Category: Faith & Ideology

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

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.

Tuesday, 1/21/25

Does 47 have what greatness takes?

[T]he heroic presidency runs the persistent danger of becoming craven or abusive, as Vietnam and Watergate taught. This is what so many critics worry about with Mr. Trump — that his transformations will be more resonant of Richard Nixon than of our most esteemed presidents.

Yet there is a complementary question that should concern supporters of Mr. Trump: Can he succeed? He has amassed enormous power in his party and is building an intensely devoted administration. Those factors will bring him wins in the short run.

But it takes extraordinary skill to wield executive power successfully throughout an administration. If past is prologue, Mr. Trump lacks the acumen to carry out his ambitious agenda.

The first problem is management style. In his first term, Mr. Trump was a poor administrator because of his mercurial, polarizing style and a general indifference to facts and the hard work of governance. …

Second is the question of whether Mr. Trump knows where he wants to go. … Mr. Trump has a powerful slogan, “America first,” a robust agenda, and many discrete and often insightful political instincts. But he lacks a coherent sense of the public ends for which he exercises power. …

Third, personal gain was neither a priority of the great presidents nor a guide to their exercise of power. …

Fourth, Mr. Trump is unlike any previous president, even Jackson, in broadly delegitimating American institutions — the courts, the military and intelligence communities, the Justice Department, the press, the electoral system and both political parties. This will do him no favors when he needs their support, as he will.

…

Fifth, Mr. Trump’s obsession with hard executive power and an extreme version of the unitary executive theory will be self-defeating. If his stalwart subordinates carry out his every whim, as he hopes, bad policies will result. If the loyalists Mr. Trump is putting at the top of the Justice Department do not give him candid independent advice that he follows, he will violate the law and often lose in court, as happened in his first term.

The great presidents … understood that hard power could go only so far and that persuasion and consent were surer tools to achieving lasting presidential goals in our democracy. This idea is lost on Mr. Trump.

Finally, as Mr. Schlesinger noted, the great presidents all “took risks in pursuit of their ideals” and “provoked intense controversy.” And, except for Washington, they all “divided the nation before reuniting it on a new level of national understanding.”

Mr. Trump is a risk taker and a divider. But it is hard to see how his approach to the presidency ends in national reunion.

Jack Goldsmith (unlocked article)

Offshore politics

Velocior, superior, stupidior

What runners they were,
round and round the arena
in their expensive armour

like that other runner
from Marathon, his time
unsurpassed until the arrival
of steroids. We cover the ground
faster, but what news do we bring?

Excerpt from Postcard, in R.S. Thomas, Collected Later Poems 1988-2000

The neutering welcome

Merkel, when she insisted that Islam belonged in Germany just as much as Christianity, was only appearing to be even-handed. To hail a religion for its compatibility with a secular society was decidedly not a neutral gesture. Secularism was no less bred of the sweep of Christian history than were Orbán’s barbed-wire fences. Naturally, for it to function as its exponents wished it to function, this could never be admitted.

Tom Holland, Dominion

If this makes no sense to you, read it again. And again. If it still makes no sense, you need to read some history, and Dominion wouldn’t be a bad place to start.

What is truly “self-evident”?

So yes, the equality of all humans seemed staringly obvious (at least in theory) to Franklin and Jefferson. But that was because their culture was saturated with Christian assumptions―so much so that the concepts and phrases they used were taken from Locke, who had got them from Hooker, who had got them from Scripture.”

Franklin’s brief, scribbled correction is a marvelous metaphor for the ex-Christian West. His replacement of the words “sacred and undeniable” with “self-evident” echoes what was happening across European society as a whole in 1776, at least among elites. It was an attempt to retain Christianity’s moral conclusions while scrubbing out its theological foundations: keeping the fruits while severing the roots, if you will. And it resulted in the insistence that JudeoChristian convictions on anthropology and ethics were now to be regarded as universal norms on which all reasonable people would agree.

Andrew Wilson, Remaking the World

See my remark in the prior item.

Oblivious

On this bitter-cold January morning in the American midwest, my thoughts turned to hot, hearty soup, and this quickly led to a reflection.

There is a catering service in my fair city that used to be open to the public for sit-down lunch. Its kitchen included a soup genius.

I’d go there on a wintery day, and once I learned of it, I would invariably check their freezer before leaving, buying as many as four quarts of frozen, leftover soup.

Then one day the proprietress approached me: “Did you realize that a lot of people on fixed incomes come here to buy soup?” Crestfallen, I answered “No, I didn’t. I’m sorry. Thank you for telling me. I’ll leave the soup for them.”

My obliviousness fit my recent description of non-rebellious sin.

God never said “Thou shalt not buy leftover soup.” He didn’t say “Thou shalt think twice or thrice about the indirect consequences of buying leftover soup.” And, since this was a rather upscale eatery (albeit in a downscale neighborhood), I’m not sure that the proverbial “moment’s reflection” would have revealed the indirect consequences to me; I just saw it as “I get good soup and this caterer gets more money.”

But I was, quite obliviously, snatching food from the mouths of poor pensioners. Greater awareness might have prevented that, and the proprietress’ consciousness-raising was welcome.

Proof

Woozle Effect

When a source makes an unproven claim and it’s then cited as proof by another, which is cited by another, and so on, until the chain of citations looks like evidence. This is common because, while many writers check their sources, few check their sources’ sources.

A recent example: evidence that puberty blockers are safe and effective was overestimated because institutions were circularly citing each other.

…

Hitchens’s Razor

“What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.” ― Christopher Hitchens. If you make a claim, it’s up to you to prove it, not to me to disprove it.

Gurwinder Bhogal

Time to pull this out (again?)

I don’t recall if I’ve shared this favorite here:

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion — put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

“Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” from The Country of Marriage, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. 1973. Also published by Counterpoint Press in The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, 1999; The Mad Farmer Poems_, 2008;_ New Collected Poems, 2012.

