Category: Faith & Ideology

Sunday, 8/10/25

No nonsense

A veteran Orthodox Priest recalls some wedding planning:

Three occasions stand out in my memory.

In the first, the mother of the bride arrived for the wedding rehearsal fifty minutes late, carrying aloft one of those rather tedious middle-class books of wedding etiquette, exclaiming that she wanted the wedding to be just “like this.” It wasn’t.

On another occasion, I was telephoned by another bride’s mother, a woman I had never met. It was quite obvious that she regarded the church as a sort of wedding shop at which she simply ordered the things she wanted and skipped things that did not look attractive. She didn’t want crowns at her daughter’s wedding, though I cannot now remember why. We had crowns.

On a third occasion, a marriage consultant had been hired to look after the wedding. When we met in the church, she told me that she was going to put in a rose bower right over where the couple would stand, and that she wanted piped music from various show tunes to “set the mood.” She got neither wish.

One of the great blessings in the Orthodox Church is that we do not have to create occasions. The Orthodox wedding service is so powerful, so profound, that we do not have to dress it up, give it atmosphere, or otherwise make it other than it already is. This allows people to relax. They may have problems at the wedding reception—crowds and alcohol are always a bit risky, and banquet food is rarely worth the money—but the marriage service of the Orthodox Church is a glimpse of heaven without making any particular fuss or effort at all.

Fr. Meletios Webber, Bread & Water, Wine & Oil.

My wife and I were fortunate in the early 70s when my then-pastor, of New England Congregationalist stock, effectively decreed that we would follow the Book of Common prayer pretty closely. It wasn’t Orthodox, but it wasn’t kitsch, either.

Life in the monastery

All my bad habits, disinfected, it is true, of formal sin, had sneaked into the monastery with me and had received the religious vesture along with me: spiritual gluttony, spiritual sensuality, spiritual pride. . . .

Thomas Merton, The Seven-Story Mountain

The reprobate in heaven

I will venture to say more than this; – it is fearful, but it is right to say it; – that if we wished to imagine a punishment for an unholy, reprobate soul, we perhaps could not fancy a greater than to summon it to heaven. Heaven would be hell to an irreligious man… He would find no one like himself; he would see in every direction the marks of God’s holiness, and these would make him shudder. He would feel himself always in His presence. He could no longer turn his thoughts another way, as he does now, when conscience reproaches him. He would know that the Eternal Eye was ever upon him; and that Eye of holiness, which is joy and life to holy creatures, would seem to him an Eye of wrath and punishment. God cannot change His nature. Holy He must ever be. But while He is holy, no unholy soul can be happy in heaven.

John Henry Newman via Addison Hodges Hart.

It is common in Orthodox Christianity to suggest that the presence of God is light to the righteous, searing heat to the unrighteous. Neither that nor Newman’s sermon is systematic theology; both are analogies to address a question that people have about God’s justice, heaven and hell.

The opposite of war

The opposite of war is not peace, but liturgy – the cognitive, bodily, totalizing act that steadily increases communion, instead of cutting it. Liturgy is an act that purifies and knits the character together, whereas trauma unravels our character. In liturgy, I give my life for my brother and sister, I renounce retaliation, and I give my very body and blood for the life of the entire world.

Timothy Patitsas, The Ethics of Beauty

Not much of a stretch

If Christianity is the one, true religion, is it that much of a stretch to believe that there is one, true expression of Christianity?

Carlton, Clark, The Way, 1998 Edition

That one true expression builds on the one foundation with gold, silver and precious stones, not wood, hay and straw.

Well-being declining

Since the 1960s we have adopted values that are more secular, more individualistic and more oriented around self-expression than the values that prevail in the Eastern Orthodox European countries such as Serbia, the Confucian countries like South Korea and the mostly Catholic Latin countries like Mexico.

The countries that made this values shift are seeing their well-being decline, according to that Gallup thriving survey. The countries that resisted this shift are seeing their well-being improve. The master trend in recent Western culture has been to emancipate the individual from the group, and now we are paying the social and spiritual price.

David Brooks, Why More People in the World Are Feeling Hopeful (Except Us) (gift link).

The Culture Wars: cui bono?

While at Brookings, [Os Guinness] helped to draft a public document that could have had the domestic impact of a Universal Declaration of Human Rights if events had only unfolded differently. Aided by the likes of Richard John Neuhaus and George Weigel, Guinness led the drafting of the Williamsburg Charter for the bicentennial celebration of the First Amendment in 1988. The document called for a “reaffirmation and reappraisal of its vision and guiding principles.” Signed by a broad coalition of religious faiths and politicians across the aisle (including presidents, chief justices, and members of Congress), the charter spelled out the importance of the First Amendment’s twin guarantees of religious liberty: the No Establishment and the Free Exercise clauses. Both clauses work together to protect religious liberty, not limit it.

Enshrining these at the heart of the Constitution as America’s “first liberty” was necessary, as the document spells out, because

[our] form of government depends upon ultimate beliefs, for otherwise we have no right to the rights by which it thrives, yet rejects any official formulation of them… The result is neither a naked public square where all religion is excluded, nor a sacred public square with any religion established or semi-established. The result, rather, is a civil public square in which citizens of all religious faiths, or none, engage one another in the continuing democratic discourse. … The Framers’ intention is indisputably ignored when public policy debates can appeal to the theses of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, or Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud but not to the Western religious tradition in general and the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures in particular.

The document was commemorated with a signing ceremony in the Hall of the House of Burgesses in Williamsburg, and many smaller events, including a conference that featured papers from intellectual luminaries like James Davison Hunter, Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor, and Peter Berger. Even still, it never made quite the impact it could have in reframing the conversation about the place of religion in society (a shame especially in light of recent controversies: e.g., Christian groups being kicked off campus, religious monuments being stripped from public locations, and the debated ‘failures’ of classical liberalism).

The Williamsburg Charter’s failure came down to the absence of a single signature: that of the sitting president, “whose backing was crucial to the practical rollout of the Charter.” At the end of the day, “strong opposition from the Religious Right blocked the participation of President Reagan.” “The culture wars are in the interests of Republicans so you will only get to the president over my dead body,” one of Reagan’s cabinet secretaries told Guinness. This destroyed any opportunity to articulate why Americans needed to bring their faith with them into the public square. While Guinness’ campaign has continued on in the work of John Inazu and that of others, the cultural capital it once had within arm’s reach is spent.

John Shelton, Os Guinness: The Christian Public Intellectual After Jacques Maritain (bold added).

Limits of redemptionist theology

The inadequacy of this theology was brilliantly deconstructed by Vladimir Lossky, whose analysis reveals why this opinion results in other problems that manifest themselves in Western Christian theology:

Christian horizons are limited by the drama played between God, who is infinitely offended by sin, and man, who is unable to satisfy the impossible demands of vindictive justice. The drama finds its resolution in the death of Christ, the Son of God who has become man in order to substitute Himself for us and pay our debt to divine justice. What becomes of the dispensation of the Holy Spirit here? His part is reduced to that of an auxiliary, an assistant in redemption, causing us to receive Christ’s expiated merit. . . . The price of our redemption having been paid in the death of Christ, the resurrection and the ascension are only a glorious happy end of his work, a kind of apotheosis without direct relationship to our human destiny. This redemptionist theology, placing all the emphasis on the passion, seems to take no interest in the triumph of Christ over death. The very work of the Christ-Redeemer, to which this theology is confined, seems to be truncated, impoverished, reduced to a change of the divine attitude toward fallen men, unrelated to the nature of humanity.

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

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

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

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

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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

And now for something more edifying

Having vented all my political bile a few hours ago, I give you, as David French puts it at the end of a column, “what else I did.”

Not “what” but “whether”

[W]e’re well past canon wars at this point. The question isn’t what people are going to read on the other side of the bottleneck; it’s whether they’re going to read anything at all. If you want a perfect example of not getting it, consider the conservatives complaining about books assigned in K-12 schools, and the liberals complaining about book-bans. How can either side keep pretending that the problem is with what students are reading? The world in which that debate made sense no longer exists. Even at elite universities, nobody reads books anymore.

