Tag: Bible

Snowed in

For the second time this late Autumn (remember: winter isn’t official until December 21, give or take a day according to some refinement that messes up my tidy grade-school precision), our Liturgy is cancelled because of hazardous travel conditions. Today, it’s sub-zero cold and winds whipping around perhaps seven inches of yesterday’s light powdery snow.

Learning to pray as we ought

No one may mock another’s form of prayer. Extempore prayers and set prayers both reach the Throne if there is any spark of desire in the one praying that they do so. God is not a literary critic or a speech teacher. He does not grade our prayers. But it is for us to realize that there is great help available for us in our prayers. Spontaneity is impossible sooner or later; there only remains for us to choose which set of phrases we will make our own. The prayers of the church lead us into regions that, left to our own resources, we might never have imagined. Also, in this connection, it is worthwhile remembering that prayer is as much a matter of our learning to pray what we ought to pray, as it is expressing what we feel at given moments. The prayer of the church gives us great help here.

Tom Howard, Evangelical is Not Enough.

I have doubtless been guilty of facile caricatures of evangelicalism. But what struck me when I first read Evangelical is Not Enough is that the evangelicalism in which Howard was raised was utterly sane and genuinely pious (it made my sane and pious childhood home look almost secular). Its fruit was not only Tom Howard, but his less-renowned sister, Elizabeth Elliot Leach.

Although I swam the Bosporus instead of the Tiber, I benefited greatly from his conclusion that even great Evangelical piety was not enough. The quote above is reflects just one of the glories of traditional Christian churches, and it’s one that I appreciated.

The inadequacies of Evangelicalism, combined with the compelling character of Jesus Christ and, these days, the shallowness of much Evangelicalism, is at the root of young people flooding into Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches.

Music in the House of Love

Not all Evangelicalism (broadly construed) is as healthy as that of the Howard household:

My music phobia began when I first converted to Christianity in my early twenties. During that time, I came into contact with well-meaning but strict Pentecostals who tended to view secular music as spiritually dangerous. Though I’d grown up with parents who had the classic and independent rock stations on all day (even when we weren’t home), and though my happiest memory was seeing Counting Crows at Jones Beach Theater with my mom at eight years old, the Pentecostals’ caution rubbed off on me. And it rubbed off badly.

In an effort to purge my home of demons, I deleted all of my favorite music (to the extent that it’s possible to do so in our digital age). I burned all my musical biographies in the wood-burning stove, including my prized possession: A large gray book of Bob Dylan’s lyrics from 1962-85, complete with recreations of sketches and notes from his journal. I tore up my collections of Leonard Cohen lyrics, frantically praying, “Lord, is there anything he has written that pleases you?”

And I swear, when I flipped open the book, it opened to Cohen’s poem “Prayer for Messiah.” I wish I could say this small miracle kept me from burning the book, but it didn’t.
…

Emily Ruddy, Music in the House of Love

This kind of thing was part of the Bill Gothard cult, the nascent version of which my Evangelical high school foolishly allowed in. But it was not ubiquitous in the sort of Evangelicalism I experienced. I rejected Gothard’s view and any others like it.

Ruddy continues:

…
Several years into my conversion to Orthodoxy, after a long stretch of heartbreaking silence and bad Christian pop, I’ve fallen in love with music again, my music. I’ve replaced the Bob Dylan book with an identical copy I found on Poshmark. According to my Spotify Wrapped playlist, I’m actually in the top 0.001% of Dylan listeners worldwide. I’m not in the 0.001% of many things in life, so I’ll take what I can get.

My healing in this area corresponds to my entry into this ancient incarnational tradition. Orthodox Christians, for the most part, truly believe what they pray: That God is everywhere present and fills all things. They have a much healthier relationship with music, literature and culture than my Pentecostal companions did, which was a part of the draw. That, and the fact that the Orthodox sanctuary truly felt like a sanctuary. No yelling, no flailing, no smoke except incense smoke. Only worship.

Nicea and its Creed

This year marks the 1700th anniversary of the First Council of Nicaea, a milestone observed by churches, seminaries, and religious institutions but largely ignored by the secular press. Perhaps that is to be expected, since most readers who don’t know their homoousios (of same substance) from their homoiousios (of like substance) can hardly be expected to care about a few hundred bishops, priests, monks, and ascetics convened nearly two millennia ago in an Anatolian backwater. Sadly, that is the public’s loss. Whatever the intricacies of theology debated at Nicaea, this first of seven ecumenical councils did nothing less than create (or rather confirm) the core doctrine of orthodox Christianity.

Constantine, who had not yet converted to Christianity or declared it the official religion of his empire, convened the gathering to address the difficult questions raised by Arius concerning the nature of Christ’s divinity: namely, whether the Son of God was created by or coeternal with the Father. “The main imperial Churches in the Latin West and the Greek East, but also on the imperial frontier, all agreed on the outcome,” writes historian Diarmaid MacCulloch in his provocatively titled book, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, “Jesus Christ the Son of God is not created and is equal to the Father in the Trinity.” 

That interpretation was more a confirmation than a conclusion, the purpose of the council having been to rectify the supposed errors of Arius and his considerable following who maintained that Christ, though divine, was still created by the Father …

…

High Church or low church, smells and bells or white-washed walls, Gregorian chants or praise bands, all orthodox believers affirm the words of that early credo. 

…

Although I am not attempting to write apologetics on behalf of those long-dead bishops or even some kind of “mere orthodoxy” for the millennial set, I would note that when it comes to the major controversies that preceded Nicaea, those who maintain that the heretical is always more radical, subversive, and ecstatic than orthodoxy are misinformed. In truth, the orthodox position was more at home with mystery and paradox than the interpretations or imaginings of erstwhile renegades.

…

[W]hen believers eschew the language of paradox, they display discomfort with the faith. A 2025 poll from the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University reports that only 16 percent of American Christians are Trinitarian, even though the vast majority are members of denominations that profess the Nicene Creed. On one hand, who can blame them? The Nicene Creed, and other statements of the early Church, are complicated, counterintuitive, baroque, and Byzantine (in both senses of that last word). Better to streamline it, clean it up, rationalize it, tame it.

Ed Simon, The Legacy of Nicaea.

Appreciative, I nevertheless beg to differ a bit. 28+ years ago, I thought I affirmed the Nicene Creed, without mental reservation, and as for the person of Jesus Christ, I probably did. But when it came to “… in one holy, catholic and apostolic Church,” I meant something other than what the 318 Holy Fathers assembled at Nicea had meant.

That was one of the two major epiphanies that shamed me out of the constellation of Protestant and Evangelical assemblies, who thought nothing of schism and who fancied the “one holy, catholic and apostolic Church” a ghostly, invisible, spiritual fellowship among all individuals who trusted Jesus properly, wheresoever they might be on Sunday morning.

(The other epiphany was that the Reformation principle of sola scriptura, scripture alone, was a Pandora’s Box of mischief, schism and disunity.)

Averting our eyes

Walking backwards into our own graves, so filled with denial because we lived not really once thinking that such a thing could one day happen to us. We miss the needed consciousness that sitting with a dead body will sober and sanctify us into. We haven’t been done a favour by having the end of life ushered out of sight.

Part of getting made into a human is the final part. Getting un-made. That preparing for death is not the same as what was before it. Denial is not just a river in Egypt. It’s not my time is not the appropriate mantra of a grown up. One day, any day, it will be my time, is better.

Martin Shaw

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 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.

Sunday, 11/30/25

Prayer

On sin

Most Holy Trinity, have mercy on us. Lord, cleanse us from our sins. Master, pardon our transgressions. Holy One, visit and heal our infirmities for Your name’s sake.

This is part of the Orthodox Trisagion (“thrice-holy”) prayers. And the first time I heard or read that prayer, I thought they get it!

I had recognized for a long time that part of the way I contributed to the chaos and evil in the world was not by shaking my fist in God’s face and saying “I know what You want, but I’m gonna do it my way!” Part of my contribution was cluelessness, self-absorption, clumsiness.

And my Protestant milieu seemed totally not to get that.

I remember being told in my Evangelical and Evangelical-adjacent Protestantism that sin was rebellion against God. “Period. Full stop.” as they say. Those four short trisagion sentences would not compute in that scheme as anything but redundant. “Transgression” was a synonym for “sin.” There was no concept of “infirmity” that needed healed, or of “sin” that needed cleansed rather than simply forgiven.

In Orthodoxy I learned that the Greek for “sin” is amartia (sometimes render hamartia), meaning essentially “missing the mark.” In that broad sense, it probably includes transgression and infirmity. “Transgression” strikes me as being the fist-shaking defiance my former milieu called sin. Infirmity strikes me more as the inability to know or do what’s right in some situations.

If I’m serious about the Christian life, I don’t just want God to forgive me of transgression after transgression. I want cleansing and healing as well so that I can “do better” and become more like Christ.