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Sunday, 1/19/25

Here’s the thing about αμαρτία

This excerpt from the Orthodox Trisagion prayers (Thrice-Holy prayers) grabbed my attention 27+ years ago:

O Lord, cleanse us from our sins. O Master, pardon our transgressions. O Holy One, visit and heal our infirmities for Thy Name’s sake.

That left an impression that is still with me.

I learned fairly early in my catechesis that sin in Greek is αμαρτία, commonly rendered “hamartia” in English. It literally means “missing the mark.”

As an Evangelical, and then as a Calvinist (though to a lesser degree), I’d gotten the impression that “sin” was simply rebellion against God. But that wasn’t true to all that I saw in me that missed the mark. There was self-absorption feeding obliviousness to the concerns of others. I didn’t choose that to rebel against God. There was such limitation that I sometimes didn’t know what I should do and chose something that harmed others. I also didn’t choose that to rebel against God (I’d have preferred omniscience).

The three sentences from the Trisagion Prayers seemed a perceptive taxonomy where my Church and pastors saw only uniformity: rebellion. For some kinds of mark-missing we need cleansing, for others pardon, for still others, healing.

My soul said “Yes! They’ve got it!” And so the case for Orthodoxy grew weightier.

I don’t remember mentioning this before. Perhaps it will help someone with the same perception I had.

But now that I’ve got that down on paper (so to speak), connections occur to me. Maybe my Protestant mentors didn’t think about human failures that aren’t acts of rebellion toward God because the common Protestant theory of atonement (basically, God the Father already gave God the Son the punishment we deserve for our rebellion and so He won’t punish us as well) is an uncomfortable fit for non-rebellious mark-missing like self-absorption and lack of omniscience, for which we need something more than pardon.

To call that idea half-baked may be too generous, but now it’s on my mind.

How liberal theology works

I pay a lot of critical attention to American Evangelicalism because in important ways it was my religious world and we’re collectively still swimming in its latest iterations.

Also, I don’t think I ever understood the Protestant mainline. I recently got some help in that regard (recently because I’m gradually catching up with the podcast series from which this transcript comes):

Fr. Stephen: … I don’t think people fundamentally understand how liberal theology works, and this can give us a window into how liberal theology works. Liberal theology is in keeping with Hegel, the Hegel we’re rejecting on this show, just to be clear. Not promoting liberal theology, but we need to understand liberal theology and how it works.

The reason I’m just saying “liberal theology”— I’m not saying “liberal” as opposed to “conservative.” I’m saying “liberal” in the sense of post-Enlightenment, that doesn’t think the Enlightenment was a bad thing. I’m talking about post-Enlightenment theology; I’m talking about— Well, let’s get to brass tacks. …

But liberal theology essentially, like Hegel, takes whatever point in time they stand at as being the apex of history to that point. This means— And I’ve critiqued it this way on the show before, but I’m going to do it again. This means that liberal theology is always innately chauvinist, at least somewhat racist, colonial, because, again, you have to take your culture and civilization as being the apex, which means the other ones who might disagree with you are somehow primitive, backward, unenlightened, etc. So there’s always overtones of that, always overtones of that within liberal theology. But you take your point as being the apex of history to that point, and you ascribe the developments that have led to that apex as being the work of the Holy Spirit.

So if now we, European-derived Western culture, have a new understanding of gender or sexuality or biological sex or any other ethical, moral issue of who God is, whatever—whatever has developed historically, in this Western—dare I say often white—culture, whatever is developed in that culture, this is the work of the Holy Spirit that has brought us to this, and therefore it is endorsed, and we re-shape our theology based on this. So a new understanding of gender that arises within culture and society is, for them—the work of God has brought that about within society.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah… This is where you hear people use language like “the right side of history.”

Fr. Stephen: So it doesn’t matter if the person questioning that is from the same culture but who says, “Hey, I don’t this historical development—” they’re doing more like what we’re advocating for, which is saying, “Well, no, we have to sift through this and say what is from God and what isn’t”; or if it’s someone from another culture, who might have another skin color, might be from another continent. It doesn’t matter who’s questioning it: whoever’s questioning it is innately backwards, is innately rejecting the work of the Holy Spirit in the world.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this is also where you hear people say things like: “It’s 2023!” Like that’s an argument! “It’s current year!”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but you have to understand, this is their understanding. And this is why trying to take any kind of approach with them, of “well, but this previous understanding…” or “this thing from the past,” no matter what it is, fundamentally doesn’t work, because they have this underlying presupposition that their culture now at this point in time is the apex of all human cultures and civilization and that God has brought it there. This is why, when I— when you hear me critiquing liberal theology, it’s often from what sounds like a liberal perspective, like I’ll say to people who express these ideas— They’ll be attacking, for example, African bishops in their own church for not going along. What’s nice about me using that example is there are at least three different denominations I could be talking about.

…

When they, as white, bourgeois Americans or Europeans, attack African bishops and call them “backwards” and all of these things for not being on-board with their new liberal consensus, I will call them white supremacists, because that’s what that is.

Fr. Andrew: Colonialism.

Fr. Stephen: Right? That is colonialism. It’s: all the things they claim to hate, they’re actually doing. But that’s why I— If people hear me critique it that way, I know some people might get confused, but that’s why I critique it that way, because that’s the only critique that can function on their own presuppositions. That’s the only critique that’s valid from their— based on their own presuppositions. Any critique from tradition is going to fall flat on its face, because they’ve substituted—instead of our understanding of tradition, they have this alien understanding of history, so trying to talk tradition doesn’t work. That’s the only kind of critique—

And that’s because, ultimately, that line of thinking is an ouroboros. It’s a snake eating its own tail. It can’t— Its first principles are incoherent. That’s why you can critique their beliefs based on their beliefs, because they don’t fit together. But so, we add that at the end this is the deviant view of how the Spirit works and how Tradition works, that we need to be aware of, because I don’t think we can have productive dialogue with people who have imbibed liberal theology and who are coming at things from that perspective when we come at them from a completely alien perspective that shares none of their presuppositions. I don’t think there’s any way for that to be productive, other than, you know, maybe just saying, “You have to abandon everything you think you know. Change everything,” which may work sometimes, and maybe if you show them how self-refuting their own ideas are, maybe that’ll help that happen, but there’s a fundamental lack of communication between those who have fallen prey to that kind of liberal theology and the rest of us. That it would be good for their sakes if we could find a bridge to try to bring them back to the truth.

