Category: Faith & Ideology

Thursday, 1/5/23

Culture

Words to live by

The larger point is that a rich and satisfying life involves checking a lot of boxes, not checking the same box over and over again until the combination of the ink and the pressure punches through the paper of your checklist. Moreover, some of these boxes require subordinating yourself to something greater than yourself. Virtually all meaningful institutions demand some sacrifice of yourself and your immediate wants to the greater good of the institution. The family is the first and most obvious example of this. You can’t be a good father or husband, mother or wife, if you expect your family to always put your needs first.

Jonah Goldberg, Something Short of Tragic

Why not wait and see if the odds are with you?

The best estimate, from studies starting in the 1970s, is that around 80% of gender-dysphoric children who are allowed to express themselves as they wish, but who do not socially transition—change their clothes, pronouns and the like to present as members of the opposite sex—will, as they grow up, become reconciled to their biological sex. Yet puberty blockers seem to prevent that reconciliation. In European clinics that report numbers, it happens with just 2-4% of children given the drugs. American clinics rarely publish figures, but anecdotally the picture is similar.

The Economist, Gender Medicine — Little Is Known About the Effects of Puberty Blockers. So far as I know, this is still true almost two years later, but the U.S. was charting its own ideologically-mad pursuit of a standard of care that said “block puberty at a minimum, no questions asked,” unlike any of our peer nations.

Self-own extraordinnaire.

I had no idea who Andrew Tate was, that he had a stable of cars, that he trolls Greta Thunberg, and that he now holds the world record for a self-own. But then someone shared this: Andrew Tate’s Arrested for Human Trafficking After Trolling Greta Thunberg.

What Purdue did in the Daniels Decade

We stood for excellence at scale. We did not accept that there’s a tradeoff when bringing education to more people – the original assignment of land grant universities like ours, to open the doors, widen the aperture to higher education. Many people, with some cause, said, Well, the bigger you grow, the lower the quality of the students you’ll have. Many of them will not succeed. We’ve challenged that. And in fact, we have grown 30%. The quality of our students, their performance, the graduation rates, everything has gone up, not down. As my successor will be happy to tell you, we’ve grown to one of the biggest engineering colleges anywhere. And at No. 4 in the national rankings, we are bigger than the top three put together. So you don’t have to trade that off, and I think we’re demonstrating that.

We said that in a world where outcomes are more and more determined by technology and science and the advance of those disciplines that we had an unusual opportunity, and very much a duty, to deliver to the nation more graduates skilled in those areas and more research that contributed the advanced knowledge in those areas. Ten years ago, 41% of the students at this university were in a STEM discipline – a high percentage. Today, it’s 68%, of a student body that is 30% bigger. We are producing for this nation, the kind of talents on which our future success so heavily depends.

Now former Purdue University President Mitch Daniels, via Based in Lafayette, a Substack that’s indispensible for local news as the local Gannett newspaper struggles.

I have my reservations about big research universities, but Purdue, and land-grant University, is a pretty good neighbor.

An Englishman on American Football

I see American Football as the sport that’s the obvious creation of a society based around hyperconsumption. It’s only about a dozen minutes of actual stuttering play stuffed into this capitalist packaging of hype and image, coming with hundreds of adverts for products you weren’t interested in and drowning in a wealth of the packing chips of instant replays and shots of players and officials loitering. I just can’t see the appeal.

Alastair Roberts He said that almost seven years ago. It wasn’t a prophecy of injuries or fatalities, but the appeal of the American spectacle should, but probably won’t, diminish after the Damar Hamlin cardiac arrest on field, triggered by the kind of hits fans pay to see. I’m skeptical that technology can make safe a game based on large people crashing into each other at high speed.

American Football eclipsed by World Football/Soccer is one of my hopes for progress.

David French to wed the grey lady

All things considered, I’m content.

David French will become a regular columnist for the New York Times on January 30 and will cease being a regular columnist for The Dispatch, which he helped to found. But (whew!) he’ll continue doing the Advisory Opinions podcast with Sara Isgur. That’s what mattered most to me.

And I subscribe to NYT, so I’ll read his relocated columns, too.

Maybe The Dispatch should try to wrest Michael Brendan Dougherty or Daniel McCarthy away from National Review now.

The Alzheimer’s Streetlight Effect

There’s an old joke about a drunk who lost his keys. It even has given a name to a cognitive error: The Streetlight effect.

I’m reminded again that it’s not always funny, as when scientists pursue theories that have been pretty well disproven, such as amaloid plaques as the cause of Alzheimer’s, simply because that’s where the grant money is.

On the other hand, that does tend to prove that scientists and humans, not gods, and as prone to venality as any preacher who tells his people what they want to hear instead of what they need to hear.

British Mysteries

The Missus and I have been enjoying British mysteries on the BritBox streaming service, but we’ve reached the point where we agree that the writers riffing on G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown, likely British secularists if not neo-pagans, have no idea what makes the protagonist Father Brown (beyond routinely telling the murderer to repent and confess to the police). The stock characters are no longer enough to sustain our interest.

They also have become less imaginative, more graphic (e.g., profuse blood flying in a knockout punch), and more sexual, the sort of pattern that turned us off other mysteries with attractive protagonists (like the Midsomer Murders).

Then, of course, there’s The Hidden Cost of Cheap TVs, too, but that’s been fairly obvious for a long time.

Stage Manager

My latest Mac OS update brought with it an annoying intruder named "Stage Manager," who keeps getting in the way of my own stage management.

I learned how to shut him off today, and now I find that I occasionally want him back on. In other words, he’s not all bad.

This is probably just me being a grumpy old man.

Politics (but smarter and less bitter than in the past)

GOP New Years Resolution: Live Not By Lies

I doubt that serial liar and fabulist George Santo deserves as much attention as he’s gotten, but at least it’s all been negative. He seems to be his only apologist.

Yet nobody with power to do anything is proposing to do it. Here’s an idea for them:

Kicking George Santos out of Congress is a job for the people of Long Island, one that they can do for themselves if they should happen to discover some particle of communal self-respect. But there are things that Republicans in Congress could and should do to set an example here: They could and should refuse to give him committee assignments; they could and should vote to censure him; they could and should expel him from the Republican Party. …

If the Republican Party would like to make a desperately needed New Year’s resolution, it should be this: that the GOP will cease being an organization dedicated to lies, based on lies, trafficking in lies, cultivating lies, and strategically reliant on lies. The Republicans should embark on a very modest course of self-improvement that begins with telling the truth. Of course, such a specimen as George Santos would have no place in such a party.

Neither would Donald Trump, Kevin McCarthy, Newt Gingrich, Sean Hannity, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Mike Pence ….

Rachael Larimore

Is Trump now a moderate?

For the first time as a candidate, Trump might not be “the craziest son of a b-tch in the race.” That phrase comes from a memorable interview Rep. Thomas Massie gave in 2017 explaining why so many Ron Paul voters in the 2012 primaries ended up becoming Donald Trump supporters in 2016. An authoritarian candidate should struggle to attract libertarians, but Trump didn’t. Massie knew why.

“I went to Iowa twice and came back with [Ron Paul]. I was with him at every event for the last three days in Iowa,” Massie said. “From what I observed, not just in Iowa but also in Kentucky, up close with individuals, was that the people that voted for me in Kentucky, and the people who had voted for Rand Paul in Iowa several years before, were now voting for Trump. In fact, the people that voted for Rand in a primary in Kentucky were preferring Trump.”

“All this time,” Massie explained, “I thought they were voting for libertarian Republicans. But after some soul searching I realized when they voted for Rand and Ron and me in these primaries, they weren’t voting for libertarian ideas — they were voting for the craziest son of a b-tch in the race. And Donald Trump won best in class, as we had up until he came along.”

Nick Cattogio

What Everybody Knows

[E]ven if American institutions and rules make the U.S. system more unstable (under certain conditions) than those in other democracies, the events of January 6 depended on the introduction of an additional variable as a catalyst—and that is Donald Trump’s narcissism and malevolence. Trump simply couldn’t face his own loss—or rather, he couldn’t face admitting his own loss in public—and avoiding that humiliation was more important to him even than the fate of American self-government. If getting himself declared the winner required overturning the rule of law and liberal democracy in the United States, that was fine with him.

