize almost nothing as authentically Christian in the straw man Freddie DeBoer attacked Monday.

I should say that Freddie almost certainly is not aware that he has set up a straw man. He’s a painfully honest man, who is describing the kind of Christianish stuff he’s seen on television or encounted beyond whatever church doors he has darkened.

The only thing he says about such Christianish stuff that belongs to authentic Christianity is his tacit acknowledgement that Christianity holds that Christ was more than a man and that his incarnation is salvific.

Curiously, on Friday, Freddie ranked the works of his favorite film director, Terrence Malick. Is there a more Christian director than Malick?

Modern syncretism

I’m very glad we live in a society that is more religiously tolerant. But this has also come at the cost of a greater indifference to the truths our various religions proclaim. Walking around these ancient once-pagan cities, thinking about how syncretic Greco-Roman polytheism was, it’s easy to grasp what a mortal threat monotheism combined with universalism was to the settled order. (The Jews were also monotheistic, but they did not proselytize, because their faith was not universalist.) How strange it is to think that Christianity in the contemporary West has become a lot like the syncretism of the ancient pagan world, in the sense that most Christians (myself included) don’t have a reflexive willingness to throw down to defend theological truths and police ecclesial borders. The Christians who lived in these Asia Minor cities were a threat to the settled social order precisely because they refused to worship the local gods. Had they just added Jesus into the mix, nobody would have bothered them. Had they kept their religion to themselves, as the Jews did, nobody would have bothered them.

In our time, the only Christians who get marked out for opprobrium are those who refuse to observe the dominant culture’s religious feasts (e.g., Pride Month), and who insist that all those who profess the faith they evangelize must also refuse. The Christians who assimilate easily to the idolatries of the day (“idolatry” is worshiping anything but the true God) have no problems. It’s helpful to think about if you were a Jesus believer in first-century Ephesus or Pergamum, if you would have been Christian enough to be persecuted.

Rod Dreher, pensive as he tours the Seven Churches of the Apocalypse in Asia Minor.

Disillusionment

Damon Linker, when he worked at First Things in 2003 and beyond, wrote an article on becoming a father, which produced many negative letters to the editor, most of them the equivalent of shit-posting comments on the web. Since First Things was a high-toned magazine, the contrast with its readers was revealing:

But reading all of those angry, sometimes vulgar, letters from First Things readers attacking me and the magazine, accusing us of abandoning the properly gendered outlook on the family, supposedly rooted in Scripture (but actually derived from pop-culture representations of 1950s middle-class white suburban family life), was significant, too. Doing so left me feeling deeply alienated from the place I worked. Not, again, in terms of the workplace. But in terms of the workplace’s telos—its end or goal. I was an editor for an opinion magazine. But who were its readers? What did its “base” believe about the world? How did I feel about devoting myself and my talents to serving this group of people and its prejudices, which I now began to wonder if I shared?

Damon Linker

What Linker writes there is part of what I felt when shifting from Evangelicalism, many long decades before Florida Man’s seduction of Evangelicalism, to the sober Calvinism of the Christian Reformed Church. Alienation. “These are not really my people.” That sort of thing, along with a more intellectual rationale that wasn’t entirely rationalization.

From what was I alienated?

  • Taboos that lacked even minimally plausible scriptural roots.
  • Altar calls in churches, irnoically without altars and without scriptural precedent.
  • Psychological manipulation in those altar calls: “I see that hand.” (There was no hand, but how was anyone to know with “every head bowed, every eye closed”? I guess I’ve outed myself.) “Is there another?”
  • Flagrant scripture-twisting.

There’s probably more.

Miscellany

Quality

I don’t know much about book-binding, but it appears to me that my small Psalter’s cover letting will wear off before the binding shows any wear.

There’s even a sort of hinge so I can hold it open without straining the spine:

Essentials

American Gnostics

Be careful what you aim for

[S]ubordinating truth to politics is a game which tyrants and bullies always win.

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge

To believe that wealth is the only significant measure of the worth of an individual, a family, or a community is to reject the teaching of nearly every religion and wisdom tradition that ever was.

