Fanatics and others

Fanaticism

The Minnesota Assassin

The Minnesota political assassin (who I won’t name) had some red flags in initial biographical information. From my perspective (Eastern Orthodox, formerly Evangelical and Calvinist, always active in my faith and never “charismatic”), the biggest one was his invocation of new apostles and prophets as what America needs spiritually — an indication of New Apostolic Reformation beliefs or something adjacent.

(Surprisingly few NAR advocates will own up to it; either it’s so loosely structured that adherence is ambiguous – which I suspect is the case – or they’re told to lie, or something.)

Now Stephanie McCrummen at the Atlantic has dug a little deeper and confirmed my suspicions.

Now comes the hard part: Assuming his guilt (which I’m allowed to do because I’m not a criminal court), dare we blame his assassinations, and the apparent intention to assassinate as many as 70 others, on his NAR ideas, or do we hold open the possibility of insanity or some other explanation?

Blaming NAR is tempting for me because I so detest it. But I have seen no information that NAR actually encourages physical violence, and not just vehement rhetoric. (Their “violent prayer” talk seems, preliminarily, to be a red herring.) The theory of stochastic terrorism has always struck me as plausible, but it’s hard to imagine any forcefully-expressed opinion that has zero chance of pushing some random person over some edge.

So I’m glad Stephanie McCrummen withheld judgment about causation. It’s still the extremely early days in the criminal proceedings, and more, if not all, will be revealed eventually.

Christianity is not an instrument of political power

David French comes closer than McCrummen to linking the assassination effect to the N.A.R. cause, and also had this observation:

Last election cycle I helped create a new Christian curriculum for political engagement …

As I talked about the curriculum in gatherings across the country, I was struck by the extent to which I was asked the same question time and again. “Sure,” people would say, “we need to be kind, but what if that doesn’t work?”

The implication was clear — victory was the imperative, and while kindness was desirable, it was the contingent value, to be discarded when it failed to deliver the desired political results.

David French

A “Christian” who thinks political victory is more important than living as Christ taught (let’s say, in the Beatitudes for instance) is a sorely confused Christian.

I’ve probably said it before, but I’ll say it again. One of the countless blessings I’ve received in Orthodox Christianity is the company of martyrs, many of whom died because they knew that gaining the world wasn’t worth losing one’s soul. If you’re in a “Christian” tradition where leaders or laity act as if that’s a good trade (none of them are wicked enough to actually teach it), get out before it’s too late.

Who are the fanatics?

We know now that the FBI’s infamous Richmond Memo, targeting traditional Catholics as potential terrorists and comparing them with Islamists, was not merely the product of a few rogues in a single field office, as the agency had claimed.  Multiple offices were involved in drafting it, and it was distributed to over a thousand employees.

This post is not going to be a rant against the Biden administration.  What interests me is what was going on in the analysts’ heads.  I credit them with sincerity.  But why did they think traditional Catholicism is comparable to the ideology of radical Islam?

The most generous interpretation which can be placed on the memo is that the analysts thought of fanaticism simply as strong belief, and assumed that any strong belief is potentially violent.

But a sensible definition of fanaticism would emphasize the content of belief, not its strength.  You aren’t a fanatic for believing very strongly that you should “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.”  The more strongly you believe that, the less likely you are to be a terrorist.

On the other hand, you really are a fanatic for believing that you should “kill them wherever you find them,” meaning Jews and infidels.  The more strongly you believe that, the more likely you are to be a terrorist.

The content of belief did come into the analysts’ definition in one way.  They plainly believed strongly in their own ideology, yet it seems never to have occurred to them to view themselves as fanatics.  It seems, then, that in their view, the term “fanatic” must have meant not just “anyone who believes strongly,” but rather something like “Anyone who believes strongly enough in God, rather than in progressive dogma, for his belief to influence the rest of his life” – and the full force of the federal government must be used to surveil and suppress all such people.

So by their definition, yes, traditional Catholics are fanatics.  But by a more sensible definition, which ideology is a better candidate for being called by that label?

J Budziszewski

Evangelical Religion

I return to the subject of Evangelicalism so often, I think, because there is some stubborn something within me that believes, against so much journalistic “evidence” (thousands of profiles of self-identified Evangelicals doing bizarre things), that a significant number of Evangelicals are acting and believing in perfect good faith, and that I simply need to find the magic words to help them see what I can’t un-see.

There is some tenderness mixed with my frustration at 28 years of almost complete failure in that regard. And there is some perversity in my rejection of the wisdom of Orthodoxy, which really does not encourage trying to argue people into the Orthodox faith. “Acquire the Holy Spirit and thousands around you will be saved,” said Saint Seraphim of Sarov, but something there is about an American ex-Evangelical that still loves a short-cut.

Over the years, I have cast a lot of shade on the concept of “religion.” I’m starting to think I should have self-critically cast similar shade under the concept of “Evangelicalism.”

Here’s what I think I’ve been doing that’s sorely mistaken:

  1. The “good faith” Evangelicals I’m trying to persuade are basically wealthy white church-going Evangelicals in, or in orbit around, Wheaton, Illinois (and maybe Grand Rapids, Michigan). The former are the kind of people I hung out with for roughly 6 years of my life (five years in school plus one year in my young adulthood), the latter for 15 years. They are the kind of people I see at my Wheaton Academy homecomings every five years. I like them; no, I love them. We don’t talk politics when we get together. I fancy they’re not Trump fans, but I really don’t know and I fear I’d be disappointed if I found out.
  2. The evangelicals I’m yelling about are random self-identified Evangelicals or flakes identified as Evangelical by journalists in mainstream media, who may or may not attend church and who may have adopted the Evangelical label simply because they’re Trump supporters. I have little experience of them. The “good faith” Evangelicals may be as baffled by them as I am.

My impression, which I’ve had but suppressed for rather a long time, is that “Evangelicalism” isn’t coherent, though we seem not to be able to live without it. So when I shout at Evangelicals, it’s like shaking my fist and cursing at the clouds.

It has always been notoriously difficult to define what an Evangelical is. Probably the most widely-accepted attempt is the Bebbington Quadrilateral. But my favorite is from Ken Myers of Mars Hill Audio Journal. I’m not going to take the time to dig it up verbatim, but the gist was that Evangelicals recognize one another not by right doctrine, orthodoxy, but by “right feeling,” orthopathos. They sing the same songs, and pray similar extemporaneous prayers, supported Billy Graham Crusades, and so forth.

I don’t know whether that is even true today of the motley crew that journalists identify as Evangelical.

“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows: You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well … Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the ‘wet streets cause rain’ stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story—and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”

Michael Crichton (via ChatGPT because I couldn’t remember “Gell-Mann Amnesia effect”).

The press tends to garble Eastern Orthodoxy, so why should I believe them about Evangelicalism?

Many of them probably labeled the Minnesota assassin “evangelical.” Was he? Is the evidence that he wasn’t a No True Scotsman fallacy?

I know Orthodoxy; I just really don’t know Evangelicalism or its outer boundaries any more, if ever I did.

So you have my permission to go back to everything I’ve written about Evangelicals and Evangelicalism and say “he doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” because much of the time I’ve been Gell-Mann-ing it.

I’ll try to do better, but old habits die hard.

Sanity (a/k/a The Gospel for people battered by bad religion)

Having dwelt long on some pretty sorry stuff, a very long but infinitely more positive note:

I know that what I’m about to talk about is something I’ve talked about probably even fairly recently on the show, but I find myself in real life — meaning as a priest dealing with a group of parishioners, and trying to help them and guide them and just family members and everybody in general — I find myself having to say this over and over and over again, which tells me that probably if I say it over this microphone to people, there’s probably at least some folks out there who need to hear it again, even if I have talked about it recently.

The Christianity that those of us, at least in the United States — and I can only speak about that experience because I haven’t had any others — the Christianity we grew up around came from one of two categories largely. And people who want to defend those types of Christianity will call this a caricature. I don’t care anymore. But what I’m about to say, even if you think it’s a caricature of what they’re trying to teach, this is what a lot of the people within these traditions have actually received. Right? So it’s very easy to defend some tradition based on what’s in the books, and what we would mean to say, right? But I’m talking about what the people who I encounter, the people who talk to me about spiritual things. come to me and give confessions, what they’ve received from the Christianity they’ve grew up around, how that has shaped them, how they think because of it. And if people, representatives of those groups want to say that’s not what they meant to teach, cool, but maybe some introspection on why that’s not what people are receiving.

Anyway, what people have received comes in two categories. One is sort of the smilin’ Bob Shuler School of, “God loves you just the way you are and you don’t have to do anything. Just don’t worry about it. Just smile and be happy and listen to the hymns of your choice that you enjoy.” … That worked really well with boomers. That seemed to answer something they needed to hear. Maybe they’re a generation who grew up with very dissatisfied perfectionist parents, and so just hearing you’re fine just the way you are was what they needed, right? But that doesn’t work on subsequent generations, because subsequent generations are more realistic or nihilistic depending on your point of view, and know there’s something deeply wrong with themselves and with the world around them. So just telling them over again, “No, no, you’re fine, everything’s fine, it doesn’t work.” That’s why those kind of churches are all empty now.

