Category: Uncategorized

Friday evening, 8/25/17

  1. Morris Dees is a Morris Dees impersonator
  2. The South ain’t rising again
  3. Bringing people together
  4. Subverting the museum-visitor pact
  5. Ad occidentum now de fides?
  6. When you’re deep in the hole …
  7. Nancy, you incredibly ignorant …
  8. The symbolic importance of The Wall

Continue reading “Friday evening, 8/25/17” →

Sunday, 8/20/17

The Orthodox Church is committed to a ministry of reconciliation, insisting that all her clergy and faithful hold fast to the Christian message of healing, salvation and love offered by Christ, who is the Way, the Truth and the Life. She exhorts our clergy and faithful to reject any attempts by individuals or groups to claim for themselves the name of “Orthodox Christian” in order to promote racism, hatred, white supremacy, white nationalism or neo-Nazism. This is in keeping with the Holy Gospels, the decisions of the Holy Councils and the experience of the Saints.

Membership in the Church is not, nor has it ever been, restricted to those of a particular race or nationality. Quite the contrary, the Church has historically, and continues to this day, to welcome all in the multicultural and multi-ethnic context of North America. Saint Justin Martyr, writing at a time when Christians were persecuted in the second century, said, “We used to hate and destroy one another and refused to associate with people of another race or country. Now, because of Christ, we live together with such people and pray for our enemies.”

May that same spirit be ours today as well, that we, as Orthodox Christians, embrace our neighbors, be they black, asian, Native American, Islamic, or whatever, as our brothers and sisters. As Christians, me must recognizes that black lives matter, just as all lives matter, and commit to reaching out to everyone in the love of Christ, ever recalling the words, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:28)”.

(Abbot Tryphon)

I wish this were self-evident, but it’s not because there is at least one excommunicated Orthodox Christian who was “on the dais,” so to speak, in Charlottesville. Moreover, I have read essays to the effect that some on the radical right are claiming Orthodox sympathies or even affiliation (e.g., attending an Orthodox Church though not formally received). And around bedtime Saturday, I read of another ex-Orthodox, also excommunicated for his racist views, who is some manner of intellectual and knows the Orthodox lingo well enough that one of his books (not racist, but calling for return of monarchy and such) found its way into the bookstore of a canonical Orthodox Church.

So far as I can tell, having read a smattering of alt-right material, the only basis for that reported affinity would be shared skepticism toward many things Western — and, frankly, some desire for monarchy especially among Russian Orthodox in North America.

But this quoted statement by Abbot Tryphon is made in the true Orthodox spirit, which allows zero room dogmatically or ecclesiastically for anything close to racism, and condemned as heresy the related concept of phyletism. That condemnation arose precisely in the context of “the creation of a separate bishopric by the Bulgarian community of Constantinople for parishes only open to Bulgarians,” which sort of thing had not been condemned previously because nobody had presumed to pull such a stunt.

And much of the alt-right, white nationalist and neo-Nazi sentiment today is explicitly contemptuous of Christianity in all forms, Eastern and Western, perhaps on Nietzscheian grounds.

* * * * *

There is no epistemological Switzerland. (Via Mars Hill Audio Journal Volume 134)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Charlottesville in my Twitter feed

I did not know until about 7:45 pm Saturday that things had gotten really ugly in Charlottesville.

One friend on Twitter seems to think people are too laid-back about it, too fixated on Google Memo or other stuff. I think he’s wrong following the wrong people.

Selected Tweets from Christians in my Twitter feed today.

Maronite Catholic:

Orthodox:

Baptist:

Reformed:

Roman Catholic:

Chameleon:

Roman Catholic:

And the very latest, pointed at the suddenly mealy-mouthed POTUS:

Evangelical:

Tweets from people whose Christian bona fides I don’t know:

Do follow that link, too.

* * * * *

“Liberal education is concerned with the souls of men, and therefore has little or no use for machines … [it] consists in learning to listen to still and small voices and therefore in becoming deaf to loudspeakers.” (Leo Strauss)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Timely today. Tomorrow, who knows?

These just won’t feel timely tomorrow, by which time, deo volente, President Mike Pence will be making his moving plans.

This is no longer “how, my fellow Americans, could you have elected this guy?” It now has become “Is this the end of this particular brief national nightmare and the resumption of normal restlessness?”

1

Recommended:

  1. Peggy Noonan’s masterfully devastating Trump Is Woody Allen Without the Humor (Half his tweets show utter weakness. They are plaintive, shrill little cries, usually just after dawn). I’m with Rod Dreher: if the preceding link doesn’t work, go to her Twitter feed and click from there.
  2. Rod Dreher, Conservative Woman Publicly Humiliates Trump. You can skip toward the end, to the paragraph that begins “It’s funny, but before I read this, I was explaining to my kids ….”
  3. Kenneth Starr: Mr. President, please cut it out.
  4. Charles Krauthammer, Sessions lessons.
  5. Eugene Robinson, The worst is yet to come.

Robinson is last because all the others are Republican and “conservative” in some sense.

2

We need a little comic relief in these midsummer horse latitudes of the mind as the ill-starred Trump Show appears to enter its ceremonial death dance …

The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine — in this case, inexorably toward the restorative medicine of the 25th amendment. There is, after all, that hoary old artifact called the national interest lurking somewhere offstage aside of all this colorful mummery, especially as the Russian Meddling gambit appears to be dribbling away to nothing. It’s more than self-evident that poor Trump is in so far over his head that he’s come down with something like the bends, a debilitating systemic disorder rendering him unfit to execute the powers of office. Decades from now, they’ll say he had “the tweets.”

…

The most economical script would have Trump graciously “resign” and be allowed to return to his familiar money-grubbing activities in real estate, where he can really only do harm to his own bank accounts and family posterity ….

(James Howard Kunstler, emphasis added)

It did feel to me like a “ceremonial death dance” this week — as if Trump is setting the stage for a resignation, blaming all the treachery around him for frustrating his magnificent beautiful plans to MAGA (i.e., get lots of money and limelight and set up Ivanka as future Empress).

* * * * *

Fiat justitia ruat caelum

There is no epistemological Switzerland. (Via Mars Hill Audio Journal Volume 134)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.