Mark Mitchell and Nathan Schlueter, The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry

The Orthodox "phronema" [roughly, mind-set] cannot be programmitized or reduced to shibboleths.

Fr. Jonathan Tobias

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Saturday 10/8/22

Personal

On a personal note, I am excited and optimistic about something, and that doesn’t happen very often.

Late Monday afternoon, a package arrived in the mail. I opened it, watched a YouTube video on getting started one more time, and attached a Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM) to my upper left arm. Two hours later, after warming up, the monitor began sending information to my smart phone — and my life may have changed.

What I discovered starting with a snack Monday evening was that what I considered a fairly healthy snack or meal could produce alarming blood sugar spikes — spikes that had never shown up on a fasting blood panel and were much higher than the blood sugar levels reflected in my A1C. Such spikes promote responsive insulin spikes, fat storage, and more, in a vicious circle.

Tuesday and Wednesday were eye-openers, too.

Until recently, CGM has been associated mostly with controlling blood sugar levels for Type 1 diabetics and for Type 2 diabetics who have had unusually great difficulty controlling their blood sugar. But I’m neither of those. I am wearing CGM as part of a metabolic study.

But being part of that study is not what motivated me. I’m not altruistic enough for that. What motivated me is the knowledge that I have had metabolic syndrome for more than 30 years, I have been as much is 100 pounds overweight, and my septuagenarian body is starting to feel very vulnerable. My participation in the study, at my own not inconsiderable expense, is motivated by the desire to lose maybe 55 pounds (I’ll settle for 90 pounds!) from my current weight and otherwise to heal my metabolic system so as to slow the aging process.

Essentially every credible thing I have read about metabolic syndrome over the past 30 years has convinced me that uncontrolled spikes of serum glucose (blood sugar) is a root cause of many if not most of America’s chronic health problems, and that the medical profession’s ability to medicate my blood pressure, lipids, and blood sugar “successfully,” grateful as I am for it, is no assurance of true metabolic health. Much of what I have read also has convinced me that metabolism varies quite a bit between individuals, and that what my wife may eat safely may be quite bad for my health.

30 years ago, I lost 35 pounds on a very low carbohydrate diet, but that’s not a diet for a lifetime, and I gradually put it all back on — plus a 30 pound bonus.

But for the last 48 hours or so, I’ve kept my blood sugar in control — no big spikes — without elimination of carbs. Indeed, a favorite bread (Great Harvest’s Dakota Seed bread) is not a real disrupter. Blood sugar’s still too high, but at least it’s stable at “a little too high.” And a few pounds seem to have come off.

Seeing in real time what that food 30 minutes ago is doing to me now now is very empowering. Getting context-sensitive feedback on the app from the study sponsor (which knows my personal goals) multiplies that. I’m pumped!

Now onto the customary kvetching.

Culture

Not the ideology you think

People who think that leftist agitators for gender fluidity are driven by ideology are correct, but it’s probably not the ideology they think it is: it’s good old capitalism — capitalism extended into the deepest recesses of personal identity. We can create that for you wholesale.

Alan Jacobs.

Metaphysical capitalism at work.

Success looks like kin to slavery

Wendell Berry has a new book, The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice. My copy is on the way, but reviews precede it.

[Wendell] Berry reports on an 1820 exchange between the Southern apologist and politician John C. Calhoun and future President John Quincy Adams … During a walk together, Calhoun praised Adams’s principles regarding free labor as “just and noble.” However, he added, in “the Southern Country…they were always understood as applying only to white men.” Hard domestic and manual labor was reserved to black slaves, an approach that was actually “the best guarantee to equality among the whites.” Adams denounced “this confounding of the ideas of servitude and labor,” this “perverted sentiment…mistaking labor for slavery and dominion for Freedom,” as a terrible consequence of slavery.

