Wednesday, 10/16/24

Not Politics

Iatrogenic Customer Dissatisfaction

I took my Lincoln into the dealer last week because wiper fluid wouldn’t spray. They fixed it and suggested wiper blades, too.

I of course got a Customer Satisfaction Survey afterword because — well, this is Weimar America 2024.

In my value system, a 3 out of 5 means this was a perfectly okay experience, no problem. I don’t expect bliss or epiphanies from a car repair.

But to Ford-Lincoln, anything less that straight 5s triggers a message to the dealer that it desperately needs to call me to fix things. So the dealer called, and I told him his corporate overlords are idiots.

And then, incredibly, another survey came to ask whether the dealer called me, and now what are my answers to the other questions (how likely are you to recommend, etc.)? I couldn’t just say the dealer called me; the other questions were mandatory so I couldn’t submit the form without answering them.

But, aha!, they had a field for free-form comments, which I filled and submitted thus:

I am never going to answer another customer satisfaction survey. You won’t be satisfied until I’ve lied and given you all fives, so I’m going to lie like a dog and give them to you. But the truth is that Ford-Lincoln has burnt some goodwill by the refusal to accept “this was a satisfactory service call.” You won’t even let me say the dealer followed up and leave it at that, because I can’t say that (which is true) without answering all the other questions and risking another round of fawning attention if the answers are less than 5.
I DON’T WANT FAWNING ATTENTION. I WANTED MY CAR FIXED. I GOT MY CAR FIXED. NOW LEAVE ME ALONE! WHAT KIND OF IDIOTS ARE TELLING YOU THAT THIS HARASSMENT IS A WAY TO BUILD CUSTOMER SATISFACTION?!

(That felt good, but I’m not sure my pulse and blood pressure are back down yet. I claim no copyright on this, and you can substitute another “f-word” for “fawning.”)

Gratitude Grievance

I beam with pride when I see companies like Shopify, GitHub, Gusto, Zendesk, Instacart, Procore, Doximity, Coinbase, and others claim billion-dollar valuations from work done with Rails. It’s beyond satisfying to see this much value created with a web framework I’ve spent the last two decades evolving and maintaining. A beautiful prize from a life’s work realized.

But it’s also possible to look at this through another lens, and see a huge missed opportunity! If hundreds of billions of dollars in valuations came to be from tools that I originated, why am I not at least a pétit billionaire?! …

This line of thinking is lethal to the open source spirit.

The moment you go down the path of gratitude grievances, you’ll see ungrateful ghosts everywhere. People who owe you something, if they succeed. A ratio that’s never quite right between what you’ve helped create and what you’ve managed to capture. If you let it, it’ll haunt you forever.

…

Thou shall not lust after thy open source’s users and their success.

David Heinemeier Hansson

The Meaning of Existence

Everything except language
knows the meaning of existence.
Trees, planets, rivers, time
know nothing else. They express it
moment by moment as the universe.

Even this fool of a body
lives it in part,
and would have full dignity within it
but for the ignorant freedom
of my talking mind.

Les Murray, New Selected Poems

Religion (whatever that is)

Papering over an abyss of waste and horror

[T]he 2024 presidential campaign is a type of tragedy. For many Evangelicals, choosing between the two is a near-existential psycho-intellectual crisis. Because we lack an understanding of the tragic, we tend to think that everything we do must somehow be “redemptive.” …

…

Evangelical treatment of politics as nearly sacramental, rather than a part of temporal or natural life, has left them unable to conceive of political tragedy. Greg Wolfe in Image sees this as an essentially American failing, and he’s probably right. “My youthful, earnest religiosity” Wolfe writes, papered over “an abyss of waste and horror with innocuous pieties.”

…

Evangelicals seem convinced that they could never be a part of a national political tragedy, and their refusal to concede the essentially tragic nature of American politics is to their peril. Every succeeding generation of evangelicals, left right and center, seem convinced that salvation lies in their own political exertions, seemingly unaware that they too could be a part of a national political tragedy, wherein God’s judgment comes on the moral and immoral, on the pious and impious. There are cases, I am sure, to be made for voting for Trump, and that is who most of my tribe will tend towards. Maybe it is necessary. Maybe it is prudent. But don’t tell me it is anything other than tragic that either of the two leading candidates for the presidency will eventually govern the American republic.

Miles Smith at Mere Orthodoxy.

“Charismatics” didn’t used to be “Evangelicals”

There was in fact a strange mix of Evangelicalism clericalism and charismatic political action that Trump effectively harnessed in unique ways.

It is not coincidental that many, if not most, exvangelical memoirs are written by people who have had some background with charismatic influence, and why the specific Cold War confluence of legacy Evangelicals and charismatics created the conditions for the exvangelical movement. In their Washington Post piece Erica Ramirez and Leah Payne rightly note that while the “Pentecostal-Charismatic movement overlaps with evangelical traditions in many ways, especially in their conservative ideas about political issues such as abortion, marriage and prayer in schools,” evangelicals and Pentecostals are “historically distinct — until the mid-20th century, Pentecostals and their Charismatic descendants weren’t routinely grouped with their evangelical counterparts.”

There was in fact a strange mix of Evangelicalism clericalism and charismatic political action that Trump effectively harnessed in unique ways.

Miles Smith, Reading the Exvangelicals

It’s tempting to muse about why both “sides” consented to the conflation of pentecostal/charismatic and evangelical.

Perhaps another day. If I tried it today, I’d be neglecting other things and my take would probably be too cynical.

Politics

New Nadir

The Rutherford County, North Carolina, Sheriff’s Office said on Monday that police officers arrested a 44-year-old man on Saturday suspected of threatening violence against Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) disaster workers. The Washington Post reported over the weekend that FEMA ordered its employees to temporarily evacuate the county after National Guard service members reported seeing a truck of armed militants who were “out hunting FEMA,” though law enforcement said the suspect acted alone. The man—carrying a handgun and rifle at the time of his arrest—was charged with “going armed to the terror of the public” and released later that day on $10,000 bail.

Via The Dispatch.

Militants hunting for FEMA workers in hurricane devastation because — why, in God’s name!? Can we sink any lower?

Kamala’s best case?

Bret Stephens, Harris Needs a Closing Argument. Here’s One. is very appealing.