I suffer from all three, sin, transgression and infirmity (mark-missing, defiance and cluelessness) and I suspect my readers do, too. All three hurt those around me. All three make the world a worse place. It reassured me that Orthodoxy, which I was just exploring when I first noticed that prayer, was wiser than where I’d been all my life, and that it recognized that each of the three needs something a bit different (cleansing, pardon, healing) from God.

Frederica Matthewes-Green distills some of this Orthodox view:

[S]in is a danger, a poison, not merely superficial matter like breaking a law. Sin is infection, not infraction.

Breastplate

I came across another version of St. Patrick’s breastplate, this one rhymed:

I bind unto myself today
The strong Name of the Trinity,
By invocation of the same,
The Three in One and One in Three.

I bind this day to me for ever.
By power of faith, Christ’s incarnation;
His baptism in the Jordan river;
His death on Cross for my salvation;
His bursting from the spicèd tomb;
His riding up the heavenly way;
His coming at the day of doom;
I bind unto myself today.

I bind unto myself the power
Of the great love of the cherubim;
The sweet ‘well done’ in judgment hour,
The service of the seraphim,
Confessors’ faith, Apostles’ word,
The Patriarchs’ prayers, the Prophets’ scrolls,
All good deeds done unto the Lord,
And purity of virgin souls.

I bind unto myself today
The virtues of the starlit heaven,
The glorious sun’s life-giving ray,
The whiteness of the moon at even,
The flashing of the lightning free,
The whirling wind’s tempestuous shocks,
The stable earth, the deep salt sea,
Around the old eternal rocks.

I bind unto myself today
The power of God to hold and lead,
His eye to watch, His might to stay,
His ear to hearken to my need.
The wisdom of my God to teach,
His hand to guide, His shield to ward,
The word of God to give me speech,
His heavenly host to be my guard.

Against the demon snares of sin,
The vice that gives temptation force,
The natural lusts that war within,
The hostile men that mar my course;
Or few or many, far or nigh,
In every place and in all hours,
Against their fierce hostility,
I bind to me these holy powers.

Against all Satan’s spells and wiles,
Against false words of heresy,
Against the knowledge that defiles,
Against the heart’s idolatry,
Against the wizard’s evil craft,
Against the death wound and the burning,
The choking wave and the poisoned shaft,
Protect me, Christ, till Thy returning.

Christ be with me, Christ within me,
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me.
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.

I bind unto myself the Name,
The strong Name of the Trinity;
By invocation of the same.
The Three in One, and One in Three,
Of Whom all nature hath creation,
Eternal Father, Spirit, Word:
Praise to the Lord of my salvation,
Salvation is of Christ the Lord.

(Source: Fr. Stephen Freeman)

Authority

Bible

Harold Lindsell launched … a “theological atom bombing.” … history provided no example of a group that had given up on inerrancy when defections from other basic doctrines did not follow. After all, if the Bible could err, it lost its authority. … Inerrancy was a watershed issue—and those who denied it were not evangelicals at all. … None of the neo-evangelical scholars Lindsell named changed their positions because of it. Northern evangelical institutions were too many and too various to be brought into line. Instead of leading to a purge of noninerrantists, the threat of excommunication merely helped to demonstrate that neo-evangelicals were irreparably divided—and further, not in control of northern evangelicalism.

Frances Fitzgerald, The Evangelicals.

After so much controversy and so many books on inerrancy, it seems mad to think that there’s a mike-drop response to it all, but here goes: What good is an inerrant Bible without inerrant interpreters?

So far as I know, nobody in the Evangelical world has claimed that there are such interpreters.

Related: One qualification on inerrancy was that the Bible was inerrant “in its original autographs.” This was the position I came to hold, and which I think I relinquished only on discovering Orthodoxy.

But again: of what use is that doctrine when we don’t have a single original autograph?

So what position do I hold on inerrancy now? I don’t know. The question seems irrelevant in Orthodox context. We’re not a Bible-only Church, nor were we built on the Bible:

The early Church had no Scripture of its own, and the Jews had no defined canon of Scripture; therefore, sola scriptura as the foundation for what Christians believed was absolutely impossible.

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox.

Yet I’m bold to boast that we revere the Bible more than Evangelicals do. We literally elevate the Epistles and the Gospels in our Liturgies. Our services are suffused with scriptural quotations (not in a preachy or proof-texty way) and allusions. If you really know the Bible, you’ll recognize its ubiquity in the Church’s services.

Come and see, I’ve got to say, though my parish is closed today because of treacherous travel conditions. Maybe next week.

Harmonizing evolution and creation

In years past (mostly long past), I’ve read a lot about the widely-assumed conflict between faith and science, but I hadn’t encountered this interesting, almost Chestertonian, twist:

One of the things that put me off of Christianity when I was young (beyond an intellectual vanity that was out of place) was that the greater part of Christian conversation and teaching, in my experience, had been intended to keep us from thinking about it too hard or taking it very seriously. Simple faith. That old-time religion. Just believe. Most of us have met That Christian—I sat next to her at my local café earlier in the week, and she was trying to convince her college-age children that there were no dinosaurs. “You have to ask yourself who pays for those studies,” she said. “I just believe the Bible.” I tried to concentrate on my eggs. 

But what I wanted to tell her is that there is an interesting concurrence between certain implications of evolution and the plainest kind of Christianity. From evolution, we learn that our bodies and our behavior were shaped by natural pressures to maximize our chances of survival in ancestral conditions of radical scarcity and, hence, we could reasonably assume that at least some of our modern problems—the prevalence of obesity and anxiety, for example, in the rich, digitally saturated world—are the result of living in an environment that is radically different from the one for which we were optimized by evolution. From Christianity, we learn that man is fallen and out of step with his intended place in creation, that we have been separated from that condition for which we were fitted. And at whatever level of literalism you wish to apply to Genesis and whatever degree of sophistication you can bring to bear on your biological analysis, there is a point of commonality:

This is not the world we were made for. We are outcasts and misfits—or, if our separation is sanctified, we are pilgrims.

Kevin D. Williamson, We Are Pilgrims, Still. I think of Williamson as a political writer, not religious, but he’s been returning to religious topics for a week or so.

Dogma

Christian or Pagan?

T.S. Eliot wrote:

Our preoccupation with foreign politics during the last few years has induced a surface complacency rather than a consistent attempt at self-examination of conscience. Sometimes we are almost persuaded that we are getting on very nicely, with a reform here and a reform there, and would have been getting on still better, if only foreign governments did not insist upon breaking all the rules and playing what is really a different game. What is more depressing still is the thought that only fear or jealousy of foreign success can alarm us about the health of our own nation; that only through this anxiety can we see such things as depopulation, malnutrition, moral deterioration, the decay of agriculture, as evils at all. 

And what is worst of all is to advocate Christianity, not because it is true, but because it might be beneficial. 

Towards the end of 1938 we experienced a wave of revivalism which should teach us that folly is not the prerogative of anyone political party or anyone religious communion, and that hysteria is not the privilege of the uneducated. The Christianity expressed has been vague, the religious fervour has been a fervour for democracy. It may engender nothing better than a disguised and peculiarly sanctimonious nationalism, accelerating our progress towards the paganism which we say we abhor. To justify Christianity because it provides a foundation of morality, instead of showing the necessity of Christian morality from the truth of Christianity, is a very dangerous inversion; and we may reflect, that a good deal of the attention of totalitarian states has been devoted, with a steadiness of purpose not always found in democracies, to providing their national life with a foundation of morality—the wrong kind perhaps, but a good deal more of it. It is not enthusiasm, but dogma, that differentiates a Christian from a pagan society.

Kevin D. Williamson.

No “kumbaya moment” here

The expression “what unites us is greater than what divides us” is typically a liberal ecumenical manner of speaking, spoken to inspire us to ecumenical charitable and “social reform” efforts. But Fr. Stephen DeYoung thinks the current and more threatening version, from the perspective of the Orthodox Church, is a right-coded version:

The threat right now is this idea that there is a thing called “conservative Christianity,” and the Orthodox Church is a branch of it.

He’s having none of it:

What divides us is a fundamental difference in how we think God works in the human heart to bring about salvation. [Many people believe] that there is a one-time act, done unilaterally by God, that labels them as being saved so that when they die they will go to heaven.

[But] I believe that God is continually pouring forth his love and his mercies and his goodness in the world and that by cooperating with what God is doing in the world I could be transformed into his likeness and find salvation.

Those are not the same thing. Those are not two different ways of describing the same thing. And one of them is a lie.

I know I’m being super hardcore today, but I don’t care, because this is really bothering me, and if this offends you as an unorthodox listener, maybe you need to be offended by it and think about it. Those aren’t the same thing.

My religion centers on the Eucharist. If yours doesn’t, we don’t practice the same religion.

I don’t relish that. Like I’m not rejoicing in the fact that there are people who consider themselves Christians—and who honestly are Christians in the sense that they’re people who love our Lord Jesus Christ as they understand him and they’re doing their best to follow him as best they understand as best they can … Mostly if they’re wrong. It’s because they’ve been misled. So I’m not judging you as a person if you’re one of those people.

