Converts

I very recently discovered that Paul Kingsnorth equivocates about whether he is a convert to Christianity. “In a sense, I was always Christian but didn’t know it.”

I suppose the same could be said of my “conversion” to Orthodox Christianity from (seriatim) Evangelicalism and Calvinism. I always intended to belong to this historic, most original Church.

As an Evangelical, I thought the historic, most original Church was that which lived most faithfully by the New Testament pattern. I now see that as a very naïve view, starting with the fact that “the New Testament Church™” did not and could not live by the New Testament (because it did not yet exist).

As a Calvinist, I thought the historic, most original Church was that which believed as the early church believed, and since I saw the progenitor of predestination in Augustine, and Augustine was about as early a Christian figure as I knew, then Calvinism (a/k/a the Reformed faith) was it. I now see that as fairly naïve because Augustine was an outlier in Christendom, who looms large in the post-Christian West because the other profound figures were all in the Greek-Speaking Christian East.

As an Orthodox, I don’t deny the validity of my prior concerns, but have added unity, holiness, catholicity and apostolicity.

Sacred rite or admission to political and social privileges?

On the indignant litigants who sue bakers, florists, photographers and such for declining services to same-sex weddings:

Maybe the prospective customers, like many Americans, do not see transcendent meaning in the ceremonial commencement of matrimony, because they associate a wedding as admittance to an institutional legal fiction that allows one access to nothing more than a cluster of political and social privileges not available to other friendships. So, given this understanding, it is not surprising that the customers see the provider’s refusal as a negative judgment on the public legitimacy of their union. Thus, it’s easy to see why the customers would be offended by the provider’s refusal and subsequently seek legal redress. But what the customers fail to see is that their demand that the courts force the providers to rescind their denial and be punished for it is really a demand that the state force the providers not to exercise their freedom of worship, the liberty not to participate in, or not provide assistance to, ceremonies that one believes have sacramental significance.

Francis Beckwith, Taking Rites Seriously

I’m aware that this war is over and my side lost. Considering how poorly Christian people have realized the sacrament of marriage, the loss probably was deserved. But I want the truth remembered. History’s arc does not bend toward falsehoods.

Marriage, terrestrial and celestial

Dreher also alluded to a bit of controversy in the Evangelical World.

A flamboyant pastor/author, Josh Butler (whose credentials are unknown to me), has written a book sort of on the topic of Christ’s relationship with the Church being recapitulated in a husband’s relationship with his wife (a thoroughly biblical comparison, but he had to spice it up with “How God’s vision for sex points us to the good, unlocks the true, and (sort of) explains everything.”)

Butler has caught a lot of flak for that, the gist being some mixture of objections to the extent to which he took the simile awfully literally if not graphically and that he was contributing to the patriarchy. See here, here and here.

Four points:

1. I’m not going to try any deep investigation into this story, which I would need to do before opining on the substance or taking sides. (Why should I take sides in a battle within an alien tribe?)
2. I presume (and see some circumstantial evidence) that Butler’s a bit of a provocateur and that he dropped some provocations into his book. Otherwise, I don’t think he’d have gotten so much pushback.
3. I’ll credit Butler’s critics with tacitly (maybe explicitly — see point 1) trying to nip another Mark Driscoll/Mars Hill Church scandal in the bud.
4. Point 3 does not negate mixed motives including jealousy.

Capturing the ineffable

I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that Rod Dreher is laboring mightily on a book about re-enchanting our imaginations. (I’d be more skeptical about the chance of the book achieving its objective had not another writer captured amazingly well something that I thought was ineffable.)

I have other concerns about this project, especially as it touches theology.

Nevertheless, I did appreciate this, which almost perfectly echoes my (much longer) experience in Orthodox Christianity:

I didn’t set out to write an “Orthodox” book, but all the research I’ve done has drawn me out, like a riptide, deeper into Orthodoxy. I have learned what Iain McGilchrist meant when he said that Eastern Christianity is the form of the faith that best corresponds to what he has learned about the way the mind relates to the world.

