Category: Faith & Ideology

Cheesefare Sunday 2026

Orthodox Mardi Gras

I’ve never been a fan of Mardis Gras, which I took to be “let’s sin a lot on the eve of Lent.” That just never sat right.

On the other hand, looking at my scale last Monday morning, I’d say we Orthodox (Americans at least) have something analogous: last weekend’s “Meatfare Sunday,” the last day meat is allowed before entering full Lent a week later (tomorrow). My attitude was “Whoopee! Let’s eat a lot of meat today!”

Forgiveness Sunday

Later today begins full Lent for Orthodox Christians:

This Sunday is the last day before the beginning of Great Lent, our 7-week journey to Pascha on April 12 … Lent begins at Sunday evening Vespers, followed by the ancient rite of forgiveness.

That’s when we line up and stand face-to-face with every member of the church in turn. We bow to them, honoring the presence of Christ in them, and say “Forgive me, my brother (or sister), for all my sins against you.” You put it in your own words, however you want to say it. That person says “I forgive you,” then goes on to say, “And forgive me for all the ways I have sinned against you” (phrasing it however they like.)

Even if there was no deliberate sin aimed against this person, you still ask forgiveness for contributing to the world’s burden of sin. A friend of mine says, “Forgive me for the way my sins pollute the world you have to live in.”

Frederica Mathewes-Green.

I found this helpful, because it has always seemed odd to ask forgiveness of someone I barely know. This idea of needing forgiven for the sort of cosmic effects of sin makes sense of it.

Yes, this implies that there are no “victimless crimes.”

A felicitous pairing

To see ourselves as a smart atheist sees us …

Christianity is a highly adaptable collection of faiths … It can be liberal or conservative or apolitical. It can be hellfire and brimstone or love and forgiveness. It can be whatever it needs to be to survive, [and] it will.

T.J. Kirk a YouTuber for twenty years as “The Amazing Atheist”, via Nick Pompella.

Christianity as a “collection of faiths” ought to jar those of us who are serious Christians, but I can certainly see how an outsider could reach that conclusion. Ecumenical bonhomie and back-slapping do nothing to throw a wet blanket over it.

“It can be whatever it needs to be to survive” also is an understandable conclusion for an atheist who watches the seven sisters jettisoning historic Christian dogmas and sexual morals.

… and as a smart Catholic sees us.

The religious mistake has been to fret over the threat posed by explicitly anti-Christian forces, while ignoring or minimizing the influence that the apostles of pseudo-Christianity exercise over the American soul.

Ross Douthat, Prologue: A Nation of Heretics, in Bad Religion.

Fairly nondescript warehouse-looking buildings

A couple of years ago, my wife and I were driving from our home in rural Illinois to St. Louis. The drive begins with corn fields, but after an hour gives way to the outer ring suburbs commonplace in any major metropolitan area. As we passed an area known mostly for the shopping centers, strip malls, and chain restaurants endemic to suburban sprawl, my wife pointed out a fairly nondescript warehouse-looking building off the highway. It had been freshly painted, and the parking lot had a new coating of asphalt. 

The only thing that made this building stand out was a sign with a generic-looking logo — maybe a tree, maybe hands in prayer — and a single word, “Ascend.” “Is it a church?” my wife asked. We googled it. It wasn’t, as we expected, an upstart, non-denominational church. It was a marijuana dispensary, one of a number of stores cropping up on the Illinois side of the Mississippi as a result of the state’s legalization of recreational weed. We laughed about that for the rest of the drive into the city, sure that we couldn’t be the only ones unable to tell the difference between a new church or a dispensary.

Ryan Burge, The Demons of Non-Denoms

Spoiler alert:

AspectTraditional ReligionNon-Denominational / New Model
Growth TrendDeclining membership and attendanceRapid growth, especially since the 1990s
Organizational StructureHierarchical, denominationalLoosely organized or disorganized
LeadershipCredentialed clergy, seminary-trainedCharismatic entrepreneurs, minimal formal training
Trust in InstitutionHistorically higherInitially low but increasing as they institutionalize
AccountabilityInstitutional oversightOften centered on individuals, risk of abuse
Cultural ImpactCohesive groups like Religious RightFragmented evangelical fiefdoms

Is the Church obsolete?

A church that holds up secularized Christian values as the point of the Christian faith is not a church worth attending—let alone giving money to. So I have great sympathy for those who have stopped going to church or who haven’t bothered to try it. Theologically, I am one of those people who believes that every person needs Jesus—that a person lacks true life without him. But the evidence is in: the people have stopped going, and at the risk of saying the obvious, they have concluded they don’t need to go. They’re not getting anything out of church that they don’t already have. Who can blame them for quitting?

Matthew Burdette, Is the Church Obsolete?

I believe Burdette’s target may have been the mainstream Protestant denominations, but that phrase “secularized Christian values” could be applied to churches that are are unconsciously striving for political power as if it were more important than the Gospel:

A lot of covering up of the churches problems it’s motivated by the idea of that if the world knows the problems, we won’t achieve our real objective, which is political power.

David French on the Russell Moore Show.

Real presence?

It’s been decades since I heard it, but I still can’t shake it. The “it” I heard was a story from the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod, which says it believes in Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist. I am reasonably sure that some other Protestant groups make the same claim, but as they say, “it’s complicated.”

In any event, the LCMS apparently follows the common Protestant practice of serving the blood of Christ (wine) in single-serv plastic cups. A convert to the Orthodox faith from the LCMS recounted what happens after the service.

  1. The remaining single-serv cups’ contents are casually poured back into the bottle in the Church kitchen.
  2. The cups themselves, with some wine residue still present, are thrown in the trash.

I have trouble seeing how this doesn’t mean throwing the blood of Christ into the trash — which surely vitiates the claim that the Church believes Christ is really present.

Your periodic reminder

The shift from church power to state power is not the victory of peaceable reason over irrational religious violence. The more we tell ourselves it is, the more we are capable of ignoring the violence we do in the name of reason and freedom.

William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence

Orthodox Theology

Theology is offered to the glory of God, not ourselves. Since it is divine, it can never be based on human reasoning, ideas, speculation, or clever argumentation. Orthodox theology can never be disconnected from the spiritual life of the theologian or from the life of the Church. Authentic Orthodox theology is “liturgical, doxological and mystical.”

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou , Thinking Orthodox

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 and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

February 16, 2026

Corriging the incorrigible

For some years now, I’ve been tearing my hair out over the faddish dogmas of adolescent gender dysphoria — the dogmas that treated as axiomatic the appropriateness of medical and surgical interventions for kids claiming gender dysphoria, and opposition as genocidal. Let’s try that again: dogmas that insisted on allowing sexual mutilation of kids experiencing some discomfort about their biological sex and that hated and defamed anyone urging caution.

The dogmas seemed incorrigible. And then, just like that, they seem to gotten corriged, or whatever the participle is for corrigible. The turning point appears to have been the Cass Report, which was officially rejected by the U.S. medical establishment but appears to have been tacitly adopted in public discourse and acquiesced in even among the medical establishment.

It doesn’t hurt that there’s been a malpractice verdict against some medical butchers with a $2 million dollar damage award to the breastless female plaintiff.

So, my inner Eeyore sometimes gets stymied by something, somewhere, getting better. Gloria in excelsis deo.

A southern stoic gets religion

In the mid-1950s, Walker Percy’s southern gentry stoicism pointed one way, his new Catholicism another:

“Faith had led him away from the plantation. Philosophy had given faith an intellectual basis and a practical rationale. Far from turning him abstract, as Shelby Foote had warned him it would do, philosophy had coaxed him down off the magic mountain and onto level ground to consider the mortal struggle of everydayness. It emancipated him from his Uncle Will and the scheme of Stoic noblesse oblige. It helped him to solve his own problems and ponder the affairs of the day. It made him, finally, an ordinary man.”

Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own. I can’t put my finger on just why, but I think the short section including this quote was worth the price of the book (and the hours I’ve already spent reading it).

