Onus probandi, nihil obstat, imprimatur – Tipsy goes all Latin

Onus probandi

[W]herever any precept of traditional morality is simply challenged to produce its credentials, as though the burden of proof lay on it, we have taken the wrong position. The legitimate reformer endeavours to show that the precept in question conflicts with some precept which its defenders allow to be more fundamental, or that it does not really embody the judgement of value it professes to embody.

C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

What happened to the nihil obstat and imprimatur?

[T]he very thought of an imprimatur on the front of a book—the approbation of a bishop, allowing the book to be printed on the grounds that it contains safe doctrine—is something that drives some people almost out of their minds with indignation.

Thomas Merton, The Seven Story Mountain It has been a very long time since I thought of the nihil obstat and the imprimatur. Do they still do that?

I’m not asking that question in the spirit of “How barbaric!”, but simply because it feels like decades since I saw one. Inasmuch as the Roman Catholic Church has no power in the US, or anywhere in the world so far as I know, to prevent publication of a book, the nihil obstat or imprimatur would serve, if used, entirely as a guide to the faithful, and I cannot object to that.

Orthodoxy and Israel

The prophecy of Isaiah 42 about Israel’s king was fulfilled in Christ and His Church, and in this it is typical of all the Old Testament passages about the Kingdom of God. However, within the last century or so, a school of thought has arisen (sometimes called “Dispensationalism”) which sees the Old Testament prophecies of Israel’s restoration fulfilled in the creation of the modern State of Israel. For this school, the “Israel” in the Old Testament prophecies refers to the Jews generally and the Zionist state in particular. … Whatever one’s sympathy for the State of Israel, it must be recognized that this school of interpretation is in flat contradiction to the apostolic view of the Old Testament prophecies. Each and every time the Old Testament prophecies are quoted by the apostles, it is in connection with Christ and His Church.

Lawrence R. Farley, The Gospel of Matthew.

I could say “this is the Orthodox agnosticism about the Israeli nation-state,” but I think that would be too narrow. Rather, the claim is that it is the Biblical view, with which claim I agree.

This do in remembrance

If recollecting Christ’s sacrifice cognitively were the only purpose of the sacrament, then we would do just as well skipping those tiny plastic cups and wafers that taste like cardboard and simply recite the Scriptures instead.

Alan Noble, Disruptive Witness

Only wonder understands anything.

St. Gregory of Nyssa

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 no-algorithm social medium.

Sophie’s Choice

Sanity returns from exile

[Indiana Fever’s Sophie] Cunningham doesn’t hate trans people, she said, but “I also think with that love is truth, being honest. And I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.”

Kat Rosenfield.

There was a half-hearted effort to cancel Cunningham over this. It seems to have flopped, though perhaps it still has a spasm or two left. But not only did she get away with this commonsensical opinion, she got away with the truth of “biological men” instead of the shibboleth “trans women.”

And when two girls showed up at the Fever-Storm game in Seattle Tuesday, sporting “Thank you Sophie” signs, and the Storm’ co-owner called them “f*****g insane,” the co-owner got fined and banned from the next five Storm games!

I wouldn’t mention all this but for one thing that I can only reluctantly acknowledge: a lot of stupid taboos have fallen, a lot of euphemisms are barely murmured any more, since Donald Trump took occupancy in the White House. I guess there’s too little energy left for fussing about shibboleths when there’s a genuine menace reigning in the Oval Office.

I’m nowhere near prepared to excuse Trump for his transgressions because of that, but I’m prepared to recognize a correlation that feels even to hostile, never-Trump me, like causation.

Read the whole Rosenfield piece if you want to see how things have turned right-side-up again.

[UPDATE: This was first published calling the Seattle team the “Aces.” I think that’s the Las Vegas franchise. I’m enjoying the WNBA, but I don’t have all the franchise names down pat.]

Oh, damn! We were hoping the maniac was a white Christian!