The other school of thought is pretty much the exact opposite. It’s God doesn’t really love you. Right. In fact He’s pretty angry with you and He’s getting ready to send you to hell. Right? And the only way to avoid that is, depending on your tradition, right, is, for you to love him nonetheless, really sincerely — and there’s a rabbit hole to go down. How sincere am I ever really? — and do that plus live your life at a certain way and follow certain rules. Which will differ based on tradition, and which you will inevitably fail at.

That second one is most of the people who I interact with on spiritual matters, and it’s almost like they’ve been taught and they’ve internalized that. Their life in this world is this sort of really horrible reality show, almost like Squid Games, and like God is about weeding out contestants and narrowing it down to this faithful few and everybody else goes to hell, goes to eternal punishment except for this faithful few who, again, depending on your tradition, he may just pick. Or, you know, they’re the ones who really did it right. They’re the ones who really loved him sincerely, or they’re the ones who really lived their life the right way.

And any way you slice those things, most people again are realistic enough that when they look at their life, they don’t see a lot of evidence in their life and their actions that they’re one of the people God picked, or they don’t see a lot of evidence of their life that they’re really sincere about following God, or they don’t see a lot of evidence of their life that they’re really toeing the line and living the life they know they should be living, meaning most people are walking around — like religious people — walking around thinking they’re probably going to end up in hell. That God is probably mad at the most of the time, and that He’s looking for them to make some missteps so, boom!, they can get nailed.

Also most atheists are walking around doing the same thing they’re protesting constantly that there is no God because they can’t deal with that guilt and stuff that they’ve internalized. They can’t live like that. No one can live like that their route to trying to live like that and deal with the cognitive dissonance is just to deny that any of it’s true, over and over and over again publicly, loudly to everyone who will listen. Right.

Whereas the religious people are just in this kind of quiet desperation of how do I figure this out. Right.

So let me reiterate again, right, and Penal Substitution plays a big part in this. That’s why I’m bringing it up in this context:

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

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

Fr. Stephen De Young.

I probably will publish this from time to time for the rest of my blogging life.

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.

Father’s Day 2025

Secularism

A modern secularist quite often accepts the idea of God. What, however, he emphatically negates is precisely the sacramentality of man and world.

Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World

The prophet Stanley speaks

Atheism slips into the church where God really does not matter, as we go about building bigger and better congregations (church administration), confirming people’s self-esteem (worship), enabling people to adjust to their anxieties brought on by their materialism (pastoral care), and making Christ a worthy subject for poetic reflection (preaching). At every turn the church must ask itself, Does it really make any difference, in our life together, in what we do, that in Jesus Christ God is reconciling the world to himself?

Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens

Undermining Early Power

Israel seems to be the first instance in which the forgiveness of debt and the practice of Sabbatarian rest – for people, land, and animals, came to be written into the very fabric of life and given divine sanction. And, even in the non-Sabbath years, there was a prohibition against harvesting an entire field. A portion had to be left standing so that the poor could “glean” the fields for their needs. Maximum efficiency was forbidden. This way of life was not an effort to solidify earthly power, but to undermine it with a radical understanding of the purpose of human existence.

Fr. Stephen Freeman

Doing the next thing

I was very struck as a young man reading the fiction of Iris Murdoch, particularly her novel “The Bell.” At the end of that, you’re faced with a chapter about the experience of somebody who has been intensely involved in religious activity and has just had an absolutely traumatic shock to everything that he believes in and everything he holds dear.

He’s living next door to a convent, and all he can do is to go to Mass every morning. And I thought, “Yes, I see what’s going on there. He’s doing the next thing.” He’s treading water, you might say, but also he knows something can be done — not to keep the darkness at bay but to keep breathing, to keep moving, to keep open to something. I think that sense of wanting to keep open to something is probably quite near the center of what I believe about a spiritual life. You don’t pray or meditate or contemplate in order to get results, exactly.

Rowan Williams with Peter Wehner.

More:

I discovered Dostoyevsky as a teenager and read him fairly intensely as a student and as a graduate student. What struck me most was two things. One is he’s very good at depicting characters who are holy, who are in some sense transparent to the divine and also letting you see that they’re not going to have all the answers. They’re going to be the window that lets the light in. And I thought, “That tells me something about holiness. Don’t look for the leader, the controller, the problem solver. Look for where the light gets in.” In Leonard Cohen’s famous image, the persons who are part of the crack that lets the light in.

Hiding God’s word in our hearts

“Thy word have I hid in my heart, that I might not sin against Thee” (Ps. 119:11) does not, I think, mean “I’ve memorized a lot of proof-texts for my tribe’s view of things.” I even suspect that someone with very few proof-texts on the tip of their tongue may have more of God’s word hidden in their heart than, say, Jack Van Impe.

New Measures then, Standard Operating Procedure now

The most prominent evangelist of the [Second Great Awakening] was Charles Finney. Often painted as a religious salesman and professional revivalist, Finney believed that success as an evangelist was measured by the number of conversions one could elicit. When accused of using emotional manipulation to push people toward accepting Christ, Finney responded by saying,

“The results justify my methods. Thousands upon thousands of converts prove my methods are sound.”

What methods exactly did Finney utilize? In his evangelistic crusade, Finney implemented what he called the New Measures, which can more accurately be described as mood management. Finney often used hymns to emotionally prepare audiences for a religious experience, creating an atmosphere that was conducive to conversions. As the genesis of today’s altar call, Finney called unsaved men to come sit at the mourner’s bench, or mercy seat, in front of the crowd and receive a special prayer for salvation. Finney popularized the mourner’s bench, which led to it appearing more often in different churches. From the pulpit, Finney also occasionally called out non-Christians by name, increasing the pressure on them to make a conversion to Christianity. According to Finney, conversions would certainly occur if evangelists planned, advertised, utilized the emotional impact of music, and strategically managed emotions.

In many ways, it could be argued that modern evangelical megachurches operate in the same way as Finney’s SGA meetings.

Many megachurches seem to ascribe to Finney’s New Measures, using emotional music, lighting programs, and foggy haze to create an emotional atmosphere. Modern megachurch pastors rarely call out non-believers by name, but altar calls are common as an emotional culmination for a worship service.

Isaac Cullum, Megachurches: A Striking Resemblance to the Second Great Awakening? – Juicy Ecumenism (bold added).

I cannot vouch for altar calls being common in megachurches, but coincidentally, these techniques are another instance of the “man behind the curtain” I described last week.

On leaving a church

Yesterday I saw a man in his late thirties who recognized me, and approached to say he is a fellow convert to Orthodox Christianity. I asked him for his story. He said he was raised in a Protestant church (he didn’t specify which kind), but it left him cold. It was cold, formal, and devoid of any passion for the faith. He drifted away.

“When I attended my first Divine Liturgy, it was — I don’t know how to describe it,” he said, with tears coming to his eyes. “This was ten years ago, and I still get shivers. I didn’t understand the Old Church Slavonic language, but it didn’t matter. It was like I didn’t have to think of anything — God was so present.”

I mentioned to him a story of mine familiar to you readers: that during Covid, we began to see at my old parish an influx of younger people — married couples and single men, most of them from Evangelical megachurch backgrounds. They all had more or less the same stories: that Covid shook them to the core about the fragility of our civilization, and they concluded that their normie middle-class suburban churches were not forming them as Christians with the kind of spiritual depth that would allow them to endure a severe social crisis. They showed up seeking more.

He then said something profound: “In the old days, people left their churches because they didn’t believe in God. Now they leave them because they do.”

Rod Dreher (who I’m trying again after a sabbatical)

The guy can write every day more than I’m willing to read every day. I’ve got to learn to skim better.

Poetic Theodicy

The Knockdown Question

Why does God not spare the innocent?

The answer to that is not in
the same world as the question
so you would shrink from me
in terror if I could answer it.

(Les Murray, New Selected Poems)

Philistines

[T]rue Philistines are not people who are incapable of recognising beauty; they recognise it all too well; they detect its presence anywhere, immediately, and with a flair as infallible as that of the most sensitive aesthete—but for them, it is in order to be able better to pounce upon it at once and to destroy it before it can gain a foothold in their universal empire of ugliness. Ignorance is not simply the absence of knowledge, obscurantism does not result from a dearth of light, bad taste is not merely a lack of good taste, stupidity is not a simple want of intelligence: all these are fiercely active forces, that angrily assert themselves on every occasion; they tolerate no challenge to their omnipresent rule. In every department of human endeavour, inspired talent is an intolerable insult to mediocrity. If this is true in the realm of aesthetics, it is even more true in the world of ethics. More than artistic beauty, moral beauty seems to exasperate our sorry species. The need to bring down to our own wretched level, to deface, to deride and debunk any splendour that is towering above us, is probably the saddest urge of human nature.

