Category: Faith & Ideology

Sunday, October 1, 2023

Let my prayer arise

We read, “Let my prayer arise in your sight as incense,” but what we hear is, “Let the incense be like my prayer…” In the inverted world of modernity, ideas are considered spiritually “real,” while actions and rituals are somehow suspect. “If incense is like prayer, then perhaps it is legitimate,” we reason. And this is precisely how its use is often explained to those who ask.

But this reasoning inverts the Scriptures themselves. For the writer of Psalm 141, the offering of incense to the Lord is spiritual reality. It is an obedience to the command of God and a fulfillment of His divine will. It is “prayer” that is suspect – so much so that he must ask that his prayer be accepted in the same manner as incense.

During the early Roman persecutions of the Christian Church, among the most common demands made of Christians was that of the offering of incense before the image of the Emperor. It was perceived as an act of worship – an honor that belonged to a god. Christians did not disagree with this interpretation – and chose martyrdom instead. The modern Christian would today argue, “But it’s only incense.”

What our thoughts betray is a deep disconnect between the material world and the world of our thoughts. Ideas, with all of their abstract qualities, are seen as the stuff of reality, while material things are somehow superficial and devoid of content. What matters for us is not matter itself – but the ideas that we associate with it. Thus nothing has any inherent meaning – only imputed meaning. Things are only valuable and important because we think they are.

Fr. Stephen Freeman, The Sweet Smoke of Prayer

Excarnation

As Western culture has shifted its focus inward, toward disengaged reason, [Charles] Taylor sees a parallel move within Christianity—a move from embodied forms of religious worship to those in which religion is essentially something that only happens in your head.

Alan Noble, Disruptive Witness. See the preceding item, too.

Foreshadowing

May your roots go down deep into the soil of God’s marvelous love; and may you be able to feel and understand, as all God’s children should, how long, how wide, how deep, and how high his love really is; and to experience this love for yourselves, though it is so great that you will never see the end of it or fully know or understand it. And so at last you will be filled up with God himself.

For whatever reason, this passage, in that very translation, became my favorite during High School. The ethos is different enough from bog standard Evangelicalism, and close enough to Orthodoxy, that I see it now as a foreshadowing of what took a bit more than 30 more years to begin resume in earnest.

Crypto-baptists

According to legend, Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate, having failed to suppress Christianity, at his death uttered: “Thou has conquered, oh thou Galilean.”

Nobody has ever tried to suppress Baptists in America since colonial church establishments were overthrown.  But the Baptists and the non-denominationals who are mostly Baptist in all but name have indeed conquered. Nearly every other branch of U.S. Christianity is shrinking. The Baptist ethos is prevailing.  That ethos includes independent churches governed congregationally with pastors ordained by their congregations with a spiritual authority, believers’ baptism instead of infant baptism, the centrality of pulpit preaching, deemphasis on liturgy, typically more contemporary in worship, and more often than not, affirming once saved, always saved, precluding a fall from grace.

Mark Tooley, Thou Has Conquered, Oh Thou Baptists

“Small-B baptists” is what I’ve called non-baptist Evangelicals for decades now.

Is there any such thing as a non-evangelical non-denominational church? I’m not sure I’ve ever seen such a thing.

Ordinary Glory

[W]hat use is a religion that only produces characters in history books? Was there not room for more ordinary glory? Civil rights activists inspired me, but the people who changed my life were regular members of my congregation.

…

My mother recently purchased about an acre of land on the plantation where many of the Black Bones lived and died. She got it for around $500 because it was the slave burial site. Their bodies, never finding rest on land owned by others, now repose on land purchased by their descendants. We hold it in trust for them as their due. If the hope of Christians is true and there is a indeed a resurrection of the dead, they will emerge from those graves as free people, and their last moments on this side of the new creation will be spent on their own soil. That is a hope worthy of my allegiance.

Esau McCaulley, Why I Am Still a Christian

European Values

A reference to Christianity as an important part of European identity in the Preamble to the EU Constitutional Treaty provoked such an angry reaction that it had to be dropped as allegedly incongruent with what the EU calls “European values.” Even acknowledging the historical role of the Christian heritage is now thought too extravagant to be tolerated.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy

Dubious decision

Recently, Ancient Faith has announced that it will be discontinuing its blog publishing ministry in order to concentrate on other areas.

Fr. Stephen Freeman

More evidence that I’m a dinosaur. I plan to continue blogging, and wish that Ancient Faith would continue its blog publishing ministry as well.

I question Ancient Faith’s judgment at times: for instance, what improvement is it to add to a wonderful audio teaching or Bible study podcast by turning it into a YouTube of — wait for it! —the podcaster sitting in her study with headphone, boom mike, computer screen and notes? Seriously?

The Devil probably didn’t make you do it

I do believe, like billions of the world’s Christians, in the existence of the Devil. But it is precisely those who have believed in such an entity the longest, as part of a disciplined tradition of theological reflection, who will tell you how fruitless it often is to invoke Satan as the direct cause of events.

Paul Christmann, The Monster Discloses Himself, 25.1 Hedgehog Review

Words to live by

Turn off your radio. Put away your daily paper. Read one review of events a week and spend some time reading such books as the above. They tell too of days of striving and of strife. They are of other centuries and also of our own. They make us realize that all times are perilous, that men live in a dangerous world, in peril constantly of losing or maiming soul and body.

Part of Dorothy Day’s diary entry for September 28, 1940.

A fundamental reality of human existence is that vice often leaves virtue with few good options. Evil men can attach catastrophic risks to virtually any course of action, however admirable.

David French

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

Friday 9/29/23

This is the 25th anniversary of my dad’s death. Alan Jacobs reminds me that it’s also the 50th anniversary of W.H. Auden’s death. I am twice bereaved (though I knew not Auden 50 years ago).

Migration

Orban’s Hungary

I’m not saying that Trump was all bad as president. But even the good things that Trump did were accompanied by a narcissism, a gratuitous aggression and not often with[] a lot of intellectual substance, while Orbán has got about the business of being a successful centre-right leader with a lot more grace and a lot more intellectual heft.

… governments have a duty to their own citizens to maintain the character of the country and not to have the character of the country changed forcibly by outsiders.

… no one has a right to turn up in someone else’s country and demand residency. Now, if they are immediately fleeing serious risks to their lives, yes, they can claim sanctuary. But for them to be genuine refugees, as opposed to would-be illegal migrants, they’ve got to seek sanctuary in the first available place. And the vast majority of those coming into Europe are not seeking sanctuary in the first available place. They aren’t even seeking sanctuary at all, most of them, they’re seeking a better life.

Former Australian PM Tony Abbott

EU

The problem with the migration package is its underlying philosophy; a philosophy of open borders complete with letters of invitation. The message that needs to be sent is that there is no allocation possible; please don’t come. If a country needs a workforce, it must be done through legal channels: embassies, consulates, and cooperation programmes with third countries.

The current policy of burdening countries that do not have any link, current or historical, to the third world is unfair and must stop. We were never part of those decisions, so why should we have any responsibility for it? This is a Central European and a Hungarian position. The EU has enough assets at its disposal to handle this problem, such as the financial instruments, to make agreements with countries outside the EU to stop, not to manage, migration. The attitude towards migration has to change completely. Policy makers must say: No, don’t come here. Everything else is hot air.

…

European voters must be told that economic migration is not a human right; asylum from a war zone is. A country neighboring a war zone should take in refugees, as Hungary has done with Ukraine (1.2 million asylum seekers have already been received since the start of the war). However, it is absurd, legally and morally, to make the same allowance for economic migrants who come from far away lands and have passed through many safe countries.

Judit Varga

Culture

Attempted aphorism

Up until now, we have had more questions than answers. What we’d like is more answers than questions.

A spokesperson for a group suspicious of a government proposal. (The details of the proposal and of the suspicious group aren’t really relevant, are they? The silliness of the attempted aphorism is the real point.)

