Sunday of the Samaritan Woman

Sorry to be so much later than usual with this. I had a very busy Saturday and Sunday.

Beauty First

Let me commend to any artistic sorts reading this the video embedded in Beauty First: Envisioning a Civilization Worth Restoring. Jonathan Pageau’s introduction should tell you whether it merits your further attention.

Live the life of the Church

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

…

I am often asked, when writing on this topic, what response Christians should make. What do we do about the state? How do we respond to modernity? For the state – quit “believing” in it. We are commanded in Scripture to pray for those in authority. We are not commanded to make the state better or participate in its projects. We are commanded to serve our neighbors as we fulfill the law of God. However, I think it is important to work at “clearing the fog” of modern propaganda regarding the place of the nation state in the scheme of things. I would frame a response to modernity in this manner: we are not responsible for foreign religions. Though Christian language and carefully selected ideas are often employed in the selling of modernity’s many projects, it is a mistake to honor its false claims. Make no mistake, modernity will offer no credit, in the end, to Christ, the Church, or to people of faith. Its interests lie elsewhere.

The proper response to these things will seem modest. Live the life of the Church. The cure of modernity’s neurasthenia is found not in yet one more successful project, but in the long work of salvation set in our midst in Christ’s death and resurrection. Our faith is not a chaplaincy to the culture, or a mere artifact of an older world. The Church is the Body of Christ into which all things will be gathered, both in heaven and on earth. It is the Way of Life as well as a way of life. It is not given to us to control how we are seen by the world, or whether the world thinks us useful. It is for us to be swallowed up by Christ and to manifest His salvation to the world. We were told from the very beginning that we should be patient, just as we were promised from the beginning that we would suffer with Christ.

I think the sickness that haunts our culture is that we fail to know and see what is good and to give thanks for the grace that permeates all things. When that is forgotten, nothing will satisfy, nothing will transcend. There is no better world to be built, nor are there great wars to be won. There is today, and that is enough.

Fr. Stephen Freeman, When America Got Sick

Astronomical accuracy

I don’t think I’d ever read the tart Orthodox response (from one Patriarch at least) when Pope Gregory invite the Orthodox to adopt his new, more astronomically-accurate calendar:

By the 16th century, concerns about secular or humanistic trends in Catholic theology had become a major theme in Orthodox apologetics. For instance, the dating of Easter was fixed by the First Ecumenical Council imn A.D. 325. At the time, their calculation was made using the Julian Calendar. However, in 1582, Pope Gregory XIII issued his new liturgical calendar—now known as the Gregorian Calendar, which he held to be more scientifically accurate. Gregory wrote to the Orthodox patriarchs inviting them to adopt his new calendar. Patriarch Joachim V of Antioch commissioned a reply from his disciple Metropolitan Athanasius al-Marmariti ibn-al Mujalla, who wrote to Pope Gregory:

Our community, our bishops, our kings and all our people, scattered in the four cardinal directions—Greeks, Russians, Georgians, Vlachs, Serbs, Moldovans, Turks, Arabs, and others . . . from the time of the Holy Apostles and God-bearing fathers of the Seven Ecumenical Councils down to this day recognize one faith, one confession, one Church, and one baptism . . . and all our nations agree in the four corners of the inhabited world with one word and one affair . . . and we did not receive the confession and the holy tradition which is in our hands . . . from unknown people, like other, foreign communities.

But we pray with the Holy Apostles and the 318 fathers [of the Council of Nicaea] whose signs and miracles shine forth from them manifestly. And so how can we change the tradition of such holy fathers and follow after unknown people who have no other trade but to observe the stars and examine the sky?

As with the filioque, we see that there are really two complaints here. (1) The dating of Easter—like the text of the Creed—had been established by an Ecumenical Council. How, then, could it be modified unilaterally by the Pope? (2) Why should the Church prefer “scientific accuracy” to the longstanding custom of the Apostolic Church?

Michael Warren Davis, The Primacy of God.

Eventually, many Orthodox Churches in the West — including my own — adopted the Gregorian Calendar — except for Pascha/Easter and the preceding Lent and following Pentecost. For those, we stuck with the dating from the Ecumenical Council.

Departure from tradition

…as Nathan Hatch, Mark Noll, and E. Brooks Holifield argue, departure from tradition explains much of the growth, influence, and shortcomings of American Christianity—including the failure of the nation’s theologians and churches to resolve the question of slavery.

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

Spontaneity is not authenticity

In our desire to be real we start thinking that authenticity is another word for spontaneity, as if everything we say at the spur of the moment is more true, more sincere than words we craft carefully. For many, the Freudian slip is considered more authentic than the measured reply. Indeed, sometimes what we blurt out thoughtlessly is actually what we mean and feel. But more often than not, what we blurt out is ill-considered and something we either need to qualify or apologize for.

Mark Galli, Beyond Smells and Bells. I have not read this book, but appreciate Readwise suggesting it.

Homo liturgicus

[I]n Augustine’s view; we are homo liturgicus, and the basic human need to worship God can be diverted and misdirected, but it cannot be eliminated.

William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry

Miscellany

Religion’s closest cousin is not rigid logic but art.

David Tracy, who died April 29. I like that, but from what I read in his obituary, there’s a lot I would dislike.

The biblical significance of the modern state of Israel is exactly the same as the biblical significance of Finland.

Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick

Really great art should have a secret in it that the artist knows nothing about.
In each experience of beauty, we’re being prepared for eternity.

Martin Shaw

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.

Thomas Sunday

Pope Francis

Friend of the Orthodox

In the Orthodox Churches they preserve that pristine liturgy. So beautiful. We have lost a bit the sense of adoration. They preserve it. They praise God, they adore God, singing. Time stops. The center is God. . . . Once, speaking about the western Church, of western Europe, above all the grown-up Church, they told me this phrase: Lux ex oriente, ex occidente luxus. [“Light comes from the East, luxury from the West.”] Consumerism, well-being, have done much harm. Instead, you preserve this beauty of God at the center, the point of reference. When reading Dostoyevsky, I believe that for all of us he must be an author to read and reread, because he has wisdom. One perceives the Russian soul, the Eastern soul. It is something that will do us all good. We need this renewal, this fresh air from the East, of this light from the Orient. . . . Too often, the luxus of the West causes us to lose the horizon. I don’t know. This is what I’m moved to say.
During the first millennium, the universal communion of the Churches in the ordinary course of events was maintained through fraternal relations between the bishops.
The bishop of Rome did not exercise canonical authority over the churches of the East.