But what I want for you is not to hold your hand and say “kumbaya” and pretend that there’s no difference between us and those differences aren’t significant. I want you to come to know the truth. I want you to come to know Christ more deeply. I want you to understand how salvation actually is and I want you to experience it yourself ….

Podcast, beginning about 10 minutes from the end (Edited for clarity).

Fissiparous

Luther’s nuclear reaction

…in the wake of his defiant appearance at Worms, he found himself impotent to control the explosions that he had done so much to set in train. Nor was he alone. Every claim by a reformer to an authority over his fellow Christians might be met by appeals to the Spirit; every appeal to the Spirit by a claim to authority. The consequence, detonating across entire reaches of Christendom, was a veritable chain reaction of protest.

Tom Holland, Dominion

Pandering

I have long wondered at the sad side-effect of the Reformation, that there were suddenly many different versions of Christianity to choose from. Each person was free to hear the current thought-leaders, read the Scriptures, and come to their own conclusions.

That meant churches were in competition with each other to attract members. (I’m not arguing about the content of the Reformation now—just focusing on this inevitable side-effect.)

Horribly, in 20th century America the choose-your-own-theology option blended with the developing consumerist ethos, and churches began thinking they’d better “be relevant” (there were dire warnings about that, in the 1960s) and “seeker-friendly” (likewise dire, 1980s).

Churches yearned to reach unbelievers by identifying their “felt needs” (hoo boy), that is, what unbelievers thought their needs were. Churches should find out what unbelievers thought they needed, and offer it, to attract them.

It was assumed that people felt sad and lonely, so these churches offered comfort and reassurance. And entertainment. Mega-churches were mega for a reason. Sadly, their offerings largely attracted already-Christians rather than unbelievers, so the earnest motivation of evangelism went mostly unfulfilled.

Frederica Matthewes-Green, Men and Orthodoxy Revisisted

A motley crew

Americans are a motley bunch when it comes to religion—unorthodox, undisciplined, and wildly entrepreneurial, having invented more religions, Christian sects, and Christian-adjacent sects in our few short centuries than the Fertile Crescent did in an active millennium or two. Within a few decades, often within a few miles of one another, and sometimes involving some of the same people, Americans dreamt up Mormonism, Seventh-day Adventism, Christian Science, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Church of God in Christ, the Unity Church, the Theosophical Society, the Christadelphians, the Restoration Movement, Ethical Culture, the Reformed Mennonites, and many more—not to mention more recent developments such as the Nation of Islam and Scientology. Americans may have given up, en masse, on most forms of orthodoxy and on practically all forms of discipline, but we remain God-haunted and Bible-spooked.

Kevin D. Williamson.

So, 60 years or so ago …

… my world was solidly and unequivocally “evangelical,” and my critical faculties were not well-enough honed for anything to bother me about my world very much.

Fast forward ten or fifteen years and some of the not-very-much” bothers had encountered some attractive resolutions. Generally speaking, I discovered that evangelical obsessions like “the Rapture” (which I had thought were obligatory but suspiciously convenient) were not obligatory unless one put solidarity with evangelicalism ahead of historic Christian truths. In short, I became a convinced Calvinist, which in my mind made me sort of evangelical-adjacent or equivocally evangelical.

I have recounted my subsequent spiritual life elsewhere, which included leaving behind Protestant and Evangelical worlds unequivocally 28 years ago this month. So active evangelicalism is but a fading memory for me, and though I read about developments there, it’s not the same as living there or next door.

But from what I read, evangelicalism is in much turmoil. And reading the many accounts of huge majorities of evangelicals supporting Donald Trump, that’s to be expected; I still think too well of evangelicalism, maybe naïvely, to see Trumpism as anything but an aberation—because that man ticks every box of vice and vulgarity, not because “real evangelicalism” inexorably leads to preferring a different political flavor.

With the end of the month approaching, and some of my New York Times gift articles set to expire, unused, I want to share with you an article from someone who I think is more in touch with evangelicalism these days than I am: David Brooks.

If you know Brooks, you likely think of him as Jewish, but he’s been on a long spiritual pilgrimage and came to identify as Christian (without, as I recall, ceasing to identify as Jewish or adopting the “Messianic Jew” moniker. I’m not sure how that works.). He’s now married to a Wheaton College alum (likely evangelical). And almost 4 years ago, he took a pretty deep dive (gift link) into how Trump and other things have divided/corrupted evangelicalism and how some prominent evangelicals are fighting back.

The Dissenters Trying to Save Evangelicalism From Itself is a long read but I found it rewarding then and still find it so when I occasionally revisit it.

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 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.

Sunday, 11/16/25

The temptation of simplicity

When an Orthodox Christian is asked questions about the faith, there is often a hesitation. The questions that come to mind (for me) are: “Where do I begin?” and “How much do I try and tell them?” For, in many ways, the amount of information includes about 2,000 years of history and an encyclopedia’s worth of teaching, practice and customs. Sometimes, in the middle of such a conversation, the other person’s eyes become dull and a rebuke comes: “I think the Bible is enough.” …

This drive towards simplicity is a common hallmark within almost all deviations from traditional Orthodoxy. No one, it seems, ever wants to make things more complicated than they already are within the tradition! But there’s the rub. The nature of Orthodox tradition is its commitment to the unchanging fullness of the faith. In that sense, the faith is everything. It is not a small set of religious rules and ideas set within the greater context of the world (that is the essence of modern, secularized religion). The faith is the whole world. Rightly spoken and understood, it must account for everything.

Fr. Stephen Freeman, The Abbreviated God

Is it really as easy as identifying with the sinner instead of with Christ?

Whenever a traditional Christian defends some point of traditional Christian morality, you’ll hear one of our lefty friends cry, “I thought Jesus ate with prostitutes and tax collectors!” Once again, the proper response is: Do you identify with Jesus in that parable?

This is where liberal Christianity becomes—ironically; hilariously—elitist. Sorry, folks, but God’s not saying you must condescend to eat with sinners. No: you are the sinner. He condescends to eat with you.

Michael Warren Davis, You’re Not Jesus (the link I had is now dead)

Not to get too meta about this, but when I first read it (I’ve published it before), I missed the gratuitous jabs at “lefty friends” and the suggestion that “traditional Christians” trigger their response by defending “traditional Christian morality.” I missed that all because (back to earth from the metasphere) the identification with Jesus instead of the sinner was, and often remains, my own default position.

That’s not entirely unwarranted, either. We’re taught to model our lives after Jesus (I Pet. 2:21), and we should, like Jesus, not disdain to eat with sinners.

Identify with Jesus, I say, but not so exclusively as to lose sight of our own need to repent.

Praying the Hours

Several years ago, I decided to marry technology (my smartphone) to piety.

You see, in monasteries—Orthodox monasteries at least—the Monks or Nuns pause their work seven (I believe) time per day to “pray the hours.” You’ll see the roots if you pay attention to Psalms where the Psalmist writes “seven times a day have I praised Thee because of thy righteous judgments” (ps. 118/119:164).

After retiring, I thought “why shouldn’t I at least gesture toward that practice, even if I won’t take ten or fifteen minutes to do the whole shebang multiple times per day. So I looked over the full 1st, 3rd, 6th and 9th Canonical Hours to get their drift and then distilled them down to four ejaculatory prayers:

Clock”Hour”Distilled Prayer
7 am1st HourGuide my footsteps in Thy paths, and so let no sin have dominion over me.
9 am3rd HourTake not Thy Holy Spirit from me.
12 pm6th HourThou who didst stretch forth Thy hands on the Cross at this hour, draw all men to Thyself.
3 pm9th HourThou who didst taste death in the flesh at this hour, mortify my sins in me.

(I’m a little fuzzy on the remaining monastic services, but I believe they’re Vespers, Compline, and Midnight Hour. Compline and Vespers are hard to distill, and I don’t anticipate getting up at midnight.)

Then I pasted those little prayers into daily reminders (Apple is my computer cosmos) that pop up on computer and phone at the appointed time. (They popped up on my watch, too, but I’ve retired that.)

It provides daily reminders of events in the life of Christ or the Church and keeps me more consciously coram deo.

Silly? I need all the help I can get. Your mileage may vary, but borrow freely if you care to.

Religious Left, Religious Right

Last Sunday’s Dispatch Faith column was awfully good – in the sense of making conceptual sense out of something I hadn’t analyzed myself. Titled How the Religious Left Ceded Political Power to the Religious Right (gift link), it does what it says on the label.

The religious right began building infrastructure in the 1950s, eventually emerging in the 1970s and ’80s with a set of powerful leaders and movements such as Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum, and James Dobson’s Focus on the Family. Over time, robust networks, both formal and informal, developed to connect churches, media, think tanks, and political campaigns. 