“Religion” as a tool of oppression

It’s outside the usual narrative of repression by religion, but it’s possibly more pervasive: marginalizing something by assigning it to the category “religion.”

In reality, the amorphous nature of Hinduism is due to the fact that Hinduism originally included all that it means to be Indian, including what modern Westerners divided into religion, politics, economics, and so on. But if Hinduism is what it means to be Indian, then by identifying and isolating a religion called Hinduism, the British were able to marginalize what it means to be Indian. Under British colonization, to be British was to be public; to be Indian was to be private. The very conception of religion was a tool in removing native Indian culture and Indians themselves from the exercise of public power.

William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence

Artificial Intelligence is still really dumb

Thanks to Jacob Mchangama, I learned that Bing Chat and ChatGPT-4 (which use the same underlying software) refuse to answer queries that contain the words “nigger,” “faggot,” “kike,” and likely others as well. This leads to the refusal to talk about Kike Hernandez (might he have been secretly born in Scunthorpe?), but of course it also blocks queries that ask, for instance, about the origin of the word “faggot,” about reviews for my coauthor Randall Kennedy’s book Nigger, and much more. (Queries that use the version with the accent symbol, “Kiké Hernández,” do yield results, and for that matter the query “What is the origin of the slur ‘Kiké’?” explains the origin of the accent-free “kike.” But I take it that few searchers would actually include such diacritical marks in their search.)

Eugene Volokh

I’ll believe that AI is “intelligent” when it can answer serious questions about contentious topics rather than imposing a blanket ban on naughty words.

Censorship from the anti-censors

The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.

Audre Lorde, quoted against the tactics of Christopher Rufo: Nico Perrino, Right-Wing Activist Christopher Rufo Became the One Thing He Claims to Hate

This led me to review my clippings on Rufo, who set my presumption to “distrust” when he spoke about “freezing the brand” of critical race theory and what he intended to do next. It turns out that some decent people think he’s mostly positive. I’m still not convinced. I feel like he’s a ticking time-bomb harboring some terrible secret.

Conspiracy theories

When should one believe a conspiracy theory?

The bottom line is that citizens should believe accounts from properly constituted epistemic authorities rather than theories that either (1) directly conflict with the epistemic authorities or (2) assert knowledge that has yet to be deemed authoritative by the epistemic authorities. A conspiracy theory may be true, but people are not justified in believing it until the appropriate epistemological authorities deem it true. Therefore, well-evidenced conspiracy theories may—should they reach a certain evidentiary bar—provide the grounds for investigation, appeal, and reassessment, but they should not be believed outright.

Joseph Uscinski and Joseph Parent, in American Conspiracy Theories (2014), quoted by Paul Christmann, The Monster Discloses Himself, 25.1 Hedgehog Review.

This would work great if only conspiracy theories didn’t so often start with axiomatic distrust of “properly constituted epistemic authorities.”

A specific conspiracy theory

Right-wing activist Charlie Kirk on Friday accused the Department of Justice of trying to cover up its biases by indicting a Democratic senator.

New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez was indicted on federal bribery charges Friday. The indictment accuses Menendez and his wife of accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, gold bars, and “luxury vehicle and home furnishings.”

But rather than accept the indictment shows that the Justice Department is actually a neutral entity, Kirk unveiled some convoluted logic to supposedly prove his original belief.

“The way that the fourth branch of government operates is with intentionality. There are no mistakes,” he said on his podcast.

“They’re doing this to create the appearance of impartiality so that they can continue their jihad against Donald Trump.”

Tori Otten, Right-Wingers Already Have a Wild Conspiracy Theory About Senator Menendez

I note that despite multiple Right-Wingers in the headline, Otten only cited the hack Charlie Kirk, good enough to affiliate with Liberty University but compared to whom Christopher Rufo is a Nobel Laureate.

Preening propagandists

danah boyd: “Over the last two years, I’ve been intentionally purchasing and reading books that are banned.” The problem here is that none, literally not one, of the books on the list boyd links to have been banned. Neither have they been “censored,” which is what the article linked to says. That’s why boyd can buy and read them: because they’ve been neither banned nor censored.

…

I sometimes wonder whether this kerfuffle isn’t something of a smokescreen, intended to distract our attention from more serious and troubling attempts at what George Orwell called “the prevention of literature” … You can buy books that some parents have protested; you can’t buy books that, because of political pressure, have never seen the light of day ….

Alan Jacobs

On the supposed superiority of empathy versus sympathy

Etymologically speaking, sympathy was here first. In use since the 16th century, when the Greek syn- (with) combined with pathos (experience, misfortune, emotion, condition) to mean “having common feelings,” sympathy preceded empathy by a good four centuries. Empathy (the “em” means “into”) barged in from the German in the 20th century and gained popularity through its usage in fields like philosophy, aesthetics and psychology. According to my benighted 1989 edition of Webster’s Unabridged, empathy was the more self-centered emotion, “the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts or attitudes of another.”

But in more updated lexicons, it’s as if the two words had reversed. Sympathy now implies a hierarchy whereas empathy is the more egalitarian sentiment. Empathy, per Dictionary.com, is “the psychological identification with or vicarious experiencing of the emotions, thoughts or attitudes of another” while sympathy stands at a haughty, “you poor dear” remove: “the act or state of feeling sorrow or compassion for another.”

…

Still, it’s hard to square the new emphasis on empathy — you must feel what others feel — with another element of the current discourse. According to what’s known as “standpoint theory,” your view necessarily depends on your own experience: You can’t possibly know what others feel.

Pamela Paul, Have Some Sympathy

Imposter syndrome

Imposter syndrome is a formidable revanchist.

I’ve found that reminding myself that other people also experience imposter syndrome has never been comforting or at all helpful.

Instead, the closest I’ve come to a “cure” is by taking the spotlight off me and trying to focus on the work. This isn’t about who I am, but about something I’m doing. I tell myself: Okay fine, maybe I am a fraud, but the work is real. I have an index card pinned to the wall that says, “The work speaks for itself.”

Robert van Vliet on micro.blog as @rnv.

Domestic Politics

DJT, MoF

What do we mean exactly by “person of faith”? Trump has had a few very good polls this week, and one deeply perplexing one. The majority of Republican voters see Donald J. Trump as a “person of faith,” according to a poll by HarrisX for the Deseret News. In fact, they see him as more religious than Mitt Romney, who definitely wears the Mormon underwear, and Mike Pence, whose faith is so strong it disallows him from looking female baristas in the eye. Trump. . . more faithful. . . than Mitt Romney and Mike Pence. I don’t even mean this as a pro-Pence take (sick), since for me personally, the one thing I like about Trump is how absolutely godless he is. My walnut-sized brain simply cannot grok the idea of Trump as your top Republican of faith. If Trump’s a man of faith, I am a pastor. My only takeaway is that I am deeply, criminally out of touch with Evangelical America. 

Nellie Bowles (or one of her acknowledged helpers)

I was going to comment on this myself, but Bowles beat me to it with something more adequate than “WTF?!” Is this not a genuine proof that much American religion is nuts?

Strive to resist numbness

Some percentage of you surely rolled your eyes when you realized what this newsletter would be about. Another Trump column?

Strive to resist numbness. Because despite all the blather about Biden and Trump being the two most known “known quantities” in politics, we actually don’t know how dangerous and destabilizing Trump might prove to be as his mind bends under the strain of an election and four indictments. Or whether it’ll break entirely once he’s back in power and surrounded by the most obsequious fascist toadies he can find.

I think he’s getting worse.

Nick Cattagio

Intellectuals and Officeholders

This points, I think, to a certain unreality on the American right. The intellectuals (or at least some of them) are nuanced in their thinking, humane in their sensibilities, keen to avoid cruelty and alleviate suffering, and willing to use government (at least sometimes) to attain that end. But the party’s officeholders and the rank-and-file voters who put them there are prone to extremism, indifferent to (and sometimes appear actively to delight in) cruelty and suffering, and unwilling to use government to make anyone’s life any easier.