…

Being Orthodox has meant a long, slow letting go of the Western way of seeing reality. When I first became Orthodox in 2006, I assumed, as many converts do, that I had taken on a version of Christianity that was more mystical and more liturgical, but basically the same thing. A woman at our church told us that it would take us at least ten years to start thinking like an Orthodox Christian. That made no sense to me then. It does now. I couldn’t have known this at the beginning of the journey, because I did not know what I did not know.

Beauty And The Sacred

Martin Shaw (who I have no reason to think follows Dreher’s musings) is still quite a novice Orthodoxen, but like the hedgehog, he seems to have understood one big thing:

For years I was looking for a bigger form of shamanism, never thinking for a moment that could be Christianity. But it’s turned out to be a Christianity I’ve never seen before, strange as that sounds.

Better late than never

I let two parts of a (so far) three-part series, over more than a year, slip by until my attention was arrested by the third this week.

• ‘Spiritual but not Religious’ Revisited: An Urgent Case for the Psychiatric – Front Porch Republic
• A Case for the Psychiatric, Part 2: Dostoevsky’s Christianity – Front Porch Republic
• Deeper than Religion, with Powys and Chesterton – Front Porch Republic

What’s most striking is that this Catholic Deacon author draws his most penetrating insights into the disease of “religion” from Orthodox sources.

Christian discipleship

If our churches have behaved as if “Christian discipleship” largely consists of “holding the right ideas in your head” and “consuming the right content,” then it isn’t terribly surprising that many Christians would encounter the difficulties of life and feel radically unprepared for them. Their churches didn’t teach them to expect suffering, didn’t give them models for resilience and dependence on God, and didn’t provide practical guidance in mortifying sin and offering oneself up to God. So of course we now have many Christian people who are a bit at sea, particularly given how chaotic, angry, and uncertain this cultural moment has become.

… [W]hile I understand that the failures of the attractional model created a vacuum that therapeutic technique has rushed in to fill, I also know that the cost of allowing therapeutic technique to persist in this work is far too high.

Jake Meador, who I suspect will one day recognize the incorrigibility of Evangelicalism and become Orthodox — where, ironically, he will discover a well-developed, non-faddish therapeutic approach, as in the phrase from the Orthodox Trisagion Prayer “Holy One, visit and heal our infirmities” (following “Lord cleanse us of our sins; Master pardon our transgressions”).

Tao

I have a few books I try to revisit regularly. One is C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man. I’m now adding Christ the Eternal Tao, which I finished not quite a year ago. Lewis’s use of the Tao was a sort of preparation for taking the second book as other than a syncretistic novelty.

Anyway, off to China:

Other creatures follow their natures without creating chaos or disaster. They change by themselves without seeking change. People, meanwhile, race through the realm of existence and never know a quiet moment. They abandon their original innocence and don’t practice the true Tao of doing nothing. They don’t care about their lives, until one day they offend and retribution arrives.

Sung Ch’ang-Hsing via Jack Leahy, Caffeine and Repentance.

More Leahy:

Not coincidentally, perhaps, during my morning reading of Christ the Eternal Tao I was pointed to Chapter 37 of the Tao Te Ching. Which goes:

The Tao does nothing yet there is nothing it doesn’t do if a ruler could uphold it the people by themselves would change and changing if their desires stirred he could make them still with simplicity that has no name stilled by nameless simplicity they would not desire and not desiring be at peace the world would fix itself

—Red Pine translation.

As it turns out I have thought about that passage for a long time now. It is a passage that has long resonated with me to my core. And yet, it is a bit disappointing how little of its message has affected the way I have chosen to live over the years. Despite my decades-long attempt of trying to put this into practice something deeper in me more strenuously seeks the opposite. The world can dole out great rewards for those who will achieve its goals. This is no small thing. To truly put this seeking aside is to become, in many ways, a non-person.

