June 11, 2025

Culture

Beauty

Many catholic young people should have arrived at Chartres Tuesday or Wenesday, having averaged about 20 miles a day in pilgrimage since leaving St. Sulpice in Paris on Sunday:

I spoke with a 32-year-old American priest who was there with a group of teenage boys from his local high school. He talked about the appeal of the old mass, and Catholic tradition, to kids today. They had been earlier on a retreat at the traditionalist Benedictine abbey of Fontgombault, and he said these American boys had been blown away by what they had seen and done there. The priest predicted that they were going to be overwhelmed by the beauty of Chartres. He said that most American boys their age have already seen the worst of humanity in hardcore porn, before they have ever seen real beauty. So Chartres is going to be a revelation for them.

Rod Dreher, Surprising Hope in the Streets of Paris (bold added)

What a thought! There is precious little “real beauty” around us in the USA, especially real manmade beauty. But there’s plenty of rot.

A part of the American ethic

Take, for instance, when the doctors were asked whether they would go to court to override the parents’ wishes if the child did not have Down Syndrome. They responded unanimously that they would, and they gave the following rationale: “When a retarded (sic) child presents us with the same problem, a different value system comes in; and not only does the staff acquiesce in the parent’s decision to let the child die, but it’s probable that the courts would also. That is, there is a different standard. . . . There is this tendency to value life on the basis of intelligence. . . . [It’s] a part of the American ethic.”

Justin Hawkins, Dignity Beyond Accomplishment – Mere Orthodoxy (bold added)

Sexual stereotypes

Popular sites like What to Expect verify that some aspects of child development differ by gender, yet even such sites advise parents to try to equalize or neutralize the differences. We’re so influenced by the Gender Ideology that we don’t seem to consider the possibility of embracing the children’s own preferences for activities that are “stereotypically” male or female.

Jennifer Roback Morse, The Sexual State

I do not recommend this book. How little did I like it? Enough that having read it when considering a conference where the author was a keynote speaker, I forewent the conference.

But it’s hard to write a whole book without an observation or two that’s both accurate and temperately made.

I am also adamant that breaking sexual stereotypes is not a sign that one is “in the wrong body.”

Marriage today

… marriage American-style, an obligation easier to walk away from than student loans or credit card debt …

Kevin D. Williamson, Husbandry Matters

Custom

I’ve been watching enough BritBox to reflexively view Elon as in the driver’s seat.

AI

Yeah, everybody’s got to prattle about AI as the topic du jour for countless jours now. I’ll try not to be anodyne or banal.

The rule of Nobody

What with expectations that AI will become our new deity, coupled with the profit motive and AI hallucinations, Matthew Crawford returns to a variation on the theme that first made him famous 16 years ago:

In the year of our Lord 2025, getting things done often requires finding, not the recent hire who just reads through the prompts on his screen and is trapped in the same hall of mirrors as you, but the guy or the gal with enough institutional knowledge to be able to thwart the system.

AI will get rid of those people. What then? The dystopia I fear is not one in which superintelligent machines achieve self-awareness and wipe out the human race, it is the prospect of a tightening grid of dysfunction and paralysis, achieved through the final victory of “the rule of Nobody,” to borrow a phrase from Hannah Arendt. The Nobody cannot be addressed.

Oh sure, there will probably still be a counter you can walk up to, with a very charming robot-lady behind it. Detecting the emotional register of your voice, she will express empathy for your plight. “I understand this can be frustrating. Let me see what I can do.” But this will turn out to be just a creepier version of “your call is important to us,” which is Business English for “fuck off, we don’t want to talk to you.”

Your call is important to us…. This post was remarkably persuasive to me, with a dandy analogy from “work-to-rule slowdowns” in labor disputes.

Language no longer implies thinking

LLMs (the so-called AI process) are impressive probability gadgets that have been fed nearly the entire internet, and produce writing not by thinking but by making statistically informed guesses about which lexical item is likely to follow another …

People have trouble wrapping their heads around the nature of a machine that produces language and regurgitates knowledge without having humanlike intelligence. The authors observe that large language models take advantage of the brain’s tendency to associate language with thinking: “We encounter text that looks just like something a person might have said and reflexively interpret it, through our usual process of imagining a mind behind the text. But there is no mind there, and we need to be conscientious to let go of that imaginary mind we have constructed.”

…

Witness, too, how seamlessly Mark Zuckerberg went from selling the idea that Facebook would lead to a flourishing of human friendship to, now, selling the notion that Meta will provide you with AI friends to replace the human pals you have lost in our alienated social-media age.

Tyler Austin Harper, What Happens When People Don’t Understand How AI Works

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

Denying our Civil Religion

America has a civil religion that is the equal of any other religion. “Why something so obvious should have escaped serious analytical attention is in itself an interesting problem.” If American nationalism is so obviously a religion, in other words, why do we deny it? Bellah posits that conservative religious groups deny it because they believe that Christianity is, in fact, the national religion. As recently as the 1950s they proposed a constitutional amendment recognizing the sovereignty of Jesus Christ. Secularists deny that America has a civil religion because they do not believe the nation-state does or should have anything to do with religion.

William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry

Short-form social media

[W]hether on Twitter or Bluesky, there are five major varieties of short-form social-media post:

“Here is some information”
“Look at how funny I am”
“Look at how stupid my enemies are”
“Look at how smart my allies are for pointing out how stupid my enemies are”
“Hello total stranger! You’re an idiot”

Obviously, posts in the first category are useful; posts in the second can be enjoyable when the poster actually is funny; and the remaining three are poisonous.

(Alan Jacobs)

Sorta political

Henry and Thomas

Each of Henry II and Henry VIII had a Thomas, Becket and More respectively, who were martyred for their resistance to totalitarian pretentions:

Washington has passed a law requiring that Catholic [also Orthodox, I’m sure, though with progressives one never knows] priests report certain sexual crimes that might be communicated to them in the confessional …

What Henry II and Henry VIII could not live with was the idea that there were centers of power independent of the state—that the power of the king was limited. Americans supposedly cherish the notion of limited government and insist that we would abide no king, but we are in most things perfectly happy to let presidents behave as though they were Louis XIV—as long as they are doing what we want them to do, or at least as long as they are irritating and discomfiting those we regard as our rivals and enemies.

…

If you cleave to a political philosophy holding that there is nothing outside of the state, then you are a partisan, however well-meaning, of absolutism and totalitarianism. Not every totalitarian temptation indulged leads directly to 1984. … There are many stops, many way stations, and (one prays) many off-ramps along the road to serfdom. But allowing the state to shove its stupid snout into the confessional is a big step in the wrong direction. It is one that should be resisted not only by litigation but also through civil disobedience, if necessary.

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.

The cardinal’s words had more impact than he intended: “I was responding to a question and I never wrote down what I said,” he later said about his famous statement, “but the words were captured on somebody’s smartphone and have now gone viral.” But his views were no less dramatic when expressed in less dramatic language: “The greatest threat to world peace and international justice is the nation state gone bad, claiming an absolute power, deciding questions and making ‘laws’ beyond its competence,” he later wrote. And his actions bore out his convictions: When the state of Illinois insisted that funding for adoption and foster care providers would be restricted to those that agreed to provide services to same-sex couples, the cardinal, with regret, instructed Catholic Charities to refuse to comply, and the archdiocese eventually discontinued those services. That is the totalitarian tendency at work: The question wasn’t whether there would be 500 adoption agencies that serve same-sex couples but whether the 12.7 million people of Illinois could tolerate one that did not.

Kevin D. Williamson, The Totalitarian Tendency and the Confessional

For what it’s worth: How do the bien pensants of Washington expect that a violation of this law will ever be discovered?

Department of Justice crashes

The Administration’s bad faith comes home to roost already.

Can’t be bothered to learn

Elon Musk’s disinterest in learning the first thing about government, combined with his enthusiasm for performatively cutting the parts of it that irked him politically (in at least some cases because he has become a deranged conspiracy theorist), led him to eviscerate USAID, and to brag about it on Twitter:

We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.

Could gone [sic] to some great parties.

Did that instead.

This decision led and will continue to lead to a heartbreaking amount of suffering and death — to children and babies dying because they were cut off from access to, for example, U.S.-provided peanut paste (cost: $1 a day). One statistical model published by a Boston University public health researcher projects that Musk’s cuts will cause hundreds of thousands of child deaths. I have not looked closely into that model, but let’s say its estimate of 300,000 is off by a massive amount and Musk’s actions only led to 75,000 deaths. Was it worth it?