…

If we are indeed entering a “new dark age” – one full of “shining devices” and for that reason mostly empty of literate persons – then Christian institutions today may have a similar mission to fulfill: saving the best of the secular world from the new bottleneck of technological “progress.” Maybe in the future it will only be students at Christian universities who read Freud and Marx and Nietzche and all the other great anti-Christian thinkers, because it will only be students at Christian universities who still read anything at all.

Adam Smith in Christian Scholars Review.

Shedding Enlightenment Values

When readers interact imaginatively with a book, they are still following the book’s lead, attempting to answer the book’s questions, responding to the book’s challenges and therefore putting their own convictions at risk.

When we interact with A.I., on the other hand, it is we who are driving the conversation. We formulate the questions, we drive the inquiry according to our own interests and we search, all too often, for answers that simply reinforce what we already think we know. In my own interactions with ChatGPT, it has often responded, with patently insincere flattery: “That’s a great question.” It has never responded: “That’s the wrong question.” It has never challenged my moral convictions or asked me to justify myself.

David A. Bell, A.I. Is Shedding Enlightenment Values.

Speaking of AI, it seems that the new ChatGPT 5 adds to its error-proneness a new feature: incorrigibility. It no longer flatters and apologizes for errors and corrects them — at least, not consistently.

To update an old aphorism, any lawyer who relies on AI has a client who has a fool for a lawyer.

Judeo-Christian anthropology

I’ve learned a lot from reading some serious religious thinkers down through the years: Augustine, Pascal, Franz Rosenzweig, Reinhold Niebuhr, TS Eliot, Walker Percy, the encyclicals of Pope John Paul II, Stanley Hauerwas, Peter Lawler, Alan Jacobs, David Bentley Hart …

The thing I most appreciate about the authors I’ve listed is how they expand my understanding of human nature. Judeo-Christian anthropology really does have a different shape than ancient Greek philosophical accounts of it, no less than modern scientific-reductionistic construals.

Damon Linker, Ask Me Anything

More:

The country is more secular than it was 20 years ago; the Republican coalition is more secular than it was then, too; and the parts of that coalition that describe themselves as evangelicals are, on average, less likely to attend church and read the Bible regularly than their counterparts a generation ago. Their faith has evolved into an identity marker: They call themselves Christians or evangelicals because those labels convey that they’re the good Americans, as opposed to those bad Americans on the other side of the partisan and culture-war divide.

We’re Babylon

I don’t feel “patriotic” if patriotism means expressing confidence in the country as it is today. Living overseas for the past two years, in a conservative country that’s in America’s ideological crosshairs, has taught me a painful lesson about what my country stands for today, and how it uses its power in the world. “We’re Babylon,” a visiting US pastor said to me recently. He’s right. … Seriously, you have to get out of America for some time to grasp how much cultural influence we have in the world, and how bad that is.

Rod Dreher.

The idea that America is “Babylon” has intrigued me for more than 50 years, after I first read Edward Tracy’s book The United States in Prophecy.

I do not recommend that book, written as it was by some manner of Evangelical or Dispensationalist. But I bought it at a time when I was Evangelical and the Evangelical Book market was flooded with crap like The Late, Great Planet Earth, which fed Evangelicals Americanism and cold war Russophobia (which differed from today’s Russophobia). The idea that the United States might be an equivocal, or even a negative, player in Bible prophecy was just irresistibly transgressive to me.

I thoroughly enjoyed the irony of using Hal Lindseyish exegesis to reach Jim Wallisish conclusions.

Still, the possibility of Tracy being at least adjacent to the truth lingered and lingers, partly because I have a much different view of Bible prophecy these days. I don’t use it to predict the future (I never really did), but I think that figures like “Babylon” can echo typologically down through the ages. In that sense “We’re Babylon” fits Edward Tracy’s exegesis awfully well (see Jeremiah 51:7-8, Revelation 14:8).

Note that “the United States as Babylon” in the constellation of my thinking antedates Trumpism by four decades or more. This is one thing I don’t blame on our current President. Indeed, events of the last 7 months or so have so debased us that it’s hard to imagine the world uniformly mourning if our instantiation of Babylon fell.

Erotica

Much later, Playboy magazine came along, in which girls removed their underwear and a boy could drive to a drugstore in a part of town where he was not known and tuck a copy into a Wall Street Journal and peruse it And later came Tropic of Cancer and Portnoy’s Complaint and now porn is freely available online though to me it has all the erotic allure of watching oil well pumps pumping in North Dakota.

Garrison Keillor

Gerrymander boomerang

Those who draw gerrymanders can get too greedy. They maximize seats by cutting their party’s margins in each seat. If 2026 is a particularly bad year for Republicans in Texas, they could lose ground from this gerrymander.

E.J. Dionne.

From your mouth to God’s ear, E.J.

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite social medium.

Sunday Sundries, 8/3/25

Shift of power

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

I’ve always loved this quote, but it somehow seems even more salient these days.

Our cultural glue

Given the destructive fruitlessness of religio-political conflicts in the Reformation era, Catholics and Protestants alike built on trends that antedated the Reformation and decided to go shopping instead of continuing to fight about religion, thus permitting their self-colonization by capitalism in the industrious revolution. In combination with the exercise of power by hegemonic, liberal states, a symbiosis of capitalism and consumerism is today more than anything else the cultural glue that holds together the heterogeneity of Western hyperpluralism.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

The shift (see first item) was not instantaneous.

The Gimlet Eye

So many well-meaning Christians believe that the best way for the Church to influence American culture is by imitating as much as possible whatever way of life happens to be fashionable and popular, in the hopes that people will like us and listen to us.

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

What is “enough”?

The question with which to start my investigation is obviously this: Is there enough to go round? Immediately we encounter a serious difficulty: What is “enough”? Who can tell us? Certainly not the economist who pursues “economic growth” as the highest of all values, and therefore has no concept of “enough.” There are poor societies which have too little; but where is the rich society that says: “Halt! We have enough”? There is none.

E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful.

A reminder

I posted this scarcely sixteen months ago, but when I stumbled onto the source again, a was struck with how it addresses a real problem:

[I]t’s good to remind ourselves periodically of the first rule of Scriptural exegesis: You are not Jesus. Whenever you read a story about Jesus’s life, you should not identify with Jesus. You should identify with the sinner whom He is healing/converting/forgiving/upbraiding/flagellating/etc.

…

Whenever a traditional Christian defends some point of traditional Christian morality, you’ll hear one of our lefty friends cry, “I thought Jesus ate with prostitutes and tax collectors!” Once again, the proper response is: Do you identify with Jesus in that parable?

This is where liberal Christianity becomes—ironically; hilariously—elitist. Sorry, folks, but God’s not saying you must condescend to eat with sinners. No: you are the sinner. He condescends to eat with you.

As for us recovering sinners (i.e., Christians) Saint Paul gives us a different rule: “But now I have written to you not to keep company with anyone named a brother, who is sexually immoral, or covetous, or an idolater, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or an extortioner—not even to eat with such a person” (1 Cor. 5:11). Why? Because, not being Jesus, you can’t trust yourself not to fall into their vice.

Michael Warren Davis, then a Catholic, You’re Not Jesus

Wingman

He recognized that he couldn’t “convert me” to Orthodoxy; only Christ can do that. The Lord had to enter my heart and lead me into a deeper relationship with Him through His Body, the Orthodox Church. The Orthodox evangelist, then, isn’t a preacher or apologist. He’s more like a wingman.

Michael Warren Davis, now Orthodox, the Yankee Athonite

Ready to get strong?

Okay, I’m stealing this analogy from a Catholic podcast/YouTube channel, but I love it and it fits Orthodoxy, too:

Protestantism is like having some dumbells at home. Orthodoxy is like having a fully-equipped gym with a personal trainer.

A long and winding road

From a different episode of that Catholic podcast, Ridvan Ayedemir, a/k/a Apostate Prophet, talks of his spiritual journey:

  • out of Sunni Islam,
  • through agnosticism,
  • through atheism (of the “there’s-just-not-enough-evidence-for-god” variety, not the “theists are stupid” variety),
  • through adopting some Jewish practice and thinking of conversion,
  • through the Rosary and its mysteries (which he still prays), and
  • into the Orthodox Catechumenate.

It’s long, but fascinating. I figured with an adopted persona like “Apostate Prophet,” he would be very polemical and combative. He’s not, though the podcast features his very most polemical points as the teaser.