(Emphasis added)

Futility to the Nth power

As I continue to read the works of liberal theologians with their many and varied alternatives in which the cardinal points of our faith are denied I cannot help thinking how ultimately insignificant their works all, for all their ingenuity and prolixity.  That is, millions of Christians who believe the Faith, Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant alike, have no time for them, write them off as unbelievers, and leave their books unread.  Millions of secular people who share their unbelief never read their books, since the books profess to be works of theology, and such people who disbelieve the Christian faith have (not unnaturally) no interest in theology.  They are, it seems, writing their books for the select liberal academics who inhabit the same liberal echo chamber.  Their works have no real significance in the minds of the overwhelming majority of men who live and work in the real world, despite the fact that their books continue to multiply like mushrooms sprouting after the rain.  For all their labour, their work deserves to be forgotten.

Fr. Lawrence Farley

Apophatic Ecclesiology

Orthodoxy cannot be simply reduced to the Orthodox doctrine of apostolic succession, seven sacraments, three degrees of hierarchy, and it is even doubtful whether such doctrines exist in a clearly defined form …

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

ECUSA celebration of Annunciation?

Is this how Episcopalians now celebrate the Feast of Annunciation?: a “solemn Service of Apology [note: not “Repentance”; and “solemn Service of Apology” makes it sound like there’s an established service for such purposes] for the participation and complicity of the diocese and its members in the Transatlantic Slave Trade and in that trade’s continuing aftermath and consequences.”

(I am not condoning slavery, of course.)

Wordplay

Where no oxen are, the trough is clean; but much increase comes by the strength of an ox.

Proverbs 14:4

Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.

Franklin P. Adams (via The Economist, The World in Brief for March 23)

Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.

Nothing new here except the possibility that the coinage is George Bernard Shaw, which I didn’t know.

I enjoy a climate with four seasons. Just not all in the same week.

@dwalbert on micro.blog

In consequence of inventing machines, men will be devoured by them.

Jules Verne

• Persiflage: Frivolity or mockery in discussing a subject.

There are related definitions, too. Try as I might, this one just doesn’t seem likely to enter my working vocabulary. I encountered it in Arthur Machen’s The Hidden Glory

Candor is the public posture of a person whose inner life is well ordered and who is grounded in their sure confidence in the love of God.

Jake Meador

‘Anthropocene’, an age in which humans have replaced nature as the big influence on Earth.

I didn’t know that was the definition of the term I’ve heard on-and-off.

We live in a culture where one of the most embarrassing things you can do is blush at the embarrassing behavior of others.

Jonah Goldberg

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.

God the creator

As Peter Geach puts it, for Aquinas the claim that God made the world “is more like ‘the minstrel made music’ than ‘the blacksmith made a shoe’”; that is to say, creation is an ongoing activity rather than a once-and-for-all event. While the shoe might continue to exist even if the blacksmith dies, the music necessarily stops when the minstrel stops playing, and the world would necessarily go out of existence if God stopped creating it.

Edward Feser, Aquinas. I view Aquinas as a notable landmark on the path of Western Christian decline, but if this comment by Mr. Geach is accurate, and especially if the minstrel versus blacksmith image is Aquinas’ (not Geach’s), then I for once applaud him.

Another misrepresentation is the not-uncommon assertion that any kind of evolutionary theory is completely alien to the patristic understanding. An evolutionary scenario was, admittedly, unavailable to the Fathers on scientific grounds, which is perhaps why few of them suggested it. We should not forget, however, that some of them did hint at the possibility of a gradual unfolding of the potential of what God had created “in the beginning.”

Christopher C. Knight, Science and the Christian Faith

Aquinas again

This difference between Aquinas and the voluntarists is related to the reasons for which Aquinas’s position is, as we saw in chapter 3, immune to the famous “Euthyphro objection” to religiously based systems of ethics. The objection, it will be recalled, is in the form of a dilemma: either God wills something because it is good or it is good because he wills it; but if the former is true, then, contrary to theism, there will be something that exists independently of God (namely the standard of goodness he abides by in willing us to do something), and if the latter is true, then if God had willed us to torture babies for fun (say) then that would have been good, which seems obviously absurd. Ockham essentially takes the second horn of the dilemma, but for Aquinas the dilemma is a false one. What is good for us is good because of our nature and not because of some arbitrary divine command, and God only ever wills for us to do what is consistent with our nature.

Edward Feser, Aquinas.