Pope Francis via Michael Warren Davis

These are important concessions by a Pope. Much more remains to be done to heal the Great Schism. Meanwhile, against my initial gut reaction, I now pray for the soul of God’s servant, Francis.

The worst of all possible Christian worlds

Not everyone feels as kindly toward Francis as does Michael Warren Davis:

Francis was thus my own worst Protestant nightmare: an authoritarian Roman pope driving a liberal Protestant agenda, a leader who embodied the worst of all possible Christian worlds.

Time will tell whether the next pope will follow in Francis’s footstep and permit the continuation of liberal Protestant policies. It’s up to the men who will be gathering in the Sistine Chapel in the coming weeks. As a Catholic friend once said to me about the last papal election, the Holy Spirit never errs. But, he added, the same cannot be said for the College of Cardinals.

Carl Trueman

Prompted by Francis’ death

I’m not claiming to be a good Catholic. I’m far from it. I’m a terrible one in many ways. I honestly, sincerely believe the church is wrong in some — but by no means all — of its teachings on sexuality. Lust has undoubtedly mastered me at times the way it has many men, and always will. But I also know my soul has far deeper problems than my love for other men, however muddied with desire; and that the world has lost its way so much more profoundly in other parts of life: in our materialism, our selfishness, our wealth and comfort, our smugness and distraction, and our abuse of our sacred planet.

Andrew Sullivan, Why I Loved Pope Francis (italics added).

The italicized portion of the block-quote bespeaks a genuine Christian faith, and I don’t have to agree with the rest to view it so.

A bitter pill

for every advance, there was an asterisk, and for every proclamation of love, a delineation of limits, so that Francis — who died on Monday at the age of 88 — personified the indelible tension in the church’s official teaching about homosexuality, which he never squarely renounced. That teaching holds that being gay isn’t a sin but that acting on those feelings is “intrinsically disordered.”

That’s tough to get your head around in the abstract. It’s even more difficult if you’ve spent much time in the church and with its clergy ….

Frank Bruni (italics added)

I’ve never seen how Rome’s position is all that tough to get your head around. “A bitter pill to swallow” is what I think Bruni may intend.

Be it remembered

What’s church good for?

[O]ur religious institutions are most important not for reasons of civic utility, such as running soup kitchens or cleaning up after natural disasters. No, their highest function is offering us access to the fullest truth about our world.

Yuval Levin via Joshua T. Katz. I encountered this quote for the first time this week, and I love it because it defies every effort to instrumentalize Church (or Synagogue, as in Levin’s case, or Mosque).

God does not have an anger problem

It is sinful to ascribe to God the characteristic features of fallen man by alleging, for example, that God is angry and vengeful, and therefore He must be propitiated and appeased. Such an attitude wants to make it appear that it is God Who needs curing, and not man. But this is sacrilegious. The sinful man, who is characterized by egoism and arrogance, is offended. We cannot say that God is offended. . . . Consequently, sin is not an insult to God, Who must be cured, but our own illness, and therefore we need to be cured

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

Other stuff

The Gramscian Heresy

The Protestant integralists belonging the New Apostolic Reformation school, with their Seven-Mountain Mandate, certainly look Gramscian, don’t they? They want the power that comes from control of key institutions.

That’s not necessarily a mike-drop observation. We have an overabundance of Gramscians trying to march through our institutions these days, but few who are Gramscian as part of an explicitly “religious” movement.

Orthodox hagiographies are full of Saints who had to be dragged kicking and screaming (as it were) to accept ordination to the Priesthood, or elevation to a Bishopric. I’ll drive my stake in the ground here: A Christian may legitimatly be led to office, but hunger for power over others is anti-Christian.

An old truth that we keep forgetting

Reason is an absolute—all is in ruins. Yet those who ask me to believe this world picture also ask me to believe that Reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of mindless matter at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. Here is flat contradiction. They ask me at the same moment to accept a conclusion and to discredit the only testimony on which that conclusion can be based. The difficulty is to me a fatal one; and the fact that when you put it to many scientists, far from having an answer, they seem not even to understand what the difficulty is, assures me that I have not found a mare’s nest but detected a radical disease in their whole mode of thought from the very beginning.

C.S. Lewis, Weight of Glory

A surprising possibility

What’s driving young people to Christianity? In UnHerd, Niall Gooch argued the answer may lie in the strict moral demands of modern secularism. “At its best, Christianity is not a moralistic religion — in other words, it does not place the expectation of perfect behaviour at its core. It is repentance and reconciliation, not respectability, that are central to the internal logic of the faith. The Christian moral system is also coherent and predictable,” he wrote. “Modern secular morality, by contrast, is extremely censorious and has a strongly arbitrary element, as we have seen in the last decade or so of ‘cancel culture.’ People have been subjected to storms of anonymous criticism, resulting in lost jobs and lost livelihoods, with no clear limiting principle and no real interest in proportionality. To make matters worse, this is all highly impersonal and offers no clear pathway for restoration and forgiveness.”

The Morning Dispatch

Mystery, not random

To call the unknown “random” is to plant the flag by which to colonize and exploit the known. . . . To call the unknown by its right name, “mystery,” is to suggest that we had better respect the possibility of a larger, unseen pattern that can be damaged or destroyed and, with it, the smaller patterns. . . . But if we are up against mystery, then knowledge is relatively small, and the ancient program is the right one: Act on the basis of ignorance.

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

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

Pascha 2025

I put the final touches on this as I waited for our Paschal/Easter Vigil. When it posts, I should be fat, happy — and sound asleep in a “meat coma.”

Fr. Stephen Freeman says “I can think of at least two times in my life that the failures of Church, or its hierarchy, drove me from the ranks of the Church, or what passed for Church at the time.” I can think of only one, but heightened apprehension of the Resurrection kept me from leaving what passed for Church at the time. So it seems personally fitting that this is Orthodoxy’s “Feast of Feasts,” surpassing even Christ’s Nativity (which seems more prominent in the West — forgive me if I err).