Maybe I just don’t know what time it is

Dreher’s writing is a useful indication of just how angry and pessimistic even the most thoughtful conservatives have become in recent years. He seems to see America as a hellscape, drained of religion and hope, drugged and distracted by the false gods of the internet. The renewal he imagines is not the sunlit, future-oriented conservatism of the Reagan era, and he doesn’t look to the Founding Fathers for inspiration. If anything, Dreher’s compass points in the opposite direction. He wants his country to turn back toward Europe—not the homogenized, secular continent of today but premodern Christian Europe, before the Enlightenment and the disenchantment set in.

…

His greatest admiration is reserved for people who commit themselves to “a fixed place and way of life,” as he wrote about Saint Benedict.

Yet Dreher seems resigned to living as a rootless exile, shorn of his family and condemned to wander a landscape of what the philosopher Zygmunt Bauman—one of Dreher’s favorite thinkers—called “liquid modernity.”

Robert F. Worth, Rod Dreher Thinks the Enlightenment Was a Mistake.

One additional, and very disheartening, item from this story:

But lately Dreher’s insights have come with an ominous political corollary. He believes our institutions are so rotten that they need a good slap from people like Trump and Orbán, even if it means losing some of them. “Maybe what’s being born now will be worse, I dunno,” he wrote as Trump and Elon Musk were using DOGE to dismantle the federal bureaucracy in early 2025. “We’ll see. But bring it on. I’ve had it.”

I quote this to observe that “bring it on” equals “burn it down,” and that glee about burning down institutions because something better might rise from the ashes is the paradigmatic marker of a revolutionary, not a conservative.

Maybe I just don’t know “what time it is.”

Political

I’ve generally been relegating political commentary to “Elsewhere in Tipsyworld,” below. But these are too important.

America’s concentration camps

“A concentration camp exists wherever a government holds groups of civilians outside the normal legal process — sometimes to segregate people considered foreigners or outsiders, sometimes to punish,” Andrea Pitzer writes in “One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps.” Conditions within the administration’s detention facilities certainly meet the bill.

Here’s how a Russian family described its four-month ordeal at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in an interview with NBC News:

“Worms in their food. Guards shouting orders and snatching toys from small hands. Restless nights under fluorescent lights that never fully go dark. Hours in line for a single pill. “We left one tyranny and came to another kind of tyranny,” Nikita said in Russian. “Even in Russia, they don’t treat children like this.”

Or consider this ProPublica exposé of the same facility, focused on the children who have been caught in the administration’s immigration dragnet.

Kheilin Valero from Venezuela, who was being held with her 18-month-old, Amalia Arrieta, said shortly after they were detained following an ICE appointment on Dec. 11 in El Paso, Texas, the baby fell ill. For two weeks, she said, medical staff gave her ibuprofen and eventually antibiotics, but Amalia’s breathing worsened to the point that she was hospitalized in San Antonio for 10 days. She was diagnosed with Covid-19 and RSV. “Because she went so many days without treatment, and because it’s so cold here, she developed pneumonia and bronchitis,” Kheilin said. “She was malnourished, too, because she was vomiting everything.”

…

During the 2024 presidential campaign, I asked readers to think seriously about Trump’s plan to remove millions of people from the United States:

Now, imagine the conditions that might prevail for hundreds of thousands of people crammed into hastily constructed camps, the targets of a vicious campaign of demonization meant to build support for their detention and deportation. If undocumented immigrants really are, as Trump says, “poisoning the blood of our country,” then how do we respond? What do we do about poison? Well, we neutralize it.

What we see now, with the immigration dragnets in American cities and the horrific conditions in the administration’s detention facilities, is what the president promised in his campaign. He said he was going to punish immigrants for being immigrants, and here he is, punishing immigrants for being immigrants, with every tool he has at his disposal.

Jamelle Bouie (gift link)

Are you cool with the concentration camps, Rod?

History Rhymes

With his contempt for elections he did not win, Lenin put an end to all semblance of democratic procedure. He made it clear that he would insist on ruling whether he had popular support or not. The legitimacy of Bolshevik rule was to be based on Marxist theory, not on the sovereignty of the people, and that made a police state ruled by force inevitable.

Jack Matlock, Autopsy on an Empire.

“Why haven’t you killed anyone?”

Several decades ago I realised I had a temper, and I went to see a specialist about this. I didn’t want anger slouching into my approaching parenting. How do you feel the second before you erupt? they asked.

Vulnerable.

That was the gold, that two minute conversation. I’m generally wired now to recognise the state and stay there as long as necessary.

But the red mist comes down and I can’t control it, I said. The specialist looked me right in the eye:

Then why haven’t you killed anyone?

Learnt behaviour. I would go far, but not that far. They showed me I could create a new boundary, and through repetition, walk it into my psyche.

Martin Shaw, storyteller and author of the New York Times bestseller Liturgies of the Wild.

Anti-Zionism versus Antisemitism

There is a difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. I just know there is.

Surely it’s theoretically possible to oppose the state of Israel’s behavior without animus toward Jews per se, right?

Oddly, in the realm of thought experiments, it’s even possible to hate Jews and be pro-Zionist, on the theory that Zion is where all the hated Jews should be sent. (I don’t think I’ve seen this kind of jackalope in the wild.)

But whatever the difference is, I cannot say that the line is “clear” because people keep insisting they (or their ideological allies) are merely anti-Zionist, not anti-Semite when it seems reasonably clear to me that they’re anti-Semites.

With the caveat that I hurt especially for the plight of Palestinian Christians (especially the Orthodox) at the hands of the Israeli government, I’m staying away from either label.

The AI Revolution

Damon Linker is in fairly close alignment with my hunches on AI:

What do you think is likely to follow from tens of millions of white-collar, college-educated workers finding over the coming years that their entire sector of the economy has been fed into a woodchipper? That they are becoming unemployed, are being forced to undertake a job search at roughly the same time as just about everyone else who held similar positions, and must face the reality that their practical, on-the-job experience and skills have become worthless in a workplace transformed by AI?

What will they have to do to make a living? How will they need to reinvent themselves? Will corporate middle managers need to repurpose themselves as nurse’s aides or orderlies, cleaning bedpans and changing soiled sheets? Or go back to school, taking on a second pile of student loans at midlife, to learn a new, more marketable skill? Or will AI be taking over so many jobs that require specialized education that they will be forced to downgrade their expectations still further, to seek out work in the service sector, for dramatically lower pay and status? Or scramble to learn how to use AI and then attempt to make a go of it as some kind of entrepreneur in a marketplace flooded with such self-starters, each trying to devise and market the Next Big Thing that might catapult them into a more comfortable income bracket? A few will do well at this; most will not.

Then this killer footnote:

For those inclined to discount the likelihood of such destabilizing events by predicting the adoption of a Universal Basic Income in the wake of widespread AI-induced job losses, I tend to think this gets the lines of causality wrong. There is no way the rich in this country would tolerate the imposition of tax rates necessary to pay for a UBI unless proverbial or literal guns were pointed at their heads. What I’m describing at the end of this post is the scenario that puts the guns there. Whether a UBI follows from it is another matter ….

Freddie DeBoer, on the other hand, isn’t buying all the revolution talk.

Shorts

  • The Bad Bunny dancing was too sexy, apparently, and also, it was almost entirely in Spanish, so TPUSA planned ahead to make a separate show with nothing sexy at all and everything in the Queen’s English. Which is why they tapped Kid Rock, conservative America’s greatest living artist. (Nellie Bowles)
  • “The ‘woke’ halftime show features a wedding, people dancing joyously and smiling. The conservative alternative was a grayscale grievance fest,” – Corey Walker.
  • Life involves divisions of labor, and conservative values just don’t make for groundbreaking art or incredible sourdough loaves, I don’t know why but it’s just the truth and we all know it. Like how the new conservative-run Kennedy Center is shutting down for two years, since too many artists were flaking. All the people with conservative values are busy at home or the office not doing art. (Nellie Bowles)
  • “Trump is delusional, okay? You need to know this. Trump is sick. He’s a delusional person … I know first-hand from people talking to the president,” – Nick Fuentes via Andrew Sullivan
  • “Small reminder: if you took conservative positions on the Constitution, the economy, foreign policy, or basic morality and then radically changed them solely because a Republican was elected president who changed the party’s positions, you were never really a conservative, you were just a Republican,” – Jonah Goldberg.
  • “My PhD student is being advised left and right to let Claude do her lit review, write her qualifying presentation, summarize the books she needs to read to prepare. She is holding fast to the conviction that this slow, frictionful work is the work she signed on for. Immensely proud of her.” (Sara Hendren on micro.blog) I guess (1) that’s the way of the world today, but (2) there are conscientious objectors.
  • “… a deliriously verbose writer on Substack.” Robert F. Worth, of Rod Dreher, in Worth’s Atlantic article Rod Dreher Thinks the Enlightenment Was a Mistake.