Simon Leys, “An Empire of Ugliness,” which I gather is one essay in The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (via Brad East)

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.

We don’t do that

The president has called a big military parade this weekend in Washington to celebrate the Army’s 250th anniversary. It is also the president’s 79th birthday, and he enjoys parades.

Early plans speak of 6,600 soldiers across at least 11 divisions; 150 military vehicles, including 26 M1 Abrams tanks and 27 Bradley Fighting Vehicles. There will be aircraft and howitzers. It all sounds showy, militaristic and braggadocious, the kind of thing the Soviet Union did in its May Day parades, and North Korea still does.

We don’t do that. We don’t have big military parades with shining, gleaming weapons driven through the streets.

Sometimes I wonder of the people around the president: Do they know we don’t do this? Have they read any history? Are they like Silicon Valley tech bros who think history started with them?

Maybe they’re thinking that in a world full of danger it’s good to let Iran and China and the rest know what we’ve got, how our missiles gleam and our soldiers march. But that is just another form of never having read a book. If they had they’d know not only that this isn’t how we do it, but also that we don’t do it that way for a reason.

Peggy Noonan

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

More Friday the 13th politics

We don’t do that

The president has called a big military parade this weekend in Washington to celebrate the Army’s 250th anniversary. It is also the president’s 79th birthday, and he enjoys parades.

Early plans speak of 6,600 soldiers across at least 11 divisions; 150 military vehicles, including 26 M1 Abrams tanks and 27 Bradley Fighting Vehicles. There will be aircraft and howitzers. It all sounds showy, militaristic and braggadocious, the kind of thing the Soviet Union did in its May Day parades, and North Korea still does.

We don’t do that. We don’t have big military parades with shining, gleaming weapons driven through the streets.

Sometimes I wonder of the people around the president: Do they know we don’t do this? Have they read any history? Are they like Silicon Valley tech bros who think history started with them?

Maybe they’re thinking that in a world full of danger it’s good to let Iran and China and the rest know what we’ve got, how our missiles gleam and our soldiers march. But that is just another form of never having read a book. If they had they’d know not only that this isn’t how we do it, but also that we don’t do it that way for a reason.

Peggy Noonan

(Yawn!) Another double-standard

If Joe Biden federalizes the National Guard [in Texas], that would be a direct attack on states’ rights. [W]e’ve seen Democrats try to take away our Freedoms of religion, assembly, and speech. We can’t let them take away our right to defend ourselves, too.

Kristi Noem, February 2024, via Andrew Sullivan, June 2025.

This was how the cabinet secretary who literally doesn’t know what habeas corpus is described sending Marines into Los Angeles:

We are not going away. We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.

She intends to liberate Los Angeles … from its duly elected officials.

Andrew Sullivan, quoting Kristi Noem June 2025.

(Yawn!) Another norm shattered

Of Trump’s speech to the troops assembled this week at Fort Bragg:

The soldiers were vetted so they were all Trump fans; Trump merchandise was openly sold at the military base (including faux credit cards labeled “White Privilege Card: Trumps Everything”); the speech was crudely partisan; and the president encouraged boos from the uniformed crowd as he lambasted his usual targets — behavior that violates Pentagon rules. If disgrace were a word Trump even understood, it wouldn’t adequately capture the despicably un-American spectacle. But this, in the president’s mind, is not America’s military, but his own.

Andrew Sullivan

Who are those masked men?

It is unconscionable that in a free society, those with the power to arrest and detain are not clearly identifiable as such, with their full faces and names and identity visible. Protestors who wear masks are just as anathema to a liberal democracy, and wearing a mask in such a context should be grounds for arrest. But for the state to be anonymous and lethal is a mark of totalitarian societies, not democracies.

And sending masked men — like Putin’s masked agents — to grab harmless foreign students and bundle them into vans, or to raid Home Depots and car washes, is not a serious attempt to deliver mass deportations. It’s designed to tell everyone — citizen or non-citizen — that this is a police state now, answerable to one man alone, and you better keep your head down.

Andrew Sullivan

Friday the 13th politics

Principles to survive by

This is from way back on January 30, but I don’t think I’ve shared it:

[W]e’re going to have to learn a lot about stupidity over the next four years. I’ve distilled what I’ve learned so far into six main principles:

Principle 1: Ideology produces disagreement, but stupidity produces befuddlement. This week, people in institutions across America spent a couple of days trying to figure out what the hell was going on. This is what happens when a government freezes roughly $3 trillion in spending with a two-page memo that reads like it was written by an intern. When stupidity is in control, the literature professor Patrick Moreau argues, words become unscrewed “from their relation to reality.”

Principle 2: Stupidity often inheres in organizations, not individuals. When you create an organization in which one man has all the power and everybody else has to flatter his preconceptions, then stupidity will surely result. As the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it: “This is virtually a sociological-psychological law. The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other.”

Principle 3: People who behave stupidly are more dangerous than people who behave maliciously. Evil people at least have some accurate sense of their own self-interest, which might restrain them. Stupidity dares greatly! Stupidity already has all the answers!

Principle 4: People who behave stupidly are unaware of the stupidity of their actions. You may have heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is that incompetent people don’t have the skills to recognize their own incompetence. Let’s introduce the Hegseth-Gabbard corollary: The Trump administration is attempting to remove civil servants who may or may not be progressive but who have tremendous knowledge in their field of expertise and hire MAGA loyalists who often lack domain knowledge or expertise. The results may not be what the MAGA folks hoped for.

Principle 5: Stupidity is nearly impossible to oppose. Bonhoeffer notes, “Against stupidity we are defenseless.” Because stupid actions do not make sense, they invariably come as a surprise. Reasonable arguments fall on deaf ears. Counter-evidence is brushed aside. Facts are deemed irrelevant. Bonhoeffer continues, “In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.”

Principle 6: The opposite of stupidity is not intelligence, it’s rationality. The psychologist Keith Stanovich defines rationality as the capacity to make decisions that help people achieve their objectives. People in the grip of the populist mind-set tend to be contemptuous of experience, prudence and expertise, helpful components of rationality. It turns out that this can make some populists willing to believe anything — conspiracy theories, folk tales and internet legends; that vaccines are harmful to children. They don’t live within a structured body of thought but within a rave party chaos of prejudices.

As time has gone by, I’ve developed more and more sympathy for the goals the populists are trying to achieve. America’s leadership class has spent the last few generations excluding, ignoring, rejecting and insulting a large swath of this country. It’s terrible to be assaulted in this way. It’s worse when you finally seize power and start assaulting yourself — and everyone around you. In fact, it’s stupid.

David Brooks

No more blind deference from the Courts

A Federal prosecutor argued that a an entire cased file should be sealed, “in seeming perpetuity,” rather than redacting sensitive portions. One of its arguments was that courts must be “highly deferential to the government’s determination that unsealing would impede its investigation.”

Along with some salty words to the effect that we don’t do secret courts in this country, the magistrate dropped a dandy footnote:

Blind deference to the government? That is no longer a thing. Trust that had been earned over generations has been lost in weeks. Numerous career prosecutors have had to resign instead of taking actions that they believe violated their oath of office, or worse, were fired for upholding that oath … On the flip side, Department of Justice leaders have decried criminal investigations from the prior administration as ranging from witch hunts to illegal …

So which prosecutors does the court defer to? The number continues to shrink. Judges have had to reprimand government attorneys for a lack of candor to the court, and worse, probe failures to comply with court orders. … These norms being broken must have consequences. High deference is out; trust, but verify is in.

In re: Search of One Device and Two Individuals, fn. 10. H/T Eugene Volokh.

“Schadenfreude” isn’t quite the right word to describe my feelings about this, because the only sadness I feel is that lawyers in the DOJ have sunk so low that they deserved this.

Critical Trump Theory

At the beginning of his Truth rant, he refers back to the Court of International Trade and asks: “Where do these initial three Judges come from? How is it possible for them to have potentially done such damage to the United States of America? Is it purely a hatred of ‘TRUMP?’ What other reason could it be?”

(Via David French) (bold added)

Trump talking about himself in the third person seems unhinged to me. Always has, always will.

And if you disagree, the only possible reason is that you hate Tipsy.

(Etiology of Critical Trump Theory)

With friends like Joni

Last Friday, at a town hall meeting in Butler County, Iowa, Senator Joni Ernst delivered a grim message to her constituents. In the midst of an exchange over Medicaid cuts in President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” someone in the crowd shouted at Ernst, “People are going to die!”

Ernst’s immediate response was bizarre. “Well, we all are going to die,” she said.

… [I]t would cost Ernst — who occupies a relatively safe seat in an increasingly red state — virtually nothing to apologize and move on. In fact, just after her flippant comment, she did emphasize that she wanted to protect vulnerable people. The full answer was more complicated than the headline-generating quip.