…

The fact is that GOP voters chose Trump—and they keep choosing him. They liked his coarseness and selfishness, his rage and fear, and his demands for personal fealty and deference. It’s therefore more accurate to say that his own exemplification and affirmation of these qualities have given Republican voters permission to exemplify and affirm these pre-existing qualities in themselves. Trump lets them off the hook. Instead of Michelle Obama exhorting them to go high when their political opponents go low, Trump assures Republican voters that the smart thing (the guarantor of political victory) is always to go as low as possible—which means indulging a temptation toward viciousness that was already there.

This has had the effect of transforming expressions of callousness and aversion to charity from selectively indulged vices into demonstrations of virtue widely admired for their toughness and ruthlessness.

Damon Linker, The Agony of the Pro-Life Intellectual

As I have noted repeatedly, I mentally checked out of the GOP (my state doesn’t register voters by party) in January 2005, but not because I found the party coarse and selfish. I began to suspect that something was more deeply wrong only during Obama administration, when Republican obsessions with bullshit like birth certificates made me suspect racism more overt than I had thought still existed. Then Trump blew the whole thing open when he moved from Birther-in-Chief to Commander-in-Chief.

As I also have noted (or at least implied) repeatedly, I haven’t checked into the Democrat party. My weak and notional party affiliation is with the American Solidarity Party.

And if you think affiliation with a third party is foolish, I’ll note that it’s no more foolish than expecting either of our major parties to embody the values that lead me to the ASP.

If out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made, then if a thing is made straight it will be because humanity has been stripped out of it.

L. M. Sacasas, Embrace Your Crookedness

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

Sunday, 9/24/23

Vacation this week, and blogging hasn’t been as fun as the alternatives.

The Holy Wells of Ireland

Father Charles O’Connor, who interrogated Owen Hester, clearly disapproved of the well rounds, the rag trees and the attempts to buy the co-operation of the fairies, but he seemed, too, to acknowledge that he was powerless to do much about it:

So thoroughly persauded were they of the sanctity of those pagan practices that they would travel bareheaded and barefooted from ten to twenty miles for the purpose of crawling on their knees round these wells, and upright stones and oak trees westward as the sun travels, some three times, some six, some nine, and so on, in uneven numbers until their voluntary penances were completely fulfilled.

This kind of thing is the reason that the Roman Catholic authorities frowned on the existence of the holy wells for a long time. Protestants, meanwhile, were frequently driven to near apoplexy by the very existence of such ‘Popish superstition’ and ‘idolatry’. But what looked like ‘paganism’ to some church authorities was more like a form of Folk Christianity, a phenomenon that finds different expressions across the Christian world. In Orthodox and Catholic countries it can still be seen, especially in the countryside, while in Protestant lands it is rare. In my own homeland, England, a once-Catholic country scoured out by fanatics during the misnamed ‘Reformation’, we live amongst remnants of what once was. A few wells and shrines remain, but most were destroyed, Taliban-style, centuries ago. The holy landscape of England has been replaced by a wholly profane one. Whitewash is our inheritance.

…

A story from County Cork tells of a protestant minister who regarded well devotion as pagan nonsense, demanding to be brought water from the local holy well to make his tea. When the locals refused to bring it to him – nobody wanted to offend the well by engaging in such domestic profanity – the minister took action himself:

In a rage he snatched a can and brought a supply of water which he placed in a pot and hung over the fire to boil. Although under the influence of much heat the water remained quite cold while the minister waited his long overdue meal. Finally, his patience being exhausted he poured the water into another vessel and declared he would wash his feet in it. Witness his consternation and suffering when he touched the water his feet were immediately scalded and blistered as from a boiling heat

The punishment for a shamanic drum circle and ayahuasca ceremony doesn’t bear thinking about.

Paul Kingsnorth

Orthodoxy theology defines only what is necessary and always leaves unspoken that which cannot be explained. This approach was part of the Christian faith from the beginning. But the Western phronema often suppresses, dismisses, minimizes, or ignores this stance. The Western mind is compelled to define and explain everything, since without a rational explanation a concept or fact cannot be considered true, or, conversely, all truth can be proven rationally.

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

Not Conservative

First Things and the Claremont Review of Books largely backed Donald Trump, seeing him as an important disruptor with the potential to form a new, larger coalition with the capacity to resist secular liberalism.

Hunter Baker, When Pragmatic Politics Goes Bad: An Apology to the Never-Trumpers – Public Discourse, January 15, 2021.

“Let’s have a revolution and see if something good comes of it” is not now and never has been a conservative attitude.

The bleeding edge of dechristianization

The legal status of abortion is at the center of the contemporary culture war because it represents the bleeding edge of dechristianization. When pro-life and pro-choice advocates fight about the nitty-gritty of abortion policy, what they are really fighting about is whether our society ought to remain Christian. Most people who describe themselves as pro-choice have not really thought about what truly abandoning Christianity would mean—that is, truly abandoning Christians’ historically bizarre insistence that “God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.” But there are a few heralds of repaganization who are willing to be confidently and frighteningly consistent.

Louise Perry

It is not necessary that one be Christian to oppose abortion, but I’ve got to admit that, in the aggregate, opposition is a Christian cause.

I’ve even come to realize that Christianity came into a world where the paterfamilias exposed infants (and doubtless would have aborted unwanted pregnancies had the risk been lower and the stigma on infanticide higher), and it revolutionized that world on that front and on the rights of women.

A fundamental reality of human existence is that vice often leaves virtue with few good options. Evil men can attach catastrophic risks to virtually any course of action, however admirable.

David French

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

Sunday, 9/17/23

Novices in the limelight

I found myself very recently worrying about Paul Kingsnorth and his sorta-kindred spirit Martin Shaw:

It is dubious to thrust Paul Kingsnorth and Martin Shaw onto the Orthodox “Christian stage.” Nothing they’re saying offends me, but I see an analogy to the qualifications of deacons in the New Testament, who are not to be novices lest they get puffed up. I saw countless Evangelical let-downs as celebrity converts crashed and burned.

Both of these men — moderately famous overall and certainly with devoted fans — have arrived at Orthodox Christianity from paganish backgrounds (I mean pagan as a descriptor, not as dismissive) within the past five years. Both lost fans who felt betrayed, and both risked (or incurred) a financial hit as a result. Both have added Christian followers, especially from Orthodoxy, as well as losing followers.

But there’s a great risk in newbie Christians being thrust forward for adulation. (“Let them be tested first.” I Timothy 3:10) Am I being an enabler by subscribing to their Substacks? Am I spurning a brother in Christ who needs to replace his former, more pagan, income sources if I don’t subscribe?

So it came as a relief to read this from Kingsnorth:

A new Christian with a platform who wants to write about his Christian journey is sailing on a sea which could sink him any time. I have prayed about this consistently, of course, and I’ve asked advice of everyone I know. Friends, family, teachers, my spiritual father, wise heads both Christian and not. I’ve even sought – and been given – answers from monks on Mount Athos. Should I really be writing about this? I have asked, over and over. I don’t know anything.

The answer has always been the same, and it has always been: yes, you should. Sometimes that has excited me, and at other times it has felt like a millstone around my neck. Of course, the ‘yes’ always comes with important caveats. If I start writing as if I were a teacher or a leader or some kind of wise or accomplished Public Christian, or somebody who knows much at all of any depth, I will fall on my face. Probably some people would enjoy that, and perhaps it would be a good lesson in humility, but still, I am going to try and avoid it.

It’s good that he recognizes the risk and is asking wiser heads. It’s good that they have given, and he apparently has heard, cautions on how he should write as a Christian novice.