All around the world tonight and tomorrow, Orthodox priests will be spared writing an “Easter Sermon” because it’s customary to read this one from a master preacher. We even do a bit of call and response, shouting “It was embittered!”

Christ is Risen!

One more Easter thought

[Saint John] Chrysostom commented on this reality: I, for instance, feel differently about these subjects than an unbeliever. I hear, “Christ was crucified” and immediately I admire His loving-kindness to men. The other hears and esteems it as weakness. I hear, “He became a servant” and I wonder at his care for us. The other hears and counts it as dishonor. I hear, “He died” and I am astonished at His might, that He was not held in death, but even broke the bands of death. The other hears and surmises it to be helplessness. He, on hearing of the resurrection, says the thing is a legend. I, aware of the facts which demonstrate it, fall down and worship the dispensation of God. . . . For not by the sight do I judge the things that appear, but by the eyes of the mind. I hear of the “Body of Christ.” In one sense I understand the expression, in another sense the unbeliever.

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

Heresy, not secularism

Ten years ago I published a book called “Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics,” which offered an interpretation of the country’s shifting religious landscape, the sharp post-1960s decline of institutional faith. Before the book’s anniversary slips away, I thought I would revisit the argument, to see how it holds up as a guide to our now more de-Christianized society.

What the book proposed was that secularization wasn’t a useful label for the American religious transformation. Instead, I wrote, American culture seems “as God-besotted today as ever” — still fascinated with the figure of Jesus of Nazareth, still in search of divine favor and transcendence. But these interests and obsessions are much less likely to be channeled through churches, Protestant and Catholic, that maintain some connection to historical Christian orthodoxies. Instead, our longtime national impulse toward heresy — toward personalized revisions of Christian doctrine, Americanized updates of the Gospel — has finally completed its victory over older Christian institutions and traditions.

Ross Douthat, The Americanization of Religion – The New York Times

Redemption (a venerable poem)

Having been tenant long to a rich lord,
Not thriving, I resolvèd to be bold,
And make a suit unto him, to afford
A new small-rented lease, and cancel th’ old.

In heaven at his manor I him sought;
They told me there that he was lately gone
About some land, which he had dearly bought
Long since on earth, to take possessiòn.

I straight returned, and knowing his great birth,
Sought him accordingly in great resorts;
In cities, theaters, gardens, parks, and courts;
At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth

Of thieves and murderers; there I him espied,
Who straight, Your suit is granted, said, and died.

(George Herbert, Redemption, via Sally Thomas at Today’s Poem).

I’m sorry that this won’t format exactly like the original I saw without using some coding that ends up rendering an ugly post.

The search for certainty

The Reformation is the first great expression of the search for certainty in modern times. As Schleiermacher put it, the Reformation and the Enlightenment have this in common, that ‘everything mysterious and marvellous is proscribed. Imagination is not to be filled with [what are now thought of as] airy images.’ In their search for the one truth, both movements attempted to do away with the visual image, the vehicle par excellence of the right hemisphere, particularly in its mythical and metaphoric function, in favour of the word, the stronghold of the left hemisphere, in pursuit of unambiguous certainty. … What is so compelling here is that the motive force behind the Reformation was the urge to regain authenticity, with which one can only be profoundly sympathetic. The path it soon took was that of the destruction of all means whereby the authentic could have been recaptured.

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary

Pecking Order Ecclesiology

It isn’t strange to learn that Prestigious Scholar X on the law/econ/poli-sci faculty at Ivy League School Y is Roman Catholic. It is a bit of a surprise to learn that he’s an evangelical. The moment you hear it, though, you wonder (or ask) whether he’s an evangelical Anglican or some such.

Brad East, Conversions, Protestantism, and a New Mainline

Misinterpreting the Bible

Both the fundamentalist and the higher critic assume that it is possible to understand the biblical text without training, without moral transformation, without the confession and forgiveness that come about within the church. Unconsciously, both means of interpretation try to make everyone religious (that is, able to understand and appropriate scripture) without everyone’s being a member of the community for which the Bible is Scripture.

Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens

It’s not just the “higher critics.” Lots of lazy unbelievers have their little proof-texts to illustrate that absurdity or barbarity of the Bible. But they read them as fundamentalists do, not as the historic Church does.

Balancing Rites

The campaign for same-sex marriage has triumphed, and I can’t imagine a successful counter-offensive (Maybe some day when I’m long dead and gone?). Meanwhile:

Maybe the prospective customers, like many Americans, do not see transcendent meaning in the ceremonial commencement of matrimony, because they associate a wedding as admittance to an institutional legal fiction that allows one access to nothing more than a cluster of political and social privileges not available to other friendships. So, given this understanding, it is not surprising that the customers see the provider’s refusal as a negative judgment on the public legitimacy of their union. Thus, it’s easy to see why the customers would be offended by the provider’s refusal and subsequently seek legal redress. But what the customers fail to see is that their demand that the courts force the providers to rescind their denial and be punished for it is really a demand that the state force the providers not to exercise their freedom of worship, the liberty not to participate in, or not provide assistance to, ceremonies that one believes have sacramental significance.

Francis J. Beckwith, Taking Rites Seriously

Convert shock

Steve Robinson on his initial experience in an Antiochian (f/k/a Syrian) Orthodox parish back when they weren’t really used to Protestant converts:

I can summarize the mutual culture shock, ours and theirs, over the next few years pretty succinctly: They didn’t know why we were so serious about Orthodoxy and we didn’t know why they weren’t. We had zeal with a little knowledge and no experience, they had some knowledge, a lifetime of experience, and little zeal (at least for the things WE thought “real Christians” should be zealous about). And for all of our decades of zealous “Christianity” we brought to the table, we didn’t know what love looked like.

This is one of the sorts of culture clashes that make Fr. Stephen De Young think that there will be no single “American Orthodox Church,” independent of traditional Orthodox lands, for a very long time — and a good thing it is! We converts (e.g., Steve Robinson, Fr. Stephen, me) are good for the Church, but we don’t have everything right. We might well push the “cradle Orthodox” aside in our arrogance and create something syncretistic under the “Orthodox” name.

