Category: Faith & Ideology

Another notebook dump

Wisdom Generally

Willie Mays

The Say Hey Kid was that rarity who played a boy’s game with a boy’s joy and a man’s discipline and shrewdness.

National Review, The Week. That’s got to be the best “in a nutshell” on Mays. One consolation of being 75 most of this year is the memory of Willie Mays playing live, not just on highlight reels. You kids have no idea ….

Even the secularists have rituals

The “acme” of religious secularism in the West—Masonry—is made up almost entirely of highly elaborated ceremonies saturated with “symbolism.”

Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World

Apple acquiesces in reality

I became an “Apple guy” at home before retirement, though I still had to use Windows at work. Now our house is all Apple (or nearly so). (I confess to brief side-eyed looks at Linux, but it’s never stuck; I’ve just got my Apple gear set up to do what I want, quickly, so why change?)

Still, VisionPro was a bridge or two too far — way too much money for a novelty. Now:

Apple has told at least one supplier that it has suspended work on its next high-end Vision headset, an employee at a manufacturer that makes key components for the Vision Pro said. The pullback comes as analysts and supply chain partners have flagged slowing sales of the $3,500 device. The company is still working on releasing a more affordable Vision product with fewer features before the end of 2025. (Source: theinformation.com)

Via John Ellis

Freud

In his fanciful narrative, religion and the civilization that springs from it are reducible to a primordial event of psychosexual violence. … For Freud, at the dawn of human civilization a group of brothers, desiring sexual gratification with their mother, spontaneously rise up against their father and commit parricide. They then devour his body in a ritual act, joining incest to cannibalism. Because of their guilt, however, they internalize their absent father’s authority, which takes the place of a collective superego. From that moment on, human civilization has worked to suppress the libidinal will to power in men by repressing desire and transferring it to more “sublimated” activities. All religions—but especially Christianity with its doctrine of God the Father—are compensations for this primordial act of parricide. They can all be traced back to this scientifically formulated (and completely theoretical) act of original sin.

John Strickland, The Age of Nihilism

Essentially, Professor Crews came to regard Freud as a charlatan. In a debate with the psychoanalyst and author Susie Orbach in 2017, published in The Guardian, he maintained that Freud had “contradicted, discomfited and harangued his patients in the hope of breaking their ‘resistance’ to ideas of his own — ideas that he presumptuously declared to be lurking within the patients’ own unconscious minds.” In the process, he said, Freud created a myth about himself and his findings that failed to live up to empirical scrutiny.

His polemical broadsides vaulted him to the forefront of a group of revisionist skeptics loosely known as the Freud bashers.

“Freud: The Making of an Illusion” was his most ambitious attempt to debunk the myth of Freud as a pioneering genius, drawing on decades of research in scrutinizing Freud’s early career. Writing in The New York Times Book Review in 2017, George Prochnik found the book to be provocative if exhaustingly relentless: “Here we have Freud the liar, cheat, incestuous child molester, woman hater, money-worshiper, chronic plagiarizer and all-around nasty nut job. This Freud doesn’t really develop, he just builds a rap sheet.”

Obituary for Frederick Crews: “A literary critic, essayist and author, he was a leading voice among revisionist skeptics who saw Freud as a charlatan and psychoanalysis as a pseudoscience.”

It does not matter that the strictly scientific status of Freud’s theories is now methodologically and materially discredited. The central notion—that human beings are at core sexual and that that shapes our thinking and our behavior in profound, often unconscious, ways—is now a basic part of the modern social imaginary.

Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self

Best and brightest besliming themselves

Cultural deregulation

Recent dustups over the supposedly racist implications of advocating marriage, thrift, and a good work ethic reveal the logic of cultural deregulation. The goal is to strip society of norms, leaving unsheltered those who cannot afford to live in well-appointed enclaves that covertly sustain modified bourgeois norms for the rich and their children. In the open culture, the lives of ordinary people become more disordered and less functional.

R. R. Reno, Return of the Strong Gods

Scientific consensus

[I]t has become increasingly obvious that science functions as much as an ideology as it does as a method of inquiry. The “scientific consensus” is now frequently invoked to settle not just scientific questions, but public-policy ones as well. Call this scientism. One of its most striking features is just how vacuous it is. Contemporary scientism doesn’t necessarily entail anything beyond uncritical deference to experts. This became clear enough over the course of the Covid pandemic. Within a month in early 2020, all right-thinking people went from ridiculing the idea that masks could stop the spread of a respiratory virus to believing it was of paramount importance to wear a mask at all times. This reversal wasn’t due to people weighing new evidence, but the empty assurance of the “scientific consensus.”

…

[U]nlike the creationists Wright might have been confronting a generation ago, proponents of “gender-affirming care” don’t appeal to sources of authority other than science. On the contrary, they point to the fact that major US medical institutions have endorsed these practices. The “scientific consensus,” then, has proved capable of giving public legitimacy to even the most outré belief systems.

…

[I]t’s clear by now that those who purport to speak in the name of science aren’t as neutral and objective as I once assumed. Often, science’s would-be spokesmen are bent on imposing their own dogmas. In hindsight, I should have been more concerned about scientism becoming an official state ideology. Science has many impressive discoveries to its credit, but we shouldn’t let it think and make political decisions on our behalf. Nor ought we to uncritically adopt the metaphysical views of the majority of scientists as our own. The question of God’s existence, for instance, remains as open today as at any other time in human history.

David Moulton, Two Cheers for ‘Intelligent Design’

At war with the human race

So it is that the gendered nature of the body is under attack, from the Left and Right, as is the connection between sex and babies. Left and Right alike resent the limitations of the human body. There’s just one small problem: sex does make babies and men and women are different. An ideology that cannot make room for the basic facts of human reproduction and sex differences is an ideology that will end up at war with the human body, with nature itself, and ultimately with the entire human race. In that war, it will go looking for allies where it can find them. It finds its most powerful, its indispensable, ally in the State.

Jennifer Roback Morse, The Sexual State.

By quoting, I’m not endorsing this book. I read it in preparation for a Symposium where the author was to be one of three keynote speakers. Based partly on the book, which did make a few points in a temperate register, I decided not to register for the symposium.

Self-delegitimation

As Harvard Law school professor Adrian Vermeule has said, liberal institutions “will have to become systematically undemocratic in order to remain liberal and, even where they do so, that will be but a stopgap measure in light of their systematic self-delegitimation.”

Rod Dreher in the European Conservative

Ruso-Ukrainian war

So: Why did Russia invade Ukraine?

WordPress unfortunately has been “improving” things again, so I cannot figure out how to embed a YouTube video, but I recommend the video at this link.

Theory 1: Putin is a revanchist, with many screws loose, who wants to rebuild the USSR in toto.
Theory 2: Putin would not tolerate NATO being extended to its very border with Ukraine (which the US promised it would not allow), kinda like our Monroe Doctrine.

Expats

“I hate Russia, for forcing me to leave her.”

It was an apt summary of what waves of émigrés from Russia and the Soviet Union since the early 20th century have felt: a sorrowful sense of loss for a motherland — what Russians call “toska po rodine” — coupled with resentment at the autocratic powers that forced them out. My grandparents were among the “White” Russians who fled the Revolution and moved to Paris in the 1920s. A second wave of emigrants left in World War II. The third, Soviet Jews, started leaving in the 1970s. Vladimir Putin has now created another wave of people fleeing Russia, and many of them may still believe, as my forebears did, that they will one day return to the homeland.

Most probably will not.

…

That is the tragic irony of Mr. Putin’s war. His attempt to “restore Russian greatness” through violence and hatred has tainted Russia’s real greatness for years to come ….

Serge Schmemann

Front lines of the LGBTTTIQA+, etc. revolution

Another bridge too far

One thing I think we can rule out right away is that the drop in support for same-sex marriage and acceptance of homosexuality is a function of religion. I’m aware of no evidence that the United States is undergoing a religious Great Awakening, at least when it comes institutional forms of worship handed down from the past. As sociologist Samuel Perry recently put it in a useful summary for Time magazine:

According to data from Gallup, Pew, and PRRI, the percentage of Americans who identify with any religion is in steady decline, as are those who believe in God, the devil, Heaven, Hell, or angels; who say religion is a very important part of their life; maintain membership in a church or synagogue; or attend church regularly.

Why, then, might Republicans have begun turning against same-sex marriage and acceptance of homosexuality in the past two years?

This is just speculation, but I’d wager it has something to do with the way left-wing activists have taken up the cause of transgender rights as the next front in the now-decades-long cultural revolution. To be clear: I don’t think such a backlash, if there’s been one, has arisen over calls to protect the civil rights of the tiny number of transgender people in the country. Rather, the backlash would come from opposition to the ideology of transgenderism promulgated by the most militant activists on the left—and the extraordinary rapidity with which that ideology’s assumptions and assertions have come to be treated as conventional wisdom among many of those who run government bureaucracies, public and private schools and universities, medical institutions, and the business sector.

…

If I’m right that declining support for same-sex marriage and homosexual acceptance among Republicans derives (at least in part) from a backlash against transgender activism, that would likely mean that more conservative-minded Americans have concluded the gay-rights movement was a Trojan Horse for something far more extreme and destabilizing. It’s not inevitable that they would conclude this, since as Andrew Sullivan and other champions of gay rights have persuasively argued, the interests of homosexuals stand in considerable tension with those asserted by the most radical transgender activists. But the Activist and Donor Complex on the left has made it natural for the rest of the country to make the leap from one to the other by bundling the two movements together in an ever-expanding, alphabet-soup abbreviation: LGBTTTIQA+, etc.

Damon Linker

March of Dimes Syndrome

Why, last year, did the Human Rights Campaign declare a “national state of emergency” for LGBT people? Why was the election of the first black American president followed by the Black Lives Matter movement? Why have reports of “hate groups” risen during the same decades that racial prejudice has been plummeting? Why, during a long and steep decline in the incidence of sexual violence in America, did academics, federal officials, and the #MeToo movement discover a new “epidemic of sexual assault”?

These supposed crises are all examples of the March of Dimes syndrome, named after the organization founded in the 1930s to combat polio. The March helped fund the vaccines that eventually ended the polio epidemics—but not the organization, which, after polio’s eradication, changed its mission to preventing birth defects. Its leaders kept their group going by finding a new cause, just as antiwar activists did after achieving their goal of ending the Vietnam War. The Three Mile Island accident offered new fund-raising opportunities and a new platform for veterans of the antiwar movement such as Jane Fonda and her husband Tom Hayden, who both addressed the crowd at that first antinuke rally.

For career activists, success is a threat. They can never declare mission accomplished.

…

So activists have moved the goalposts once again. It is no longer enough for conservative Christians to tolerate same-sex marriage—now they must be legally required to bake cakes and design web pages for the weddings. It is no longer enough to protect gay students from harassment—now these students must have access in elementary school libraries to how-to manuals for anal sex. Public schools must encourage prepubescent students to explore the many possible gender identities without their parents’ knowledge. Biological males self-identifying as females must be allowed to compete against females in sports. These new causes have been wildly unpopular, arousing opposition from homosexuals as well as heterosexuals, and have led to a decline in public support for the gay rights movement. But however much the backlash has hurt the original cause, the controversies keep activists in business.