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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 my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

Meatfare Sunday

One week from full Lent. Tomorrow, Orthodox Christians are to cease eating meat until Pascha/Easter.

How last Sunday began for me

A young man paced the sidewalk nervously as I approached Church for Matins. We exchanged names, his sounding middle-eastern.

“I’m an inquirer,” he said. “First time in an Orthodox Church?” “Yes.” “What drew you?”

Notable hesitation, then one word: “Repentance.”

“You picked a good Sunday for that. The theme is the parable of the Prodigal Son. Do you know it?”

“No. I just started reading Matthew.”

(Edited to make me sound slicker than I was.)

So I summarized the parable for him and then left to do my part in the services.

Seldom have we had someone starting with such a “clean slate,” innocent of any knowledge of the faith.

But remarkable, too, that seldom have we had someone give a confident answer that “repentance” is what drew him. That is probably the very best of all possible answers. I don’t know where he got it.

He stayed all three hours through the Divine Liturgy. I think God’s up to something in this young man.

His Catechist will have to change or abandon curricula crafted for Catechumens coming from other Christian traditions, sometimes with deep knowledge of scripture but always with some knowledge.

Speaking of repentance …

Repentance is everything you do to get sin, those inborn passions, out of you. It’s reading, thinking, praying, weeding out disruptive influences in your life, sharing time with fellow Christians, following the guidance of the saints. Repentance is the renunciation of what harms us and the acquisition of what is beneficial to us, writes a holy counselor.

Dee Pennock, God’s Path to Sanity

The full-meal deal

Almost all the good stuff in the spiritual life is risky, but although the Church knows this, she views the risk differently that Protestants do. Traditional forms of Protestantism are risk-averse; their tendency is to view all spiritual risk as impermissible. But the [Orthodox spirit] is that we should embrace all the good stuff while rejecting all the distortions. Don’t let the harmful things frighten you from enjoying the beneficial ones. Don’t let the false doctrines frighten you from embracing the true. From a[n Orthodox] point of view, that would be like cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face.

For example, to avoid unhealthy attitudes toward the dead, an Evangelical will decline to invoke the intercession of the saints at all. To avoid the temptation of drunkenness, a Baptist will use grape juice, not wine, to commemorate the sacrifice of Christ. To avoid the danger of polytheism, an old-fashioned Unitarian will reject the doctrine of the Trinity ….

Adapted from J Budziszewski, who wrote these sentiments about Roman Catholicism rather than Orthodoxy.

This is one of the ways in which Catholicism retains much of the Orthodox spirit.

Thin memory

In churches with thin memory, Christianity quietly reorganizes itself around personalities … Authority is denied in principle and exercised constantly in practice. Someone still decides what matters, what counts as faithful, what gets emphasized—but those decisions are no longer accountable to anything older than the present moment.

When tradition is pushed aside, it doesn’t leave neutrality behind. It leaves a vacuum.

And into that vacuum rush charisma, moral urgency, cultural pressure, and the unspoken anxieties of the age.

…

I didn’t return to the creeds because I wanted certainty. I returned to them because I realized I couldn’t keep pretending faith was a solo project.

… Faith was never meant to be sustained alone. The creeds weren’t written to stifle thought or end conversation. They were written to ensure that what Christians confessed together remained recognizable across time and place.

When we say “I believe” together, we are admitting something deeply unfashionable: belief is not something we invent from scratch. It is something we receive. Something we are carried by when our own confidence runs out.

The Church remembers on our behalf. It holds words steady when our language falters. It confesses truths that do not depend on our clarity, enthusiasm, or emotional health.

…

Tradition does not eliminate authority. It restrains it. It binds teachers and leaders to something older than themselves.

Tradition does not promise certainty. It promises continuity.

Adam Finkney. As always, the caveat that “Mere Orthodoxy” is not an Orthodox site; it is a site full of thoughtful young Calvinistish guys (mostly) who sometimes stumble hearteningly close to the truly old truths.

The Orthodox difference

But how could we ever relate to God or, even more challenging, truly unite with Him? Of all religions, only Orthodox theology emphasizes union with God—in a real and actual sense—as the goal and purpose of all human life. We rarely speak of “going to heaven,” as though it were a destination. We do not speak of experiencing a “beatific vision” of God, as though God could be viewed but remained at some distance from us. Rather, Orthodox Christianity speaks of theosis, the divinization of the human person. We expect, hope, and strive for actual union with the perfect, infinite, eternal, omnipresent, and changeless God. But we are flawed, limited, and come into existence for a brief time; we are confined to one place at one time, and we are constantly changing. So how is union with God possible? The Incarnation, the enfleshment of the Son of God, gave us the ability to truly connect to God and become united with Him, transformed and illumined by Him, not simply because He died for us but because of the way He lived among us.

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

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 and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Sunday of the Prodigal Son

Today is the Sunday of the Prodigal Son, part of the Church’s preparation for Lent.

Hesitating at the threshold

During my years as an Orthodox priest, I have had visitors to my parish who sheepishly told me that they had visited for a number of weeks but had never gotten out of their cars. They came to Church, but could not go in. When I’ve been told such a thing, I understood that I was speaking with someone who had, at last, found the courage to cross the threshold, to take a step beyond the bulwark of unbelief and to risk an encounter with God. They already understood that the consequences of such an encounter would change their lives. That this has been a not uncommon story across the years speaks volumes to me about the perception of Orthodox Christianity.

In Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Mr. Beaver says this about Aslan (the Christ figure) when asked, ‘Is he safe?’:

“Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.”

The great contradiction in Christianity is the claim that Jesus Christ was crucified, dead and buried, and has risen from the dead. It is a supernatural claim that echoes through every sentence of the New Testament. It was the contradiction voiced by every martyr standing before the flames, the sword, the lions, and every wicked form of torture. The tomb was empty. Christ rose from the dead…

“and was seen by Cephas [Peter], then by the twelve. After that He was seen by over five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain to the present, but some have fallen asleep. After that He was seen by James [the Brother of the Lord], then by all the apostles. Then last of all He was seen by me [Paul] also, as by one born out of due time.” (1 Corinthians 15:5–8)

The instinct within us that hungers for the transcendent is not a fluke nor a mistake. It is a whisper (or a shout) that calls us to stand face-to-face before the contradiction of our age. It says, “You are known. You are loved. You have purpose. You have meaning. I’ve been waiting for you.”

Fr. Stephen Freeman (bold added)

Jake sorta gets it

If you want people to be bewildered by church, then church needs to be weird in some way. It does not need to be weird in the way Shaw’s Orthodox parish is. But if church seems to consist largely in confirming people in their priors—either by an explicit endorsing of their political vision, as if Jesus shared their exact politics or through a consumeristic liturgy that is nearly indistinguishable from a fusion of concert and TED talk—then I suspect that even when a sincere seeker stumbles into our church, as Shaw did in his book, that seeker will not find anything that helps them to actually encounter Christ and grow into Christian maturity. The life of the church impedes the life of indulgent self-expression. And as Wendell Berry said long ago, it is the impeded stream that sings.

Jake Meador, reviewing Martin Shaw’s Liturgies of the Wild

As the White House tutors us about the “real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” I’m very glad to be in a church where every Sunday we sing the Beatitudes, which tell us the way blessedness works.

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 and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Sunday of the Publican and Pharisee, 2026

Recommendation

Two guys who know what’s going on in Evangelicalism these days sat down for a chat a few months ago: Russell Moore and David French. I only heard it this past week, and it’s really awfully good. It’s available as a podcast as well as the linked YouTube video.

I’m used to David French as a legal and political commentator, but he’s a pretty darned good observer of his religious milieu — as, of course, is Russell Moore whose life work is pervasively religious.

Sizing things up realistically

On the one hand, I trust in God’s providence.

