“Import substitution” — the heinous crime of a wretched, ungrateful colony producing goods the colonizers wanted to sell it. (H/T Edward Goldsmith, Development As Colonialism)

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As a gold ring in a pig’s snout is a beautiful woman who lacks sense.

Proverbs 11:22

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An author’s first duty is to let down his country.

Brendan Behan in The Economist The world in brief for March 20, 2023

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When people talk about “the kind of worship I like” (or similar sentiments, whatever the words), what in the world do they mean? Do they think that worship is primarily to please themselves? What kind of god, then, do they “worship”?

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Why is “you’re not photogenic” an insult while “your pictures don’t do you justice” is a compliment? (H/T Kevin D. Williamson)

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For all its piety and fervor, today’s United States needs to be recognized for what it really is: not a Christian country, but a nation of heretics.

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

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

Losing Passion

As I age, I find I’m ever slightly improving in my ability to, as my internal dialog has it,

Let it go. You can’t change it, either because you don’t know how or because your superannuated and faith-informed voice is inaudible to the powers that be. If it’s to be changed, someone else, someone younger, someone more fluent in the desacralized argot of the day, must take the initiative.

To some extent, this is just an appropriate response to my stage of life. I said four years ago, as I passed threescore and ten, that I’d passed my “Sell By” date. Eternal matters feel even more urgent.

But there’s a sense in which anyone who wants truly to follow Christ needs the same attitude. So teaches my tradition, pretty consistently.

It’s a hard admonition to heed.

I therefore take it that Orthodox politicians, varying from to Justin Amash to Barbara Mukulski, are rather like soldiers, doing what needs to be done but risking or incurring a lot of soul-harm in the process.

Is that why we’re admonished to pray for those in authority?

Priorities

Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom. And in all your getting, get understanding.

Proverbs 4:7

Making a virtue of one of the great vices

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

Fr. Lawrence Farley

Myth and Tradition

In Japan, the old myths broke down after the war, and people needed a new way to understand our place in the universe. So because it is impossible to go back to the old myths, we will have to make new ones.

Quoted by Andy Couterier, The Abundance of Less: Lessons in Simple Living from Rural Japan

This reminds me of when my high school Headmaster announced that we were starting “a new tradition.”

That I didn’t have great regard for tradition at the time may have what made it sound weird to me; that I have much respect for tradition now makes it sound no less weird.

Not Just Another Pretty Face

Raquel Welch, to my surprise, died a traditional Presbyterian Church lady in a small church outside Beverly Hills:

Outside Beverly Hills, the starlet found a small church “on the way to Pasadena, where the pastor and congregation were very devout and really knew their scripture. I had come there because I’d heard the pastor speak on the radio, and it sounded like he might be a good source of information. That turned out to be true. Apparently, even inept, awkward prayers are answered.”

Welch described the congregation as modest, unassuming, and friendly. “The people in this church weren’t Hollywood types,” she reported. “Even so, when I entered the chapel on that first day, I felt quite tentative. Maybe I didn’t belong among these people who actually practiced their faith. I didn’t look like them, sound like them, or act like them. I stood out like a sore thumb.” She sat in the back of the chapel.

“By the time the sermon was over, I felt remarkably comfortable sitting among these parishioners; not one of them gave me a second look,” recalled Welch. She found the members refreshing. “Not a superficial bone in their body.”

Without divulging the name of the congregation, Welch had found a spiritual home. “This is my church now. I have become a member of this parish and its people are my brothers and sisters in faith,” she wrote. “Together we form a fellowship where I can reaffirm my beliefs and worship every Sunday. When I’m in their midst, I’m just Raquel, not anybody special.”

This may have been the only location in Southern California where Raquel Welch was “not anybody special.” Counterintuitively, that must have been sweet liberation for a woman who had spent a lifetime under intense scrutiny and critique.

• Steve Beard, Not Just Another Pretty Face: Raquel Welch, RIP (H/T Terry Mattingly)

If she had joined a megachurch, we surely we have known about it.

Ravi Zacharias

The Ravi Zacharias scandal and corporate complicity have bothered me a great deal, if only because Zacharias seemed even to skeptical Orthodox me like a serious and devout guy.

Oddly, a court decision in a lawsuit against Ravi Zacharias International Ministries, Inc. has helped me get my facts a little straighter, to lessen my impression of a pervasive coverup, and to appreciate how damaging it would have been to allow the class action lawsuit to proceed. (Don’t be intimidated: this link is to a blog summary of the decision.)