An Islamist terrorist drives a van into a Berlin Pride parade, killing one person and injuring dozens more. And how is it reported? Much of the media went with the usual formulation: that the attacker might as well have been a self-automated vehicle. The white van “didn’t exactly hit the parade,” one typical report went, but as it drove through the parade it “attacked the people who were going away from the parade.”

As I have had cause to say too many times, this is something which, from Stockholm to Nice, is best understood as the “naughty van” phenomenon. If a van or car is driven into a crowd by an Islamist, you can swiftly tell who the culprit is because the vehicle will be talked about as though it suddenly took on a life of its own and began a rampage.

…

The organizers of the Pride parade gave a press conference in which they admitted that they had hoped the perpetrator had been a white Christian man ….

Douglas Murray.

I read the other day that something like 58% of Muslims in America disapprove of Islamoterrorism. That was supposed to reassure me, but I wondered why it wasn’t 98%. And it didn’t help that the 58% is inert because they are threatened by the terrorists.

I just don’t want to hang around people like that

In February, a Pew Research Center poll found that white evangelical Protestants were the only large religious group in America in which a clear majority still supported all or most of Trump’s plans and policies.

And this brings me to perhaps the least shocking statistic in America. The Billy Graham Center Research Institute at Wheaton College in Illinois recently released polling data showing that almost half — 48 percent — of Gen Z adults surveyed said that Christians’ support for Trump made them less likely to want to attend church, at least to some degree.

David French

Stupid laws make stupid problems

Local news, mid-north Indiana: Recount Commission rejects Copenhaver’s demand to subpoena voters

I am pleased. District 23 is, I believe, pretty solidly “red.” If I were a Democrat (and lived in that District), I likely would have reasoned:

No way is a Democrat getting elected in my district. The best I can do is pull a Republican primary ballot and vote for the less objectionable Republican, the one not backed by Trump because he stood up to Trump.

I’m given to understand that such a vote is against Indiana law. A stupid law: “Don’t register by party but don’t you dare pull the ballot of the party we don’t think you really in your heart-of-hearts belong to.”

The Indiana GOP, however, appears prepared to require registration by party instead of sensibly abolishing the ban on crossover voting.

What Team Copenaver should have done was deploy poll-watchers to challenge those wicked, wicked Democrats who want to be represented by the less bad Republican if they can’t have a Democrat. Then the voters could have pulled a Democrat primary ballot. But no, Team Copenhaver assumed that Trump would carry their gal over the finish line first, and decided only after a narrow loss that the VAR refs shouldn’t count the only vote those wicked Democrat cross-overs cast, disenfranchising them utterly.

The campaign was dirty on both sides, and Deery’s ads were dirtier than Copenhaver’s by my lights.

I hate politics.

Spear Phishing

An AI model doesn’t need to breach a hardened network to do catastrophic damage. It only needs to talk an employee into opening the door. And the victims won’t be only governments and businesses. They will be ordinary people — the elderly, yes, but also anyone busy enough to answer an email or a message on Slack or WhatsApp on autopilot. Many have learned to spot the tells of a mass-produced scam. Few are ready to spot an attack written for an audience of one.

Jeremy Philip Galen, Richard Whaling, AI is gaining ability to personalize cyberattacks, enabling phishing at scale – Washington Post

Data Center Defamation

Some billionaire named Kevin O’Leary (I guess if you watched Shark Tank you may know of him) announced his plan to build a 40,000 acre data center in a remote part of Utah. Opposition predictably arose:

With the controversy heating up, O’Leary and Palandjian had a choice. They could have offered to meet with the project’s opponents and laid out for them the various ways their data center would mitigate their fears. They could have stated publicly something Palandjian told me when I spoke to him—that the permitting process was just in its beginning stages. “Our permit applications will all be a matter of public record, and in some instances, we’ll have hearings that will be open to the public, where the public will have a voice. We welcome a healthy dialogue and a healthy debate,” he added.