On the other hand, there was a whole lot about the America I grew up in, and worked in, that I’m going to miss now that it’s gone. I’m reminded of the Brit who said of losing the war something like “I should not be able to number all the things I would miss.”

Here comes the acid test of “I have learned in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content.”

Reading the Riot Act to Social Media “Theologians”

You have to accept that if you only know English and you can only read the Church Fathers and the Bible in translation, you at some point are going to have to … find someone who actually knows the original languages who you trust, and just believe them about what it says.

You don’t have to go learn those languages, but if you’re not going to go and learn those languages, you’re not entitled to an opinion on this … Shut up. Shut up on social media. Stop causing trouble. Stop trying to cause factions in the Church. That’s a sin. That’s a grievous sin … You have to learn before you can teach.

Stole Something? Kill a Goat!.

This blunt quote is directed particularly at Orthodox laymen who argue for substitutionary atonement based on reading the Church Fathers translated, in most instances, by Philip Schaff, a Calvinist Protestant. Substitutionary atonement (Christ in place of me) is not the position of the Orthodox Church (more like Christ on behalf of me — setting aside our different view of “atonement” itself).

But I’m confident that Orthodox Christians aren’t the only autodidact “theologians” quoting Church Fathers from Schaff. I own Schaff’s translations (as I did before becoming Orthodox, I believe). I honor his monumental work in translating so much. Heck, I even honor, in relative terms, the Mercerburg Theology with which he is associated. But I dare not trust him very far.

The least you can do

The man and woman cannot utterly sink who on every seventh day is obliged to appear in decent apparel, and to join with all the standing and respectability of the community in a united act of worship.

David Hacket Fischer, Albion’s Seed. I don’t recall who, or when, or in what region of America, Fischer was quoting, and it doesn’t seem worth looking up.

How do you measure comfort care?

Gonzalez is troubled to learn that the nuns “consistently fail to provide statistics on the efficacy of their work.” But there is no ready yardstick to measure the success of outreach programs to lepers. And how does one measure the efficacy of programs designed to comfort the dying?

Bill Donohue, Unmasking Mother Teresa’s Critics.

There are swaths of reality that are not susceptible to meaningful metrics and statistics. It’s prudent to ask for statistics on some things, yes, but monstrously reductionist to treat as some kind of scam the inability to produce statistics on other things.

Ecumenical Winter

The foremost divides in Western Christendom for some time fell along Protestant and Roman Catholic dividing lines, from the sixteenth century well through the Troubles in Northern Ireland. But today all Christians with even the most basic (creedal) orthodox theology and shared vision of human sexuality, the sanctity of life, and more find themselves as co-belligerents in a struggle with an inhumane and secularizing Western society and progressivist religion. There is far greater good will towards one another for that reason alone than there was in the past five centuries, culminating in cooperation such as Evangelicals and Catholics Together. Gone with the vanishing Protestant Mainline is the milquetoast ecumenism wherein “doctrine divides, service unites.” Here to stay is an emerging ecumenism where the things held in common run to the core of one’s commitments in life and in death.

Joshua Heavin, Confessional Protestantism in Ecumenical Winter

Ancillary reading

The first time I went to India, it was such a shock for me, the different culture, and everything was a new experience for me. I had so much to learn. The second time it was more like everyday life. The main thing I understood the second time was that I didn’t need as many things as I thought. Not at all. I could live with what I could carry in one backpack. With a family, I had thought I needed all that furniture and tables and kitchen equipment and washing machines and a vacuum cleaner. I realized I really can live simply. After that, I thought, I could live exactly this way anywhere.

Andy Courturier, The Abundance of Less

Highly recommended for seeing how life could be different without being worse. Like the Tao Te Ching (directly and through Christ The Eternal Tao), this book helped me see some things more vividly because of the foreign setting.

As the White House tutors us about the “real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” I’m very glad to be in a church where every Sunday we sing the Beatitudes, which tell us the way blessedness works.

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 and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Zaccheus Sunday 2026

Explanation of the title.

History

Theology the authorities can work with

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

The long shadow of Puritanism

Long after Puritans had become Yankees, and Yankee Trinitarians had become New England Unitarians (whom Whitehead defined as believers in one God at most) the long shadow of Puritan belief still lingered over the folkways of an American region.

David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed

Human Rights

Most menacing of all was the United Nations. Established in the aftermath of the Second World War, its delegates had proclaimed a Universal Declaration of Human Rights. To be a Muslim, though, was to know that humans did not have rights. There was no natural law in Islam. There were only laws authored by God.

Tom Holland, Dominion.

That’s pretty terrifying if Holland is correct and if a lot of Muslims are still faithful to that command ethic.

Salvation (“Soteriology”)

Hacking Eternity

I’m glad the authors or editors at Dispatch Faith came up with that “Hacking Eternity” title for a little bit of musing on Scott Adams’ (creator of Dilbert) self-reported deathbed conversion. It’s perfect:

For whatever reason, Adams delayed his conversion … In that January 4 X post, only nine days before his death, Adams said, “So I still have time, but my understanding is you’re never too late.” His final message, read by his first wife after his death, confirmed his plans: “I accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior … I have to admit, the risk-reward calculation for doing so looks so attractive to me. So here I go.”

I cannot categorically rule out the sincerity of Scott Adams’ “conversion,” but with all the Pascal’s wager trappings, and delaying claiming Christ as Lord until the very last minute (when the formulaic Lordship carried no practical meaning, no period of following Christ’s example or commandments) I can’t not put conversion in precatory quotes, either.

I recall one classmate in my Evangelical boarding school who declared his intent to become a Christian some day, but not before he’d whooped it up as much as possible. Last I knew, he was whooping it up at age 50+ with pneumatic wife #2. His declaration was so consistent with the logic of evangelical soteriology (study of salvation) pervasive in that time and place that the only refutations I can recall were:

  1. That he might be murdered, or have a fatal car collision, or otherwise die too suddenly to effectuate his last minute “conversion.”
  2. That refusing salvation for too long risked “hardening of the heart” to where could not repent.

Better would be this, I think, though it would probably be dismissed as “works righteousness”:

Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting.

Galatians 6:7-8.

Yeah, that’s a proof-text, taken without context. But I’d still say it fits.

The current milieu

The denominations

A new era of martyrdom

The Episcopal Church of New Hampshire is ready for frickin’ war. The Episcopalians are amped up. Bishop Rob’s reflection from earlier this month: “We are now, I believe, entering a time, a new era of martyrdom.” Of his priests: “And I’ve asked them to get their affairs in order—to make sure they have their wills written, because it may be that now is no longer the time for statements, but for us with our bodies to stand between the powers of this world and the most vulnerable.” These guys are not kidding around anymore. They are ready to die. And there will be cookies after the sermon.

Nellie Bowles. Bishop Rob’s letter has to be seen to be disbelieved. It features an ecclesiology straight from the lowest-church fever swamps:

As soon as the Christian church became linked to the empire by Constantine in the year 325 or so, the church immediately became corrupt.

(Italics added)

Ummmm, that’s just not credible. I don’t even think that educated clergy of low-church persuasion would defend that if pressed. To hear it from a Bishop of a high church is shocking but evocative. After all, what authority does a corrupt church have to tell Bishop Rob,

a man of profound historical privilege, … one who has made statements that, [he has] to say, have been really good and eloquent,

that he can’t innovate like mad to drive out that millenia-long corruption?

I’m still trying to figure out if “Rob” is his last name or if it’s an aw-shucks affectation. (Googles the question) Of course: it’s affectation.

Ostensibly Protestant; functionally, what?

There is another obvious fact that few denominational Protestants in the SBC or PCA seem willing to admit: The growth in these ostensibly traditional denominations stems almost entirely from the work of the Non-Denom churches. As already mentioned, pan- or pseudo-denominational organizations now own the church planting space. All church plants, to a great extent, utilize the methods and mores of Non-Denom Church. Most no longer even have their host denomination in their names. Therefore, I wager that whatever growth exists in the SBC and PCA is almost entirely the result of the Non-Denom churches growing within the husk of the world of traditional Protestantism.

Casey Spinks, Does Traditional Protestantism Have a Future?