…

As the civil rights movement searched for new causes, no group shifted as adroitly as the Southern Poverty Law Center. The group launched in the 1970s to offer legal representation to individual victims of discrimination but then switched to filing lawsuits against chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. In 1986, the SPLC’s entire legal team resigned in protest—they’d signed up to help poor people, not sue an organization whose national membership barely eclipsed 10,000. But the Klan made an ideal villain for fund-raising appeals to northern liberals, and the SPLC prospered from the publicity about lawsuits that bankrupted chapters of the Klan.

By the 1990s, virtually nothing was left of the Klan to sue, so the SPLC pivoted again. It changed the name of its “Klanwatch” project to “Hatewatch,” and began issuing reports listing a growing number of “hate groups” and “extremists” across America. Scholars, journalists, and nonprofits have repeatedly denounced SPLC’s blacklists, noting that its tallies include many “hate groups” that don’t exist, or are harmless (such as a Confederate memorabilia shop that made the list), or are mainstream conservative and Christian organizations that simply oppose progressive policies. The SPLC’s lists of dangerous “extremists” have included respected conservatives such as Charles Murray, Rand Paul, and Ben Carson … The SPLC’s appeals to combat a “rising tide of hate” have brought in so much donor money that its endowment has soared above $600 million.

John Tierney, The March of Dimes Syndrome

Politics

Tribal conformity

I personally know progressives who are absolutely furious that GOP figures don’t speak out against Trump, but those same individuals are petrified of the intolerant elements of their own political tribe. They wouldn’t dream of speaking against the most-woke elements of the radical left. After all, their jobs are at stake. Their reputations hang in the balance. Remember the now-famous Vox essay, “I’m a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me”? I’ve heard that sentiment many times.

David French, Let’s Talk About Fear

The Donilon strategy: All About ‘Dat Coup

If the sudden prospect of electing the first president who is a convicted felon hasn’t put Americans off Trump, why would Joe Biden, Mike Donilon, or anyone else think that reminding them of his coup plot and the insurrection it led to will do so?

On the other hand, how can one run against Donald Trump and not make his authoritarian ambitions the centerpiece of the campaign? He’s not shy about expressing those ambitions; should he win in November, the next four years will in fact be defined by his attempts to subvert the constitutional order. The right’s hostility to Western liberalism is the elephant in the room of this election. How can the president resist making a spectacle of it?

I think his and Donilon’s strategy of making the race about democracy is simultaneously weak and quite possibly the strongest one available to them.

…

There’s another case for the Donilon strategy. Namely, it’s worked before. And I don’t just mean in 2020.

Five days before the 2022 midterms Biden delivered a speech warning Americans that, with so many Trump-backed post-liberal populist Republicans running for major offices, “democracy is on the ballot.” He called on voters to ask themselves this question when considering a candidate: “Will that person accept the legitimate will of the American people and the people voting in his district or her district? Will that person accept the outcome of the election, win or lose?”

Some pundits called the address “head-scratching” in light of polling that showed the economy, not democracy, dominating when voters were asked what the most important issue in the election was. Yet five days later Republicans ended up underperforming badly in a midterm in which the out-party typically cleans up. One Trump-endorsed MAGA acolyte after another fell short in key races, holding the GOP to modest gains in the House and helping Democrats gain a seat in the Senate.

…

For me, the great virtue of the Donilon strategy is that it’ll leave America with no excuses if Trump wins. An election framed around the economy or immigration that ends in Republican victory will let denialists about the country’s decline insist that things would have been different if only Biden had taken a different approach. “He should have emphasized the coup attempt and January 6,” they’ll say. “Surely Americans wouldn’t have reelected Trump if the election had been about that.”

I’m not sure of that at all, personally. I’d like to test the proposition. And if Trump is returned to power, I’d find comfort in knowing that we maximized our collective shame by approaching the race as a referendum on the constitutional order—and chose the other option. If we do this, let’s be clear-eyed about it. No excuses. Trump 2024: Maximum Shame.

Nick Catoggio

The Machiavelli IQ test

The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.

Niccolo Machiavelli

After Trump’s guilty verdicts, the popular sports talk radio host Colin Cowherd, who’s not a usual Trump critic, treated his listeners to an inventory of the criminals around Trump: “His campaign chairman was a felon. So is his deputy campaign manager, his personal lawyer, his chief strategist, his national security adviser, his trade adviser, his foreign policy adviser, his campaign fixer and his company C.F.O. They’re all felons. Judged by the company you keep. It’s a cabal of convicts.”

Frank Bruni

We knew damn well he was a snake before we took him in.

Populism anticipated

For the success of our restoration it cannot be too often said that society and mass are contradictory terms and that those who seek to do things in the name of mass are the destroyers in our midst. If society is something which can be understood, it must have structure; if it has structure, it must have hierarchy; against this metaphysical truth the declamations of the Jacobins break in vain.

Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences.

Past their “Sell By” Dates

Also Presented Without Comment

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, asked by Anderson Cooper whether she has “confidence” in the Supreme Court: 

“No, I think they’ve gone rogue. It’s most unfortunate.”

Also Also Presented Without Comment

New York Post: Trump Camp Claims He Was ‘Tortured’ in Fulton County Jail—as It Peddles Coffee Cups With His Mugshot

Australia can have him

Julian Assange on his leaking of the names of hundreds of Afghan civilian informants into the hands of the Taliban: “Well, they’re informants. So, if they get killed, they’ve got it coming to them. They deserve it.”

Jim Ellis, News Items

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.

Pentecost …

(at least in the Eastern Church)

For the very first time, I vetted this post with AI. I didn’t change so much as a jot or a tittle.

Evangelicals

Overlooking the obvious

In the past year I have visited the Middle East, India, Africa, Latin America, and Europe as the guest of churches and ministries. In each place, evangelicals exude life and energy. While staid churches change slowly, evangelicals tend to be light on their feet, adapting quickly to cultural trends.

The Jesus movement, the house-church movement, seeker-friendly churches, emergent churches—evangelicals have spawned all of these. In their wake, worship bands have replaced organs and choirs, PowerPoint slides and movie clips now enliven sermons, and espresso bars keep congregants awake. If a technique doesn’t work, find one that does.

Although I admire the innovation, I would caution that mimicking cultural trends has a downside …

Perhaps we should present an alternative to the prevailing culture rather than simply adopt it. What would a church look like that created space for quietness, that bucked the celebrity trend and unplugged from surrounding media, that actively resisted consumerist culture? What would worship look like if it were directed more toward God than toward our entertainment preferences?

…

While writing a book about prayer, I learned more from Catholics than from any other group. They have, after all, devoted entire orders to the practice. I learn mystery and reverence from the Eastern Orthodox. In music, in worship, in theology, they teach me of the mysterium tremendum involved when we puny human beings approach the God of the universe.

As I survey evangelicalism I see much good, but also much room for improvement. Our history includes disunity—how many different denominations do this magazine’s readers represent?—and a past that includes lapses in ethics and judgment.

Phil Yancey’s 2009 farewell column for Christianity Today (illustration added). I don’t understand why the farewell wasn’t because he was going somewhere more conducive to prayer or reverence. Does it not occur to him that one decision for Christ plus good works does not a complete Christian make, that emotion is not the same as the Holy Spirit?

Biblicist Guruism

Reflecting on a story about exvangelicals:

So how do you help address the problem that Miles is describing in his review, a culture of biblicist guruism in which the churches do not even look recognizably Protestant in any real way? How do you address the massive gaps and holes in a person’s Christian discipleship that result from sustained exposure to such churches?

…

If the Gospel was not clear or was not preached, then what you had was more a religious assembly than a church. If the sacramental life of the church was non-existent, you had a religious assembly, not a church. And if there was no aid in Christian discipline… well, you know the drill.

When I came to Grace Chapel in 2007, a small PCA church that was at the time located in central Lincoln, I didn’t know that I’d not really been part of a church before, at least as the church was traditionally understood. What I found at Grace was something I hadn’t even known to look for because I didn’t know it existed. I found something obviously and unapologetically Christian—the Gospel was clear in every sermon, and clear in a way I’d never heard it from a pulpit before, the Eucharist was celebrated regularly, and the pastor at the church actually seemed to know the people in his church and to think it was his job to care for them and aid them in their discipleship. I’d never seen anything like it before.

And the services themselves helped to reenforce the basics of Christian belief and practice: We prayed the Lord’s Prayer corporately. We confessed our sins corporately. We sang old hymns. Every week we received a benediction. The grammar and vocabulary of Christianity pervaded the liturgy; it wasn’t just a guy in a pulpit pontificating, loudly proclaiming his own loosely assorted thoughts about life and expecting you to take him seriously because he attempted to root them in scripture.

Jake Meador (italics added).

The non-church “church” Jake came from may have been an example of what he calls “biblicist guruism.”

Second Great Awakening

While Methodists, Disciples, and Mormons disagreed radically on what constituted belief in the gospel, they all shared an intense hostility to the passive quality of Calvinist religious experience, and they all made salvation imminently accessible and immediately available.

Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity

I have alluded to this antipathy toward Calvinism previously, having first encountered it in Hatch’s book (I’m pretty sure). When I moved from frank Evangelicalism to Calvinism, it felt as if I was moving to a much different worldview, and I guess my intuitions were sound.

Protestants

… [Luther] had been wrestling with an unsettling conundrum: the failure of the Spirit to illumine all those inspired by his teachings as he himself had been illumined.

Tom Holland, Dominion

It seems fair to distinguish Protestants from Evangelicals, contrary to lifelong habit. I’m not positive that Evangelicals circa 2024 AD are no longer Protestant, but along with Jake Meador, I’m entertaining that possibility quite a lot lately. If they’ve left Protestantism, it strikes me as a continuing outworking of Luther’s conundrum.

Catholics

According to Catholic doctrine, sin offends God, disrupts the moral order, and deprives God of His glory and majesty. Punishment for the sin restores order and the glory of God.

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

When I first read that, it made me a bit nauseous. The Orthodox mind is quite different from that.

Orthodoxen

Start with the Psalms

It came to me a few days ago, during morning devotions, that it would be very easy for a 21st century convert to Orthodox Christianity, from Protestantism or Evangelicalism, to overlook one very important and durable tradition of the church.

Perhaps because the Anglophone church has gained so many converts, and because those converts were accustomed to regular preaching from a wide range of scripture, we have available to us, notably on Ancient Faith “Radio,” an array of Orthodox versions of Bible studies. One of them even bears the title “The Whole Counsel of God,” and has progressed through all books of the Old and New Testaments and started over again.

In my mind, those podcasts risk obscuring from the view of converts that the basic scripture for Orthodox Christians is the Psalter — the book of Psalms. As Father Jonathan Tobias emphasized,

Chant the Psalms every morning and every evening. Two kathismata in the morning, one in the evening as appointed. This will form your mind into prayer and life.

There’s nothing wrong with going beyond that, and I should do more of general Bible study than I do, but start with the Psalms. Always start with the Psalms.