Fathers Andrew Stephen Damick and Stephen DeYoung on the Lord of Spirits podcast for December 29, 2023.

I share this because I found it helpful in understanding United Methodists and Episcopalians over my lifetime. They’re treating the Zeitgeist as the Heiliger Geist, and they contemn Africans in their communions whose Zeitgeist isn’t keeping up with the latest fashions.

Secularizations

After he had twice visited the United States in the 1930s, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a perceptive essay contrasting Christian development in America with parallel developments in the parts of Europe most directly shaped by the Protestant Reformation. His assessment included an observation that was as shrewd in its comparative wisdom as it is relevant for the themes of this book: “The secularization of the church on the continent of Europe arises from the misinterpretation of the reformers’ distinction of the two realms [of church and society]; American secularization derives precisely from the imperfect distinction of the kingdoms and offices of church and state, from the enthusiastic claim of the church to universal influence in the world.” What Bonhoeffer saw has been described with other terms here: The key moves in the creation of evangelical America were also the key moves that created secular America.

Mark A. Noll, America’s God. This surely is relevant to my inquiry into Carlo Lancelotti’s Touchstone article.

Truth gets a rocky start

Schaff’s work in America got off to a rocky start. In his inaugural address at Mercersberg, The Principle of Protestantism, Schaff argued that American Protestantism needed to reject its antihistorical, sectarian tendencies and recognize its place within the historic church, which had organically developed through time.

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

Schaff wasn’t wrong.

Religious versus Secular

Why accept the substantivist definition of religion as about belief in transcendence? Taylor thinks he needs such a definition in order to keep his subject matter properly delimited; if nationalism were a religion, then the whole religious/secular distinction would get thrown into confusion. But there might be good reasons to question this distinction. The distinction has come under increasing scrutiny from scholars who view the religious/secular distinction as both historically constructed and politically motivated.

William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry

Authenticity

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

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.

Thursday, 1/16/25

American Meritocracy

For most of my professional career, I’ve been a skeptic of the American meritocracy. Not a skeptic of the basic idea that competent and intelligent people should fill positions requiring competence and intelligence, but a skeptic of the idea that a system of frantic adolescent hoop-jumping and résumé-building, designed to skim the smartest kids from every region and segregate them from the rest of society for college and beyond, has actually created an elite that’s more responsible, effective, morally grounded and genuinely cosmopolitan than the more quasi-aristocratic upper class that it displaced.

Ross Douthat

NAR

I’ve spent most of my life thinking that I was well-informed on the American religious scene — especially Evangelicalism. For a long time, that self-regard may have been warranted.

No more. I recently passed the 27th anniversary of my reception into the Orthodox Christian faith. And it may be time to admit that I’ve lost track of what’s going on in the American Evangelical world.

Stephanie McCrummen of the Atlantic has recently published two articles on the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) and those who share its outlook with or without conscious acknowledgement of NAR.

I’ve had my eyes on NAR for a few years, but here’s where McCrummen floored me:

What was happening in the barn in Lancaster County did not represent some fringe of American Christianity, but rather what much of the faith is becoming. A shift is under way, one that scholars have been tracking for years and that has become startlingly visible with the rise of Trumpism. At this point, tens of millions of believers—about 40 percent of American Christians, including Catholics, according to a recent Denison University survey—are embracing an alluring, charismatic movement that has little use for religious pluralism, individual rights, or constitutional democracy.

What she’s describing in NAR That 40% figure got my back up as absurd until I realized that I was basing it on the typical doctrinal commitments of Evangelicalism more than 27 years ago. In fact, it’s been 45 years since I unequivocally identified as Evangelical, being for 18 subsequent years (before my Orthodox reception) only Evangelical-adjacent.

So I can’t say she’s wrong. I also can’t say she’s right, but if she’s right, it would go fairly far in explaining the great Evangelical murmuration from “character matters” (Bill Clinton) to, in effect, “he may be a rapist sonofabitch but he’s our rapist sonofabitch.” So the NAR “prophets” have spoken.

Metaphors: Choose Wisely

Metaphors matter. They can elucidate, but they can also elide and confuse. For a long time, the conservative metaphor for the Left’s tactics has been “slippery slope.” It’s a bad metaphor. It suggests that radical efforts to harm American families are all just the result of the gravitational pull of the earth, or the inevitability of logical progression. That isn’t the case. The tactics used against American families are far more clever. And they invariably involve a “Bait and Switch.” Sell the American people on a principle we can all agree on: “inclusivity,” “tolerance” and “anti-bullying.” Then, smuggle in an entirely different program under its name. That is how gender ideology ended up part of the mandatory “anti-bullying” curriculum, as opposed to the “sex education curriculum,” which is subject to parental opt out.

Abigail Shrier

Greenland, Canada and the Canal

When an authoritarian-minded leader poised to control the world’s most powerful military begins overt saber-rattling against neighbors, the most obvious and important question to ask is whether he intends to follow through. That question, unfortunately, is difficult to answer. On the one hand, Trump almost certainly has no plan, or even concepts of a plan, to launch a hemispheric war. Seizing the uncontrolled edges of the North American continent makes sense in the board game Risk, but it has very little logic in any real-world scenario.

On the other hand, Trump constantly generated wild ideas during his first term, only for the traditional Republicans in his orbit to distract or foil him, with the result that the world never found out how serious he was about them. This time around, one of his highest priorities has been to make sure his incoming administration is free of officials whose professionalism or loyalty to the Constitution would put them at risk of violating their loyalty to Trump. We cannot simply assume that Trump’s most harebrained schemes will fizzle.