So here’s some of how he’s struggling with his new task:

Here I am, surprisingly and yet not suprisingly, a Christian. It is on the one hand not surprising, because I have never been a materialist; I have always had some intuition of God or gods or spirits, usually experienced for me through the natural world, and I have always been searching for the truth of that, always scanning the horizon for the true harbour. Yet it is surprising too, because I never imagined that, in the words of Seraphim Rose, patron saint of Lost Western People, the truth was ‘a person, not an idea.’

…

I have noticed in the last few years a constant temptation to systematise Christianity; to bend it into a shape that fits a pre-existing pattern in people’s heads…

My version of this temptation is to view the deep mystery of creation and creator through the prism of my attitudes to the Machine, and then to bend the former to suit the latter, rather than the other way around. I think that I have been stuck for words all week because I was struggling with this tendency. I found, when I stood outside myself and looked in, that I was almost unconsciously seeking a grand theory big enough to accommodate Christ. The old habit of constructing some thesis or other was refusing to die. It was as if I couldn’t write about this journey at all without knowing the destination in advance. As if this ancient spiritual pathway were not an exploration or an unfolding, but a thesis or an argument.

…

‘Ideas create idols’, said St Gregory of Nyssa. ‘Only wonder leads to knowing.’ St Augustine agreed. ‘If you understand,’ he said, ‘it is not God you understand.’

Paul Kingsnorth, Inis Cealtra

Christian Zionism

Christian Zionism is the term used to describe the view that the Old Testament prophecies of the return of exiled Israel to the Promised Land find their fulfillment in the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, and not in Christ and the Christian Church.  This theological view is comparatively recent, and is totally at odds with the views of the Church Fathers.  A more detailed critique of this theology can be found here.

Fr. Lawrence Farley. I quote this for its succinctness, first, and to retell (briefly, I hope) why I have a particular wariness of Christian Zionism.

My Evangelical boarding school of 60 years ago was less homogenous in thought than I imagined going into it, but I didn’t tease out that observation until much later. (This is because “Bible only Christianity” has always produced flaky opinions and eventual schisms.) One teacher was, by Fr. Lawrence’s definition, a Christian Zionist, but with an overlay on that.

  • The founding of Israel in 1948 started the end-times clock running.
  • The Great Tribulation, the rule of Antichrist, and the return of Christ would all be within 40 years of the founding of Israel.
  • A Biblical generation is 40 years.
  • Therefore we would not see 1988 before Christ’s return.
  • (And therefore, I would not live to age 40.)

I add the obligatory caveat that my parents did not inculcate stuff like this, and I don’t recall whether I mentioned it to them. By God’s grace, and perhaps partly by the parents’ sobriety about “Bible prophecy,” I never fully bought into this. I thought this lurid schema stretched the plain meaning of the Bible past the breaking point and I (tacitly) rejected approaching the Bible as if it were some kind of cypher, which if broken could satisfy our curiosity about the near future.

Still, it haunted me a little.

So far as I can tell, the false prophets who peddled that sort of crap (I’m looking at you, Hal Lindsey) never repented but presumably came up with just-so stories on how they were fundamentally right all along — just like all the Adventists and other 19th-century sects they deride.

Young, headstrong, and hurtful

There must have been moments during those formational years when someone said something like this: “We don’t really know what we are doing. We need to join a larger group or institution or denomination. We need oversight and accountability and guidance.” But that attitude did not prevail. If these young, headstrong men had more fully embraced all that history and tradition had to teach them, they might not have tried to reinvent the wheel. It would have spared many people some of the pain to come.

Jon Ward, Testimony.

Irreligious Right

[W]e are far more likely to see the coming of a right-wing, essentially pagan political order than we are the restoration of anything meaningfully Christian … The Left, by attacking Christianity directly and indirectly, has torn down the greatest barrier holding back political paganism of the Right. Christian parents now have to worry that their children will be seduced by cultural leftism (including the sanctification of LGBT and other forms of sexual paganism), or by post-Christian right-wing paganism, which entails white identity and other forms of militant racism. We have to watch out for syncretism of white identity with hardline conservative Christianity …

You can lose your Christian soul to the far right as easily as you can to the far left. The devil doesn’t care how you lose it; he just wants you to lose it.

Rod Dreher.

I quote Rod much less than I used to for reasons I haven’t entirely sorted out in my own head. I’m not going to try to sort them out here in public.

But on this, I’m confident that he’s right, including about the infiltration of the most “conservative”-looking versions of Christianity. Pastors looking for disciples of Christ must be on alert; pastors happy with disguised pagans in the pews may be in for a bonanza.

Of what one may not speak one must remain silent

The full doctrine of the Church was made available only to baptized Christians. It still is. Much of it is written and so accessible to all, but the most important aspects are passed on orally and symbolically because they can only be transmitted to someone who is ready to receive them. And by their very nature they cannot be written. By taking the first step, by being baptized into the Orthodox Church, I had not experienced any new convictions but had opened myself to an evolving mystery which the Church has preserved and which exists to communicate to its members. And, on Patmos, I had become normal.

Peter France, Patmos: A Place of Healing for the Soul

New eyes

How do we become uncomplicated and unsophisticated? Can we simply unlearn all that we have learned?

No, we cannot, but what we can do is to separate ourselves from it in order to look at it with new eyes. For us Westerners to truly enter into the ancient Christian transmission and catch the essence of Christ’s teaching, it is necessary for us to crucify our rationalizing minds and arise above the level of thought and emo for a society founded on Descartes’ proposition “I think, therefore I am,” this of course means a kind of suicide; and it is to precisely such an ego-death that Christ calls us. Contemporary western Christianity trained us how to think and what to think; whereas Christ himself, as did Lao Tzu before Him, taught us how not to need to think.

Hieromonk Damascene, Christ the Eternal Tao

Invisible realities

To be a devout Christian or a believing Jew or Muslim is to be a bit like a conspiracy theorist, in the sense that you believe there is an invisible reality that secular knowledge can’t recognize. But the great religions are also full of warnings against false prophets and fraudulent revelations. My own faith, Roman Catholicism, is both drenched in the supernatural and extremely scrupulous about the miracles and seers that it validates. And it allows its flock to be simply agnostic about a range of possibly supernatural claims.

Ross Douthat, quoted in a lengthy New Yorker profile by Isaac Chotiner

Stagnation or permanence?

”How has it come about,” C. S. Lewis once asked, “that we use the highly emotive word ‘stagnation,’ with all its malodorous and malarial overtones, for what other ages would have called ‘permanence’?” It is, Lewis suggests, because the dominance of the machine in our culture altered our imagination. It gave us a “new archetypal image.”

Ken Myers, All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes

Just askin’

Why is it unjust for a nation, convinced of the truth of Islam or Christianity or Judaism, to give preference to truth over falsehood in education, law, and cultural institutions? Don’t all regimes claim to give preference to truth over falsehood? Or, to bring the question down from the metaphysical stratosphere: Is it unjust for, say, Ireland to give discriminating support to Irish holidays, cultural traditions, or language? If that is ­unobjectionable, why can’t Ireland give preference to its traditional Catholic religion? Questions of truth aside, why should religion be treated differently than other national traditions?

Peter J. Leithart, Rethinking Religious Freedom. Leithart presumably used and Irish example because he is not Roman Catholic.

Evangelistic gimmickry is nothing new

”Original sin, [Charles Finney] declared, is not a “constitutional depravity” but rather a deep-seated “selfishness” that people could overcome if they made themselves “a new heart.” “Sin and holiness,” he declared, “are voluntary acts of mind.” He was just as clear about the role of the preacher in bringing people to salvation. “A revival,” he wrote in 1835, “is not a miracle, or dependent on a miracle, in any sense. It is a purely philosophical result of the right use of the constituted means.””