With Harris I’m pretty sure there will be another Election in four years; I’m not at all sure with Trump. But with Trump at +16 in my state, I have the luxury of voting for neither of them.

Poetic justice

Less than four weeks from the election, Michigan’s Democratic governor made an in-kind contribution to Donald Trump’s campaign. Gretchen Whitmer appeared last week in a video featuring her placing a Dorito chip on the tongue of a kneeling social-media influencer. After Michigan’s bishops denounced the clip as “specifically imitating the posture and gestures of Catholics receiving the Holy Eucharist,” Ms. Whitmer apologized.

The kicker: She was wearing a Harris-Walz campaign hat in the video.

The swing-state governor says she had no idea people might find the post offensive, which speaks to how out of touch Democratic elites are ….

William McGurn

This may qualify as poetic justice. Kamala Harris deserves to be outed as anti-Catholic (see this as well as the McGurn column) quite apart from Gretchen Whitmer’s mockery of the eucharist.

But I’m kind of waiting for the rest of the Whitmer story. What’s above is suspiciously weird; I just don’t know how Whitmer could have blundered her way into that highly-scripted gaff unless it was some kind of Borat or Project Veritas entrapment. Maybe that kneeling social-media influencer was a conservative provocateur, in which case I’d fault her (him?) equally with Whitmer in staging the mockery.

Russian 1988, China 2024

So: Why didn’t Gorbachev’s reforms succeed and save an empire?

Regarding the key figure, opinion was split at least five ways: some said it had been Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk; others, Russian President Boris Yeltsin; still others, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev or KGB Chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov. Finally, one or two passed the credit (or guilt) back to Leonid Brezhnev.

Each had a cogent reason for his answer. Moscow’s Mayor Gavriil Popov and Alexander Yakovlev fingered Kravchuk because his action in leading Ukraine to complete independence had removed an essential component of any possible union. Without Ukraine, their argument went, a union would be unworkable, since the discrepancy in size between Russia and each of the other republics was so great. At least one unit of intermediate size was needed to create the sort of balance a federation, or even confederation, would require.nov Others, such as Anatoly Sobchak and Konstantin Lubenchenko, the last speaker of the USSR Supreme Soviet, did not agree with this logic.

Russia, Belarus, the countries of Central Asia, and perhaps one or two from the Transcaucasus could have formed a viable union even without Ukraine, they argued. Only one republic was irreplaceable, and that was Russia. Ergo, Yeltsin had been the key figure. If he had not conspired with the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus to form the Commonwealth of Independent States, some form of confederation could have been cobbled together to the benefit of all.

“No,” said others, including Vladislav Starkov and Sergei Stankevich, who felt that Gorbachev’s stubbornness, his failure to understand the force of nationalism, his devotion to a discredited socialism, and the authoritarian streak in his personality had prevented him from voluntarily transferring the sort of power to the republics that their leaders demanded. His failures in leadership, in short, had determined the collapse of the state he headed, and no other political figure could have saved it.

Anatoly Chernyayev, ever loyal to his boss, would have none of that. He felt that a union treaty would have been signed if the attempted coup had not occurred in August. This implied that Vladimir Kryuchkov had been the key figure. He, after all, had organized the coup, and nobody else could have done it without his cooperation.

Starkov, who named Gorbachev as the principal culprit, also pointed out that Leonid Brezhnev had shared much of the responsibility, for he was the Soviet leader who had set the stage for collapse by neglecting the country’s economic, social, and ethnic problems and by permitting local “mafias” under the guise of the Communist Party to obtain a hammerlock on power in many of the union republics.

Jack Matlock, Autopsy on an Empire

This stuff’s complicated and most of us Americans haven’t got a clue what Russia is about. Gobachev tried major reform, but there were too many moving pieces and personalities — so he got collapse in the end.

China seems to be in similar bind as Gorbachev: economic dysfunction, the cure of which might bring down the CCP.

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, 10/13/24

Tomorrow, we will bury my youngest brother, who died Tuesday. So it has been a busy and stressful week.

Jonathan’s life on earth was, by upper-middle class, first world standards, unusually afflicted, and he was not afraid of death. We, his surviving brothers, all practicing Christians of varying traditions (our parents did well), see God’s gracious hand in this in many ways.

If you do such things, pray for God’s servant, Jonathan, who has “fallen asleep” in hope of resurrection, though in his tradition he would have called it something else.

Here’s what I have for you today.

Christians did not worry that absence of the pagans from their services constituted a lost opportunity. Their worship was not evangelistic; it was not “seeker sensitive.” Their intent in worshiping was to glorify God rather than to attract outsiders. And since they believed that authentic worship formed the worshipers, they believed that in the course of time the behavior of those so formed would attract outsiders.

Alan Kreider, The Patient Ferment of the Early Church

In 1184, bishops who previously might have been content to let sleeping heretics lie had been instructed actively to sniff them out. Then, in 1215, at the great Lateran Council presided over by Innocent III, sanctions explicitly targeting heresy had provided the Church with an entire machinery of persecution.

Tom Holland, Dominion

For what it’s worth, I seem to recall a trustworthy source affirm that there was never any sort of inquisition in the Eastern (Orthodox) Church, and I know I have heard of none.

Those who, like him, had dared to repudiate the Roman Church but had then been guilty of what Luther condemned as a failure properly to understand the Spirit, had also been the objects of his ire. Theologians in Swiss or German cities who presumed to dispute his views on the eucharist; Anabaptists, with their wild contempt for infant baptism and secular authority; Henry VIII, who seemed to think he was God. Luther, fretting where it all might lead, had not shrunk from contemplating a nightmarish prospect: a world in which the very concept of truth might end up dissolving, and everything appear relative. ‘For whoever has gone astray in the faith may thereafter believe whatever he wants.’

Tom Holland, Dominion

Protestants made the sixteenth century an era of unprecedented emphasis on doctrine. In their divergent ways, all Protestants thought that the most fundamental problem with the Roman church was its mistaken truth claims, that is, its false doctrines. As we saw in the previous chapter, they offered their respective corrections based on scripture, variously supplemented by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and the exercise of reason. Because Lutherans and Reformed Protestants were supported rather than suppressed by political authorities, theirs were the particular Protestant truth claims institutionalized in cities, territories, and countries whose leaders rejected Rome.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

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.