But they didn’t do that. Instead, O’Leary went on Fox News and Tucker Carlson’s podcast and accused Kanter and Finlayson, both of whom have deep roots in Utah, of working on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party. O’Leary is convinced—and he’s hardly alone—that China is funding data center opponents, hoping to slow down the U.S. while it tries to catch up in the race for AI supremacy. There was no publicly available evidence, however, that Kanter and Finlayson were doing China’s bidding. That didn’t stop O’Leary. During one of his appearances on Fox, he said, “They should rename this thing ‘Alliance for a Better China in Utah’ after you look at how much money is coming out of China pouring into this organization.” It wasn’t until Kanter and Finlayson threatened to sue for defamation (which they ultimately did) that O’Leary and Fox acknowledged that they had no proof for this allegation, and issued an apology.

…

Is it any wonder that people are up in arms about all the data centers that are proliferating around the country? Big Tech has never been known for its transparency and accountability, and that is especially true as they rush to build multibillion-dollar data centers to satisfy the voracious needs of AI. Data center developers have bought up land in secret, forced local politicians to sign nondisclosure agreements, and then steamrolled their way to permits and zoning changes ….

Joe Nocera in the Free Press.

(The idea of public officials entering into nondisclosure agreements with billionaire developers gives me a major case of the willies, by the way. Leave it to a retired lawyer to pick that out for highlighting.)

Memento Vivere

The most obvious threat of further confusion about what it means to be alive is posed by artificial intelligence. We often describe AI tools as “thinking.” Some of the advocates and enthusiasts of AI suggest that it is conscious. And we know that people can easily become convinced that it is “alive” in some meaningful way. The famously skeptical atheist Richard Dawkins believes that AI is conscious, capable of complex thought, and alive enough to experience death. What it means to be alive is clearly less obvious to people than it used to be.

…

If a machine is better at “caring” than we are, we are bad at caring. If robots can cure our loneliness, we have more problems than loneliness. If we think AI will improve aspects of our humanity, we do not understand humanity very well. In this context, memento mori is not useless, but it would be more useful to bring memento vivere into the conversation.

…

It’s very possible that if we cannot distinguish between what is alive and what is not, or understand why someone would want to use the good silver, we are not doing much better than unlimited pancakes.

Elizabeth Stice, Memento Vivere – Front Porch Republic

Having been drawn in by the title and that gorgeous illustration at the top, I almost didn’t read this. Shift your mental gears, or suspend incredulity, and savor it.

Shorts

[D]octrine is not belief, it is only one way of talking about belief …. (Marilynne Robinson in one of the Gilead novels)
[John Williamson] Nevin … depicted Winebrenner as a religious entrepreneur, daring to invent a new and competing church: “It is felt to be as easy to start a new Church, as it is to get up a new moral or political association under any other (Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity)
All power tends to coopt and absolute power coopts absolutely. (Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue)
River Page, Welcome to Secular Sharia (The Free Press)
Tact is to lie about others as you would have them lie about you. (Oliver Herford)
[T]he last thing Americans need right now is another reason not to make out. (Faith Hill, The Horrible Rise of the Makeout Police. For the record, I don’t think she made her case.)
I’m telling you, most Protestants or Catholics today, if they were to time-travel back to [western Europe, 1450-1650], would be tempted to run into the arms of Voltaire. (Rod Dreher, singing the praises of Carlos Eire, Reformations)
“We spent $3,000 or $4,000 an acre on the Old Vineyard,” Mr. Hirsch recalled in 2005. “That wouldn’t get you through the paperwork today.” (Quoting David Hirsch, vineyard pioneer of California’s Sonoma coast, who died Tuesday at 81)
He was right about things early, wrong about things honestly and never, not once, boring. (Katie Kingsbury, NYT opinion editor, of Ross Douthat, who’s leaving the Times after 17 years to join CBS 60 Minutes)
The problem today is we value what’s countable rather than what’s important. (David Brooks)
Americans of all political stripes are sick and tired of pretending they can’t see the emperor’s whole entire ass. (Kat Rosenfield)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg

Bigger on the inside

My last few Sunday blogs felt pretty “meh” to me, but not this one. The post quoted in my first item particularly grabbed me as a true and wise observation that I needed to hear.