I don’t think Elon Musk woke up one day and decided to starve some Yemeni children to death. Rather, I think he couldn’t be arsed to learn the details of what he was doing, and instead succumbed to conspiracy theories about USAID (the drug use can’t have helped here), until he really did convince himself USAID was “a criminal organization” that needed to “die.”

Jesse Singal

Bro, you gave up a podcast. And you’re not divorced. Or separated.

It is easy to make fun of Dan Bongino, the emotionally incontinent former cop turned podcaster appointed for some inexplicable reason by Donald Trump to serve as deputy director of the FBI as a subordinate to Kash Patel, whose main qualification for the job was having been the author of … a children’s book about the Steele dossier, a fact that sounds totally made-up but that is totally not made-up.

And it is a good week for making fun of Bongino, who recently had a public emotional breakdown on Fox News—where else?—about how he “gave up everything” to take on a thankless job in public service. About which: Bro, you gave up a podcast. Bongino went on to say that the job was so hard that he was now divorced from his wife, only to realize that he didn’t exactly mean what he said. The bombastic mode of speech that is apparently obligatory in Trump’s orbit had served him poorly, and so he corrected himself: “separated.” But he didn’t mean “separated” the way it sounds when it is used in conjunction with “divorce.” He just meant that he’s spending a lot of time at the office away from his family.

Kevin D. Williamson

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. I am now exploring Radiopaper.com as well.

Sunday of the Samaritan Woman

Sorry to be so much later than usual with this. I had a very busy Saturday and Sunday.

Beauty First

Let me commend to any artistic sorts reading this the video embedded in Beauty First: Envisioning a Civilization Worth Restoring. Jonathan Pageau’s introduction should tell you whether it merits your further attention.

Live the life of the Church

Having largely lost our religion(s), modernity has seen fit to create new ones. If we wonder what constitutes a modern religion (or efforts to create one) we need look no further than our public liturgies. Various months of the year are now designated as holy seasons set-aside to honor various oppressed groups or causes. It is an effort to liturgize the nation as the bringer and guardian of justice in the world, an effort that seeks to renew our sense of mission and to portray our nation as something that we believe in. It must be noted that as a nation, we have not been content to be one among many. We have found it necessary to “believe” in our country. It is a symptom of religious bankruptcy. As often as not, major sports events (Super Bowls) are pressed into duty as bearers of significance and meaning. The pious liturgies that surround them have become pathetic as they try ever-harder to say things that simply are not true or do not matter. This game is not important – it’s just a game.

…

I am often asked, when writing on this topic, what response Christians should make. What do we do about the state? How do we respond to modernity? For the state – quit “believing” in it. We are commanded in Scripture to pray for those in authority. We are not commanded to make the state better or participate in its projects. We are commanded to serve our neighbors as we fulfill the law of God. However, I think it is important to work at “clearing the fog” of modern propaganda regarding the place of the nation state in the scheme of things. I would frame a response to modernity in this manner: we are not responsible for foreign religions. Though Christian language and carefully selected ideas are often employed in the selling of modernity’s many projects, it is a mistake to honor its false claims. Make no mistake, modernity will offer no credit, in the end, to Christ, the Church, or to people of faith. Its interests lie elsewhere.

The proper response to these things will seem modest. Live the life of the Church. The cure of modernity’s neurasthenia is found not in yet one more successful project, but in the long work of salvation set in our midst in Christ’s death and resurrection. Our faith is not a chaplaincy to the culture, or a mere artifact of an older world. The Church is the Body of Christ into which all things will be gathered, both in heaven and on earth. It is the Way of Life as well as a way of life. It is not given to us to control how we are seen by the world, or whether the world thinks us useful. It is for us to be swallowed up by Christ and to manifest His salvation to the world. We were told from the very beginning that we should be patient, just as we were promised from the beginning that we would suffer with Christ.

I think the sickness that haunts our culture is that we fail to know and see what is good and to give thanks for the grace that permeates all things. When that is forgotten, nothing will satisfy, nothing will transcend. There is no better world to be built, nor are there great wars to be won. There is today, and that is enough.

Fr. Stephen Freeman, When America Got Sick

Astronomical accuracy

I don’t think I’d ever read the tart Orthodox response (from one Patriarch at least) when Pope Gregory invite the Orthodox to adopt his new, more astronomically-accurate calendar:

By the 16th century, concerns about secular or humanistic trends in Catholic theology had become a major theme in Orthodox apologetics. For instance, the dating of Easter was fixed by the First Ecumenical Council imn A.D. 325. At the time, their calculation was made using the Julian Calendar. However, in 1582, Pope Gregory XIII issued his new liturgical calendar—now known as the Gregorian Calendar, which he held to be more scientifically accurate. Gregory wrote to the Orthodox patriarchs inviting them to adopt his new calendar. Patriarch Joachim V of Antioch commissioned a reply from his disciple Metropolitan Athanasius al-Marmariti ibn-al Mujalla, who wrote to Pope Gregory:

Our community, our bishops, our kings and all our people, scattered in the four cardinal directions—Greeks, Russians, Georgians, Vlachs, Serbs, Moldovans, Turks, Arabs, and others . . . from the time of the Holy Apostles and God-bearing fathers of the Seven Ecumenical Councils down to this day recognize one faith, one confession, one Church, and one baptism . . . and all our nations agree in the four corners of the inhabited world with one word and one affair . . . and we did not receive the confession and the holy tradition which is in our hands . . . from unknown people, like other, foreign communities.

But we pray with the Holy Apostles and the 318 fathers [of the Council of Nicaea] whose signs and miracles shine forth from them manifestly. And so how can we change the tradition of such holy fathers and follow after unknown people who have no other trade but to observe the stars and examine the sky?

As with the filioque, we see that there are really two complaints here. (1) The dating of Easter—like the text of the Creed—had been established by an Ecumenical Council. How, then, could it be modified unilaterally by the Pope? (2) Why should the Church prefer “scientific accuracy” to the longstanding custom of the Apostolic Church?

Michael Warren Davis, The Primacy of God.

Eventually, many Orthodox Churches in the West — including my own — adopted the Gregorian Calendar — except for Pascha/Easter and the preceding Lent and following Pentecost. For those, we stuck with the dating from the Ecumenical Council.

Departure from tradition

…as Nathan Hatch, Mark Noll, and E. Brooks Holifield argue, departure from tradition explains much of the growth, influence, and shortcomings of American Christianity—including the failure of the nation’s theologians and churches to resolve the question of slavery.

Paul J. Gutacker, The Old Faith in a New Nation

Spontaneity is not authenticity

In our desire to be real we start thinking that authenticity is another word for spontaneity, as if everything we say at the spur of the moment is more true, more sincere than words we craft carefully. For many, the Freudian slip is considered more authentic than the measured reply. Indeed, sometimes what we blurt out thoughtlessly is actually what we mean and feel. But more often than not, what we blurt out is ill-considered and something we either need to qualify or apologize for.

Mark Galli, Beyond Smells and Bells. I have not read this book, but appreciate Readwise suggesting it.

Homo liturgicus

[I]n Augustine’s view; we are homo liturgicus, and the basic human need to worship God can be diverted and misdirected, but it cannot be eliminated.

William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry

Miscellany

Religion’s closest cousin is not rigid logic but art.

David Tracy, who died April 29. I like that, but from what I read in his obituary, there’s a lot I would dislike.

The biblical significance of the modern state of Israel is exactly the same as the biblical significance of Finland.

Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick

Really great art should have a secret in it that the artist knows nothing about.
In each experience of beauty, we’re being prepared for eternity.

Martin Shaw

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.

3rd Sunday of Pascha

Who will be the next Pope?