Instrumentalizing Christianity

People who take an instrumental and political view of Christianity, however well-meaning (Dennis Prager is an example of this kind), sometimes argue that only “Judeo-Christian religion”—and there is no Judeo-Christian religion, nor are there “Judeo-Christian values” in any meaningful sense—provides a possible basis for a sound moral life, including the moral basis of national political life. This is, of course, what T. S. Eliot called the “dangerous inversion,” i.e., the argument that we should accept the supernatural claims of Christianity because they are useful for fortifying a moral sensibility when we should, instead, derive our moral sensibility from the truth of Christianity, if we believe it to be true, or from something else that we believe to be true rather than merely convenient. In a sense, the non-believer who sympathizes with Christianity is more of an enemy than is the frank atheist who hates Christianity—because the “cultural Christian” trivializes Christianity. The cultural Christian believes that Christianity is false and that this does not matter, while an evangelical atheist such as the late Christopher Hitchens believes that Christianity is false and that this does matter—that it matters a great deal.

…

Some of you will be stuck on the fact that I wrote that there are no Judeo-Christian values in any meaningful sense. I know that this flies in the face of the conservative catechism, but I think it is true. Christianity and Judaism are very different religions, but they have a great deal in common when it comes to moral prescription—but they have this in common not only with one another but with many other religions and with the moralities of many other cultures. With apologies to my learned Christian friends who sometimes insist that it is otherwise, Christianity is not especially radical as a purely moral position. Those Christians who take a view of life based on “natural law”—which really means only that we can use reason to discover how it is we should live—should not be surprised to find that Christianity is not a moral outlier, inasmuch as the ancient Greek philosophers and Hindu sages and Confucian scholars had fully functioning powers of reason, too. It is not that there is nothing at all distinctive about Christianity, but even its most radical moral demand—that we should love our enemies—would not be alien to a pagan Stoic.

Kevin D. Williamson, Who Are These ‘Cultural Christians’?

So what?

[I]f you did convince an unchurched young American to go to services, what would they encounter? Wonder? Enchantment? Or dull bourgeois ceremonial, mixed with greeting-card uplift or political exhortation, either left or right?

Rod Dreher

This invites me to reveal my “heresy”: I’m surprisingly ambivalent about the “revival” at Asbury University. I don’t think anyone’s fibbing about it, but the form of revived Christianity is terribly problematic from the perspective of historic Christianity.

The longing of all the nations

It is a strange yet incontrovertible fact that, when God did take flesh, He in many ways (though certainly not all) revealed himself to be closer in spirit to the Tao of Lao Tzu then to God as conceived by the Hebrews at that time, even though the Hebrews had the revelation of Moses. This might be difficult to accept by those who are accustomed to thinking of Christ as the fulfillment of the expectation specifically of the Hebrews. Ancient Christian tradition, however, holds that Christ satisfied the longing of all the nations.

Hieromonk Damascene, Christ the Eternal Tao

New American Religion

[W]e ended our Disney World visit in the Animal Kingdom, going through the Avatar-themed rides (drenched in pantheism, like their source material) and then heading out as dusk fell over the vast (artificial) Tree of Life at the center of that park, its trunk carved with a bestiary and its leaves suffused by colors for the park’s magic-hour light show.

There was a big crowd gathered near its rearing shape, watching both the lights and the images of the natural world projected on the trunk — a show called “Tree of Life Awakenings,” though I didn’t know that at the time. And there was a different vibe there than at the fireworks show; less celebratory and boisterous, more meditative and awe-struck, with people in a lotus position or taking other pious-seeming postures toward the tree, the show, the lights, the visions of the natural world.

It felt a little different from the rest of Disney World — more reverent than the other quasi-religious elements, less nakedly commercial, more distant from Disney’s 20th-century origins, an intimation of a 21st-century paganism or pantheism slowly taking over the Mouse Cult from within.

Ross Douthat

Poetic Wordplay

I am the singular
in free fall.
I and my doubles
carry it all:

life’s slim volume
spirally bound …

R.S. Thomas

I was vicar of large things
in a small parish.

R.S. Thomas

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.

Just sayin’

‘Modern Islam,’ as the scholar Kecia Ali has put it, ‘is a profoundly Protestant tradition.’