(Weird historic fact: Back in the day, Evangelicals would do some Evangelistic spadework by distributing inexpensive copies of the Gospel According to John — not the whole New Testament, but just that one Gospel account. In contrast, the Orthodox Church didn’t expose converts to the Gospel According to John, the most profoundly theological of the four Gospels, until after significant preliminary catechesis and baptism. See text at fns. 2 & 3.)

Thanks but No Thanks

Without entering into particulars, we say that as long as the Church of the Saviour shall stand upon earth, we cannot admit that there is in her bosom a Bishop Supreme other than our Lord Himself; or that there exists an infallible Patriarch, who can speak, ex cathedra, superior to Ecumenical Councils – to which Councils alone belongs infallibility, because they have always conformed to the Sacred Scriptures and apostolical tradition. Nor can we admit that the Apostles were unequal, inasmuch as they were all illuminated by the Holy Ghost up to the same measure; or that to this or that Patriarch a precedence has been given, not by any synodal or human resolution, but by right Divine, as you assert.

Ecumenical Patriarch Gregory VI, firmly refusing to attend Vatican I, which was poised to declare papal infallibility at the behest of Pope Pius IX. Via Matthew Namee. The Orthodox Patriarch of Alexandria was no less firm, but pointed out (though the Pope surely knew it) what the Pope needed to do:

But not to prolong this discussion let me repeat once, and for all, that as this new attempt on the part of his Holiness the Pope has miscarried, it is necessary, if he sincerely desires the unity of the Universal Church that he should write to the patriarchs individually, and acting in concert, endeavor to come to an understanding with them respecting the course to be adopted – renouncing every dogma on which opinions may clash in the church. By so doing his efforts might perchance be crowned with some degree of success.

Involuntary sin

According to Scripture, the cause of all sin that is involuntary lies in what is voluntary.

Dee Pennock, God’s Path to Sanity

… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)

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

Juneteenth

I have nothing to say about Juneteenth except that emancipation was a legitimately huge landmark in our nation’s history and worthy of annual commemoration.

Public affairs

Indiana’s GOP Lieutenant Governor nominee

Indiana over last weekend nominated as its Lieutenant Governor candidate, Micah Beckwith, a pastor of some sort who:

  • Thinks that the “progressive left has taken over the Republican Party in Indiana,” and that some Republicans today are “champions of Communism.”
  • Said on a Christian(ish) podcast “We are in a season of war right now … People need to wake up, or else this mental and heart battle that we find ourselves in culturally, it will lead to bullets and bombs. It’s just a matter of time.”
  • Said God had told him, on January 7, 2021: “Micah, I sent those riots to Washington. What you saw yesterday was my hand at work.” (This is what every story on him seems to pick up.)

Those quotes are from Michelle Goldberg at the New York Times. Goldberg also says, sans quote, that he’s a “self-described Christian Nationalist.”

Beckwith was forced onto the ticket against the wishes of the Gubernatorial nominee, retiring U.S. Senator Mike Braun.

Yeah, I guess it’s national news.

I didn’t support Braun for Governor. I was unenthusiastic about him when he ran for Senate in a GOP primary whose theme was “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the Trumpiest of them all?” (but I preferred him to Todd Rokita, now our Attorney General and a truly loathsome person). I’m not certain I’ll vote for him in the General Election.

My decision will hinge to some degree on how effective he is at keeping a reassuring distance from Beckwith without, of course, repudiating him so firmly as to hand the election to Democrats. So far, his pointed message “I’m in charge” seems about right.

I’ve noted repeatedly that I repudiated any loyalty to the Republican Party on Inauguration Day 2005. But I still have a reflex to vote Republican over Democrat, and to mourn what already has become of the Republican party, and what one likely future holds.

On Christian Nationalism

Having noted Micah Beckwith’s purported Christian Nationalism, I’m reminded that I may not have staked out my own position openly.

First, I define it narrowly. There have been ridiculous accusations of Christian Nationalism based on undisclosed or untenable definitions. Real Christian Nationalists are still pretty rare, I think (but what do I, a contrarian, know?).

I’m not unaware that American pluralism is an experiment. I’m not sure whether it will succeed or fail. I’m familiar with and friendly toward the phrase “worst form of government except for all the others.” I’m not ready to abandon it.

At the risk of ad hominem, I don’t trust the “Christians” who expressly advocate for Christian Nationalism. One of my older blogs, on what we then called “culture wars,” remains relevant, but I’ll paraphrase excerpts rather than do direct quotes.

My distrust of Christian Nationalists stems fairly directly from my disagreements with their form of our putatively shared faith — disagreements that lead me to chronic use of scare-quotes around the word Christian or the use of “Christianish.”

The pious Protestants among them tend functionally believe that God’s only presence in the world is His rules, so they “honor” Him by keeping his rules. But the age of Trump has brought many to profess that they’re Evangelicals even if, in the extreme case, they’re Muslims or even atheists, because of something they like about the politics now associated with that label.

The most coherent, maybe the only, Protestant theorists of Christian Nationalism are theonomists, or more specifically Reconstructionists. If these Calvinist intellectuals had their way, there would be 18 Old Testament Capital Crimes in our law books – including sassing parents. They’d shut down my Church and desecrate its icons. They might, for all I know, execute me for idolatry for the icons in my home prayer corner.

Ummmm, no thanks.

The Catholic theorists of Christian Nationalism (Integralism, they call it) are much better — not okay, but less bad. But I don’t think their side would get the levers of power anyway.

There is no remotely viable Orthodox version of Christian Nationalism, Byzantium being long-gone. And we’d lack the numbers to staff government if there were.

So I think “Christian Nationalism” in America would be, in ascending order of likelihood:

  1. Catholic Integralism
  2. Calvinistic Reconstructionism
  3. A blasphemous mish-mash of right wingnuttery in the name of God. (Like Indiana’s GOP Lietenant Governor nominee or the yard sign “Make Faith Great Again: Trump 2020.”)

I reject them all. I think all of them would be hostile to Orthodox Christianity. I prefer to continue our flawed experiment with pluralism. But I suspect I’ll live to see one of them.

We Orthodox have survived similar or worse circumstances before.

America’s enemies

American leaders have a great need to identify an enemy or group of enemies that the U.S. can define itself against in order to justify the dominant position that they want the U.S. to have. It doesn’t occur to these leaders that the pursuit of dominance itself is what creates so many enemies or that the U.S. would be far more secure by renouncing the pursuit.

…

Losing the Soviets as an enemy created a hole in U.S. foreign policy that Washington desperately tried to fill with anything our leaders could find, but the substitute villains (Saddam Hussein, Milosevic, etc.) were so weak by comparison that the threats had to be massively inflated.

Daniel Larison (who had fallen off my radar)

We seem hellbent on creating intractible enemies in at least three corners of the world. Depending on their political stripe, American politicians speak as if Russia, China, and/or Iran pose existential threats to us. Yes, we do have substantive differences with all, but I can make a case for all three that they simply wish to live their lives in their own ways in their part of the world without our interference. Look at the flash points with each: Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan. All are American dependencies; all are projections of our hegemony into the very heart of their respective spheres. Regardless of your sentiments, the fate of none of those areas have any existential meaning to the U.S.; and yes, I am including Israel in that. They do, however, have existential meaning to our supposed adversaries.

Terry Cowan

J.D. Vance

I commented on June 13 about Ross Douthat’s interview with J.D. Vance.

There doubtless have been many commentators weighing in on the interview, but I’ve read only one so far: Andrew Sullivan. He made some excellent observations about places where Vance was tap-dancing around the unvarnished truth (to stay in Trump’s good graces?) or omitting crucial facts that eviscerate his argument.

Of the changes in voting rules to deal with Covid?:

The new pandemic rules, moreover, were endorsed by the Congress, which passed $400 million in the CARES Act for the election’s unique challenges, which Trump himself signed into law. If the rules were rigged, Trump helped rig them!

…

Vance’s case is completely undermined by Trump himself. Trump, after all, did not say after the election that the Covid rules were why he’d lost. He said he’d lost because votes were stolen, stuffed, and hidden, and the voting machines had been rigged. He’s saying the same things today. And the reason for all of it was not some genuine concern about easier mail-in and absentee voting (he endorsed absentee voting, after all), but Trump’s basic, characterological inability to function in a system that doesn’t guarantee him victory every single time.

That is not the system’s fault. It’s the fault of the party that nominated a malignant, delusional loon.

Putin

This week in Budapest, I met with an American academic active in the struggle for international religious freedom. We spoke about the Russia-Ukraine war, and established that we both believe Russia ought not to have invaded its neighbor. I added that as an Orthodox Christian, it grieves me how Putin has instrumentalized the Church to advance his war aims.

Then the American, a conservative Christian, posed a provocative question, that went something like this: For all his thuggishness, do you think that Vladimir Putin is on the right side of broad civilizational trends? My interlocutor brought up Putin’s harsh criticism of Western secularism and its emptiness, contrasting it to a Russia built on traditional values, including religion. Yes, Russia is in deep social and demographic trouble, and yes, Putin might be a colossal hypocrite, but, said the American, on the deep civilizational questions, isn’t Putin, you know … right?

I knew the answer, but as a man of the West, was too depressed by the question to admit it ….

Rod Dreher in the European Conservative

Degrowth

The case for degrowth is not about martyred self-denial or constraining human potential; it is about reorienting socioeconomies to support collaborative and creative construction of lives that are pleasurable, healthy, satisfying, and sustainable for more people and more places. End goals of degrowth – dignified work, less selfish competition, more equitable relationships, identities not ranked by individual achievement, solidary communities, humane rhythms of life, respect for natural environments – are also the means through which people exercise and embody, day by day, the lifestyles, institutions, and politics of degrowth worlds to come.

The Cauldron of Degrowth – Front Porch Republic

Euro-skepticism

The European Union began as a trading bloc, but by the early 1990s, it had evolved into a moral project fueled by elite distaste for (even revulsion against) the nationalistic sentiments these elites had become convinced were the source of all the crimes of the European past, including imperialism, racism, fascism, and genocide. What Europe needed was an inoculation against these sentiments, and the EU would be the vaccine, giving the continent a collective goal of striving to overcome particularistic attachments and the cruelty, suffering, and oppression they supposedly implant and encourage. Nationalistic sentiments would be sublimated into the transnational idea of the EU, with the EU itself eventually expanding without limit as the leading edge of a world without borders or walls impeding trade, the free movement of people, products, capital, and labor.

Damon Linker

I am enthusiastically European; no informed person could seriously wish to return to the embattled, mutually antagonistic circle of suspicious and introverted nations that was the European continent in the quite recent past. But it is one thing to think an outcome desirable, quite another to suppose it is possible. It is my contention that a truly united Europe is sufficiently unlikely for it to be unwise and self-defeating to insist upon it. I am thus, I suppose, a Euro-pessimist.