Who can theologize?

[T]he overintellectualization of religion has contributed to the belief that anyone can theologize. Our Western culture, which itself is a by-product of the Renaissance, Reformation, and so-called Age of Enlightenment, influences us to focus on the intellectual aspect of Orthodoxy.

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

The Gospel of Progress

In these latter days, the masters of machines and money have imagined themselves to be “building the Kingdom” (Blake’s Jerusalem) with plans, intentions, goals, and utopias. [Such language was the bread and butter of public speech in my time among the Episcopalians]. The plans generally seemed to involve the rich helping the humble and meek so they would no longer need to be humble and meek. With every success they became even greater strangers to God. Their Churches stand empty, their children having forgotten God and looked towards other dreams.

Fr. Stephen Freeman, The Gospel of Progress – and the New Jerusalem

Attempted aphorism

A Christian who Pastors himself has a fool for a parish.

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Tradition is a bulwark against the power of commerce and the dissolving acid of money, and by removing these, all revolutions in the modern period have ended up accelerating the commercial and technological shift towards the Machine.

Paul Kingsnorth

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

Emotionally right

Don’t hold your breath for an apology from those who pooh-poohed the lab leak theory. Those smeared as conspiracy theorists will remain smeared as such. The people in charge will remain in charge, and the journalists will keep going, smug, content to be wrong but to have always been, most importantly, emotionally right.

Suzy Weiss

Fox News, again

The revelations about Fox news’ amplification of Trumpist lies about the 2020 election obviously elicit some “Whataboutism.” Is Fox on the Right really worse than, say, MSNBC? Andrew Sullivan thinks so:

The great and obvious flaw in the political right’s legitimate criticism of mainstream media bias is that the most dishonest, cynical, postmodern, post-truth, “everything-is-power” media enterprise is Fox News.

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Fox News president, Jay Wallace, remarked that “the North Koreans do a more nuanced show” than Fox Business did. “It’s remarkable how weak ratings make good journalists do bad things,” Fox news exec Bill Sammon agreed. And he’d know.

And the topic they were lying about was not some minor culture-war controversy, or some genuinely vexing congeries of electoral glitches that could be aired out. It was the core foundation of democracy itself — the basic public legitimacy of our elections, the charge that the fraud was “massive” and comprehensive and that democracy was over.

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The usual counter to what seems to me an open-and-shut case of grotesque corruption is as follows: well, they all do it. Fox’s lies are no different than MSNBC’s or the NYT’s or NPR’s lies — and because most media are now captured by a faction of the far left, some response from the right on the same lines is appropriate. 

To which I’d make three responses. First, of course two wrongs don’t make a right. You will never get ethical journalism by practicing unethical journalism, just as you will never get rid of racism by discriminating on the basis of race. Second, if this is your view, please be consistent and condemn Fox as well as the others (and you usually won’t). But third, I do honestly think that the corruption at Fox is different. 

[Whereas liberal media have actually ceased believing in objective reality, Fox hasn’t] abandoned the tradition of objective fact in favor of moral narrative. They still privately believe in empirical reality; they will just happily trash it in public if they think it will lose them viewers and thereby money. The core principle is money. Not truth, money. Not ethics, money. Not even obeying the law. Money.

(Emphasis added)

A critic is a man who knows the way but can’t drive the car.

Kenneth Tynan via The Economist

Full Lent is just a week away for us Orthodoxen. And my Bishop will be at my Parish to begin with us!

A long-favorite passage

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. That this has been a favorite passage for more than 50 years may explain why, after 30 years, I embraced Orthodoxy readily.

Wrong question

Fr Alexander pointed to the adverse results of that confusion:

In my opinion, the Orthodox, when discussing the problems stemming from our present “situations,” accept them much too easily in their Western formulations. They do not seem to realize that the Orthodox Tradition provides above all a possibility, and thus a necessity, of reformulating these very problems, of placing them in a context whose absence or deformation in the Western religious mind may have been the root of so many of our modern “impasses” And as I see it, nowhere is this task more urgently needed than in the range of problems related to secularism and proper to our so-called secular age.

Healing Humanity: Confronting our Moral Crisis

Adam’s sin

Christian readers at least since St. Augustine have tended to see in Adam the archetypal sinner who passes sin on to his physical progeny. This, however, is not the way Adam was seen within the Second Temple period that formed the background for the New Testament texts. Adam was seen rather as the one who brought death to the human race. He is not so much seen as the origin of human sin as the origin of human mortality.