An easier question to answer is why Trump keeps uttering these threats. One reason is that he seems to sincerely believe that strong countries have the right to bully weaker ones. Trump has long insisted that the United States should seize smaller countries’ natural resources, and that American allies should be paying us protection money, as if they were shopkeepers and America were a mob boss.

Jonathan Chait, Donald Trump’s Performative Imperialism

We’ll know he’s a Christian by his blasphemy

So let’s run the race marked out for us. Let’s fix our eyes on Old Glory and all she represents. Let’s fix our eyes on this land of heroes and let their courage inspire. And let’s fix our eyes on the author and perfecter of our faith and our freedom and never forget that where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. That means freedom always wins.

Mike Pence, at the 2020 Republican National Convention, via William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry. Compare this the Hebrews 12:1-2 and ask yourself “just how low is the bar for being considered a devout Christian Republican?”

Cui bono?

Cui bono? Whom did this new story serve? Who benefits from a world of consequence-free sex, weak ties, the putting off of childbearing and family? Today, the pharmaceutical and medical industries benefit, by selling decades-long prescriptions for contraceptives, and then various attempts at ART [Assisted Reproductive Technology] later on. Corporations and employers benefit: they gain a new labor force unsaddled by commitments to family, place, or other less-than-profitable concerns.

Christine Emba quoted by Alan Jacobs

Pathetic wankers get their day at SCOTUS

On Wednesday America’s Supreme Court examined a Texas law mandating age verification for websites where a third or more of the material is “sexual” and “harmful to minors”. A district judge blocked the law, which is similar to measures recently passed by 18 other states, but an appeals court reinstated it last year.

A trade association of adult entertainers, known as the Free Speech Coalition, is arguing that the law restricts adult Texans’ access to protected speech and violates the First Amendment. The Supreme Court struck down a similar law (the federal Child Online Protection Act) in 2004, the plaintiffs point out. Texas’s defence relies on a high-court ruling from 1968 that upheld a law banning erotic bookstores from selling their wares to children. But online commerce, the plaintiffs retort, is a world apart: adults may be reluctant to reveal their identities to porn sites because they worry about “identity thieves and extortionists”.

Economist World News in Brief for 1/15/25.

That last sentence should be a real eye-opener. Paraphrasing: “We’re such pathetic wankers that we do business with identity thieves and extortionists. We have a right to be pathetic wankers, so to hell with the kids who get exposed.”

That’s not the whole case the “Free Speech Coalition” could make against the Texas law (and about the logic of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals) but it’s got to be among the most risible.

Glimmers

Woke retreat

Recently, [Mark] Zuckerberg ordered tampon machines to be taken out of men’s bathrooms in all of Meta’s offices. Commenter Richard Hanania said,

This is like pulling down the statue of Saddam. Now you know wokeness is dead.

… Nobody could have imagined that a vulgar, orange billionaire from New York and an anti-woke South African immigrant in Silicon Valley might be the champions Europe needs to find its own courage and Make Europe Great Again. But then again, despite the false faith of the left-wing ideologues and their bureaucracies, the march of history follows no predictable path.

Rod Dreher

Cabinet of the Cancelled

[F]or those of us who have run afoul of the Left’s dogma, particularly in public, it’s harder to worry over the Trump cabinet’s failure to harmonize with the views of credentialed bureaucrats.

Abigail Shrier, Trump’s ‘Cabinet of the Cancelled’

Devouring one another

Look no further than MAGA mega-toady Steve Bannon declaring war on MAGA mega-toady Elon Musk.

Bannon has had a bee in his bonnet about Musk for the better part of a month, ever since Elon went to the mat in support of H-1B visas for highly skilled immigrants. “He is a truly evil guy, a very bad guy. I made it my personal thing to take this guy down,” he told an Italian newspaper recently, vowing to have Musk “run out of here by Inauguration Day.” Turning to Silicon Valley’s habit of hiring migrants instead of Americans, Bannon took the gloves off—and sounded a little, well, woke in the process:

“No blacks or Hispanics have any of these jobs or any access to these jobs,” Bannon said.

“Peter Thiel, David Sachs, Elon Musk, are all white South Africans,” Bannon observed. “He should go back to South Africa. Why do we have South Africans, the most racist people on earth, white South Africans, we have them making any comments at all on what goes on in the United States?”

Well then.

Pity poor Elon, who spent Christmas week defending Indian engineers from Groypers calling them sewage-drinking subhumans only to have Groyper-adjacent nationalist Steve Bannon turn around and accuse him of being racist. The rift over immigration policy developing between red-pilled tech bros, color-blind nativist ideologues, and gutter white supremacists will be a fun one to follow over the next four years.

But it won’t be the only one. There are numerous rifts opening on the right as Donald Trump prepares to take office. The GOP caught the proverbial car on Election Day and now each of its factions wants to drive; watching them tear each other apart will be one of the small silver linings of a second Trump presidency.

Nick Catoggio

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

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 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

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.

Eleventh Day of Christmas

Liberal democracy versus Populism

For those bewildered by why so many Americans apparently voted against the values of liberal democracy, Balint Magyar has a useful formulation. “Liberal democracy,” he says, “offers moral constraints without problem-solving” — a lot of rules, not a lot of change — while “populism offers problem-solving without moral constraints.” Magyar, a scholar of autocracy, isn’t interested in calling Donald Trump a fascist. He sees the president-elect’s appeal in terms of something more primal: “Trump promises that you don’t have to think about other people.”

M. Gessen, New York Times

Limited supply, infinite demand

What a lot of people who are celebrating Thompson’s death and demonizing UnitedHealthcare don’t seem to understand—or don’t seem to want to understand—is that in every modern health-care system, some institution is charged with rationing care. In some, it’s a government bureaucracy. In others, it’s a private for-profit or nonprofit insurer. In America, it’s a mix of all three. Many insurers, such as Blue Cross Blue Shield and Kaiser Permanente, are nonprofits. The biggest insurers are Medicare and Medicaid, which are single-payer public programs. So is the Veterans Affairs Department. Other insurers are for-profit companies, like UnitedHealthcare.