Sunday, 10/6/24

Going to church

Festive events like rock concerts, Taylor says, are “plainly ‘non-religious’; and yet they also sit uneasily in the secular, disenchanted world. . . . The festive remains a niche in our world, where the (putatively) transcendent can erupt into our lives, however well we have organized them around immanent understandings of order.”

William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry

I’m not so sure rock concerts aren’t religious in a world where churches imitate rock concerts.

On the other hand,

Taylor notes that not all expressions of Christianity have adopted excarnation, but in general, it is true that our church services (especially in evangelicalism) involve less liturgy, less focus on bodily participation, and greater emphasis on disengaged reason.

Alan Noble, Disruptive Witness

We have only ever lived in the Negative World

I recently re-subscribed to Touchstone. I’m not entirely sure why I did, and when my first copy arrived, I skimmed it, snorted ruefully, and set it aside.

I picked it up again weeks later, and was pleased at the lead editorial:

We wish the Republican Party hadn’t altered its platform, and we wish it hadn’t invited Amber Rose to speak as a representative of what the party now endorses (and let’s not kid ourselves; she represents what the party now believes). But in the Negative World, American Christians should no longer expect to find safe sanctuary in the GOP.

The reality is that we have only ever lived in the Negative World. Even though Christians knew long before any of us was born that our nation was drifting away from the church, we lived for a time under the Positive-World illusion that Christian notions of right and wrong would endure, if not in the world, then at least in the West, and if not in the West, then at least in the United States. And if not even in the United States, then in the Republican Party at the very least of all.

Now that we can see the world for what the Bible tells us it has always been, we may all soon see what the Venerable Fulton Sheen saw more than a half-century ago, when he looked upon our Negative World and announced the “end of Christendom” yet affirmed that:

these are great and wonderful days in which to be alive. . . . It is not a gloomy picture—it is a picture of the Church in the midst of increasing opposition from the world. And therefore live your lives in the full consciousness of this hour of testing, and rally close to the heart of Christ.

Douglas Johnson, Great and Wonderful Days (emphasis added).

If a nontrivial portion of the rest of Touchstone is that good, I’ll hang around a while.

Science and Magic

The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse … There is something that unites magic and applied science while separating both from the wisdom of earlier ages. For the wise men of old, the cardinal problem was how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution was knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike, the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men, and the solution is technique. Both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious, such as digging up and mutilating the dead.

C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

Of proposals to legalize euthanasia:

This exists in bleak meme form in millennial jokes about “Day of the Pillow”, a proposed mass-smothering event conducted against their over-numerous Boomer elders … [E]very polity where the demographic pinch prevails is making the same proposals. For example, since 2020 the call has been raised in China, Japan, and India as well as the West.

From a perspective that views human life as sacred, this looks horrific. But it is a logical endpoint for a technological order whose inorganic growth is in important ways parasitic on the organic kind: exploiting the natural world, for instance, or instrumentalising “human resources” even as it affords women more social status for literally anything other than creating and nurturing those “resources”. And when no effort to rein in this exploitative, anti-life nature seems to have succeeded yet, perhaps the only way out is through. So we can maybe take a crumb of comfort from the likelihood that whatever society survives this now self-devouring culture of death will have done so by refusing its paradigm, and choosing life instead.

Mary Harrington, Why assisted dying is now inevitable

What Christ gave us before He ascended

Before Christ ascended, He did not give us Scriptures, canons, doctrines, rules, or definitions. He bestowed the Holy Spirit on the Eleven in the Upper Room (John 20:22) and later sent the Holy Spirit to the entire Church at Pentecost (Acts 2)”

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

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

Sundays are joyful days, but there’s a little cloud on this one: 26 years ago, my father died, quite unexpectedly.

His was a quick and apparently painless death — what we think of as a good death these days. But I’m not so sure. Meeting God face-to-face is a serious business. I’m inclined to think a slow and painful death, with lots of time to face the reality and to set aright things that are our of kilter, has its own advantages.

We brought nothing into this world

Modernity equates liberty with the freedom to decide and choose, to define ourselves and the world around us. In the words of Justice Anthony Kennedy (Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, 1992):

At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.

We relish this concept of unfettered freedom. But, of course, it is absurd, even for a secularist. For whether we choose to admit it or not, we “brought nothing into this world” (1 Tim. 6:7). Everything in our lives is derived and gifted. We are not the inventors of the world nor of our lives. And though we struggle to understand and even master our own DNA, it remains a primary component of our destiny, a genetic memory of the history of our coming into being across the ages. To be told that we have some portion of DNA contributed by Neanderthals reminds us that even such obscure ancestors are “selves we have received” through our genetically traditioned existence.

Fr. Stephen Freeman

There has never been a “Positive World”

I was a casual follower of Aaron Renn until Alan Jacobs demolished Renn’s famous February 2022 piece, The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism.

Without defining Christianity, Renn says the world used to be positive toward it. You can read Renn for yourself, and Jacobs, too (and you really should read Jacobs if you think Renn is onto something important), but here’s the gist (via Jacobs) of why there was never a “positive world” for thoroughgoing Christianity:

Professing Christianity is what Renn calls a “status-enhancer” when and only when the Christianity one professes is in step with what your society already and without reference to Christian teaching describes as “being an upstanding citizen.” If you don’t believe me, try getting up on stage in an evangelical megachurch and reckoning seriously with Jesus’s teaching on wealth and poverty. Even a sermon on loving your enemies, like Ruby Bridges, and blessing those who curse you, can be a hard sell — as many pastors since 2016 have discovered. News flash: if you make a point of never saying anything that would make people doubt your commitment to their preferred social order, they’ll probably think you an upstanding citizen. (Who knew?)

There are pretty much always some elements of Christian teaching that you can get away with publicly affirming; but you can never get away with affirming them all. If American Christians sixty years ago felt fully at home in their social world, that’s because they quietly set aside, or simply managed to avoid thinking about, all the biblical commandments that would render them no longer at ease in the American dispensation. Any Christians who have ever felt completely comfortable in their culture have already edited out of their lives the elements of Christianity that would generate social friction. And no culture that exists, or has ever existed, or ever will exist, is receptive to the whole Gospel.