Tony Judt

Matters of Opinion

The continuing siege of Samuel Alito

I’m a journalist. We’re journalists. There are certain things we do. When we interview somebody, we make it clear that I work for the New York Times, the “NewsHour,” the Washington Post. Like, we make it clear who we are. We don’t lie. We don’t misrepresent ourselves. We don’t hide a tape recorder somewhere, and we don’t lead people on with a bunch of ideological rants. And this person did all that. It’s a complete breach of any—the basic form of journalistic ethics. And I was, frankly, stunned that all of us in our business just reported on it, just like straight up. And to me, this information is so doctored by her attitudes, the way she’s leading on Alito and his wife. It’s just—it’s unfair to them, frankly, to treat this as some major news story. We should be treating it as somebody, a prankster. And there’s a right-wing version of this called Project Veritas, where they lie too—as some prankster who’s creating distorted information.

David Brooks, on the Journalist who plied Justice Alito with a red-meat rant and got only a very anodyne response.

I found myself hoping that she will forever be known as the journalist who engaged in sleaze and then made it worse by publishing the nothingburger results. And then I remembered an incident in my past, when I may have been older than she is now, when I broke the rules to get the true story — not as a journalist, but as a lawyer. I, too, came up dry — and exposed for my wrongdoing.

I’m glad that did not follow me the rest of my life. I hope she has learned her lesson as I learned mine.

Worst Matter of Opinion podcast ever?

With Ross Douthat on vacation, Michelle Cottle, Carlos Lozada and Lydia Polgreen invited their hardcore colleague Jesse Wegman to join them.

Synopsis: Some justices blame the press for distrust of the U.S. Supreme Court. But that’s not it. It’s really Justice Alito’s [first exaggeration about Justice Alito] and [generalization built on exaggeration] and Clarence Thomas [Oh, hell, let’s just lump him with Alito] and dismissing Alito’s version of flag-gate and laughing out loud at Justice Alito saying [garbled version of he has a duty to deliberate if he’s not required to recuse, which is true] and Mitch McConnell, who played unprecedented political hardball to defeat Merrick Garland (by delay) and confirm Justice Barrett (by contrasting haste), so that Trump’s two appointees have cooties-by-association.

I will give Carlos Lozada credit for pushing back. The bias, dishonesty, and inexcusable ignorance of the other three make me want to cancel my Times subscription.

Intuition

“I have the feeling that I understand it.” But then he adds, “In fact, it is not ‘understanding,’ and it is not ‘knowledge.’ It is a direct awareness, or intuition. It’s not the kind of thing you ‘understand.’ It’s like I said before to you: one grain of rice, and the whole earth, they are the same. You can’t learn that from a book.”

Andy Couturier, The Abundance of Less

Mordant observation

The more people came to know gay people and understand the aims of the movement for gay marriage, the more accepting they became of it. The more people come to know trans people and understand the aims of the transgender moment, the more skeptical they become of its claims.

Wesley Yang on new polling. (Via Andrew Sullivan)

Books

There are 10,000 books in my library, and it will keep growing until I die. This has exasperated my daughters, amused my friends and baffled my accountant. If I had not picked up this habit in the library long ago, I would have more money in the bank today; I would not be richer.

Pete Hamill via Robert Breen on micro.blog.

I know what Hamill means.

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go? Well, first, I resolved to stop harping on it. But then, I just moved it off to my reflexive blog, trying to keep this one relatively reflective.

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 of the Fathers

This “Fathers Day” in the USA also happens to be the Sunday of the Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council in the Orthodox Church. That was the Council that dealt with Arianism, the heresy of Arius, who taught that Christ was a creature — very special and exalted, but a creature nonetheless.

That council responded that Christ was “very God of very God, begotten not made, of one essence with the Father,” words of the Nicene Creed, so called because that Council met at Nicea.

Theological definitions

Theological definitions were declared only reluctantly by the Church, only if absolutely necessary, and only to the extent necessary to oppose specific heresies.

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox.

Such was the practice of the early church, before the Great Schism. It’s still that way in Orthodoxy, although the whole story now is a bit more complicated. An Orthodox cyberfriend summarized it: If it weren’t for heretics, we would have no theology.

Reminiscenses

The Red Shoes

There are many versions of The Red Shoes, but it basically tells of a young girl without much money who is entranced by a pair of red shoes she sees a princess wearing. They are so different to the heavy black shoes that everyone tramps in and out of church with. They all seem so serious, so weighed down. Through various kindnesses she gets a similar pair of red shoes.

One day outside the church she meets a man returning from a great war, far away. He has a long white beard and very bright eyes. He starts to play a fiddle. While others disapprove, he coos and simpers over the girl’s shoes, even asking her to give him a little twirl, a little dance. Feeling shamed by the churchgoers and affirmed by his gaze, she starts to dance. For a while it’s quite wonderful, even liberating. She twirls past the villagers, round the graves, laughing and in wild excitement. She hollers and pirouettes, all the time with the old man playing his fiddle and making her feel seen. For a few minutes this is quite the spectacle, but after a while, the crowd grow bored, gather their kids and go home for Sunday dinner.

Point made, the laughing girl tries to stop dancing and finds she can’t. As the panic grows in her eyes, this excites the old man even more. He starts to play faster and leads her out of the graveyard and onto the moors and through the woods. For many hours she splashes through streams and over hills, growing more and more crazed, more exhausted. Under a full moon she spasms and twists as the fiddling man keeps pace. The ecstasy has descended into nightmare, the passion into enchantment. Her feet are bleeding and somehow twined to the shoes.

Finally she dances into the arms of an angel who frees her from the ghastly parade and liberates her feet. The old man melts away into the trees. The angel washes her feet in a stream and over time she recovers. She is never going to wear those big heavy black shoes of the others, but she finds gentler, sweeter rhythms to move to. When she wants to stop, she simply sits down and takes her handmade shoes off.

…

In more brutal versions of the story, the girl meets not an angel but villagers, who, at her prompting, cut her feet off to stop the dance. She is now crippled but safe, being wheeled in and out of church for the rest of her life, chastened but wiser.

Martin Shaw, On Sex: Dancing With The Passions

Martin Shaw is a storyteller, but he upacks this story, with two of its alternate endings, nicely for the hard of hearing, including:

This grotesque scenario just exaggerates further the juxtaposition of rabid licentiousness and morbid ideas of purity. There is a distinct lack of imagination in both forms of acting out.

I’d never heard this story until last Sunday. Today’s blog is so full (too full?) of personal reminiscences that I’ve deleted an awkward one here.

The Refrigerium

Did ye never hear of the Refrigerium? A man with your advantages might have read of it in Prudentius, not to mention Jeremy Taylor.

The name is familiar, Sir, but I’m afraid I’ve forgotten what it means.

It means that the damned have holidays—excursions, ye understand.

Excursions to this country?

For those that will take them. Of course most of the silly creatures don’t. They prefer taking trips back to Earth. They go and play tricks on the poor daft women ye call mediums. They go and try to assert their ownership of some house that once belonged to them: and then ye get what’s called a Haunting. Or they go to spy on their children. Or literary ghosts hang about public libraries to see if anyone’s still reading their books.

This forgotten passage from C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce popped up recently.

The Great Divorce is one of the most important books in my spiritual biography. There’s not a single word of explicit theology that I remember, but the tacit theology that struck me — that one might, by indulging habitual sins (including distortions of things like the maternal instinct, or pride), make his soul unfit for heaven and even repelled by it — shook me out of a dangerous rut. Since I didn’t think that God would hold an unwilling soul hostage in heaven, just because he’d once said “the sinner’s prayer” in a fit of pious enthusiasm, I in due course left Calvinism (which suggested something like that) for Orthodox Christianity (which decidedly does not).

(That’s not the whole story. There have been 26 or 27 intervening years as I’ve lived an active corporate life in Orthodoxy, and my thinking doesn’t exactly run along those lines any more. But an effort to put the change into words has failed me.)

Proto-exvangelical

When I left evangelicalism, it certainly was not because I was disillusioned with the faith of my early childhood. I have sweet (if somewhat nutty) memories of all those days … I think my problem with remaining an evangelical centered on what the evangelical community became. It was the merging of the entertainment business with faith, the flippant lightweight kitsch ugliness of American Christianity, the sheer stupidity, the paranoia of the American right-wing enterprise, the platitudes married to pop culture, all of it . . . that made me crazy. It was just too stupid for words.

Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God

I do not recommend books by Frank Schaeffer, but I read them “back in the day” for reasons not worth going into again. This quote popped up recently and seemed on point to some other things I’ve been thinking about.

Specifically, I’ve been thinking about how much Evangelicalism has changed since my youth. It really shouldn’t have surprised me; Evangelicalism is built on shifting sands, because the Bible they claim (or claimed in Evangelicalism1967) as their sole authority is easily twisted and manipulated.

The nondenominational Evangelical/Charismatic/Clericalist syncretism described in this piece would have been recognized, back in my Evangelical days, as cultic and outside Evangelical boundaries. Apparently it’s not so recognized any longer, but some people, God bless ‘em, become “exvangelical” by abandoning it.

IVCF & CCC

… on many campuses the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship flourished and became a locus for evangelical dissent. Founded in Britain and rooted in the tolerant English evangelical tradition, the ministry emphasized fellowship and religious studies. It published books, encouraged critical thinking, and gave students leave to raise the issues of their generation, such as racism and the Vietnam War.

Frances FitzGerald, The Evangelicals.

I was an IVCF kind of Christian, not a Campus Crusade for Christ (now “Cru”) kind of Christian, I found when I left Evangelical hothouses and entered a secular university. (Navigators wasn’t much of a thing on my campus.) Now a great chasm lies between me and both, as both are Western and Protestant, but I can say with some confidence that IVCF prepared me in many ways for Orthodoxy, and I still feel kindly toward it.

… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)

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

Notebook Dump 6/13/24

Culture

Incentivizing misery (bad urbanism)

There is nothing economically or socially inevitable about either the decay of old cities or the fresh-minted decadence of the new unurban urbanization. On the contrary, no other aspect of our economy and society has been more purposefully manipulated … to achieve precisely what we are getting. Extraordinary governmental financial incentives have been required to achieve this degree of monotony, sterility and vulgarity. Decades of preaching, writing and exhorting by experts have gone into convincing us and our legislators that mush like this must be good for us, as long as it comes bedded with grass.

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

“Assignable Curiosity” — ouch!

As Jeff Schmidt writes in Disciplined Minds (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), academia and the other high-ranking professions are good at maintaining “ideological discipline” within their ranks, and people who do well in the academy tend to have “assignable curiosity,” which is to say, they are obediently interested in the things they’re told to be interested in.

Alan Jacobs, How to Think

By what authority?

The newest [Covid conspiracy theory] I’ve heard is that Covid is ravaging people’s immune systems on a mass scale comparable to that of H.I.V. On what authority can such a falsehood now be debunked?

As the expression goes, trust is built in drops and lost in buckets, and this bucket is going to take a very long time to refill.

Zeynep Tufekci, A Lesson From Covid on How to Destroy Public Trust (emphasis added)

And then there’s the National Security officials who prostituted themselves to declare Hunter Biden’s laptop a made-in-Russia hoax.