You don’t have to be a fan of the way that UnitedHealthcare makes its decisions to acknowledge the difficulty of mediating between providers and patients. Private insurers make their rationing decisions in ways that are relatively transparent but always far from perfectly simple or fair. But if they didn’t do it, someone else would need to, Yuval Levin of the American Enterprise Institute told me. The reality of scarcity is not their fault, nor is it “social murder.”

Peter Wehner (emphasis added)

“Scarcity” doesn’t mean we should educate more doctors, build more hospitals, etc. (nor that we shouldn’t). It means that aggregate demand for healthcare services will always exceed the funds available to pay for them all, in every imaginable system of funding healthcare.

Everybody knows the Emperor is naked

[I]f you want to understand what happened in politics this year, you can get by with two sentences from the Washington Post: “[Joe] Biden and some of his aides still believe he should have stayed in the race, despite the rocky debate performance and low poll numbers that prompted Democrats to pressure him to drop out. Biden and these aides have told people in recent days that he could have defeated [Donald] Trump, according to people familiar with their comments, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.”

…

Never Trump is heavy on moralizing, and how could it not be? Trump hasn’t just upended the conservative agenda, he’s cultivated an anti-morality in the American right that’s turned scumminess into a leadership credential. For Reaganites of a certain age, watching traditional “values” voters grant moral carte blanche to a seedy authoritarian is so baffling that it leaves one thinking there must be a conscientious impulse still buried in them somewhere that might be roused if only the right appeal can be made.

And so we Never Trumpers often end up behaving like the child in The Emperor’s New Clothes. If only we say out loud that the emperor is wearing nothing at all—and say it and say it and say it—the spell will eventually be broken and the crowd will come to its senses. By all means, run Liz Cheney out on the campaign trail with Kamala Harris and have her recite the thousandth iteration of her civic indictment of Trumpism. Maybe the thousandth time will be the charm.

… Most Americans understand very well, after all, that Emperor Trump is sleazy, oafish, and dangerous. But they concluded that there would still be more upside to his presidency, warts and all, than to Harris’.

They know the emperor is naked. They watched the news on January 6. They either like it that way, as Trump’s base does, or they don’t care overly much, as swing voters ultimately did not. Never Trumpers reminding them of it incessantly anyway—surely you’re not going to reelect the coup-plotter—resembles the so-called definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

Nick Catoggio

Nick has given a good description of me for the last eight-or-so years. I finally grokked why voters might reject the Democrats in favor of Trump (for instance), but I’d cast a protest vote for Angela Davis first, I think.

And that’s quite apart from the absurd journalistic murmurations to protect Joe Biden.

A wan Audie Murphy

I am an admirer of Audie Murphy, the celebrated yet troubled hero who was the most decorated U.S. soldier of World War II but struggled with mental illness and addiction for the rest of his relatively short life before dying at the age of 45 … 

He was a hell of a soldier, by all accounts. 

Nobody ever thought he should be secretary of defense. 

Pete Hegseth is something of a soft echo of Audie Murphy—an Ivy League version for our wan times. Like Murphy, Hegseth served honorably in combat (you will have heard that he was awarded two Bronze Stars), went into the entertainment business (his last job was as one of the hosts of Fox & Friends Weekend), took up drinking, wrecked some marriages (he is on his third), etc. He is today one year younger than Murphy was when he died. 

Hegseth has an excellent general education, having done his undergraduate degree at Princeton and his master’s in public policy at Harvard. Harvard’s MPP program will graduate almost 700 students in its next class, and those are the only 700 people in the world who think any of them ought to be the next secretary of defense.

Kevin D. Williamson

Scientific realism

European scientists have started work on a project to create simple forms of life from scratch in the lab, capitalizing on theoretical and experimental advances in the fast-growing field of synthetic biology … “Success would constitute a landmark achievement in basic science,” said Eörs Szathmáry, director of the Centre for the Conceptual Foundations of Science at the Parmenides Foundation in Germany, who is a principal investigator on the ERC grant. “De-novo creation of living systems is a long-standing dream of humanity.”

John Ellis (hyperlink relocated from omitted text)

For the records, de-novo creation of living systems is not a dream of mine. Rather, I think of C.S. Lewis when I read things like this: “Man’s ‘power over nature’ is the power of some men over other men with nature as their instrument.”

Wonder not

Wonder not that Evangelicals are ga-ga over Donald Trump. “Evangelicalism is Protestant populism.” (Brad East, Conversions, Protestantism, and a new mainline)

God, Human Rights and other woo-woo

[T]he existence of human rights [is] no more provable than the existence of God.

Tom Holland, Dominion

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Sunday After Nativity

Intellectual converts

The Free Press yesterday published a longish item, How Intellectuals Found God by Peter Savodnik.

I was familiar with all the intellectuals named except Jordan Hall, and they all seem to fit Brad East’s year-old Conversions, Protestantism, and a new mainline commenting on the rarity of intellectual conversions to Protestantism as opposed to catholic traditions. Add to Brad East’s exploratory hypotheses about that phenomenon those of Fergus McCullough, Why don’t intellectuals convert to Protestantism?.

Tyler Cowen chimes in, in a somethat different key:

Not too long ago, I was telling Ezra Klein that I had noticed a relatively new development in classical liberalism. If a meet an intellectual non-Leftist, increasingly they are Nietzschean, compared to days of yore. But if they are classical liberal instead, typically they are religious as well. That could be Catholic or Jewish or LDS or Eastern Orthodox, with some Protestant thrown into the mix, but Protestants coming in last.

As an Orthodox Christian, I take no offense at intellectual converts gravitating in a catholic direction, but for a number of reasons, I’m not doing an end-zone dance about it, either, unlike one (Roman) Catholic bishop in Texas:

Catholicism will be nihilism’s last competitor on the dance floor of history, and Catholicism will see it drop from exhaustion as the orchestra plays on. The music itself will testify.