In comparison, the religious left inherited the United States’ once powerful Protestant establishment. Protestant elites were almost always more liberal than the majority of people in the pews, but their voice carried real authority. Pastors, denominational leaders, and theologians from this group regularly appeared on the cover of Time magazine, while liberal Protestant publications like the Christian Century and Christianity and Crisis, along with denominational magazines like the Methodist Christian Advocate and The Lutheran collectively reached millions of households monthly.

…

But after the 1960s, the Protestant establishment’s power waned as fewer Americans attended mainline Protestant churches, and the infrastructure that sustained it began to collapse. With fewer people in the pews, budgets declined, clergy lost their social influence, seminary enrollments dropped, and denominational publishing houses sold fewer books. It is not that liberal clergy stopped engaging in political and social rhetoric. It’s just that there were fewer people to hear the message.

…

Many religious conservatives, particularly those in the Reformed tradition, inherited a Puritan theological legacy that emphasizes God’s sovereignty, power, and glory. This theology breeds comfort with wielding power: If God is sovereign over nations, Christians should seek positions of influence to advance divine purposes. Even the megachurch pastor wrapping theology in self-help packaging is teaching congregants that God cares about outcomes, and importantly, that the faithful should pursue the levers that produce them. The line from “God is in control” to “Christians should control institutions” is short and straight.

The religious left learned different lessons from its history and theology. Influenced by the Progressive Era Social Gospel movement and, later, by liberation theology, progressive Christians came to see power structures themselves as suspect …

Liberation theology, fused with critical theory’s analysis of oppression, taught progressive Christians that power corrupts and that prophetic witness from the margins was more virtuous than wielding influence from the center. But this theological framework emerged after the Protestant establishment had already begun to collapse.

I quote so freely (a) to think through the article myself and (b) because I’ve used a gift link to share the full thing with you. Recommended.

Entry barriers? Not so much.

It was easy to start a nondenominational church. There was no institutional leadership to report to. There was no accreditation or credentialing needed for those who wanted to serve in positions of leadership, including lead pastor. If you were a good speaker and knew a few good musicians, you could start a church.

Jon Ward, Testimony.

Tens of thousands did exactly that, and tens of millions followed.

I have no idea how many of America’s 44,319 nondenominational congregations (2020) are outright heretical, and I’m not sure anyone else reliably knows, either – partly because we have no consensus on what is sound doctrine and practice versus heretical doctrine and practice.

But in a preference poll (that I just made up and has no external existence), I trust a generic institution’s judgment on doctrine more that I trust some random religiopreneur’s judgment.

Random observation

Onlookers jeered when Christ hung on the Cross. But the Gospels do not record any punditry.

Robert Wyllie, commenting on the instapundit reaction to the Charlie Kirk assassination.

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 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.

Sunday, November 2

The final blow

A campaign led by the kings of France and England to recapture it had failed. A second expedition, launched in 1202 in obedience to Innocent’s own summons, had been diverted to Constantinople. In 1204 it had stormed and sacked the city. A stronghold that for long centuries had withstood the envy of pagan warlords had fallen at last—to a Christian army. Its captors justified their storming of the city by charging that its inhabitants were rebels against the papacy: for the churches of Rome and Constantinople, ever since the age of Gregory VII, had been divided by an ever-widening schism. Innocent, however, appalled by the despoliation of Christendom’s bulwark, lamented the fall of Constantinople as a work of hell.

Tom Holland, Dominion.

The Great Schism between the papacy and Eastern Christian patriarchs is conventionally dated 1054, and not without reason. But those who dig deeper (or, like me, who read those who have dug deeper) tend to think that the 1054 schism was curable until this sacking of Constantinople by Crusaders.

A quintessential American heresy

[L]iving by no rule but the Bible turned out to be a defense against virtually the same list of enemies as living up to the standards of republicanism: “Many are republicans as to government, and are yet half republicans, being in matters of religion still bent to a Catechism, creed, covenant, or a superstitious priest. Venture to be as independent in things of religion as in those which respect the government in which you live.” Few Protestants expressed themselves as flamboyantly as [Elias] Smith in the early republic, but most followed where he led.

Mark A. Noll, America’s God.

I was reminded this week of a distinction that’s relevant here. I believe I learned it from the late Richard John Neuhaus, who I followed closely starting sometime in the 1980s. I won’t give a name (other than “quintessential American heresy”) to the view expressed so flamboyantly by Elias Smith, a view which I once effectively held, but I’m now in the camp of “ecclesial Christians”: those for whom faith in Christ and faith in His Church is one act of faith, not two.

I decidedly do not venture to be independent in things of religion, but very consciously submitted to the tradition of the Church particularly about Mary, the Mother of God-in-the-flesh, who was a stumbling-block to me as she has been to other Protestants (who in our generation call her “blessed” only sullenly, bound by scripture to do so).

The worst of the worst

Church management is a tricky and complicated business. I am glad that it is not my job. But I do know this much: The church is there for Gyp the Blood and Humpty Jackson, for Charlie Whitman and John Wilkes Booth and me. If there is no room for the worst of the worst in your church, then you do not have a church: You have a crappy book club.

Kevin D. Williamson (hyperlinks added).

Work and play

But there is the question. What, precisely, is “the business of life”? We can get onto an endless carousel if we try to decide which is the serious stuff of life, work or play. It is possible to take either view: either we toil away our eight hours so that we can get down to the real stuff—pleasure and love and recreation—or we enjoy periodic intervals of escape from the real stuff, the work.

Thomas Howard, Chance or the Dance? I would not have retired had I thought the real stuff was work; that’s just livelihood, not life.

What evangelism can obscure

With the clergy focused on the task of evangelism, their doctrines received so little scrutiny that laypeople took them for granted: the Bible was an infallible guide in every situation, and the church taught what was written in it. Coming into contact with people who read the Bible differently, southerners, unconscious of their own scrim of interpretation, concluded that those others were not Christians.

Frances Fitzgerald, The Evangelicals.

Fallen hero

Jérôme Lejeune was a hero of the National Right to Life Committee for his stance against aborting unborn children with Down syndrome.

He also was a thief—a stealer of glory that belonged to others.

It was apparently how the game was played back then. (Gift Link) That may not have changed much.

There’s probably a better moral to this little story than I can write: convention is no assurance of morality.

Upright life, sound doctrine

Over and over again he insisted that in electing an abbot upright life and soundness of doctrine were to be the prime considerations, not rank or family influence. ’I tell you in all sincerity,’ he said, ‘that as a choice of evils I would far rather have this whole place where I have built the monastery revert forever, should God so decide, to the wilderness it once was, rather than have my brother in the flesh, who has not entered upon the way of truth, succeed me as abbot. Take the greatest care, brothers, never to appoint a man as father over you because of his birth; and always appoint from among yourselves, never from outside the monastery.

Bede et al, Bede

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 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.

Sunday, 10/19/25

The cultural formations of western Christianity

Christianity as we see it in eighteenth-century Britain or twenty-first-century America is not Christianity as it has always been, and the more fundamental changes may not be those that the received history of religion narrates. The cultural formations of western Christianity, growing as they do in good part from binary, Protestant-Catholic debates, can be thrown into stark relief, for instance, when studied in comparison to that much neglected third term in Christendom: the Eastern Orthodox churches from which Rome severed itself nearly half a millennium before the Reformation, charting a course for Western Christianity wed to rationalism and enamored of individual authority, whether papal or personal.

Lori Branch, Rituals of Spontaneity (italics added).

The italicized phrase warms my heart because almost every non-Orthodox writer in the West, including anti-Catholic polemicists, inverts it to Orthodox Churches severing themselves from Rome.

A well I keep returning to

It’s mind-bending in a good way to consider the possibility that Protestantism is effectively dead because the nondenominational megachurchy world is something, or some things, else:

Imagine a world without Protestantism.

I don’t mean a world without Christians who are neither Catholic nor Orthodox. I mean a world in which there are only two groups of Christians. The first group encompasses believers who belong to ancient fellowships led by bishops and ordained priests, who confess the Creed and their sins and celebrate the Eucharist in a traditional liturgy of word and sacrament. These believers hand on tradition, petition the saints, venerate icons, and baptize their babies. Call them “catholic.”

Call the other group “evangelicals.” They have no creed but the Bible. They have no bishops or priests; instead, they have ministers and elders, who are rarely ordained. They baptize not infants but adults, who can make a public declaration of faith. They reject the interposition of anyone or anything between the individual and Jesus, who is known immediately in the soul and clearly through the Scriptures.

Imagine a world in which every Christian is either catholic or evangelical, with nothing in between. It is a world without Protestantism—for the religion of the magisterial Reformers in the sixteenth century did not desire, commend, or practice either of these options. Theirs was a via media. They baptized babies, recited the Creed, ordained pastors to the service of word and sacrament, practiced baptism and communion as sacraments (not as symbols), and insisted on the validity of the early councils.

The world I invite you to imagine, then, is one in which this middle way—neither Roman nor Anabaptist, both traditional and reformed—has vanished. Is such a world possible? It is. In fact, we are living in it right now. Ours is a world without Protestantism.