Christianity and nationalism

Christianity does not simply fade away with the rise of nationalism; the process is more one of the reconfiguration of Christian elements to fit within a nationalist framework. When the holy migrates from the church to the nation-state, the church does not disappear but generally takes a supporting role to the creation of national identities.

William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry

The nondenominations

Nondenominational Protestantism

Douthat: Right. But I’m going to ask you to generalize. … For people who aren’t familiar with that world, what is nondenominational Protestantism right now?

Burge: They’re evangelical. Not all of them, but the vast, vast majority are evangelical in their orientation and theology and practice and all the things that we would call evangelical.

One thing is, they’re anti-institutional. They’re anti-authority in a lot of ways. Where does your money go when you put it on the plate? Well, it goes right here. It stays right here in these four walls. So what we’re going to have is a very fragmented Protestant Christianity, where you’ve got a little fiefdom here of 15,000 people in this church, and 20,000 people in this church.

I think the problem is, it’s going to be harder to conceptualize, to measure, to really understand what these groups look like, because now you’ve got these little pockets. You’ve got Joel Osteen in Houston, Texas. He’s an evangelical, but he doesn’t interface with most other evangelicals. You got Paula White down in Florida, whom Trump loves, but she’s Pentecostal and believes in the gifts of the spirit. And other evangelicals, like Franklin Graham, would never talk to Paula White.

You’ve got all these little pockets, and they don’t add up to a cohesive “What is evangelicalism?” In 30 years, that question is going to be almost impossible to answer. Not that it’s easy now, but it’s going to be 10 times harder because of this amorphous nature of nondenominationalism.

Ross Douthat and Ryan Burge (shared link). Ryan Burge is the most interesting social scientist focused on religion that I know. The transcript of his podcast is worth reading in full; I both listened and then read, highlighting heavily.

For my money, “amorphous” and “fiefdom” are the keys to nondenominational evangelicalism, and the two are related. The substantive religious content of the nondenominational religious landscape is amorphous, despite the shared term “evangelical,” because they are individual fiefdoms. The pastors may well be untutored and unorthodox, and they certainly are unaccountable to any higher authority.

But be careful: Burge leaves the impression, inadvertently I think, that these nondenominational churches typically number in the thousands. I’d be surprised if the median number of members or attenders was as high as 200. Burge no doubt would know the numbers on that if asked directly.

Orthopathos

Because of the divorce from the historic Church, Evangelicalism has sought for a new way to satisfy the need for materiality. This is why such believers have welcomed pop music and rock-n-roll into their churches. It is why emotion is mistaken for spirituality. It is why sentiment is substituted for holiness. Sincere feeling is the authenticator. Instead of icons of Christ, whose piercing stare calls you to repentance, the Evangelical can go to a Christian bookstore and buy a soft-focus, long-haired picture of Jesus. He’s a “nice” Jesus, but it is hard to believe that He is God.

Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick, Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy

I bang on a lot about Evangelicalism, my former affiliation, and specifically about the difficulty of defining it so as to be able to say “no, that’s not evangelical.” Ken Myer, founder of Mars Hill Audio Journal, once offered the possibility that while evangelicals don’t really share a coherent common doctrine, an orthodoxy, that they do share a common feeling or sentiment, an “orthopathos.”

Christianity Today

Sometime within the past year, I subscribed to Christianity Today. It is a magazine whose founding described it as “A fortnightly journal of evangelical persuasion” or something very like that.

I thought very highly of it. Just as I was an Intervarsity Christian Fellowship guy instead of a Campus Crusade for Christ guy, so I was a CT guy instead of a Moody Monthly guy. I even wrote a very cringe item they published. (I’ll give you no further hints whereby to unearth it.)

By and large, CT today has been a big disappointment, and I do not intend to renew.

The main part of the disappointment has been less the content of their articles (which certainly need a critical filter for evangelical bias), but the banality (it seems to me) of the topics of their articles. We’re just not remotely on the same wavelength any more. This “dumbing down” began nearly 50 years ago, and even then I took that as a sign that the evangelical appetite for chewing on meaty topics was waning.

But Thursday past, they finally floated on their RSS feed a story the topic and timeliness of which got my attention: How to Know If You’re Growing in Patience—or Just Giving Up.

Yes, it should be “whether” instead of “if,” but I’ll not dwell on that. It just seems to me as we, to whatever degree, watch the ICE terrorism and murders in Minneapolis, powerless to do anything, the spiritual line between patience (with prayer and trust in God’s providence) and giving up is an important one.

Jaw-dropping nadir

Majorities of white evangelicals favor deporting undocumented immigrants to foreign prisons in El Salvador, Rwanda, or Libya without allowing them to challenge their deportation in court (57 percent), and approve of placing immigrants who have entered the country illegally in internment camps (53 percent).

“It has become virtually impossible to write a survey question about immigration policy that is too harsh for white evangelicals to support,” Robert P. Jones, the president of the Public Religion Research Institute, recently wrote.

Tobias Cremer is a member of the European Parliament. His book The Godless Crusade argues that the rise of right-wing populism in the West and its references to religion are driven less by a resurgence of religious fervor than by the emergence of a new secular identity politics. Right-wing populists don’t view Christianity as a faith; rather, Cremer suggests, they use Christianity as a cultural identity marker of the “pure people” against external “others,” while in many cases remaining disconnected from Christian values, beliefs, and institutions.

…

The Trump administration has gone one step further, inverting authentic Christian faith by selling in a dozen different ways cruelty and the will to power in the name of Jesus. It has welcomed Christians into a theological twilight zone, where the beatitudes are invoked on behalf of a political movement with authoritarian tendencies. This isn’t the first time in history such things have happened.

…

Huge numbers of American fundamentalists and evangelicals—not just cultural Christians, but also those who faithfully attend church and Bible-study sessions and prayer gatherings—prefer the MAGA Jesus to the real Jesus. Few of them would say so explicitly, though, because the cognitive dissonance would be too unsettling. And so they have worked hard to construct rationalizations. It’s rather remarkable, really, to see tens of millions of Christians validate, to themselves and to one another, a political movement led by a malignant narcissist—who is driven by hate and bent on revenge, who mocks the dead, and who delights in inflicting pain on the powerless. The wreckage to the Christian faith is incalculable, yet most evangelicals will never break with him. They have invested too much of themselves and their identity in Trump and what he stands for.

Peter Wehner

Sacraments or notions?

Christianity that has purged the Church of the sacraments, and of the sacramental, has only ideas to substitute in their place. The result is the eradication of God from the world in all ways other than the theoretical.

Fr. Stephen Freeman, Everywhere Present

Orthodoxy

Rescue

He is Jesus, the name chosen before his birth. The angel spoke separately to Mary and Joseph, and told them that the baby’s name would be Jesus, “because he will save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21). The name Jesus means, in Hebrew, “God will save.” When Gabriel says “he will save his people” the Greek verb sozo means “save” as in rescue, like “saved you from drowning.” That kind of “saved,” not “intervened and paid your debt.”

I had been a Christian decades before it occurred to me that this means Jesus can rescue us from our sins, not merely from the penalty for our sins. He can free us from the sins themselves. We will still fail over and over to take his outstretched hand and be lifted from the mire. We like mire. But he can do it, and make us not merely debt-free in his Father’s sight, but transformed and filled with his light.

Frederica Matthewes-Green

Repentance

Repentance is everything you do to get sin, those inborn passions, out of you. It’s reading, thinking, praying, weeding out disruptive influences in your life, sharing time with fellow Christians, following the guidance of the saints. Repentance is the renunciation of what harms us and the acquisition of what is beneficial to us, writes a holy counselor.

Dee Pennock, God’s Path to Sanity

A glimpse into an Orthodox mind

The Protoevangelium of James is not a text that itself holds a position of authority in the life of the Church. Indeed, the West formally rejected it well before the Great Schism. Nevertheless, the Church preserved the text through centuries of copying and recopying. It stands as the earliest written witness to the antiquity of a number of important traditions related to the New Testament Scriptures regarding the lives of the Theotokos, St. James, and their family. The Protoevangelium of James did not originate these traditions, nor does it provide their authority. Their authoritative form exists in the liturgical life of the Church, in hymnography and iconography.

Fr. Stephen DeYoung, Apocrypha (bold added).