Adams indirectly affirmed here the immense value to American democracy of the simple freemen who toiled for subsistence on their own family farms or in their own shops. Berry argues, though, that “Calhoun’s values” have in fact won out in America. Success today means to go to the university and so be lifted above the “mind numbing” work of the body and the hands, no matter who gets hurt by the individual’s climb upward. Bluntly put: “We all, black and white together, [now] want to be John C. Calhoun,” leaving the hard and essential work to lesser men and women.

Allan Carlson (emphasis added)

And as lesser the untermenschen do the hard and essential work, we can wank away at bullshit jobs.

Truths that dare not speak their names

An excerpt from Berry’s new book via Katherine Dalton’s review:

I have received a number of warnings of the retribution that will surely follow. But I wonder if they have considered well enough what they have asked of me, which amounts to a radical revision of my calling. They are not asking me for my most careful thoughts about what I have learned or experienced. They are asking me to lay aside my old effort to tell the truth, as it is given to me by my own knowledge and judgment, in order to take up another art, which is that of public relations.

How common such warnings are, and how priceless is Berry’s refusal to abandon the effort to tell the truth!

[T]he courage to ask for historical understanding, charity, and free political speech from a position that will very possibly be labeled “racist” is rare at the moment.

What will we do without Wendell Berry when the day comes? But I wonder, probably not often enough, whether reading and praising Wendell Berry is some kind of cheap grace for over-educated rich people who sense that all is not well but who act as if it’s good enough. People like me.

Superlatively poor medical performance

America’s superlatively poor performance cannot solely be blamed on either the Trump or Biden administrations, although both have made egregious errors. Rather, the new coronavirus exploited the country’s many failing systems: its overstuffed prisons and understaffed nursing homes; its chronically underfunded public-health system; its reliance on convoluted supply chains and a just-in-time economy; its for-profit health-care system, whose workers were already burned out; its decades-long project of unweaving social safety nets; and its legacy of racism and segregation that had already left Black and Indigenous communities and other communities of color disproportionately burdened with health problems. Even in the pre-COVID years, the U.S. was still losing about 626,000 people more than expected for a nation of its size and resources. COVID simply toppled an edifice whose foundations were already rotten.

It would be nice to say that the pandemic revealed deep-seated problems that we had managed to avoid facing — but now we must face them! Nah. We mustn’t, and we probably won’t. It turns out that reality has limited power over an infinitely distractible and distracted society.

Alan Jacobs, block-quoting Ed Yong

First, they cheated at chess …

A cheating scandal has rocked the professional fishing world after two men competing in a tournament Friday were caught stuffing their fish with golf ball-sized weights and fish fillets to, er, tip the scales in their favor.

The Morning Dispatch

The world of Irish step dancing convulsed with cheating allegations after evidence surfaced this week that teachers have been fixing competitions for their students.

The Morning Dispatch

News and not

[T]he third openly transgender actor isn’t news.

Kevin D. Williamson

Award-Winning photo

I always enjoy Atlantic’s photo collections:

“On either side of a highway, gullies formed by rainwater erosion span out like a tree, in Tibet, an autonomous region in southwest China. To capture this image, photographer Li Ping slept alone in a roadside parking lot overnight before using a drone in the early morning hours.”

Politics

Involuntarily moderate

Last month The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg published a fascinating interview with Israeli prime minister Yair Lapid. … “Everybody is stuck in this left-versus-right traditional dynamic,” he said. “But today, all over the world, it’s centrist versus extremist.”

I wanted to stand up and cheer. Now, to be clear, this is a strange position for me. I’ve always been conservative. In the left versus right context, I’ve always considered myself a man of the right—the Reagan right. But when the extremes grow more extreme, and the classical liberal structure of the American republic is under intellectual and legal attack, suddenly I’m an involuntary moderate.

… [O]utside of criminal law, it’s difficult to think of an exercise of state power more raw, immediate, and devastating than the use of state power to sever the bond between parent and child [as both California and Texas do on adolescents with gender identity issues].

David French.

“Involuntary moderates” indeed. Parents care more about their own kids than do California or Texas, to whom the kids are mere political pawns.