We’ll probably know by next Sunday, but for now:

JD Vance, it seems, is responsible for the death of Pope Francis. In this case, I believe that to the victor should go the spoils, and Vance should be the next Roman pontiff. The circumstantial evidence is beyond doubt: Vance and Pope Francis had a public disagreement over the concept of ordo amoris, and then the pope died shortly after they met for the first time. There are no coincidences. This isn’t even without precedent: Pope Sergius III (allegedly) killed his two predecessors Pope Leo V and Antipope Christopher. Don’t we want a return to tradition? The tradcath convert Vance could take the name Sergius, and then even have one of his sons installed after him, just like his namesake. Besides, there’s nothing in the Constitution that says the vice president can’t also be the pope. Maybe in a few years Pope JD can also be President JD. This would also be very traditional and return secular power to the papacy, and I look forward to a return of Renaissance-era political intrigue in the Vatican. (Virginia Aabram)

…

David Bentley Hart’s election as pope would give the Church a leader who is sure of his own infallibility. As a dogmatic Catholic, I would welcome such a development. I would also be glad to have a pope with a first-class theological mind, a due appreciation for Robert Louis Stevenson, and a desire to heal the schism between East and West. There is of course a risk that Hart would seek to suppress people with my conservative theological views. But I believe that his doctrinal chief, Roland, would help to ensure a just and liberal policy. If Hart concludes that he must refuse the burdens of the papal office, I could reconcile myself to the election of Cardinal Sarah. (Matthew Schmitz)

The First Things Conclave

Okay, sex fiends, answer me these:

I was doing some computer housekeeping Thursday and came across this. It reminded me of one of the weirdest things I ever heard a fringe Christian say: “It would have been perverted if Mary and Joseph didn’t have sex after Jesus was born!”

For those who think it’s obvious that Joseph and Mary had normal marital relations, and younger brothers and sisters of Jesus, because the scriptures refer to his “brothers”:

When you say that they were his brothers, do you mean that they had the same parents?
If so, are you saying that Joseph was Jesus’ father?
If Joseph was not Jesus father, then wouldn’t any brothers spoken of in scripture be half-brothers?
Have you ever considered the possibility that Joseph and Mary were not teenagers in love, but that Joseph was an older man, a widower, with children by a prior marriage?
Did you know that this is the tradition of the orthodox church? (I believe it is the tradition of the Roman Catholic Church that the brothers and sisters were more like cousins.)
If the Orthodox church is right, then the brothers referred to are older stepbrothers, right?
Is it any stranger calling stepbrothers “brothers” then it is calling half-brothers “brothers”?
If not, and since Christians believe that Joseph was not Jesus father, but rather that Jesus was conceived of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, why not just accept that they were stepbrothers?
Considering the times when Jesus brothers tried to stage a sort of intervention, wouldn’t it make sense that they were older stepbrothers, rather than younger siblings?
Does it bother you at all that all of the protestant reformers believe that Mary remain a virgin, the rest of her life, after giving birth to Jesus as a virgin?

Transhumanism: Christianity without all those God parts

The Silicon Valley agenda, the transhumanist agenda, is extremely utopian, and actually very religious. I think it’s like if you took the Christian religion — which they’re all sort of steeped in because they’re in America — and you take out the actual bits about God and Jesus and things, you’re left with a desire for transcendence and utopia and life after death, living forever and universal justice — all of which are sort of Christian notions — and so they’ve decided they’re going to build those themselves.

Paul Kingsnorth, interviewed by Freddie Sayers

A pagan century?

We seem to be entering a pagan century. It’s not only Trump. It’s the whole phalanx of authoritarians, all those greatness-obsessed macho men like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. It’s the tech bros. It’s Christian nationalism, which is paganism with worship music. (If you ever doubt the seductive power of paganism, remember it has conquered many of the churches that were explicitly founded to reject it.)

… Christianity is built on a series of inversions that make paganism look pompous and soulless: Blessed are the meek. Blessed are the poor in spirit. The last shall be first. The poor are closer to God than the rich. Jesus was perpetually performing outrageous acts of radical generosity, without calculating the cost.

David Brooks, How to Survive the Trump Years With Your Spirit Intact

Brooks’ impression will be hard to vindicate if we continue with our “religious revival,” so very much of which is crypto-pagan.

Ordinary

You have permission to be ordinary. To live a quiet life. To go for a walk without turning it into content. To do good work without chasing viral. To be present with your people instead of always ‘building something.’ Your life doesn’t have to be optimized to be meaningful. The Ordinary creates space for what truly matters.

David Keeler.

Thanks

Weep
If you can,
Weep,
But do not complain.
The way chose you –
And you
must be thankful.

(Dag Hammarskjold)

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

Thomas Sunday

Pope Francis

Friend of the Orthodox

In the Orthodox Churches they preserve that pristine liturgy. So beautiful. We have lost a bit the sense of adoration. They preserve it. They praise God, they adore God, singing. Time stops. The center is God. . . . Once, speaking about the western Church, of western Europe, above all the grown-up Church, they told me this phrase: Lux ex oriente, ex occidente luxus. [“Light comes from the East, luxury from the West.”] Consumerism, well-being, have done much harm. Instead, you preserve this beauty of God at the center, the point of reference. When reading Dostoyevsky, I believe that for all of us he must be an author to read and reread, because he has wisdom. One perceives the Russian soul, the Eastern soul. It is something that will do us all good. We need this renewal, this fresh air from the East, of this light from the Orient. . . . Too often, the luxus of the West causes us to lose the horizon. I don’t know. This is what I’m moved to say.
During the first millennium, the universal communion of the Churches in the ordinary course of events was maintained through fraternal relations between the bishops.
The bishop of Rome did not exercise canonical authority over the churches of the East.

Pope Francis via Michael Warren Davis

These are important concessions by a Pope. Much more remains to be done to heal the Great Schism. Meanwhile, against my initial gut reaction, I now pray for the soul of God’s servant, Francis.

The worst of all possible Christian worlds

Not everyone feels as kindly toward Francis as does Michael Warren Davis:

Francis was thus my own worst Protestant nightmare: an authoritarian Roman pope driving a liberal Protestant agenda, a leader who embodied the worst of all possible Christian worlds.

Time will tell whether the next pope will follow in Francis’s footstep and permit the continuation of liberal Protestant policies. It’s up to the men who will be gathering in the Sistine Chapel in the coming weeks. As a Catholic friend once said to me about the last papal election, the Holy Spirit never errs. But, he added, the same cannot be said for the College of Cardinals.

Carl Trueman

Prompted by Francis’ death

I’m not claiming to be a good Catholic. I’m far from it. I’m a terrible one in many ways. I honestly, sincerely believe the church is wrong in some — but by no means all — of its teachings on sexuality. Lust has undoubtedly mastered me at times the way it has many men, and always will. But I also know my soul has far deeper problems than my love for other men, however muddied with desire; and that the world has lost its way so much more profoundly in other parts of life: in our materialism, our selfishness, our wealth and comfort, our smugness and distraction, and our abuse of our sacred planet.

Andrew Sullivan, Why I Loved Pope Francis (italics added).

The italicized portion of the block-quote bespeaks a genuine Christian faith, and I don’t have to agree with the rest to view it so.

A bitter pill

for every advance, there was an asterisk, and for every proclamation of love, a delineation of limits, so that Francis — who died on Monday at the age of 88 — personified the indelible tension in the church’s official teaching about homosexuality, which he never squarely renounced. That teaching holds that being gay isn’t a sin but that acting on those feelings is “intrinsically disordered.”

That’s tough to get your head around in the abstract. It’s even more difficult if you’ve spent much time in the church and with its clergy ….

Frank Bruni (italics added)

I’ve never seen how Rome’s position is all that tough to get your head around. “A bitter pill to swallow” is what I think Bruni may intend.

Be it remembered

What’s church good for?

[O]ur religious institutions are most important not for reasons of civic utility, such as running soup kitchens or cleaning up after natural disasters. No, their highest function is offering us access to the fullest truth about our world.

Yuval Levin via Joshua T. Katz. I encountered this quote for the first time this week, and I love it because it defies every effort to instrumentalize Church (or Synagogue, as in Levin’s case, or Mosque).

God does not have an anger problem

It is sinful to ascribe to God the characteristic features of fallen man by alleging, for example, that God is angry and vengeful, and therefore He must be propitiated and appeased. Such an attitude wants to make it appear that it is God Who needs curing, and not man. But this is sacrilegious. The sinful man, who is characterized by egoism and arrogance, is offended. We cannot say that God is offended. . . . Consequently, sin is not an insult to God, Who must be cured, but our own illness, and therefore we need to be cured

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

Other stuff

The Gramscian Heresy

The Protestant integralists belonging the New Apostolic Reformation school, with their Seven-Mountain Mandate, certainly look Gramscian, don’t they? They want the power that comes from control of key institutions.

That’s not necessarily a mike-drop observation. We have an overabundance of Gramscians trying to march through our institutions these days, but few who are Gramscian as part of an explicitly “religious” movement.