I came to the Church for respite and healing of my evangelical battle scars. After all, it is “the hospital for sinners” originally founded by The Great Physician, who organized and staffed it with his own hand picked specialists who were guided by an inspired Mission Statement.

…

I think of all I have learned in twenty six years, perhaps this is the most important: The Hospital is also The Arena. It is a place of a brutal, to the death cage fight with my demons and I will not finish the battle un-scarred. The Hospital treats my wounds with the sacramental medicine of immortality and arms me with the gifts of the Holy Spirit, sometimes in spite of the attending physician. I cannot pick only one wing of the building, they co-exist in the same place.

Standing, Still

Evangelical political theology

Though it feels rather remote now, it is important to recall that back in the 2000s and 2010s, popular level evangelical political theology basically did not exist. The two dominant paradigms on offer were a kind of lazy baptizing of conservative fusionism that was shockingly indifferent to historic Christian reflection or a watered down evangelical Hauerwasianism that attempted to locate Christian political witness within the church, all while being mostly unaware of how impoverished evangelical ecclesiology had become.

Jake Meador, Anti-Wokeness and the Evangelical Fracturing

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

Balm for Those Battered and Bruised by Bad Religion

From early adolescence to age forty-nine, my life as a Christian (which started when I was very young) was very American, in Evangelical and Calvinist modes. I got into it pretty deeply, as I have a compulsion to figure things out, and that involved reading lots of stern explanations (“theology”).

Then, twenty-eight or so years ago, I stumbled into an Orthodox Christian Church:

Having settled in for a few decades, what have I found uniquely true about the Orthodox Church?

It’s hard to put into words. That’s why Orthodox evangelism tends to consist of “come and see.”

Harder still for me personally, I need to find words for feelings and tendencies that an intellectualoid has trouble trusting — things that may be true but approach ineffability. I have a Dostoyevsky “Beauty Will Save the World” sticker on my office window, but long habit and self-image keep pulling me back toward “Spock-like logic … will save the world.”

(A life in a string of epiphanies)

Yesterday, though, I heard something that can serve as a decent summary that I suspect that a lot of American Christians need to hear:

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

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

Fr. Stephen De Young

This Great and Holy Friday, I would add that the Son loves us, too, and is entirely on our side. We die with Him, and are raised with Him.

St. John Climacus, 2025

Denying our ancestry

Just as the Bishop of Oxford refused to consider that he might be descended from an ape, so now are many in the West reluctant to contemplate that their values, and even their very lack of belief, might be traceable back to Christian origins.

Tom Holland, Dominion

The virtue of essays

I write here not as a teacher to students but rather as a reader to other readers, a citizen to other citizens. I write because I think I have learned a few things in my teaching life that are relevant to our common life. You will see what those are if you read on.

My approach here is anything but systematic. Of all the literary genres, I am fondest of the essay, with its meandering course that (we hope) faithfully represents the meanderings of the human mind … certain images in advance and people will recur throughout this book, returning perhaps when you think we’re done with them. I write this way because none of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread with the Dead. That last sentence is a gem.

Notional Evangelical Bibicism

As a public relations stunt, Trump’s Bible photo might seem unserious, but the president certainly understood the importance of Christian scripture to a significant voting bloc. Evangelicals are biblicists, and the extent to which American religiosity has been dominated by evangelical Protestantism correlates to the degree to which American culture has been shaped by the Bible.

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

I would be remiss were I not to recommend Brad East’s ‌Biblicist churches that don’t read the Bible — Brad East. Historian Gutaker may be missing something contemporary.

The one, true meaning of the text

When I try to explain to people why we need to recover patristic interpretation, the biggest obstacle I face is the desire of my interlocutors to establish the one, true meaning of the text. When I assert that there is no such thing, I provoke raised eyebrows: I must be playing fast and loose with the biblical text, making it echo my preconceptions. My insistence that biblical texts have multiple, even innumerable meanings contradicts our modern objectivism. My defense of patristic allegorizing likewise elicits fears of arbitrariness and subjectivism.

Hans Boersma, No Method but Christ

Whither the magisterial Reformation?

Nearly two decades ago, Bruce McCormack, professor of systematic theology at Princeton Seminary, wrote: “The situation in which Christian theology is done in the United States today is shaped most dramatically by the slow death of the Protestant churches.” He went on:

if current rates of decline in membership continue, all that will be left by mid-century will be Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and non-denominational evangelical churches. . . . The churches of the Reformation will have passed from the scene—and with their demise, there will be no obvious institutional bearers of the message of the Reformation. What all of this means in practice is that it will become more and more necessary, for the sake of the future of Christianity, to establish stronger ecumenical relations with the Catholics and the Orthodox.

This is a grave prediction, but its sobriety makes it not just prescient but practical. Non-catholic varieties of Christendom are here for good, but Goldilocks Protestantism was always doomed to fail. It presumed too much, relying on a common inheritance—patristic, medieval, and cultural—that was bound to be called into question by future reformers in search of their own style of biblical renewal.

In any case, McCormack is right: Whether, in the coming decades, magisterial Christians look “up” or “down” for friendship and cooperation, they will be living in a world without Protestantism. In truth, they already are.

Brad East, Goldilocks Protestantism

Martyrdom

Many a man will live and die upon a dogma: no man will be a martyr for a conclusion.

John Henry Newman

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

Cheesefare 2025

Gymnasiums

The gym where God retrains our hearts

Worship is the arena in which God recalibrates our hearts, reforms our desires, and rehabituates our loves. Worship isn’t just something we do; it is where God does something to us. Worship is the heart of discipleship because it is the gymnasium in which God retrains our hearts.

James K.A. Smith, You Are What You Love

And that, my friend, is why I [still] don’t mind singing in an empty Church.

Smith gets a lot of things right.