By the standards of 2025, Ernst’s comment would have been little more than a micro-scandal, gone by the end of the day. And if we lived even in the relatively recent past, demonstrating humility could have worked to her benefit. It can be inspiring to watch a person genuinely apologize.

But we’re in a new normal now.

That means no apologies. That means doubling down. And that can also mean tying your cruelty to the Christian cross.

David French

The way Ernst “sincerely” doubled down, by insults and then a little altar call, made me throw up in my mouth a little:

“I made an incorrect assumption,” she continued, “that everyone in the auditorium understood that, yes, we are all going to perish from this earth.”

She didn’t stop there. “I’m really, really glad that I did not have to bring up the subject of the tooth fairy as well. But for those that would like to see eternal and everlasting life, I’d encourage you to embrace my lord and savior, Jesus Christ.”

With “friends” like Joni Ernst, Jesus don’t need no enemies.

Beyond Good and Evil

Musk and the Muskovites talk about the world of politics and policy in terms of good and evil, and most of the idiotic catchphrases of the contemporary right—elites, Deep State, woke, etc.—are just dumb and/or dishonest ways of saying evil.

…

That kind of thing is the reason Musk failed at DOGE and the reason DOGE itself has failed and will fail to amount to anything other than a gormless blue-ribbon commission run by dilettantes and ignoramuses. Musk et al.—and Trump himself above all—believe that they can set things right in our wobbly republic if only they could simply punish the wicked and reward the virtuous, and, because their ignorance is compounded by arrogance, it never occurs to them that this is another way to say, “We require the power to disadvantage people who compete with us for status or resources in order to hand out favors for our friends.” Trump is a kind of naïve Nietzschean, unable to distinguish what is good from what he wants

…

The people who know what they are talking about talk about incentives. The people who don’t know what they’re talking about—or who wish to deceive you and to treat you like a fool—talk about good and evil.

On either side of the aisle, the smarter kind of politician understands that our problems are not simple. But many of them believe that you are.

Kevin D. Williamson, Beyond Good and Evil

Speaking of incentives, especially the perverse kind:

[The Affordable Care Act] gave states a financial incentive to treat able-bodied adults better than the disabled. The federal government gives states $9 for every $1 they spend on able-bodied adults, but only $1.33 for every dollar spent on children, people with disabilities, pregnant women and seniors. Drawn by the promise of so much federal money, Arkansas’s Democratic governor expanded Medicaid in 2013. The program now covers more than 230,000 able-bodied adults.

Because able-bodied adults bring so much money, Arkansas makes them a priority. We applied for in-home care in 2023, but state officials said it would take 10 years. Democrats are doing everything they can to keep my son on the wait list. They’re trying to frighten Republicans into abandoning work requirements by claiming they’re ineffective, unnecessary and cruel—none of which is true.

Nick Stehle, My Son Is Counting on Medicaid Work Requirements

I worked professionally on qualifying elderly people for Medicaid to help with the cost of nursing home care, but I had no idea that “poor people Medicaid” (versus “old people Medicaid”) had such a perverse incentive built in.

Trump is no avatar of civilization or culture

Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, posted on social media that Trump’s military invasion of Los Angeles “is a fight to save civilization.” A letter from Charlie Kirk’s “Turning Point America” arrived Saturday, asking me for money to help Trump restore the culture.

I’m not in the market for Stephen Miller’s kind of civilization or Kirk’s kind of culture.

That was then, this is now

When California has asked for needed federal help—during the wildfires earlier this year for example—Trump has begrudged that help and played politics with it. Trump is now forcing help that the city and state do not need and do not want, not to restore law but to assert his personal dominance over the normal procedures to enforce the law.

David Frum

Rearranging the deck chairs

Constitutionally, it’s hard for me to avoid the logic of “unitary executive” theory, but now that Trump is that objective my heart protests, and I at least want the mildest plausible version of the theory (e.g., the President can fire and replace agency heads but public-facing workers can continue to enjoy civil service protections).

On the other hand, the ship seems to be sinking so maybe it’s silly to worry too much about the locations of deck furniture.

Riots are unpopular

Every time a protester burns a car, hurls a rock, or smashes a window, the protester ceases to be a lawful demonstrator and becomes a rioter. And contrary to a lot of left-wing romantic nonsense, rioting is not only wrong and illegal, it’s politically unpopular. Then-Massachusetts Gov. Calvin Coolidge became a national star by calling in the Massachusetts Guard in response to the 1919 Boston police strike, which had ignited riots and looting. In the 1968 election, Richard Nixon used the riots after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination to win the presidency on a promise of restoring law and order.

The fringe left has a long love affair with the “propaganda of the deed,” a stupid concept holding that direct or revolutionary action persuades the masses to align with their cause. In America, it almost never works. But for some reason, too many mainstream progressives get tongue-tied when it comes to condemning their fringe unequivocally.

The political utility of domestic unrest is far more acute and consequential under Donald Trump because he subscribes to his own theory of the propaganda of the deed. Trump has long been enamored of using the military to quash domestic unrest. In a 1990 Playboy interview, he expressed admiration for the Chinese Communist Party’s willingness to display “the power of strength” in crushing the Tiananmen protests. In his first term, he reportedly wanted troops to fire on protesters after the murder of George Floyd. Since the beginning of his second term, his administration has been pushing political, legal, and rhetorical claims that he should be granted wartime powers, most notably on trade and immigration.

Jonah Goldberg

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.

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.

Pentecost 2025

AI at Prayer

At a recent Gospel Coalition conference, celebrity pastor John Piper told his audience about a task he had given ChatGPT: Write a prayer informed by the theology of Don Carson. He proceeded to read the resulting text. ChatGPT’s “prayer” seemed to tick all the theological boxes; the crowd murmured, seemingly impressed. But John Piper was not. He declared that such a “prayer” was not a prayer at all, being the product of a soulless machine rather than the expression of a worshipful human heart.

…

Machine-generated prayers really can sound just like human-generated ones, prone as we are to fall back on generic formulations and common clichés. If an AI prayer isn’t truly prayer, what implications might that have for our own praise and petition, which too often evince our programming in Christianese and other habitual forms?

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus warns his disciples not to “heap up empty phrases [“use vain repetitions,” in other translations] as the Gentiles do” (Matt. 6:7, ESV throughout). He then proceeds to teach the disciples the specific words of the Lord’s Prayer.

…

In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus addressed the problem of “vain repetitions” not by extolling the authenticity of spontaneous and personally composed—or generated?—prayers but by giving his hearers a specific prayer, with petitions whose depths his followers have meditated on for around 2,000 years.

…

[Jesus Christ] is forming people as living words. In 2 Corinthians 3:3, the apostle Paul described the Corinthian Christians as a “letter from Christ delivered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.” Elsewhere, in Colossians 3:16, he spoke of “the word of Christ dwell[ing] in you richly” in the singing of psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. The church is a living message of Christ, a people who are formed as word bearers as Holy Scripture is metabolized into us through memorization, meditation, song, prayer, sermons, reading, and praise.

This, of course, is the purpose of something like the Lord’s Prayer: that in constantly returning to these words, we might be formed by them, becoming the sort of people who can pray them fully. Spontaneity and originality can be worthwhile in their place, but far more important than the words that we produce are the words that go down into our bones and are treasured in our hearts.

Alastair Roberts

It has been a very long time now since I ascribed any value to the “spontaneous” part of “spontaneous prayer” because I long ago picked up on the generic formulations, clichés, and faux fervency.

Contrariwise, when I found the Orthodox faith, the exalted words of its prayer books immediately struck me as (a) better than my own and (b) something that would form me if I continued praying them. They still are the backbone of my daily prayers.

Knowing for the first time

People in American think they know what Christianity is. Some of them intensely dislike it. Some of them dislike it for what it truly is (it was ever so), some for what they mistakenly imagine that it is.

The first of my daily prayers for America is:

Prosper your one holy, catholic and apostolic Church in America, drawing all to your Church and to true repentance and faith in You. May we remember You once more, “knowing You for the first time” in an Orthodox manner.

The quote is from T.S. Eliot’s Little Gidding, part of his famous Four Quartets:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

I came across it Saturday as the epigraph for Addison Hart’s Orthodox “conversion story.” He nearly became Orthodox in 1982, but settled for a halfway measure:

Since my “first” conversion during my early twenties, these convictions have remained in me like bedrock, though they were briefly obscured. That earlier conversion consisted in a turn to a richly liturgical, mystically inclined, patristically informed, uncompromisingly traditional Anglo-Catholicism, from out of an anemic liberal Protestant Episcopalianism – a sort of “in-house” conversion since both were nominally Anglican.

…

Wildernesses don’t come with marked directions, and in recent years my intellectual religious life likewise seemed directionless. I had tried to “come home” to Anglicanism, but it wasn’t home anymore. For one thing, its sheer unrelieved blandness left me at times feeling stultified.