Renn is Evangelical or Evangelical-adjacent (PCA Presbyterian). I was once very friendly toward the PCA, so I think I can say that it’s not a church that rocked the social order (at least until Orgasms for All! became the unofficially established religion of the USA).

The bloom is entirely off my Renn Rose. I deeply discount articles that take his “three worlds” model as their premise.

A Christian Is An Outlaw

Apropos of “negative world”:

It would be honour in modernity for a Christian to be called such an outlaw, for surely they do not conform to the laws of this world.

Martin Shaw, A Christian Is An Outlaw

God in a box

There’s a brilliant episode of King of the Hill where Bobby, the thirteen-year-old boy, gets really into Christian rock. At the end of the episode his dad, Hank, shows him a box where he keeps tokens from all the different phases he has gone through. There’s a Beanie Baby, a Tamagotchi, a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle… Bobby cringes—and that’s the point. “I know you think the stuff you’re doing now is cool,” says Hank to his son, “but in a few years, you’re going to think it’s lame. And I don’t want the Lord to end up in this box.”

Theophan Davis, How Not to Be a Saint

This Orthodox novice’s section on prayer (“Play to your weakness”) was also very good.

Sufficiently Rawlsian?

I might appeal to the second chapter of Genesis when speaking about the fundamental importance of male–female complementarity. But I do so because the biblical witness so succinctly and powerful states a fundamental truth that every civilization has honored.

R. R. Reno, responding to a transcribed speech of Oren Cass on how to construct a secular conservatism.

Would John Rawls accept this as public reasoning?

Sola Scriptura

Even as they claimed to rely on the Bible alone, antebellum Protestants frequently turned to Christian saints, exegetical traditions, the practices of Christians past, and official church teachings, employing these sources to complement or clarify what they took the Bible to mean. Perhaps this betrays a deeper sense that the Bible was not as self-interpreting as many Protestants hoped. At the very least, it shows the inescapability of tradition. American Protestants never read, or argued over, the Bible alone.

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

What the heck is a Carpatho-Rusyn?

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Byzantine Rite Christians from the Carpathian mountain region began to arrive in America. It is difficult to label these people: they came from an area that today is divided among Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Moldova, Belarus, and Ukraine, and they were known by a great variety of names, including Carpatho-Russians, Rusyns, Ruthenians, Galicians, and others. Their ancestors were originally Orthodox Christians, but in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries they submitted to the pope of Rome through a series of “unions,” which is why they have long been known to the Orthodox as “Uniates.” Despite their subordination to the pope, they retained most of the external forms of Orthodox worship and practice, including allowing married men to become priests.

Matthew Namee, Lost Histories.

These people are the historic core of my diocese. And my parish’s Patron Saint, Alexis Toth, led multitudes back to the Orthodox faith, after he was spurned by Archbishop John Ireland.

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

Sunday Potpourri

Consider the following question. What is closer to the original Easter: January 3, 1975, or Easter Sunday 2023? According to human reason, we would say that January 3, 1975, is forty-eight years closer to the original Easter (or “Pascha,” as I prefer to call it) than Easter Sunday 2023. But that is a secular way of approaching time. With our thinking informed by a Judeo-Christian worldview, we understand that Easter Sunday is actually closer to the events of Christ’s Resurrection, though on a different axis from secular time.

Robin Phillips and Fr. Stephen DeYoung, Rediscovering the Goodness of Creation

The modern West is said to be Christian, but this is untrue: the modern outlook is anti-Christian, because it is essentially anti-religious; and it is anti-religious because, still more generally, it is anti-traditional; this is its distinguishing characteristic and this is what makes it what it is.

René Guénon Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern Age

If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do.

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

The nation that spends more on its military than the next ten largest militaries combined bases its group identity on violence.

William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry

Because we are confident in the Church, we do not replace its teachings and guidance with our own individual opinions. That itself is part of the phronema.

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

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

After the Reformation

\[After the Reformation,\] though sacraments remained important (at first), they were deeply suppressed in favor of “the word.” The Scriptures were emphasized but in a new manner. They were the treasure-trove of all information. Believers were to be instructed constantly and urged towards right choices. Christianity quickly morphed into a society of religious morality (information+decision). This arrangement and understanding are so commonplace today that many readers will wonder that it has ever been anything else.

However, liturgy itself was never meant to convey information in such a manner. It has a very different understanding of what it is to be human, what it means to worship, and what it means to liturgize in the Church. Human beings learn in a variety of ways. Young human beings do almost nothing but learn every waking moment of the day. But they primarily learn by doing (kinesthetic memory) and mimicry (play). It is possible to acquire some information in a lecture format but this remains perhaps the least effective human activity when it comes to learning. It has almost nothing to do with liturgy.

Christianity, prior to the Reformation, was largely acquired as a set of practices … The pattern of feasts and fasts, the rituals of prayer, the preparation for and receiving of communion, all of these, far too complex and layered to be described in a short article, formed a web of nurture that linked the whole of culture into a way of life that produced Christian discipleship …

…

We are not an audience in the Liturgy. We are not gathering information in order to make a decision. We are in the Liturgy to live, breathe, and give thanks, in the presence of God. There is often a quiet movement within an Orthodox congregation. Candles are lit and tended. Icons are venerated. Members cross themselves at certain words, but are just as likely to be seen doing so for some reason known only to them and God. It is a place of prayer, and not just the prayers sung by the priest and choir.

Fr. Stephen Freeman, An Audience of None.

I doubt that these excerpts suffice to summarize Fr. Stephen’s observations. Do read it all, because it’s all I have on offer today.

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

Elevation of the Holy Cross 2024

I’m on vacation, so I’m not going to take the time to sort these into topics.

Also, it’s a major Feast day in the Eastern Church. The Orthodox Church at my vacation destination appears to be postponing observance to tomorrow — an Orthodox oddity in my limited experience.

Selling hoi polloi a delusion

Those with a material interest in doing so have learned to speak autonomy talk, and to tap into the deep psychology of autonomy in ways that lead to its opposite.

Matthew Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head

Purposeful to a fault

Himmler quite aptly defined the SS member as the new type of man who under no circumstances will ever do “a thing for its own sake.”

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Sit quietly with that one for a minute. Then consider Josef Pieper, Leisure, The Basis of Culture.