Fr. Stephen DeYoung, Religion of the Apostles

Self-evidently true

At the level of the church, we must abandon practices adopted from the secular marketplace that trivialize our faith, and instead return to traditional church practices that encourage contemplation and awe before a transcendent God.

Alan Noble, Disruptive Witness

I say this is self-evident, but somehow people ignore it or (at best) interpret it differently than I do.

When thinking gets in the way

I’m always struck by the fact that so many of the great saints were completely unlettered. St. Porphyrios is one of my favorite modern saints. He ran away from his parents at the age of twelve, went to Mount Athos, never went to school. He was a great saint because he didn’t ever think about God in that theological way. These people  know the Gospels intimately, they understand the church, but they’re not academics. They’re not sitting around with their big left brains, trying to dissect the faith. It never occurs to them to do that. I think it’s partly because they haven’t gone through fifteen years of Western-style education, which you later have to unlearn. I feel like I’ve spent the last twenty years progressively getting rid of stuff I thought was the way to gain knowledge. I mean, it’s a way to gain certain kinds of knowledge, but if you want to engage with a spiritual path, or with Nature, or with any of the stuff that matters, it gets in the way. I’ve found that repeatedly.

Paul Kingsnorth via Rod Dreher

Remembering Benedict XVI

All that said, I believe that when future historians look back and write about modern Catholicism, Benedict XVI will be remembered less for what he wrote (here I respectfully differ from Cardinal Müller) and more for two acts of ecclesiastical governance that will have consequences for a long time to come.

The first was the 2007 papal directive Summarum Pontificum_,_ which liberalized rules concerning the celebration of the traditional Latin Mass. By this act of administrative fiat, Benedict XVI entrenched the celebration of a rite that had defined Catholicism for centuries before Vatican II. It was a concrete expression of his view that the Second Vatican Council must be interpreted and implemented with a “hermeneutic of continuity.”

The ongoing celebration of an ancient liturgy has no direct logical implications for our interpretation of Vatican II’s teaching on dogmatic topics, nor does it bear upon moral theology. Nevertheless, there is a fundamental truth often repeated by the Church Fathers: Lex orandi, lex credendi—the law of prayer is the law of belief, or more colloquially, as we pray, so we believe …

The present pontiff has issued his own executive order, Traditionis Custodes, which reverses Summarum Pontificum. Pope Francis backs up his new restrictions with the strong language of censure. But this pontificate has failed to curtail celebration of the old rite. The reason is simple: We live in an era that champions permission and ignores prohibition…

No doubt the Bavarian pope, who coined the memorable phrase “dictatorship of relativism,” knew that in the twenty-first century permissions granted cannot easily be rescinded. Benedict granted capacious permission to celebrate the traditional Latin Mass, in all likelihood knowing that once the “yes” gained a foothold, only Herculean efforts by ecclesiastical authorities would eliminate the new freedom. The consequences are wonderful. Benedict’s “liberalization” of rules concerning the Latin Mass has created and will continue to create a barrier to theological, moral, and liturgical programs of discontinuity, which means that liberal Catholic dreams of reinventing the faith to make it more congenial to our present age will not succeed. Benedict XVI was a church politician of greater wile than he let on.

R.R. Reno.

I quote this mostly to plant a seed: Lex orandi, lex credendi. A Church that “worships” with drums, guitars and synthesizers at 90db doesn’t believe the faith of the Orthodox Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom. A Roman Catholic Church that forbids the traditional Latin Mass does not, it seems to me, practice the same faith as a Church that celebrates it.

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Tradition is a bulwark against the power of commerce and the dissolving acid of money, and by removing these, all revolutions in the modern period have ended up accelerating the commercial and technological shift towards the Machine.

Paul Kingsnorth

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

Everybody is talking these days about the decline of the West, and with good reason. Some people think that Christianity should have something to say about this: that as the faith was the rock on which the West was built, so the faith should rebuild it again, or defend it against its enemies. We need a Muscular Christianity! they insist in the comment sections. Bring on the Christian knights! they shout on YouTube. But I don’t think this is how it works. When the last empire collapsed, the Christians of Europe weren’t trying to build, let alone defend, some construction called “Christendom.” They didn’t plan for the dome of St. Peter’s or the Battle of Lepanto. They were just trying to do the humblest and the only thing: to worship the true God, and to strip away everything that interfered with that worship. They took to the deserts to follow Christ and to battle the Enemy. Their work was theosis. They had crucified themselves as instructed. What emerged as a result, and what it turned into—well, that wasn’t up to them.