All the well-educated Orthodox teachers agree on this. If you hear an Orthodox layman answer “How do you know that?” with “We get it from the Protoevangelium of James,” know that s/he’s got that backwards.

Darkness and Light

As Stephen Wormtongue Miller pronounces from the White House that the way the world works is by force, I’m very glad to be in a church where every Sunday we sing the Beatitudes, which tell us the way blessedness works.

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

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

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

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Thursday, 1/22/26

Political Theory

The next two items, though illustrated by our present political circumstances, are intended to make points that will continue to be important in new circumstances.

Integrity matters

The health of the American experiment rests far more on the integrity of any given American president than we realized.

We trusted that presidents would impose accountability on the executive branch. We trusted that presidents wouldn’t abuse their pardon power — or, if they did, then Congress could impeach and convict any offenders. And so we manufactured doctrine after doctrine, year after year, that insulated the executive branch from legal accountability.

It’s hard to overstate how much this web of immunities — combined with the failure of Congress to step up and fulfill its powerful constitutional role — has made the United States vulnerable to authoritarian abuse.

In Federalist No. 51, James Madison wrote some of the most famous words of the American founding. “If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” Madison wrote. “If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

David French (shared link)

The Prerogative State

The David French column continues. I broke it in two because I thought it was important, once again, to warn against ever again electing high officials of such low character.

But there’s a specific ramification I hadn’t identified:

[Y]ou can see the emerging dual state in action in Minneapolis right now. In much of the city, life is routine. People create new businesses, enter into contracts, file litigation and make deals as if life were completely normal and the rule of law exists, untainted by our deep political divide.

But if you interact with ICE, suddenly you risk coming up against the full force of the prerogative state. One of the most heartbreaking aspects of the ICE agent’s video of the fatal encounter between Renee Good and ICE is that it’s plain that Good thinks she’s still in the normative state. She has no idea of the peril she’s in.

She seems relaxed. She even seems to have told the agent that she’s not mad at him. In the normative state, your life almost never depends on immediate and unconditional compliance with police commands.

But she wasn’t in the normative state. She had crossed over the border to the prerogative state, and in that state you can be shot dead recklessly, irresponsibly and perhaps even illegally, and no one will pay the price. You might even be rewarded with more than $1 million in donations from friends and allies.

David French (shared link)

Competing, revealing, metaphors

In February … I spoke at a gathering of conservatives in London called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship …

As the conference went on, I noticed a contest of metaphors. The true conservatives used metaphors of growth or spiritual recovery. Society is an organism that needs healing, or it is a social fabric that needs to be rewoven. A poet named Joshua Luke Smith said we needed to be the seeds of regrowth, to plant the trees for future generations. His incantation was beatitudinal: “Remember the poor. Remember the poor.”

But others relied on military metaphors. We are in the midst of civilizational war. “They”—the wokesters, the radical Muslims, the left—are destroying our culture. There were allusions to the final epochal battles in The Lord of the Rings. The implication was that Sauron is leading his Orc hordes to destroy us. We are the heroic remnant. We must crush or be crushed.

The warriors tend to think people like me are soft and naive. I tend to think they are catastrophizing narcissists. When I look at Trump acolytes, I see a swarm of Neville Chamberlains who think they’re Winston Churchill.

David Brooks, I Should Have Seen This Coming, April, 2025.

Occasionally, I achieve a complete mind-meld with Brooks. This was one of those times, at least for the first third of his article; after that, he notes some things that I hadn’t noticed until he pointed them out.

Sanctuary City primer

So-called “sanctuary cities” and “sanctuary states” choose not to assist the federal government in finding or deporting illegal aliens, and they have a constitutional right to make that choice.

What does noncooperation look like on the ground? A flash point involves immigration detainer orders, which call on state and local law enforcement agents to transfer into ICE custody illegal aliens who are about to be released from state custody.

…

The administration says that Minnesota is refusing to honor ICE detainers and has released hundreds of illegal aliens “onto the streets” instead of turning them over to ICE. Minnesota denies this accusation and insists that it’s honoring all immigration detainers.

Whichever side is correct, federal courts have held that ICE detainers issued to state agencies are “requests,” not “orders.” …

…

The federal government does have a mechanism for getting states and cities to voluntarily do what they can’t be forced to do. It’s called money. Congress could deny states or cities certain funds unless they abolish their sanctuary policies. There are limits to this strategy: Washington can’t shut off unrelated funds that states or cities need to keep functioning. But immigrant-related federal funding—for example, money devoted to sheltering new, legal immigrants—could presumably be denied to states and cities that maintain sanctuary policies.

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump declared that after February 1, “We are not making any payments to sanctuary cities or states having sanctuary cities.” But while Congress could condition state and local funding on cooperation with ICE, the president’s powers are more limited. Trump has tried this strategy before. Both in his first term and second, he issued executive orders calling for sanctuary states and cities to be denied federal monies. Except in narrow circumstances, courts have not been receptive, holding that without congressional approval, the president could not unilaterally deny states money that Congress had already appropriated for them.

Jed Rubenfeld

The name “Sanctuary City” has always struck me as a bit preening, but the principle that that cities and states are not (normally, though if there are exceptions, I can’t think of one) obliged to assist in enforcement of federal law or in advancement of federal priorities. A non-immigration example is marijuana legalization by the states, whereas marijuana remains illegal in national law. If and when the DEA comes to bust up a dispensary, local officials presumably won’t help, but the principle doesn’t allow them to interfere, either.

Of being a conservative radio talk-show host back in the day

So for years, when someone sent me something that was a conspiracy theory, or false, or just misleading or unfair, I would be able to push back and say “this is not true; there are not bodies stacked up in the Clinton warehouses; no this is not happening over here,” and people would say “thank you, Charlie for setting me straight” …

[I]n 2015 and 2016, what I found, very gradually but very forcefully, was that it became harder and harder to push back; it became harder and harder to give them any information that would change their mind.

And that’s when I realized that we had been too successful, that we had destroyed all the immune system to false information, to this kind of propaganda. And this was kind of an “Oh, shit!” moment for me.

Charlie Sykes, interviewed by Andrew Sullivan.

Morality, Law and Religion

The public should be absolutely concerned about whether a nominee for judicial office will be willing and able to set aside personal preferences. That’s not a challenge just for religious people. That’s a challenge for everyone.

Amy Coney Barrett (italics added)

Pet peeve: The idea that “separation of church and state” requires religious public officials and employees to set aside their religious beliefs when conducting public business. The tacit message in that is either that (1) morality and law are completely separate or (2) that religion is inherently irrational whereas other moral beliefs are not. In truth, there is no neutral, preference‑free judicial standpoint, and the available standpoints all are larded with moral intuitions that either can be accused of irrationality.

Yes, I have advocated in public meetings where I wished that others on “my side” would shut up if all they had to contribute was dubiously-applicable Bible proof-texts. But those kinds of folks never get nominated for any federal bench, and they’d be eaten alive if they were.

Consequences

The yield spread between three-month Treasury bills and 10-year bonds has widened by some 0.6 percentage points since early November. “The Fed may want lower interest rates, but the market ain’t buying it,” said Willian Adler, an Elliott Wave technical analyst.

He warns that the conditions are in place for a serious sell-off across risk assets. It could be similar to the bond rout that spooked Trump after the “liberation day” tariffs.

This rising spread may simply reflect fears of resurgent inflation as front-loaded stimulus from the “one big beautiful bill” juices the economy over the coming months, with the risk of full-blown overheating if Trump hands out $2,000 a head as a pre-electoral bribe.

But it may also be the first sign that America is starting to pay a price for the collapse of political credibility.

(Telegraph UK via John Ellis)

Unpopular opinions

I keep a private list of my truly unpopular opinions – opinions so far outside the Overton Window that I could lose friends if I voiced them.

I review and supplement the list occasionally, but never before have I decided that something doesn’t belong on the list any more (or maybe never belonged on it in the first place). This one probably never belonged on the list:

1. Subsidies for pro sports, including stadium construction, are damnable boondoggles. I would vote against every one of them until the franchise-owning billionaires ran me out of office.