If I were on the Left, I hope I’d have the objectivity to reject most of what comes out of HRC and SPLC, both of them media-coddled bullshit factories, dependent on fear to stay in business. (By all rights, HRC should have declared victory and closed up shop after Obergefell; instead, it took up a version of transgender rights that many gays and lesbians reject.) But the Media lap up their stuff.

I don’t know who’s trustworthy any more. Whereas I formerly read stuff regularly from sources on the fairly far Left and Right, I now try to stick to sane-seeming, more-or-less-centrist sources, the fairly far Left and Right having become chronic liars. But I have no conclusive reason to think the center isn’t lying, too.

Any glimmers of absolute certainty I saw in the past were probably unwarranted, but these days it’s hard to find “beyond reasonable doubt.”

Elusive higher purposes

L.M. Sacacas attempts to disenthrall us from a subtle delusion:

Implicit in the promise of outsourcing and automation and time-saving devices is a freedom to be something other than what we ought to be. The liberation we are offered is a liberation from the very care-driven involvement in the world and in our communities that would render our lives meaningful and satisfying. In other words, the promise of liberation traps us within the tyranny of tiny tasks by convincing us to see the stuff of everyday life and ordinary relationships as obstacles in search of an elusive higher purpose—Creativity, Diversion, Wellness, Self-actualization, whatever. But in this way it turns out that we are only ever serving the demands of the system that wants nothing more than our ceaseless consumption and production.

…

Perhaps the best expression I know of the sentiment I’m trying to convey is from a poem by Marylin Chandler McEntyre, “Artists at Work,” from her collection inspired by Vermeer’s women:

The craftsman who made the rose window at Chartres
rose one morning in the dead of winter,
shivered into what layers of wool he owned,
and went to his bench to boil molten lead.
This was not the day to cut the glass or dye it,
lift it to the sun to see the colors dance
along the walls, or catch one’s breath
at peacock shades of blue: only, today,
to lay hot lead in careful lines, circles,
wiping and trimming, making
a perfect space for light.

When Wren designed St. Paul’s, he had to turn away
each day from the vision in his mind’s wide eye
to scraps of paper where columns of figures measured
tension and stress, heft and curve, angle and bearing point.
Whole days he spent considering the density
of granite, the weathering of hardwoods,
the thickness of perfect mortar; all
to the greater glory of God.

And Vermeer with his houseful of children
didn’t paint some days, didn’t even mix
powders or stretch canvasses, or clean palettes,
but hauled in firewood, cleaned out
a flue, repaired a broken cradle, remembering,
as he bent to his task, how light shone gold
on a woman’s flesh, and gathered
in drops on her pearls.

Teflon Sam

A liberal (maybe even left-wing) provocateur named Lauren Windsor attended a dinner of the Supreme Court Historical Society and, with hidden recording device and pretending to be a fervent Catholic conservative, tried to bait Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito into saying something inflammatory. She utterly struck out with Roberts but got an polite, anodyne response from Alito. The liberal media are now dishonestly engaged in trying to distill something sinister, even theocratic, from the weak tea of what he said.

But …

To start with the question of judicial ethics: Where was the justice’s error? He did not mention any pending case or litigation. He did not name any person or party. He did not discuss any specific political or moral matter. Most of the exchange consists of the filmmaker’s own goading remarks, followed by the justice’s vague and anodyne affirmations and replies. About what you might expect when cornered at a boring cocktail party.

Setting aside judicial ethics, I can think of two possible objections to what Justice Alito said: that he should not hold these views; or that he should not express them in public.

As to whether he should hold these views, I would suggest that they are not so extreme as to merit denunciation. On the contrary, they are reasonable, even commonplace.

Marc O. DeGirolami. And:

Alito wasn’t wrong. What’s wrong is what this Windsor woman did: misrepresented herself in an attempt to bait these Justices into saying something she could weaponize on social media.

To be fair, the right-wing activists of Project Veritas have famously done the same kind of thing. I’ve praised it before, but on reflection, I regret that. It is a bad thing to turn even private life into an ideological battleground. When activists of either Left or Right go picket outside a public figure’s house, they claim that their cause (pro-life, gay rights, whatever) is so morally urgent that it justifies violating the unwritten taboo that separates public from private. Both sides do it, and it’s wrong. They’re making life together impossible.

Project Veritas has landed some excellent scoops with its undercover activism, and has exposed some bad actors, for sure. Yet I have come to believe the price for doing so is too high. If we lose the ability to socialize with each other out of fear that the stranger we have just met might not be who he or she claims to be, and that they might be leading us into a trap, then we have lost something fundamental to civilized life, haven’t we?

Rod Dreher.

Errata

In March, I wrote:

IVF is in fact popular … (I’d say “nobody would dare try to outlaw IVF” except that people are daring some pretty bizarre things these days.)

I stand at least semi-corrected:

The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest and most politically powerful Protestant denomination, voted Wednesday to oppose in vitro fertilization. The move may signal the beginning of a broad turn on the right against IVF, an issue that many evangelicals, anti-abortion advocates and other social conservatives see as the “pro-life” movement’s next frontier — one they hope will eventually lead to restrictions, or outright bans, on IVF at the state and federal levels. (Source: politico.com)

Via John Ellis, whose daily new curation I recently discovered.

I note that the SBC resolution does not call for legislation, but I’m placing no bets on this being the end of the subject.

If you have no idea why anyone might opposed IVF, you need to get out more. As an oblique reminder, I again dig into my archives:

When the industry makes promises to prospective parents about in vitro fertilization, it leans on images of cherub-cheeked babies. And when it pitches to egg donors, it speaks the language of altruism: You can help make a family. But when something goes wrong, the liability-shy industry is quick to retreat to the language of cells and property. IVF relies on treating the embryos it creates, freezes, and often discards as Schrödinger’s persons: we cannot make a moral pronouncement about what they are until we know whether they’re intended for life or death.

Leah Libresco Sargeant

Beginning with the paragraph “The media’s manipulations …”, Ryan Anderson critiques IVF more directly.

Politics

Trading Power for Liberty

So why are parts of the right so discontent? The answer lies in the difference between power and liberty. One of the most important stories of the last century — from the moment the Supreme Court applied the First Amendment to state power in 1925, until the present day — is the way in which white Protestants lost power but gained liberty. Many millions are unhappy with the exchange.

David French, MAGA Turns Against the Constitution

Western Hegemony has ended

Five hundred years of Western hegemony has ended, while the global majority’s aspiration for a world order based on multipolarity and sovereign equality is rising. This incisive book addresses the demise of liberal hegemony, though pointing out that a multipolar Westphalian world order has not yet taken shape, leaving the world in a period of interregnum. A legal vacuum has emerged, in which the conflicting sides are competing to define the future order.

NATO expansionism was an important component of liberal hegemony as it was intended to cement the collective hegemony of the West as the foundation for a liberal democratic peace. Instead, it dismantled the pan-European security architecture and set Europe on the path to war without the possibility of a course correction. Ukraine as a divided country in a divided Europe has been a crucial pawn in the great power competition between NATO and Russia for the past three decades.

The war in Ukraine is a symptom of the collapsing world order. The war revealed the dysfunction of liberal hegemony in terms of both power and legitimacy, and it sparked a proxy war between the West and Russia instead of ensuring peace, the source of its legitimacy.

The proxy war, unprecedented sanctions, and efforts to isolate Russia in the wider world contributed to the demise of liberal hegemony as opposed to its revival. Much of the world responded to the war by intensifying their transition to a Eurasian world order that rejects hegemony and liberal universalism. The economic architecture is being reorganised as the world diversifies away from excessive reliance on Western technologies, industries, transportation corridors, banks, payment systems, insurance systems, and currencies. Universalism based on Western values is replaced by civilisational distinctiveness, sovereign inequality is swapped with sovereign equality, socialising inferiors is replaced by negotiations, and the rules-based international order is discarded in favour of international law. A Westphalian world order is reasserting itself, although with Eurasian characteristics.

The West’s defeat of Russia would restore the unipolar world order while a Russian victory would cement a multipolar one. The international system is now at its most dangerous as the prospect of compromise is absent, meaning the winner will take all. Both NATO under US direction and Russia are therefore prepared to take great risks and escalate, making nuclear wan increasingly likely.

Summary blurb for Glenn Diesen, The Ukraine War & the Eurasian World Order, recommended by cyberfriend and blogger Terry Cowan.

Although Diesen, even Cowan, pay closer attention to such things than I do, this is very much my view as well. So do I buy the book to confirm my priors or move on to another topic? If the Russia-Ukraine war ends before I buy it, I’ll probably move on.

But first, a key quote, from 1987 and from an eminent source, to keep and ponder:

George Kennan:

Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial complex would have to go on, substantially unchanged until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.

Via Diesen and Terry Cowan

Nothing has changed. It is literally true that we invent enemies to justify feeding what Dwight Eisenhower presciently called “the military-industrial complex.”

J.D. Vance (see below) also thinks the world is becoming multipolar.

J.D. Vance

Ross Douthat has an important interview: J.D. Vance on Where He’d Take the Republican Party. I’m sharing an unlocked version which, if you wonder, as I do, “What happened to the never-Trump author of Hillbilly Elegy?” is worth reading.

I’ll probably wrestle with it more if he becomes Trump’s running mate. For now, I’m slightly less cynical about his change(s) over eight years than I was before, and I find that I’m of one mind with him substantively on a few things.

Balancing Sociopathy against policy

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

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

This, published 9 days after the January 6 insurrection (or whatever you want to call it, except “patriot rally” or its cognates) remains worth reading — if only for his rationale for voting as he did. I consider his rationale incoherent; one need not vote for a menace who might do some good things in order avoid being a “free rider” if the menace actually does them. One can say “I think the menace outweighs the possible benefits.”

Reminder …

I’ve moved most political stuff to another blog, but if you’re curious, they’re just a click away.

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go? Well, first, I resolved to stop harping on it. But then, I just moved it off to my reflexive blog, trying to keep this one relatively reflective.

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, 6/9/24

Ayan Hirsi Ali update

Sorry if the headline is misleading; I really don’t know more about Ayan Hirsi Ali’s conversion from “New Atheist” to some kind of Christian. But I have been thinking about what I do know.

I listened this week to a predictably futile, moderated public discussion between New Atheist Richard Dawkins and his friend, lapsed New Atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. If you, too, want to waste some time on something that seems like the sort of thing that smart people should listen to, break a leg.

Ali said one thing in the discussion that I thought was worth preserving. When she was one of the elite New Atheists, the author of Infidel, probably the leading vocal apostate from Islam in the democratic West, and a despiser of Christianity as well, she travelled with 8 bodyguards. They were not there to protect her from angry Christians. Instead, she recalls Christians contacting her to say “we think you’re mistaken and we’re praying for you.”

Some of Ali’s answers in the discussion bothered me. They are not the answers of a well-formed Western Christian, let alone of an Orthodox Christian. But then (duh!) she hasn’t really been at this long enough to be a well-formed Christian of any sort, and they were things Dawkins pressed her on — not prideful heresies she blurted out to ingratiate herself with someone. Moreover, her conversion, like many (most?) seems to be kind of a “right-brain” thing, not as easily articulated as syllogisms.