Frances FitzGerald, The Evangelicals

And now for something quite different …

I syng of a m[a]yden that is makeles.
kyng of alle kynges to here sone che ches.
he cam also stylle there his moder was
as dew in aprylle, that fallyt on the gras.
He cam also stylle to his moderes bowr
as dew in aprille, that fallyt on the flour.
He cam also stylle ther his moder lay
as dew in aprille, that fallyt on the spray.
Moder & mayden was never non but che–
wel may swych a lady godes moder be.

Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars

A fundamental reality of human existence is that vice often leaves virtue with few good options. Evil men can attach catastrophic risks to virtually any course of action, however admirable.

David French

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

Sunday, 9/10/23

War by other means

In a conversation with a young friend, I was told that politics is the only way to get anything done. This is not true.

Politics — that is, the use of civil power — is a means to gain the upper hand in a Hobbesian struggle. It is war, fought by other means.

It is for that reason that politics is a questionable activity for Christians. The victories achieved are often brief and, depending on the opposition, only maintained by the continued use of force.

It is profoundly the case that civil or military force are not the tools of the Kingdom of God. It is among the many reasons that the Kingdom of God is not, and never can be, a human project.

Fr. Stephen Freeman, The Peaceable Kingdom in a World at War

The best reason yet to kick the news and opinion addiction.

Where did the schadenfreude go?

There’s something wrong with me (or is it “right with me”?). I waded into Kevin D. Williamson’s High Plains Grifter to wallow in schadenfreude at the self-inflicted wounds of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who’s about to get his comeuppance.

But I didn’t feel it. The schadenfreude wasn’t there, even though a corrupt top law enforcement officer is particularly odious.

What I felt was that Texas needs to remove this cancer from public office and the cancer needs to spend the rest of his life in repentance — as do we all.

TEC

[T]he Episcopal Church across centuries served as America’s religious finishing school, educating our leaders, and providing liturgies for our national life.

Mark Tooley

For most of my life, I operated an analytical view toward churches’ doctrines, and the waffling of the Episcopalians vexed me sorely. In recent years, they’ve vexed me by waffling on human sexuality.

But I’ve also come to appreciate the beauty of Anglican worship. I’m glad some of our solemn national moments are enacted or remembered in the National Cathedral in DC, and are done with Anglican dignity. Gone is my youthful contempt for civil religion.

I also no longer shake my head in bafflement when some doctrinally conservative sort leaves Evangelicalism for the ECUSA. It may be less than ideal (or may not), but I don’t doubt that the dignified Episcopal service is more nourishing than the gimmickry of many Evangelical Churches.

(But what do I know about typical Evangelical Churches today? I barely pay attention to the televised ones, and they’re probably not typical.)

Creative investigations of decency, virtue, and goodness

How many more novels, TV shows, and movies do we need exploring yet another flavor of badness, charting yet another journey of self-destruction, physical or moral or both? It’s like … yeah, I get it! This kind of work might have been revelatory once; that time has passed. Too often (and here I’ll get extra-ornery) the creative cover story that goes “I’m interested in these deeply flawed characters … I like writing about broken people” is simply an excuse to revel in depictions of violence — physical or moral or both.

I believe it is time, instead, for creative investigations of decency, virtue, and goodness. If that sounds boring: yes! That’s why the project is needed! Let’s learn how to render complex and compelling the characters who are trying their best to live correctly — and sometimes, gasp, even succeeding.

Robin Sloan

I’ve newly subscribed to Robin Sloan’s newsletter on the concurring praise of several cyber-friends. His point here is solid — but not exactly original. It’s a notorious fact that it’s much harder for a writer to create a compelling portrayal of goodness than a compelling portrayal of evil. Why that should be so is above my pay grade.

A fundamental reality of human existence is that vice often leaves virtue with few good options. Evil men can attach catastrophic risks to virtually any course of action, however admirable.

David French

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

Labor Day (observed) 2023

Public affairs

Vice and virtue redux

I can’t get this out of my head as pundits keep explaining what’s wrong with every approach to dealing with Donald Trump’s damnable lies and crimes: A fundamental reality of human existence is that vice often leaves virtue with few good options. Evil men can attach catastrophic risks to virtually any course of action, however admirable. (David French)

If hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, what do you call vice so shameless that it doesn’t even pretend to be virtuous?

(Asking for a friend whose initials are USA)

On a related note:

  • Of impeachment #2, from January 6, Mitch McConnell says we can’t impeach a President who’s no longer in office but there’s always the legal system.
  • Four indictments into the legal system, Republicans scream that “the Democrats are criminalizing politics.”

There’s just no pleasing utterly unprincipled power-seekers.

The end of the uneasy anti-Roe coalition

The [Supreme] Court’s landmark [Dobbs] decision brought an end to that uneasy anti-Roe coalition, revealing the amalgamation for what it was: a group of fellow travelers whose interests aligned to a point, but who had their own, separate visions for what would replace the status quo. Was overturning Roe and returning the abortion issue to the states the end goal, as many Federalist Society types saw it? Was Alito’s Dobbs decision the first step toward a nationwide ban? Is there a middle ground that’s both morally acceptable to the pro-life movement and electorally popular?

TMD

Scientism

If the conveyor belt of science dictating politics has fallen out of favor in administrative law and is even more obviously inapplicable to politics in general, why are so many politicians returning to its rhetoric? The reason is that, even if it is an intellectually bankrupt tradition, it remains politically useful. Scientism is an attempt to shut down political debates. It shifts the discussion from questions of value, which are accessible to all, to questions of facts which are in the domain of the experts, thus shifting the terrain of the debate. It also hampers the evolution of expert consensus, because when science becomes a front for politics, dissenting from the party lines becomes harder even for experts. And it allows progressives to portray their opponents as ignorant. That has been a common trope of progressive politics: conservatives are the stupid party.

John O. McGinnis, **Blinded by Scientism

From a public point of view, the specialist system is a failure because, though everything is done by an expert, very little is done well.

Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America

Gun-in-cheek

I am not anti-gun. I’m pro-knife. Consider the merits of the knife. In the first place, you have to catch up with someone in order to stab him. A general substitution of knives for guns would promote physical fitness. We’d turn into a whole nation of great runners. Plus, knives don’t ricochet. And people are seldom killed while cleaning their knives.

Molly Ivins, via the Writer’s Almanac

Profiles in something-or-other

Brian Kemp still has balls

Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, said Thursday he would not call a special session of the legislature to investigate Willis, despite requests from some GOP lawmakers in the state. “Up to this point, I have not seen any evidence that DA Willis’ actions or lack thereof warrant action by the prosecuting attorney oversight commission,” Kemp told reporters.

The Morning Dispatch

Antinomy or telos?

Consensus is the opposite of leadership.

Mike Pence at the first GOP Presidential debate for the 2024 election.

I thought that was wrong in one sense when I first read it, justifying Pence’s position favoring national abortion legislation. For more than 40 years, I said that reversing Roe would return the abortion issue to the states. Now Mike Pence was boasting that it was a mark of his awesome leadership to over-promise dubiously-constitutional legislation on abortion.

My conviction has grown since then that it’s sheer idiocy, faux high rhetoric. Consensus is not the opposite of leadership; it is a goal of leadership.

Shorts

American conservatism

American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader.

Robert Lewis Dabney

Thought-provoking

The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.

Martin Heidegger

Epic Blurb

Alan Jacobs finds Pablo Neruda’s book blurb the greatest ever:

Anyone who doesn’t read Cortázar is doomed. Not to read him is a serious invisible disease which in time can have terrible consequences. Something similar to a man who has never tasted peaches. He would quietly become sadder, noticeably paler and, probably, little by little, he would lose his hair. I don’t want those things to happen to me, and so I greedily devour all the fabrications, myths, contradictions, and mortal games of the great Julio Cortázar.

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

Sunday, 9/3/23

Three ways

Buddy Jesus

  • ‌

“We have effectively communicated to young people that sincerely following Jesus is synonymous with being ‘fired up’ for Jesus, with being excited for Jesus, as if discipleship were synonymous with fostering an exuberant, perky, cheerful, hurray-for-Jesus disposition like what we might find in the glee club or at a pep rally,” Smith wrote. “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.”