Brad East, Goldilocks Protestantism, First Things.

Stumbled onto this …

As a 14-year-old I had embraced Jesus as my Savior but had confused the abundant Christian life with the great American dream: I was a Christian and would lose weight, get good grades, get voted captain of the hockey team, go to college, marry a wonderful man who made $250,000 a year, and we’d have 2.5 children. It was me-focused: What can God do for me? I almost thought I had done God a great big favor by accepting Jesus ….

Joni Eareckson Tada.

I recently got a digital subscription to Christianity Today, a magazine I’ve known all my life, in order to keep up a little with doings in the non-Orthodox Christian world. Eareckson Tada was a big deal in the Evangelical tradition decades ago and apparently has remained so, living a remarkably long life for a quadriplegic – perhaps because she has kept so busy with her talents.

Related: Frederika Matthewes-Green reported in one of her books the comment of a first-time visitor to an Orthodox Church: “Wow! That was soooo not about me!”

Duly Noted

A line is being crossed in Canterbury. I share a communication published by a priest who received it:

Almost inevitably, these “Forward in Faith” and other GAFCON Anglicans will be painted in the popular press as schismatic for not going along with a radical provocation. I hope, but faintly, that the popular press will report their claim (encountered elsewhere) that they are the Anglican Church.

I make no facile prediction that “history will vindicate them,” but I’d rather be among them than the innovators when, at the end of history, Christ comes from heaven to judge the living and the dead.

Not every wound is PTSD

Therapists themselves are noting that if every time a soldier confesses his soul wound from combat we then label him with PTSD, that we will find ourselves recommending psychological therapies and prescribing psychiatric medications when what is needed is something like a religious ritual of purification and forgiveness.

Timothy Patitsas, The Ethics of Beauty.

Note to Peter Thiel

In the Lateran, at a council held in 1513, a formal prohibition had been issued against preaching the imminence of Antichrist.

Tom Holland, Dominion

Evangelicals and Calvinists

A lot of the evangelical world leaves the dirty work to the Calvinists.

Derek Rishmawi, Calvinist.

Caveat: Political Application is Patent

On Sundays, I rarely post things with pointed political applications. For that matter, I rarely post political items with explicit Christian underpinnings on Mondays through Saturdays. Today marks an exception where I judged that these fit Sunday better than weekdays because my target readers are specifically Christians.

Salt & Light

Christians who vote for Republicans are called to be salt and light within the Republican Party. That means being a voice calling the Republican Party to obey the rule of law. Yours should be the loudest voice condemning Trump’s pardon for January 6 rioters and pushing against his challenge to the checks and balances that are supposed to constrain the executive . You should speak up in favor of the poor and powerless and against the culture of cruelty, spite, and vengefulness Trump cultivates. It corrodes our public square and demeans our shared citizenship even as it poses more specific dangers to those targeted by Trump’s weaponization of federal law enforcement. If you do not speak up, you are both credulous and culpable, complicit with the party’s sins—including those yet to come.

Paul D. Miller, A Confessing Church for America’s Weimar Moment

MAGA Christianity

In last Sunday’s “Dispatch Faith” Column, Paul D. Miller asks Is MAGA Christianity True Christianity?, and essentially answers “no”: MAGA Christianity often mixes Christian symbols and Scripture with partisan rhetoric and calls to fight enemies, producing superficially Christian religion that departs on key theological and ethical points.

Commenting on The Charle Kirk Moment, Nijay Gupta resurrected a saying I’m pretty sure I last heard decades ago:

What you win them with is what you win them to.

Gupta’s role in this podcast was that of a more progressive Christian, relatively skeptical of the work of Charlie Kirk, and this comment had in view Kirk’s interweaving of conservative politics and evangelism.

I repeat from prior posts: I knew very, very little about Kirk until he was killed. From what I’ve learned since, I suspect he’d have insisted that conservative politics is such a concomitant of Christian faith that it is meet and right to interweave them from the podium/pulpit. (He said repeatedly that one cannot be a Christian and vote for Democrats.)

That is a message I’ve heard (though almost always tacitly) most of my life, and have resisted for almost as long. Despite my impression that most conservative Christians in North America lean right, and acknowledging that I, too, do so (though the meaning of “right” grows ever fuzzier), I nevertheless endorse the shared thrust of Miller and of Gupta.

And that’s why I consciously avoid political talk at Church coffee hour. All are welcome, regardless of politics, though some politics will prove to be baggage that must eventually be shed, as I’ve had to shed some of my own baggage.

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 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.

Sunday 10/5/25

Fullness

Orthodoxy holds that the fullness of the Faith was revealed to the Church at Pentecost, once and for all. The Greek Fathers utilized their education in the service of the Church to explain doctrine, not to find new truths, since the fullness of the truth was received at Pentecost.

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

Secularism

Secularism was not a neutral concept. The very word came trailing incense clouds of meaning that were irrevocably and venerably Christian.

Tom Holland, Dominion

Ring-lust

When people justify their voting choice by its outcome, I always think of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien emphasizes repeatedly that we cannot make decisions based on the hoped-for result. We can only control the means. If we validate our choice of voting for someone that may not be a good person in the hopes that he or she will use his power to our advantage, we succumb to the fallacy of Boromir, who assumed he too would use the Ring of Power for good. Power cannot be controlled; it enslaves you. To act freely is to acknowledge your limits, to see the journey as a long road that includes dozens of future elections, and to fight against the temptation for power.

Jessica Hooten Wilson, What ‘The Lord of the Rings’ Can Teach Us About U.S. Politics, Christianity and Power.

In the US, we decided, twice, that if we gave Sauron the ring, he’d use it for good. How’s that workin’ out for ya?

Conversion and cosmology

There is no point in converting people to Christ if they do not convert their vision of the world and of life, since Christ then becomes merely a symbol for all that we love and want already – without Him. This kind of Christianity is more terrifying than agnosticism or hedonism.

Fr. Alexander Schmemann. Again:

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

Fr. Alexander Schmemann (different source).

Climbing the elite ladder

Here’s one way to think about it. An evangelical who climbs the elite ladder is more or less required, by the nature of the case, to shed vital elements of her evangelical identity. But a Catholic is not. And a Catholic is not for the same reason that, once upon a time, a liberal Protestant was not.

Brad East, Conversions, Protestantism, and a New Mainline. I would add that an Orthodox Christian need not shed identity either.

East’s post is target-rich with suggestions about questions that fascinate me.

Politically homeless

According to the Public Religion Research Institute’s annual census last year, upward of 80 percent of Republicans described themselves as Christian …

Ryan Burge. It might surprise you that I’m unimpressed and un-encouraged by that. I don’t even know what “Christian” means in common parlance any more if 80% of Republicans think of themselves as Christians.

Ain’t. No. Way.

… But the Democratic coalition is a very different spiritual universe. It is made up of a big mix of faiths — Christians of various kinds, Jews, Muslims — as well as somewhere between 30 percent and 40 percent of nones, or people who describe their faith as atheist, agnostic or nothing in particular.

Ryan Burge again. These figures are a surprise, but they may be correlated to the Democrat party positions that keep me politically homeless instead of joining the Dems.

Chicago archbishop Blase Cardinal Cupich, who has stirred some controversy recently, said one true thing that made my heart leap when it was misattributed to the new Pope by a commentator: that Christians (Cupich said “Catholics”) are now politically homeless in the US.

I have recognized my political homelessness for twenty years now.

On reading the Bible

Most North American Christians assume that they have a right, if not an obligation, to read the Bible. I challenge that assumption. No task is more important than for the Church to take the Bible out of the hands of individual Christians in North America. Let us no longer give the Bible to all children when they enter the third grade or whenever their assumed rise to Christian maturity is marked, such as eighth-grade commencements. Let us rather tell them and their parents that they are possessed by habits far too corrupt for them to be encouraged to read the Bible on their own ….

Stanley Hauerwas. Hauerwas wrote the book this quote comes from 32 years ago. It seems to me that those corrupt habits haven’t been reformed.

Get ready

You may have heard these famous lines from Cardinal Francis George, the late archbishop of Chicago …:

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.

Kevin D. Williamson, The Totalitarian Tendency and the Confessional, reflecting on a new Oregon law requiring that Catholic priests report certain sexual crimes that might be communicated to them in the confessional.

Starving the beast

In our last episode, I wrote “I don’t think I frequent any websites that use algorithms to target my inferred vulnerabilities.” It may be worth noting that I also have unsubscribed from some blogs and Substacks that I felt were grinding out agitprop aimed at people like me.

Go thou and do likewise.

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 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.

Saturday, 8/23/25

Public Affairs

Ted Cruz knows better

[Ted] Cruz was an intellectually serious politician of the kind who would quote Hayek and reference Milton Friedman off-the-cuff in private conversation until he discovered—and this is a thing with Texas politicians—that there was more juice to be had from pretending to be the good ol’ boy that he is not than in simply being the Ivy League lawyer he is. Cruz’s current position in American public life is that of a piteous and contemptible figure. … [F]or the moment, he is still a senator caught between the fringeward push of his radicalizing party and the centerward pull of his state’s urbanizing electorate. 