“Why don’t you just say ‘I trust the Church on some things I haven’t personally grokked yet’,” I wanted to say. But I’m not even certain that she has settled in any church yet; I just don’t know.

Further, her path into the faith from atheism surely is vastly different from my path within the faith (very broadly construed) from a Protestant tradition to Orthodoxy. Of that path I wrote almost two decades later:

I had my qualms about some specifics, like the Theotokos, who is a hangup or blind spot for many low-church Protestants. But I had reached the point where I trusted the Church’s dogma (the title “Theotokos” is a dogma of an Ecumenical Council) more than I trusted my own, likely-skewed, judgment.

(Hyperlink added) I don’t think that paragraph distorts the reality of my 1997 formal conversion. I was becoming for the first time an “ecclesial Christian,” which the late Richard John Neuhaus described:

An ecclesial Christian is one who understands with mind and heart, and even feels with his fingertips, that Christ and his Church, head and body, are inseparable. For the ecclesial Christian, the act of faith in Christ and the act of faith in the Church are not two acts of faith but one. In the words of the third century St. Cyprian, martyr bishop of Carthage, “He who would have God as his Father must have the Church as his mother.”

And I indeed have come to agree with the Church, not just to trust it while holding my doubts in abeyance.

But for now, I think Ali is sorting through the good she sees in Western Christendom (and post-Christendom) and the doctrinal and ecclesial specifics of the faith that gave birth to it. That’s not a quick or easy task — or so I imagine, having not walked that particular path myself.

I’m praying for her to grow up into her new faith, to shun limelight as much as she can for a while, and to preface her doubts, if she must voice them at all, with something like “I’m still learning and settling in, but for now, no, I don’t quite believe [X]. Maybe I will later.”

I have little doubt that if she doesn’t apostatize, she will wind up Episcopalian/Anglican, Roman Catholic, or Orthodox.

Christian Nationalists for real

I am skeptical of press alarmism about “Christian Nationalism” in the U.S. It’s generally a cheap trick to marginalize some conservative-ish folks without getting into the weeds on what they actually believe and teach.

But I believe there are two Christian Nationalist movements worth a wary and sustained eye:

  1. Douglas Wilson’s hard-core Calvinist confessional Christian nationalists, based in Moscow, Idaho.
  2. C. Peter Wagner and his merry Seven Mountain Mandate heretics. I hate to cite Wikipedia on this, but the other information I have is too scattered. If you want to go the the source, search Amazon books for “Seven Mountain Mandate” focusing on books by Johnny Enlow and Lance Wallnau, two figures who I know are mandate fans.

I rather doubt that these two groups could make common cause. Wilson’s folks are Calvinists, Wagner’s spawn charismatic flakes who claim to have prophetic apostles. That’s oil and water, folks.

Wagner’s group probably is a bigger threat because its following is excitable and flaky; Wilson’s young, intellectual Calvinists are unlikely to match their volatility (American Evangelicalism was pretty much born in anti-Calvinism 200-ish years ago).

Proto-Jihad

Of the Crusades:

Daringly, he offered his listeners an electrifying new formula for salvation. Listed as an official decree of the council held at Clermont, it promised warriors a means by which their trade of arms, rather than offending Christ and requiring penance to be forgiven, might itself serve to cleanse them of their sin. ‘For, if any man sets out from devotion, not for reputation or monetary gain, to liberate the Church of God at Jerusalem, his journey shall be reckoned in place of all penance.’

Tom Holland, Dominion

Secularist concessions

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

Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World

Irony

In our consumption, we are consumed.

L.M. Sacasas, What You Get Is the World

… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)

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

Sunday June 2

Reformation

An indifferent history student in my youth, I now enjoy it very much.

Pandora’s box

…in the wake of [Luther’s] defiant appearance at Worms, he found himself impotent to control the explosions that he had done so much to set in train. Nor was he alone. Every claim by a reformer to an authority over his fellow Christians might be met by appeals to the Spirit; every appeal to the Spirit by a claim to authority. The consequence, detonating across entire reaches of Christendom, was a veritable chain reaction of protest.

Tom Holland, Dominion

Seizing Church properties

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

Beauty

Conversion

The prevailing image of religious conversion today is one that is individualistic—conversion is in some sense experienced within the self—and sentimental—one is transported by emotions—which then cause one to affirm a certain set of religious dogmas. Such things do happen and to be absolutely clear they are great, but this individualistic and pietistic model is also of modern, recent vintage. Such experiences have always happened but they were not thought to be the majority, even less the default or only case.

“The best argument for the Catholic faith, in the end, is the beauty of her art, and the life of her saints,” once said none other than Benedict XVI, and the argument presented there is really a different version of Ali’s: look at what Christian civilization has produced, look at how uniquely beautiful and praiseworthy it is; the fact that a civilization animated by such ideas produced such unique and surpassing greatness must be an indication that these ideas are in a profound way true.

This is a perfectly rational train of thought, a perfectly legitimate thing to believe, and a perfectly legitimate route to the Church!

…

I have seen many people stumble on the path of faith because they have an expectation that religious belief or practice must, of necessity, produce some sort of deep personal or emotional effect, and therefore feel that they’re “doing it wrong” or that it’s “not for them” or that they just “haven’t been touched” or “called”. No! These people have also been called and touched, just in a different way. In the meantime, this pietistic understanding of faith has done a lot of damage.

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, In Defense Of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Conversion

I perhaps should note that while Gobry is of the Roman Catholic faith, “Catholic” is also an appropriate adjective for the Orthodox Church.

Divine and counterfeit beauty

During his American tour in 2011, Archimandrite Vasileios of Iveron spent considerable time teaching Americans how to reorder their affections toward divine beauty. Speaking to Americans, who are known for their love of pleasure and their worship of the body, the Athonite monk warned his audience not to mistake the call of divine beauty by settling their affections on lesser objects that lure us with a counterfeit beauty.

Robin Phillips and Stephen De Young, Rediscovering the Goodness of Creation

One of the huge confusions in our time is to mistake glamour for beauty.

Poet John O’Donohue, interviewed by Krista Tippett.

The sects

Achieving our country

For all its notional secularity, much of today’s liberalism is still informed by the essentially messianic assumption that “achieving our country,” in the words of Richard Rorty, the post-Christian grandson of the great Social Gospel theologian Walter Rauschenbusch, can be a substitute for the consolations of traditional religious faith.

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

The Force

When I was studying systematics, one of our seminars required us to read about a dozen different, so-called, systematic theologies, from across a very broad spectrum. I recall someone presenting a paper on the doctrine of God in the writings of the radical feminist Catholic, Rosemary Radford Ruether. When the student finished reading the paper, there was a dead, stunned silence in the room. Finally, a sheepish voice piped up, “Isn’t that the Force in Star Wars?” We broke out in laughter because it was precisely what she had articulated. It might make for interesting reading, but it certainly could not be called “Christian.”

Fr. Stephen Freeman

Ties that bind

The reality is that while many in the evangelical movement thought their bonds were primarily (or exclusively) theological or missional, many of those bonds were actually political, cultural, and socioeconomic.

Michael Graham, The Six Way Fracturing of Evangelicalism

Or, as Ken Myers had it decades ago, binding by feelings manifested in a common sensibility.

Christology

There is a cooperation of the divine and the human, the uncreated and the created. Christ is the perfect man, the complete man, the whole man. But Christ is also God. That is to say, paradox as it may sound, it is God alone who is the perfect man. Only God is completely and utterly human. As we said, in so far as man fails to realize the divine in himself, to that extent he falls short of being completely human. He remains less than human … It is not accidental or a cause of surprised that man’s attempts to be only human — to fulfill the ideals of the non-religious humanism of the last centuries — results in the dehumanization both of man and of the forms of the society which he has fabricated around himself.

Philip Sherrard, The Rape of Man and Nature

Miscellany

Benedict Option

Socialized to believe that their culture was the majority, it seems Christians have invested much less than Orthodox Jews in four key elements of faithful living required to thrive as a minority: educating children separately from the broader society, marking space and time to bolster community cohesion, strengthening local institutions, and reducing the influence of secular media.

…

A Christian reader may counter that Jewish rules seem legalistic. Yes, Jewish rules are indeed commands. This is a key difference in our faiths, and Christians seem to enjoy a liberty that Jews do not. I wonder, though, if community-held “constraints” would bring Christians greater freedom. Could they leave you unhindered by the burden of trying to change the majority culture and free instead to pursue joy as a flourishing minority?

Seth Kaplan, How to Flourish as a Creative Minority

It’s true that a Christianish civil religion lulled a Christianish people into complacency. That possibility if over for the foreseeable future; neither wokeism (all is allowed, nothing forgiven) nor MAGA is bringing it back. Kaplan’s advice is good, though I don’t really see more than a tiny minority (e.g., the Bruderhof) re-arranging life to live in close physical proximity to other Christians.

In a manner of speaking …

Nancy French talks about David French’s return from war (he enlisted gratuitously and served in a war zone as a J.A.G.):

Before he left, he’d been patient, slow to anger. But now my formerly carefree husband was foul tempered and anxious. Many of his friends had been killed, but war did not provide him time to process the trauma. After someone was killed, he had to focus on the next thing and the next and the next. But now he was swallowed up by grief. Plus, his faith had taken a hit. And since he was the one who’d introduced me to Christianity, it was unnerving.

Nancy French, Ghosted (emphasis added).

Nancy French grew up in the Church of Christ denomination. She attended (albeit resentfully) a Church of Christ college. That she should say so casually that David introduced her to Christianity is quite telling.

  1. Was the Church of Christ devoid of Christianity?
  2. Were her ears stopped, her heart embittered, by something she experienced in the Church of Christ (she was sexually abused in early adolescence by a youth pastor)?
  3. Is she fibbing a bit to zip up her book a bit?

I have heard things like this so many, many times. I heard a nationally famous figure say he’d “never heard the gospel” in the Church my wife and I were attending; I found that an indefensible swipe at a very sound Church (as Protestant Churches go), but it’s kind of the way Evangelicals tell their stories.

From my current perch, I can’t defend the adequacy of any Protestant Church. But it’s jarring to hear a Baptist or PCA Presbyterian or nondenominational Evangelical say that they never heard the heard the gospel (or never encountered Christianity) in the Baptist or PCA Presbyterian or nondenominational Evangelical church they left in favor of some other Baptist or PCA Presbyterian or nondenominational Evangelical Church.

I’m just not really buying it.

… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)

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

Making a virtue of necessity

I just finished reading The Old Faith in a New Nation, a 2023 book by one Paul J. Gutacker. I can write no better summary of the author’s purpose than the publisher’s:

Conventional wisdom holds that tradition and history meant little to nineteenth-century American Protestants, who relied on common sense and “the Bible alone.” The Old Faith in a New Nation challenges this portrayal by recovering evangelical engagement with the Christian past. Even when they appeared to be most scornful toward tradition, most optimistic and forward-looking, and most confident in their grasp of the Bible, evangelicals found themselves returning, time and again, to Christian history. They studied religious historiography, reinterpreted the history of the church, and argued over its implications for the present. Between the Revolution and the Civil War, American Protestants were deeply interested in the meaning of the Christian past.