…

I’m not Orthodox with any other goal than to be within the historical Church (and I emphatically do not believe in an “invisible church” where affiliation is of no matter).

Addison Hodges Hart, How I wandered into Orthodoxy: an uncharacteristically personal reflection

One of the causes I’ve consciously taken on in my 27+ years as an Orthodox Christian is to entice people who are mistaken about Christianity to take a look at Orthodox Christianity. Part of that is to help them see things they “can’t unsee” about other traditions that I think I’m competent to comment on. Another part is to feature winsome things from Orthodoxy — winsome enough to entice them into exposure to the Orthodox Faith.

“I’m the man behind the curtain”

When I first started looking into the Orthodox Church, I was still working as a stagehand. So I worked in theaters. I did big concerts, all this kind of stuff, and I was going, as I said, to the beginnings of a megachurch, and there was one point on Sunday morning that as I looked around me and I saw the people lifting up their hands and clearly having, you know, some kind of experience, I thought to myself — and it was a very cynical thought, but this was the thought that I had — “I can, through my professional skills, make them have this experience — whether I believe in it or not, through the technique of the music and the lights and so forth.”

I went to, professionally, I went to a few Dave Matthews band concerts. And so Dave Matthews band, they had this song called Ants Marching, and there’s this one moment in the song when they always turn on this huge bank of lights towards the audience, and I watched this happens three times. The audience gets very excited, goes crazy, has a big emotional experience. That is pure technique, and you can absolutely press a button and they’re suddenly having an experience. And I realized at that moment, I said to myself, “I’m the man behind the curtain. I can do this.”

Now, I don’t doubt the sincerity of those people. I grew up with those people. They’re my family. Absolutely, and I believe in their sincerity. I believe in their love for God. But at the same time, knowing that I could make that happen myself, and … that disillusioned me in a very real way.

And then my experience of orthodox worship, even a very poor version of it in terms of its its wealth, was the thing that actually overwhelmed me and not in like an emotional way like I didn’t have big emotions there was something there was a sense of being of connecting another world.

Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick to Justin Brierly.

Fr. Andrew wasn’t wrong that he could use rock concert techniques to induce “spiritual” ecstasies. My experiences in Evangelicalism were fairly low-tech, but not low on technique. Tone of voice, shouting and then dropping to a whisper; “Now every head bowed and every eye closed … I see that hand; is there another” when there was no hand raised in the first place (to signify that the sermon had landed, and the fruit was ready for harvest).

I was lucky enough not to be quite good enough to be in the proto- “Praise Band,” on stage, watching the manipulation first-hand. Had I actually participated in such, I might well have lost my faith — as some who did participate lost theirs.

One of those was a friend of mine. He was good enough to be in the band. He saw that there were no hands raised when the bandleader/evangelist asked if there were others. He questioned the bandleader, who shot back angrily “I learned that from Thurlow Spurr! Don’t you dare question it!”

When the genuineness of Christian conversion is gauged by a “born-again experience,” and that experience can be produced on demand by manipulative techniques, how can you keep believing?

As it was, I (who heard the Thurlow Spurr story second-hand) only lost the kind of faith you can gin up with trickery. Instead of losing Christianity, I eventually found what Fr. Andrew found.

Come and see.

Filled with all the fullness of God

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 3:17-19 (emphasis added).

This has been a favorite passage of mine for almost 60 years now( I believe I even signed high school yearbooks with the citation). My love of that last phrase in particular, it seems to me, is an anticipation of my almost instant love Orthodox Christianity once I encountered it.

A very, very low bar

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 [one holy church].

Fr. Lawrence Farley

Creation

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

Team Christian

Sometimes people hear about my religious journey and ask me about my “conversion,” but that word is a relic from the rationalist mentality — as if I traded one belief system for another. The process felt more like an inspiration, like someone had breathed life into those old biblical stories so that they now appeared true.

Today, I feel more Jewish than ever, but as I once told some friends, I can’t unread Matthew. For me, the Beatitudes are the part of the Bible where the celestial grandeur most dazzlingly shines through. So these days I’m enchanted by both Judaism and Christianity. I assent to the whole shebang. My Jewish friends, who have been universally generous and forbearing, point out that when you believe in both the Old and New Testaments, you’ve crossed over to Team Christian, which is a fair point.

David Brooks, The Shock of Faith: It’s Nothing Like I Thought It Would Be

Last Meal

I frequent a health club where they post a question on the corkboard daily. A few weeks back, one went like this:

You’re on death row. You’re to be executed tomorrow. What do you want your last meal to be?

I said “the Eucharist.”* It gratified me to hear that my Missouri Synod Lutheran friend who trains in the slot ahead of me had said the same.

I dare say that not one in ten white American evangelical would say that in 2025.

I confess that I struggle to see how “Christian” can meaningfully cover both wanting a last meal of prime rib and wanting a last meal of the body and blood of Christ.

* Confession: “Lobster” flickered in my imagination for about a half-second.

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.

Pure politics, 6/5/25

The Courts

Petulant Trump disavows his signature success (1)

Mr. Trump lashed out at the Federalist Society, blaming it for bad advice on whom to appoint to judgeships. He singled out Leonard Leo, a former longtime leader of the Federalist Society who helped recommend his first-term nominees and who exemplifies the conservative legal movement.

“I was new to Washington, and it was suggested that I use the Federalist Society as a recommending source on judges,” the president wrote. “I did so, openly and freely, but then realized that they were under the thumb of a real ‘sleazebag’ named Leonard Leo, a bad person who, in his own way, probably hates America, and obviously has his own separate ambitions.”

Mr. Leo and Mr. Trump had a falling out in 2020, but the personal attack was a sharp escalation. In a statement, Mr. Leo said, “I’m very grateful for President Trump transforming the federal courts, and it was a privilege being involved.”

Still, Mr. Trump’s tirade strained an already uneasy relationship with traditional legal conservatives.

Many share the president’s goals of strengthening border security, curbing the administrative state and ending “diversity, equity and inclusion” programs, said John Yoo, a conservative law professor. But, he added, they dislike some of Mr. Trump’s methods, whether that is prolifically invoking emergency powers or insulting judges who rule against his administration.

And Professor Yoo, who wrote memos advancing sweeping theories of presidential power as a Bush administration lawyer, said Mr. Trump’s attacks on Mr. Leo were “outrageous.”

“Calling for the impeachment of judges, attacking Leonard Leo personally and basically calling him as traitor as far as I can tell — Trump is basically turning his back on one of his biggest achievements of his first term,” he added, referring to the reshaping of the federal judiciary.

Charlie Savage, Trump, Bashing the Federalist Society, Asserts Autonomy on Judge Picks

For what it’s worth, Trump’s pledge to appoint federal judges from a list compiled by Leonard Leo (not the Federalist Society, which doesn’t do endorsements) was pivotal to his 2016 Election victory, especially among abortion foes who understandably did not trust a twice-divorced narcissist playboy with gambling and porn connections. Charlie Savage hasn’t forgotten that, but I shouldn’t quote his whole article.

If the Senate has a couple of Republicans with integrity, hack appointees like Emil Bove will not be confirmed. C’mon, guys! Save him from himself!

Petulant Trump disavows his signature success (2)

There are many stories in literature about people making deals with the devil. Weirdly, in most of them the devil is a square dealer.

That is, he keeps up his end of the bargain. He offers the protagonist wealth or power in exchange for something ethereal, like their immortal soul, and when they agree he delivers. The Prince of Lies turns out not to be a swindler. Most of the drama happens after he makes good on his promise and comes to collect.

The moral of those stories isn’t that you’re a fool to trade with Beelzebub because you’ll be cheated. It’s that you’re a fool to sacrifice your noblest self for something as fleeting as worldly power.

Conservatives made a deal like that in 2016. Donald Trump offered to stock the federal judiciary with their favorite judges, beginning with the vacancy left by Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court; in return they would set aside their moral, civic, and ideological objections to him and support him in virtually anything he wanted to do, even if it affronted their conservative beliefs. Or basic decency.

The bargain was struck—and he delivered. Three eminent conservative jurists were added to the Supreme Court. Hundreds more were confirmed to federal appellate and district courts. The great white whale of social conservatism, Roe v. Wade, was harpooned in 2022 after a 50-year chase. Many other landmark legal victories for the American right have accumulated since Trump took office in 2017.

Conservatives weren’t cheated. The devil made good.

Fast-forward to last night …

[Leonard] Leo spent many years as the Federalist Society’s sherpa on judicial nominees, advising Republican presidents on whom to appoint and helping to shepherd candidates through the confirmation process. With the exception of Mitch McConnell, no one has done more this century to build a federal bench of originalist judges. But Trump didn’t want originalists—he wanted flunkies—and so Leo’s influence, and the influence of the organization he serves, have gone up in smoke …

Conservatives got the judiciary they wanted in exchange for supporting a man who radiates contempt for the constitutional order. In doing so, they empowered a postliberal movement that despises judges who do their jobs conscientiously instead of dutifully midwifing a Trumpist autocracy. As the Republican Party proceeds further down the path to fascism that those conservatives enabled, eventually the federal judiciary will consist entirely of believers in the “living Constitution,” half authoritarian and half progressive. In the long run, as Reaganites age out and are replaced by younger Trumpists, conservative judges as we’ve known them will go mostly extinct.