Bishop Daniel E. Flores of Brownsville, Texas

But so what?

Men are apt to prefer prosperous error to an afflicted truth.

Jeremy Taylor

Both quotes via R.R. Reno

Those evangelicals of intellectual bent should be wrestling with this question, though.

Carefully Rehearsed Spontaneity

The framers of the Directory [for the Publique Worship of God] were not unaware of its paradoxical stance vis-à-vis ritual, either. Its preface obliquely acknowledged the oddity of institutionalizing a prescribed means of praying when Puritan teaching held that converted people would pray aright by the Spirit, but offered it as “some help and furniture” to the minister, so that he might “furnish his heart and tongue with Materials of Prayer and Exhortation, as shall be needful” (7-8). The careful, italicized language of the Directory, meant to be paraphrased but not displaced altogether, embodies a sort of anxious, secret checking of spontaneity that is in fact part and parcel of its logic. In spite of the selection of a man who appeared a trustworthy minister of God’s word, not only might his prayers stray from sound doctrine, but more than that, they might not flow freely, spontaneously, and affectively at all. In referring to the guide as “help and furniture,” the Directory portrays what it believes should be a modern, rational, self-transparent, and spontaneous self, operating under what it figures as deformities, weaknesses, and handicaps: seeking to authenticate its goodness and wholeness, yet perennially afraid of its inner divisions, the demand of its repeated performance, and perhaps most of all of its silences.

In this way, the Directory also looks toward the spiraling anxiety. That is one of the enduring legacies of Protestant and English dissenting spirituality in the restoration and enlightenment. More paradoxically than the writers of the Directory, Dissenters later wrote a vast literature to instruct those within their camp in the art of praying spontaneously. This literature too begs the question of why free prayer needed coaching, a query many dealt with directly. But it also sets forth as its most common recommendation for achieving true prayer the collection of lists of phrases, usually from Scripture, which once memorized would roll off the tongue and be easily assembled into prayer on the spur of the moment. Where the Directory‘s very form expresses the implicit knowledge that spontaneity is no real guarantor of (doctrinal or spiritual) truth, these free-prayer guides murmur with the fear that spontaneity may not come at all. While they seek to fill the mind with scriptural phrases, constructing, in Matthew Henry’s words, a “Storehouse of Materials for Prayer,” they also speak another truth. Besides being furnished with nonorthodox materials, the self that flees performativity and ritual, looking inward for authentic substance, finds itself fluctuating and, in the face of the demands of performance and empirical, experimental repetition, often silent and empty.

…

[Matthew] Henry’s Method culminates with his most fascinating phrase-collection of all, “A Paraphrase on the Lord’s Prayer, in Scripture Expressions.” Christ’s own form of prayer given to his disciples had long been a thorn in Puritans’ sides, to be plucked out by being understood as only a general guideline. Henry’s strategy is to neutralize the prayer’s form in a similar method; he provides, for instance, and amazing two and a half pages of verses elaborating on the one phrase “Our Father, who art Heaven” (MP, 163-65), a general topos, he says, from which prayer begins. Many editions of the Method were printed as Henry intended, interleaved with one blank page between each printed one, to enable the reader to pen in his own collection of phrases to supplement Henry’s own. Like Bunyan’s demand for scrupulous sincerity, Henry’s lists and blank pages, figures of accumulation and abstraction, combine literally to efface the Lord’s Prayer and erase it from Dissenting practice.

…

The more individualized these spiritual practices became, like the personalized collections of scriptural phrases, the more readily their constructedness-their nonspontaneity-was apparent, opening the believer to a sense of isolation and perpetual, nearly neurotic self-critique …

Lori Branch, Rituals of Spontaneity, pp. 55-57, 60.

This fake spontaneity persists in verbal tics like “Father God, we just” this, that, or the other thing. It’s like refrigerator magnet poetry only less creative.

The sober prayers of the Book of Common Prayer always secretly guided me when, as a Calvinist Elder, I was to lead congregational prayer, and those of the Orthodox Prayer books had an outsized influence on my eventual embrace of Orthodoxy.

Watch what they do, not what they say

Paradoxically, therefore, the structures necessary for the Reformers to extend the sacred into all of life included a whole constellation of structures and practices that they undermined. For if everything is sacred, then in another sense, nothing is sacred. This struck me in a particularly visceral way one Sunday morning at the Calvinist church in Idaho. After the service, I went to use the restroom and found leftovers of Communion bread in the bathroom garbage. The clergy routinely gave leftover bread and wine to the children to consume as a snack, which the children could then take wherever they wished.

Robin Phillips, Rediscovering the Goodness of Creation

Sometimes this whole 2000-year-old faith seems like a living koan. Chew on this until you are enlightened. Keep walking.

Paul Kingsnorth

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 before Nativity, 2024

David Brooks

I have long admired David Brooks, and a few years ago I heard fairly detailed rumors about his embrace of Christian faith — without ceasing to identify as Jewish.

This week, he wrote at some length about his pilgrimage (unlocked article). So far as I know, this is his public “coming out”:

When I was an agnostic, I thought faith was primarily about belief. Being religious was about having a settled conviction that God existed and knowing that the stories in the Bible were true. I looked for books and arguments that would convince me that God was either real or not real.

Some people are spiritual but not religious; during that time, you could say I was religious but not spiritual.

…

When faith finally tiptoed into my life it didn’t come through information or persuasion but, at least at first, through numinous experiences …

…

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.

…

We religious people talk about virtue so much you’d think we’d behave better than nonreligious people. But that’s not been my experience. Over the past decade, especially in the American church, I’ve seen religious people behaving more viciously, more dishonestly and, in some ways, more tolerant of sexual abuse. I sometimes joke that entering the church in 2013 was like investing in the stock market in 1929. My timing could have been better.