In a time when the temptation is always toward culture war rather than inner war, I think we could learn something from our spiritual ancestors. What we might learn is not that the external battle is never necessary; sometimes it very much is. But a battle that is uninformed by inner transformation will soon eat itself, and those around it. Why, after all, were the cave Christians so sought after? Because they were not like other people. Something had been granted to them, something had been earned, in their long retreats from the world. They had touched the hem. After years in the tombs or the caverns or the woods, their very unworldliness became, paradoxically, just what the world needed.

Paul Kingsnorth, A Wild Christianity

The loss of Christendom gives us a joyous opportunity to reclaim the freedom to proclaim the gospel in a way in which we cannot when the main social task of the church is to serve as one among many helpful props for the state.

Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens

What to do when there’s nothing left to do – I

In both of the spiritual traditions in which I have immersed myself over the last decade – Buddhism and Orthodox Christianity – this spirit of necessary detachment, this sense that to tie yourself too closely to the churning affairs of the world is to invite destruction, is the precursor to the work. To a Buddhist, the ongoing effort to ‘detach’ yourself from created things is the only way to sidestep the first of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths: that ‘to live is to suffer.’ From an Orthodox perspective, to live after the Fall is also to suffer. The work of the Christian who wants to find the way home again is to ‘die to the world’: to rid himself of the ‘passions’ of worldly attachment as the essential prelude to walking the narrow path which leads to theosis: union with God.

The theologies of Zen, Orthodoxy, Mark Anthony and Robinson Jeffers differ wildly, and yet they alight, all of them, on this same reality. So does every other religious tradition I know of. To watch the great fall, to say goodbye to Alexandria, to accept that nothing gold can stay: this is the task of people who find themselves living through the falling years. It is the prelude to doing anything useful with our time. If we spend that time lamenting the fall, or trying to prevent it, or stewing in bitterness at those we believe responsible, we will find ourselves cast into darkness. If we ‘degrade ourselves with empty hopes’ of some form of technological or political salvation yet to come, the darkness will be just as deep.

No: the only way out is through. To dance with the way things are moving. To watch the great fall, accept its reality, and then get on with our work. What that work might be, in the age of the Total system, will differ for each one of us. Rebellion, restoration, protection, the building of new structures: I’m going to explore each of these in coming essays. But before anything can happen, we have first to get our inner house in order.

Paul Kingsnorth, Watch the Great Fall

What to do when there’s nothing left to do – II

The loss of Christendom gives us a joyous opportunity to reclaim the freedom to proclaim the gospel in a way in which we cannot when the main social task of the church is to serve as one among many helpful props for the state.

Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens

“Religion”

Hindus who used words such as religion, or secular, or Hinduism were not merely displaying their fluency in English. They were also adopting a new and alien perspective on their country and turning it to their advantage.

Tom Holland, Dominion

Science & Faith

Coincidentally, as I approached the end of Fr. Christopher C Knight’s Science and the Christian Faith: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Uncommon Knowledge podcast featured Michael Behe, John Lennox, and Steven Meyer arguing for Intelligent Design against Darwin.

It’s astonishing how differently Knight and the Intelligent Design proponents treat Darwin. Knight:

The question of how miracles are to be understood becomes a very different one than that usually assumed if we abandon the notions of the “supernatural” that are now prevalent in discussions about miracles … [M]iraculous events represent, not the “supernatural” action of of an outside agent, but an anticipation of the character of the “world to come.” The state that these events unveil is above nature only in the sense that it is above the subnatural state in which, because of the fall, we now find ourselves. Miracles represent the true nature of the world intended by God in his creation of it.

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[O]ur scientific picture of evolution through natural selection arose originally from Charles Darwin’s observations of differences between closely related species and subspecies. It was later reinforced and refined, however, both by fossil evidence and by genetic insights quite unknown to Darwin himself. These genetic insights were themselves later underpinned by biochemical insights that arose through the work that followed the discovery of the structure of DNA, and by technical advances that now enable us to look in detail at the genetic makeup of all living things.

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The robustness of the present scientific consensus means that those Christians who insist that their faith is incompatible with that consensus often present an enormous barrier to those who are scientifically literate but who might be willing to explore the Christian view of the world.

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Though Darwin’s achievement was a magnificent one, it was only later, through the integration of genetic insights unknown to Darwin himself, that his evolutionary theory could be regarded as robust from a scientific perspective.