The book

I concur with the 4-star rating at Amazon, mostly because the sympathetic academic author obviously spent a lot of time researching a narrow topic, off-the-beaten track. When I stumbled across it, I knew that I needed it to challenge the “conventional wisdom” resident in my own imagination.

It would be churlish to complain of faults in a book that did what I wanted it to do, and was passably readable to boot. I now have a better idea of how nineteenth-century American Evangelicals (and a few mainstream Protestants and Unitarians) treated Christian history.

Generally, the Evangelicals settled for tendentious 18th-Century historiography. It’s hard to blame them — the laymen, at least. There are only 24 hours in a day, and the 8-hour workday didn’t exist. We’re still that way:

The instinctual shortcut that we take when we have “too much information” is to engage with it selectively, picking out the parts we like and ignoring the remainder, making allies with those who have made the same choices and enemies of the rest.

Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise

Mnemohistory

A lover of obscure mots justes, I was pleased to meet the word mnemohistory, which to my disappointment isn’t even in the online Merriam-Webster. It is “the history of memory … The past is not only remembered by later generations, it also exerts by itself an influence on later times.” A near-equivalent, I guess, is “cultural history.”

The 19th-century American Evangelical mnemohistory was fiercely anti-Catholic — especially, and oddly, anti-celibacy, though the anti-Catholicism was comprehensive.

Somewhat to my surprise (I had already read in Frances Fitzgerald that it was anti-Calvinist), it was quite contemptuous of the Protestant Reformation as well — largely because the Reformation wasn’t adequately anti-Catholic. The Reformers baptized infants? Mumbled vague nothings about Christ’s presence in the Eucharistic elements? Damnable papacy!

Though the Magisterial Reformation opened Pandora’s box with its sola scriptura même, I’m newly-appreciative of its merits, at least compared to what followed. The Magisterial Reformers didn’t intend the whirlwind, and Rome did need reform.

That the best-laid plans chronically go astray is enough to make one suspect all is not right in the pre-eschaton world. (It’s also an imaginative buttress for temperamental conservatism.)

The acid test

The acid test of American Evangelical mnemohistory came in the debates over slavery, when there arose an urgent need to shuffle the deck chairs. Gutacker summarizes:

This was only one of many ironies in the debates over slavery, which saw Catholics ignoring or reinterpreting papal decrees, Episcopalians celebrating early American Puritans, Presbyterians defending medieval society while criticizing the Reformation, Baptists treating patristic exegesis as authoritative, and anticlerical abolitionists praising the pope. Not all of this irony was lost on contemporaries. As has been discussed, African American historians, in particular, took pleasure in pointing out the hypocrisy of proslavery authors who cited North African church fathers in their arguments for white supremacy.

Antebellum 19th-century American Evangelicals didn’t so much revere history as to use it to confirm their priors. They rejected tradition and precedent, those inconvenient facts, in favor of congenial theories they called “history” — again, a relatable vice, but it’s how we got Baptists and Southern Baptists, Methodists and Southern Methodists, and even Presbyterians and Southern Presbyterians (a division that leaves fewer contemporary traces than the Baptist and Methodist schisms).

Oh, yeah, almost forgot: It’s also a substantial explanation of how we got a Civil War.

I think that qualifies as failing the acid test.

Bless their hearts!

I’m fond of the expression “making a virtue of necessity.” 19th-century schisms over slavery were lamented at the time. Today’s more mercenary schisms pass without much objection as “isn’t-it-nice-that-there’s-a-church-for-all-preferences?” nondenominationalism. All hail the religiopreneur! (Bless their hearts!)

Christians were until recently (and in ecclesial Christianity, still are) horrified by schism. But what to make of the continued fissiparousness of movements themselves born in conscious schism, as was post-Second Great Awakening evangelicalism? Is it all that bad when badness can’t cohere?*

I confess a bit of schadenfreude, mitigated morally by faint hope for the epiphany “this isn’t working; our first principles must be wrong” — and for return to the Church that remained, albeit centered outside the West, when the Roman Church went into schism from it. There, Holy Tradition is preserved and transmitted as the warp and woof of liturgies, hymns, prayers, scripture, and all that goes into a lived faith.

* (An aside about coherence: Ken Myers, muse of Mars Hill Audio Journal, once suggested that today’s evangelicalism coheres, is united, not by orthodoxy but by orthpathos — not right shared doctrine but right shared feeling. Insofar as it does loosely cohere, I have no better explanation, and if I did it would be a topic for another day.)

… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)

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

May 30, 2024

Just yesterday …

Pick at random any other graduate from Steinert High School in Trenton, Class of 1968, and call their wife the c-word. See what would happen. Judicial restraint would not be the order of the day. (By chance, the District Court judge I clerked for graduated from Steinert a few years before Justice Alito.)

Josh Blackman

I have no intention of entering into the dispute about Mrs. Justice Alito flying her flag funny or how she was or wasn’t provoked by neighbors.

Rather, I’m tattling on myself: when I read “Steinert High School in Trenton, Class of 1968,” I thought “Who is he talking about? That’s just yesterday. Supreme Court Justices in 2024 graduated earlier than that!”

In point of fact, they did not. Most of the current court graduated later than that. Most of them are, in other words, young whippersnappers.

And I’m old enough to be that actress’s grandfather. And, no, I’m not up for a game of touch football this afternoon, thank you. And so on and so forth.

The mind rebels at the thought that I really am this old.

Nonpolitics

Chatbot “biographies”

Bruni recently published another book, The Age of Grievance, after which there appeared on Amazon’s pages a “biography” of him — actually, several — that apparently were generated by chatbots hoovering up random biographical bits from the web:

I guess that … I should be flattered? I am, sort of. I never imagined I’d be the subject of any biography, so a pamphlet of pablum exceeds my dreams! But I’m also unsettled, and not by the realization that my life, or at least life story, doesn’t belong to me, but by the idea that we are masses of bytes at the mercy of bots. In this scenario, emblematic of our digital age, I’m neither “he” nor “she.” I’m really more “it.”

Frank Bruni

The Humanities

I won’t deny that the downward trend in majors is troubling to people (like me) who love the humanities.

But I disagree with the notion that success is based on convincing 18 year olds to declare an English major. That makes a mockery of the whole subject. Youngsters may eventually decide that the humanities are worth studying, but that will only happen after humanistic thinking starts to pervade our society.

Ted Gioia, The Real Crisis in Humanities Isn’t Happening at College

Extraction economy still

Extracting eyeball minutes, the key resource for companies like Google and Facebook, has become significantly more lucrative than extracting oil.

Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism

Sustainability

During some “foreign” travel a few years ago (Vancouver, BC), we got a carryout rotisserie chicken we tried to carve up in our hotel room with wooden knives and then eat with wooden sporks. I longed for plastic.

Plastic utensils set for immediate disposal after use truly is not sustainable though, and the Vancouver way (sigh!) is better.

Speaking of which:

David Mamet via Nellie Bowles (This is satire. With California, though, it’s sometimes hard to tell.)

The Algorithms Are Broken

The Google algorithm deliberately makes it difficult to find reliable information. That’s because there’s more money made from promoting garbage, and forcing users to scroll through oceans of crap.

…

I ought to share more examples. But there are so many. Where do I even start?

For example, Amazon’s algorithm suggests books I might enjoy. But the recommendations have gotten worse over time—much worse!—just like everything else coming out of the technocracy.

…

I became am a conscientious objector in the world of algorithms. They give more unwanted advice than any person in history, even your mom.

At least mom has your best interests at heart. Can we say the same for Silicon Valley?

Ted Gioia, Let’s Just Admit it: The Algorithms Are Broken

Irrational fear and animus

From my own experience, it seems the reverse is true: very few who hold a strong position on this issue, whether for or against SSM, are driven by irrational fear or animus. They seem to be driven by beliefs they hold to be properly basic in terms of justice, whether it is the rightly ordered ends of our sexual powers (including their relation to marriage’s nature) or the rightly ordered ends of our public institutions. Both sides answer these concerns differently and thus come to contrary conclusions on whether the legal recognition of SSM is just.

Francis J. Beckwith, Taking Rites Seriously

Success

Years ago at a Stanford conference, Girard faced a tough question about his unconventional methods. His research had involved a close reading of archaic texts—which is to say, stories. In them, he discerned hidden patterns of rivalry and the sacralization of violence to end strife, an unending sequence throughout the long night of humanity. His writing was seasoned with characteristic humor and insight—he had learned something about himself along his journey, and so did not offer himself as a hero or an answer.

After the talk, one man asked a provocative question: “Given that we can’t entirely trust the veracity of ancient writings, how would you measure the success of your theory?”

Girard’s answer was a thunderbolt in its directness and simplicity: “You will see the success of my theories when you recognize yourself as a persecutor.”

Cynthia L. Haven, We Do Not Come in Peace

NCAA

Nowhere else in America can businesses get away with agreeing not to pay their workers a fair-market rate on the theory that their product is defined by not paying their workers a fair-market rate.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, concurring, in N.C.A.A. v. Alston, that student athletes should be able to profit from their names, images or likenesses. Via Jane Coaston

Advanced or underdeveloped?

The Stalinist interpretation of socialism has made it possible for socialists and capitalists alike to agree on how to measure the level of development a society has achieved. Societies in which most people depend for most of their goods and services on the personal whim, kindness, or skill of another are called “underdeveloped,” while those in which living has been transformed into a process of ordering from an all-encompassing store catalogue are called “advanced.”

Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality

Ouch!

The New York Times this week frames a shibboleth combined with a vague appeal to authority, writing: “President Biden placed electric vehicles at the heart of his climate agenda because scientists say that a rapid switch from gasoline-powered cars to electric versions is one of the most effective ways to slow the carbon dioxide emissions that are dangerously heating the planet.”

Economists might be better to consult than scientists, but, in all likelihood, no one was consulted by the Times on the question of whether the policy will be effective.

This sentence, we can safely assume, arose entirely as a backward-reasoned justification of the Biden program, concocted on the spot by a Times editor to fill the place where a reader expects to be assured that the policy has been vetted and found to be sensible.

Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., Anatomy of an EV Policy Error

Politics

Nonsequitur of the week

(The Economist) A governor‘s pardon implies nothing about the trustworthiness of the courts that convicted the now-pardoned person.

Please: make sure brain is working before engaging mouth.

Not actual news, but cuts pretty close to the bone

TALLAHASSEE, FL—Touting the legislation as a common-sense victory for family values, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed a new law Thursday requiring all Florida women to produce three healthy, white sons by the date of their 22nd birthday. “The production of white daughters will not be penalized, but they will be seized by the state for the production of white sons,” said DeSantis, who clarified that regardless of the race, ethnicity, or religious background of the mother, all sons would be required to be both white and raised in a Catholic household. “Three is the bare minimum. Despite what the virtue-signaling, left-wing fanatics are espousing on CNN, this requirement is actually quite fair and attainable. Whether Florida women and girls choose to get started at age 15 or 19, they will have plenty of time to comply.” At press time, DeSantis added that a miscarriage counted as negative one white sons.