…

[A] number of prominent GOP candidates were extreme, badly informed, personally unappealing, and wildly inarticulate, and so performed poorly in the midterm’s general election contests. But how did these bum candidates end up competing in general elections in the first place? The answer, obviously, is that Republican voters chose them (often at Trump’s urging).

And that means it isn’t just Trump who’s responsible for January 6. It’s also all the voters who ended up doubting the trustworthiness of America’s electoral institutions across the board while simultaneously placing the entirety of their faith in the hands of a verified con artist out to protect his delicate ego from the painful truth of his failure to win an election.

It’s this consideration, among others, that keeps me from joining The Bulwark’s Jonathan Last in reversing position on the question of whether Trump should be prosecuted. Where Last has come around to the view that prosecution may well be the least-bad option, I continue to believe it would be less bad to allow Trump to continue fading in stature than to risk reviving his reputation among the mob of dittoheads who once revered him by turning him into an outlaw/folk-hero locked in a fight to the figurative death with the “Democrat Justice Department.”

Damon Linker, What Everybody Knows

Blaming the victim without regret

Even on issues where I am nominally on his side, I think he deserves all of the trouble he has invited upon himself …

I do not think Congress should make his tax returns public because I think punitively releasing tax returns is a bad practice, even when done against people I think have it coming.

…

Donald Trump lied over and over again about his tax returns. He said he’d release them, then didn’t, claiming he couldn’t because he was being audited. He probably lied about the audit; he certainly lied that being audited prevented him from releasing them. He broke all sorts of rules—admittedly informal rules, but rules nonetheless—and as we’ve seen over and over again, when one “side” breaks the rules, it gives the other “side” psychological permission to break other rules in response. Trump invited the predicament he’s in. He wants the rules to benefit him, never to bind him.

Jonah Goldberg, Something Short of Tragic

Congress and Trump’s Tax Returns

The actual point of the release is to embarrass Mr. Trump for refusing to release his returns. We criticized him for this, but it isn’t a legal requirement. Democrats needed a legislative purpose to pry private records from the IRS, and the best excuse they could manage was a desire to strengthen the agency’s presidential-audit policy. The weakness of that rationale was laid bare at the Dec. 20 meeting when Ways and Means approved the release.

Karen McAfee, Democrats’ top oversight staffer, couldn’t explain how releasing the returns would affect legislation. Pressed by GOP Rep. Kevin Brady, she sputtered that Democrats want a bill “to make sure that the audits start on time.” No word on how speeding up audits requires broadcasting Mr. Trump’s finances to the world.

The Trump Tax Return Precedent

Here’s another instance where someone did something unjust to Trump, but at the same time it’s true that he brought it on himself.

I doubt we’re heard the last of this. Trumpist Republicans will want payback, and they’ll not have trouble finding allies.

Just Desserts

McCarthy is getting exactly what he deserves. After January 6, he failed to lead. Instead, he swallowed what was left of his pride and traveled down to Mar-a-Lago to make amends with Donald Trump.

Yet he’s not being punished for that grotesque capitulation. Instead he’s facing yet another act of “burn it down” disruption from many of the same figures—including Matt Gaetz, Paul Gosar, and Lauren Boebert—who’ve built their entire brands around trolling, rage, and rebellion.

It’s possible that GOP obstruction will yield a better speaker. One can hope. But a hope is not a plan, and it seems that the “plan” is to simply block McCarthy and see what happens.

While I don’t want to intrude too much on Nick’s populism beat, one of the tragedies of our time is that populists can often diagnose real maladies (elites have failed in many respects, and America faces real problems), yet they often decide to “solve” the problem with something  worse ….

David French

To hell with that

Wren: To hell with what?

Meijer: With the idea of running at this moment [against other Trumpist candidates]. What is required from a purity test standpoint — folks know they need his endorsement, and then what they end up doing to get that endorsement ends up being disqualifying.

Wren: This dynamic played out with your Republican primary opponent, John Gibbs, the far-right conspiracy theorist who criticized women’s right to vote and propagated the idea that Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta participated in satanic rituals. Yet you went to a unity rally with him. That surprised me.

Meijer: I was surprised at the media reaction to that. In my mind, not going to something like that is a sore loser move. The least I can do is wish him congratulations and best of luck. It’s funny there were a lot of kind of anti-Trump and Never Trump folks who trashed me for that. I was like, “Oh, do you want me to act the same way [Trump] did? Do you want me to deny that I lost? Do you want me to be a sore loser? Come on.”

Former Congressman Pete Meijer

Senator Sinema’s Independent prattling

… we are united in our … independence.

Kyrsten Sinema, putative Independent, via Lee Drutman, Kyrsten Sinema and the Myth of Political Independence

I fear that her personal declaration of independence will be the electoral kiss of death, as it was with another interesting political figure, Justin Amash.

Closing thought

Life doesn’t come with a trigger warning.

Poet/Activist Pádraig Ó Tuama, Interview with Krista Tippett

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.

New Year’s Day 2023

Happy New Year!

I rarely go back and read things I wrote earlier in the life of this blog, but I did so recently and was pleased with, for instance, 50th Anniversary. Indeed, I’m a bit ashamed at how much thought I put into that compared to my current tendency to curate other people’s memorable passages.

I suspect that I’ve resorted to curation because I long ago blogged my big ideas and I’m under no pressure (financial, for instance) to generated new content on some schedule or other.

I’m hoping to publish more of my own thoughts in 2023, but we’ll see how that goes.

Evangelicals and Evangelicalism

I have written many a critical word about Evangelicals and Evangelicalism. I’m going to step back from that a bit.

First, it’s exceedingly difficult to define who is an Evangelical or what is Evangelicalism. I’ve tended to go with the term when my sources used it. That’s a problem when some of the press may over-apply the term.

But there’s a bigger reason than that for backing off a bit: what I have been calling “Evangelical” or “Evangelicalism” is almost entirely non-denominational Protestantism. With a few possible exceptions, Evangelical denominations (there are a few), especially those denominations wherein local churches aren’t entirely at liberty to do their own thing (unlike the Souther Baptist Convention, where they are entirely free to go astray), tend not to be the perpetrators of the stuff I criticize.

These thoughts came to me as I thought about the Religion News Association’s #9-ranked religion story of 2022:

Non-denominational Christian churches soar in growth, according to the newly released 2020 U.S. Religion Census, a decennial survey conducted by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies. There are now more non-denominational churches than any denominations’ churches but Southern Baptists, and their 21 million adherents outnumber every group but Catholics.

I also think it’s time for me to re-re-read Tom Howard’s Evangelical is Not Enough. It’s not that I’m tempted to return to Evangelicalism; it’s that I tend to forget what Evangelicalism at its best can be (Howard’s childhood Evangelical home was idyllic), and that in a non-trivial sense, believing Evangelicals (as opposed to Trumpists who use Evangelical as a political identity), however misguided I think them, are fellow-Christians.

How capacious is “Christian”?

I was preparing something for publication a few days ago on the boundaries of the term “Christian.” Part of the question in mind was “can a sect hold such a skewed idea of Christ that I need not credit their claims to be “Christian” because they follow the “Christ” of their skewed ideas?”

More specifically, “Do Mormons hold such a skewed idea of Christ that I need not credit their claims to be “Christian”?

Then I stumbled onto something I’d written on the topic earlier that was better than what I was in the process of writing. My bottom line: if a sect rejects the Christology of the first three or four ecumenical councils, I won’t acknowledge them as Christians. And the Mormons, for all their clean living, are dead wrong about Christ.

For those who think “Christian” is the equivalent of “nice guy,” this doubtless seems unkind, but we already have “nice guy” to describe nice guys, and “Christian” is not a synonym.