Bigger on the inside

[W]hen my friend Leah Libresco Sargeant talks about her conversion to Catholicism, she sometimes notes that focusing on the conversion story is a little bizarre. Like imagine (this is the analogy she’s used) that the Pevensie children come back from Narnia, and they start telling people about it—and everyone’s reaction is, “Oh sure, talking lion, mysterious lands, terrible betrayals and redemptions, I get it. Tell us more about the wardrobe!”

There’s been a rebound in adult conversions to Catholicism. This just seems to be true by now, as far as I can tell. … [T]here are all kinds of questions one could raise …

But the question online-people seem to want to talk about, instead, is, “Are these people converting for the right reasons?” There’s a lot of Discourse about whether people are coming to the Catholic Church because it’s right-wing (? not the most obvious option here but okay), or because they want to be manly men (hmm), or because of Catholic “influencers” etc. To put the fear or criticism most charitably, it’s a fear that people are entering the Church for a political persona, not an encounter with Jesus Christ.

And yet I guess all of this seems to me like an obsession with the wardrobe. Nobody stays in the Faith for the same reasons they converted. The Church is bigger on the inside. Having entered, you may discover how much there really is, beyond the little alcove where you happened to find a door.

…

So the real thing here is that when people enter the Church through small, weird, insufficient, or warped doors, they need wise guides to show them the path deeper in, into the heart of the Church ….

Eve Tushnet, Nobody Converts Right. Tushnet is a convert to the Roman Catholic Church, but her observations fit Orthodoxy as well (or perhaps even better; the press seems to have discovered Orthodoxy and to be hinting that it’s a dark masculinist and nationalist hotbed).

May you find yourself in a Church this morning that has depths to explore beyond “the Wardrobe,” that isn’t all “alcove.” And if you’re an old-timer there, may you be a wise guide to newcomers.

Nobody sticks right, either

At the conference, I had drinks with a devout Lutheran friend. We discovered that we shared a love for Carlos Eire’s stupendous history of Early Modern Western Christianity, Reformations. I told my friend that reading the book has caused me to realize, to my personal shock, that had I been alive back then, I might well have been tempted to join Luther, simply because of my personal temperament (that is, easily inflamed by corruption and abuse). To my surprise, my Lutheran interlocutor said reading the book made them realize that, given their deeply conservative temperament, they probably would have stayed Catholic. We got a good laugh out of that.

Rod Dreher

As hard as it must be

It would be silly for physicists to complain, “The truth about quantum mechanics is too hard!” In the same way, it would be silly for us to complain that the truth about God is too hard. The truth about God is just exactly as hard as it has to be in order to fit how things really are with Him.

J Budziszewski

Losing the trail

Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells, to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him. For it doesn’t stop at being interested in paint, you know. They sink lower—become interested in their own personalities and then in nothing but their own reputations.

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

I didn’t remember that quote at all, but it perfectly fits the arc of the narrative in this, one of the most important books in my spiritual journey.

Theology as infomercial

Growing up in church, we were taught that Jesus was the answer to all our problems. We were taught that there was a circle-shaped hole in our heart and that we had tried to fill it with the square pegs of sex, drugs, and rock and roll; but only the circle peg of Jesus could fill our hole. I became a Christian based, in part, on this promise, but the hole never really went away. To be sure, I like Jesus, and I still follow him, but the idea that Jesus will make everything better is a lie. It’s basically biblical theology translated into the language of infomercials. The truth is, the apostles never really promise Jesus is going to make everything better here on earth.

Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years

Agree or disagree, there’s something worthy to chew on: Where in scripture is the promise of Jesus filling up a hole in you and making everything better? My initial, long-ago commitment to Christ was not based on that, but I heard that message a great deal in my teenage years.

(I was surprised to stumble across this quote because the book, which I read after it got a lot of buzz a few years ago, was almost completely unmemorable to me otherwise.)

Talking the talk

A Christian polemic—a Christian serrated edge—must be based on the Word of God, and not based on the sensibilities of men who spend Sunday mornings swaying side to side, moaning along to the newest Hillsong release.

Promotional blurb for provocateur Doug Wilson’s book The Serrated Edge. This isn’t a book or an author I would recommend, but having come across it, I’m reminded of how Wilson appeals to a certain sort (and such once was I).

Hannah Anderson profiles Wilson:

In a weird twist, evangelicals are more likely to follow the person who talks or writes about the importance of virtue than the person who is actually virtuous.
…
when you pull back the curtain to reveal the man behind it, you find someone with a history of speaking philosophically about the goodness of common life while also undermining it. You find a man who was raised within mainstream evangelicalism who intentionally chose marginality.

You find a man who speaks a lot about submission to authority while refusing to submit himself. You find a man who easily discusses the most extreme hypotheticals, seemingly unmoved by how they would actually affect the person sitting in front of him.

Wilson is not dangerous because he is an ideologue. He is dangerous because he’s comfortable entertaining radical ideas to further pragmatic ends, knowing that if they go wrong, he can always retreat to the safety of the theoretical. In this way, Wilson finds a natural home among the protected class of lawmakers and bureaucrats in Washington who seem beyond the reach of voters—who increasingly engage in the work of public policy as if it were a game or reality show, who are insulated from the consequences of their choices, who remain theoretically detached while others suffer and even die under their watch.

Hannah Anderson, The Great and Powerful Doug

Discernment

Sometimes the God Within isn’t God at all, but just the ego or the libido, using spirituality as a convenient gloss for its own desires and impulses. Sometimes your books and teachers are right, and what seems your Highest Thought is really emanating from the lower reaches of your soul.

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

What is an evangelical?

For quick surveys, often tied to elections, national polls tend to measure evangelicalism by self-ID. That is, if a respondent says she is an evangelical, so she is.

This is a defensible method: replicable and quick. And it generally produces serviceable results. But it also makes evangelicalism whatever survey participants suppose it to be, which is how we have 7 to 20 percent of American Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, and people of no religious affiliation telling pollsters they’re evangelical Christians.

Bonnie Kristian, There Will Never Be Another Billy Graham. The title is derived from the once-useful, now-fading, definition of an evangelical as “someone who likes Billy Graham.”

The difficulty in defining “evangelical” may be a problem, but to bring today’s post full circle, a larger problem seems to be that it’s not bigger on the inside. It’s all alcove, all the time.

Only wonder understands anything.

St. Gregory of Nyssa

Meandering through “Mere Christianity,” denominations, missions, and extra Ecclesiam nulla salus

I spent some time this week mulling over a blog that talked about some YouTube video dialogs across the lines of Christian traditions. The result seems kind of half-baked, but it’s what I’ve got this Sunday.

The point of “mere Christianity” for Lewis was not to minimize ecclesial distinctives, but rather to help people make useful distinctions as they think about their relationship to faith. Yet, and Scrivener himself develops this point in his own way in the video, to even conceive of such a project as being legitimate is itself to be committed in some limited way to Protestantism. It is not really possible for a Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox Christian to separate belief in “mere Christianity” from membership in and submission to the ecclesial life of Rome or Constantinople. To imagine that there is a set of cardinal doctrines that transcends ecclesial divisions and unites all people as “Christian” is inherently to speak and think as a Protestant.