What I found most interesting is that he didn’t start really feeling attracted to Jesus Christ until he tried filling his “meaning” void with the Rosary! He liked it, started reading about the mysteries of the Rosary (which I’ve never read), and came to love Jesus through the Rosary meditations on His Crucifixion.

Most of us are so used to insisting on understanding and certainty before we take a religious step that taking a step, assessing its effects, and then coming to understanding (not always certainty) seems like a real man-bites-dog story.

I had already heard rumors that Ridvan/Apostate, who I’d never heard of until within the past two months or so, had become Orthodox. I was praying for him since he’s at least a minor celebrity and I don’t want him making shipwreck because of Christian limelight. Having now heard him for some 2.75 hours, my prayers will be more appreciative and fervent.

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

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

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

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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

Sunday, 7/27/25

My parish takes an important vote in a special meeting today. I think I know how I’ll vote, but it’s premature to write about it – and it may forever be premature, for that matter, depending on whether I see a larger application than just us.

Manly Orthodoxy

Speaking of sanity:

So there have been a few reports of late, including this most recent one currently making the rounds, about a number of young people converting to Orthodoxy, particularly young men, converting because they find in the Orthodox Church, according to these reports, an environment that preaches ‘masculinity’ and real ‘manhood’. And I want to say that if you’re here because you think that that’s what we are here to do, then you are a fool. This is stupidity. ‘Masculinity’, so far as I am aware, is not an Orthodox term. It is not a term that has any traditional place in Christianity. It is a term embraced by the secular world because this world has rejected normal concepts of humanity, in which of course there is male and there is female, there is child, there is adult. These are simply human beings. But because the world has lost sight of the basics of what it means to be human, it is forced to respond to the lack of clarity it has pushed on itself by fostering these concepts of ‘femininity’, ‘masculinity’, and so on.

…

Our only goal is that every single human being might become a living image of Christ Himself. That men might become Christ-like men; that women might become Christ-like women; that children might be true children of God; that the aged might find the real respect due to those who long live and struggle for Christ; that this world might come to understand what it means to be redeemed.

… [I]f any of us is here so that we can be reinforced in our cultural understandings, so that we can somehow have strengthened our own politics or our own social norms, if that’s what you want, go do that at home. Go do that by yourself, and come back to us when you’re ready to repent.

Seeking After Worldly Visions of “Masculinity” is Not an Orthodox Pursuit

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

by Wendell Berry

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion — put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

“Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” from The Country of Marriage, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. 1973. Also published by Counterpoint Press in The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, 1999; The Mad Farmer Poems_, 2008;_ New Collected Poems, 2012.

An insta-favorite

This seems to be a Sunday for posting favorites. Here’s a quite new favorite I’ve called “The Gospel for People Battered by Bad Religion”:

God loves you. Jesus said so. St. John’s Gospel, the Father Himself loves you. He is not angry at you. He does not want to destroy you for your sins. There is no power of justice that commands him to do so. No one commands him to do anything. He loves you. He wants you to find salvation, but salvation is a thing you have to actually do. He wants you to do it. The Bible says so. God wills that all men be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth. But you have to do it. He empowers you to do it. He forgives you when you mess up trying to do it. He heals you when you damage yourself trying to do it and failing. He is entirely on your side. The God who created the universe is entirely on your side and the saints are on your side and the church is on your side. Everyone is on your side. Christ is advocating for you. Everything is set up for us.

When Saint Paul says to us, continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling. You don’t stop them like Kierkegaard did. Read the next verse because it is God who is working in you to will and to do according to his pleasure. We continue on and we work out our salvation because we know that God is on our side and empowering us to do it and loving us and loving other people through us. We need to pray about that. We need to pray it. We need to repeat it. We need to kind of imitate what the atheists are doing. We need to say it out loud. We need to say it to each other. We need to say it to everyone who will listen right? That God loves you and wants you to find salvation, wants you to be healed, wants you to be set free from sin. He wants all these things for you. It doesn’t mean you have nothing to do. That doesn’t mean you’re fine just the way you are. You know you’re not fine just the way you are, right? But it means that He is there to help you to grow to be transformed into the person who you need to be and want to be. The person he created you to be for eternity. That’s the actual message of Christianity. Don’t accept any substitutes for that, ever at all for any reason.

Fr. Stephen DeYoung

Life verse

At my evangelical high school, there was a bit of social pressure to choose a “life verse.” I resisted, but if forced, it likely would have been these:

For this reason I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, from whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man, that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the width and length and depth and height—to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Ephesians 3:14-19.

Their sensibility, their longing for something deeper than hell-avoidance, may explain why, after another 30 years or so, I embraced Orthodox Christianity so readily.

Orthodoxy also clarified Hebrews 6:1-3 for me.

Political wisdom through a shepherd who hasn’t been bought

A B-team religio-political pundit has dined out of late on calling various evangelical pastors and leaders sell-outs. That pundit’s own motivations aside, here, I think, is the voice of a shepherd who truly hasn’t been bought:

I think it is a drastic mistake to think that the deadly influences of a leader come only through his policies and not also through his person.

This is true not only because flagrant boastfulness, vulgarity, immorality, and factiousness are self-incriminating, but also because they are nation-corrupting. They move out from centers of influence to infect whole cultures. [The years 2015-2020] bear vivid witness to this infection at almost every level of society.

…

I find it bewildering that Christians can be so sure that greater damage will be done by bad judges, bad laws, and bad policies than is being done by the culture-infecting spread of the gangrene of sinful self-exaltation, and boasting, and strife-stirring (eristikos) … And I think it is baffling and presumptuous to assume that pro-abortion policies kill more people than a culture-saturating, pro-self pride.

When a leader models self-absorbed, self-exalting boastfulness, he models the most deadly behavior in the world. He points his nation to destruction. Destruction of more kinds than we can imagine.

It is naive to think that a man can be effectively pro-life and manifest consistently the character traits that lead to death — temporal and eternal.

John Piper, Policies, Persons, and Paths to Ruin, October 22, 2020.

When I think all Evangelicals are nuts, I should read some John Piper (having lost my taste for Russell Moore for reasons other than his alleged selling out).

Chew, walk

Sometimes this whole 2000-year-old faith seems like a living koan. Chew on this until you are enlightened. Keep walking.

Paul Kingsnorth, The Moses Option

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

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

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

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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

Sunday, 7/20/25

Divorce, penance, annulment

Roman Catholic apologists have long cited their Church’s ban on divorce and remarriage as commending it and condemning other Churches’ approaches. I have occasionally wondered if they were right.

Such doubts diminished when I began acquiring an Orthodox Christian way of thinking. I heard the somewhat penitential tone of the service for a second marriage. I gained empathy for some of those whose marriages ended, even through their own fault, because we are broken and we do break things. And God doesn’t give up on us when we do.

I also knew that Roman Catholic annulment practice could easily be cast as a (hypocritical) workaround for wealthy Catholics who cared to pursue it (like one of my very attractive law school classmates). I came to prefer the Orthodox practice; briefly:

  • some sort of penance being connected to the Church’s recognition of divorce and,
  • as mentioned earlier, the very service for a second marriage reflecting soberly that a second marriage is a concession to human weakness — “better to marry than to burn with lust”

Then a day or two ago I heard an Orthodox podcast’s treatment of the difference, and decided to dig in a bit deeper.

The Orthodox Church doesn’t give divorces; it penances divorces. Its approach is pastoral. Before remarriage, one must repent of his or her fault in the destruction of the first marriage. This helps those hurt by divorce to be healed and re-integrated into the community and set on the right path again. Since marriage is ordered to the salvation of the spouses, a second marriage is sometimes necessary (“better to marry than to burn with lust”). For a specific, albeit typical, “procedure” for Orthodox second marriages, see here.

The Roman Catholic Church officially does not permit divorce, but has a legal process for declaring, retroactively, that there was never a valid marriage in the first place. Suspecting that the Orthodox podcaster’s characterization of that process and its effects went a bit overboard, I sought out reliable Catholic sources, like here, here, and here.