That’s what conservatives got for their bargain. The devil has come to collect.

Nick Catoggio

Pardons

The concept of a pardon, of course, is extremely hard for Trump to understand. Traditionally, a pardon is due to someone who has completed (or nearly completed) their sentence, expressed remorse, and turned their life around — and thereby been the recipient of mercy. But remorse is a concept unknown to a pathological narcissist. Mercy is even stranger. After all, who wins and who loses in an act of mercy? It’s one of those acts defined by grace — another literally meaningless concept for Trump. For him, all human conduct is built on a zero-sum, winner-vs-loser foundation. So a pardon is always instrumental — a way to reward allies, win credits, and enlarge his power by announcing to the world that he alone is the ultimate rule of law, and can intervene at any point to ensure his version of justice is the dispositive one. A monarch, in other words.

…

But Trump is the real outlier (and Biden, in his defense, used Trump’s abuse as a justification for his own self-dealing). In recent times he’s out in front in numbers: more than 1,700 full pardons so far, and we have three-and-a-half years to go. Nixon’s 863, Carter’s 574, Clinton’s 396, W’s 189, and Obama’s 212 put it in perspective. But these previous presidents abused the power occasionally — it’s an absolute power after all — while largely respecting the contours of the rule of law.

Trump has dispensed with any pretense of that. He is an instinctual tyrant — see his immigration overreach and his unilateral tariff mania — and the pardon power was almost made for him. The weakness of any constitution is the virtue — or, more often, the lack of it — in its office-holders. And Trump has the civic virtue of Jeffrey Epstein. The pardon power was always going to be a loaded gun in his tiny, careless hands.

… [H]e is using the pardon power all the time, rather than waiting till the end of his term. It replaces the rule of law with monarchical discretion. That’s why he could not tolerate Jeff Sessions all those years ago. Because Sessions, for all his passionate partisanship, still understood the system he was operating in and still believed that the appearance of impartial justice was integral to liberal democracy’s survival. Sessions was an American.

…

A majority of the American electorate, mind you, endorsed this lawlessness last November. It’s hard to pity them, as they absorb or ignore all the corruption they voted for and are still content to tolerate. They love crypto-monarchy as long as their king is on the throne. They do not seem to understand that this version of monarchy is still an elected one, and that another king from the other tribe may wear the crown some day. They may miss the benefits of liberal democracy once they have succeeded in killing it.

Andrew Sullivan, Pardon The Death Of Liberal Democracy

TACO

I’m not an active investor. I tend to buy and hold Mutual Funds and ETFs. (That’s just me; you do you.) But it did not escape my notice, even before the term was coined, that what’s now dubbed “TACO trades” could be profitable.

Wall Street is all over the “TACO trade,” another instance of people realizing they shouldn’t take the president at face value. “TACO” is short for “Trump always chickens out.” Markets have tended to go down when Trump announces new tariffs, but investors have recognized that a lot of this is bluffing, so they’re buying the dip and then profiting off the inevitable rally.

A reporter asked Trump about the expression on Wednesday, and he was furious. “I chicken out? I’ve never heard that,” he said. “Don’t ever say what you said. That’s a nasty question. To me, that’s the nastiest question.” The reaction demonstrates that the traders are right, because—to mix zoological metaphors—a hit dog will holler. The White House keeps talking tough about levying new tariffs on friends and geopolitical rivals alike, but Trump has frequently gone on to lower the measures or delay them for weeks or months.

Foreign leaders had figured out that Trump was a pushover by May 2017, and a year later, I laid out in detail his pattern of nearly always folding. He’s a desirable negotiating foil, despite his unpredictable nature, because he doesn’t tend to know his material well, has a short attention span, and can be easily manipulated by flattery. The remarkable thing is that it’s taken this long for Wall Street to catch on.

David A. Graham, The TACO Presidency

Now that the cat’s out of the bag, the profitability will diminish and what’s left will mostly be the pleasure of annoying Velveeta Voldemort.

The most incompetent administration ever

A federal appeals panel ordered officials not to deport a 31-year-old to El Salvador. Minutes later, it happened anyway. The government blamed “administrative errors.”

Alan Feuer, NYT

Will Trump pay any price for this fishy string of “administrative errors”?

Among his voters, I doubt it. But with the courts, the toll is steep and rising. They just cannot believe anything Administration lawyers promise. And they shouldn’t.

DJT, the anti-conservative

[I]t’s hard to think of a more anti-conservative figure than President Donald Trump or a more anti-conservative movement than MAGA. Trump and his supporters evince a disdain for laws, procedures, and the Constitution. They want to empower the federal government in order to turn it into an instrument of brute force that can be used to reward allies and destroy opponents.

Trump and his administration have abolished agencies and imposed sweeping tariffs even when they don’t have the legal authority to do so. They are deporting people without due process. Top aides are floating the idea of suspending the writ of habeas corpus, one of the most important constitutional protections against unlawful detention. Judges, who are the target of threats from the president, fear for their safety. So do the very few Republicans who are willing to assert their independence from Trump.

In one of his first official acts, Trump granted clemency to more than 1,500 people charged in connection with the violent attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, including those convicted of seditious conspiracy. The president and his family are engaging in a level of corruption that was previously unfathomable. And he and his administration have shown no qualms about using the federal government to target private companies, law firms, and universities; suing news organizations for baseless reasons; and ordering criminal probes into former administration officials who criticized Trump.

The Trump administration is a thugocracy, and the Republican Party he controls supports him each step of the way. Almost every principle to which Republicans once professed fealty has been jettisoned. The party is now devoted to the abuse of power and to vengeance.

…

The significance of this shift can hardly be overstated. A party that formerly proclaimed allegiance to the Constitution and the rule of law, warned about the concentration and abuse of power, and championed virtue, restraint, and moral formation has been transmogrified. The Republican Party now stands for everything it once loathed.

Peter Wehner

Thugocracy update

And she has been frank about the dilemma faced by Republicans like her who are dismayed about the president’s policies and pronouncements but worried that speaking out about them could bring death threats or worse.

“We are all afraid,” she told constituents in April, adding: “I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real. And that’s not right.”

Catie Edmondson, Lisa Murkowski Isn’t Using ‘Nice Words’ About Life Under Trump

I do acknowledge threats against Trump’s life, too. Several isolated nuts have been arrested and charged. But it seems to me that a President and his supporters holding Congress hostage for fear of their lives is an order of magnitude worse.

No laughing matter

Next month will be the first anniversary of Tim Walz’s branding of Donald Trump, JD Vance and, by implication, some of their political associates as “weird,” and it’s obvious now that Walz spoke too soon, before Trump won in November and his administration turned weirdness into a credential and an operating principle, before weirdness started afflicting Trump allies who seemed a little less weird in the past, before episodes of Trump-adjacent weirdness proliferated.

… [T]his pageant of peculiarity isn’t a laughing matter. It reflects Trump’s confusion of nonconformity with boldness. It speaks to his love of performance, even if it’s the fruit of a loopy performer. It demonstrates his desire to rattle, no matter how infantile the rattling.

Frank Bruni

Same column, change of topic:

If I’m subjected to one more lamentation, one more rant, about how lost and pitiable and shameful the Democratic Party is, my head is going to explode. Not because the Democratic Party is in good shape — it isn’t. Not because it can make do with only minor adjustments — it can’t. It’s guilty of the arrogance and incompetence of which it’s accused. And the country’s future as a reasonably healthy and prosperous democracy depends on Democrats’ recognition and remedy of that.

But some of the extravagant lashing of the party carries the implicit suggestion that Republicans, by contrast, have their act together. Excuse me? If success at the polls is the only metric for that, then sure, yes, they’re in an enviable spot. But it’s a wretched (and, I have to believe, vulnerable) one. Republican lawmakers who rightly gaped in horror at the events of Jan. 6, 2021, later developed collective amnesia, putting power several light-years above principle. They then indulged or outright applauded Trump’s laughable cabinet picks and his adoration of Musk and his cockamamie tariffs and his abandonment of due process and his swag from Qatar and his sadistic humiliation of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and so many other cruelties and outrages that this sentence could go on forever. I struggle to admire Republicans’ political chops. I’m too distracted by their moral rot.

For love of sentences

In Esquire, Dave Holmes marveled at Senator Lindsey Graham’s suggestion, in a social media post before the conclave, that cardinals consider the idea of Trump as the next pope: “I guess he had not yet closed the day’s humiliation ring on his Apple Watch.” Holmes added that while Graham was probably joking, “You can’t be tongue-in-cheek when you are actively licking the boot. There is just not enough tongue for both jobs.” (Susan Fitzgerald, Las Cruces, N.M.)