Tom Holland, Dominion

Wicked good

Petey the Parrot served twenty-one months
On a rap for indecent exposure.
His Bishop paroled him and gave him a perch
On his pear-wood episcopal crosier.

He scolded the skeptics who labeled the bird
Unsuited for pastoral placement:
“I’m giving him charge of the CCD staff
And an office in Barney Frank’s basement.”

Chorus:
Hide the eggs, Gwendolyn, hide the eggs, Tom! 
Hide the eggs, Kate and Kareem!
Petey the sinister Young Adult Minister’s
back on the pastoral team!
With an aawk! and a squawk! twenty months and you walk,
back on the pastoral team!

Petey was therapized, pampered, prepared,
Pronounced cured by professional weasels
Who shortly thereafter were found to have died
From a sorrowful shortage of T-cells.

The cops nearly nabbed him at Cock-à-Two’s Bar
But Petey was just enough quicker
To fly through the window, and home, where he found
He’d been named archdiocesan vicar.

[Chorus]

When the parents complained that his ministry style
Included non-standard relations,
The kindly old bishop asked Petey to screen
First his phone calls, and then his vocations.

It didn’t take long for the entering class
To grow from near thirty to—zero.
Now Petey’s a bishop himself, don’t you know,
And described as “The NCR’s hero.”

Paul Mankowski, ‌The Ballad of Petey the Parrot (2006), via Jerry J. Pokorsky

Explain this if you can

I did not recall this anecdote from Iain McGilchrist, and the full context is the whole book:

At a Benedictine monastery in the South of France, chanting was curtailed in the mid-1960s as part of the modernisation efforts associated with the Second Vatican Council. The results could not have been more disastrous. The monks had been able to thrive on only about four hours sleep per night, provided they were allowed to chant. Now they found themselves listless and exhausted, easily irritated, and susceptible to disease. Several doctors were called in, but none was able to alleviate the distress of the monastic community. Relief came finally, but only when Alfred Tomatis convinced the abbot to reinstate chanting.

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary

East versus West

According to Bernard of Clairvaux,

Christ became human because “he wanted to recapture the affections of carnal men who were unable to love in any other way, by first drawing them to the salutary love of his own humanity, and then gradually to raise them to a spiritual love.” This is a fascinating statement. According to it the Incarnation is not about God’s assimilation of humanity to His divinity, resulting in the prospect of man’s deification. It is about creating the basis for man’s emotional relationship to God. The fourth-century Athanasius had stated that God became man so that man might become God. It seems that for Bernard, God became man so that man might sympathize with God.

Fr. John Strickland, The Age of Division

Is there room in Scotland for Kate Forbes?

Lent began this week with a rehearsal for a crucifixion. On Tuesday, SNP leader hopeful and devout Presbyterian Kate Forbes was faced with something she must have known was coming: a challenge from journalists about her views on gay marriage, womanhood, and children being born out of wedlock. She did not flinch from spelling out what she thought. By Ash Wednesday, several of her backers within the SNP had publicly recanted, running scared from the ensuing furore, and Forbes was said to be taking “a break from media commitments”.

… Perhaps unaccustomed to the sight of a principled act of conscience from a Scottish politician, our modern-day Pharisees — otherwise known as newspaper columnists — swung into action to make sure it would not happen again.

As is their wont, several commentators pretended to be taking the room’s temperature while actually turning up the thermostat. …

[W]hat we have here is a clash of two religions. One of them is full of sanctimonious, swivel-eyed moral scolds, rooting out heresy and trying to indoctrinate everybody into their fantastic way of thinking. The other is a branch of Calvinism ….

Kathleen Stock, The crucifixion of Kate Forbes

He opponents may not be able truly to refute her, but they’re higher in the pecking order, and they buy their ink by the barrel, so they can cancel her.

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.

Irish Saints are special

My favorite story about [St. Colman Mac duaghis, who lived in a cave as a hermit for seven years] concerns his wild companions. The saint, the legends tell us, somehow befriended a cockerel, a mouse, and a fly, and trained them to help him out. The cockerel’s job was to crow when he needed to get up in the morning to pray. The mouse’s role was to step in if Colman didn’t feel like getting out of bed: It would nibble his ear until he roused himself. As for the fly, Colman trained it to walk along the lines of his Bible in the dim light, so he could follow it as he read. A new stained glass church window in the nearby town of Gort portrays the saint with his three animal companions rather sweetly.