You can read and judge for yourself (they’re not long), but I find that process described a legal and apologetical dodge with no repentance and spiritual healing for anyone. There’s nothing pastoral about it. In the three sources I consulted, there was only one whiff of examination of conscience about the broken marriage, and even that was in the form of “some people find that simply writing out their testimony helps them to understand what went wrong and why,” not “you really should pause, reflect and repent for your role.”

If the point is to get people into the Kingdom of Heaven, I see a clear winner as between the Orthodox approach and the Roman Catholic. And I’m ready to give as good as I get the next time a Catholic apologist tries the play the divorce card.

Biblical rules

I never hear the [college] administration admit they’re wrong about anything, even though you and I both know they’ve made some bad decisions. Rules get changed every year, but the deans never acknowledge the previous rules were arbitrary—they’re couched in all this talk of biblical principles.

Philip Yancey, Where the Light Fell (Kindle location 3371)

Yancey is very much my contemporary, and I think he was writing professionally before we were 25. Where the Light Fell is autobiographical, and I’m astonished that he retained any sort of Christian faith considering the spiritually abusive environment he grew up in.

The pretense that Christian college policies were from “biblical principles” is one that I knew well and saw through quickly. But it’s a pretext that Biblicists almost have to adopt if they’re going to (a) make rules without (b) appearing arbitrary.

It’s very much with us still. Ross Douthat this week interviews a proponent, one Allie Beth Stuckey, host of an evangelical podcast called “Relatable,” which I guess is a big deal.

For the most part, Ms. Stuckey acquits herself well (Ross is not an interviewer who goes on the attack, like a cross-examiner), but there’s one thing that bothered me. She podcasts on theology, lifestyle, politics, the leftward drift of evangelical leaders and probably other topics. She claims clear guidance from “biblical principles” on all these, and on such things as Donald Trump’s policies on immigration and deportation (which biblical principles predictably support).

And next year, when she changes her mind, it will be from “biblical principles,” too.

It’s false clarity. But the pretext of biblical principles on everything is de rigueur in the Evangelical world.

Most of the time, the earth is flat

Multiple cosmologies should be able to coexist and play different functions, some more philosophical and human and others more technical and mathematical. But in our lives most of the time, the Earth is flat. Most of the time, the Heaven is up and the Earth is down, most of the time means in those instances when I am interacting with my family, my society and my enemies. And most of all, if we wish to understand religion and its symbolism, if we wish to understand the Bible or icons or church architecture we must anchor ourselves to the world of human experience, for that is where we can love our neighbor. We must force ourselves to believe that the sun rises every morning, or that the moon waxes and wanes and honestly it should not be so difficult, because despite Galileo and Newton and Einstein I’m pretty sure I will find some Truth in tomorrow’s rosy fingered dawn.

Jonathan Pageau

Ties that still bind, at least a little

Amid the hyperpluralism of divergent truth claims, metaphysical beliefs, moral values, and life priorities, ubiquitous practices of consumerism are more than anything else the cultural glue that holds Western societies together.

Brad Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

Quotable

I am a slow unlearner. But I love my unteachers.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World, via Phil Yancey

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

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

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

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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

Sunday, 7/13/25

Our unchurchy churchiness

The confusion of confessions at these revivals dismayed Joseph Smith (d. 1844), a recent settler in western New York. Caught up with his parents in the wildfire of emotions, he had a conversion experience in which all Christian confessions were revealed to be false. He then encountered a spiritual being who told him he would be the founder of the only true religion on earth. Like many Protestants since the time of Luther, Smith saw his work as an act of restoration.

John Strickland, The Age of Utopia (italics added).

I don’t remember whether I’ve said this out loud before, but the deeper I get into the Orthodox Christian faith, the more arbitrary do I find Protestant line-drawing that tries to distinguish “denominations” and the tens of thousands of non-denominational evangelical churches (including Joel Osteen) from “cults” like the Latter Day Saints — cults that came out of the selfsame time, places and democratic impulses.

Oh, I’ve read my Walter Martin back in the day, but it just doesn’t linger persuasively after one gets deeper into Christian history.

Chesterton was half-right: America is a “nation with the soul of a church.” The other half of the truth is that many of our churches lack basic features of historic churchiness: sacraments, liturgical forms, settled creeds, authority. Like America itself, the American church seems a novus ordo seclorum. Our churchy national soul weirdly inhabits a body of peculiar, borderline-heretical actual churches.

In some respects, our unchurchy churchiness is no surprise. We’re Protestant, and Protestants have always been, as Alec Ryrie writes, radicals, lovers, and fighters, restlessly carrying on a centuries-long “open-ended, ill-disciplined argument,” churning out new ideas and rehabilitating old ones with “a certain generic restlessness, an itchy instability.” A “self-perpetuating dynamo of dissatisfaction and yearning,” the Protestant churches have been “one of the engines driving modern history.”

America was founded as a post-Christendom Christian nation. Christian, yes, profoundly so, but never Christian in the way Europe was Christian. Europe became Christian century after plodding century. We started out Christian. The Reformation battered and splintered European Christendom. Colonists brought their European splits with them, and proceeded to split even more. The church was the unifying reality of medieval Europe; after the Reformation, most European nations established one or another variety of national church. Free church Christianity was a late development in Europe. Free church Christianity is American Christianity. States retained established churches into the early nineteenth century, but that was a long time ago. Our default ecclesiology is Lockean and Baptist.

Peter Leithart, The Genius of American Christianity. Leithart keenly recognizes the problem, but (IMHO) misapplies it:

Without revivalist Christianity, America would have rolled over and succumbed to secularism long ago.

But because we did have revivalism, we call “Churches” our “borderline-heretical”, crypto-secularist bacchanalia.

Heretics all

Alas, we are heretics all, and the one we subscribe to is not love any more than the kingdom for the sake of which we are fools is the kingdom of heaven.

R.S. Thomas, Collected Later Poems 1988-2000

I.R.S. Says Churches Can Endorse Candidates From the Pulpit

The agency said that if a house of worship endorsed a candidate to its congregants, the I.R.S. would view that not as campaigning but as a private matter, like “a family discussion concerning candidates.”

David A. Fahrenthold, I.R.S. Says Churches Can Endorse Candidates From the Pulpit.

I don’t consider this good news except insofar as it should clear away any chill on free speech when a pastor is preparing remarks on moral issues (i.e., “Can I say that from the pulpit? Could it be considered a violation of the 1950s’ ‘Johnson Rule’ and cost my church its tax exemption?”).

Even then, I’m not much enthused, because I’m mindful that “Christ did not come to make bad men good, but to make dead men live.” (Fr. Stephen Freeman, paraphrased from memory.) There is such a thing as too much preaching on “moral issues.”

Neither did he come to make Republicans out of Democrats or vice-versa.

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

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

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

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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

Saturday, 7/12/25

Miscellany

Intellectual honesty got in the way

Over the weekend, I listened to the six episodes of The Protocol, the new NYT podcast on child sex changes. It’s very helpful to get a chronology of the ideologically-motivated shifts in policy and treatments, and to hear a range of views, pro and con. It was also obvious that the two reporters were super-liberal, and desperately wanted to confirm the benefits of child transition – but intellectual honesty got in the way, as it must. This is a more balanced treatment than anything you will find in, say, the Washington Post.

Well worth a listen.

I was struck by a few things. Both Bowers and Kennedy – trans activists and surgeons – still eagerly deploy the trope that transition is necessary to stop children from killing themselves. They know this isn’t true at this point, and the NYT did not provide the data that shows that trans youth suicide is extremely rare (2 cases among kids denied a sex change out of 1500 in the UK over ten years, for example). That anyone would still be telling parents confronting a kid with acute gender dysphoria that their only choice is between a “live boy” or a “dead girl” is appalling, unethical and untrue. yet the leading trans activists know it’s their best line, and are happy to keep lying if it will help keep them transing children.

Bowers denies that there is any debate to be had at all – “there are not two sides” – and denigrates Hillary Cass as “haughty” and “old,” without addressing her findings. Kennedy argues that child sex changes came about at first so that black trans women would be less vulnerable to being murdered because they would pass better. (I’d suspect the opposite: that passing better as female at first makes the subsequent revelation that they are still biological men that more dangerous.) But the data we actually have suggests that black transwomen have a lower chance of being murdered than an average citizen.