Orthodox hagiographies are full of Saints who had to be dragged kicking and screaming (as it were) to accept ordination to the Priesthood, or elevation to a Bishopric. I’ll drive my stake in the ground here: A Christian may legitimatly be led to office, but hunger for power over others is anti-Christian.

An old truth that we keep forgetting

Reason is an absolute—all is in ruins. Yet those who ask me to believe this world picture also ask me to believe that Reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of mindless matter at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. Here is flat contradiction. They ask me at the same moment to accept a conclusion and to discredit the only testimony on which that conclusion can be based. The difficulty is to me a fatal one; and the fact that when you put it to many scientists, far from having an answer, they seem not even to understand what the difficulty is, assures me that I have not found a mare’s nest but detected a radical disease in their whole mode of thought from the very beginning.

C.S. Lewis, Weight of Glory

A surprising possibility

What’s driving young people to Christianity? In UnHerd, Niall Gooch argued the answer may lie in the strict moral demands of modern secularism. “At its best, Christianity is not a moralistic religion — in other words, it does not place the expectation of perfect behaviour at its core. It is repentance and reconciliation, not respectability, that are central to the internal logic of the faith. The Christian moral system is also coherent and predictable,” he wrote. “Modern secular morality, by contrast, is extremely censorious and has a strongly arbitrary element, as we have seen in the last decade or so of ‘cancel culture.’ People have been subjected to storms of anonymous criticism, resulting in lost jobs and lost livelihoods, with no clear limiting principle and no real interest in proportionality. To make matters worse, this is all highly impersonal and offers no clear pathway for restoration and forgiveness.”

The Morning Dispatch

Mystery, not random

To call the unknown “random” is to plant the flag by which to colonize and exploit the known. . . . To call the unknown by its right name, “mystery,” is to suggest that we had better respect the possibility of a larger, unseen pattern that can be damaged or destroyed and, with it, the smaller patterns. . . . But if we are up against mystery, then knowledge is relatively small, and the ancient program is the right one: Act on the basis of ignorance.

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

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

St. John Climacus, 2025

Denying our ancestry

Just as the Bishop of Oxford refused to consider that he might be descended from an ape, so now are many in the West reluctant to contemplate that their values, and even their very lack of belief, might be traceable back to Christian origins.

Tom Holland, Dominion

The virtue of essays

I write here not as a teacher to students but rather as a reader to other readers, a citizen to other citizens. I write because I think I have learned a few things in my teaching life that are relevant to our common life. You will see what those are if you read on.

My approach here is anything but systematic. Of all the literary genres, I am fondest of the essay, with its meandering course that (we hope) faithfully represents the meanderings of the human mind … certain images in advance and people will recur throughout this book, returning perhaps when you think we’re done with them. I write this way because none of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread with the Dead. That last sentence is a gem.

Notional Evangelical Bibicism

As a public relations stunt, Trump’s Bible photo might seem unserious, but the president certainly understood the importance of Christian scripture to a significant voting bloc. Evangelicals are biblicists, and the extent to which American religiosity has been dominated by evangelical Protestantism correlates to the degree to which American culture has been shaped by the Bible.

Paul J. Gutacker, The Old Faith in a New Nation

I would be remiss were I not to recommend Brad East’s ‌Biblicist churches that don’t read the Bible — Brad East. Historian Gutaker may be missing something contemporary.

The one, true meaning of the text

When I try to explain to people why we need to recover patristic interpretation, the biggest obstacle I face is the desire of my interlocutors to establish the one, true meaning of the text. When I assert that there is no such thing, I provoke raised eyebrows: I must be playing fast and loose with the biblical text, making it echo my preconceptions. My insistence that biblical texts have multiple, even innumerable meanings contradicts our modern objectivism. My defense of patristic allegorizing likewise elicits fears of arbitrariness and subjectivism.

Hans Boersma, No Method but Christ

Whither the magisterial Reformation?

Nearly two decades ago, Bruce McCormack, professor of systematic theology at Princeton Seminary, wrote: “The situation in which Christian theology is done in the United States today is shaped most dramatically by the slow death of the Protestant churches.” He went on:

if current rates of decline in membership continue, all that will be left by mid-century will be Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and non-denominational evangelical churches. . . . The churches of the Reformation will have passed from the scene—and with their demise, there will be no obvious institutional bearers of the message of the Reformation. What all of this means in practice is that it will become more and more necessary, for the sake of the future of Christianity, to establish stronger ecumenical relations with the Catholics and the Orthodox.

This is a grave prediction, but its sobriety makes it not just prescient but practical. Non-catholic varieties of Christendom are here for good, but Goldilocks Protestantism was always doomed to fail. It presumed too much, relying on a common inheritance—patristic, medieval, and cultural—that was bound to be called into question by future reformers in search of their own style of biblical renewal.

In any case, McCormack is right: Whether, in the coming decades, magisterial Christians look “up” or “down” for friendship and cooperation, they will be living in a world without Protestantism. In truth, they already are.

Brad East, Goldilocks Protestantism

Martyrdom

Many a man will live and die upon a dogma: no man will be a martyr for a conclusion.

John Henry Newman

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

Cheesefare 2025

Gymnasiums

The gym where God retrains our hearts

Worship is the arena in which God recalibrates our hearts, reforms our desires, and rehabituates our loves. Worship isn’t just something we do; it is where God does something to us. Worship is the heart of discipleship because it is the gymnasium in which God retrains our hearts.

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

And that, my friend, is why I [still] don’t mind singing in an empty Church.

Smith gets a lot of things right.

The gym where amnesiacs stultify our hearts

[T]he practices and prayers set out for God’s people in the prayer book have been amongst the most formative in western and, indeed, global Christianity. But to American evangelicals in the 2020s, living after nearly 50 years in which our corporate liturgy and prayer life has soaked in the corrosive acid of seeker sensitive church life, the practices and even the language of the prayer book can feel strange and foreign and even a bit frightening, I think. We have become accustomed to three songs and a TED talk, to spectacle, and to spontaneity. And while I think there are a great many of us who are quite tired of such things, it is not easy for those on the far side of a great forgetting to regain what previous generations misplaced—unless they have help ….

Jake Meador.

Jake is a young man, so it’s understandable that he thinks the great forgetting began with seeker-sensitivity. I think it started earlier, perhaps more than a century earlier. But I’m neither a historian nor an eyewitness.

Miscellany

Out of my yawns, a grabber

Ross Douthat was being interviewed by Andrew Sullivan about his forthcoming book, Believe. For the most part, I am uninterested in this book (which gives all kinds of rational, scientific arguments for the reasonableness of belief and some kind of God) simply because I think God‘s existence per se is not very interesting.

However, there was one argument of a sort that I had not heard before, and that caught my attention: Why is mankind so gifted with intelligence and curiosity that he penetrates many of the secrets of the universe? Why was our intelligence not limited to that degree that, for instance, would allow us to be subsistence, farmers or herders? If we merely evolved, why didn’t evolution stop there? Might it be that we are given much greater intelligence than that in order that we could both discover facts about the universe and commune more fully with God?

(I’m not sure where Douthat ends and I begin in the prior paragraph.)

Some day, a story

I’m fatigued by politics at the moment – I have to be careful with attempting punditry in this state – as Gary Snyder said, “Don’t be a slave to your lesser talents”. But at some point a story rather than a polemic will appear that speaks to the moment we are in and I will proceed from there. Nobody needs more clever arguments. I miss the woods, the sea, the swooping buzzard, I don’t miss any more retina-blitzing bit of adrenal-wrecking rhetoric.

Martin Shaw, 2/23/25

Correctness < Theology

Nothing is as difficult as true theology. Simply saying something correct is beside the point. Correctness does not rise to the level of theology. Theology, rightly done, is a path towards union with God. It is absolutely more than an academic exercise. Theology is not the recitation of correct facts, it is the apprehension and statement of Beauty.

It is this aspect of liturgical life that makes it truly theological. It is also the failure of most contemporary Christian worship efforts. Gimmicks, emotional manipulation and a musical culture that barely rises above kitsch reveal nothing of God – and embarrassingly much about us.

Fr. Stephen Freeman

Catholic or Orthodox?

It happened one afternoon last autumn. I was praying before an icon of the Holy Family. “What should I do? Should I stay Catholic or become Orthodox? Please give me some sign.”

A tear rolled down Mary’s face. I wiped it away. My fingers were wet. I burst into the living room and called to my wife. “The icon is weeping,” I told her. She looked incredulous. “Call Father T.,” she said.