Caesaropapism

The Royal Court, grouped round the Imperial Chapel and, seized with theological fervour, sought to ensure the triumph of a novel teaching concerning the procession of the Holy Spirit. Pressure from the Frankish empire caused this strange teaching to triumph in the West. After resisting for a while, the Popes were in the end obliged to alter the traditional, sacred text of the Creed. From then on, schism from the Eastern Patriarchates became inevitable. (Byzantium, on the other hand, never experienced such an extreme case of Caesaropapism.)

Vladimir Lossky, Seven Days on the Roads of France: June 1940

The “novel teaching concerning the procession of the Holy Spirit” was the filioque, the unilateral corruption of the Nicene Creed’s declaration that the Holy Spirit “proceeds from the Father” by changing it to “proceeds from the Father and the Son.”

Human reasoning

Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos also noted the difference in process and perspective between Latin scholasticism and the patristic approach. He concluded that the emphasis on human reasoning led to the collapse of Western Christian theology.

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox: Understanding and Acquiring the Orthodox Christian Mind

The more I understand the real-world limits of human reasoning, the truer this seems.

The Fall

There is a common mistaken notion about the fall (the sin of Adam and Eve). That mistake is to think that the fall somehow changed all of creation and human beings from a state of original innocence into an altered state of evil and corruption. This is not the teaching of the Scriptures or of the Tradition.

Occasionally you hear the term “fallen nature” which is another inaccurate term. “Nature,” in theological terms, is synonymous with “essence,” or “ousia.” It is the very “thing” that something is. What is understood, theologically, is that the fall has brought death into the world. What is different about human beings is not our nature, but our inability to actually fulfill our nature.The bondage that comes into our lives through death is what we term “sin.” But this is not our “nature” causing the problem.

Fr. Stephen Freeman, The Essential Goodness of All Things

[S]ubordinating truth to politics is a game which tyrants and bullies always win.

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge

To believe that wealth is the only significant measure of the worth of an individual, a family, or a community is to reject the teaching of nearly every religion and wisdom tradition that ever was.

Mark Mitchell and Nathan Schlueter, The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry

The Orthodox “phronema” [roughly, mind-set] cannot be programmitized or reduced to shibboleths.

Fr. Jonathan Tobias

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 reading, 12/25/22

Church History 101

Don’t lose the first part of that quote by getting caught up in the important end of the quote — and end that defies pop Christian history. A lot of interpretive problems become easier if you remember that followers of The Way were originally a sect within Judaism (until eventually Judaism expelled them).

Islanded Selves

In late Western modernity we have constructed an atomized, value-free, material model in which our islanded selves are ultimately disconnected from one another. T.S. Eliot put his finger on it in the Choruses from the Rock:

When the Stranger says ‘What is the meaning of this city?
Do you huddle close together because you love each other?’
What will you answer? ‘We all dwell together
To make money from each other’? or ’this is a community’?

Malcolm Guite, Waiting on the Word

Three Maxims

  • I have never met a person that fasts faithfully who is at all more hypocritical or less virtuous than one who does not fast – not a single one … it is far more likely that the one who fasts is much more faithful.
  • Do not turn every virtue (like almsgiving or any “ministry”) into a program. This sort of administrative philosophy leads to despair.
  • Always remember that anger makes us temporarily energetic, but also stupid … I cannot think of one good thing I ever did or said in anger: but I can think of many regrets.

Father Jonathan Tobias, Second Terrace blog, January 29, 2018 (“Some maxims for the new wilderness”)

A Good Question

Rod Dreher, With the Bruderhof

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.

American Christianity Today

Affiliation versus Faith

As Bullivant notes in his book, the fall of communism meant that “talk of ‘a final, all-out battle between communist atheism and Christianity’ was much less a part of the cultural background.” Now only the oldest millennials have the faintest recollection of what it meant to fear the destruction of our civilization at the hands of a hostile imperial aggressor.

Instead, millennials faced something else entirely. “Very soon,” writes Bullivant, “the most pressing geopolitical threat to baseball, Mom, and apple pie was not from those without religion but those with rather too much of the wrong kind of it.” The 9/11 attacks introduced Americans to Islamic fundamentalism, and “religious extremism, in the form of radical Islamic terrorists, usurped the place in American nightmares that communist infiltrators used to occupy.”

…

Where does this leave us? Bullivant’s book is a reminder that culture and context matter. While any given individual may resist the tides of the times, at scale religious affiliation is more malleable than we might think. The malleability of religious affiliation is one reason why it’s important to think of affiliation and faith as perhaps distinct and different concepts.

David French, mulling over what he’s read so far in Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America

Americanized religion

When I saw that Ross Douthat had written on The Americanization of Religion, I knew it would be good.

I was right.

By the way, The Americanization of Religion is not a good thing, just in case you were wondering.

Douthat’s column is so rich that I highlighted most of it and cannot find a satisfactory representative quote. Reading it will take you about 6 minutes if you don’t compulsively highlight and index it.

Religious “secularism”

Along the same lines:

On a daily basis, I have become increasingly aware of the “religious” nature of almost the whole of modern life. That might seem to be an odd observation when the culture in which we live largely describes itself as “secular.” That designation, however, only has meaning in saying that the culture does not give allegiance or preference to any particular, organized religious body. It is sadly the case, however, that this self-conception makes the culture particularly blind to just how “religious” it is in almost everything it does. I suspect that the more removed we are from true communion with God, the more “religious” we become.

Fr. Stephen Freeman, The Religious Nature of Modern Life

All of today’s observations echo one of the most illuminating books I’ve ever read, Nathan Hatch’s The Democratization of American Christianity. I can’t recommend it too highly if you have any interest in the history of religion — or if you think American popular religion is simply New Testament Christianity.

[S]ubordinating truth to politics is a game which tyrants and bullies always win.

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge

To believe that wealth is the only significant measure of the worth of an individual, a family, or a community is to reject the teaching of nearly every religion and wisdom tradition that ever was.

Mark Mitchell and Nathan Schlueter, The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry

The Orthodox "phronema" [roughly, mind-set] cannot be programmitized or reduced to shibboleths.

Fr. Jonathan Tobias

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.

Monday, 12/19/22

How we differ from traditional cultures

Choose ye this day

You can believe exactly what people in 1450 believed, but you cannot believe it in the same way they believed it because you have a choice.

Paraphrase of Carl Trueman, interviewed by Andrew Sullivan

This is a modern conundrum. I can say “I had no choice but to become Orthodox when I saw and learned what I did,” but of course I did have a choice. Choosing has been unavoidable for centuries now — at least in upper strata in Western Christendom (perhaps it’s one of those proverbial “first-world problems”).

Choosing to change religion is not even a costly choice here as it is still elsewhere in the world. Yet there is a toll to be paid, coming from banks of integrity, for not choosing what overwhelmingly commends itself.

(Sullivan/Trueman was a great interview, by the way, between very smart Oxbridge men with significant differences of opinion but an ability to converse civilly. Go thou and do likewise.)

East and West

Further:

To say that Orthodoxy is “Eastern” and that Catholic and Protestant Christianity are “Western” is not a poetic description or a mere matter of geography. The terms have long been employed to indicate real differences in historical experiences and thought—not simply the final conclusions but the process by which we arrive at those conclusions.

Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox. I do not have, even by inheritance, the historical experience of the Eastern Church. My heritage is Western. So while I believe and practice Eastern Orthodoxy, I cannot believe and practice it in quite the way a devout “cradle Orthodox” would.

I like to think that converts like me bring something of value nonetheless, particularly where the faith may have tended toward a complacent cultural club or, as in my parish, where no single cultural group of Orthodox Christians coalesced to to support a church, and converts both added numbers and served as a catalyst for a new, more American (i.e., “pan-Orthodox”) parish. That my parish is in the relatively obscure Carpatho-Rusyn diocese may make it easier to avoid an ethnic identification — as in when people ask whether my Orthodoxy is Greek or Russian.

Traditional civilizations

In a traditional civilization it is almost inconceivable that a man should claim an idea as his own; and in any case, were he to do so, he would thereby deprive it of all credit and authority, reducing it to the level of a meaningless fantasy: if an idea is true, it belongs equally to all who are capable of understanding it; if it is false, there is no credit in having invented it.