In contrast, the ID guys (who I can’t directly quote because it was a podcast, and I wasn’t interested enough to try to write down quotes) all spoke as if accumulating evidence against Darwin is growing more irrefutable every day.

I have no need of that hypothesis.

AI

My attitude is that there is no AI. What is called AI is a mystification, behind which there is the reality of a new kind of social collaboration facilitated by computers. A new way to mash up our writing and art.

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I frequently found myself trying to dissuade people from buying NFTs in 2022. They were often working folks without a lot of money to spare. When I would try to explain that only a very few, very early people made those fortunes you hear about, that by now there’s no one left to buy your NFT for more than you paid; when I said those things they looked back at me like cult members, eyes full of hope. Sure, people have been falling for get-rich-quick schemes forever, but this was something more. There was also religion. NFTs were a cross between a lottery and the prosperity gospel, which holds that wealth and godliness are the same thing. When I tried to save people from getting ripped off it was as if I was attacking their religion. They weren’t angry; they pitied me.

Jaron Lanier

No comment

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Tradition is a bulwark against the power of commerce and the dissolving acid of money, and by removing these, all revolutions in the modern period have ended up accelerating the commercial and technological shift towards the Machine.

Paul Kingsnorth

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

We know Lent is coming when Zacchaeus Sunday arrives. It has arrived.

Unions

Every sacrament of the Church is about union with Christ, or union with another human being (marriage). It is predicated on the possibility of true communion and participation.

The claim that this is true and possible distinguishes Orthodox Christianity from virtually every form of contemporary Christian believing. It is the foundation of the sacramental world of the Church.

Fr. Stephen Freeman, The Communion of Friends

The (occasional religious) wisdom of David French

It’s one thing to yell at the culture, “Get back to church!” It’s another thing entirely to make sure your religious community is worth coming back to.

David French

I enjoy David French on the law quite a lot, but there’s a wide gap between his Reformed Christianity (in which I’d have been quite at home 30 years ago) and Orthodox Christianity. Hence the parenthetical in the title.

Science and the Christian Faith

After a 25-year hiatus, I am reading again about Science and the Christian Faith. What drew me back was that this book is by an Orthodox Christian — a priest and astrophysicist. Apparently there have been others, but this was the first to come to my attention.

The difference from other Christian treatments is material, as I fully expected it would be. I may have more to say later — or I may not. Some of it’s getting pretty deep.

Rule-following

Observing Orthodox practices is no more a guarantee of salvation than abiding by all the decisions of the pope and the magisterium, or speaking in tongues, or saying the “sinner’s prayer” and acknowledging Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior.

Adhering to Orthodox practices to the letter is legalism, and legalism distorts the entire spiritual life. True Orthodoxy is devoid of a spirit of legalism.

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

I can think of a very prominent person, widely judged to be evil, who knows and practices much Orthodox choreography.

Evangelical guru lightened up in Italy

Italy was where they proved themselves to be so much more than their fundamentalist beliefs. It was as if they wanted me to somehow grow past the constricted world they had fallen into.

Frank Schaeffer, of his parents Francis and Elizabeth Schaeffer, in Crazy for God.

I quote this with my usual caveat: Frank Schaeffer was an angry Protestant/Evangelical/Fundamentalist and now he’s an angry Orthodox Christian. I don’t like or trust anger, even if I tend toward it myself.

That said, this is an uncommonly gracious observation, almost out of context in the overall book.

A pairing

Ultimately, theology is not a set of definitions or theories. Theology is mystery since it transcends the rational mind and attempts to express the inexpressible. In schools of theology and seminaries, theology is indeed an academic subject and, as such, it requires accuracy and embraces a certain “intellectual rigour,” as Met. Kallistos remarks. This does not conflict with Orthodoxy, since “we do not serve the Kingdom of God through vagueness, muddle and lazy thinking.”28 But he also notes that in other sciences or areas of investigation, the personal sanctity of the scientist or inquirer is irrelevant. This is not the case with theology, which requires metanoia (repentance), catharsis (purification), and askesis (spiritual struggle).

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

Both the fundamentalist and the higher critic assume that it is possible to understand the biblical text without training, without moral transformation, without the confession and forgiveness that come about within the church. Unconsciously, both means of interpretation try to make everyone religious (that is, able to understand and appropriate scripture) without everyone’s being a member of the community for which the Bible is Scripture.

Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens

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Tradition is a bulwark against the power of commerce and the dissolving acid of money, and by removing these, all revolutions in the modern period have ended up accelerating the commercial and technological shift towards the Machine.

Paul Kingsnorth

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