Father T. was the priest of our Eastern-Catholic parish. He retired from the local police force as a homicide detective before taking holy orders. I told him what happened. “I’m an old cop,” he said, “so I assume there are natural causes before I start looking for supernatural ones.” As we were talking, I watched a tear form in Joseph’s eye and roll down his face.

“It’s happening again,” I said.

Father T. was silent for a moment. “Oh.”

We hung up. I was staring at the icon when another tear formed in Mary’s eye. This time I brought it to my wife. “Do you see this?” I asked her. She wiped the tear from the icon and tasted it. “It’s sweet.”

A few hours later I called Father T. back. He said that, in his opinion, the weeping icon was a sign to remain Catholic. Surely, Mary and Joseph were crying because I was thinking about leaving the Church. Also, icons of the Holy Family are definitely “Western-style.” (Mrs. Davis and I bought the icon shortly after we were married, at a conference hosted by the Society of St. Pius X.) Isn’t that significant? Besides, in the East, miraculous icons usually stream myrrh all over, like a glass of ice water sweating in the hot sun. Ours wept tears from its eyes, more like the miraculous statues one finds in the West. This was a “hybrid” miracle: no doubt a sign to remain Eastern Catholic. All of which are perfectly good arguments.

Afterwards I called Father A., an old Russian priest in whom I’d been confiding. Father A. also happens to be a master iconographer. I asked him, “Is this a sign to become Orthodox?” To my surprise, he demurred. Weeping icons are not like Ouija boards, he said. They don’t give yes-or-no answers to the questions we ask God in prayer. First and foremost, they are gifts. They remind us of God’s presence in our lives, and of His love for us. Secondly, they call us to repentance—to enter more deeply into a life of prayer and fasting.

Father A. told me that, of course, he would love for us to become Orthodox. He felt that our fasting and prayer would, in time, lead us to the Orthodox Church. But God is not like you and me, he said. His gifts are never purely utilitarian.

Michael Warren Davis

It may well be that “Father T” opined badly by the standards of his own Church and that Orthodox Priests exist who, unlike Father A, would play the same game. But I’m pretty sure Father A is in the Orthodox mainstream.

Lazarus on Cyprus

It is well-known among Cypriots, not to mention a matter of national pride, that St. Lazarus lived on the island of Cyprus after the Lord’s Resurrection. Saint John’s Gospel tells us that the Jewish leaders had resolved to kill both Jesus and Lazarus. They considered it necessary to kill Lazarus because belief in Jesus as the Messiah increased after he raised Lazarus to life when he had been dead for four days (John 12:9–11). Lazarus was literally living proof of this extraordinary miracle. The New Testament itself does not tell us that Lazarus went to Cyprus later, but this was known in the tradition of the Church of Cyprus. The gospel message came to Cyprus very early, and the Church was established there even before St. Paul became a missionary (Acts 11:19–21).

My husband, Fr. Costas, was born and lived on the island of Cyprus when it was still a British colony. He related to me that the Cypriots would boast about St. Lazarus to the British there. But the British would often scoff at this claim, saying there was no proof that Lazarus had ever come to Cyprus.

A very old church dedicated to St. Lazarus, dating back to the 800s, is located in Larnaca, Cyprus. In 1972 a fire caused serious damage to the church building. The subsequent renovation required digging beneath the church to support the structure during reconstruction. In the process of digging, workers uncovered the relics of St. Lazarus located directly below the altar in a marble sarcophagus engraved with the words “Lazarus, the four-day dead and friend of Christ.”

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

Why do we find it implausible that Lazarus lived somewhere after Christ raised him, and that it/he was important enough that people there preserved the memory?

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

Sunday, 1/26/25

Musings from a funeral

I went to a funeral on MLK Day (when there were unrelated festivities going on in Washington DC as well). I hadn’t seen the deceased probably in more than a quarter century, but I always liked him.

Apart from being dead, Tom looked good. Apart from her hair haven’t gone white, his wife looked great. It was good to see them again, though it does eventually get tiresome when you only see your old friends at funerals, especially when one is the guest of honor.

His daughter’s Remembrance dwelt at some lengths on Tom’s piety, and deservedly so in my experience. We got acquainted at our former Reformed church. When our church ~~split~~ planted a sister church with guitars and drums and plexiglass and repetitive praise songs and such, I think he went with the sister church instead of staying with us stick-in-the-muds. Eventually, he moved out of state, to a warmer and trendier place, to start his own business in a field he knew from 30 or so years’ experience. He remained firmly in the Reformed tradition, though he switched in his new home to the Presbyterian side rather than the continental.

And soon enough, the Orthodox Christian faith caught my serious attention and I, too, left — in an opposite direction from Tom.

Which brings me to my topic. Why me? Why did I get lucky? Why don’t more people like me find the Orthodox Christian faith?

I don’t really have an answer, but I have largely gotten over my convert-itis, my urge to harangue people about looking into Orthodoxy. I’m just not prepared to say that the world would be a better place if every pious Protestant was forever wringing his hands and anxiously poring over books to see if maybe he hadn’t picked (or been born into, or married into, or whatever) the true/best Church. There’s something to be said for settling down and practicing your faith, especially since the alternative of searching, searching, searching just might be unhealthier than settling down in the wrong place.

Or so it seems to me. I don’t mean to be cavalier about extra Ecclesiam nulla salus or to fudge the borders of Ecclesiam, but if I can hope for the salvation of all, and can get out of my left brain about distinctions, surely I can hope for the salvation of heterodox Christians.

Settling is what I had done 30-plus years ago. As I can attest, God knows how to unsettle you when you need it. So if you are feeling unsettled in your Church, come and see what’s up in your nearest Orthodox Church. Otherwise, stay put and be the best [fill in the blank] you can be.

And may God have mercy on me if this is the advice of a squish.

Before we forget the stunt …

Of Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde’s National Cathedral sermon (which turned to direct admonition of Donald Trump):

I must be one of the only people other than those actually in the cathedral to have listened to the entire thing. It was dry, high-minded, and Christ-light, and it built on a theme of “unity” in which all people drop their political differences and embrace a generalized, feel-good, Esperanto-like uni-faith, with everyone directing their prayers to Whom It May Concern.

Caitlin Flanagan

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

Sunday After Nativity

Intellectual converts

The Free Press yesterday published a longish item, How Intellectuals Found God by Peter Savodnik.

I was familiar with all the intellectuals named except Jordan Hall, and they all seem to fit Brad East’s year-old Conversions, Protestantism, and a new mainline commenting on the rarity of intellectual conversions to Protestantism as opposed to catholic traditions. Add to Brad East’s exploratory hypotheses about that phenomenon those of Fergus McCullough, Why don’t intellectuals convert to Protestantism?.

Tyler Cowen chimes in, in a somethat different key:

Not too long ago, I was telling Ezra Klein that I had noticed a relatively new development in classical liberalism. If a meet an intellectual non-Leftist, increasingly they are Nietzschean, compared to days of yore. But if they are classical liberal instead, typically they are religious as well. That could be Catholic or Jewish or LDS or Eastern Orthodox, with some Protestant thrown into the mix, but Protestants coming in last.

As an Orthodox Christian, I take no offense at intellectual converts gravitating in a catholic direction, but for a number of reasons, I’m not doing an end-zone dance about it, either, unlike one (Roman) Catholic bishop in Texas:

Catholicism will be nihilism’s last competitor on the dance floor of history, and Catholicism will see it drop from exhaustion as the orchestra plays on. The music itself will testify.

Bishop Daniel E. Flores of Brownsville, Texas

But so what?

Men are apt to prefer prosperous error to an afflicted truth.

Jeremy Taylor

Both quotes via R.R. Reno

Those evangelicals of intellectual bent should be wrestling with this question, though.

Carefully Rehearsed Spontaneity

The framers of the Directory [for the Publique Worship of God] were not unaware of its paradoxical stance vis-à-vis ritual, either. Its preface obliquely acknowledged the oddity of institutionalizing a prescribed means of praying when Puritan teaching held that converted people would pray aright by the Spirit, but offered it as “some help and furniture” to the minister, so that he might “furnish his heart and tongue with Materials of Prayer and Exhortation, as shall be needful” (7-8). The careful, italicized language of the Directory, meant to be paraphrased but not displaced altogether, embodies a sort of anxious, secret checking of spontaneity that is in fact part and parcel of its logic. In spite of the selection of a man who appeared a trustworthy minister of God’s word, not only might his prayers stray from sound doctrine, but more than that, they might not flow freely, spontaneously, and affectively at all. In referring to the guide as “help and furniture,” the Directory portrays what it believes should be a modern, rational, self-transparent, and spontaneous self, operating under what it figures as deformities, weaknesses, and handicaps: seeking to authenticate its goodness and wholeness, yet perennially afraid of its inner divisions, the demand of its repeated performance, and perhaps most of all of its silences.