Cruz is (or should be) smart enough to have figured out by now that he is never going to be president, and he ought to allow himself to be liberated by this and take on a new role—one that the genuine Ted Cruz, if there is anything left of him inside the chrysalis of grotesque opportunism and self-degradation in which he has enveloped himself, would be well-suited to undertake: defending the Constitution and the American order from a sustained assault that is coming from within his own party.

It would not take very much: “No, Mr. President, you may not willy-nilly create a new national sales-tax regime with rates based on how you’re feeling that day, even if you call it a tariff; no, you may not federalize the Philadelphia police department or deploy troops in U.S. cities based on whatever phony emergency pretext occurs to you in between social media posts; no, the states are not your ‘agents,’ and they most certainly do not have to do ‘whatever the president of the United States tells them’ to do, even if you put ‘FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY’ in capital letters. And if you refuse to honor the constitutional limits on your office, then you can be removed from that office—with my vote, if necessary, though I would regret it and would probably lose my Senate seat as a result. But there are things more important than winning the next election.” 

No, I do not think Cruz has it in him. 

But he is starting to reach the stage of life when, to borrow David Brooks’ formulation, it is time to stop thinking about one’s résumé and start thinking about one’s eulogy.

Kevin D. Williamson, Ted Cruz Knows Better.

In which I reveal an unpopular opinion

Almost everything I knew about him, and particularly his professional accomplishments and opinions, made me think that Brett Kavanagh would be a good Supreme Court justice, and I haven’t been disappointed.

Why “almost”? It wasn’t really the Christine Ford Blasey accusations, but it was related to them: Brett Kavanaugh was an underage, binge-drinking party boy.

That was never in dispute. And I hate that. From him, there wasn’t so much as a “when I was young and foolish, I was young and foolish” acknowledgment. I don’t care if his parents winked at it or even bought the beer.

Now I don’t recall anyone else who was bothered enough even to shrug it off with “boys will be boys.” I seemingly stood alone in thinking underage binge drinking a blot on his character and fitness to uphold the law — all of it, including the parts that inconvenience him.

It’s not okay, and if that makes me a prig, so be it.

There is no possible religious neutrality in schools. So there!

J Budziszewski wants to make Catholic education more widely available without the governmental “strings attached” of Charter School (or presumably vouchers):

Please let’s not blather about religious “neutrality.”  So called secular education is not neutral, but reflects a bias against faith in favor of irreligion.

In fact, even that way of putting it is not precisely accurate. It isn’t that public schools have no god; in fact they place many gods before God. Superficial thinkers suppose that unconditional loyalties – whether of the “woke” or another variety — don’t count as religion just because they don’t use the word “god” for their gods. But the crux of the matter does not lie in the words they use.

I take a different minor issue with the first paragraph quoted than Budziszewski himself does. What “secular education” does is inculcate indifference. Purporting to teach children what they need to know without telling them anything about religion tacitly tells them that they need not know anything about it.

And this is not a straw man. The two-hundred-page course guide for Advanced Placement (AP) course in U.S. government and politics “doesn’t mention Christianity or the Bible—not once, even though it professes to cover ‘the intellectual traditions that animated our founding.’” (Mark Bauerlein)

But that’s not the same as teaching hostility toward religion (“irreligion”).

On the point about unconditional loyalties I couldn’t agree more. I just don’t know what we do about it. Deschooling Society?

DOGE

I have had a faint hope that we would discover that DOGE has begun modernization of software and strategic use of AI in the agencies they blitzkrieged immediately after our latest Presidential inauguration.

But they appears at this point to have been engaged in pure, nihilistic destruction — a style that, along with vengeance-destruction, appears to be what this 47th Presidency is all about.

Capitalist Economy

Pay no heed to the man in the management handcuffs

Ted Gioia was writing a book and looking for a publisher:

This person ran a legendary publishing house, and was also a jazz lover. He was a fan of my writing. We exchanged some emails, and then had a phone conversation.

“Ted, I love the book you’re writing,” he told me. “The sample chapters you sent are outstanding. You’re a special writer, and I’d love to sign you a contract. But…”

My head was already spinning. These people typically pay out big advances. I could finish the book and pay all my bills—no sweat! But before I could pursue these daydreams any further, this famous editor went on:

“I’d love to sign you to a contract. But I can’t.”

“Why not?” I asked—and even I could hear the plaintive note in my voice.

“Well, I’m sure your book would sell. But we evaluate books on their projected sales during the three years following release. If a book doesn’t have a three-year payback, we don’t do it.”

“I don’t think I understand this,” I whimpered in reply. “What are you saying?”

“It’s simple. Your book will probably sell for the next ten years or more. But I can only consider the first three years in making an offer—that’s why I have to turn you down.”

Okay, I understood discounted cash flow even better than this editor. I could give you a lecture on the Capital Asset Pricing Model in my sleep. In my early days, I made a living doing this kind of analysis.

But this way of thinking is wrong in the world of arts and culture.

…

When I tell editors that my books demonstrably sell for 25-50 years and longer, this is a turn-off. They actually hate it when I say it.

They won’t be around that long—editors constantly change jobs. They don’t give a hoot what sales will be like in the year 2050. They want something with cocktail party buzz for the six weeks following publication.

That’s the world they live in. But I don’t—and I refuse to move there.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Short-Term Results in My Career (bold added)

There’s a lot more where that came from because Ted Gioia is a freakin’ polymath. His has become (probably) my favorite Substack that doesn’t focus on religious subjects.

Work-life balance

I’m 22 and I’ve built two companies that together are valued at more than $20 million. I’ve signed up my alma mater as a client, connected with billionaire mentors and secured deferred admission to Stanford’s M.B.A. program. When people ask how I did it, the answer isn’t what they expect—or want—to hear. I eliminated work-life balance entirely and just worked. When you front-load success early, you buy the luxury of choice for the rest of your life.

… I averaged 3½ hours of sleep a night and had about 12½ hours every day to focus on business. The physical and mental toll was brutal: I gained 80 pounds, lived on Red Bull and struggled with anxiety. But this level of intensity was the only way to build a multimillion-dollar company.

Emil Barr, ‘Work-Life Balance’ Will Keep You Mediocre

So that’s the world he lives in. I don’t, never have, and I refuse to move there — or to recommend it to anyone I care about.

Culture

Gay race communism

Now, Cracker Barrel is updating its décor and branding—slightly. The bulk of the update is a brighter, less cluttered interior design, but the “controversial” decision is to change its logo. The company removed the old white guy in overalls sitting by a barrel, and now just has a text-only sign that reads “Cracker Barrel.” 

And people are losing their minds, claiming that it has gone “woke.” What seems to have sparked this brouhaha is a tweet saying that the store has “scrapped a beloved American aesthetic and replaced it with sterile, soulless branding.” 

This prompted an outraged “WTF is wrong with @CrackerBarrel??!” tweet from Donald Trump Jr., that loyal guardian of all that is homey and traditional in American life. The very popular End Wokeness Twitter account proclaimed: “Cracker Barrel CEO Julie Masino should face charges for this crime against humanity.”

Chris Rufo then came out with a Cracker Barrel delenda Est pronunciamiento:

Alright, I’m hearing chatter from behind the scenes about the Cracker Barrel campaign and, on second thought: we must break the Barrel. It’s not about this particular restaurant chain—who cares—but about creating massive pressure against companies that are considering any move that might appear to be “wokification.” The implicit promise: Go woke, watch your stock price drop 20 percent, which is exactly what is happening now. I was wrong. The Barrel must be broken.

Now, it’s true that Cracker Barrel has done some LGBT marketing stuff, probably as a result of being criticized for alleged discriminatory policies in the 1990s. But maybe also because gay people—and people who aren’t particularly horrified by gay people—might like good, affordable breakfasts, too. They’ve also tried to cultivate Hispanic customers. I’m not sure this means they’ve been taken over by the Latinx reconquista. 

I am also, shall we say, skeptical that a few old website screenshots of these efforts are proof that, in the words of Federalist co-founder Sean Davis, “Cracker Barrel’s CEO and leadership clearly hate the company’s customers and see their mission as re-educating them with the principles of gay race communism.”

Jonah Goldberg. It’s enough to make me want to try to remember that I keep forgetting to eat at Cracker Barrel.

What nihilists can’t believe

It’s hard enough to get people to believe something, but it’s really hard to get people to believe in belief — to persuade a nihilist that some things are true, beautiful and good.

David Brooks, The Rise of Right-Wing Nihilism (gift link)

I just can’t root for a guy who looks like Caligula

My libertarian and anti-state impulses incline me to be favorable toward Julian Assange, but I’ve never been able to shake how much he looks like John Hurt’s Caligula.