René Guénon Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World

Culture generally

Journalistic murmurations

I’ve heard, and find it plausible, that the New York Times tacitly decides what’s “news” worthy of mainstream attention.

I’m starting to think there is some similar organ on the Christian and Christianish Right, because (for instance) all of a sudden “everyone” (i.e., many on the Christian Right, from which orientation I gain much daily commentary — this, for instance) is writing about MAID, Medical Assistance in Dying, as implemented in Canada and increasingly “recommended” in heavy-handed ways.

It’s a worthwhile story, but I don’t think you’ll see it in the New York Times. It may have started with advance copies of The New Atlantis.

It occurs to me that this phenomenon is rather like a murmuration. (I hope that apt metaphor is original. I certainly am not conscious of having encountered it elsewhere.)

The Promise of Pluralism imperiled

In the seven years since Obergefell was decided, the American left has been on a mission to diminish the legal and practical foundations of the Constitution’s free-speech rights.

They argue that antidiscrimination laws should be recognized as more important and that the Supreme Court in Ms. Smith’s case, 303 Creative v. Elenis, should affirm this new reality. Colorado’s law lists the classes of discrimination as “race, color, disability, sex, sexual orientation (including transgender status), national origin/ancestry, creed, marital status.”

This Supreme Court is likely to decide in Ms. Smith’s favor, maintaining the prohibition established in 1943 by Justice Robert Jackson as the “fixed star in our constitutional constellation” that the government can’t compel, or coerce, an individual to adopt the majority’s opinion.

Still, this case is among the reasons you have been seeing a public assault on the high court’s conservative members. The left’s playbook, across politics, is to stigmatize its opposition as outside acceptable opinion.

Daniel Henninger, They Want to Shut You (and 303 Creative) Up.

I’ll be blunt: I think free speech rights trump antidiscrimination rights. The only issue is whether what the state is forbidding or commanding qualifies as “speech.” In the 303 Creative case, it so clearly was speech that Colorado admitted it.

Western Civ

The argument now that the spread of pop culture and consumer goods around the world represents the triumph of Western civilization trivializes Western culture. The essence of Western civilization is the Magna Carta, not the Magna Mac.

Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

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

Questioning whether violence really is religious risks the “No True Scotsman” fallacy, but I’ve believed that violence doesn’t come from true Christianity for more than 50 years. I probably was guilty of scripture-twisting, but I cited James 4:1-4 as my prooftext.

My conviction, and the bloody wars provoked by non-Christian ideologies in the last century, gives me cause for grave concern as we arguably are abandoning a real, if flawed, Christian heritage now that our great atheist enemy is defunct.

Politics (sigh!)

Marshall Law

Here at The Dispatch, we are mostly anti-snark and anti-sneer, so I will try to consider this question earnestly: What does it say about our country that we are governed by illiterates?

One “Marshall Law” is a typo. Two is a trend. And the recently published trove of January 6-related texts is a testament to the illiteracy of the people who represent millions of Americans in Congress ….

Kevin D. Williamson

Ron DeSantis

I want two things out of the 2024 presidential cycle. One is the end of Donald Trump’s political career, whether in the primary or general election. I don’t care when or how it happens as long as it happens.

The other is a greater willingness among conservatives to criticize their leadership. We’ve spent seven years encased in a repulsive personality cult devoted to a repulsive personality. If the cult disbands in the next election, one obvious lesson in the aftermath is that it shouldn’t be replaced by a new one.

Nick Cattogio

Cattogio thinks the best way to end Trump’s political career is an incumbent Florida Governor, Ron DeSantis (you may have heard of him).

I’m agnostic on what it will take to drive a stake through Trump’s blackened heart, but I’m tending negative on DeSantis.

He’s smart enough to know that some of the culture war laws he has backed are unconstitutional, but backed them anyway despite his oath to uphold the constitution. Maybe the Morning Dispatch’s satirical summary of the Bill of Rights is his for real:

On this day in 1791, the fledgling United States of America ratified its Bill of Rights, conferring on its citizens a host of fundamental freedoms that can only be infringed upon if doing so helps one’s political team win culture war fights.

That’s not my view of the Bill of Rights.

I can forgive Marjorie Taylor Green her illiterate outbursts before I forgive the likes of Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley and Ron DeSantis. All of them are better-educated and probably smarter than me, but they tend toward unprincipled pandering and willing to subvert the Constitution for political gain. For all I know, DeSantis seems better than the other two only because I’m less familiar with him.

The Coverup is the Crime

Remember that dad who got dragged out of a school board meeting in Loudon County, Virginia, after pressing school officials about in-school sexual assaults on girls by a cross-dressing boy? The idea of the problem being the dad fit a leftish narrative so well that Merrick Garland directed the FBI to investigate threats against teachers and school officials and people began viewing vocal parental involvement in Board meetings as terroristic.

Well, it turns out the dad may have been right and that school officials were criminally covering up the assaults.

Caveat: There are twists and turns in this story. The charges are mostly misdemeanors and potentially somewhat political. I doubt that the dust has settled enough for clarity. It’s now well-known that a cross-dressing male sexually assaulted two girls in two bathrooms, but those bathrooms apparently were not yet subject to a “come as the gender you feel today” policy.

Let the healing begin

Republicans actually turned out more voters than Democrats in November. They even won the national popular vote. But in races involving Trump’s candidates, many Republican voters split their tickets, punishing Trump favorites like Arizona’s Blake Masters and Kari Lake who questioned the 2020 results. It turns out that running against democracy is not a recipe for democratic success.

…

It’s sobering to realize that history can turn on the personal quirks of one person. But it’s also comforting, because as the 2022 midterm results suggest, some of the ugliest aspects of the Trump era aren’t inherent to our system or deeply embedded in our society. They are the downstream effects of one bad actor. Remove him and the pollution he caused will remain, but once disconnected from its source, it can slowly be cleansed, as we saw in this past election.

Yair Rosenberg, Deep Shtetl. The idea of a “national popular vote” in Congressional and Senate elections is quite bogus for most purposes, but it somehow feels instructive here.

Hard fact

You can’t fact-check a person out of hope and purpose. They’ll resent you even if you’re right.

David French

Just for fun

France can still pull it off if Mike Pence has the courage

@EricMGarcia

[S]ubordinating truth to politics is a game which tyrants and bullies always win.

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge

To believe that wealth is the only significant measure of the worth of an individual, a family, or a community is to reject the teaching of nearly every religion and wisdom tradition that ever was.

Mark Mitchell and Nathan Schlueter, The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry

The Orthodox “phronema” [roughly, mind-set] cannot be programmitized or reduced to shibboleths.

Fr. Jonathan Tobias

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 before Nativity 2022

Antiquity envy

By Lingard’s day, the Church of England held the smug and self-affirming view that the old Anglo-Saxon Church—that is to say, Christianity in the British Isles prior to 1066—was in fact, proto-Protestant; concluding that Anglicanism was nothing more than English Christianity as it had always been before all those pesky Papists showed up and ruined things. From the actual historical record, to accomplish this, you must turn your head just right and squint at one isolated primary source, and then use 17th-century Protestant speculations as your guide for its interpretation. Lingard lays waste to such pretensions, but is always a slightly bemused gentleman in doing so.

Terry Cowan

Thus does Terry introduce the theme of what I’ll call “antiquity envy” in various 200-year-old sects. He even (blush!) gives me a shout-out as his favorite aggregator. What’s not to like?

Accommodating brute facts

In May 2021, a time when public gatherings in England were strictly limited because of the coronavirus pandemic, the British tabloids were caught off guard by a stealth celebrity wedding in London. Westminster Cathedral—the “mother church” of Roman Catholics in England and Wales—was abruptly closed on a Saturday afternoon. Soon the groom and bride arrived: Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Carrie Symonds, a Catholic and a former Conservative Party press officer with whom he had fathered a child the previous year. A priest duly presided over the marriage, despite the fact that the Catholic Church opposes divorce and sex outside marriage, and that Johnson had been married twice before and had taken up with Symonds before securing a divorce. It was an inadvertently vivid display of the Church’s efforts to accommodate its teachings to worldly circumstances.