Still, I’ve been grateful to live in an enchanted world, to live toward someone I can seek and serve. I’ve been grateful to have to learn and relearn yet another startling truth, that faith is about yearning but it’s not about striving. You can’t earn God’s love with good behavior and lofty thoughts, because he’s already given it to you as the lavish gift that you don’t deserve. “I prayed for wonders instead of happiness, Lord,” Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, “and you gave them to me.”

Three decades ago, I might have snorted and said “this guy is no Christian!” Or maybe I wouldn’t have. It’s hard to remember all of my past attitudes, and tempting to caricature them. But I’m confident that I would at least have felt that this account was alien and challenging to my then-understanding of Christian faith. Today, I find his account quite sympathetic, as, I think, the late Bishop Kallistos Ware would have as well:

Faith is not the supposition that something might be true, but the assurance that someone is there.

And I have it on reasonably good authority that most uses of “faith” in English-language Bibles would better be rendered as “faithfulness,” which is especially salient this morning as the gospel reading (on the Orthodox “new calendar”) is much of Hebrews chapter 11.

Chistianities: thin, sharp, thick

Jonathan Rauch, in conversation with David French (unlocked), divides Christianity in the US into thin, sharp, and thick versions. It’s of concern to him — gay, atheist and Jewish — because he has come to see that Christianity is congruent with liberal democracy and our liberal democracy may need it for survival.

I’ve rejected untold times the idea that Christianity is only important in publicly instrumental ways, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t important in those ways. And I thought Rauch’s descriptions of thin and sharp Christianities are pretty well on target.

It seems to me, though, that Rauch’s example of what constitutes thick (i.e., useful) Christianity is off-base:

This is what’s been missing. Christians have a teaching about how individuals should relate to the world around them. If there’s a hurricane in Asheville, the stories of what the church is doing are fantastic. But they don’t have a teaching about how to engage politics as Christians. And that leads me to realize what the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is actually modeling is a whole civic theology, and that’s what Christianity needs more of: teachings about how would Jesus approach politics.

I think my concern arises because Rauch is seeing Christianity largely in instrumental terms. Or maybe it’s because I’m having trouble figuring out how a Church stays thick while diverting attention to thinning civics (“teaching about how to engage politics as Christians”). Or maybe I recoil at the thought that anything good could come out of Salt Lake City.

The inevitability of ritual

In England, the two kinds of churches I do still see filling appear rather different. In a local baptist church the pews are crammed with young families having powerful, intimate encounters with their faith. Something immediate is being accommodated. I remember seeing a guy fresh from a building site, dusty with a high viz jacket. Family with him, arms outstretched, tears on his cheeks. It would bring a lump to your throat.

Then I see my own parish, hushed and seemingly antique, but with more young people than ever before. In both I see people who look spiritually fed. Then out there in the wider audit of emptying churches there seems often to be a sense of weariness, or simple lack of oomph. There will be exceptions to this last sentence, I have no sneer in writing it. I sometimes go sit in those congregations simply out of love for the yards they’ve put in as parishioners. Solidarity, a hand held across the fence to a fellow worker bee.

It seems, from a distance, the two churches are very different, and I am well aware of the theological wrestles that create distance. What I don’t go along with is the notion that one is completely improvisational and unencumbered by tradition, and the other set-and-only-set in a kind of endless, ancient theatre or lifeless ceremony. Dame Mary Douglas, a cultural anthropologist, encapsulates something she calls the ‘anti-ritualist’ approach:

The confirmed anti-ritualist mistrusts external expression. He values a man’s inner convictions. Spontaneous speech that flows from the heart, unpremeditated, irregular in form, even somewhat incoherent, is good because it bears witness to the speaker’s real intentions.

I think actually, ritual is inevitable, even when tacit. We are ceremony people, no matter how spontaneous we think we may be. There will be a loved formula, a linguistic groove long established, a shared initiatory language in common for any community that lasts. It’s about the dynamic counterpoints of tradition and innovation. We may have done away with the candles, offerings and holy smoke, but simply to feel safe repetition will always have value.

Martin Shaw.

Don’t forget the Christian East

It is noteworthy that no institutional form of religious persecution was ever introduced in the Christian East. Because of Western historiographical ignorance of the Orthodox Church, however, the inquisition would come to represent, for secular intellectuals in modern times, the illegitimacy of any civilization grounded in Christianity, whether Western or Eastern.

John Strickland, The Age of Division

Fully God, fully man

And from this we draw a refutation of Eutyches: since Christ is declared to be the fruit of the womb. And all fruit is of the same nature as the parent plant: so it follows that the Virgin also was of the same nature as the Second Adam, Who takes away the sins of the world. And let those be ashamed at the true child-bearing of the Mother of God, who have invented some fantastic notion concerning Christ’s Body; for the fruit proceeds from the very substance of the tree. And what of those who say that Christ passed through Mary as water through a channel? Let them hearken to the words of Elizabeth, who was filled with the Holy Ghost; saying that Christ was the fruit of the womb.

Severus (of Antioch) via Jonah (of micro.blog). Emphasis added because I heard somebody on WMBI say exactly that (actually, she said “pipe” rather than “channel”).

If Christ passed through Mary as water through a pipe, where did He get His humanity, which all Christians now confess? How do you get to “fully God and fully man” if Mary was just a pipe?

Denying Christ’s humanity is a pretty high price to pay for dodging her whose “fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum” is a crucial element in the story of our salvation.

A terrible choice

Christians in Germany will face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that Christian civilization may survive, or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying our civilization.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Sometimes this whole 2000-year-old faith seems like a living koan. Chew on this until you are enlightened. Keep walking.