“Televangelists”

Fugitive Televangelist Wanted by F.B.I. Is Caught in the Philippines
Weeks of tense standoff in the Philippines have ended in the capture of a pastor accused of leading an international ring of sex abuse and trafficking of young women and girls.

New York Times

I don’t believe it would be fair to saddle any Christian tradition or denomination with this guy. From what the Times says about the idolatrous adulation he cultivated, he was plainly some kind of one-off cultist.

But I have no idea how many one-off cultists are abroad in the world, when this admonition currently being featured at the end of my Sunday blog posts:

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

Huge (if true)

Donald Trump runs no risk of going to prison in the middle of his campaign, thanks to Judge Juan Merchan’s decision Friday to postpone sentencing until Nov. 26. The delay gives his lawyers more time to prepare an appeal. Fortunately for Mr. Trump, his trial was overwhelmingly flawed, and a well-constructed appeal would ensure its ultimate reversal.

A central problem for the prosecution and Judge Merchan lies in Article VI of the U.S. Constitution, which makes federal law the “supreme law of the land.” That pre-empts state law when it conflicts with federal law, including by asserting jurisdiction over areas in which the federal government has exclusive authority.

Mr. Trump’s conviction violates this principle because it hinges on alleged violations of state election law governing campaign spending and contributions. The Federal Election Campaign Act pre-empts these laws as applied to federal campaigns. If it didn’t, there would be chaos. Partisan state and local prosecutors could interfere in federal elections by entangling candidates in litigation, devouring precious time and resources.

That hasn’t happened except in the Trump case, because the Justice Department has always guarded its exclusive jurisdiction even when states have pushed back, as has happened in recent decades over immigration enforcement.

The normal approach would have been for the Justice Department to inform District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who was contemplating charges against Mr. Trump, of the FECA pre-emption issue. If Mr. Bragg didn’t follow the department’s guidance, it would have intervened at the start of the case to have it dismissed. Instead the department allowed a state prosecutor to interfere with the electoral prospects of the chief political rival of President Biden, the attorney general’s boss.

David B. Rivkin Jr. and Elizabeth Price Foley, Why Trump’s Conviction Can’t Stand

They evolved

In the summer of 2015, back when he was still talking to traitorous reporters like me, I spent extended stretches with Donald Trump. He was in the early phase of his first campaign for president, though he had quickly made himself the inescapable figure of that race—as he would in pretty much every Republican contest since. We would hop around his various clubs, buildings, holding rooms, limos, planes, golf carts, and mob scenes, Trump disgorging his usual bluster, slander, flattery, and obvious lies. The diatribes were exhausting and disjointed.

But I was struck by one theme that Trump kept pounding on over and over: that he was used to dealing with “brutal, vicious killers”—by which he meant his fellow ruthless operators in showbiz, real estate, casinos, and other big-boy industries. In contrast, he told me, politicians are saps and weaklings.

“I will roll over them,” he boasted, referring to the flaccid field of Republican challengers he was about to debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library that September. They were “puppets,” “not strong people.” He welcomed their contempt, he told me, because that would make his turning them into supplicants all the more humiliating.

“They might speak badly about me now, but they won’t later,” Trump said. They like to say they are “public servants,” he added, his voice dripping with derision at the word servant. But they would eventually submit to him and fear him. They would “evolve,” as they say in politics. “It will be very easy; I can make them evolve,” Trump told me. “They will evolve.”

Like most people who’d been around politics for a while, I was dubious. And wrong. They evolved.

Mark Leibovich, Hypocrisy, Spinelessness, and the Triumph of Donald Trump

Change of perspective or sign of deline?

The eighteenth-century Humean slave of the passions is thus indistinguishable from the liberated, twentieth-century Sartrean individual living authentically.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

All that matters is strength

Part of the reason Trump is less constrained on [the abortion] issue than his predecessors is that he’s transformed the Christian right just as he has the broader conservative movement, dethroning serious-seeming figures while promoting those once regarded as flamboyant cranks. In Republican politics, Steve Bannon and Alex Jones now have far more influence than erstwhile conservative stalwarts like Paul Ryan and Dick Cheney. Similarly, in the religious realm, the ex-president has elevated a class of faith healers, prosperity gospel preachers and roadshow revivalists over the kind of respectable evangelicals who clustered around George W. Bush. “Independent charismatic leaders, who 20 years ago would have been mocked by mainstream religious right leaders, are now frontline captains in the American culture wars,” writes the scholar Matthew D. Taylor in his fascinating new book, “The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy.”

The churches Taylor is writing about exist outside the structures and doctrines of denominations like the Southern Baptists. They’re led by flashy spiritual entrepreneurs who fashion themselves as modern apostles and prophets with supernatural spiritual gifts, and they represent one of the fastest-growing movements in American Christianity. Among many of these churches, Trump remains the anointed one, chosen by God to restore Christian rule to the United States. These Christians care a great deal about abortion, but they appear to care at least as much about Trump. Many of them see him as a modern-day version of the Persian emperor Cyrus, a heathen who, in the sixth century B.C.E., rescued God’s chosen people from Babylonian captivity. In this framework, Trump’s piety is irrelevant; all that matters is his strength.

Michelle Goldberg

I think Goldberg, no Christian, is right. And that means that it’s hard to say that MAGA and I share the Christian tradition; their religion seems from a darker source.

Ted Cruz is no dummie

Liz Cheney famously endorsed Kamala Harris over Donald Trump, and less famously endorsed Democratic U.S. Representative Colin Allred over Ted Cruz for Cruz’s Texas Senate seat.

So has she abandoned the GOP?

I can’t speak for Cheney, but I can tell you why I’m voting for Allred over Cruz—and it has nothing to do with policy or burning anything down.

Since January 6, the threshold question I ask when considering whether to vote for a Republican is how that candidate responded to Trump’s coup attempt. There’s a spectrum of behavior on that point, with Cheney and Kinzinger on one end, Trump himself on the other, and the mass of congressional Republicans somewhere in between.

At the two extremes of the spectrum, policy doesn’t matter to me. Policy debates are things you get to have when everyone agrees on the rules of the game. Rewarding those who defended democratic norms and punishing those who undermined them is more important.