Jon Ward, Testimony, quoting James K.A. Smith, You Are What You Love

For some reason, this way of being Christian never appealed to me, though it was in many ways my millieu for a long time in my formative years. I never took the Book of Common Prayer (Episcopalian/Anglican) route, but took a twenty-some-year detour through a Calvinism that, God be thanked, wasn’t very friendly to the second option:

The Hate Option

I’d never heard of the book The Boniface Option, and with any luck I’ll never hear of it again. Its premise (mediated to me by the reviewer) seems to be that following Jesus is synonymous with being pissed off at all the bad people and ideas around us.

But Rod Dreher fears it will fall into the hands of angry, Christianish young men who’ll take it as gospel. He also knows, from his own life experience and continuing propensities, how dangerous it is:

The Boniface Option is a strange book. I’d say eighty percent of it already appeared in The Benedict Option (I’m certainly not accusing author Andrew Isker of plagiarism; I’m simply saying that the ideas are not new). But this book is just over half as long, and the ideas have been re-imagined here as pugnacious and resentful. If you had ever wondered how The Benedict Option would have been if its author were a late-millennial Calvinist Memelord Of Moscow, Idaho, well, now you have your answer.

…

[I]f you aren’t angry at what this world has become, you aren’t paying attention. Who can live on that, though? Who should want to live on it? I’ve noticed over the years, watching how disciples of Douglas Wilson operate rhetorically, that they typically lead with a quarrelsome overstatement, and take strong negative reaction to it as a sign that they’ve really hit the mark with their criticism. Sometime that’s true, I suppose, but more often than not, it’s because they have been nasty for the sake of being nasty, or petulant because they think that shows strength. I once knew a nice young man who had been trained by Wilson, who leaned into being verbally obnoxious in public discussions, because he genuinely believed this was how one advanced the Kingdom. He truly thought that this was manly. He ended up mostly making people feel sorry for him, if they didn’t outright dislike him for what they took to be his arrogance.

…

Another Protestant pastor, of an earlier generation, wrote:

There’s another reason why you should love your enemies, and that is because hate distorts the personality of the hater. We usually think of what hate does for the individual hated or the individuals hated or the groups hated. But it is even more tragic, it is even more ruinous and injurious to the individual who hates…. For the person who hates, the true becomes false and the false becomes true. That’s what hate does.

Those are the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., commenting on the command of Our Lord to love those who hate us, and to pray for those who persecute us.

…

As a conservative Catholic in 2002, I took the Boniface Option in tearing into the corrupt clerics, rotten institutions, and hideous complacency in the Catholic Church, as revealed by the abuse scandal. I hated half-measures, and scorned fellow Catholics who hemmed and hawed about how it wasn’t as bad as all that. And you know what? To this day, seventeen years after I burned out and lost my Catholic faith, I believe I was far more right than wrong. Many of those people really were cowards. Some of those who encouraged me from behind to keep flailing away with my axe against the crooks and the cretins in the Church, while taking no risks themselves to do the same, were also among the first to criticize me when, spiritually exhausted, my faith collapsed.

My error was thinking I was strong enough to take down a tree as formidable as the evil one that had grown within the garden of the Catholic Church. I believed then that the only brave option was taking on the idol with the axe that was my pen, and chopping like a berserker. I lacked prudence, but more to the point, I did not have the internal spiritual resources necessary to see me through the fight. You readers know my story about how Father Tom Doyle warned me early on that I would be going to places darker than I could imagine, and that I would need to be ready for it. He was right — and I wasn’t ready.

This is the risk that Isker and his followers face.

Rod Dreher.

This is the sort of Christianity that says “Yeah, yeah, yeah! ‘Turn the other cheek.’ Look at what that‘s got us!”

Bible Jesus Option

Bruce Cockburn was once an angry young man, but age may be softening him:

The just, the merciful, the cruel
The stumbling well-intentioned fool
The deft, the oaf, the witless pawn
The golden one life smiles upon
The squalling infant in mid-squall
The neighbors fighting down the hall
The list is long – as I recall
Our orders said to love them all

The cynic and the crooked priest
The woman wise, the sullen beast
The enemy outside the gate
The friend who leaves it all to fate
The drunk who tags the bathroom stall
The proud boy headed to his fall,
The list is long – as I recall
Our orders said to love them all

The pastor preaching shades of hate
The self-inflating head of state
The black and blue, the starved for bread
The dread, the red, the better dead
The sweet, the vile, the small, the tall
The one who rises to the call
The list is long – as I recall
Our orders said to love them all

The one who lets his demons win
The one we think we’re better than
A challenge great – as I recall
Our orders said to love them all

Orders, from Bruce Cockburn’s recent album O Sun O Moon

What secularism rejects

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

Hypocrisy

Then, throughout the entirety of Matthew 23, Jesus launched into a series of “Woes” and denunciations. He explained to one and all and to the Scribes and Pharisees to their face exactly why they were unable to understand the Kingdom, why they couldn’t recognize the Truth of it even though that Truth was standing and speaking and miraculously working right in front of them, just like He did with the Roman procurator in John 18.37, although Pilate was probably much more amenable.

The problem was simply hypocrisy. In the New Testament, hypocrisy is not inconsistency. That is a modern misunderstanding of the term.

Hypocrisy, rather, is existential schizophrenia. There is an exterior claim of piety, religiosity, and a prideful (but false) confidence of knowing the Kingdom. But on the inside, it’s all lies. There is a complete failure to love. There is a putrid cesspool of avarice and lust, pride and anger. And there is a demonic willingness to engage in domination, power, and violence, an enthusiasm for putting people in bondage and daring, horribly, to dress up their wickedness in religious clothing.

Second Terrace: the last judgment and the problem of goathood

Taking stock

I was (am?) a culture warring evangelical. But, like so many, I’ve seen what that has gotten us. And I’ve seen what we’ve lost, too. So as much as I still very much identify as evangelical and want to recover whatever in it that is good, I also lament what we have gotten wrong.

Karen Swallow Prior

When progress isn’t really progress

That was then, …

Pope Leo III ordered his northern allies and erstwhile protectors to desist immediately from using the filioque in the Creed. The fact that they had been doing so for generations, he observed, was irrelevant insofar as it was a violation of universal church order. Then, to teach the Franks a lesson and make his continued allegiance to the Byzantine East clear, the very pope who had crowned Charlemagne in Saint Peter’s Basilica commissioned an elaborate pair of silver shields to be forged. He ordered engraved upon their faces—in Latin and in Greek—the Nicene Creed without the filioque. Leo then had these “shields of faith” mounted inside Saint Peter’s Basilica, the most prominent church in Rome, on the tomb of the Apostle Peter—the most prominent place in that church ….

John Strickland, The Age of Paradise.

I believe the silver shields are still there, but the Western Church continues to violate universal church order by reciting the creed with the filioque.

Anselm’s atonement

The broad acceptance of Anselm’s logic speaks to the extreme legalism and the radical departure from apostolic Tradition that had developed in the medieval West. It is ironic that Anselm’s conclusion was so readily accepted in the West. The Catholic Church affirms the development of doctrine and holds that medieval and scholastic theologians understood the faith and expressed its concepts in a manner superior to that of the Fathers. And yet Anselm’s theology is crude, faulty, shallow, simplistic, and manifestly inferior to the understanding of salvation among the Church Fathers. It can hardly be considered superior to or an improvement on their work.

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox. I’m pretty sure that she had Anselm of Canterbury’s Cur Deus Homo in mind.

Chastity

And what about chastity? It’s a basic truth of Christian discipleship. And it does not mean, “Sorry, no sex for you.” Rather, God asks us to live our sexuality virtuously according to our calling. For some this means celibacy, setting aside marriage for love of the larger family of the Church and a different form of fertility in service. For most people, though, in most times, it means sexual intimacy within marriage.