While I’m at it, these too can come off the list:

2. Abolitions I supported that may well have hurt America:

  • The military draft Politicians who have anything to do with war policy should have skin in the game, even if it’s the skin of their descendants.
  • The Fairness Doctrine. We opened Pandora’s box before cable TV and the internet obliterated it. I don’t see a way back to sanity through reinstating the policy.

While I’m on a roll, here’s one that’s never been on the list:

3. The states should stop running primary elections. Neither major party is worth the powder to blow it up. Let them run their own elections or go back to “smoke-filled rooms” (which incidentally yielded better candidates than crackpot “base voters” have been yielding).

Logic mincing

Q: Which is better: a ham sandwich or complete happiness in life?
A: A ham sandwich, of course! Nothing is better than complete happiness in life and a ham sandwich is better than nothing.

  1. Something must be done!
  2. This is something.
  3. This must be done!

Shorts

  • No one is really working for peace unless he is working primarily for the restoration of wisdom. The assertion that “foul is useful and fair is not“ is the antithesis of wisdom. (E.F. Shumacher) Small Is Beautiful is a classic for good reason.
  • The national emergency is avoiding a national emergency. (Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, citing the president’s authority to impose tariffs in an economic emergency, arguing that America’s supposed need to control Greenland is a national emergency.)
  • The health of the American experiment rests far more on the integrity of any given American president than we realized. (David French)
  • The pervasiveness of legal sports gambling can make an undefeated season and a 6-point victory in the national championship game feel like a loss if “the margin” was 7.5. (Moi)
  • At some point, we’ll reach the bottom of this dystopian populist abomination, but no one thinks we’re there yet, do they? (Nick Catoggio)
  • “The Trump Denmark letter is his Biden debate moment,” one Twitter user claimed.
  • Donald Trump is a peacock among the dull buzzards of American politics. (Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium).
  • A clown with a flame thrower still has a flamethrower. (Charlie Sykes to Andrew Sullivan)
  • When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow. (Ursula K. Le Guin)
  • TikTok is still a danger. America no longer cares.
  • The souvenir is a fetish object that substitutes for the finite experience of the destination. (William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

A devil is no less a devil if the lie he tells flatters you and stands to help you defeat your enemies and achieve power.

Rod Dreher

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 my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

Sunday, 1/18/26

Ecclesiology 101

  • When Cardinal Newman was asked at a dinner party why he became a Catholic, he responded that it was not the kind of thing that can be properly explained between soup and the fish course.
  • 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.
  • Across the street from the parsonage of St. John’s [Missouri Synod Lutheran Church] was an evangelical Protestant church. Also across the street lived my best friends, the Spooner brothers, who with their devoutly Catholic family attended St. Columkil’s Cathedral. I am sure it was unarticulated but self-evident to me by the time I was five years old that St. John’s and the cathedral had more in common than either had with the evangelical chapel. For one immeasurably momentous thing, our churches baptized babies. Then too, our being saved was something that God did through His Church; it was a given, a gift. It did not depend—as it did for Dougy Cahill, our evangelical friend—upon feelings or spiritual experience. It depended upon grace bestowed through things done.

Richard John Neuhaus

Trendiness

One thing I’ve never quite understood about our Evangelical friends is why they are so susceptible to trendiness. A reader of this blog with whom I corresponded earlier this year told me that she and her family recently left their Evangelical megachurch to join an Orthodox congregation. A big part of it was that the church fell all over itself trying to accommodate the Next Big Thing in worship trends, and theological trends, to keep growing the church, and to keep people interested so they wouldn’t leave. Discipleship was neglected, and theologically, it became decadent. Though my correspondent is non-white, she became frustrated at how this multicultural megachurch’s leaders began putting race consciousness at the center of that congregation’s life. But then, that’s the contemporary trend.

Rod Dreher

Mile wide, inch deep

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

Fr. Lawrence Farley

Counter-hegemonic thinking

The dominant system today is built on analysis. And it’s worth remembering that the root meaning of analysis is the reduction of things into parts.

Holistic thinking, in contrast, is always inherently Romantic. You can also call this visionary thinking.

Ted Gioia’s Substack is consistently good. Sometimes it’s great, as in 25 Propositions about the New Romanticism, which he made a public post.

This is one of the best things I’ve read in a long while – an unironic analysis of our tendency to analyze everything to death (“we murder to dissect”).

Iain McGilchrist would approve.

(And no, I don’t think this is out of place in a Sunday post. Getting caught up in rationalistic analysis of everything is spiritually stultifying.)

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

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

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

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Sunday, 1/11/26

Quitting First Things

I think I’m a charter subscriber to First Things. I was following Richard John Neuhaus’s publication from the Rockford Institute before he started First Things and was on board soon if not immediately. I’ve been a subscriber ever since.

But I’m quitting. Part of it is that the magazine has too much MAGA in its leadership these days. Time may prove Rusty Reno right and me wrong, but I’m not going to wait for it or subordinate my judgment to his..

I think another part is that I’ve moved on. I was Reformed when First Things started; I’ve been Orthodox now for 28+ years. When I was Reformed, the catholicity of First Things was a sort of tonic; now, it varies from “Yawn!” to too Latin Catholic. (The MAGA these days is less tonic, more burr-under-the-saddle.)

The renewal form went in the bin just before I typed this paragraph.

I suspect I’ll get more from Plough, which has been pretty ascendant these days. Maybe even more catholic, which if true of an Anabaptist-grounded publication, would be an interesting twist.

Enchantment in Religion

Taylor says that enchantment is essential to some forms of religion, but not to others, such as Christianity that has gone through Reform, in both its Protestant and Catholic varieties. Such kinds of religion have gone from being more embodied to being more in the mind; they have changed but not disappeared.

William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry

Bodiless Angels

It is not therefore a contradiction that Orthodox Tradition often calls the angels “bodiless,” but we should understand bodiless to be in comparison to human beings. In comparison to God, they are embodied. While we do not understand what angelic bodies are or how they work, nor can we see them as they truly are, angels nevertheless have form, limitation, and location, which are known to God.

Frs. Andrew Stephen Damick and Stephen DeYoung, The Lord of Spirits

Confession

When I became a Catholic in 1993, I was frightened about confession. After the first one, though, I loved it. I tend to be a man who perseverates on his sins. I wouldn’t say that I’m guilty of what Catholics call “scrupulosity” — a pathological obsession with one’s sins — but I do think a lot about my moral failures. After I had come to believe in Christ, but before I was a Catholic, I would ask God for forgiveness, but would torment myself with “How do you really know you were forgiven?”

It is possible that God forgave me the moment I asked, seeing the sincerity in my heart. But I couldn’t know that, and me being me, I worried about this all the time. What the rite of confession did, on a purely psychological level, was free me of that worry. When I would go to confession, as I did every two or three weeks, I could leave the confessional certain that I had been forgiven. That is so, so powerful — the deed, which has sacramental power, released me at a purely psychological level.

I carried this over with me into Orthodoxy, which I joined twenty years ago. It turns out that Orthodoxy today takes confession more seriously than contemporary Catholicism does ….

Rod Dreher.

We converts to liturgical Christianity, it seems, come at things from different directions. I wondered about whether I was forgiven because habitual sinning suggested that my episodic repentance was mostly an effort to avoid consequences, lacking meaningful resolve to stop. The resolve to stop finally came early in my pilgrimage to Orthodoxy, proximately caused by an epiphany upon re-reading C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce, not some canonical Orthodox source.

Apophasis Today

Five years ago today, I was baptised. It was an icy cold day, the ground covered in hoar frost, and I was due to walk in to the River Shannon to be reborn. The covid pandemic was raging, and officially we probably shouldn’t even have been outside, but one reason I chose to enter the Orthodox church is that they have their priorities right. Christ comes first: everything else then falls into place.

So I went under the water three times, and when I came out I was an Orthodox Christian, swimming in a stream of wisdom and truth that is two millennia old. I came out unable to speak, for reasons both spiritual and physical. A dip in the Shannon in January will generally do that to you.

I could say a lot about what has happened since then – I have said a lot on this Substack – but I could also say nothing and it would perhaps mean as much. Words have their uses and their limits. God is not heard in whirlwind or thunder, but as a still, small voice.

Paul Kingsnorth.

I love “I could … say nothing and it would perhaps mean as much.”