In this way, the Directory also looks toward the spiraling anxiety. That is one of the enduring legacies of Protestant and English dissenting spirituality in the restoration and enlightenment. More paradoxically than the writers of the Directory, Dissenters later wrote a vast literature to instruct those within their camp in the art of praying spontaneously. This literature too begs the question of why free prayer needed coaching, a query many dealt with directly. But it also sets forth as its most common recommendation for achieving true prayer the collection of lists of phrases, usually from Scripture, which once memorized would roll off the tongue and be easily assembled into prayer on the spur of the moment. Where the Directory‘s very form expresses the implicit knowledge that spontaneity is no real guarantor of (doctrinal or spiritual) truth, these free-prayer guides murmur with the fear that spontaneity may not come at all. While they seek to fill the mind with scriptural phrases, constructing, in Matthew Henry’s words, a “Storehouse of Materials for Prayer,” they also speak another truth. Besides being furnished with nonorthodox materials, the self that flees performativity and ritual, looking inward for authentic substance, finds itself fluctuating and, in the face of the demands of performance and empirical, experimental repetition, often silent and empty.

…

[Matthew] Henry’s Method culminates with his most fascinating phrase-collection of all, “A Paraphrase on the Lord’s Prayer, in Scripture Expressions.” Christ’s own form of prayer given to his disciples had long been a thorn in Puritans’ sides, to be plucked out by being understood as only a general guideline. Henry’s strategy is to neutralize the prayer’s form in a similar method; he provides, for instance, and amazing two and a half pages of verses elaborating on the one phrase “Our Father, who art Heaven” (MP, 163-65), a general topos, he says, from which prayer begins. Many editions of the Method were printed as Henry intended, interleaved with one blank page between each printed one, to enable the reader to pen in his own collection of phrases to supplement Henry’s own. Like Bunyan’s demand for scrupulous sincerity, Henry’s lists and blank pages, figures of accumulation and abstraction, combine literally to efface the Lord’s Prayer and erase it from Dissenting practice.

…

The more individualized these spiritual practices became, like the personalized collections of scriptural phrases, the more readily their constructedness-their nonspontaneity-was apparent, opening the believer to a sense of isolation and perpetual, nearly neurotic self-critique …

Lori Branch, Rituals of Spontaneity, pp. 55-57, 60.

This fake spontaneity persists in verbal tics like “Father God, we just” this, that, or the other thing. It’s like refrigerator magnet poetry only less creative.

The sober prayers of the Book of Common Prayer always secretly guided me when, as a Calvinist Elder, I was to lead congregational prayer, and those of the Orthodox Prayer books had an outsized influence on my eventual embrace of Orthodoxy.

Watch what they do, not what they say

Paradoxically, therefore, the structures necessary for the Reformers to extend the sacred into all of life included a whole constellation of structures and practices that they undermined. For if everything is sacred, then in another sense, nothing is sacred. This struck me in a particularly visceral way one Sunday morning at the Calvinist church in Idaho. After the service, I went to use the restroom and found leftovers of Communion bread in the bathroom garbage. The clergy routinely gave leftover bread and wine to the children to consume as a snack, which the children could then take wherever they wished.

Robin Phillips, Rediscovering the Goodness of Creation

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

Paul Kingsnorth

Sunday, 12/15/24

Theology isn’t all deductive

Catholics find it impossible to theologize without deductive reasoning—a characteristic shared by virtually all Western Christians…

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

Puritan Phobia

The Puritans quickly developed a phobia about ritual, going so far as to resist “rote” recitation of the Lord’s Prayer:

Henry’s Method culminates with his most fascinating phrase-collection of all, “A Paraphrase on the Lord’s Prayer, in Scripture Expressions.” Christ’s own form of prayer given to his disciples had long been a thorn in Puritans’ sides, to be plucked out by being understood as only a general guideline. Henry’s strategy is to neutralize the prayer’s form in a pages of verses elaborating on the one phrase “Our Father, who art in similar method; he provides, for instance, an amazing two and a half Heaven” (MP, 163-65), a general topos, he says, from which begins. Many editions of the Method were printed as Henry intended, interleaved with one blank page between each printed one, to enable the reader to pen in his own collection of phrases to supplement Henry’s own. Like Bunyan’s demand for scrupulous sincerity, Henry’s lists and blank pages, figures of accumulation and abstraction, combine literally to efface the Lord’s Prayer and erase it from Dissenting practice.

Between the ledgerlike pages of Henry’s collected phrases and the blank sheets for scribbled lists of readers’ personal prayer phrases, one senses of variety of fears: that without this careful accounting, the business might go bankrupt, that in the copious, nervous quoting from God’s word to talk and talk and talk to God, God might not listen or respond at all.

Lori Branch, Rituals of Spontaneity

Hyperpluralism’s roots

Moreover, Reformation scholars tend analytically and in their division of labor to hive off the magisterial Reformation-Lutheranism, Reformed Protestantism, and the Church of England-from the radical Reformation. Consequently, whether oriented primarily toward theology or toward social history, they have overlooked the significance of the principle of sola scripture for contemporary hyperpluralism.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

A catholic vision of Christian faith

When I first opened A Severe Mercy nearly 20 years ago I had needed a vision of Christian faith that was unapologetically devoted to Christian doctrine without being materialistic, more American than Christian, and completely uprooted from history. Up to that point, the expressions of Christianity I had encountered were simply different forms of sectarian faith—a vapid progressivism or a parochial and narrow fundamentalism. Vanauken gave me catholicity ….

Jake Meador (hyperlink added)

Know-it-alls

In practical terms, the Reformed commitment to the theological significance of everyday life led to the development of something like Protestant metaphysics, Protestant epistemology, Protestant science, Protestant politics, Protestant social and economic theory, Protestant art, and Protestant poetics. The development of these Reformed spheres of intellectual and cultural activity never occurred without substantial influence from sources not specifically religious. In Switzerland, the southern German regions, Hungary, Holland, and the British Isles, the Reformed perspective could be used to mask economic or political aggression. More commonly, it emerged from a complicated mix of sacred and secular motives. Yet wherever sufficient Reformed strength existed, the assumption also existed that biblical Christianity had something fairly definite to say about everything.

Mark A. Noll, America’s God

Some of us have been glued to the BBC on a Sunday evening this autumn watching Mark Rylance return mesmerically as Thomas Cromwell in the second series of Wolf Hall. This all takes place in the era of the Reformation, and a particular scene has stayed with me. Surrounded by crosses lifted from churches, Cromwell says the following:

The English will discover God in daylight, not hidden in a cloud of incense. They will hear his word in their own language from a minister who faces them, not turning his back and muttering in some obscure, foreign tongue…no one will ever believe the poor once bowed and scraped to stocks of wood, and prayed to lumps of plaster.

I have such a mixed response to this brilliant bit of writing.

I went to such a daylight church and could not find God there. I didn’t find him in a cloud of incense either. I found him in a moonlit, midnight forest. I found him in a place with almost no human imprint. That was where he suddenly said NOW.

And I suppose I have become someone who ‘bows and scrapes’ to icons and prays to ‘lumps of plaster’. But, of course, to reduce them as Cromwell does is to misunderstand their function, what they do to the spirit and heart of the faithful. It’s not to the wood or plasterness of them I am praying. It’s just that I am not entirely just a brain on legs fed by sermons. These scorned ‘lumps’ of Cromwell become luminous by attention and repetition, by their physicality, by their evocation of tradition, what exudes through them. They gather and focus devotion, taking it from a lyric (entirely personal) into an epic (collective) encounter with the divine. Their materials are not the thing.

I have sympathies with all that want to hear gospel in their own language, and I’m glad that happened. Surely we all, really, want a profound sense of both tradition and innovation?

Maybe we long for a God of daylight and moonlight, of lyric and epic, of straight talking and unknowable mystery. I’d find it hard to imagine someone who didn’t. We stand on the Mount of Olives with our teacher and surely all is possible. Surely anything less than this is just silly.