Then there was the refusal of the trans activists even to acknowledge the profound differences between adults and minors. You get the sense that these older trans people are telling children to transition before puberty because they regret not having done so themselves. Again, a form of unethical projection.

The podcast argues that politics and medicine should not be entangled – and imply that the backlash to child sex changes is thereby illegitimate. But the “science” of sex and gender itself originated in postmodern ideology.

One other major lacuna: the podcast never tackles how many kids who have been mistakenly transed are gay and lesbian. The children most vulnerable to this irreversible medical treatment are same-sex attracted, which make the whole subject something that destroys the entire premise of a single LGBTQ+ identity. I understand that this is unsayable in the NYT, but it’s true nonetheless.

Listen to it and make your own mind up. It’s designed to engage liberals who have been accepting of anything any minority activists want. And that’s a good thing. Well-meaning liberals need to be better informed by liberals who actually care about the truth. Whether liberals can break free of the tribal politics that have frozen this medical scandal in place remains an open question. But I doubt it.

Andrew Sullivan

A very brief obituary for a very dubious bishop

I clip obituaries, as well as bios and interesting profiles. For reasons I needn’t go into, I’ve been systematically editing those old clips.

It may not qualify as an obituary, but Alan Jacobs, an Anglican, had some pointed words upon the death of John Shelby Spong, an apostate who nevertheless (or was it for that reason?) became a Bishop in the Episcopal Church U.S.:

John Shelby Spong is dead. If he had been an intelligent man, he would have developed more coherent and logical arguments against the Christian faith; if he had been a charitable man, he would have refrained from attempting to destroy the faith of Christians; if he had been an honest man, he would have resigned his orders fifty years or more ago. May God have mercy on his soul.

Ease is the disease

In Bellevue, Washington, [Nick] lands the perfect job: glorified stock boy, hurtling around on a mini-forklift in an enormous Fulfillment Center, unpacking mountainous pallets of books, scanning their bar codes, then storing their precise locations in the vast, 3-D storage matrix. He’s supposed to set land speed records. He does. It’s a kind of performance piece for that most rarefied of audiences, no one.

The product here is not so much books as that goal of ten thousand years of history, the thing the human brain craves above all else and nature will die refusing to give: convenience. Ease is the disease and Nick is its vector. His employers are a virus that will one day live symbiotically inside everyone. Once you’ve bought a novel in your pajamas, there’s no turning back.

Richard Powers, The Overstory

What Musk’s Grok thinks of Musk’s American Party

My favorite take on our newest political party is this one, brimming with nationalist scorn:

The America Party is Elon Musk’s new third-party push in 2025, born from his beef with Trump, aiming to snag a few key seats and shake up the uniparty. … It’s led by immigrants like Musk (South African) and tech bros pushing H-1B visas for cheap foreign talent over Americans. … [It’s a] power grab to flood tech with imports, under the guise of “innovation.”… It’s just elites gaming the system.

The author? Grok, the artificial intelligence chatbot developed for The Platform Formerly Known as Twitter by its owner, Elon Musk.

Nick Catoggio

Your postliberalism versus ours

To these liberals, in Brussels and everywhere else, ‘diversity’ means ‘every place looks like we want it to look,’ and ‘democracy’ means ‘the people agree with Brussels.’ And he fights back, using the same tools these establishments use, even as they deny doing so.

Is it at times illiberal, or postliberal? Yes. But if the alternative is not liberalism vs. postliberalism, but their postliberalism vs. our postliberalism, the choice is rather clearer, isn’t it?

Rod Dreher, America Votes in a Clash of Postliberalisms, regarding the 2024 Presidential election.

I don’t think reframing the clash as between competing postliberalisms makes the choice clearer because I cannot identify with either postliberalism.

I fear that this really is the choice we typically face now, and I pray that whatever rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Washington to be born will turn out to be a prince.

But I can’t knowingly vote for it. I refuse to choose.

Scientizing the humanities

The scientific conception of knowledge has become virtually equated with the only way of knowing there is. Not only does it dominate its own offspring, such as the social sciences and anthropology, but it has invaded the classical fields of the humanities, a fact which makes a proper understanding of poetry, for instance, almost inaccessible to the modern student. The degree to which philosophy has capitulated is clear from the extent to which it is preoccupied with such mental gymnastics as logical analysis and even mere information theory.

Philip Sherrard, The Rape of Man and Nature

Thugocracy

ICE: random acts of state terror

ICE will now have more resources than all but 15 countries’ military budgets, and is set to grow from an annual budget of $10 billion to $150 billion over four years. This is a ramp up of mind-boggling size and speed. Some of it will be helped by deputizing the military to some tasks, including, as we saw in Los Angeles this week, performative acts of intimidation. Garrett Graff notes the inevitable result of such spurts:

Hiring standards fall, training is cut short, field training officers end up being too inexperienced to do the right training, and supervisors are too green to know how to enforce policies and procedures well. … [We’ll likely see] a tidal wave of applicants who are specifically attracted by the rough-em-up, masked secret police tactics, no-holds-barred lawlessness that ICE has pursued since January.

And indeed the evidence of such recruits exists. From a recent ICE jobs fair:

I spoke to a gregarious New York police officer who was fed up with patrolling Times Square and all “the savages” there. Another applicant said he was sick of installing office furniture in properties subleased by the United States Marines.

And the order is now a simple one: arrest and detain as many as you can: old, young, criminal, lawful, children, those who have lived here for decades with no incident — alongside drug traffickers. Child rapists alongside landscapers. Gang members alongside church regulars. And the percentage of violent criminals is quickly dwindling — only 8 percent of all detainees this year, according to CBS.

…

And those tasked with enforcing all this will be anonymous. That is utterly new — and a deeply authoritarian and un-American development. Thousands of men and women with the power to seize anyone off the street will have no faces, no badges, no identification, and often no uniform. We are told the reason for this is that the families of the “brave” ICE officers can be doxxed by enraged citizens and potentially harassed or threatened. In the words of one officer:

We wear masks not to scare people, but to protect our families. If our faces are known, our children and spouses could be threatened at school, at church, or even at the grocery store.

But this logic applies to every single law enforcement officer anywhere — to anyone in public anywhere — and yet only the ICE officers get to look like Putin’s thugs. If cops can’t wear masks, and must have ID, neither should ICE cops. Threats to and assaults of them — 79 incidents this year out of a workforce of 20,000, we’re told — can and should be strongly prosecuted. But masks have to go. If we’re going to call ICE officers brave, then showing their faces in public is the least they can do.

With masks, we unleash thousands of unaccountable, unknowable, and armed figures on the streets of America, breaking down doors, scaring kids, raiding Home Depots, SWATing car washes, evoking what can only be called random acts of state terror. And this, we discover, is the point. The whole purpose is to engender so much fear that migrants self-deport and potential migrants never come. The latter is an important tool for border control, as far as Miller is concerned. It’s the new wall.

…

We also have a president unique in our history in his contempt for the rule of law, who abuses the pardon power to empower lawlessness from his subordinates, deploys a rhetoric designed to encourage thuggery among the ICE rank and file, and who makes memes mocking the detained. He and his minions have also now designed a system that will not speed up legal processing of illegal immigrants,* will not target employers, but will fill our streets with a new stormtrooper army and build super-size detention camps — some surrounded by gimmicks like gators or sharks — to generate sufficient state terror to deter anyone from coming to this country.

Andrew Sullivan

(* When Sullivan says the Administration “will not speed up legal processing of illegal immigrants,” he’s referring to the trivial increase in immigration courts compared both to their backlogs and to the huge increase in ICE’s budget.)

Another sign (as if we needed one) that we’re authoritarian now

“When you see important societal actors — be it university presidents, media outlets, C.E.O.s, mayors, governors — changing their behavior in order to avoid the wrath of the government, that’s a sign that we’ve crossed the line into some form of authoritarianism,” said Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard and the co-author of the influential 2018 book How Democracies Die.