Hecklers, trying to veto SCOTUS

Justice Elena Kagan has warned repeatedly about the risk of courts becoming politicized, but others seem less concerned. “The court has always decided controversial cases, and decisions always have been subject to intense criticism, and that is entirely appropriate,” Chief Justice John Roberts said in September. “I don’t understand the connection between opinions that people disagree with and the legitimacy of the court.”

“A lot of the criticism of the court’s legitimacy is basically a heckler’s veto,” [Adam White of AEI] said. “You now have waves of Democrats and progressive activists denouncing the court as illegitimate and then pointing to complaints about the court’s legitimacy as proof of their own accusations.”

The Morning Dispatch

Nobody today is heckling louder than the New York Times:

Re-Christianizing America

You would think that the most controversial claim made at the recent National Conservatism Conference—that the re-Christianization of American culture is the greatest hope for preserving the republic for future generations—would have been made by a Christian.

It wasn’t. It came from Yoram Hazony, chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation, who argued that, despite being an Orthodox Jew, he believes Christianity to be the only force strong enough to defeat leftist authoritarianism in America.

Delano Squires, Drag Queen Conservatism Is the Real Threat to Religious Freedom.

Did you catch the meaning of that consequentialist opening: we should re-Christianize American not because Christianity is true but because it’s anti-woke. I do not wish to be governed by consequentialist pseudo-Christians, so I’m still in center-right classical liberal camp.

Why should we support the GOP?

Nobody on the right seems able to stop and ask: “Why? Why do we want a party whose leading lights are such figures as Donald Trump and Herschel Walker to control the Senate? Why would we want such figures as Lindsey Graham or Josh Hawley to control anything?”

Maybe there is a case for that. But I spend a lot of time around politicians, especially Republican politicians, taking copious notes on their emissions, and I have not heard a case for Republicans worth repeating in years—only a case against Democrats.

Democrats, for their part, are in essentially the same rhetorical position.

… Mitch McConnell, shrewd carnivore that he is, has tried to dissuade Republicans from producing any kind of legislative to-do list at all, and his argument for that—Why give the Democrats something to run against?—gives away the game: McConnell knows that Republicans are, at this curious political moment, entirely incapable of producing a positive agenda that is anything other than a net loss for them politically. …

The argument ends up being ridiculous for Republicans: Vote for Donald Trump so that he can snog with Kim Jong-un because Joe Biden is a … socialist? Communist? Fascist? Stalinist? Whatever. Trump was buddies with pretty much every extant Stalinist wielding real political power today, while Biden spends his days mumbling into his tapioca about the glories of the WPA.

Kevin D. Williamson

The tiresomeness of it all

There are times, I confess, when I decide to pass on writing another column on how degenerate the Republican Party is. What else is there to say? It’s not as if the entire media class isn’t saying it every hour of every day.

Andrew Sullivan

This was not a day when Sullivan or I could pass on that topic.

Georgia Senate

Noonan

[V]oters don’t expect much. They’ve had their own imperfect lives, and they long ago lost any assumption that political leaders were more upstanding than they. We are in the postheroic era of American politics. What voters want is someone who sees the major issues as they do. Conservatives especially see America’s deep cultural sickness and wonder if the country is cratering before our eyes. In such circumstances personal histories don’t count as once they did.

But I see the [Herschel] Walker story differently and expect a different outcome.

…

“The question going forward is how transactional is the average voter going to be?” If you’re sincerely pro-life, how does the Walker story reflect on the pro-life movement?

Peggy Noonan, quoting former DeKalb County GOP Chairman Lane Flynn. Noonan’s focus is not on Walker paying for an abortion, but for his failure to father any of his four (or more) children.

Power, with or without virtue

Conservative radio host Dana Loesch: “I am concerned about one thing, and one thing only, at this point. So I don’t care if Herschel Walker paid to abort endangered baby eagles — I want control of the Senate.”

Sahil Kapur on Twitter (H/T The Morning Dispatch)

Well! That settles that! (What were we talking about again?)

At one time, science said that man came from apes, did it not? But if that’s true, why are there still apes? Think about it.