But human history is human history and we make our choices. They are rarely ideal, but we chew, we rail, then we decide.

Martin Shaw

A personal favorite

I have three lists of Maxims or such that I review regularly. This one, which I think was originally embedded in a longer blog post by Father Stephen Freeman, seems more precious (in the good sense, not the snarky sense) every time I read it:

First, live as though in the coming of Jesus Christ, the Kingdom of God has been inaugurated into the world and the outcome of history has already been determined. (Quit worrying)
Second, love people as the very image of God and resist the temptation to improve them.
Third, refuse to make economics the basis of your life. Your job is not even of secondary importance.
Fourth, quit arguing about politics as though the political realm were the answer to the world’s problems. It gives it power that is not legitimate and enables a project that is anti-God.
Fifth, learn to love your enemies. God did not place them in the world for us to fix or eliminate. If possible, refrain from violence.
Sixth, raise the taking of human life to a matter of prime importance and refuse to accept violence as a means to peace. Every single life is a vast and irreplaceable treasure.
Seventh, cultivate contentment rather than pleasure. It will help you consume less and free you from slavery to your economic masters.
Eighth, as much as possible, think small. You are not in charge of the world. Love what is local, at hand, personal, intimate, unique, and natural. It’s a preference that matters.
Ninth, learn another language. Very few things are better at teaching you about who you are not.
Tenth, be thankful for everything, remembering that the world we live in and everything in it belongs to God.

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

Paul Kingsnorth

Elevation of the Holy Cross 2024

I’m on vacation, so I’m not going to take the time to sort these into topics.

Also, it’s a major Feast day in the Eastern Church. The Orthodox Church at my vacation destination appears to be postponing observance to tomorrow — an Orthodox oddity in my limited experience.

Selling hoi polloi a delusion

Those with a material interest in doing so have learned to speak autonomy talk, and to tap into the deep psychology of autonomy in ways that lead to its opposite.

Matthew Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head

Purposeful to a fault

Himmler quite aptly defined the SS member as the new type of man who under no circumstances will ever do “a thing for its own sake.”

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Sit quietly with that one for a minute. Then consider Josef Pieper, Leisure, The Basis of Culture.

“Televangelists”

Fugitive Televangelist Wanted by F.B.I. Is Caught in the Philippines
Weeks of tense standoff in the Philippines have ended in the capture of a pastor accused of leading an international ring of sex abuse and trafficking of young women and girls.

New York Times

I don’t believe it would be fair to saddle any Christian tradition or denomination with this guy. From what the Times says about the idolatrous adulation he cultivated, he was plainly some kind of one-off cultist.

But I have no idea how many one-off cultists are abroad in the world, when this admonition currently being featured at the end of my Sunday blog posts:

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

Huge (if true)

Donald Trump runs no risk of going to prison in the middle of his campaign, thanks to Judge Juan Merchan’s decision Friday to postpone sentencing until Nov. 26. The delay gives his lawyers more time to prepare an appeal. Fortunately for Mr. Trump, his trial was overwhelmingly flawed, and a well-constructed appeal would ensure its ultimate reversal.

A central problem for the prosecution and Judge Merchan lies in Article VI of the U.S. Constitution, which makes federal law the “supreme law of the land.” That pre-empts state law when it conflicts with federal law, including by asserting jurisdiction over areas in which the federal government has exclusive authority.

Mr. Trump’s conviction violates this principle because it hinges on alleged violations of state election law governing campaign spending and contributions. The Federal Election Campaign Act pre-empts these laws as applied to federal campaigns. If it didn’t, there would be chaos. Partisan state and local prosecutors could interfere in federal elections by entangling candidates in litigation, devouring precious time and resources.

That hasn’t happened except in the Trump case, because the Justice Department has always guarded its exclusive jurisdiction even when states have pushed back, as has happened in recent decades over immigration enforcement.

The normal approach would have been for the Justice Department to inform District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who was contemplating charges against Mr. Trump, of the FECA pre-emption issue. If Mr. Bragg didn’t follow the department’s guidance, it would have intervened at the start of the case to have it dismissed. Instead the department allowed a state prosecutor to interfere with the electoral prospects of the chief political rival of President Biden, the attorney general’s boss.

David B. Rivkin Jr. and Elizabeth Price Foley, Why Trump’s Conviction Can’t Stand

They evolved

In the summer of 2015, back when he was still talking to traitorous reporters like me, I spent extended stretches with Donald Trump. He was in the early phase of his first campaign for president, though he had quickly made himself the inescapable figure of that race—as he would in pretty much every Republican contest since. We would hop around his various clubs, buildings, holding rooms, limos, planes, golf carts, and mob scenes, Trump disgorging his usual bluster, slander, flattery, and obvious lies. The diatribes were exhausting and disjointed.

But I was struck by one theme that Trump kept pounding on over and over: that he was used to dealing with “brutal, vicious killers”—by which he meant his fellow ruthless operators in showbiz, real estate, casinos, and other big-boy industries. In contrast, he told me, politicians are saps and weaklings.

“I will roll over them,” he boasted, referring to the flaccid field of Republican challengers he was about to debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library that September. They were “puppets,” “not strong people.” He welcomed their contempt, he told me, because that would make his turning them into supplicants all the more humiliating.

“They might speak badly about me now, but they won’t later,” Trump said. They like to say they are “public servants,” he added, his voice dripping with derision at the word servant. But they would eventually submit to him and fear him. They would “evolve,” as they say in politics. “It will be very easy; I can make them evolve,” Trump told me. “They will evolve.”

Like most people who’d been around politics for a while, I was dubious. And wrong. They evolved.

Mark Leibovich, Hypocrisy, Spinelessness, and the Triumph of Donald Trump

Change of perspective or sign of deline?

The eighteenth-century Humean slave of the passions is thus indistinguishable from the liberated, twentieth-century Sartrean individual living authentically.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

All that matters is strength

Part of the reason Trump is less constrained on [the abortion] issue than his predecessors is that he’s transformed the Christian right just as he has the broader conservative movement, dethroning serious-seeming figures while promoting those once regarded as flamboyant cranks. In Republican politics, Steve Bannon and Alex Jones now have far more influence than erstwhile conservative stalwarts like Paul Ryan and Dick Cheney. Similarly, in the religious realm, the ex-president has elevated a class of faith healers, prosperity gospel preachers and roadshow revivalists over the kind of respectable evangelicals who clustered around George W. Bush. “Independent charismatic leaders, who 20 years ago would have been mocked by mainstream religious right leaders, are now frontline captains in the American culture wars,” writes the scholar Matthew D. Taylor in his fascinating new book, “The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy.”

The churches Taylor is writing about exist outside the structures and doctrines of denominations like the Southern Baptists. They’re led by flashy spiritual entrepreneurs who fashion themselves as modern apostles and prophets with supernatural spiritual gifts, and they represent one of the fastest-growing movements in American Christianity. Among many of these churches, Trump remains the anointed one, chosen by God to restore Christian rule to the United States. These Christians care a great deal about abortion, but they appear to care at least as much about Trump. Many of them see him as a modern-day version of the Persian emperor Cyrus, a heathen who, in the sixth century B.C.E., rescued God’s chosen people from Babylonian captivity. In this framework, Trump’s piety is irrelevant; all that matters is his strength.

Michelle Goldberg

I think Goldberg, no Christian, is right. And that means that it’s hard to say that MAGA and I share the Christian tradition; their religion seems from a darker source.

Ted Cruz is no dummie

Liz Cheney famously endorsed Kamala Harris over Donald Trump, and less famously endorsed Democratic U.S. Representative Colin Allred over Ted Cruz for Cruz’s Texas Senate seat.

So has she abandoned the GOP?

I can’t speak for Cheney, but I can tell you why I’m voting for Allred over Cruz—and it has nothing to do with policy or burning anything down.

Since January 6, the threshold question I ask when considering whether to vote for a Republican is how that candidate responded to Trump’s coup attempt. There’s a spectrum of behavior on that point, with Cheney and Kinzinger on one end, Trump himself on the other, and the mass of congressional Republicans somewhere in between.

At the two extremes of the spectrum, policy doesn’t matter to me. Policy debates are things you get to have when everyone agrees on the rules of the game. Rewarding those who defended democratic norms and punishing those who undermined them is more important.