Elisabeth Bumiller

Morality is not a language Trump speaks

Along comes Trump, who doesn’t even try to speak the language of morality. When he pardons unrepentant sleazeballs, it doesn’t seem to even occur to him that he is doing something that weakens our shared moral norms. Trump speaks the languages we moderns can understand. The language of preference: I want. The language of power: I have the leverage. The languages of self, of gain, of acquisition. Trump doesn’t subsume himself in a social role. He doesn’t try to live up to the standards of excellence inherent in a social practice. He treats even the presidency itself as a piece of personal property he can use to get what he wants. As the political theorist Yuval Levin has observed, there are a lot of people, and Trump is one of them, who don’t seek to be formed by the institutions they enter. They seek instead to use those institutions as a stage to perform on, to display their wonderful selves.

David Brooks, Why Do So Many People Think That Trump Is Good?

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg.

Trumpism can be seen as a giant attempt to amputate the highest aspirations of the human spirit and to reduce us to our most primitive, atavistic tendencies.

David Brooks

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite social medium.

Sunday, 7/6/25

Quest for certainty

The Reformation is the first great expression of the search for certainty in modern times. As Schleiermacher put it, the Reformation and the Enlightenment have this in common, that ‘everything mysterious and marvellous is proscribed. Imagination is not to be filled with [what are now thought of as] airy images.’ In their search for the one truth, both movements attempted to do away with the visual image, the vehicle par excellence of the right hemisphere, particularly in its mythical and metaphoric function, in favour of the word, the stronghold of the left hemisphere, in pursuit of unambiguous certainty. … What is so compelling here is that the motive force behind the Reformation was the urge to regain authenticity, with which one can only be profoundly sympathetic. The path it soon took was that of the destruction of all means whereby the authentic could have been recaptured.

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary

If I were inclined to doubt this analysis, I’d only need to think of the ubiquitous Evangelical insistence that real Christians have assurance of salvation and “eternal security,” whereas I have fear and trembling as I work out my salvation.

Orestes Brownson on “Bible alone”

Orestes Brownson, who was on the verge of leaving behind a checkered career as Protestant, freethinker, and transcendentalist for the Roman Catholic Church, issued a challenge to American Bible-believers in his new role as a Catholic apologist: “We are … never in a condition to rely on the Bible alone. We never go to it wholly devoid of preliminary instructions, and therefore of prepossessions.” Given this circumstance, as Brownson saw the matter, “for the most part, when we do come to study the Bible, we find little else in it than the faith, we have brought to it, so that we may be said to put our faith into the Bible, not to obtain our faith from it.”

Mark A. Noll, America’s God

Brash Jimmy Swaggart

Swaggart’s empire, with receipts of over $150 million annually, fell suddenly in 1989 when he was found with a prostitute in a Baton Rouge motel, caught by a rival preacher whose adultery Swaggart had challenged. Swaggart’s denomination, the Assemblies of God, put him on a on disciplinary probation, which he initially accepted, admitting to decades of sexual struggles, but later rejected when it was prolonged. Instead, he effusively and tearfully on television admitted he had sinned, and then he resumed his ministry. But his church emptied, the dollars shrank, the television contracts ended. He was again discovered with a prostitute in 1991, after which he offered no public apologies. He was still doing the Lord’s work. Swaggart embodied the growing rejection of denominations by increasingly individualistic American Christians. Before the internet, there was television ministry, which made denominations, and even physical church, seem inconsequential to many.

Mark Tooley, Jimmy Swaggart & Brash USA Christianity (bold added)

Unlike some of my acquaintances, I was never a Swaggart devoteé. I was aware of him; he bought (or was given) air time on a Christian Radio station I listened to during a part-time desk job, but he wasn’t why I tuned in — more a bug than a feature (J. Vernon McGee was the feature).

My priors about southern charismatics left me unsurprised at his Fall, though his emotionalism was very skillful and even convincing at times, unlike, say, Jim and Tammy Fay.

God is, as always, merciful and loves humankind. Requiescat in pace, y’all.

Another take on Swaggart

Rod Dreher encountered Jimmy Swaggart after Swaggart’s first unmasking as a user of prostitutes:

I was there, at the Family Worship Center, for this electrifying sermon. I was a student at LSU, and a writer for the campus newspaper. Swaggart had been under fire, and word got out that he was going to make a big announcement on Sunday morning. I went to hear it. I was not a Christian then, in any real sense, though I was making my way towards the faith. I certainly had nothing but contempt for the man back then.

But a strange thing happened to me as I heard his sermon. I was sitting up in the rafters, and expected to feel a sense of Schadenfreude over the fire-and-brimstone televangelist’s downfall. In the moment, though, I looked around me, and saw a crowd of broken people. They were crying, or at least sitting there in shock and disbelief. I noticed that these were not well-dressed people, but men and women wearing the clothes of working-class and lower middle class folks. The kind of people that I came from. And they were in pain.

I didn’t stick around. I remember walking out to my car, feeling awful. I had no sympathy at all for Swaggart, but I felt bad for all those who had believed in him, and been conned. This surprised me. It’s one thing to see a man one regarded as a religious charlatan brought low, but to see the pain of simple people in the face of their spiritual leader’s unmasking? Well, it made my liberal triumphalism seem like a shameful, immature thing. I didn’t know what to do with that.

I’m not convinced that Swaggart was a charlatan insofar as that implies conscious deception at a pretty deep level. I’ve got too many incidents of my own I’d be mortified to have brought under bright lights. You probably do, too. But I don’t think that made me a charlatan. It just proved that I was spiritually immature and formed in part by what my particular Christian upbringing legalistically forbade – and what it thereby tacitly allowed. Imagine growing up with Jerry Lee Lewis and Mickey Gilley as cousins.

I’ll stop there lest I lapse into a confessional essay that would do nobody any good.

The oneness of God

One might say that while for the Greeks there is one God because there is one Father, for the Latins there is one God because there is one Essence, one divine and entirely simple Being.

It can now be seen how, as the presuppositions of the respective views of the Latins and Greeks differed, so did their ways of envisaging the ‘structure’ of the Trinity; and how, further, given the ‘absoluteness’ of these presuppositions, the rival representations of the Trinity which derived from them must also appear absolute. If the Greeks assumed as axiomatic, first, their understanding of the Essence; second, their understanding of the distinction between the Essence and the powers and energies of the Divinity, and hence between the Essence and hypostatic powers of each Person of the Trinity; and, third, their idea that the cause and principle of being in the Trinity is the hypostasis of the Father, it was impossible for them to admit that the Spirit proceeds from both Father and Son, for this would have implied a violation of their axioms. In the same way, if the Latins took as axiomatic the idea that Essence and Being and power form a single and entirely simple divine nature, it was impossible for them not to conclude that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.

Philip Sherrar, The Greek East and the Latin West, p. 70

American efficiency

What the Japanese Imperial government could not do in 250 years of persecution (destroy Japanese Christianity) American Christians did in 9 seconds.

Gary G. Kohls, MD, Unwelcome Truths for Church and State Concerning the Bombing of Nagasaki August 9, 1945

Discerning Christ in the Old Testament

What was the mind that could see Christ in the Passover Lamb? Indeed, what was the mind that could see Christ’s death and resurrection as a fulfillment of Passover itself? Beneath the letter of the Old Testament, beneath the surface of its poetry, its historical stories, its prophetic works, the primitive Church discerned Christ Himself and the shape of the story which we now know as the gospel.

The shape of the gospel story is not derived from the Old Testament. It is discerned within the Old Testament, after the resurrection of Christ and His subsequent teaching …

For example, that “Christ died for our sins,” is not obvious. It can be discerned in the Old Testament if one comes to understand, for example, that the “Servant Songs” in Isaiah are actually referencing Christ. … When that tradition is accepted and “received” (more about this in a moment), then passages like the Servant Songs begin to open up and yield their deeper meaning.

When a gospel writer shares a story about Christ and adds, “This was done that the saying in Isaiah might be fulfilled…,” we are reading the tradition in its operation. But the passages in Isaiah do not themselves give a clue for their interpretation. …

The giving of this tradition is described in Luke 24:44-48:

Then He said to them, “These are the words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all things must be fulfilled which were written in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms concerning Me.” And He opened their understanding [nous], that they might comprehend the Scriptures. Then He said to them, “Thus it is written, and thus it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead the third day, “and that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. “And you are witnesses of these things. (Luke 24:44-48)

It is important to see that this new insight into the Scriptures is described as a noetic event. It is not described as technique or style of interpretation that is taught and learned. It is specifically referred to as a change of the nous. In the same manner, the continued understanding of the gospel is, properly, a noetic exercise.