I would vote for Cheney and every other Republican who voted to impeach or convict Trump following the insurrection in hopes that their victories would embolden others in the party to resist his power grabs in a second term. And I would vote against Trump and all of his co-conspirators for the opposite reason, in hopes that their defeats would convince others that civic crime, like trying to overturn an election on false pretenses, doesn’t pay.

Ted Cruz was Trump’s chief co-conspirator in the Senate after the 2020 election, initially agreeing to argue before the Supreme Court that the electoral votes of swing states won by Joe Biden should be thrown out. When the court declined to hear that case, Cruz switched to Plan B and ring-led a scheme on January 6 to stop Congress from certifying Biden’s victory by objecting to those swing-state electoral votes. Had he gotten his way, some sort of chaotic ad hoc election “commission” would have been thrown together before Inauguration Day to decide who the next president should be.

He did all of this knowing full well that Trump was and is a loon and that egging on Americans to doubt the fairness of their own elections will destabilize the country long-term. But he was willing to pay that price because he thought making himself useful to the coup would give him a leg up with Trump’s base when he runs for president again someday.

You don’t need to agree with Colin Allred on a single policy issue to grasp that a person like Ted Cruz cannot be trusted to defend the constitutional order. He was tested and failed grievously. If you believe that a second Trump presidency would create a “unique threat” to American government, as Liz Cheney and I do, it’s urgent that Trump’s most unethical enablers in Congress be replaced by people who won’t rubber-stamp anything he does.

Republicans in Texas had their chance to replace Cruz with a candidate like that in this year’s primary, just as Republicans nationally had their chance to replace Trump. They made their choice. Cheney and I have made ours.

It’s frankly amazing to me that so many conservatives have been left struggling to understand Cheney’s endorsement of Allred. To a certain sort of partisan, it seems, Trump is the only elected Republican who bears meaningful responsibility for the attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, the scores of House GOPers who voted to object on January 6—they’re all off the hook because, well, there are just too many of them to punish. Beating them at the polls would wipe out the party, and partisans won’t tolerate that. Even for just one election cycle, to teach their representatives a hard lesson about authoritarian bootlicking.

If you feel obliged to excuse Ted Cruz for his role in a coup plot because that’s what hating Democrats requires of you, you do you. But let’s please stop memory-holing his part in it by feigning confusion as to why Liz Cheney might want to drive him from politics. It’s pathetic.

Nick Catoggio

Ted Cruz is no dummie. He’s whip-smart and cunning. He also is a contemptible human being with no core. His mentor, Princeton’s Robert P. George, must be deeply grieved.

Shanghaied

Few cities in Asia match Shanghai’s level of economic development. In the fanciest shopping streets in the city center you can go miles without leaving the realm of luxury stores, with a Hermes outlet abutting a Louis Vuitton outlet, which in turn abuts a Rolex outlet. At times, the city reminded me of an acquaintance’s semi-humorous observation that, in a hundred years, luxury brands may be all that remains of Europe’s once enormous influence on the world.
In Postwar, Tony Judt argues that in the 1960s, the restive mood of Europe’s young was in part fueled by the ugliness of the homes in which they had been raised and the new universities in which they were being educated. Comparisons between Europe sixty years ago and China today are certain to be wrong for any number of reasons, but my mind kept going back to Judt’s observation every time I drove past another island of identical, unadorned housing blocks.
Preferences about the next American president seem to be nearly as divided among Chinese intellectuals as they are among the American electorate. A senior scholar of international relations told me that Donald Trump would likely be more willing to cut deals with China but that he preferred Kamala Harris because of her greater predictability on the international stage. A senior economist told me that Kamala Harris might prove softer on tariffs but that she would prefer Donald Trump because of his greater predictability on economic policy. The only consistent refrain was the preference for perceived predictability: Chinese elites seem as discombobulated by the sense that it’s impossible to predict what Washington might do as they are by any specific action the next president might take.

Yasha Mounk, 3 of 21 Observations About China

The All-Volunteer Navy at Play

The chief petty officers aboard the USS Manchester (LCS-14) were caught illicitly placing and using a Starlink satellite-internet antenna while the ship was under way. The conspiracy, involving all senior enlisted sailors attached to the littoral combat ship, came to light after months of use, when a civilian contractor came aboard and stumbled upon the bootleg setup. The ship’s command senior chief and ringleader of the operation was convicted at court-martial and reduced in rank from E-8 to E-7: an outrageously light penalty considering her repeated lies to her commanding officer, her background in Navy IT that ensures she was absolutely aware of her transgression, and the cover-up campaign that involved the intimidation and silencing of those below her. This betrayal of the ship’s whereabouts in service to movie-streaming, texting, and other forms of personal entertainment is especially egregious because of the role that chiefs have in preserving good order and discipline among the ranks while upholding Navy traditions. A bad chief is the ruin of a ship and its crew, and the legal equivalent of keelhauling the only correct recourse.

National Review’s The Week Friday email. See also the Navy Times.

Donald Trump after the debate

The Hill: Trump Floats Punishment For ABC After Debate

I mean, to be honest, they’re a news organization. They have to be licensed to do it. They ought to take away their license for the way they did that.

Via The Dispatch

This response is fractally wrong. ABC doesn’t need a license to be a news organization (thank God and the First Amendment).

If they did have a license, it would be dictatorial to revoke it for displeasing the President or anyone else.

Trump once again exhibits his anti-democratic impulses, though once again it probably will deter no fans.

Lesser evils

“Sending migrants away, not allowing them to grow, not letting them have life is something wrong; it is cruelty,” Francis said in a news conference on the plane as he returned to Rome after his long trip to Southeast Asia and Oceania. “Sending a child away from the womb of the mother is murder because there is life. And we must speak clearly about these things.”

…

But when asked whether it would be morally admissible to vote for someone who favored the right to abortion, he responded: “One must vote. And one must choose the lesser evil. Which is the lesser evil? That lady or that gentleman? I don’t know. Each person must think and decide according to his or her own conscience.”

Pope Says Both Trump and Harris Are ‘Against Life’.

Donald Trump seemingly is Teflon-coated, but explicit Papal permission to vote for the (more) pro-abortion candidate could logically be a factor in this election.

Even WSJ is appalled

Ms. Loomer is usually described in the press as “far right,” but that’s unfair to the fever swamps. On Sunday she posted on X that if Ms. Harris wins the election, “the White House will smell like curry,” a gibe against Ms. Harris’s Indian heritage.