Frank Bruni (a prior week)

Dissing the Dems

I confess that my laser-focus on Trump can sound like excusing the Democrats’ problems. It really isn’t. I’m just madder at my former party than at the I party whose Presidential nominee I voted for only once, 53 years ago.

An Andrew Sullivan podcast this week with the authors of Original Sin reminded me of just how screwed we are in the other of our major-party choices, the Dems, and how Joe Biden fooled me with his “nice guy” schtick. Though I didn’t vote for him, I would have done so if my fair state hadn’t been a lock for Trump.

Hypocrisy

Hypocrisy is the tribute paid to virtue by vice.

I will give Trump 2.0 credit for not adding hypocrisy to its countless other sins.

On second thought, his attacks on Ivy League universities for suffering antisemites gladly may qualify.

The best jokes

It has been said that the best jokes are dangerous because they are in some way truthful.

On Wednesday, a dangerous joke was told in the Oval Office. The South African president turned to the American president and said: “I’m sorry I don’t have a plane to give you.”

NYT

FWIW

  • Trump lost 96% of federal court cases in May. Even GOP-appointed judges ruled against him 72% of the time,” – Jack Hopkins.
  • “The Washington Post has now confirmed that it was Trump who asked the Qataris to gift him the plane for free (rather than the Qataris offering it), and that Qatar is demanding a written memo from the White House to this effect before the deal is finalized,” – Tom Malinowski.

Andrew Sullivan, Pardon The Death Of Liberal Democracy

PBS

… and by the numbers 86 and 47.

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.

Holy Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council, Afterfeast of Ascension

What am I to do?

“Man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal.” Ethical questions presuppose narrative questions. As he put it, “I can only answer the question, ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question, ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’”

Alasdair Macintyre, 1929-2025, via Christopher Kaczor

Inoculated

C. S. Lewis once claimed that it was much harder to present the Christian story to a post-Christian culture than to a pre-Christian one, and today we can see how true this claim is. Where I come from, people are largely inoculated against Christianity, or what they imagine Christianity to be. The history, the cultural baggage, the half-formed prejudices: all of these are compounded by a stark lack of understanding of what the Christian Way really is.

Paul Kingsnorth, Prose and Principalities

Not Mincing Words

On Memorial Day, I stumbled onto an Orthodox Priest in Texas who is gung-ho on “masculinity” and other click-baity stuff. I don’t link to indecent material, and this stuff felt indecent, twisted — Mark Driscoll in a cassock.

Since the story was from BBC, it came to the attention of the Russian Orthodox Bishop of London and Western Europe, who felt compelled to speak.

If he was speaking spontaneous, unprepared remarks, then he’s a remarkable man and Bishop. I want to quote every pointed, potent word, because my effort to excerpt it could leave out things that might be just what you need to “hear.”

So I give you a link to the full remarks: ‘Seeking After Worldly Visions of “Masculinity” is Not an Orthodox Pursuit’: A Word From Bishop Irenei.

I cannot deny that growth of the Orthodox Church in North America has been disproportionately from men coming in, and young men particularly. The appeal of Orthodoxy to men had been noted before I entered the Church, but I’m not sure it has ever been explained.

What I can tell you from my own parish (and my personal experience doesn’t extend much further than that) is that it’s not because our Priest obsesses over masculinity, or because the parish has special men’s ministries, or any other gimmick. It seems to be “a God thing,” and I can go no further than that.

Christ, the Life of all

To be Christian, to believe in Christ, means and has always meant this: to know in a transrational and yet absolutely certain way called faith, that Christ is the Life of all life, that He is Life itself and, therefore, my life. “In him was life; and the life was the light of men.” All Christian doctrines—those of the incarnation, redemption, atonement—are explanations, consequences, but not the “cause” of that faith. Only when we believe in Christ do all these affirmations become “valid” and “consistent.” But faith itself is the acceptance not of this or that “proposition” about Christ, but of Christ Himself as the Life and the light of life. “For the life was manifested and we have seen it, and bear witness, and show unto you that eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us” (1 Jn. 1:2). In this sense Christian faith is radically different from “religious belief.” Its starting point is not “belief” but love.

Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World

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

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

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

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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

Saturday, 5/31/25

AI doomsday?

[Jaron] Lanier agreed that it’s up to humans to protect the truth in the age of AI, but was less optimistic that we will do so: “The issue with AI is not the AI. It’s not the large language model. It’s the concentration of power and wealth around who owns it,” he said. “You have to look at the big system, including the people, the money, the business, the society, the psychology, the mythmaking, the politics.”

A Free Press Debate on Artificial Intelligence in San Francisco

Jaron Lanier had fallen off my radar for a few years. I’ll forever be interested in his take on anything regarding computers and humanity (together, not separately).

Bon mots

Codgers and technology go together like peanut butter and sardines.

Frank Bruni. Then this, merely via Frank Bruni, not from him:

In the quarterly journal Sapir, Bret Stephens made a kind of peace with the heavily partisan slant of so much cable television news: “To demand scrupulous impartiality on their broadcasts is like expecting fancy linens at a Motel 6.” (Naomi Lerner, West Orange, N.J.)

A non-tribal Democrat

Some of my subscribers dislike when I throw elbows to my left. They share my disdain for Donald Trump and his party, and my commitment to understanding them in light of political theory and history, but they are also devoted Democrats who have warm feelings for Joe Biden, were thrilled by the campaign of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, and still seethe about Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016.

That isn’t me. I vote for Democrats. I directionally agree with them on most issues. And I consider the Republican alternative thoroughly unacceptable. Yet I am not a devoted Democrat. A big part of the reason is that I’m not a joiner—of anything. I value my own independence too much and temperamentally resist deploying my talents to advance a cause—any cause, even a worthy one, and even one wrapped up, at this moment, with the fate of liberal democratic self-government in the United States.

But this way of thinking presumes that working to help the Democrats should take the form of deferring to and falling in line behind party leadership and elected officials, taking marching orders, rallying around candidates and nominees endorsed by the party bigwigs, and then maintaining message discipline to get them elected. That’s what I resist. But there’s another kind of devotion—one that expresses itself as tough love and a willingness to speak candidly, and even harshly, about faults.

…

… a Democratic researcher is quoted as saying that when she asks swing voters to liken the two parties to animals, they consistently describe Republicans as lions, tigers, and sharks—“apex predators” that “take what they want when they want”—but Democrats as tortoises, slugs, or sloths, creatures typically considered “slow, plodding, [and] passive.”

Damon Linker, A Party of Sloths

Substance, process

One of this crazy-making aspects of life in Trump 2.0 is that the media coverage of the administration’s antics focuses, mostly on the substance of what they are doing, ignoring the process, and the question of whether they have the authority to do it at all.

Such, I feared, was the infirmity of NPR and PBS Aren’t Entitled to Your Tax Dollars, a Free Press article by a serious Ivy league constitutional law professor. I slogged my way through it, agreeing with the author again and again, but frustrated that he was ignoring the elephant in the room. Finally, in literally the last paragraph, he mentioned the elephant almost as a throwaway line:

NPR also alleges in its complaint that the federal statute creating the Corporation for Public Broadcasting prohibits Trump from making this defunding decision. That’s a very different argument, which I’m not addressing here ….

I would venture a guess that nine out of ten people who read this column will come away with the impression that NPR and PBS are suffering from a liberal sense of entitlement to tax dollars, and miss the point about there being some limits to executive power.

In the end, it may not matter because this Congress is sufficiently servile that if Trump asks Congress to defund CPB, PBS and NPR (a longtime GOP talking point), it almost certainly will oblige him.

But process does matter, tremendously. Where the power to do something resides also matters.

Dissing Adoption

The New York Times … has never found a basic human good it couldn’t ponderously criticize with the shuffling-foot smarm of the ideas festival class. There’s “I Was Adopted From China as a Baby. I’m Still Coming to Terms With That.” There’s “World’s Largest ‘Baby Exporter’ Admits to Adoption Fraud.” There’s “Given Away: Korean Adoptees Share Their Stories.” (In easily-digestible video format!) There’s “I Was Adopted. I Know the Trauma It Can Inflict.” (Subtle.) The New Yorker, a $12,000 espresso machine transformed into a magazine by a mischievous wizard, has “How an Adoption Broker Cashed In on Prospective Parents’ Dreams,” “Living in Adoption’s Emotional Aftermath,” and “Where is your Mother?” (The answer is that she has been separated from her child by a cruel and fickle child welfare system despite being perfectly fit, which I’m sure is how it usually goes.) The Atlantic has “No One’s Children: America’s long history of secret adoption.” (Would you be shocked to learn that said history isn’t a good one?) They’ve got “The New Question Haunting Adoption,” the question being whether adoption is really a secretly selfish act, you know, the selfish act of taking a severely-disabled toddler into your home to provide them with support and love after their birth parents smoked meth throughout pregnancy. They also have, incredibly, “What Adoption ‘Salvation’ Narratives Get Wrong,” “Adoption Is Not a Fairy-Tale Ending,” “The Dark, Sad Side of Domestic Adoption”…. I could go on, and that’s just three prestigious publications. There’s a whole world out of this out there.