Paul Kingsnorth

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, 12/15/24

Theology isn’t all deductive

Catholics find it impossible to theologize without deductive reasoning—a characteristic shared by virtually all Western Christians…

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

Puritan Phobia

The Puritans quickly developed a phobia about ritual, going so far as to resist “rote” recitation of the Lord’s Prayer:

Henry’s Method culminates with his most fascinating phrase-collection of all, “A Paraphrase on the Lord’s Prayer, in Scripture Expressions.” Christ’s own form of prayer given to his disciples had long been a thorn in Puritans’ sides, to be plucked out by being understood as only a general guideline. Henry’s strategy is to neutralize the prayer’s form in a pages of verses elaborating on the one phrase “Our Father, who art in similar method; he provides, for instance, an amazing two and a half Heaven” (MP, 163-65), a general topos, he says, from which begins. Many editions of the Method were printed as Henry intended, interleaved with one blank page between each printed one, to enable the reader to pen in his own collection of phrases to supplement Henry’s own. Like Bunyan’s demand for scrupulous sincerity, Henry’s lists and blank pages, figures of accumulation and abstraction, combine literally to efface the Lord’s Prayer and erase it from Dissenting practice.

Between the ledgerlike pages of Henry’s collected phrases and the blank sheets for scribbled lists of readers’ personal prayer phrases, one senses of variety of fears: that without this careful accounting, the business might go bankrupt, that in the copious, nervous quoting from God’s word to talk and talk and talk to God, God might not listen or respond at all.

Lori Branch, Rituals of Spontaneity

Hyperpluralism’s roots

Moreover, Reformation scholars tend analytically and in their division of labor to hive off the magisterial Reformation-Lutheranism, Reformed Protestantism, and the Church of England-from the radical Reformation. Consequently, whether oriented primarily toward theology or toward social history, they have overlooked the significance of the principle of sola scripture for contemporary hyperpluralism.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

A catholic vision of Christian faith

When I first opened A Severe Mercy nearly 20 years ago I had needed a vision of Christian faith that was unapologetically devoted to Christian doctrine without being materialistic, more American than Christian, and completely uprooted from history. Up to that point, the expressions of Christianity I had encountered were simply different forms of sectarian faith—a vapid progressivism or a parochial and narrow fundamentalism. Vanauken gave me catholicity ….

Jake Meador (hyperlink added)

Know-it-alls

In practical terms, the Reformed commitment to the theological significance of everyday life led to the development of something like Protestant metaphysics, Protestant epistemology, Protestant science, Protestant politics, Protestant social and economic theory, Protestant art, and Protestant poetics. The development of these Reformed spheres of intellectual and cultural activity never occurred without substantial influence from sources not specifically religious. In Switzerland, the southern German regions, Hungary, Holland, and the British Isles, the Reformed perspective could be used to mask economic or political aggression. More commonly, it emerged from a complicated mix of sacred and secular motives. Yet wherever sufficient Reformed strength existed, the assumption also existed that biblical Christianity had something fairly definite to say about everything.

Mark A. Noll, America’s God

Some of us have been glued to the BBC on a Sunday evening this autumn watching Mark Rylance return mesmerically as Thomas Cromwell in the second series of Wolf Hall. This all takes place in the era of the Reformation, and a particular scene has stayed with me. Surrounded by crosses lifted from churches, Cromwell says the following:

The English will discover God in daylight, not hidden in a cloud of incense. They will hear his word in their own language from a minister who faces them, not turning his back and muttering in some obscure, foreign tongue…no one will ever believe the poor once bowed and scraped to stocks of wood, and prayed to lumps of plaster.

I have such a mixed response to this brilliant bit of writing.

I went to such a daylight church and could not find God there. I didn’t find him in a cloud of incense either. I found him in a moonlit, midnight forest. I found him in a place with almost no human imprint. That was where he suddenly said NOW.

And I suppose I have become someone who ‘bows and scrapes’ to icons and prays to ‘lumps of plaster’. But, of course, to reduce them as Cromwell does is to misunderstand their function, what they do to the spirit and heart of the faithful. It’s not to the wood or plasterness of them I am praying. It’s just that I am not entirely just a brain on legs fed by sermons. These scorned ‘lumps’ of Cromwell become luminous by attention and repetition, by their physicality, by their evocation of tradition, what exudes through them. They gather and focus devotion, taking it from a lyric (entirely personal) into an epic (collective) encounter with the divine. Their materials are not the thing.

I have sympathies with all that want to hear gospel in their own language, and I’m glad that happened. Surely we all, really, want a profound sense of both tradition and innovation?

Maybe we long for a God of daylight and moonlight, of lyric and epic, of straight talking and unknowable mystery. I’d find it hard to imagine someone who didn’t. We stand on the Mount of Olives with our teacher and surely all is possible. Surely anything less than this is just silly.

But human history is human history and we make our choices. They are rarely ideal, but we chew, we rail, then we decide.

Martin Shaw

A personal favorite

I have three lists of Maxims or such that I review regularly. This one, which I think was originally embedded in a longer blog post by Father Stephen Freeman, seems more precious (in the good sense, not the snarky sense) every time I read it:

  1. First, live as though in the coming of Jesus Christ, the Kingdom of God has been inaugurated into the world and the outcome of history has already been determined. (Quit worrying)
  2. Second, love people as the very image of God and resist the temptation to improve them.
  3. Third, refuse to make economics the basis of your life. Your job is not even of secondary importance.
  4. Fourth, quit arguing about politics as though the political realm were the answer to the world’s problems. It gives it power that is not legitimate and enables a project that is anti-God.
  5. Fifth, learn to love your enemies. God did not place them in the world for us to fix or eliminate. If possible, refrain from violence.
  6. Sixth, raise the taking of human life to a matter of prime importance and refuse to accept violence as a means to peace. Every single life is a vast and irreplaceable treasure.
  7. Seventh, cultivate contentment rather than pleasure. It will help you consume less and free you from slavery to your economic masters.
  8. Eighth, as much as possible, think small. You are not in charge of the world. Love what is local, at hand, personal, intimate, unique, and natural. It’s a preference that matters.
  9. Ninth, learn another language. Very few things are better at teaching you about who you are not.
  10. Tenth, be thankful for everything, remembering that the world we live in and everything in it belongs to God.

Sometimes this whole 2000-year-old faith seems like a living koan. Chew on this until you are enlightened. Keep walking.

Paul Kingsnorth

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.