That noetic perception is the common thread of the liturgical texts and hymns of the Orthodox faith. The liturgical life of the Church has a two-fold purpose: the worship of God and the spiritual formation of the people of God. As cited earlier, there must be a movement from “flesh and blood” to “spirit and life.” It is this spiritual transfiguration that is operative in the life of the Church.

This is the same reason that I have written against popular notions of morality. The Christian life does not consist of flesh and blood struggling to behave better. Rather, it is the transformation of flesh and blood into spirit and life. Only a “new creation” (2 Cor. 5:17) sees and understands and lives the new life of the resurrected Christ.

This spiritual ability to see beneath the letter and perceive the truth continues in the life of the Church, unabated. It is particularly evident in the dogmatic formulations of subsequent centuries. Only a nous, properly illumined, could learn to profess the Trinity in the fullness of its mystery. The same is true of Christ’s God/Manhood and the nature of our salvation through the Divine Union.

Fr. Stephen Freeman.

In the Orthodox Church, the story of Christ’s resurrection appearance on the road to Emmaus is a frequent reading. The thing that rivets me is that Christ had to walk through the Old Testament with his disciples, teaching them about the “things concerning Himself.” They weren’t all obvious, but they were precious. And oddly enough, they never were systematically enscripturated. But the Church knows them deep in its bones now.

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

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

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

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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

Ss. Peter and Paul

Entrenched myth

The picture of the world as divided among major “religions” offering alternative means to “salvation” or “enlightenment” is thoroughly entrenched in the modern imagination.

Brent Nongbri, ‌ Before Religion

Nationalist Churches

I trust that my Protestant friends will forgive this Puritan-friendly Catholic what might sound at first like a sectarian point, but: While most Protestants today not only accept but also cherish the principle of religious liberty, the entire point of the English Reformation—not merely an unintended consequence—was ending the separation of church and state. English religious history does more than rhyme: They had two kings called Henry (II and VIII) with chancellors called Thomas (Becket and More) who became martyrs (in 1170 and 1535, respectively) because they insisted that there were limits to what a king could do to the church, that altar could not be entirely subordinated to throne. There is a reason so many of the churches of the Reformation became state churches: The Catholic Church was the premier European multinational organization, and it was not only in England that the Reformation was a nationalist project that produced national and nationalist churches. If you ever heard Nigel Farage talking about the European Union in the days before Brexit, you heard a very old and very English voice—and I do not mean only his accent.

… [T]he Henrician line of thinking—that the church and its officers must ultimately bend the knee to the king rather than to the King of Kings—has never quite gone away.

You may have heard these famous lines from Cardinal Francis George, the late archbishop of Chicago, envisioning life under such totalitarian assumptions:

I expect to die in bed. My successor will die in prison. And his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history.

Kevin D. Williamson, inveighing against a Washington State law requiring that Catholic priests report certain sexual crimes that might be communicated to them in the confessional.

I would venture an educated guess that the law takes in Orthodox priests as well, and any other priests who hear confessions sacramentally and under seal.

It will not stand.

Philosophy infiltrating theology

[T]hat aspects of the Christian doctrine were now codified in forms which were binding upon, and therefore mentally accessible to, individuals regardless of the capacity of these latter to experience the Truth which they express, exposed the doctrine in a new and dangerous degree to what may be described as the infiltrations of the philosophical mentality.

What this means should, perhaps, be explained more clearly. We have noted that, where Christianity is concerned, there is an intimate connexion between doctrine and method: the Truth of the doctrine, that which doctrinal formulations not only ‘reveal’ but also ‘conceal’, is, in its essential and universal nature, something that can be known only by one who is ‘initiated’ into it through following the discipline of the Christian Way itself. It is not something which man can arrive at through the unaided processes of human thought. It transcends the reason, It transcends logic.

Rational and logical demonstrations are only ‘true’, and this in a relative sense, provided that they begin in, and develop from, an a priori realization of what is in itself supra-rational and supra-logical. If they do not begin in, and develop from, such a realization, but merely in and from some arbitrary fiat of the human mind, what they represent is no more than a blind and unreal operation, lacking all objective validity.

Logic is but the science of mental co-ordination and of arriving at rational conclusions from a given starting-point. If the starting-point is a supra-logical ‘visionary’ knowledge of the Truth attained through initiation, then logic has a positive content in the way we have indicated. But if man merely ‘thinks’ of the Truth with his mind, then all his logic is useless to him because he starts with an initial fallacy, the fallacy that the Truth attained by the unaided processes of human thought.

Philip Sherrard, The Greek East and the Latin West

Secular expressions

Liberalism is a secular expression of the Christian teaching that the individual is sacred and deserving of protection. Socialism is a secular expression of Christian concern for the poor and downtrodden. Globalism is a secular expression of the Christian hope that history is leading to a kingdom of universal peace and justice. … And here we reach the essence of the Christian Question. Christianity denied what antiquity had serenely assumed: that the strong are destined to rule the weak, that we have no obligations to strangers, and that our identities are constituted by our social status.

Matthew Rose, A World After Liberalism

Fullness

I wish everyone would convert to Orthodoxy, not because there is no truth in their own ecclesial communion, but because I believe Orthodoxy has the fullness of the truth.

… I don’t see the Church — Orthodox, Catholic, or Protestant — as an end in itself, but as a means to the end of theosis, or full unity with God.

Rod Dreher

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

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

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

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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

Birth of John the Baptist

So far as I know, we have little or no evidence for when John the Forerunner/Baptist was born, but both Orthodox and Roman Catholics commemorate it on June 24. It’s a big enough deal that my parish had a liturgy for it.

The rest of this post has nothing to do with that.

At Stake in Harvard Grants

Harvard is unique both in the volume of its research output and the extent of these cuts — the government has threatened to end every research dollar to the university. The canceled grants accounted for here add up to about $2.6 billion in awarded federal funds, nearly half of which has already been spent according to government data.

“Even ‘grant’ is a problematic word, because people think they’re just sort of handing this money out for us to do what we want with,” said Marc Weisskopf, who directs a center for environmental health at Harvard that lost its funding from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

On the contrary, the government is much more explicit in competitive research applications and grant reviews: It wants more neuroscientists. It wants better opioid treatment. It wants to know how lightweight origami-inspired shelters and antennas can be unfurled in war zones.

The money the government sends to Harvard is, in effect, not a subsidy to advance the university’s mission. It’s a payment for the role Harvard plays in advancing the research mission of the United States.

This is the science model the U.S. has developed over 80 years: The government sets the agenda and funds the work; university scientists design the studies and find the answers. The president’s willingness to upend that model has revealed its fragility. There is no alternative in the U.S. to produce the kind of scientific advancements represented by these grants.

Emily Badger, Aatish Bhatia and Ethan Singer, Here Is All the Science at Risk in Trump’s Clash With Harvard

GOP 2012 redux

Many have made the point, but it’s nonetheless true: Presidents can now do pretty anything they want in foreign policy without seeking congressional authorization, provided it involves dropping bombs on other countries.

Five months into the second Trump administration, isn’t it astonishing that we have a Republican president: pushing for passage of a budget bill that cuts Medicaid and Medicare; pursuing an immigration policy focused on workplace enforcement, deportation of non-criminals, and the encouragement of “self-deportation”; and a happy John Bolton cheering the bombing of Iran? After a decade of debates about What Trump Means for the Right, we’ve ended up governed by the GOP circa 2012, as if the Trump administration were just the asshole version of the Romney/Ryan administration we were spared by Obama’s successful bid for re-election that year.

Damon Linker

Received financial wisdom

The longer I live, the more I appreciate that we can’t know everything, and that we live our lives mostly on the basis of trust. What we trust depends largely on our milieu (the polite term for “tribe” for present purposes), despite trying to avoid echo chambers.