The gym where amnesiacs stultify our hearts

[T]he practices and prayers set out for God’s people in the prayer book have been amongst the most formative in western and, indeed, global Christianity. But to American evangelicals in the 2020s, living after nearly 50 years in which our corporate liturgy and prayer life has soaked in the corrosive acid of seeker sensitive church life, the practices and even the language of the prayer book can feel strange and foreign and even a bit frightening, I think. We have become accustomed to three songs and a TED talk, to spectacle, and to spontaneity. And while I think there are a great many of us who are quite tired of such things, it is not easy for those on the far side of a great forgetting to regain what previous generations misplaced—unless they have help ….

Jake Meador.

Jake is a young man, so it’s understandable that he thinks the great forgetting began with seeker-sensitivity. I think it started earlier, perhaps more than a century earlier. But I’m neither a historian nor an eyewitness.

Miscellany

Out of my yawns, a grabber

Ross Douthat was being interviewed by Andrew Sullivan about his forthcoming book, Believe. For the most part, I am uninterested in this book (which gives all kinds of rational, scientific arguments for the reasonableness of belief and some kind of God) simply because I think God‘s existence per se is not very interesting.

However, there was one argument of a sort that I had not heard before, and that caught my attention: Why is mankind so gifted with intelligence and curiosity that he penetrates many of the secrets of the universe? Why was our intelligence not limited to that degree that, for instance, would allow us to be subsistence, farmers or herders? If we merely evolved, why didn’t evolution stop there? Might it be that we are given much greater intelligence than that in order that we could both discover facts about the universe and commune more fully with God?

(I’m not sure where Douthat ends and I begin in the prior paragraph.)

Some day, a story

I’m fatigued by politics at the moment – I have to be careful with attempting punditry in this state – as Gary Snyder said, “Don’t be a slave to your lesser talents”. But at some point a story rather than a polemic will appear that speaks to the moment we are in and I will proceed from there. Nobody needs more clever arguments. I miss the woods, the sea, the swooping buzzard, I don’t miss any more retina-blitzing bit of adrenal-wrecking rhetoric.

Martin Shaw, 2/23/25

Correctness < Theology

Nothing is as difficult as true theology. Simply saying something correct is beside the point. Correctness does not rise to the level of theology. Theology, rightly done, is a path towards union with God. It is absolutely more than an academic exercise. Theology is not the recitation of correct facts, it is the apprehension and statement of Beauty.

It is this aspect of liturgical life that makes it truly theological. It is also the failure of most contemporary Christian worship efforts. Gimmicks, emotional manipulation and a musical culture that barely rises above kitsch reveal nothing of God – and embarrassingly much about us.

Fr. Stephen Freeman

Catholic or Orthodox?

It happened one afternoon last autumn. I was praying before an icon of the Holy Family. “What should I do? Should I stay Catholic or become Orthodox? Please give me some sign.”

A tear rolled down Mary’s face. I wiped it away. My fingers were wet. I burst into the living room and called to my wife. “The icon is weeping,” I told her. She looked incredulous. “Call Father T.,” she said.

Father T. was the priest of our Eastern-Catholic parish. He retired from the local police force as a homicide detective before taking holy orders. I told him what happened. “I’m an old cop,” he said, “so I assume there are natural causes before I start looking for supernatural ones.” As we were talking, I watched a tear form in Joseph’s eye and roll down his face.

“It’s happening again,” I said.

Father T. was silent for a moment. “Oh.”

We hung up. I was staring at the icon when another tear formed in Mary’s eye. This time I brought it to my wife. “Do you see this?” I asked her. She wiped the tear from the icon and tasted it. “It’s sweet.”

A few hours later I called Father T. back. He said that, in his opinion, the weeping icon was a sign to remain Catholic. Surely, Mary and Joseph were crying because I was thinking about leaving the Church. Also, icons of the Holy Family are definitely “Western-style.” (Mrs. Davis and I bought the icon shortly after we were married, at a conference hosted by the Society of St. Pius X.) Isn’t that significant? Besides, in the East, miraculous icons usually stream myrrh all over, like a glass of ice water sweating in the hot sun. Ours wept tears from its eyes, more like the miraculous statues one finds in the West. This was a “hybrid” miracle: no doubt a sign to remain Eastern Catholic. All of which are perfectly good arguments.

Afterwards I called Father A., an old Russian priest in whom I’d been confiding. Father A. also happens to be a master iconographer. I asked him, “Is this a sign to become Orthodox?” To my surprise, he demurred. Weeping icons are not like Ouija boards, he said. They don’t give yes-or-no answers to the questions we ask God in prayer. First and foremost, they are gifts. They remind us of God’s presence in our lives, and of His love for us. Secondly, they call us to repentance—to enter more deeply into a life of prayer and fasting.

Father A. told me that, of course, he would love for us to become Orthodox. He felt that our fasting and prayer would, in time, lead us to the Orthodox Church. But God is not like you and me, he said. His gifts are never purely utilitarian.

Michael Warren Davis

It may well be that “Father T” opined badly by the standards of his own Church and that Orthodox Priests exist who, unlike Father A, would play the same game. But I’m pretty sure Father A is in the Orthodox mainstream.

Lazarus on Cyprus

It is well-known among Cypriots, not to mention a matter of national pride, that St. Lazarus lived on the island of Cyprus after the Lord’s Resurrection. Saint John’s Gospel tells us that the Jewish leaders had resolved to kill both Jesus and Lazarus. They considered it necessary to kill Lazarus because belief in Jesus as the Messiah increased after he raised Lazarus to life when he had been dead for four days (John 12:9–11). Lazarus was literally living proof of this extraordinary miracle. The New Testament itself does not tell us that Lazarus went to Cyprus later, but this was known in the tradition of the Church of Cyprus. The gospel message came to Cyprus very early, and the Church was established there even before St. Paul became a missionary (Acts 11:19–21).

My husband, Fr. Costas, was born and lived on the island of Cyprus when it was still a British colony. He related to me that the Cypriots would boast about St. Lazarus to the British there. But the British would often scoff at this claim, saying there was no proof that Lazarus had ever come to Cyprus.

A very old church dedicated to St. Lazarus, dating back to the 800s, is located in Larnaca, Cyprus. In 1972 a fire caused serious damage to the church building. The subsequent renovation required digging beneath the church to support the structure during reconstruction. In the process of digging, workers uncovered the relics of St. Lazarus located directly below the altar in a marble sarcophagus engraved with the words “Lazarus, the four-day dead and friend of Christ.”