Herschel Walker, Republican Candidate for the Unites States Senate, via Andrew Sullivan

All Things 45

Writing for the Ages

Kevin D. Williamson’s Bye, Donald Trump — Witless Ape Rides Helicopter is writing for the ages, even if it is going on two years old:

Let me refresh your memory: On the day Donald Trump was sworn in as president, Republicans controlled not only the White House but both houses of Congress. They were in a historically strong position elsewhere as well, controlling both legislative chambers in 32 states. They pissed that away like they were midnight drunks karaoke-warbling that old Chumbawumba song: In 2021, they control approximately squat. The House is run by Nancy Pelosi. The Senate is run, as a practical matter, by Kamala Harris. And Joe Biden won the presidency, notwithstanding whatever the nut-cutlet guest-hosting for Dennis Prager this week has to say about it.

Donald Trump is, in fact, the first president since Herbert Hoover to lead his party to losing the presidency, the House, and the Senate all in a single term …

…

“But the judges!” you protest. Fair point: Trump’s absurd attempts to overturn the election through specious legal challenges were laughed out of court by the very men and women he appointed to the bench. Even his judges think he’s a joke.

Everybody has figured that out. Except you.

Seemingly a new point about Trump

Ms Haberman makes a particular contribution with this book by describing how the annealing interplay of politics and commerce in the New York of the 1970s and 1980s equipped Mr Trump with the low expectations and cynical convictions that would carry him so far: that racial politics is a zero-sum contest among tribes; that allies as well as enemies must be dominated; that everything in life can be treated as a transaction; that rapidly topping one lie or controversy with the next will tie the media in knots; that celebrity confers power; that not only politicians but even prosecutors are malleable.

Yet these same convictions would also carry Mr Trump only so far. They doomed his presidency. After Mr Trump was elected, James Comey, the FBI director, warned him that a dossier was circulating that alleged Mr Trump had compromised himself in Russia. New York had taught Mr Trump that damaging information was a means of leverage, and so he assumed Mr Comey was threatening him. “Comey was blind to the depths of Trump’s paranoia and to his long history of gamesmanship with government officials,” Ms Haberman writes. Mr Trump would later fire Mr Comey, with disastrous repercussions for himself. The first exchange “set the terms” for Mr Trump’s subsequent interactions with intelligence and law-enforcement officials, according to Ms Haberman.

What Donald Trump Understands, a review of Maggie Haberman’s new book The Confidence Man (emphasis added).

Eating crow

Hunter Baker voted for Trump in 2016.

A binary system dictates binary choices. The Democrats were out for me. Donald Trump was the alternative.

He privately despised the never-Trumpers:

My judgment of colleagues and of various conservatives who opposed Trump was privately severe. On the surface, I fully granted the strength of their concerns. But in the confines of my mind, I concluded that they were moral free riders.

He eventually came to his senses:

I don’t apologize for the votes I cast after careful (indeed, searching) consideration. However, I do have to apologize for my view of the never Trumpers whom I found to be histrionic and unrealistic. They saw further that there were significant risks involved with Donald Trump that could very well outweigh the policy outcomes. They were right about that, and they deserve an apology from me (and perhaps others who saw it the way I did) for not perceiving that their concerns were grounded in reality, not merely some idealistic moral fragility. They perceived a legitimate threat, which did come to significant fruition.

When Pragmatic Politics Goes Bad: An Apology to the Never-Trumpers

I probably haven’t said this in months, so consider this a reminder. I could, given time, come up with thousands of reasons why I can never vote for Donald Trump (if nothing else, I’d chronicle some of his tens of thousands of lies). But the bottom line for me, from the very beginning, was his narcissism along with his sociopathic abuse of people who crossed him. That narcissism sooner or later was going to lead him to dangerously misjudge reality, which does not revolve around him as the planets around the sun. Either he’s lying (again) or it did lead him to his inability to admit losing the 2020 Election.

[S]ubordinating truth to politics is a game which tyrants and bullies always win.

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge

The Orthodox "phronema" [roughly, mind-set] cannot be programmitized or reduced to shibboleths.

Fr. Jonathan Tobias

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.