The Onion

Political bons mots

  • [I]n The Post, Matt Bai sought to trace J.D. Vance’s boundless sycophancy, including his appearance last week at Donald Trump’s trial: “I can’t say from experience how you’re supposed to know when you’ve officially become part of an organized crime family, but if you feel it necessary for your professional advancement to show up at a courthouse and pay respect to a patriarch charged with fraudulent payments to a porn star, chances are you check all the boxes.”
  • In USA Today, Rex Huppke examined the folly and failure of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s unsuccessful attempt to oust House Speaker Mike Johnson: “Like a dull-witted Icarus, she has now flown too close to the dumb.”
  • In The Times, Bret Stephens previewed the first planned presidential debate next month: “If President Biden gets through the debate without committing a gaffe, he’ll surpass expectations. If Donald Trump gets through it without committing a felony, he’ll surpass expectations.”

Frank Bruni

I would be remiss were I not to give a shout-out to Kevin D. Williamson as well:

… Mike Johnson, a coup-backing knee-walking MAGA grotesque and Trump enabler who is somehow not depraved and sycophantic enough for [Marjorie Taylor] Greene.

Just links

I’ve posted some political things elsewhere that you might (or might not) want to see.

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 cathartic venting, 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 of the Paralytic, 2024

No sectarians in post-Christian foxholes

… churches centered on the Bible, evangelism, and personal faith in Jesus; often but not necessarily nondenominational, with moderate to minimal emphasis on sacraments, liturgy, and ecclesiastical authority; and marked by a revivalist style as well as conservative beliefs about sex, marriage, and other social issues. Historically, … white and middle- to lower-class …

Brad East, describing the sorts of churches in which he has noticed a loosening of social taboos (and in some cases, abandonment of prior understandings of scripture), and some putting on of liturgical airs, in The Loosening of American Evangelicalism.

East describes a lot of the changes he sees, and then speculates on the reasons for them. His fourth suggested reason got my attention as a plausible “silver lining” to secularization:

Fourth and finally, there are no sectarians in post-Christian foxholes. As counterintuitive as it may seem, the same forces leading evangelicals to start drinking, getting tattoos, and watching HBO are also leading them to say the creeds, receive ashes on their forehead, and read Pope Benedict XVI. When the world feels arrayed against faithfulness to Christ, you need all the friends you can get. Doctrinal differences that aren’t relevant to current cultural battles—think infant baptism, not theologies of sex and gender—can be overlooked in a pinch.

What intellectuals are searching for

[S]uppose you are an atheist or agnostic exposed, over time, to the desert fathers, or to the pro-Nicene fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries, or to Saint Maximus Confessor or Saint John of Damascus, or to Benedictine monks, or to Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, or to Julian of Norwich, or to Saint Francis or Saint Bernard or Saint Anselm. It would simply never occur to you that what you find in these authors is what you’d find in the Methodist congregation on the corner, or the Baptist church around the block, or the non-denom start-up across town. Not only do the devotional and liturgical, spiritual and theological worlds conjured by these writers and texts not exist in such spaces. The traditions themselves do not claim the figures in question. You go, therefore, to the people and the places who are bold enough to say, “Those names are our names; those saints are our saints; those books are our books. We nurture and preserve and pass them on. Come learn them from us; indeed, come learn from us what they learned themselves, in their own time.”

In sum: What intellectuals, especially agnostic intellectuals in midlife, are restlessly searching for is something not man-made, but divine; not provisional, but final; not a question, but an answer. They are looking for rest, however penultimate in this life, not more open-ended restlessness. Something that lasts. Something that can plausibly make a claim both to antiquity and to permanency. A bulwark that will not fail. Something to defer to, submit to, bow one’s head in surrender to; something to embrace and be embraced by: a teacher but also a mother. And the truth is that Rome plausibly presents itself as both mater et magistra, the pillar and bulwark of the truth. Orthodoxy does as well. The plausibility explains why so many intellectuals find port of harbor with each of them. The reverse, in turn, explains why so few of those sorts of people convert from rudderless adult atheism to Protestantism with a capital-p.

Brad East, musing on why intellectuals and other public figures convert to Christianity in Catholic, Orthodox (or perhaps Anglican) traditions.

A life-giving gift

I’m almost certain I’ve shared this before, but I share it again not only because it seems wise, but because I lived it — with a big caveat: happy-clappy is not confined to youth groups, and I wasn’t young when I discovered ancient Christianity.

For those young people who are either scared or suspicious of happy-clappy versions of youth group Christianity, ancient Christian disciplines and historic Christian worship can be received as a life-giving gift. When you have only seen forms of piety that value spontaneous expression and clichéd sincerity, to be given the cadences and rhythms of the Book of Common Prayer can be like receiving the gift of tongues. In my experience, many young people are intensely ritual animals without realizing it. And when they are introduced to habit-forming practices of Christian faith, invited into ways of following Jesus that are ancient and tested, their faith is given a second life.

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

Context is broader than the text itself

Context includes not only the historical and cultural setting and textual elements such as literary arrangement and relationship of the words. Context includes the original setting in which the Scriptures were written—the Church. The author belonged to the community of faith, as did his anticipated audience…

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

The democratic spirit at prayer

Much of what today passes for Protestantism is nothing of the sort. Rather, it is a thinly veiled cloak for the democratic spirit at “prayer.”  “Salvation by grace through faith” is a slogan for individualism, a Christianity “by right.” There are no works, no requirements, only a “grace-filled” entitlement. For the ultimate form of democracy is the person who needs no one else: no Church, no priest, no sacrament, only the God of my understanding who saves me by grace and guarantees that I can do it alone.

Fr. Stephen Freeman

If you think that’s a cheap shot, you need to read Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity.

Nine paths of complicity

I returned to following the Mere Fidelity podcast after a year or two absence (when I was more preoccupied with other things). One back episode I manually downloaded was Moral Complicity, which took as its springboard a controversy over one Alistair Begg’s faux pas.

It was an interesting episode, part of which lamented Evangelicalism’s lack of tools and training in moral reasoning, leaving Evangelicals to live in ambiguous situations based on shibboleths.

I was surprised at my own inability to justify my reaction to the particular question posed. Then I remembered that even my tiniest prayer book has some resources:

NINE WAYS OF PARTICIPATING IN ANOTHER’S SIN

  • By counsel.
  • By command.
  • By consent.
  • By provocation.
  • By praise or flattery.
  • By concealment.
  • By partaking.
  • By silence.
  • By defense of the sin committed.

THE CHIEF SPIRITUAL WORKS OF MERCY

  • To admonish sinners.
  • To instruct the ignorant.
  • To counsel the doubtful.
  • To comfort the sorrowful.
  • To suffer wrongs patiently.
  • To forgive injuries.
  • To pray for the living and the dead.

Wise eunuch

Then the Spirit said to Philip, “Go near and overtake this chariot.” So Philip ran to him, and heard him reading the prophet Isaiah, and said, “Do you understand what you are reading?” And he said, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” And he asked Philip to come up and sit with him.

Acts 8:29-31.

I was rather old when I learned (as I understood it) that reading silently, sola mentes, was unknown in the ancient world.

I wasn’t quite as old when I realized that “How can I, unless someone guides me?” was a wise answer, not a pathetic one.

Col. R.B. Thieme, Jr.

“Well-nigh 50 years ago,” wrote the geezer, “I heard a guy who in retrospect was the weirdest, but most mainstream, preacher I ever heard.”

I’m the geezer. The guy I heard was “Col. R.B. Thieme, Jr..” See also R. B. Thieme, Jr., Bible Ministries | Home

Thieme was not outside the Evangelical Overton Window, but I recall two really weird things he said during the week or so of meetings I attended in Prescott, Arizona (I have a vague idea that I listened to him on the radio even longer):

  1. Nothing pleases God more than doctrine in the frontal lobe. It is fair to say that this was an obsessive theme of Thieme, if you’ll pardon the wordplay.
  2. The human ovum is the only sinless cell in the human body. Were it not sinless, Christ would have inherited sin from Mary.

I immediately thought the first thing quoted (almost verbatim) was weird and off-key. Now I’m quite sure it was wrong to the point of heresy. God desires several things more than storing up doctrine in one’s wetware. It is spiritually perilous not to value them as He does.

But the idea that mastery of doctrine was paramount was mainstream western Christianity. Since Thomas Acquinas, over-intellectualizing the Christian life has been (dare I say it?) a major way of avoiding actual encounter with God. In that sense, he was mainstream. And his website doesn’t put this idea front and center, portraying instead an extraordinarily hard-working dispensational premillennial evangelical pastor — adherent to a doctrinal scheme that led me to distance myself from evangelicalism around the time I encountered Thieme, though I don’t recall any cause-and-effect relationship.

The ovum remark was not an obsession, in my limited experience. The idea of inheriting sin and guilt is ubiquitous in Western Christianity (and repudiated in Eastern Christianity, which recalls that the wages of sin is death, not guilt — but that’s a longer story, and one that I’m probably not qualified to tell). Nevertheless, I don’t recall any other teacher ever making anything like Thieme’s weird remark.

Wedding rites

Contrast the vision of family carried in these cultural liturgies—and played out in television dramas and romantic comedies—with the countercultural, biblical vision that is carried in an Orthodox wedding rite. The rite has two “movements” or stages. The first is the Service of Betrothal. In the entrance or vestibule of the church, the priest asks both the groom and the bride a question. To the groom: “Have you, Nicholas, a good, free, and unconstrained will and a firm intention to take unto yourself to wife this woman, Elizabeth, whom you see before you?” And to the bride: “Have you, Elizabeth, a good, free, and unconstrained will and a firm intention to take unto yourself to husband this man, Nicholas, whom you see before you?” Each in turn replies, “I have,” and these are the only words they will speak in the ceremony. This won’t be an expressive opportunity for them to “show their love.” There’s no fixation on novelty in the idiosyncratic writing of their own vows. The actor and agent here is the Lord, the church’s Bridegroom, and their lives as husband and wife (and as mother- and father-to-be) are here being taken up into that life. The Triune God is the center of this ceremony, exhibiting a vision of marriage in which this is also true. This is beautifully signaled in vows that echo their baptism “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

It occurred to me as I was posting this that Smith’s book is one of extremely few contemporary Protestant-written books I can commend — not that I read all that many, mind you. It’s one of a few (along with books by Hans Boersma) that leave me wondering “why haven’t these guys shed their obviously uncomfortable Protestantism for Orthodoxy?”

When I heard the learn’d theologian …

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

Walt Whitman

Do American Evangelicals despise history?

Last night, I began reading Paul Gutacker, The Old Faith in a New Nation: American Protestants and the Christian Past. Gutacker doesn’t buy the standard narrative that bibicist American Evangelicalism has no interest in Church history and traditions. It sounded promising enough that I bought it without any personal recommendations from trusted sources.

I’m especially interested to see whether it will call into question anything I’ve internalized from Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity. So far, it seems to accept Hatch’s work.

… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)

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