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

Why do we find it implausible that Lazarus lived somewhere after Christ raised him, and that it/he was important enough that people there preserved the memory?

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

Sunday of the Last Judgment

No, that’s not a prediction. That’s the formal name of this last pre-Lenten Sunday in Orthodox Christianity. It’s also known as “meatfare,” because tomorrow we begin abstaining from meat until Pascha, April 20 this year.

State of the Union, February 23

A lot of people are trying to find precedents for what’s going on with the USA over the last 34 days. May I suggest that this is a fall of Babylon?

The US as Babylon was first suggested to me by a schismatic (when I was unwittingly schismatic) almost 60 years ago. I’ve never quite shaken it, and I think that there was a seed of truth there that’s compatible with Orthodoxy. One important divergence in my application is that I absolutely wouldn’t say “When the Bible says ‘Babylon,’ it means the USA.” Rather, I think Babylon is a typology, and that the USA fits it to a “T” today. In a few hundred years (“if the Lord tarries,” as they say), it could be China.

On the other hand, we don’t read Revelation liturgically, and I’ve never heard an Orthodox Priest or academic suggest this directly. I can’t rule out that the thought is just a bit of mental baggage from my past. It hasn’t caught on in white American Evangelicalism because — well, read the passage. It’s not holding up a flattering mirror.

In all this, friends, remember that God’s judgments are true and righteous, that He is gracious and loves mankind, and that the end of a world isn’t the end of the world.

Atheism in the Church

Last week, I quoted the ever-provocative Stanley Hauerwas

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?

Might this be profitably expanded to include political mobilization? …

The Atheist Liturgical Calendar

… Or our “liturgical calendars”?

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so … what any calendar does, because any calendar you use is going to be cyclical, is going to be a series of weeks that make up a series of months that make up a series of years, and that cycle is going to repeat. There’s going to be a May 23 every year. It loops back around.

Even if you want to talk about— Let’s talk about the most secular calendar I can think of, which is the American consumer calendar, meaning it’s structured around holidays that are built to sell things. So we just had Memorial Day: sell barbecue supplies and flags. We’re going to have—now, Juneteenth has been added to the list; I think that’s also going to be a lot of barbecuing for most people. Fourth of July, sell fireworks, sell flags. Mother’s Day, Father’s Day is in there: buy gifts for Dad, get the tie cake from Carvel. Valentine’s Day. St. Patrick’s Day: sell a lot of beer and green stuff, etc. So this is the most— about as secular as you can get of a calendar; even though some of those dates are still named after saints, it’s pretty secular.

That calendar, if you follow it, will shape the rhythm of your life. And that’s what it’s designed for! … Retail establishments want that to shape the rhythm of your life. That “seasonal” section at your local Walmart, where they have the stuff for whatever the next one of these holidays that aren’t really holy days per se in most cases— They’re counting on that cycle. They want that to shape your life. “Oh, now I go and buy and consume this. Now I go and buy and consume that.” They’ll shape your life; it’ll form you.

This, to me, is one of the worst backlashes of particularly the Puritan movements that come out of the Protestant Reformation. Bear with me here, Protestant friends. Really think about this. They had such an antipathy for [things] like saints’ days… Some of those Puritan movements— Well, most of those Puritan movements wouldn’t celebrate Christmas, the birth of Christ. Some of them won’t even celebrate Easter, Pascha. But definitely we don’t want a lot of, you know, feast days. I think it’s in the Westminster Standards that says you must guard against the proliferation of saints’ days.

Fr. Andrew: Nice! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Protect everyone from this, right? So all of this stuff from the Christian liturgical calendar gets removed. And most American Christianity, American Evangelicalism really comes out of those Puritan movements, just historically. But then what do you end up centering even your church life around? You’ve got Mother’s Day sermons, Father’s Day sermons.

Fr. Andrew: You’re going to have a liturgical calendar one way or another.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! Fourth of July sermons when you sing patriotic songs in a church!

Fr. Andrew: I know.

Fr. Stephen: All of these things. It’s the same thing! You’ve just chosen the most secular possible version!

Fr. Andrew: What I want to know is—and I’m pretty sure the answer to this question is yes; I just haven’t encountered it yet because I haven’t googled it up yet— Are there Amazon Prime Day sermons?

Fr. Stephen: Oh, I’m sure. I know there are Black Friday sermons.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, of course!

Fr. Stephen: [Sigh] Right? Just pause and think about it for a minute. What’s better: to base and structure your liturgical life on the life of Christ and the stories about Christ recounted in the Bible, or to base the cycles of your church life on random national holidays that often don’t even have any particular religious significance? I mean, the answer to that seems so obvious to me. I think the Puritans would be horrified by Fourth of July sermons and Mother’s Day and Father’s Day sermons! So think about that. But this is why, again, the calendar is so important.

Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick and (mostly) Fr. Stephen De Young

Science and religion

Just as colonial officials and missionaries, traveling to India, had imposed the concept of ‘religion’ on the societies they found there, so did agnostics colonize the past in similar manner. The ancient Egyptians, and Babylonians, and Romans: all were assumed to have had a ‘religion’. Some peoples—most notably the Greeks—were also assumed to have had ‘science’. It was this that had enabled their civilization to serve as the wellspring of progress. Philosophers had been the prototypes of scientists. The library of Alexandria had been ‘the birthplace of modern science’. Only Christians, with their fanatical hatred of reason and their determination to eradicate pagan learning, had prevented the ancient world from being set on a path towards steam engines and cotton mills.

Tom Holland, Dominion (spelling Americanized)

History Rhymes

Most Church leaders—conscious that to condemn Nazis for blasphemous kitsch might prove risky—opted to bite their tongues. Some, though, actively lent it their imprimatur. In 1933, the year that Hitler was appointed chancellor, Protestant churches across Germany marked the annual celebration of the Reformation by singing Wessel’s battle hymn. In Berlin Cathedral, a pastor shamelessly aped Goebbels. Wessel, he preached, had died just as Jesus had died. Then, just for good measure, he added that Hitler was ‘a man sent by God’.