Technology

The technologies we use to try to “get on top of everything” always fail us, in the end, because they increase the size of the “everything” of which we’re trying to get on top.

Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

Brought to you by the letter “D”

Dust and decay,
ditherers upon the doorstep
of death itself; dried-
up ghosts of daisy-chain
days that were once dappled
with dew and delight.

R.S. Thomas, Anybody’s Alphabet, Collected Later Poems 1988-2000.

The Los Alamos Sin

As Freeman Dyson put it, the “sin” of the scientists at Los Alamos was not that they made the bomb but that they enjoyed it so much.

Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos

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.

Sunday, 7/20/25

Divorce, penance, annulment

Roman Catholic apologists have long cited their Church’s ban on divorce and remarriage as commending it and condemning other Churches’ approaches. I have occasionally wondered if they were right.

Such doubts diminished when I began acquiring an Orthodox Christian way of thinking. I heard the somewhat penitential tone of the service for a second marriage. I gained empathy for some of those whose marriages ended, even through their own fault, because we are broken and we do break things. And God doesn’t give up on us when we do.

I also knew that Roman Catholic annulment practice could easily be cast as a (hypocritical) workaround for wealthy Catholics who cared to pursue it (like one of my very attractive law school classmates). I came to prefer the Orthodox practice; briefly:

  • some sort of penance being connected to the Church’s recognition of divorce and,
  • as mentioned earlier, the very service for a second marriage reflecting soberly that a second marriage is a concession to human weakness — “better to marry than to burn with lust”

Then a day or two ago I heard an Orthodox podcast’s treatment of the difference, and decided to dig in a bit deeper.

The Orthodox Church doesn’t give divorces; it penances divorces. Its approach is pastoral. Before remarriage, one must repent of his or her fault in the destruction of the first marriage. This helps those hurt by divorce to be healed and re-integrated into the community and set on the right path again. Since marriage is ordered to the salvation of the spouses, a second marriage is sometimes necessary (“better to marry than to burn with lust”). For a specific, albeit typical, “procedure” for Orthodox second marriages, see here.

The Roman Catholic Church officially does not permit divorce, but has a legal process for declaring, retroactively, that there was never a valid marriage in the first place. Suspecting that the Orthodox podcaster’s characterization of that process and its effects went a bit overboard, I sought out reliable Catholic sources, like here, here, and here.

You can read and judge for yourself (they’re not long), but I find that process described a legal and apologetical dodge with no repentance and spiritual healing for anyone. There’s nothing pastoral about it. In the three sources I consulted, there was only one whiff of examination of conscience about the broken marriage, and even that was in the form of “some people find that simply writing out their testimony helps them to understand what went wrong and why,” not “you really should pause, reflect and repent for your role.”

If the point is to get people into the Kingdom of Heaven, I see a clear winner as between the Orthodox approach and the Roman Catholic. And I’m ready to give as good as I get the next time a Catholic apologist tries the play the divorce card.

Biblical rules

I never hear the [college] administration admit they’re wrong about anything, even though you and I both know they’ve made some bad decisions. Rules get changed every year, but the deans never acknowledge the previous rules were arbitrary—they’re couched in all this talk of biblical principles.

Philip Yancey, Where the Light Fell (Kindle location 3371)

Yancey is very much my contemporary, and I think he was writing professionally before we were 25. Where the Light Fell is autobiographical, and I’m astonished that he retained any sort of Christian faith considering the spiritually abusive environment he grew up in.

The pretense that Christian college policies were from “biblical principles” is one that I knew well and saw through quickly. But it’s a pretext that Biblicists almost have to adopt if they’re going to (a) make rules without (b) appearing arbitrary.

It’s very much with us still. Ross Douthat this week interviews a proponent, one Allie Beth Stuckey, host of an evangelical podcast called “Relatable,” which I guess is a big deal.

For the most part, Ms. Stuckey acquits herself well (Ross is not an interviewer who goes on the attack, like a cross-examiner), but there’s one thing that bothered me. She podcasts on theology, lifestyle, politics, the leftward drift of evangelical leaders and probably other topics. She claims clear guidance from “biblical principles” on all these, and on such things as Donald Trump’s policies on immigration and deportation (which biblical principles predictably support).

And next year, when she changes her mind, it will be from “biblical principles,” too.

It’s false clarity. But the pretext of biblical principles on everything is de rigueur in the Evangelical world.

Most of the time, the earth is flat

Multiple cosmologies should be able to coexist and play different functions, some more philosophical and human and others more technical and mathematical. But in our lives most of the time, the Earth is flat. Most of the time, the Heaven is up and the Earth is down, most of the time means in those instances when I am interacting with my family, my society and my enemies. And most of all, if we wish to understand religion and its symbolism, if we wish to understand the Bible or icons or church architecture we must anchor ourselves to the world of human experience, for that is where we can love our neighbor. We must force ourselves to believe that the sun rises every morning, or that the moon waxes and wanes and honestly it should not be so difficult, because despite Galileo and Newton and Einstein I’m pretty sure I will find some Truth in tomorrow’s rosy fingered dawn.

Jonathan Pageau

Ties that still bind, at least a little

Amid the hyperpluralism of divergent truth claims, metaphysical beliefs, moral values, and life priorities, ubiquitous practices of consumerism are more than anything else the cultural glue that holds Western societies together.

Brad Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

Quotable

I am a slow unlearner. But I love my unteachers.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World, via Phil Yancey

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.

Sunday, 7/13/25

Our unchurchy churchiness

The confusion of confessions at these revivals dismayed Joseph Smith (d. 1844), a recent settler in western New York. Caught up with his parents in the wildfire of emotions, he had a conversion experience in which all Christian confessions were revealed to be false. He then encountered a spiritual being who told him he would be the founder of the only true religion on earth. Like many Protestants since the time of Luther, Smith saw his work as an act of restoration.

John Strickland, The Age of Utopia (italics added).

I don’t remember whether I’ve said this out loud before, but the deeper I get into the Orthodox Christian faith, the more arbitrary do I find Protestant line-drawing that tries to distinguish “denominations” and the tens of thousands of non-denominational evangelical churches (including Joel Osteen) from “cults” like the Latter Day Saints — cults that came out of the selfsame time, places and democratic impulses.

Oh, I’ve read my Walter Martin back in the day, but it just doesn’t linger persuasively after one gets deeper into Christian history.

Chesterton was half-right: America is a “nation with the soul of a church.” The other half of the truth is that many of our churches lack basic features of historic churchiness: sacraments, liturgical forms, settled creeds, authority. Like America itself, the American church seems a novus ordo seclorum. Our churchy national soul weirdly inhabits a body of peculiar, borderline-heretical actual churches.

In some respects, our unchurchy churchiness is no surprise. We’re Protestant, and Protestants have always been, as Alec Ryrie writes, radicals, lovers, and fighters, restlessly carrying on a centuries-long “open-ended, ill-disciplined argument,” churning out new ideas and rehabilitating old ones with “a certain generic restlessness, an itchy instability.” A “self-perpetuating dynamo of dissatisfaction and yearning,” the Protestant churches have been “one of the engines driving modern history.”

America was founded as a post-Christendom Christian nation. Christian, yes, profoundly so, but never Christian in the way Europe was Christian. Europe became Christian century after plodding century. We started out Christian. The Reformation battered and splintered European Christendom. Colonists brought their European splits with them, and proceeded to split even more. The church was the unifying reality of medieval Europe; after the Reformation, most European nations established one or another variety of national church. Free church Christianity was a late development in Europe. Free church Christianity is American Christianity. States retained established churches into the early nineteenth century, but that was a long time ago. Our default ecclesiology is Lockean and Baptist.

Peter Leithart, The Genius of American Christianity. Leithart keenly recognizes the problem, but (IMHO) misapplies it:

Without revivalist Christianity, America would have rolled over and succumbed to secularism long ago.

But because we did have revivalism, we call “Churches” our “borderline-heretical”, crypto-secularist bacchanalia.

Heretics all

Alas, we are heretics all, and the one we subscribe to is not love any more than the kingdom for the sake of which we are fools is the kingdom of heaven.

R.S. Thomas, Collected Later Poems 1988-2000

I.R.S. Says Churches Can Endorse Candidates From the Pulpit

The agency said that if a house of worship endorsed a candidate to its congregants, the I.R.S. would view that not as campaigning but as a private matter, like “a family discussion concerning candidates.”

David A. Fahrenthold, I.R.S. Says Churches Can Endorse Candidates From the Pulpit.

I don’t consider this good news except insofar as it should clear away any chill on free speech when a pastor is preparing remarks on moral issues (i.e., “Can I say that from the pulpit? Could it be considered a violation of the 1950s’ ‘Johnson Rule’ and cost my church its tax exemption?”).

Even then, I’m not much enthused, because I’m mindful that “Christ did not come to make bad men good, but to make dead men live.” (Fr. Stephen Freeman, paraphrased from memory.) There is such a thing as too much preaching on “moral issues.”

Neither did he come to make Republicans out of Democrats or vice-versa.