Paul Elie, The Reinvention of the Catholic Church – The Atlantic (emphasis added)

I assume that accommodating Orthodoxy to worldly circumstances (which isn’t exactly changing its teachings, but may eventuate in that) is what Archbishop Elpidophoros of America was thinking at the ”First Greek Orthodox Baptism for Child of Gay Couple in Greece”

It is a fearful thing to be responsible for a multitude of human souls, as are priests and, a fortiori, Bishops, Archbishops and Patriarchs.

Deny baptism to the children “of” the gay couple and you’re mean or homophobic. Grant it and, among other problems, it is seen as “a sign of great progress in the Greek Orthodox Church in terms of acceptance of the LGBT community,” a not entirely salutary development. Do the wedding and you’re countenancing adultery and divorce; deny it and you’re promoting bastardy.

The only way I know of squaring the circle is that you consider stepping beyond the letter of the law only if you have reason to think that doing so will conduce to the salvation of one or more parties to the irregular circumstance, which in all the cases I can imagine will mean that there’s already some repentance for the circumstances they’ve created.

But then I’m not a Priest or a Bishop, am I?

Humble in theory, arrogant in fact

Over the last two centuries, an egalitarian culture has given rise to a diverse array of powerful religious leaders, whose humble origins and common touch seem strangely at odds with the authoritarian mantle that people allow them to assume.

Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity

I cannot help but think of a law school classmate’s description of leaving the Protestantism of southern Indiana for the Roman Catholic Church: he gave up untutored and pompadoured tyrants who denied any authority beyond expounding the Bible in exchange for priests who claimed to be God’s authoritative presence but who let him live his own life.

We’re all liberals now

The late conservative philosopher Roger Scruton once referred to conservatism as ‘a hesitation within liberalism’ rather than an alternative to it, and Deneen too believes that while left and right might want to liberate different things, they are both onboard with the overall project:

What is bemoaned by the the right is not due to the left but to the consequences of its own deepest commitments, especially to liberal economics. And what is bemoaned by the left is not due to the right but to the consequences of its own deepest commitments, especially to the dissolution of social norms, particularly those regarding sexual behaviour and identity. The ‘wedding’ between global corporations and this sexual agenda is one of the most revealing yet widely ignored manifestations of this deeper synergy.

Paul Kingsnorth, In This Free World

[S]ubordinating truth to politics is a game which tyrants and bullies always win.

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge

To believe that wealth is the only significant measure of the worth of an individual, a family, or a community is to reject the teaching of nearly every religion and wisdom tradition that ever was.

Mark Mitchell and Nathan Schlueter, The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry

The Orthodox “phronema” [roughly, mind-set] cannot be programmitized or reduced to shibboleths.

Fr. Jonathan Tobias

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, 12/11/22

Big day today for the vocal chords. Church, then warmups, then a Chamber Singers concert.

Let my prayer arise …

Incense

Sermon on the Mount

Those Sermon on the Mount Virtues …

… just don’t work any more

Pastors have spoken to [Russell] Moore about getting blowback from their congregants for preaching biblical ideas about mercy, with people saying, “That doesn’t work anymore, in a culture as hostile as this.”

Michelle Goldberg.

So mercy (and other Sermon on the Mount virtues) are just some kind of jujitsu? A tactic rather than a principle?

Pathetic! Any pastor with integrity will recognize that it’s time to preach the whole Gospel until those who don’t like it repent or leave.

Worldview

Can a place be holy?

Rod Dreher is doing tons and tons of research and thinking for a forthcoming book on the re-enchantment of imagination (my version of his project, not his). Preparation includes visiting ancient Christian sites — presumably to try to recapture the context in which a more expansive view of reality than ours prevailed.

He’s been going back and forth with another American on the tour:

Pat and I got into another argument on the bus. I mentioned that the holiest place on earth for Christians is Jerusalem, especially inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which takes in the spot where Jesus died, and the place where he rose from the dead. “You can’t say that,” said Pat. “I’m a Christian, and I don’t necessarily agree with you.” And then we were off. Pat’s view — a thoroughly nominalist one — is that when you say a place is “holy,” you are offering an opinion about the emotions it evokes within you. To Pat, there is no intrinsic holiness to a place, or an object. If the Prayer Tower at Oral Roberts University makes you feel closer to God than the Holy Sepulchre, well, then it is holier for you. Nobody can say that one place is more sacred than another.

You can imagine how I reacted to that line of argument. But again, I think it was important for me to hear it — I mean, to encounter someone who believes these things, and who thinks this way. Remember, Pat is not a liberal; in fact, Pat complained at one point on the trip about how the cultural climate in the city requires non-progressive Christians like him to be closeted. I never could really figure Pat out, to be honest, but he seems to sincerely believe that true Christianity can only be disembodied. He deflected every challenge from me with some form of, “That’s your perspective.” My guess is that he has only lived and dwelled among fellow Pentecostals, and assumes that Pentecostalism is normative. He had no awareness how very, very modern his take on Christianity is. I said to him at one point that if the early church had thought and lived as he does, it would not have survived. I got the sense that he regards me as a nut who worships Tradition, not God.

Again: it’s really useful for me to know as I write this book. Pat — who is a nice guy, actually — and I are at two extremes of the Christian spectrum, but I suspect that most contemporary American Christians are a lot closer to Pat’s end than mine.

Rod Dreher

So at which end, or where along the spectrum, do you stand? My reasoning as an ecclesial Christian puts me with Rod; my culture — and I cannot deny being its creature to a substantial extent — sides with Pat.

So I wouldn’t argue against Rod’s project, but my visceral reactions might not be consistently welcoming.

An older system of values

David French had a very powerful Sunday column last week, Remembering What Repentance Looks Like.

He leads with the story of Johnny Hunt, a big-name Southern Baptist pastor (and former national President) who in May, after finding that his lies about sexually assaulting another pastor’s wife weren’t fooling anybody, was forced out of ministry.

Now a self-appointed committee of four lackies/pastors declare that he’s ready to be restored — less than seven months after removal, and despite a recent SBC resolution (toothless, like all SBC resolutions, because each local church is entirely autonomous) that “any person who has committed sexual abuse is permanently disqualified from holding the office of pastor.”

Lots of juicy stuff in that story, including a cameo appearance by Herschel Walker, whose “repentance” looks more like intransigence. But I want to note two un-juicy things:

  1. Southern Baptist scripture-twisting. Johnny Hunt never confessed his sin to his congregation, citing Psalm 51:4, which states, “against You and You only have I sinned and done this evil in Your sight.” Further, one of the four lackeys justified his whitewashing of Hunt with the story of the Good Samaritan — which should have led him to run to the aid of the low-status victim pastor’s wife who’d been assaulted by Hunt, not to Hunt, the high-status perpetrator.
  2. The contrast with disgraced John Profumo, the backstory to which I personally recall: “the dignity, discretion, restraint, and repentance with which Profumo lived his life after his fall were the last gasp of an old system of values. His honorable conduct—continued for years, away from the blaze of publicity—would now be almost inconceivable among the political elite.”

We first of all need more men to keep their zippers up, but among those who fail, we need more John Profumos and fewer Johnny Hunts.

Freddie demolishes a straw man

For what it’s worth, I recognize almost nothing as authentically Christian in the straw man Freddie DeBoer attacked Monday.

I should say that Freddie almost certainly is not aware that he has set up a straw man. He’s a painfully honest man, who is describing the kind of Christianish stuff he’s seen on television or encounted beyond whatever church doors he has darkened.

The only thing he says about such Christianish stuff that belongs to authentic Christianity is his tacit acknowledgement that Christianity holds that Christ was more than a man and that his incarnation is salvific.

Curiously, on Friday, Freddie ranked the works of his favorite film director, Terrence Malick. Is there a more Christian director than Malick?