Several of my social media cyberfriends (see footer) are living quite counterculturally, and one of them introduced me to the Dense Discovery newsletter. I probably give it awfully short shrift most weeks, but today caught my attention and led to something pretty thought-provoking, starting with a graph:

Okay, but let’s talk about the prescribed wealth hoarding model in the United States, otherwise known as prudent financial planning (supposedly). The conventional advice from financial planners is that people of my age are supposed to accumulate something like $1 million in order to retire. Or maybe $1.5 million.1 In case you’re not hip to the logic here – I wasn’t until I married a very specific kind of nerd – we’re supposed to amass so much wealth that we can live off the interest and dividends until we die. It’s not enough to save what we’ll need to make it to the end of our life; we need (ostensibly) way more than that. We need to accumulate so much wealth that we can live off the wealth that our wealth earns. We need – we are told – enough that we never have to touch the principal, and we can pass our wealth along to our next of kin, whoever they may be.2

Interdependence is My New Retirement Plan – by Lisa Sibbett

My father, a professional, seemed to live fairly consistently with the values Lisa Sibbett suggests. My widowed mother had enough and to spare, but their church saw a lot of money over the years, too, and his kids occasionally got gifts at the end of a bountiful year.

My father-in-law, a tradesman, lived the “conventional advice from financial planners,” and we are now benefitting from his success at that model.

I’ve lived somewhere in between those two models. Though I (credulously?) aspired to the “conventional advice” model, I just couldn’t resist living life along the way, and not waiting until I was properly fixed for life. Unlike my parents’ generation, I did not live through any Great Depression and didn’t feel that possibility in my bones. I don’t regret it.

One caveat with Sibbett’s approach is that it requires long-enduring personal bonds. You’ll need to sink roots somewhere, and that somewhere will need to be where others are sinking roots as well. It requires long-enduring personal bonds. It’s not for individualist nomads.

The unmentionable elephant in the room

I confess that I struggled with the reasoning of the Supreme Court in Skrmetti although I reluctantly welcomed the outcome.

I was not alone. Josh Blackman and Hadley Arkes (not a lawyer, but an Amherst professor of Jurisprudence) were in the same position as me, but Arkes in particular pointed to the root problem:

The truth that dares not speak its name here is that this wide array of gender-affirming therapies and surgeries is simply predicated on a falsehood. And yet those are the words that the conservative justices apparently see themselves as barred from speaking. Something in conservative jurisprudence holds them back from appealing to the inescapable and objective truth that lies at the heart of these cases. But without it, what were these accomplished jurists able to explain here? What was their ground of justification in overriding the judgments of those parents who were absorbed in the grief and confusion that seized their children? . . . .

The only “instruction” that would be relevant, Justice Thomas, is the unyielding fact that the child is in a state of confusion: he is not occupying some body apart from his own; his sex was not “assigned” at birth but marked inescapably in the organs of reproduction, in the arrangement of his body. His sex is immutable and printed plainly upon him.

Those were the words that Chief Justice Roberts and five colleagues could not move themselves to speak. Or they thought they were constrained from speaking by a jurisprudence that bars them from invoking truths beyond the text of the Constitution—even on the question of what is a human being, the bearer of rights, and when does that “human person” begin? . . .

Without those points in place, the judgment of the Court simply dissolves into a chain of ipse dixits. Why was it not legitimate for the parents of stricken youngsters to order the procedures that might relieve their “gender dysphoria?” Answer: The legislature of Tennessee did not think it a legitimate medical remedy to choose—even though the children and the parents did not share that judgment and were willing to take their risks. One judgment had to prevail, and it was the judgment backed by the power of the State. To put a high finish on it, that “power” represented the authority of a people to govern itself through elected representatives. But when the people speak through their representatives, and override the judgments of parents about their children, they are still obliged to say something more than “we have brute the power to impose this judgment through brute enactment of the law.”

Arkes singles out Justice Thomas, I suspect, because he said “so-called experts have no license to countermand the ‘wisdom, fairness, or logic of legislative choices.’” (Justice Thomas, concurring in U.S. v. Skrmetti, via Eugene Volokh.) Arkes’ re-formulation, I guess, is that the legislature can tell the experts “your elaborations are predicated on the falsehood that a person can be inhabiting a body of the wrong sex.”

That’s not the end of the story, but it’s a starting point for re-writing a story written up to now by activists hiding something only a few clicks less deranged than the whack-a-doodle Chase Strangio ideology:

Strangio disputed that a trans woman could be “born with a male body” or “born male”; in his view, a trans woman was born a woman just like any other woman. There was no such thing as a “male body,” Strangio told his colleagues: “A penis is not a male body part. It’s just an unusual body part for a woman.” Before the advertisement aired, Strangio elaborated on his critique in an article in Slate. “Many advocates defend the use of the ‘born male’ or ‘born with a male body’ narrative as being easier for nontransgender people to understand,” Strangio wrote. “Of course it is easier to understand, since it reinforces deeply entrenched views about what makes a man and what makes a woman. But it is precisely these views that we must change.”

My own position hasn’t changed in 39 months. I think we’re still seeing a cultural contagion of trans claims in adolescents and must be very cautious – which is a bit easier now that even Strangio has given up on the “live son or dead daughter” emotional blackmail.

Patience, Mercy, Tolerance

For defenders of political liberalism there is perhaps no more pressing problem than this: How do you make a compelling case for liberalism in an era of ascendant [illiberalism or] strong gods? The idea of “strong gods” comes from the book Return of the Strong Gods by R. R. Reno, editor of the conservative ecumenical journal First Things.

By “strong gods” Reno means the kind of visceral or agonistic forces that can compel political or social action through deeper existential or even guttural appeals. The strong gods work not by chiefly targeting the intellect, but the appetites.

Michael Reneau, Evan Spear, and Jake Meador, A Virtue-Centric Argument for Political Liberalism (shared link). This article was welcome in light of the ascendance of various illiberalisms.

With a little help from AI, I got this summary table:

VirtueRole Against Postliberalism & Strong GodsRoot/Source
PatienceProvides long-term perspective, allowing growth and changeChristian theology & history
MercyBreaks cycles of retribution, fosters trust and forgivenessScripture, Shakespeare
ToleranceIntellectual humility; suspends harsh judgment; enables coexistenceLiberal philosophy & Scripture (e.g., parable of wheat and tares)

Wordplay

I know every one of these carries political freight, but that’s the burden of many writers these days:

  • Glenn Thrush, Alan Feuer and Adam Goldman remarked on the right-wing ire confronting Patel and Pam Bondi, the attorney general, as they fail to substantiate the accusations that they hurled in their bid for power: “They are running what amounts to a conspiracy theory fulfillment center with unstocked shelves.” (Jeff Lebsack, Buffalo, and Marianne Painter, Tacoma, Wash., among others)
  • In The Financial Times, Edward Luce worried that certain scenes from the Los Angeles protests played into the president’s hands: “Every rock hurled lands like a penny in Trump’s wishing well.” (Todd Lowe, Simpsonville, Ky., and Al Gallo, Huntersville, N.C., among others)
  • In The Washington Post, Philip Bump expressed skepticism about the government’s claim that immigration officers must wear masks for self-protection: “We should not and cannot take ICE’s representations about the need for its officers to obscure their identities at face value.” (Patrick Bell, Carmichael, Calif.)
  • Also in The Post, Dana Milbank took in Trump’s pleasure at some sycophantic Republicans’ suggestion that the D.C. Metro be renamed the “Trump Train”: “It’s a great idea. Qatar will donate the subway cars, which will be powered by coal. Passengers will pay for fares with cryptocurrency after first showing proof of citizenship. And the trains will reverse themselves regularly and without warning — never quite reaching their original destination.” (Mary Ellen Maher-Harkins, Orwigsburg, Pa., and Stan Shatenstein, Montreal)

Via Frank Bruni

Ceci n’est pas un phone

Methaphone. Like Methadone. Get it?

In case you’ve been wondering …

No, you’re not imagining it. The main source of political violence in the USA in this century has been right-wing, not left. Jamelle Bouie, Right-Wing Violence Is Not a Fringe Issue:

It is simply a fact that the far right has been responsible for most of the political violence committed in the United States since the start of the 21st century.

I had been wondering, because there has been some leftwing violence against persons, and much against property.

Poor fit

If it seems that America’s colleges and universities are poorly suited to the average American eighteen-year-old, perhaps that’s because they were never designed to serve him.

Oren Cass, The Once and Future Worker

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg.

Trumpism can be seen as a giant attempt to amputate the highest aspirations of the human spirit and to reduce us to our most primitive, atavistic tendencies.

David Brooks

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite social medium.