Occasionally, I envy pagan converts a teensy-weensy bit because of the vividness of their experience. The fact is, I remember nothing significant from before “I asked Jesus into my heart” as a very young child (maybe 5, but younger I think), after however few years of living with parents who had something more like Kingsnorth’s experience between the War and my birth.

Chinese Evangelicals becoming Orthodox

ThemeDescription
Intellectual SearchAcademic study leads to discovery of early church history and theological depth missing in evangelicalism.
Spiritual HabitsEmphasis on habitual prayer and spiritual discipline over emotional spontaneity.
Historical ContinuityDesire for connection to a faith rooted in the first millennium of Christianity.
Ecclesial FragmentationConcern about diversity and lack of unity in Protestantism leads some to seek Orthodoxy’s consistency.
Personal TransformationConversion results in deeper spiritual formation rather than rejection of previous faith.
Social ChallengesConverts face varying responses within their communities, including misunderstanding.

I can’t personally say that’s how it’s happening in China, but it’s similar to my own experience, converting from Evangelical-adjacency to Orthodoxy, and the source of the article the chart summarizes is Christianity Today, which isn’t exactly carrying water for Eastern Orthodoxy.

January 4, 2026

Rationality

If you believe that all reactions ought to be ‘rational’, which means open to examination by calculative reason, then all reactions which stem from felt intuition, but which reason has trouble explaining, are at a disadvantage. This explains why a mystic will never win a debate with an atheist: he may have a truth on his side, but it will not be demonstrable through anything other than personal experience, and that doesn’t count. Therefore, he loses.

Paul Kingsnorth, In the Black Chamber.

I understand why we developed a social convention that one is only obligated to believe things that can be rationally proven. But I do not understand the irrational corollaries that one is barely permitted to believe what one cannot rationally prove and certainly may not try to persuade others of it.

I don’t think those corollaries are straw men, but I have no rational proof at hand that they’re real.

(Yes, I’ve been reading Iain McGilchrist again.)

Vainglory

One person seeks to be admired for the clothes he is wearing; another seeks the same admiration in priestly vestments. One wishes to be admired for singing on stage, another for chanting in church. One wants to be thought of as tough and cool, another as prayerful and humble. It is the same vainglory in them all.

Vassilios Papavassiliou, Thirty Steps to Heaven

More Anecdata

A congregation that is overflowing. On Christmas Eve morning we baptized 25 adults and 2 babies. We borrowed a second adult-size immersion “font” (actually, a Rubbermaid cattle trough) from a neighboring church, and the two priests just kept baptizing side-by-side till they got through them all.

Also, you can see that the majority of the baptized, wearing white, are young. This is going on all over the country. It’s a fine time to be Orthodox, just as a wave is rising. It’s not always been this way in the past, and may not always be this way in days to come; but right now, it’s pretty terrific.

Via Frederica Matthewes-Green, whose husband is the retired priest of the parish.

Monks and Nuns on Iona

Iona remained a place of pilgrimage, until the Protestant Reformation snuffed out its monastic life. The abbey was dissolved, and its traditions dispersed.

The Monk Bringing Orthodox Christianity to an Island at the Edge of the World.

Nothing makes me angrier at the Protestant Reformation than two sentences like this, which recur depressingly in history.

Orthodox Christianity is the branch of the Christian faith that split from Roman Catholicism in the Great Schism of 1054.

Nothing makes me angrier at lazy journalists than a sentence like this, which recurs depressingly in stories about Orthodox Christianity.

The Orthodox side had four patriarchs. The Roman Catholic side had one patriarch, who had increasingly claimed supremacy over the four others. Prima facie, if you know nothing but that, who’s likelier to have been schismatic: the one or the four?

The Journalist even knows better, though he hasn’t bothered connecting the dots:

[Orthodox Christianity] retains the early creeds, sacraments, and saints of Western Christianity; but where the Western faith has diverged, its theology, liturgy, and rhythms of life have remained unchanged.

UPDATE: I left a thought hanging. The second sentence makes me angry because the Protestant Reformation sometimes bore an uncanny resemblance to ISIS, destroying anything “religious” it didn’t understand, including genuine and venerable Christian practices and symbols its bad religion disallowed. See Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580.

Reaching the lost as a journeyman trade

Finney’s Lectures on Revivals of Religion (1835), which is discussed at greater length below in chapter 15, was important for summarizing a new approach toward reaching the lost. Since God had established reliable laws in the natural world and since humans were created with the ability to discern those laws, it was obvious that the spiritual world worked on the same basis. Thus, to activate the proper causes for revivals was to produce the proper effects: “The connection between the right use of means for a revival and a revival is as philosophically [i.e., scientifically] sure as between the right use of means to raise grain and a crop of wheat. I believe, in fact, it is more certain, and there are fewer instances of failure.”

Because the world spiritual was analogous to the world natural, observable cause and effect must work in religion as well as in physics. The wine of revival—confidence in God’s supernatural ability to convert the sinner—may have looked the same in antebellum America as it had in earlier centuries, but the wineskin was of recent manufacture.

Mark A. Noll, America’s God.

This account of Finney’s stunningly presumptuous theory of revival is in a section of Noll’s book titled “Assumptions and Assertions of American Theology.” I strongly suspect that this theory is how we got the foregrounding of manipulative rhetorical technique:

  • The rising and falling of the preaching voice; the shouting followed by the whisper
  • dimmed lights
  • “every head bowed and every eye closed” altar calls,
  • saccharine music (The Savior is waiting to enter your heart was the biggie in my teenage years)
  • and the rest.

If manipulating people to an emotional climax, to get insta-saved, is your metric for “revival,” I suppose Finney was right. But I’ve lived too long and seen to much to think that such manipulated response is in any very meaningful sense a conversion to Christian faith. The wiser course is the Orthodox catechumenate.

What St. John Chrysostom knew that Jefferson Davis wanted to forget

Chrysostom’s Homilies posed problems for slaveholders, as elsewhere in this work the bishop instructed Christians to educate their slaves and manumit them as soon as possible.

Paul Gutacker, The Old Faith in a New Nation. I had never heard of St. John Chrysostom until I entered an Orthodox Church for a Sunday observance of his Liturgy. He was perhaps the greatest preacher in Christian history — in the 4th century.

Credit where credit is due: though Gutacker is neither Orthodox nor Roman Catholic, he knows of Chrysostom.

Is Christianity a Religion?

I recall the formulation, uttered many times in my presence (or written many times in sources I read), that “Christianity is not a religion; it’s a relationship.”

As best as I can recall, I thought that was facile, though not entirely worthless, and was formulated in response to a then-current cultural bias that religion was bad (which bias I think I never shared).

But here’s a weightier explanation of why Christianity is not a religion:

Nowhere in the New Testament, in fact, is Christianity presented as a cult or as a religion. Religion is needed where there is a wall of separation between God and man. But Christ who is both God and man has broken down the wall between man and God. He has inaugurated a new life, not a new religion.

Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World

Schismatic

Unlike immediately after the Protestant Reformation, almost all Christians today are happy to affirm that Protestants or Catholics or the Orthodox are truly Christians—and are thereby burdened to explain why their differences actually matter. The partial success but overall failure of the modern ecumenical movement has meant that many members of churches, especially Protestant, have become fundamentally post-denominational in their outlook. When churches can acknowledge that other churches from whom they are separated are equally valid as Christian churches, but don’t overcome the actual divisions, the unintended message is that the divisions are evidently not so theologically important after all, and the result is a church culture of consumer choice about where to worship and what to believe. But a faith decision based on preference is no faith decision at all—it permits no authority. The agony of those with faith is to respond to authority in this situation of choice.

Matthew Burdette, Zero Gravity. I struggled with “the unintended message is that the divisions are evidently not so theologically important after all.” It seemed to me that the unintended message is that that divisions are important — almost like we’re just being polite when we acknowledge that other traditions are Christian, too. But he said “that the divisions are … not so … important,” not “that doctrine is not important.” We’re too dismissive of the grave sin of schism seems to be his meaning.

I’m going to forego my temptation to theorize why we’re dismissive of schism.

No, on second thought, I’m going to give the short answer: we’re “making a virtue of necessity.” We can’t stop doing it, and we’re good people, aren’t we? So how can it be all that bad?

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

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

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

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.