Modern syncretism

I’m very glad we live in a society that is more religiously tolerant. But this has also come at the cost of a greater indifference to the truths our various religions proclaim. Walking around these ancient once-pagan cities, thinking about how syncretic Greco-Roman polytheism was, it’s easy to grasp what a mortal threat monotheism combined with universalism was to the settled order. (The Jews were also monotheistic, but they did not proselytize, because their faith was not universalist.) How strange it is to think that Christianity in the contemporary West has become a lot like the syncretism of the ancient pagan world, in the sense that most Christians (myself included) don’t have a reflexive willingness to throw down to defend theological truths and police ecclesial borders. The Christians who lived in these Asia Minor cities were a threat to the settled social order precisely because they refused to worship the local gods. Had they just added Jesus into the mix, nobody would have bothered them. Had they kept their religion to themselves, as the Jews did, nobody would have bothered them.

In our time, the only Christians who get marked out for opprobrium are those who refuse to observe the dominant culture’s religious feasts (e.g., Pride Month), and who insist that all those who profess the faith they evangelize must also refuse. The Christians who assimilate easily to the idolatries of the day (“idolatry” is worshiping anything but the true God) have no problems. It’s helpful to think about if you were a Jesus believer in first-century Ephesus or Pergamum, if you would have been Christian enough to be persecuted.

Rod Dreher, pensive as he tours the Seven Churches of the Apocalypse in Asia Minor.

Disillusionment

Damon Linker, when he worked at First Things in 2003 and beyond, wrote an article on becoming a father, which produced many negative letters to the editor, most of them the equivalent of shit-posting comments on the web. Since First Things was a high-toned magazine, the contrast with its readers was revealing:

But reading all of those angry, sometimes vulgar, letters from First Things readers attacking me and the magazine, accusing us of abandoning the properly gendered outlook on the family, supposedly rooted in Scripture (but actually derived from pop-culture representations of 1950s middle-class white suburban family life), was significant, too. Doing so left me feeling deeply alienated from the place I worked. Not, again, in terms of the workplace. But in terms of the workplace’s telos—its end or goal. I was an editor for an opinion magazine. But who were its readers? What did its “base” believe about the world? How did I feel about devoting myself and my talents to serving this group of people and its prejudices, which I now began to wonder if I shared?

Damon Linker

What Linker writes there is part of what I felt when shifting from Evangelicalism, many long decades before Florida Man’s seduction of Evangelicalism, to the sober Calvinism of the Christian Reformed Church. Alienation. “These are not really my people.” That sort of thing, along with a more intellectual rationale that wasn’t entirely rationalization.

From what was I alienated?

  • Taboos that lacked even minimally plausible scriptural roots.
  • Altar calls in churches, irnoically without altars and without scriptural precedent.
  • Psychological manipulation in those altar calls: “I see that hand.” (There was no hand, but how was anyone to know with “every head bowed, every eye closed”? I guess I’ve outed myself.) “Is there another?”
  • Flagrant scripture-twisting.

There’s probably more.

Miscellany

Quality

I don’t know much about book-binding, but it appears to me that my small Psalter’s cover letting will wear off before the binding shows any wear.

There’s even a sort of hinge so I can hold it open without straining the spine:

Essentials

American Gnostics

Be careful what you aim for

[S]ubordinating truth to politics is a game which tyrants and bullies always win.

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge

To believe that wealth is the only significant measure of the worth of an individual, a family, or a community is to reject the teaching of nearly every religion and wisdom tradition that ever was.

Mark Mitchell and Nathan Schlueter, The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry

The Orthodox "phronema" [roughly, mind-set] cannot be programmitized or reduced to shibboleths.

Fr. Jonathan Tobias

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.

Saturday, 12/10/22

Politics

Georgia Voters Call B*llsh*t on Existential Threatism

If you’ve spent any time in Republican circles since 2016, you’re familiar with a particular pattern of GOP political pressure. No, pressure is perhaps too mild of a word. The better word is bullying. 

The pattern works like this. Trumpist activists seize disproportionate power in the grassroots, work with the Trump team to nominate Trumpist candidates, and then browbeat every conservative who raises objections in the general election. They use negative polarization (with a helpful assist from Democratic extremism) to present voters with the “binary choice.” 

Are you pro-life? Then you can’t vote for the Democrat. Are you worried about the border? Then you can’t vote for the Democrat. Even if the Republican’s character is so deficient that you wouldn’t want your kid working for them if they managed the local McDonald’s, the MAGA movement will yell, “Still better than the Democrat!”

It turns out that people don’t want to be bullied into the ballot box. It turns out a significant enough number of Republicans and Republican-leaning voters will turn to their own party and say, “Do better.” They’ll call the Trumpist bluff and turn the challenge back to them—if these issues are so vital, why are you nominating obviously deficient candidates? Why aren’t you taking the high demands of public office seriously? 

But this point becomes truly powerful only combined with this last observation. MAGA losses combined with normie Republican wins shows there’s life left in conservatism yet. Here’s the tale of the tape in Georgia: Walker was the only Republican this year to lose a statewide race.

David French, Georgia Exposed the Trumpist Scam (Emphasis added)

Of course, a similar argument applies to Democrats: If Doug Mastriano was an existential threat to democracy, why did you spend money to get him elected in the primary?

Bad Omen

Any Republican that’s out there trying to work with [Democrats] is wrong.

Kevin McCarthy, quoted in the Economist

Culture

What subscriptions should I cancel next?

One of my most vital convictions is summed up in this post: “Wondering how to decide what to read? Here’s a simple but effective heuristic to cut down the choices significantly. Ask yourself one question: Does this writer make bank when we hate one another? And if the answer is yes, don’t read that writer.” Americans have these wildly distorted views of people whom they perceive to be their political enemies because so many journalists and talking heads enrich themselves through stoking hatred. Those people should be utterly shunned.

Alan Jacobs, via a reminder from John Brady.

I’ve looked ahead on my list of books to read and eliminated a few based on this wise heuristic.

But what of newspaper editorials that say “hateful rhetoric directed toward transgender people and the broader LGBTQ community” aired from “church pulpits” to “school board debates and libraries” causes people who’ve rarely or never darkened the door of any church open fire in gay bars and clubs? Aren’t those newspapers making bank on hatred?

Alan Jacobs at least is consistent. Last I knew, he read news once per week, on Friday, from The Economist, which doesn’t write such piffle.

Noble lies

The Matthew Shepard myth — that he was murdered by two redneck strangers because he was gay — is still widely believed, even though the hideous murder was far more complex and fundamentally about meth. The idea that the Pulse shooting was motivated by homophobia — not true — is routinely repeated …

This is not healthy. Noble lies are still lies. And lies always fail in the end.

…

“I sure hope Trump has some more brilliant ideas for can’t-miss Senate candidates. Omarosa maybe? Carrot Top? Ghislaine Maxwell?” – Ann Coulter on the Georgia runoff.

“Can’t believe Lindsey Graham’s pitch of ‘vote for the brain damaged guy to show you’re not racist’ fell short,” – Richard Hanania.

Andrew Sullivan

Wordplay, an occasional feature

When the right words won’t suffice

We are currently in a time, perhaps unprecedented, when talk about all kinds of sexual behavior is pervasive, even inescapable. And we Christians who value purity are very much on the outside, expressing beliefs that the culture can’t even understand. There’s little likelihood that, if we could only find the right way to say it, we’d win people over; I found that out with the pro-life issue. It’s the beliefs themselves that they reject, and changing the words won’t fool them.

Professor David Bradshaw, The Beauty of Chastity, a chapter in Healing Humanity

Words of the Year

For the first time in its history, the Oxford English Dictionary trusted the general public to vote on the word of the year instead of having its esteemed lexicographers make the choice.

Predictably, the general public immediately abused this trust by voting overwhelmingly for the slang term “goblin mode.”

The Morning Dispatch

… “goblin mode”. That means a state in which someone indulges their laziest or most self-indulgent habits—perhaps suitable as a symbol for the first proper post-lockdown year.

The Economist Daily Briefing for December 5

the stink of loserdom

The aura now surrounding Florida Man, per Ross Douthat

[S]ubordinating truth to politics is a game which tyrants and bullies always win.