Charles J. Chaput, Strangers in a Strange Land (italics added)

A fundamental reality of human existence is that vice often leaves virtue with few good options. Evil men can attach catastrophic risks to virtually any course of action, however admirable.

David French

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

Wednesday, 8/30/23

Culture

Industrialism

It is a monstrous piece of bogus liberalism to deny that industrialism has done much for the highest interests of humanity by raising the standard of living. It is as foolish as to deny the harm it has done them by not raising it enough, by poisoning the skies and fields with cheap cities, and taking away the will of its employees by keeping them in political and economic subjection.

Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

Who thinks learning is the point of university?

[I]n the American university system the vast expansion of DEI apparat simply follows the previous (and not yet complete) expansion of the mental-health apparat, all of which siphons resources away from the teaching of students. But that’s okay, because almost no one — least of all students and their parents — thinks that learning is the point of university. The university is for socialization, networking, and credentialing, and I expect to see a continuing expansion of the bureaucracies that promote these imperatives and a corresponding contraction of the number of teachers. And anyway, insofar as teaching and learning remain a burdensome necessity, if an annoying one, much of that work can be outsourced to ed-teach products and, now, to chatbots. 

Genuine teaching and genuine learning will always go on, but for the foreseeable future it will happen at the margins of our universities or outside the universities altogether. Meanwhile, the symbolic work of the party-state will grind on ….

Alan Jacobs

… that all men are created equal …

This meant bringing together supporters and opponents of slavery. (Not free and slave states: in 1776, every state recognized slavery. The Betsy Ross flag shows us thirteen stars in a circle, and every star represents a slave state.) Some of the colonists disliked slavery; others were very attached to it. In consequence, the Declaration adopts a political theory that has no direct implications for slavery: it is about the rights of insiders and focused on the question of when the governed may reject the legitimate political authority of their governors.

Kermit Roosevelt III, The Nation That Never Was

1619 Project versus the Standard Story

What the 1619 Project is, really, is the extreme progressive version of the standard story: it tells us that we have fallen further short of our ideals, more frequently, more consistently, and more deliberately than we realize. Yet it still tells us that “our founding ideals” were written in 1776—and it is still a profession of faith in them, of faith in an America we can work to perfect.

Kermit Roosevelt III, The Nation That Never Was

Protesters and vigilantes

From Tuesday more motorists must pay to drive in London. The Ultra-Low Emissions Zone—in which a surcharge applies to high-polluting vehicles—will be expanded to all 32 boroughs of Britain’s capital. The £12.50 ($15.75) daily levy will cover diesel cars and vans that do not meet “Euro 6” standards (typically those bought before 2015), and cars that don’t meet “Euro 4” (which typically predate 2006). A scrappage scheme has been introduced to help owners of non-compliant cars buy greener vehicles.

London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, a member of the Labour Party, argues that the move will improve health, especially of children. But it has provoked a fierce backlash, particularly among drivers who live in peripheral parts of the city. That has been seized upon by Britain’s ruling Conservative Party, which has had a hard time winning votes in London in recent years. The party is now portraying Labour as anti-driver. Some vigilantes have vandalised the cameras used to enforce the clean-air scheme.

The Economist’s World in Brief 8/29/23. A thousand takes on this story could be, and probably are being, written. I noted it for the trajectory of western governments and to note that another publication might have used “protesters” where the Economist chose “vigilantes.” After all, it’s “mostly peaceful,” isn’t it?

Travel

People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.

Dagobert D. Runes. But God help me, I love it anyway.

Legalia

No-fault divorce

Professor Lynn Wardle has shown that the American Law Institute’s Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution approach to fault has serious inconsistencies. If one party squanders family wealth, this fact can be considered in the property settlement, almost like an “economic fault.” Allegations of assault, battery, or abuse of the children can be handled as criminal acts.

So, if the ALI’s Principles still effectively permit the consideration of economic faults and abuse faults, what does no-fault amount to? It means that the major fault removed by “no-fault” was adultery or sexual infidelity.

Jennifer Roback Morse, The Sexual State

(I gritted and ground my teeth through this book not because of its substance but because of a style I found grating. Caveat emptor.)

Tortious spam filters?

U.S. District Court Judge Daniel Calabretta granted Google’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the Republican National Committee (RNC) claiming the company’s Gmail spam filter unfairly suppressed RNC messages. “While it is a close case,” the judge wrote, “the court concludes that … the RNC has not sufficiently pled that Google acted in bad faith in filtering the RNC’s messages into Gmail users’ spam folders, and that doing so was protected by section 230.” As Sarah wrote last year, Republican fundraising appeals are likely flagged by spam filters at higher rates due to abuse of email lists.

The Morning Dispatch

Sobering statistic

The prison population roughly doubled during Reagan’s years in office, from 329,000 Americans in jail in 1980 to 627,000 in 1988. This trend accelerated during the Bush and Clinton presidencies. By 2008, there were 1.6 million people in American prisons, with the US leading the world in total prison population and imprisonment rate.

Jon Ward, Testimony. That should be enough to make anyone think twice, two or three times, about how “free” we really are.

Politics

What is this “white trash”?

Once, coming back on his plane with a billionaire friend who had brought along a foreign model, Trump, trying to move in on his friend’s date, urged a stop in Atlantic City. He would provide a tour of his casino. His friend assured the model that there was nothing to recommend Atlantic City. It was a place overrun by white trash. “What is this ‘white trash’?” asked the model. “They’re people just like me,” said Trump, “only they’re poor.”

Michael Wolff, Fire and Fury (I have not read this book but ran across this quote anyway.)

Manly men

[Ted] Cruz is one of the many singing the totally-normal-and-not-at-all-weirdly-homoerotic praises of Donald Trump’s recent Fulton County Jail mugshot: “Trump’s mugshot where he looks like a pissed off and angry badass is an iconic historic photo. It’s going viral, and it’s making a heck of a statement.” Jesse Watters of Fox News, affirming his “unblemished record of heterosexuality,” said of Trump: “He looks good and he looks hard.”

In reality, Trump looks like the Grinch after a makeover performed by John Wayne Gacy—I’d love to know what the last man booked into that jail while wearing that much makeup was charged with, and I’ll bet it was hilarious—but it is of interest to me what these guys with their unblemished records of heterosexuality think looks and seems tough. Donald Trump is a guy who has never lifted anything heavier than money and blasts Broadway show tunes and the Village People at his rallies for totally normal people who are by no means members of a cult. I don’t know how much time you can spend dancing to “Macho Man” before your record of heterosexuality gets a blemish, or at least a footnote. And then there’s the inevitable playing of the music from Cats.

Kevin D. Williamson

Williamson doesn’t have much use for Mike Pence, either (same column, titled The Whited Sepulcher. Ouch!).

We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.

R.R. Reno

The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.

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

Wednesday, 8/23/23

Culture

The collectivist-individualist dichotomy

The collectivist-individualist dichotomy is a clear example of the modern mind opposing ideas that are only in opposition once abstracted from reality. What is this collectivism? What is this individualism? I have never encountered a society that was not composed of individuals, and I have never met an individual who did not belong to a society. 

Take anyone you know, and try to imagine the pre-societal self that exists there free from all the social influences that have made him. If I try to imagine myself independent of where I was born, the family that brought me forth, the schools I attended, the language in which I think and speak, the books I’ve read, the friends I’ve made, I simply cannot do it, and if I were to achieve some imagining of such a pre-social self, it wouldn’t be me in any case.

So, what ought the conservative response to be in the face of people living in a way they find reprehensible, if it is not that of doubling-down on individualism? The true conservative response is: we live in a society, and there are some things we will accept and some things we will not, and where the line lies is worked out circumstantially by prudential deliberation and negotiation. We will tolerate certain behaviours which we dislike and be intolerant of others. But if you want to mutilate yourself, we will aim to prevent you from doing so, for we have to live in a community with you, and we think that such behaviour is impermissible in our community ….