Nothing lasts, of course, especially the life of a fly. It wasn’t long before Colman’s companions died. He confided his sadness in a letter to another Irish saint of the time, Columba. His friend’s brief reply distilled the unworldly essence of desert spirituality: “You were too rich when you had them. That is why you are sad now. Trouble like that only comes where there are riches. Be rich no more.”

Paul Kingsnorth, A Wild Christianity

Hate-Mongers

A new Terry Mattingly article for the Acton Institute, The Evolving Religion of Journalism reminds me to share some wise words from Alan Jacobs:

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

Avoiding them will do wonders for your blood pressure. More importantly, it’s a pre-condition for healing your soul.

Sometimes the application of the heuristic is awkward: I read Rod Dreher’s “diary” on Substack but stopped reading the bile he’s paid to produce for the American Conservative.

And I pray for him to unite his divided mind.

Clive the Convivial

Clarke and Lewis eventually met, perhaps around 1960, as Francis Spufford has narrated: “Clarke contacted Lewis and they arranged to meet in the Eastgate Tavern, Oxford. Clarke brought Val Cleaver as his second; Lewis brought along J. R. R. Tolkien. They saw the world so differently that even argument was scarcely possible. As Orwell said about something completely different, their beliefs were as impossible to compare as a sausage and a rose. Clarke and Cleaver could not see any darkness in technology, while Lewis and Tolkien could not see the ways in which a new tool genuinely transforms the possibilities of human awareness. For them, machines at very best were a purely instrumental source of pipe tobacco and transport to the Bodleian. So what could they do? They all got pissed. ‘I’m sure you are very wicked people,’ said Lewis cheerfully as he staggered away, ‘but how dull it would be if everyone was good.’ ”

Alan Jacobs, The Year of Our Lord 1943

Dystopians: Orwell < Huxley < Lewis

On the flight over from Budapest, I almost finished Lewis’s novel That Hideous Strength, which is really terrific. I would have done, but the plane landed with two chapters to go. I’ve been saying for a while that the totalitarian dystopia we are living towards is much more like Huxley’s Brave New World than Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, but it’s really and truly like Lewis’s That Hideous Strength. I kept thinking, as I read along, how eerily on the nose Lewis was in 1945, when he published it, about how things are today in our creepy technocratic anti-human society. The technocratic conspiracy that runs the Britain of the novel manages to manipulate the media to manufacture consent and approval by the population, in ways that bring to mind the way the US Government manipulated social media outlets to control the Covid message. On the hopeful side, the brave little band of Christian warriors in That Hideous Strength are humble and frail, but heroic. One wants to be like them, when the time comes. One also wants a kindly bear called Mr. Bultitude.

So I did finish it, in London, and the conclusion was deeply moving, but not just at the emotional level. I felt like I had glimpsed a deeper truth — the kind of truth that moves the world. I won’t spoil it for you, don’t worry. I can say, though, that at the end, the “Director” — a sort of Gandalf figure directing the resistance to nation-destroying evil — explains to his seemingly feeble band of conspirators why despite appearances, the plain work they did vanquished great evil in an apocalyptic spiritual battle.

Rod Dreher

I agree with Rod: Orwell < Huxley < Lewis

Cravings

What is it that craves? It is your ego—your created sense of a permanent ‘self’—and it craves because it believes that if it can have what it craves it will stop suffering. This is the story of our civilization, and we are discovering the hard way that it doesn’t work.

Paul Kingsnorth, Savage Gods. This was written while Kingsnorth was a Pagan or a Buddhist or something — not yet Orthodox Christian — but he wasn’t wrong.

Our barbarism and superstition

Sometimes it is difficult to exaggerate how strange, barbaric, and superstitious an age ours really is.

David Bentley Hart, Therapeutic Superstition.

I don’t much care for Hart these days, but I much enjoyed the essay he concludes thus.

Don’t think about this

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.