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge

To believe that wealth is the only significant measure of the worth of an individual, a family, or a community is to reject the teaching of nearly every religion and wisdom tradition that ever was.

Mark Mitchell and Nathan Schlueter, The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry

The Orthodox “phronema” [roughly, mind-set] cannot be programmitized or reduced to shibboleths.

Fr. Jonathan Tobias

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, 12/7/22

Today is my father’s 103rd birthday. I’m now officially past the "I wish he were still with us" stage (though he regularly appears in dreams), since he presumably would be pretty miserable if he were.

Yes, his 22nd birthday got quite a cloud over it.

Legalia

How long, O Lord?

How many times do Republican- and Trump-appointed federal judges have to totally smack down Team Trump arguments before the mainstream media stop insinuating that Republican judges uniquely cannot separate law and politics?

303 Creative

Cage Fighting comes to SCOTUS

I listened to about an hour of Supreme Court Oral Argument in Monday’s 303 Creative case.

I thought I was confused because I’m old and rusty, but two younger, un-rusty commentators, Sara Isgur and David French, flagged the argument as very low-caliber and peppered with lurid hypotheticals designed not to explore the the implications of each advocate’s position, but to make the advocates whose arguments they disfavored look monstrous.

In other words, it was more like a televised Senate hearing than an ordinary Oral Argument. (Pro tip: if you consistently defend free speech, you can be “hypoed” into defending really abhorrent speech. Get a backbone.)

I am relieved. I may be rusty, but it was a poor argument, courtesy of the Justices.

Look for very sharp dissents from the justices on the losing side, because both sides seemed pretty heavily-invested.

An academic frames the question

The question is whether civil rights protections properly include the suppression of speech that disagrees with legal norms, or compels speech that celebrates those norms. Alternatively: do artists (including web designers) have the freedom to depict what subjects they wish, and how—even if they take money for doing it, and even if their perspective is hurtful (to some people)?

Prof. Michael McConnell

Moore v. Harper

Prof. Akhil Amar’s oddly-compelling, low-tech podcast had a couple of podcasts (October 26 and followup episodes with Steven Calabresi) on the Independent State Legislature doctrine purportedly at issue in Wednesday’s Moore v. Harper SCOTUS oral argument.

For the first time, though, I’m now feeling misled by Prof. Amar. Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal features two pieces, one by the Editorial Board and one by lawyers, casting the controversy in terms that seem to make Prof. Amar’s argument peripheral if not irrelevant to the real issues.

Prof. Amar legitimately notes that each state legislature is created by that state’s constitution, and the boundaries of the “legislature” vary according to things like whether the governor has veto power, thus making him a part of the legislative process. This matters because elections are unusually entrusted not to the states generally, but specifically to their legislatures.

The Wall Street Journal pieces legitimately note that under no sane construal are state courts part of the legislative process. Thus, state courts have no role in overseeing federal elections, though federal courts may.

That is perhaps an over-simplification, but it struck me as a powerful point against the backdrop of state courts making up anti-gerrymander rules not found explicitly in their state constitutions, or overruling the legislature’s absentee ballot deadlines in favor of their own.

Maybe litigants took more extreme positions, justifying Prof. Amar’s characterization of ISL’s danger.

I expect SCOTUS, as I almost always do, to adopt narrow reasoning in Moore v. Harper — to deal with the case(s) at hand without sweeping pronouncements that they might regret later.

P.S.: I listened to a half-hour or so of arguments in the case Wednesday, and it seems that SCOTUS views the case more as does Wall Street Journal, less as does Akhil Reed Amar.

Trumpish

Snivelling cowards cool on Florida Man

He used us to win the White House. We had to close our mouths and eyes when he said things that horrified us.

Mike Evans, a former member of Trump’s evangelical advisory board, via Michelle Goldberg

You only had to close your mouth if you valued power and proximity over integrity. Don’t come snivelling to me now.

Pissing away Georgia — again

I’m gratified at the loss of Herschel Walker in the Georgia runoff for U.S. Senate.

I loved Walker as a football player. I probably could tolerate him as a former football player, bastard children and absentee fatherhood notwithstanding.

But his only claim to qualification for the U.S. Senate is that Florida Man endorsed him and encouraged him, despite patent unfitness intellectually. And when his sins found him out, his response was not that of a repentant Christian, but of someone with a sense of entitlement.

To drive a stake squarely through Florida Man’s heart, I only wish Walker had lost by more. He now has twice cost the GOP some national elective offices from Georgia that really should have been theirs:

All of this [context of Trump behavior] predictably helped make the runoff a fractal of the larger 2022 pattern: Under Trump’s influence, with Trump’s preferred candidates, the Republican Party first sacrificed a potential Senate majority and then sacrificed one more Senate seat for good measure.

Ross Douthat

Unrealistic, but instructive nonetheless

National Review’s Charlie Cooke would like a word with those arguing that, because Donald Trump’s call to suspend the Constitution won’t be heeded, it doesn’t really matter. “During the closing days of the 2020 election, I wrote repeatedly about the seriousness of Joe Biden’s refusal to reject his party’s growing demand to ‘pack’—i.e. destroy—the United States Supreme Court,” Cooke writes. “Not once did I receive an email from a Trump voter telling me that my alarm was misplaced on the grounds that, in all likelihood, Biden would not have the votes to do it. Back then—and rightly so—the mere fact that Biden was entertaining the idea was deemed instructive: ‘When people tell you what they want to do with power,’ my correspondents invariably opined, ‘you should believe them. Joe Biden cannot be trusted with power.’ Well, so it is with Donald Trump once again. … American patriots do not seek to overturn legitimate election results or recommend the suspension of the United States Constitution; they respect and defend both at all costs. Donald Trump is not a patriot. He is, in his heart of hearts, a tyrant. Take note, America.”

The Morning Dispatch

[S]ubordinating truth to politics is a game which tyrants and bullies always win.

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge

To believe that wealth is the only significant measure of the worth of an individual, a family, or a community is to reject the teaching of nearly every religion and wisdom tradition that ever was.

Mark Mitchell and Nathan Schlueter, The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry

The Orthodox "phronema" [roughly, mind-set] cannot be programmitized or reduced to shibboleths.

Fr. Jonathan Tobias

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, 12/4/22

What is Religion?

In the next few chapters, I am inevitably going to have to use some much debated terms, such as the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and Romanticism. To the left hemisphere these look like categories that should be definable; to the right hemisphere they are the products of experience of loose constellations of phenomena, which have a family resemblance.

Iain McGillchrist, The Master and His Emissary, Chapter 9 (The Renaissance and the Reformation).

I remember a cartoon in a youth-oriented Christian magazine 50 years or so ago, wherein an “educated” person was claiming that “All religions are fundamentally alike under their superficial differences. I’ll show you: just name any two religions.” The response was “Micronesian frog worship and Christian Science.”

I have been, and remain, a bit skeptical of the term “religion,” but I suppose major religions might fall into the category of “loose constellations of phenomena, which have a family resemblance.”

There are even mutually exclusive Christianities

There is a Christianity that tells us God plans to save us from our sins: To heal our passions, conform our character to His, and make us capable of union with Him. And there is a Christianity that tells us God wants you to be happy in this life. These two Christianities are mutually exclusive.

There are certainly times of happiness for the disciple of Christ – and at least seeds of joy which can be brought to bloom through the practice of gratefulness, humility, and love. But in 21st-century America, perhaps Christianity’s most counter-cultural message is that God isn’t really interested in making you happy; the Gospel is about the Kingdom of God, not about you, and Christ unconditionally promises His people, “In this world you will have tribulation.” (Jn 16:33)

Fr Silouan Thompson, Your Best Life?. (H/T John Brady)

In our post-Christian Christendom, though, ghosts live on, not merely between salvation Christianity and happiness Christianity, but in how people prattle about Christianity.

A pet peeve example is people mis-identifying important peripheral matters as the core of Christianity. Phillip Rieff captures what’s wrong, and what’s almost right, about a major example:

Rightly ordered sexuality is not at the core of Christianity, but as Rieff saw, it’s so near to the center that to lose the Bible’s clear teaching on this matter is to risk losing the fundamental integrity of the faith.

Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option

It drives me batty when people prattle that sexuality (or variants thereof) are “the very core of Christianity” (or variants thereof). It tells me that the prattler is merely a culturally Christian conservative, or that he has a very tenuous connection between brain and the various organs of expression (mouth, fingertips, etc.).

But I had forgotten this quoted sentence, which I think is a much more accurate formulation, and gives the prattler’s at least a little bit of cover.

Cremation and Christianity

I went to a funeral home visitation of a friend recently, and what quickly struck me was that there was no casket, only an urn, presumably with the “cremains” of my friend.

Cremation hits me like a gut punch, and that reaction is getting worse. It wasn’t always so, even though I never, even in my giddiest infatuation was all things modern in my youth, thought I’d like cremation.

And it’s not just that Orthodox Christianity is dead-set against cremation. I know full well that not all Christians are Orthodox. But I’d like them actually to be Christian, and to have a Christian anthropology.

Part of my reaction to this most recent visitation, I’m pretty sure, was that everything about my friend’s obituary and visitation bespoke that she and her spouse had ceased observing any form of the Christian faith they professed when I first got to know them. They became nice, comfortable, and secular.

But earlier this year, I went to a visitation for another friend whose body likewise wasn’t present in his big-box, bare-black-wall warehouse church. So why did that bother me?

I mentioned my visceral reaction to my Protestant wife, whose parents also chose cremation. She repeated a fairly standard defense of cremation, though neither of us will be cremated: that God is capable of resurrecting a cremated body (fair enough; of course God can do that), and that cremation today is not an effort to defy God and avoid resurrected condemnation (probably true, but only because a lot of Christians believe in the resurrection of something than yucky old bodies).

Cremation says “Our bodies don’t matter, and maybe even are evil. (Insert prooftext, like maybe Romans 7:18.) We’re really spirits.” You can see that same attitude in the way moderns and postmoderns almost all speak about death as being a liberation from the body.

I do not believe that. Death indeed separates soul and body, but we’re not meant to be disembodied, and the resurrection restores the body-soul unity that God intends. The separation of soul and body is not a liberation, but a violent insult, wanting redress. When the resurrected Lord Jesus Christ ascended to His Father, he ascended in the body and His glorified, incarnate body is seated at His Father’s right hand. That should bring us up short if we discount our bodies.

For that reason, the dead body should be treated with respect, treated as part of the person who has died, not as an apartment they’ve vacated, and laid to rest intact — not because God cannot resurrect a body from ashes, but because cremation symbolically reinforces a sub-Christian doctrine of man, one that is rampant in our culture and even in many of our Churches. It’s as much for the living as from respect for the dead that we treat bodies with due respect, not as trash.

Maybe I’ll fret my way to a clearer articulation of a feeling that’s pre-verbal, but that can do for now.

Salvation? (Yawn!)

Salvation is constantly associated with palms, crowns, white robes, thrones, and splendour like the sun and stars. All this makes no immediate appeal to me at all, and in that respect I fancy I am a typical modern.

C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

One reason for epistemic humility is that we are all, to some extent, creatures of our age, and our age will one day (here or hereafter) be recognized as full of errors.

The words of Judas

I grieve deeply when I hear the modern sentiment directed towards a beautiful Church “that money should have been given to the poor.” These are the words of Judas. And those who say such things rarely give anything themselves. Beauty is not a contradiction of generosity. The movement towards Beauty is a movement towards Goodness (which contains generosity at its core).

Fr. Stephen Freeman, The Erotic Language of Prayer

Barbarians capture Wheaton, but a few escape

The real problem at Wheaton College runs deeper than culture-war effervescence: Few students care about or even understand the mission of Christian intellectual formation. At Wheaton, when students pick up a book for a course, they usually ask only two questions: “Will this help me get a prestigious job?” and “Will this further my personal relationship with my savior?” Wheaton students tend to focus on practical career training and individual spirituality, giving little thought to how liberal learning can enhance one’s spiritual life or the importance of intellectual formation in the Christian tradition.

…

[E]ven humanities students get caught up in the careerist mindset, talking about their education as if it was merely one consumer preference among many. Though these students enjoy their studies, they do not see intrinsic value in learning and passing down Christian culture across the ages. The humanities can be an edifying hobby, but non-professional intellectual formation has no claim to any special, protected, or elevated status for many humanities students at Wheaton.

…

Wheaton’s culture of ahistoricism is even more pronounced than its careerism. On the surface, there seems to be little appetite for experiencing one’s faith as an inheritance transmitted through thousands of years of Christian civilization. But the fact that many evangelical students who enter Wheaton denominationally indifferent end up leaving as converts to Anglicanism, Catholicism, or Eastern Orthodoxy suggests that such an appetite is not whetted through the college. Its administration and trustees would do well to remember that the body of Christ isn’t merely alive in the present but transcends time and space. Full participation in the body of Christ requires knowledge of one’s place in that living chain.

James Diddams, The Real Problem at Wheaton College.

Of the many Wheaton students who leave as Anglicans, Catholics or Orthodox, I’d draw the opposite conclusion that Wheaton does, however inadvertently, however inadvertently, whet the appetite for what Richard John Neuhaus called “ecclesial Christianity,” defined as that Christianity in which faith in Christ and faith in Christ’s Church is one act of faith, not two.

The ephemeral pleasure of the in crowd

By the very act of admitting you it has lost its magic. Once the first novelty is worn off, the members of this circle will be no more interesting than your old friends. Why should they be? You were not looking for virtue or kindness or loyalty or humour or learning or wit or any of the things that can be really enjoyed. You merely wanted to be “in.”

C.S. Lewis, The Inner Ring, an essay in The Weight of Glory

Myth and epiphany

To the considerable extent that questions of value, of right and wrong, of justice and of beauty cannot be experimentally or rationally resolved, myth allows many individuals to share an epiphany, a vision of truth granting them a basis for accepting certain normative standards for which there are no clear or convincing proof … [M]yth assures mankind that certain values transcend reason to give human existence meaning within an unchanging frame of reference, while ensuring unity among the members of the community concerning these values. This unity of values is the hallmark of culture. Without this unity regarding the imponderables, civilized actions become impossible, and man is cast upon the shabby mythology of his own random dream-world and is at the mercy of state and natural religions.

David V. Hicks, Norms and Nobility

Conversion from paganism was a really big deal

When a gentile convert stood in the baptistery on Easter’s eve and, before descending naked into the waters, turned to the West to renounce the devil and the devil’s ministers, he was rejecting, and in fact reviling, the gods in bondage to whom he had languished all his life; and when he turned to the East to confess Christ, he was entrusting himself to the invincible hero who had plundered hell of its captives, overthrown death, subdued the powers of the air, and been raised the Lord of history. Life, for the early Church, was spiritual warfare; and no baptized Christian could doubt how great a transformation—of the self and the world—it was to consent to serve no other god than Him whom Christ revealed.

David Bentley Hart, Christ and Nothing, via Rod Dreher (emphasis added by Rod).

Dreher, touring Southeast Turkey, including ancient Ephesus, continues:

I had … prickly discussion with one of the members of our group, an American Christian who said he didn’t understand wars of religion, and religious conflict. He described religious difference as an unimportant matter of personal preference — and did this in a way that is very familiar in 21st century American life. He seemed to think that the pagans of Ephesus had no reason to fear the Christians, and were mean to them for no reason. I politely challenged him, but after a few barbed exchanges, we dropped the subject. For the early church in Ephesus, this wasn’t a potayto-potahto issue.

That other American could use a bit of epistemic humility, no?

[S]ubordinating truth to politics is a game which tyrants and bullies always win.

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge

To believe that wealth is the only significant measure of the worth of an individual, a family, or a community is to reject the teaching of nearly every religion and wisdom tradition that ever was.

Mark Mitchell and Nathan Schlueter, The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry

The Orthodox "phronema" [roughly, mind-set] cannot be programmitized or reduced to shibboleths.

Fr. Jonathan Tobias

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.