She added that Ms. Harris’s speeches “will be facilitated via a call center.” U.S. companies often farm out their information lines to Indian firms, get it? We wonder if JD Vance’s Indian-American wife thinks that’s funny.

In 2018 Ms. Loomer chained herself to Twitter’s New York headquarters after the platform banned her. She suggested that Casey DeSantis, the wife of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, might have lied about having breast cancer: “I’ve never seen the medical records.” This week she smeared Sen. Lindsey Graham after he criticized her association with Mr. Trump.

All of this would be ignorable, except that others close to Mr. Trump say he is listening to Ms. Loomer’s advice. People in the Trump campaign are trying to get her out of the former President’s entourage, to no avail. Even Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene thinks Ms. Loomer is damaging the former President’s election chances.

As North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis put it on Friday: “Laura Loomer is a crazy conspiracy theorist who regularly utters disgusting garbage intended to divide Republicans. A DNC plant couldn’t do a better job than she is doing to hurt President Trump’s chances of winning re-election. Enough.”

Wall Street Journal Editorial Board

On the other hand …

If anyone is looking for facts to support a vote for Trump despite loony Loomer (and everything else), these two graphs may be just the ticket. The Biden administration has not covered itself in glory on illegal immigration.

The yellow bar is illegal immigrants and those awaiting adjudication of asylum claims or other claims to remain.

See the Wall Street Journal story.

Where customer service and stalking overlap

Delta wants to know what I thought of my flight. Honda wants to know what I thought of my oil change. The company that inspects my HVAC system twice yearly wants to know what I thought of … the air filter replacements? The technician’s demeanor? I’m not sure because I’ve read only the subject lines of the emails, which keep coming, imploring me to reflect on the experience and charting some strange new territory where customer service and stalking overlap. It may be time for a restraining order. Or, minimally, a different kind of filter, the one that consigns certain senders’ electronic missives to the Spam or Trash folders.

Frank Bruni

Life goes on

O when the world’s at peace and every man is free
then will I go down unto my love.
O and I may go down several times before that.

Wendell Berry

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

Sunday potpourri

Western Civ

The Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov expressed the non sequitur at the heart of Western civilization with a deliciously sarcastic aphorism: “Man descended from apes, therefore we must love one another.”

Andrew Wilson, Remaking The World

Irony

You can spend forty years teaching people to be awake to the fact of mystery and then some fellow with no more theological sense than a jackrabbit gets himself a radio ministry and all your work is forgotten. I don’t know where it will end.

Rev. John Ames via @dswanson and @KyleEssary on micro.blog.

I follow @dswanson and @KyleEssary on micro.blog. They seem like very nice guys and pretty well-educated and sensible (I wouldn’t follow them otherwise; if I want outrage, I can visit my disused X account or rejoin Facebook).

But I gotta say (the preface to many a gratuitous and unnecessary comment) that Orthodox Christianity often has a similar gripe against Protestantism, and its incorrigible devotion to novel doctrines that kept it from returning to Orthodox Christianity as it failed to reform schismatic Latin Christianity.

Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant

In my experience, really committed Protestants tend to think of themselves as “saved” because they have accepted Jesus; Roman Catholics, on the other hand, see themselves as “sinners” in need of weekly absolution. Orthodox just think themselves lucky.

Peter France, A Place of Healing for the Soul

Inquisition

In 1184, bishops who previously might have been content to let sleeping heretics lie had been instructed actively to sniff them out. Then, in 1215, at the great Lateran Council presided over by Innocent III, sanctions explicitly targeting heresy had provided the Church with an entire machinery of persecution.

Tom Holland, Dominion

Ethics

[T]he recent (as in, since the nineteenth century) evangelical Protestant practice of building ethics on proof texts is remarkably limited in our day and age. Proof texts work when the moral intuitions of the culture track with the broad shape of biblical teaching. That is no longer the case. Further, advances in technology now raise all kinds of questions about what it even means to be human—which in turn raises questions not only about fertility, but about other issues, from end-of-life care to the use of AI. The broader biblical account of human nature, not isolated proof texts, must now factor into Christian discussions of the most pressing ethical issues that we face.

Carl R. Trueman, We Need Good Protestant Ethicists

Identitarianism is anti-Christian

Fr. Andrew: The human identity, as we were made to be, is something that is always in the future. Because we, being finite, will never arrive at being God.

Fr. Stephen: Right, our identity is always in the future, my existence is what I am today … There’s this gap, there’s this lack between me and it … even when we’re in the life of the world to come, we are not going to be in a static state.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which also implies that if our progress is always this point in the future—future for us—which is the fullness of the stature of Christ, to use St. Paul’s language, then that means that this modern thing that we see now, identitarianism, where people take these labels and apply them to themselves and that becomes the end-all … of how they conceive of themselves, looking for their identity either in something in the past or something at this moment … [i]t’s really an anti-Christian philosophy, and it’s really kind of an unhopeful philosophy, because it means I’ve arrived, I am this thing, and this is what I am and who I am, period. The becoming is not on the plate, on the table. It’s a distortion, really.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and one way, one devastatingly destructive way in which we are faithful to something other than Christ is when we’re faithful to some version of ourselves. We have this idea that we’re not allowed to break character, that whoever I was yesterday I have to be someone consistent with that today, even if who I was yesterday was wretched and miserable.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] “This is just who I am!” No, you can be better!

Fr. Stephen: Right, “I can’t make a break…” And this is something I say to people over and over and over again in confession, is that the devil doesn’t spend his time trying to get us to sin; we do that on our own. The devil spends his time, when we fall, telling us not to get up, telling us that this is where we belong, this is who we are, don’t bother trying to do better, to be better, to make any progress …

Fr. Andrew: I can’t remember—didn’t one of the saints say something to the effect of the demons always whisper two lies? One is: “You’re doing great!” And the other is: “There’s no hope for you!” And, I mean, those are the roots of… I don’t know, I’ve heard confessions for well over a decade and a half now; I’m pretty sure those are the roots of basically most sins.

Fall of Man Part 1: Garments of Skin | Ancient Faith Ministries

The Gospels are not a software license

The four Gospels are not a software user license — do not skip to the end and click “I agree.”

