Recommendation

Two guys who know what’s going on in Evangelicalism these days sat down for a chat a few months ago: Russell Moore and David French. I only heard it this past week, and it’s really awfully good. It’s available as a podcast as well as the linked YouTube video.

I’m used to David French as a legal and political commentator, but he’s a pretty darned good observer of his religious milieu — as, of course, is Russell Moore whose life work is pervasively religious.

Sizing things up realistically

On the one hand, I trust in God’s providence.

On the other hand, there was a whole lot about the America I grew up in, and worked in, that I’m going to miss now that it’s gone. I’m reminded of the Brit who said of losing the war something like “I should not be able to number all the things I would miss.”

Here comes the acid test of “I have learned in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content.”

Reading the Riot Act to Social Media “Theologians”

You have to accept that if you only know English and you can only read the Church Fathers and the Bible in translation, you at some point are going to have to … find someone who actually knows the original languages who you trust, and just believe them about what it says.

You don’t have to go learn those languages, but if you’re not going to go and learn those languages, you’re not entitled to an opinion on this … Shut up. Shut up on social media. Stop causing trouble. Stop trying to cause factions in the Church. That’s a sin. That’s a grievous sin … You have to learn before you can teach.

Stole Something? Kill a Goat!.

This blunt quote is directed particularly at Orthodox laymen who argue for substitutionary atonement based on reading the Church Fathers translated, in most instances, by Philip Schaff, a Calvinist Protestant. Substitutionary atonement (Christ in place of me) is not the position of the Orthodox Church (more like Christ on behalf of me — setting aside our different view of “atonement” itself).

But I’m confident that Orthodox Christians aren’t the only autodidact “theologians” quoting Church Fathers from Schaff. I own Schaff’s translations (as I did before becoming Orthodox, I believe). I honor his monumental work in translating so much. Heck, I even honor, in relative terms, the Mercerburg Theology with which he is associated. But I dare not trust him very far.

The least you can do

The man and woman cannot utterly sink who on every seventh day is obliged to appear in decent apparel, and to join with all the standing and respectability of the community in a united act of worship.

David Hacket Fischer, Albion’s Seed. I don’t recall who, or when, or in what region of America, Fischer was quoting, and it doesn’t seem worth looking up.

How do you measure comfort care?

Gonzalez is troubled to learn that the nuns “consistently fail to provide statistics on the efficacy of their work.” But there is no ready yardstick to measure the success of outreach programs to lepers. And how does one measure the efficacy of programs designed to comfort the dying?

Bill Donohue, Unmasking Mother Teresa’s Critics.

There are swaths of reality that are not susceptible to meaningful metrics and statistics. It’s prudent to ask for statistics on some things, yes, but monstrously reductionist to treat as some kind of scam the inability to produce statistics on other things.

Ecumenical Winter

The foremost divides in Western Christendom for some time fell along Protestant and Roman Catholic dividing lines, from the sixteenth century well through the Troubles in Northern Ireland. But today all Christians with even the most basic (creedal) orthodox theology and shared vision of human sexuality, the sanctity of life, and more find themselves as co-belligerents in a struggle with an inhumane and secularizing Western society and progressivist religion. There is far greater good will towards one another for that reason alone than there was in the past five centuries, culminating in cooperation such as Evangelicals and Catholics Together. Gone with the vanishing Protestant Mainline is the milquetoast ecumenism wherein “doctrine divides, service unites.” Here to stay is an emerging ecumenism where the things held in common run to the core of one’s commitments in life and in death.

Joshua Heavin, Confessional Protestantism in Ecumenical Winter

Ancillary reading

The first time I went to India, it was such a shock for me, the different culture, and everything was a new experience for me. I had so much to learn. The second time it was more like everyday life. The main thing I understood the second time was that I didn’t need as many things as I thought. Not at all. I could live with what I could carry in one backpack. With a family, I had thought I needed all that furniture and tables and kitchen equipment and washing machines and a vacuum cleaner. I realized I really can live simply. After that, I thought, I could live exactly this way anywhere.

Andy Courturier, The Abundance of Less

Highly recommended for seeing how life could be different without being worse. Like the Tao Te Ching (directly and through Christ The Eternal Tao), this book helped me see some things more vividly because of the foreign setting.

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As the White House tutors us about the “real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” I’m very glad to be in a church where every Sunday we sing the Beatitudes, which tell us the way blessedness works.

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 and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.