This is all, for the record, a really excellent example of what we used to mean when we used the word ideology. Once upon a time, one wouldn’t say “My ideology is…” because ideology referred to the hidden, unexplored, unconscious politics that lay beneath the public, open, explicit politics. An ideology was those pre-political assumptions and beliefs which conditioned and limited political thought, which made the conscious political philosophy of any individual what it was. Ideology is the skeleton that hides unseen within the animal of politics but nevertheless determines the structure of that which is seen. Ideology exists in both the macro and the micro; this bizarre upper-caste antipathy towards ideology is a good example. If you asked leadership at these publications if they had any particular interest in leading a charge against the practice of adoption, they’d say no, of course not, what a weird question! If you were to show them just how repetitively this particular set of critiques and questions and hrm hrm hrm noises gets published in their pages, they’d swear to you that it reflects no underlying party line. And yet there it is, the evidence, in black and white. Something about the current constitution of the anxious educated urbanite liberal soul cries out inside of them: the real problem is adoption.

Freddie deBoer, Adoption is Good

If the shoe fits

A well-regarded Evangelical pastor published this weeks before the 2020 Election.

[T]his is a long-overdue article attempting to explain why I remain baffled that so many Christians consider the sins of unrepentant sexual immorality (porneia), unrepentant boastfulness (alazoneia), unrepentant vulgarity (aischrologia), unrepentant factiousness (dichostasiai), and the like, to be only toxic for our nation, while policies that endorse baby-killing, sex-switching, freedom-limiting, and socialistic overreach are viewed as deadly.

…

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

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

…

Christians communicate a falsehood to unbelievers (who are also baffled!) when we act as if policies and laws that protect life and freedom are more precious than being a certain kind of person. The church is paying dearly, and will continue to pay, for our communicating this falsehood year after year.

The justifications for ranking the destructive effects of persons below the destructive effects of policies ring hollow.

I find it bewildering that Christians can be so sure that greater damage will be done by bad judges, bad laws, and bad policies than is being done by the culture-infecting spread of the gangrene of sinful self-exaltation, and boasting, and strife-stirring (eristikos).

…

I think it is baffling and presumptuous to assume that pro-abortion policies kill more people than a culture-saturating, pro-self pride.

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

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

John Piper, Policies, Persons, and Paths to Ruin: Pondering the Implications of the 2020 Election

Piper did not say who he was voting for. He did not name names. For that reason, I’m blogging this separately from pointed political material.

But I’m not going to deny that my heart soared to see that our current President had not captured and reduced to servility the entirety of one of America’s most prominent Christian traditions.

The right to know isn’t the whole story

To further clarify our situation, consider W. H. Auden’s discussion, which I’ve cited before, of the idea that, as he put it, “the right to know is absolute and unlimited.” “We are quite prepared,” Auden wrote,

“to admit that, while food and sex are good in themselves, an uncontrolled pursuit of either is not, but it is difficult for us to believe that intellectual curiosity is a desire like any other, and to recognize that correct knowledge and truth are not identical. To apply a categorical imperative to knowing, so that, instead of asking, ‘What can I know?’ we ask, ‘What, at this moment, am I meant to know?’ — to entertain the possibility that the only knowledge which can be true for us is the knowledge that we can live up to — that seems to all of us crazy and almost immoral.”

L.M. Sacasas, Structurally Induced Acedia (The Convivial Society)

Harvard and the Trump administration

Harvard and the Trump administration have each finally met an adversary too big to push around. America’s richest university never really considered how much it depends on government policy, including lavish federal research funding, federal student aid, and a permissive immigration regime for the foreign students—who make up a third of the university’s student body and often subsidize the rest by paying more. Progressives also never thought through how the many tools they devised for using government leverage against private institutions—including threatening tax exemptions, as the Supreme Court allowed on dubious grounds in Bob Jones University v. United States (1983)—could be used against universities that engage in race discrimination for the “right” reasons, cultivate a political monoculture among the faculty, and permit campus mobs to terrorize minority groups who are out of progressive favor (Jews). Now, Trump is trying to strip Harvard of everything—tax exemption, federal funding, and visas for foreign students already enrolled. While the comeuppance for Harvard is admittedly delicious, the president is abusing powers he ought not to have, and Harvard has deep enough pockets to fight him in court.

National Review Weekly email.

Some cases don’t have valid arguments on both sides. That I find nothing “delicious” about Harvard’s “comeuppance” is an example of why I ignore National Review’s regular email invitations to resubscribe.

Can a car have a “catfish smile”?

“Behind that catfish smile, the company’s twin-turbo 4.0-liter DOHC V8 now discharges a drama-drenched 656 hp and 590 lb-ft—153 hp and 85 lb-ft more than the previous Vantage Roadster—thanks to larger turbochargers, revised camshaft profiles, optimized compression ratio and upgraded fueling and cooling.”

Kudos to Dan Neil for the spot-on “catfish smile.”

The car, by the way, is a 2025 Aston Martin Vantage Roadster, which will set you back $300,000 as equipped (this week’s ephemeral tariffs not included).

Credentials, good times, and genuine learning

Most young people today feel, with considerable justification, that they live in an economically precarious time. They therefore want the credential that will open doors that lead to a good job, either directly or (by getting them into good graduate programs) indirectly …

But those same young people also want to have a good time in college, a period of social experience and experimentation that they (rightly) think will be harder to come by when they enter that working world …

… Yes, students understand — they understand quite well, and vocally regret — that when they use chatbots they are not learning much, if anything. But the acquisition of knowledge is a third competing good, and if they pursue that one seriously they may well have to sacrifice one of the other two, or even both. Right now they can have two out of three, and as Meat Loaf taught us all long ago, two out of three ain’t bad.

Alan Jacobs, responding to Ted Gioia on the topic of ending AI cheating.

Potpourri

  • After Trump held a crypto dinner last Thursday night, crypto moguls who paid to be there felt scammed that the president didn’t even stick around at the event they’d hoped to do their own scams at. I saw someone describe him as the apex scammer. Our Scammander in Chief.
  • In other Russia news, a new statue of Joseph Stalin in a Moscow metro station was unveiled this month. President Putin has called Stalin an “effective manager,” and has said that enemies of Russia use the “excessive demonization” of Stalin to attack “the Soviet Union and Russia.” Stalin is back, big time. Interesting that “effective manager” is being used here to describe a man who facilitated the death of millions—and not efficiently. But I’m not a businessman.
  • The continued reckoning: A postmortem on Kamala Harris’s campaign cited a “perception gap” as one of the reasons she lost, saying voters believed she held positions that she didn’t. “Over 80% of swing voters who chose Trump believed Harris held positions she didn’t campaign on in 2024, including supporting taxpayer funding for transgender surgeries for undocumented immigrants (83%), mandatory electric vehicles by 2035 (82%), decriminalizing border crossings (77%), and defunding the police (72%).” But Harris had, in fact, supported all of these positions. Like, she is on record supporting each of those positions (here, here, here, and here). So it’s not really a perception problem so much as a reception problem, like these ideas are not popular even though I support them. There’s a sense among Dems that people should simply ignore the things that are unpopular and that referencing them is fake news. Like, how dare you talk about the surge of migrants coming through our new open borders thanks to swift changes from the Biden admin. Yes, it’s technically true, but it’s disinformation-coded.
  • Leave Bruce alone: A bar in New Jersey canceled a performance by a Bruce Springsteen tribute band after the real Springsteen called Trump “corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous” while on tour in England. Citing the bar’s MAGA clientele, the bar owner said that a Springsteen cover band would be “too risky at the moment.” And: “Whenever the national anthem plays, my bar stands and is in total silence, that’s our clientele. Toms River is red and won’t stand for his bull—.” [But MAGA doesn’t have a violent streak. No way. That’s fake news.]
  • Things that are not antisemitism: The Democratic Socialists of America “Liberation Caucus” has announced its support for Elias Rodriguez, the suspect arrested for slaughtering two Israeli Embassy staffers outside D.C.’s Capital Jewish Museum last week. Here’s the statement signed by the DSA Liberation folks and a bunch of others: “As imperialism has made the entire world its battlefield, it is justified to fight it, by any means necessary, without regard for geography.” And: “[T]here must be consequences for genocidal [Z]ionist imperialism, and those consequences are righteous.”

Nellie Bowles

Fake my …

The latest fitness craze is surely going to be Fake My Run. It fits perfectly with the national ethos whereby university students are already doing Fake My Education.

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.