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.

Sunday, 7/6/25

Quest for certainty

The Reformation is the first great expression of the search for certainty in modern times. As Schleiermacher put it, the Reformation and the Enlightenment have this in common, that ‘everything mysterious and marvellous is proscribed. Imagination is not to be filled with [what are now thought of as] airy images.’ In their search for the one truth, both movements attempted to do away with the visual image, the vehicle par excellence of the right hemisphere, particularly in its mythical and metaphoric function, in favour of the word, the stronghold of the left hemisphere, in pursuit of unambiguous certainty. … What is so compelling here is that the motive force behind the Reformation was the urge to regain authenticity, with which one can only be profoundly sympathetic. The path it soon took was that of the destruction of all means whereby the authentic could have been recaptured.

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary

If I were inclined to doubt this analysis, I’d only need to think of the ubiquitous Evangelical insistence that real Christians have assurance of salvation and “eternal security,” whereas I have fear and trembling as I work out my salvation.

Orestes Brownson on “Bible alone”

Orestes Brownson, who was on the verge of leaving behind a checkered career as Protestant, freethinker, and transcendentalist for the Roman Catholic Church, issued a challenge to American Bible-believers in his new role as a Catholic apologist: “We are … never in a condition to rely on the Bible alone. We never go to it wholly devoid of preliminary instructions, and therefore of prepossessions.” Given this circumstance, as Brownson saw the matter, “for the most part, when we do come to study the Bible, we find little else in it than the faith, we have brought to it, so that we may be said to put our faith into the Bible, not to obtain our faith from it.”

Mark A. Noll, America’s God

Brash Jimmy Swaggart

Swaggart’s empire, with receipts of over $150 million annually, fell suddenly in 1989 when he was found with a prostitute in a Baton Rouge motel, caught by a rival preacher whose adultery Swaggart had challenged. Swaggart’s denomination, the Assemblies of God, put him on a on disciplinary probation, which he initially accepted, admitting to decades of sexual struggles, but later rejected when it was prolonged. Instead, he effusively and tearfully on television admitted he had sinned, and then he resumed his ministry. But his church emptied, the dollars shrank, the television contracts ended. He was again discovered with a prostitute in 1991, after which he offered no public apologies. He was still doing the Lord’s work. Swaggart embodied the growing rejection of denominations by increasingly individualistic American Christians. Before the internet, there was television ministry, which made denominations, and even physical church, seem inconsequential to many.

Mark Tooley, Jimmy Swaggart & Brash USA Christianity (bold added)

Unlike some of my acquaintances, I was never a Swaggart devoteé. I was aware of him; he bought (or was given) air time on a Christian Radio station I listened to during a part-time desk job, but he wasn’t why I tuned in — more a bug than a feature (J. Vernon McGee was the feature).

My priors about southern charismatics left me unsurprised at his Fall, though his emotionalism was very skillful and even convincing at times, unlike, say, Jim and Tammy Fay.

God is, as always, merciful and loves humankind. Requiescat in pace, y’all.

Another take on Swaggart

Rod Dreher encountered Jimmy Swaggart after Swaggart’s first unmasking as a user of prostitutes:

I was there, at the Family Worship Center, for this electrifying sermon. I was a student at LSU, and a writer for the campus newspaper. Swaggart had been under fire, and word got out that he was going to make a big announcement on Sunday morning. I went to hear it. I was not a Christian then, in any real sense, though I was making my way towards the faith. I certainly had nothing but contempt for the man back then.

But a strange thing happened to me as I heard his sermon. I was sitting up in the rafters, and expected to feel a sense of Schadenfreude over the fire-and-brimstone televangelist’s downfall. In the moment, though, I looked around me, and saw a crowd of broken people. They were crying, or at least sitting there in shock and disbelief. I noticed that these were not well-dressed people, but men and women wearing the clothes of working-class and lower middle class folks. The kind of people that I came from. And they were in pain.

I didn’t stick around. I remember walking out to my car, feeling awful. I had no sympathy at all for Swaggart, but I felt bad for all those who had believed in him, and been conned. This surprised me. It’s one thing to see a man one regarded as a religious charlatan brought low, but to see the pain of simple people in the face of their spiritual leader’s unmasking? Well, it made my liberal triumphalism seem like a shameful, immature thing. I didn’t know what to do with that.

I’m not convinced that Swaggart was a charlatan insofar as that implies conscious deception at a pretty deep level. I’ve got too many incidents of my own I’d be mortified to have brought under bright lights. You probably do, too. But I don’t think that made me a charlatan. It just proved that I was spiritually immature and formed in part by what my particular Christian upbringing legalistically forbade – and what it thereby tacitly allowed. Imagine growing up with Jerry Lee Lewis and Mickey Gilley as cousins.

I’ll stop there lest I lapse into a confessional essay that would do nobody any good.

The oneness of God

One might say that while for the Greeks there is one God because there is one Father, for the Latins there is one God because there is one Essence, one divine and entirely simple Being.

It can now be seen how, as the presuppositions of the respective views of the Latins and Greeks differed, so did their ways of envisaging the ‘structure’ of the Trinity; and how, further, given the ‘absoluteness’ of these presuppositions, the rival representations of the Trinity which derived from them must also appear absolute. If the Greeks assumed as axiomatic, first, their understanding of the Essence; second, their understanding of the distinction between the Essence and the powers and energies of the Divinity, and hence between the Essence and hypostatic powers of each Person of the Trinity; and, third, their idea that the cause and principle of being in the Trinity is the hypostasis of the Father, it was impossible for them to admit that the Spirit proceeds from both Father and Son, for this would have implied a violation of their axioms. In the same way, if the Latins took as axiomatic the idea that Essence and Being and power form a single and entirely simple divine nature, it was impossible for them not to conclude that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.

Philip Sherrar, The Greek East and the Latin West, p. 70

American efficiency

What the Japanese Imperial government could not do in 250 years of persecution (destroy Japanese Christianity) American Christians did in 9 seconds.

Gary G. Kohls, MD, Unwelcome Truths for Church and State Concerning the Bombing of Nagasaki August 9, 1945

Discerning Christ in the Old Testament

What was the mind that could see Christ in the Passover Lamb? Indeed, what was the mind that could see Christ’s death and resurrection as a fulfillment of Passover itself? Beneath the letter of the Old Testament, beneath the surface of its poetry, its historical stories, its prophetic works, the primitive Church discerned Christ Himself and the shape of the story which we now know as the gospel.

The shape of the gospel story is not derived from the Old Testament. It is discerned within the Old Testament, after the resurrection of Christ and His subsequent teaching …

For example, that “Christ died for our sins,” is not obvious. It can be discerned in the Old Testament if one comes to understand, for example, that the “Servant Songs” in Isaiah are actually referencing Christ. … When that tradition is accepted and “received” (more about this in a moment), then passages like the Servant Songs begin to open up and yield their deeper meaning.

When a gospel writer shares a story about Christ and adds, “This was done that the saying in Isaiah might be fulfilled…,” we are reading the tradition in its operation. But the passages in Isaiah do not themselves give a clue for their interpretation. …

The giving of this tradition is described in Luke 24:44-48:

Then He said to them, “These are the words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all things must be fulfilled which were written in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms concerning Me.” And He opened their understanding [nous], that they might comprehend the Scriptures. Then He said to them, “Thus it is written, and thus it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead the third day, “and that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. “And you are witnesses of these things. (Luke 24:44-48)

It is important to see that this new insight into the Scriptures is described as a noetic event. It is not described as technique or style of interpretation that is taught and learned. It is specifically referred to as a change of the nous. In the same manner, the continued understanding of the gospel is, properly, a noetic exercise.

That noetic perception is the common thread of the liturgical texts and hymns of the Orthodox faith. The liturgical life of the Church has a two-fold purpose: the worship of God and the spiritual formation of the people of God. As cited earlier, there must be a movement from “flesh and blood” to “spirit and life.” It is this spiritual transfiguration that is operative in the life of the Church.

This is the same reason that I have written against popular notions of morality. The Christian life does not consist of flesh and blood struggling to behave better. Rather, it is the transformation of flesh and blood into spirit and life. Only a “new creation” (2 Cor. 5:17) sees and understands and lives the new life of the resurrected Christ.

This spiritual ability to see beneath the letter and perceive the truth continues in the life of the Church, unabated. It is particularly evident in the dogmatic formulations of subsequent centuries. Only a nous, properly illumined, could learn to profess the Trinity in the fullness of its mystery. The same is true of Christ’s God/Manhood and the nature of our salvation through the Divine Union.

Fr. Stephen Freeman.

In the Orthodox Church, the story of Christ’s resurrection appearance on the road to Emmaus is a frequent reading. The thing that rivets me is that Christ had to walk through the Old Testament with his disciples, teaching them about the “things concerning Himself.” They weren’t all obvious, but they were precious. And oddly enough, they never were systematically enscripturated. But the Church knows them deep in its bones now.

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.