I would vote for Cheney and every other Republican who voted to impeach or convict Trump following the insurrection in hopes that their victories would embolden others in the party to resist his power grabs in a second term. And I would vote against Trump and all of his co-conspirators for the opposite reason, in hopes that their defeats would convince others that civic crime, like trying to overturn an election on false pretenses, doesn’t pay.

Ted Cruz was Trump’s chief co-conspirator in the Senate after the 2020 election, initially agreeing to argue before the Supreme Court that the electoral votes of swing states won by Joe Biden should be thrown out. When the court declined to hear that case, Cruz switched to Plan B and ring-led a scheme on January 6 to stop Congress from certifying Biden’s victory by objecting to those swing-state electoral votes. Had he gotten his way, some sort of chaotic ad hoc election “commission” would have been thrown together before Inauguration Day to decide who the next president should be.

He did all of this knowing full well that Trump was and is a loon and that egging on Americans to doubt the fairness of their own elections will destabilize the country long-term. But he was willing to pay that price because he thought making himself useful to the coup would give him a leg up with Trump’s base when he runs for president again someday.

You don’t need to agree with Colin Allred on a single policy issue to grasp that a person like Ted Cruz cannot be trusted to defend the constitutional order. He was tested and failed grievously. If you believe that a second Trump presidency would create a “unique threat” to American government, as Liz Cheney and I do, it’s urgent that Trump’s most unethical enablers in Congress be replaced by people who won’t rubber-stamp anything he does.

Republicans in Texas had their chance to replace Cruz with a candidate like that in this year’s primary, just as Republicans nationally had their chance to replace Trump. They made their choice. Cheney and I have made ours.

It’s frankly amazing to me that so many conservatives have been left struggling to understand Cheney’s endorsement of Allred. To a certain sort of partisan, it seems, Trump is the only elected Republican who bears meaningful responsibility for the attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, the scores of House GOPers who voted to object on January 6—they’re all off the hook because, well, there are just too many of them to punish. Beating them at the polls would wipe out the party, and partisans won’t tolerate that. Even for just one election cycle, to teach their representatives a hard lesson about authoritarian bootlicking.

If you feel obliged to excuse Ted Cruz for his role in a coup plot because that’s what hating Democrats requires of you, you do you. But let’s please stop memory-holing his part in it by feigning confusion as to why Liz Cheney might want to drive him from politics. It’s pathetic.

Nick Catoggio

Ted Cruz is no dummie. He’s whip-smart and cunning. He also is a contemptible human being with no core. His mentor, Princeton’s Robert P. George, must be deeply grieved.

Shanghaied

Few cities in Asia match Shanghai’s level of economic development. In the fanciest shopping streets in the city center you can go miles without leaving the realm of luxury stores, with a Hermes outlet abutting a Louis Vuitton outlet, which in turn abuts a Rolex outlet. At times, the city reminded me of an acquaintance’s semi-humorous observation that, in a hundred years, luxury brands may be all that remains of Europe’s once enormous influence on the world.
In Postwar, Tony Judt argues that in the 1960s, the restive mood of Europe’s young was in part fueled by the ugliness of the homes in which they had been raised and the new universities in which they were being educated. Comparisons between Europe sixty years ago and China today are certain to be wrong for any number of reasons, but my mind kept going back to Judt’s observation every time I drove past another island of identical, unadorned housing blocks.
Preferences about the next American president seem to be nearly as divided among Chinese intellectuals as they are among the American electorate. A senior scholar of international relations told me that Donald Trump would likely be more willing to cut deals with China but that he preferred Kamala Harris because of her greater predictability on the international stage. A senior economist told me that Kamala Harris might prove softer on tariffs but that she would prefer Donald Trump because of his greater predictability on economic policy. The only consistent refrain was the preference for perceived predictability: Chinese elites seem as discombobulated by the sense that it’s impossible to predict what Washington might do as they are by any specific action the next president might take.

Yasha Mounk, 3 of 21 Observations About China

The All-Volunteer Navy at Play

The chief petty officers aboard the USS Manchester (LCS-14) were caught illicitly placing and using a Starlink satellite-internet antenna while the ship was under way. The conspiracy, involving all senior enlisted sailors attached to the littoral combat ship, came to light after months of use, when a civilian contractor came aboard and stumbled upon the bootleg setup. The ship’s command senior chief and ringleader of the operation was convicted at court-martial and reduced in rank from E-8 to E-7: an outrageously light penalty considering her repeated lies to her commanding officer, her background in Navy IT that ensures she was absolutely aware of her transgression, and the cover-up campaign that involved the intimidation and silencing of those below her. This betrayal of the ship’s whereabouts in service to movie-streaming, texting, and other forms of personal entertainment is especially egregious because of the role that chiefs have in preserving good order and discipline among the ranks while upholding Navy traditions. A bad chief is the ruin of a ship and its crew, and the legal equivalent of keelhauling the only correct recourse.

National Review’s The Week Friday email. See also the Navy Times.

Donald Trump after the debate

The Hill: Trump Floats Punishment For ABC After Debate

I mean, to be honest, they’re a news organization. They have to be licensed to do it. They ought to take away their license for the way they did that.

Via The Dispatch

This response is fractally wrong. ABC doesn’t need a license to be a news organization (thank God and the First Amendment).

If they did have a license, it would be dictatorial to revoke it for displeasing the President or anyone else.

Trump once again exhibits his anti-democratic impulses, though once again it probably will deter no fans.

Lesser evils

“Sending migrants away, not allowing them to grow, not letting them have life is something wrong; it is cruelty,” Francis said in a news conference on the plane as he returned to Rome after his long trip to Southeast Asia and Oceania. “Sending a child away from the womb of the mother is murder because there is life. And we must speak clearly about these things.”

…

But when asked whether it would be morally admissible to vote for someone who favored the right to abortion, he responded: “One must vote. And one must choose the lesser evil. Which is the lesser evil? That lady or that gentleman? I don’t know. Each person must think and decide according to his or her own conscience.”

Pope Says Both Trump and Harris Are ‘Against Life’.

Donald Trump seemingly is Teflon-coated, but explicit Papal permission to vote for the (more) pro-abortion candidate could logically be a factor in this election.

Even WSJ is appalled

Ms. Loomer is usually described in the press as “far right,” but that’s unfair to the fever swamps. On Sunday she posted on X that if Ms. Harris wins the election, “the White House will smell like curry,” a gibe against Ms. Harris’s Indian heritage.

She added that Ms. Harris’s speeches “will be facilitated via a call center.” U.S. companies often farm out their information lines to Indian firms, get it? We wonder if JD Vance’s Indian-American wife thinks that’s funny.

In 2018 Ms. Loomer chained herself to Twitter’s New York headquarters after the platform banned her. She suggested that Casey DeSantis, the wife of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, might have lied about having breast cancer: “I’ve never seen the medical records.” This week she smeared Sen. Lindsey Graham after he criticized her association with Mr. Trump.

All of this would be ignorable, except that others close to Mr. Trump say he is listening to Ms. Loomer’s advice. People in the Trump campaign are trying to get her out of the former President’s entourage, to no avail. Even Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene thinks Ms. Loomer is damaging the former President’s election chances.

As North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis put it on Friday: “Laura Loomer is a crazy conspiracy theorist who regularly utters disgusting garbage intended to divide Republicans. A DNC plant couldn’t do a better job than she is doing to hurt President Trump’s chances of winning re-election. Enough.”

Wall Street Journal Editorial Board

On the other hand …

If anyone is looking for facts to support a vote for Trump despite loony Loomer (and everything else), these two graphs may be just the ticket. The Biden administration has not covered itself in glory on illegal immigration.

The yellow bar is illegal immigrants and those awaiting adjudication of asylum claims or other claims to remain.

See the Wall Street Journal story.

Where customer service and stalking overlap

Delta wants to know what I thought of my flight. Honda wants to know what I thought of my oil change. The company that inspects my HVAC system twice yearly wants to know what I thought of … the air filter replacements? The technician’s demeanor? I’m not sure because I’ve read only the subject lines of the emails, which keep coming, imploring me to reflect on the experience and charting some strange new territory where customer service and stalking overlap. It may be time for a restraining order. Or, minimally, a different kind of filter, the one that consigns certain senders’ electronic missives to the Spam or Trash folders.

Frank Bruni

Life goes on

O when the world’s at peace and every man is free
then will I go down unto my love.
O and I may go down several times before that.

Wendell Berry

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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