Tom Holland, Dominion

Naked suffering

My grandparents did not have a car, but they hired one to go in to the hospital, when the end finally came. I went with them in the car, but was not allowed to enter the hospital. Perhaps it was just as well. What would have been the good of my being plunged into a lot of naked suffering and emotional crisis without any prayer, any Sacrament to stabilize and order it, and make some kind of meaning out of it? In that sense, Mother was right. Death, under those circumstances, was nothing but ugliness, and if it could not possibly have any ultimate meaning, why burden a child’s mind with the sight of it?

Thomas Merton, The Seven-Story Mountain

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

Sunday of the Publican and Pharisee

An American Orthodox Church?

There is no American Orthodox Church. It’s going to take centuries for there to be an American Orthodox Church. It took centuries for there to be a Russian Orthodox Church. There was a metropolitan of Kiev … who was appointed by the patriarch of Constantinople, who was a Greek for a long time, the metropolitan of Kiev. Because Russian Orthodoxy didn’t exist yet. It took centuries for it to come into existence.

Gentile Christianity took a long time to come into existence. The core of every church St. Paul founded was Jewish Christians, and he argued vehemently that that did not mean the Gentiles did not need to become Jews to become part of the community. So the fact that we have— Well, there have been attempts, but the fact that the Orthodox Church has not tried to boot-strap an American Orthodoxy is a very good thing, because the thing that would be produced by that would be a nightmare. It would be American in all the worst ways. There are forms of Christianity in the United States that are very, very American in all the worst ways: consumerism, obsession with entertainment culture and celebrity, this men’s conference this week that was like: “Saturday, Saturday, Saturday, monster trucks! UFC fights…” Like, it’s pathetic. It’s a distortion of Christianity in favor of Americanism.

…

[T]he Orthodox Church [in the USA] is still very close to its immigrant roots. That’s a good thing. That’s one of the things that’s protected Orthodox Christianity in this country from the way that American culture colonizes everything and corrupts it, frankly, with consumerism and these other traits, these other negative traits. It’s not just consumerism either. It’s pornification; it’s all kinds of things in American culture … But those immigrant ties have protected the Orthodox Church from that, and those immigrant ties are not going to last forever. My concern is less with how do we make the Orthodox Church more American; my concern is how do we stop it from becoming too American too fast and becoming some weird chimera.

Our goal has to be preserving what’s been handed down to us, preserving it intact, preserving it free from corruption, and then presenting it to people because it will bring about their salvation. But it’s going to challenge them. It’s going to be difficult.

Fr. Stephen De Young

Muscular Christianity?

One reason I became Orthodox is that the heart of this faith is not to be found in the legacy of Imperial Byzantium but in the spirit of the Desert Fathers, the hesychasts and the saints of the prisons. I don’t think many of my critics really understand Orthodoxy; but the life and teachings of, say, St John Chrysostom, St Isaac the Syrian, St Moses the Black or modern saints such as St Porphyrios or St Nektarios are more than enough to refute some of the cruder arguments for a ‘muscular Christianity’ that the Internet is currently coughing up.

Paul Kingsnorth

White Man’s Burden

My morning prayers used to include “thwart our meddling in traditional cultures, teaching them acquisativeness and perversion as the new White Man’s Burden.” If you have no idea why I would pray such a thing, go back and read this week’s news stories about some of the liberal groin pieties that USAID has been funding of late. Or this distilled version:

I doubt that it was necessary (not to mention legal) to feed USAID to the wood chipper to stop that crap, and I strongly suspect that some very meritorious work that enhances our image in the world will be collateral damage of Elon and his band of snot-nosed barbarians.

But my prayer for thwarting has been answered — a reminder to “be careful what you pray for.”

What’s better than joy?

‘Milton was right,’ said my Teacher. ‘The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” There is always something they insist on keeping even at the price of misery. There is always something they prefer to joy—that is, to reality.

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

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

Sunday, 1/26/25

Musings from a funeral

I went to a funeral on MLK Day (when there were unrelated festivities going on in Washington DC as well). I hadn’t seen the deceased probably in more than a quarter century, but I always liked him.

Apart from being dead, Tom looked good. Apart from her hair haven’t gone white, his wife looked great. It was good to see them again, though it does eventually get tiresome when you only see your old friends at funerals, especially when one is the guest of honor.

His daughter’s Remembrance dwelt at some lengths on Tom’s piety, and deservedly so in my experience. We got acquainted at our former Reformed church. When our church ~~split~~ planted a sister church with guitars and drums and plexiglass and repetitive praise songs and such, I think he went with the sister church instead of staying with us stick-in-the-muds. Eventually, he moved out of state, to a warmer and trendier place, to start his own business in a field he knew from 30 or so years’ experience. He remained firmly in the Reformed tradition, though he switched in his new home to the Presbyterian side rather than the continental.

And soon enough, the Orthodox Christian faith caught my serious attention and I, too, left — in an opposite direction from Tom.

Which brings me to my topic. Why me? Why did I get lucky? Why don’t more people like me find the Orthodox Christian faith?

I don’t really have an answer, but I have largely gotten over my convert-itis, my urge to harangue people about looking into Orthodoxy. I’m just not prepared to say that the world would be a better place if every pious Protestant was forever wringing his hands and anxiously poring over books to see if maybe he hadn’t picked (or been born into, or married into, or whatever) the true/best Church. There’s something to be said for settling down and practicing your faith, especially since the alternative of searching, searching, searching just might be unhealthier than settling down in the wrong place.

Or so it seems to me. I don’t mean to be cavalier about extra Ecclesiam nulla salus or to fudge the borders of Ecclesiam, but if I can hope for the salvation of all, and can get out of my left brain about distinctions, surely I can hope for the salvation of heterodox Christians.

Settling is what I had done 30-plus years ago. As I can attest, God knows how to unsettle you when you need it. So if you are feeling unsettled in your Church, come and see what’s up in your nearest Orthodox Church. Otherwise, stay put and be the best [fill in the blank] you can be.

And may God have mercy on me if this is the advice of a squish.