Read them. Realize the implications. Count the cost. Commit to live this life under the laws of this Kingdom, and set your feet on the road of repentance.

If more people wrestled with the difficult commands and expectations of Christ, then there might be fewer people called Christians — but they would be more ready for life in Christ.

Fr. Silouan Thompson

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

Indiction 2024

This is the Eastern Church’s Indiction, the beginning of the liturgical year.

[I]n the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship . . . is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

David Foster Wallace, quoted as the epigraph to the Introduction of William T. Cavanaugh’s new The Uses of Idolatry. It seemed a fitting epigraph for this post as well.

From incarnate God to Baby Jesus

Historian John Strickland rues

that moment in history when the incarnate God gives way to “Baby Jesus,” a departure from tradition so great that it represents the transition between a paradisiacal art and a utopian one. To a member of the old Christendom, it bordered on blasphemy. In an effort to celebrate human life in a spiritually untransformed world, the artist of the new Christendom now emasculates the image of the Godman and by doing so diminishes His divinity. … the only clue that the painting represented the Madonna was that it conformed in content to the standard iconography of the Theotokos inherited from and still normative in the East. … Jesus Christ had become an adorable baby whose passivity incites a desire to pinch him on the cheek and poke him in the belly like some fourteenth-century Pillsbury Doughboy.

From the chapter The End of Iconography in The Age of Utopia.

Christian schools as an effective alternatives to secular schools

Christian schools will be effective alternatives to secular schools only to the extent that students at those schools are formed in a sacramental imagination that sees the cosmos as “charged with the grandeur of God.” Too often, Christian educators formed by the secular academy have unwittingly adopted modes of teaching and attention that impart a reductive, materialist understanding of reality.

Their materialist assumptions are often disguised by a veneer of prayer that is equal parts domesticated, distant, and safe. It’s easy to see why. While a handful of faithful families might reject a school that adopts the lens of the world, many more—hungry for their children to fit into mainstream American culture—will line up, especially if the school has a proven track record of finding places for their graduates at elite colleges and universities, which are still seen by far too many parents as the only path to a good life.

As families begin to see the dangers that secular and secular-adjacent institutions of higher education pose to their children over the next decade, and as alternative career paths in the trades become increasingly commonplace, it’s essential for educators at Christian schools to begin discerning a new path forward. Is there a different way to educate young men and women that avoids the college prep vortex?

Randy Aust, Sacramental Ontology in a Christian School

What follows this quote are four suggested steps to inculcate a sacramental ontology.

As a Board Member of two different Christian schools in my lifetime, these opening paragraphs really ring true — especially the tacit point that it’s hard to maintain a school with just “a handful of faithful families” who set their sites higher than hunger for their children to fit into mainstream American culture with a little Baby Jesus thrown in for good measure.

Not my circus, not my monkeys inquisitors

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

Lazarus

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

Rubes

The Presbyterian David Rice described these impulses at work among people in Kentucky: “They were then prepared to imbibe every new notion, advanced by a popular warm preacher, which he said was agreeable to Scripture. They were like a parcel of boys suddenly tumbled out of a boat, who had been unaccustomed to swim, and knew not the way to shore. Some fixed upon one error, and some upon another.”

Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Religion

Something in common

As a historical and empirical reality between the early Reformation and the present, “Protestantism” is an umbrella designation of groups, churches, movements, and individuals whose only common feature is a rejection of the authority of the Roman Catholic Church.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

How we got critical theory

Convinced that capitalism must be abolished before the promises of humanism could be realized, they considered liberal democracy a functional dystopia. Contrary to the promises of Marx, the proletariat did not choose to overthrow the bourgeoisie when given the opportunity. In fact, it came to embrace the values of the oppressors. This was astonishing to Marxist intellectuals. The Frankfurt School developed an entirely new method of understanding the calamity, something they called “critical theory.”

John Strickland, The Age of Nihilism

Authentic embrace of the struggle

One of the first things most young men do who authentically embrace the struggle is get rid of their video games. The same with drugs. If the young man is to succeed, the marijuana has got to go as well.

From the chapter An Approach to Healing in Frederica Mathewes-Green & Rod Dreher, Healing Humanity

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

Sunday, 8/25/24

Reminder

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

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

Any questions?

And so, sola scriptura got glossed

[I]n American religion, both scholars and rank-and-file evangelicals contend, sola scriptura has morphed from theological principle to exegetical method. Particularly in the nineteenth century, evangelical Protestants rejected other religious authorities and relied instead on a plain reading of scripture. After clearing away the rubble of history and abandoning the old wineskins of tradition, one was left with everything needed to do theology: common sense and the Bible. The effects of this sort of biblicism on the shape of American religion—and, indeed, American history writ large—are difficult to overstate. Or so the standard story goes. Claims of relying on “the Bible alone” become harder to sustain when biblicists find themselves disagreeing on the meaning of Christian scripture. … As it turns out, evangelical Protestants do not avoid tradition as much as the ideal of biblicism makes it seem. … Wylie was a “Covenanter,” who believed governments that did not support Reformed religion necessarily rejected divine authority. In 1800, Wylie became the first Covenanter ordained in the United States. Findley, in contrast, came from a long line of “Old Dissenting” Presbyterians, who generally opposed the state establishment of churches.

Paul J. Gutacker, The Old Faith in a New Nation (emphasis added). It bears repeating that I came upon this book via a podcast recommendation by a Southern Baptist luminary. Gutacker is no hack, but I soon will be reading Mark Noll’s, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln to enrich my understanding.

The right way to read the Bible

I am very, very enthusiastic about How (and How Not) to Read the Bible, a podcast (transcript available) I’d been waiting for, unawares. I’ve long (but not always; I remember my unwarranted elation at cracking, I thought, some theological nuts) had a vague feeling that the kinds of Bible study I knew sought information about God when what we need is God.

I’m elated again. I was pointed in the right direction, but uncertain that it was right, or why it was right. This podcast bodes to be a key epiphany in my life (or maybe an apocalypse).

The podcast and transcript are long, and the podcasters are far too digressive for my tastes. I edited out their digressions as I read the transcript.

I’m too new to this insight to write about the ramifications, but I think I see in the Fathers of the Church, sermonizing on a pericope of scripture, an avoidance of “this is the point the Apostle was making” or anything equivalent to that. Stay tuned.

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