Sebastian Morello, Libertarian ‘Conservatism’: A Trojan Horse

Countering the Zeitgeist

I don’t often recommend poetry, but Famous, by Naomi Shihab Nye, caught my ear in a podcast reading, and is notable in the context of Illich for its call to humbler ambitions.

Segregated sports

I had no idea that chess routinely holds separate men’s and women’s competitions, and that the women overall are objectively worse than men. See Frank Haviland, Chess: Checkmate for the Egalitarians for a fascinating and possibly illuminating treatment. I’m still scratching my head.

Striking

General Carrera Lake, Chile, via Prufrock

Legalia

Neutral laws of general applicability

Since Employment Division v. Smith in the early 1990s, we’ve been living under a constitutional regime which, viewed from a galloping horse, looks quite a bit less favorable than prior law for religious exemptions from some laws. So long as a law is neutral and generally applicable, one isn’t entitled to a religious exemption however strong one’s beliefs or weak the governmental interest in making the law.

But when you slow down and look closer, the concept of “neutral laws of general applicability” keeps tripping up rulemakers, as they keep creating loopholes for some but not for none. Sometimes, the loophole is as big as “we can make exceptions case-by-case.” In others, it’s gerrymandering the law to target a disfavored religious practice, as when Hialeah Florida tried to hobble the animal sacrifices of Santeria while permitting Kosher slaughter.

So I was gratified to see the religion-friendly ending to a case I’ve watched, on and off, since its 2017 beginning, Country Mill Farms, LLC. V. City of East Lansing, where the City of East Lansing excluded Country Mill Farms from its farmers market because it refused, at its own facility, to host same-sex weddings. Click the link for Euguene Volokh’s fuller description.

Politics

My Man Mitch strikes again

We’re mired in a hot-dog, look-at-me, dance-in-the-end-zone world. Success in public capacities seems reliant not on the quality of officeholders’ ideas or effectiveness, but on their cleverness and audacity in sound bites, tweeting and the other ‘performative’ arts.

Mitch Daniels in the Washington Post via TMD

“Vote fraud” was pre-baked into Trump’s cake

The most interesting act out of the 126 acts laid out in the indictment is the first one. It reads:

On or about the 4th day of November 2020, DONALD JOHN TRUMP made a nationally televised speech falsely declaring victory in the 2020 presidential election. Approximately four days earlier, on or about October 31, 2020, DONALD JOHN TRUMP discussed a draft speech with unindicted co-conspirator Individual 1, whose identity is known to the Grand Jury, that falsely declared victory and falsely claimed voter fraud. The speech was an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.

The most significant claim here is that Trump always planned to cry, “Fraud!” if he lost regardless of the evidence. This is not a shocking revelation, given that he has a long history of preemptively saying that the only way he might lose anything is if his opponents cheated or rigged the game.

Jonah Goldberg, Trump’s Unconstitutional Enterprise

The Truthiness of Trump

More generally, Trump’s voters hold him as a source of true information, even more so than other sources, including conservative media figures, religious leaders, and even their own friends and family.

(CBS News, Emphasis added). “True information”! Words have lost all meaning!

We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.

R.R. Reno

The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it. I’m even playing around a bit here, but uncertain whether I’ll persist.

The cost of living in a tolerably decent society

I roll my eyes every time I see the conspicuous virtue signaling at coffee shops that fly the rainbow flag, but if I like their coffee, and they treat me nice as a customer, why shouldn’t I be prepared to tolerate that as the cost of living in a tolerably decent, not to say pleasant, society?

This quote comes from one of the usual suspects and expresses my feelings pretty well.

The most intensely-pondered version of my own toleration began last Spring, when the Artistic Director of a chorus I sing in announced our performance season for 2024-24. Our Fall concert was to be an unfamiliar contemporary Oratorio called Considering Matthew Shepard. If you’re unfamiliar with the Matthew Shepard story, here’s a fair synopsis from Wikipedia:

Matthew Wayne Shepard (December 1, 1976 – October 12, 1998) was a gay American student at the University of Wyoming who was beaten, tortured, and left to die near Laramie on the night of October 6, 1998. He was taken by rescuers to Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado, where he died six days later from severe head injuries received during the attack.

Suspects Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson were arrested shortly after the attack and charged with first-degree murder following Shepard’s death. Significant media coverage was given to the murder and what role Shepard’s sexual orientation played as a motive for the crime.

The prosecutor argued that the murder of Shepard was premeditated and driven by greed. McKinney’s defense counsel countered by arguing that he had intended only to rob Shepard but killed him in a rage when Shepard made a sexual advance toward him. McKinney’s girlfriend told police that he had been motivated by anti-gay sentiment but later recanted her statement, saying that she had lied because she thought it would help him. Both McKinney and Henderson were convicted of the murder, and each of them received two consecutive life sentences.

…

A few hours after Shepard was discovered, his friends Walt Boulden and Alex Trout began to contact media organizations, claiming that Shepard had been assaulted because he was gay. According to prosecutor Cal Rerucha, “They were calling the County Attorney’s office, they were calling the media and indicating Matthew Shepard is gay and we don’t want the fact that he is gay to go unnoticed.” Tina Labrie, a close friend of Shepard’s, said “[Boulden and Trout] wanted to make [Matt] a poster child or something for their cause”. Boulden linked the attack to the absence of a Wyoming criminal statute providing for a hate crimes charge.

That ill-founded conclusion (note: I don’t blame the young friends for trying to make sense of the shocking crime) went viral and remains extant to an extent that I call it the Matthew Shepard myth. It’s powerful enough to have led to the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act.

But a gay author who investigated concluded that Matt was a methamphetamine dealer who knew his killers, and the murder was a drug transaction gone awry. As noted above the prosecutor argued that the murder of Shepard was premeditated and driven by greed. So “the Matthew Shepard myth” is mythical in at least two senses, including the one that connotes falsity. That’s my take.

Now, back to last Spring, when our upcoming season was announced.

I brushed the dust off my priors about the Matthew Shepard myth, looked again, and came to the same conclusion as before: the homophobic hate crime version is probably false. But it’s entrenched, and powerful; it’s Matt’s “Legacy”, and used occasionally as a bludgeon on anyone reticent about supporting the constellation of changes encompassed in the shorthand “the gay rights movement,” as am I.

Apart from that legacy, I’ve no doubt that Considering Matthew Shepard never would have been written. Could I in good conscience sing it?

I found a streaming audio recording of it (by a group the composer directs) and pored over the libretto. I found a pleasant composition with a libretto that paints “an ordinary boy,” the bereavement of his parents, a coy hint that the Jesus he’d come to know in the Episcopal Church had been with him as he hung comatose on the rural fence to which his attackers tied him, and the reality that he’d become a symbol. I found a slightly hyperbolic portrayal of the demonstrators at Matt’s funeral from Westboro Ba***** Church (the demonstrators didn’t literally cry out Kreuzige!). But I did not find the piece propagandistic per se (i.e., in and of itself); any propagandistic effect is contextual, from the reality I noted in the preceding paragraph.

I also thought of a few chorus members who are jewish, one California import who was astonishingly ignorant of the basic Christian story, and of untold numbers who probably had zero Christian commitment of any sort, orthodox or otherwise. These folks have joined in repeatedly in singing masses, passions, Christian oratorios, Christmas carols — the great music of the formerly-Christian West — without complaining that the music would never have been written had the Christian story not taken root. So too their families in the audience.

So I’m singing the Matthew Shepard oratorio, much as I preferentially buy my commercial coffee at a chain famous for pacific northwest progressivism. It seems like the cost of living in a tolerably decent society.

We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.

R.R. Reno

The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it. I’m even playing around a bit here, but uncertain whether I’ll persist.