Before we forget the stunt …

Of Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde’s National Cathedral sermon (which turned to direct admonition of Donald Trump):

I must be one of the only people other than those actually in the cathedral to have listened to the entire thing. It was dry, high-minded, and Christ-light, and it built on a theme of “unity” in which all people drop their political differences and embrace a generalized, feel-good, Esperanto-like uni-faith, with everyone directing their prayers to Whom It May Concern.

Caitlin Flanagan

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

Sunday before Theophany

Myth and Truth

A man who disbelieved the Christian story as fact but continually fed on it as myth would, perhaps, be more spiritually alive than one who assented and did not think much about it.” So claimed C. S. Lewis in his 1944 essay “Myth Became Fact.” Lewis insisted that myth lies at the heart of the faith—even if it embarrasses those moderns who would cover over the mythic imagery of Scripture with the whitewash of literalism, replacing lively stories with morals, principles, and ideas. The similarities between the Christian faith and the myths of the pagans need not occasion unease, Lewis argued; rather, they manifest a “mythical radiance” that should be preserved within our theology.

…

Jordan Peterson is an especially vivid example of one who feeds upon the Christian story as myth, while not believing it as fact. He is far from alone, and though We Who Wrestle with God is not a true Christian reading of Holy Scripture, it represents an encouraging trend of serious thinkers recognizing the vital cultural significance of the Bible. This trend may be a much-needed beachhead for the evangelization of righteous pagans—and a spur to Christians to return to a spiritual reading of Holy Scripture. In myth, as Lewis recognized, meaning is encountered neither as abstract nor as bound to the particular, but as reality. And in the Incarnation, myth and fact are joined.

Alastair Roberts, Jordan Peterson’s “God”.

My attitude toward Jordan Peterson is vexed. I pray for him as a very important Christian-adjacent “influencer” — that he will lead his (mostly young, or so I hear) followers to good places and that he himself will embrace the Orthodox Christian faith to which he is is multiple ways very close. On the other hand, I don’t have time for his logorrhea and circumlocution.

Ritual

The genius of ritual is that it allows us not to articulate our feelings. It allows us to express our faith through an act.

Andrew Sullivan via Peter Savodnik

Why so much doctrine in catechesis?

Frs. Andrew and Stephen, in an un-transcribed asynchronous Q&A podcast, observed that although catechesis ideally should be more about how to live an Orthodox life, less about what the Orthodox Church believes (90% of that can be gotten from Kallistos Ware’s The Orthodox Church), nonetheless people come to Orthodoxy thinking, for instance, “St. Paul taught X, Y and Z in Romans” when in fact he did not so teach. Leaving that Protestant artifact unaddressed will lead some people to a place where they feel that the Church is contradicting St. Paul. So we’ve got to do some doctrine in catechesis.

My comment: One of the doctrines we need to emphasize with converts coming from a left-brain culture is that praxis may be more important than doctrine.

Caveat Zeitgeist

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.

Fr. Stephen Freeman

Golden Rule, misapplied

“Why do you defame us?” asks the former president. “Why concentrate on the negative? We give you the Alumnus of the Year award, and you turn around and lambaste us in your writing every chance you get.” Blindsided, I don’t reply right away. Finally, I say, “I don’t intend to demean anyone. I guess I’m still trying to sort through the mixed messages I got here.” He doesn’t back off. “I know all sorts of juicy stories about people in Christian ministry,” he says. “But I would never write about them because of the pain it would cause. I go by the Golden Rule: Do unto others as I would have them do to me.” Later, as his comment sinks in, I realize that is the very reason I probe my past, even though it may cause others pain. My brother’s question plagues me still: What is real, and what is fake? I know of no more real or honest book than the Bible, which hides none of its characters’ flaws. If I’ve distorted reality or misrepresented myself, I would hope someone would call me out.

Philip Yancey, Where the Light Fell.

Yancey’s interlocutor wants to be left alone, and thinks that’s the meaning of the “Golden Rule.” Yancey won’t leave him alone because he wouldn’t want to be left alone if he strayed.

I’m with Yancey, but it seems like the world around me, including purported Christians, is almost unanimously with his interlocutor.

A most kingly Reformation

Predictably, secular authorities convinced by the reformers’ truth claims liked the distinction drawn between the necessity of obedience to them and of disobedience to Rome. They liked hearing “the Gospel” accompanied by such “good news”—it would allow them, for starters, to appropriate for themselves all ecclesiastical property, including the many buildings and lands that belonged to religious orders, and to use it or the money from its sale in whatever ways they saw fit. In two stages during the late 1530s, seizing for himself the vast holdings of all the hundreds of English monasteries and friaries, Henry VIII would demonstrate how thoroughly a ruler could learn this lesson without even having to accept Lutheran or Reformed Protestant doctrines about grace, faith, salvation, or worship.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

That God-shaped hole

“There is a God-shaped hole in every human heart, and I believe it was put there by evolution,” [Jonathan Haidt] said. He was alluding to the seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal, who wrote extensively on the nature of faith.

“We evolved in a long period of group versus group conflict and violence, and we evolved a capacity to make a sacred circle and then bind ourselves to others in a way that creates a strong community,” Haidt told me.

Ferguson added that “you can’t organize a society on the basis of atheism.”

“It’s fine for a small group of people to say, ‘We’re atheist, we’re opting out,’ ” he said, “but, in effect, that depends on everyone else carrying on. If everyone else says, ‘We’re out,’ then you quickly descend into a maelstrom like Raskolnikov’s nightmare”—in which Rodion Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, envisions a world consumed by nihilism and atomism tearing itself apart. “The fascinating thing about the nightmare is that it reads, to anyone who has been through the twentieth century, like a kind of prophecy.”

Peter Savodnik again.

The emergent culture

In the emergent culture, a wider range of people will have “spiritual” concerns and engage in “spiritual” pursuits. There will be more singing and more listening. People will continue to genuflect and read the Bible, which has long achieved the status of great literature; but no prophet will denounce the rich attire or stop the dancing. There will be more theater, not less, and no Puritan will denounce the stage and draw its curtains. On the contrary, I expect that modern society will mount psychodramas far more frequently than its ancestors mounted miracle plays.

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

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