So in that sense the best way to read what Scrivener calls the era of “mere christianity” is probably to regard it as a period of deficient Protestantism in which people presupposed Protestant conceptions of the church without understanding that they were doing that. They mistook their implicitly Protestant commitments for a kind of broadly Christian and ecclesially indifferent set of commitments. That is never what Lewis was trying to do in his own work, but it is how his work was received by highly democratic and anti-institutional American readers.

Jake Meador, Is the Era of Mere Christianity Over?.

Youngish Calvinist Jake Meador is too young to feel in his bones the weight of implicit “common-core Protestantism” in America. I felt it to a degree in the 50s as a fundamentalist/evangelical oddball in a public school that didn’t share our taboos but somehow was Christianish. Observant Catholics felt it to the extent that they really supported their parochial schools. I lived across the street from an empty field on which we watched a Catholic high school arise in the late 50s.

Meador rightly observes that “It is not really possible for a Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox Christian to separate belief in “mere Christianity” from membership in and submission to the ecclesial life of Rome or Constantinople.” To Protestants, that may be baffling, but Christ promised to build his church and, as I have noted before, there are Christians for whom belief in Christ and His Church is one act of faith, not two. I’m now one of them.

On the question of whether denominationalism is coming back, though, Meador is wise to distinguish the return of doctrinal particularity from the return of the denominations, each one instantiating those particularities, and to ask “how’s that going to work when most of the Christian action is taking place in non-denominational assemblies that have fancied that they were avoiding particularities?” (Spoiler alert: they weren’t avoiding partiuclarity. Try getting an infant baptized in one of these non-particular churches. They’re crypto-baptists.) Sociologist of Religion Ryan Burge has documented lavishly the decline of denominations relative to independent churches (religiopreneurs).

The video Meador is discussing features snippets of conversation between Protestant Gavin Ortlund and Orthodox Jonathan Pageau. Ortlund is kind of hurt that Pageau seemingly cannot univocally call him a brother in Christ. Pageau responds in part at the oddity of that hurt, inasmuch as Protestants have long sent missionaries to traditionally Orthodox lands, where they try to persuade Orthodox Christians that they’re not really Christians until they embrace some Protestant tradition or another.

Protestant prickliness about Orthodox Christians hesitating to greet them with unguarded bonhomie reminds me of Mormon complaints about Evangelicals (and others) not accepting them; why then, have the Mormons been sending pairs of young “Elders” throughout the land all my life to evangelize for their church? They’re asking for acceptance they don’t reciprocate.

I’m obviously on Team Pageau when it comes to repudiating “salvation by faith alone” and other aspects of Protestantism. I think it’s worth noting, too, that the Orthodox position that there’s no salvation outside the ark of the Church shouldn’t be taken anachronistically or out of context.

“Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus. All the categorical strength and point of this aphorism lies in its tautology. Outside the Church there is no salvation, because salvation is the Church” (G. Florovsky, “Sobornost: the Catholicity of the Church”, in The Church of God, p. 53). Does it therefore follow that anyone who is not visibly within the Church is necessarily damned? Of course not; still less does it follow that everyone who is visibly within the Church is necessarily saved. As Augustine wisely remarked: “How many sheep there are without, how many wolves within!” (Homilies on John, 45, 12) While there is no division between a “visible” and an “invisible Church”, yet there may be members of the Church who are not visibly such, but whose membership is known to God alone. If anyone is saved, he must in some sense be a member of the Church; in what sense, we cannot always say.

Bp. Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Church.

Catholics find it impossible to theologize without deductive reasoning—a characteristic shared by virtually all Western Christians

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox. I almost made this a separate item in my typical multipart collation, but it feels rather like an epilogue.

Sunday, July 12, 2026

I saw a theme trying to emerge from what I’m calling the main course, but I don’t think I teased it out successfully. Read with your heart and you may see it.

The main course

Road to Emmaus

Most Christians are presumably familiar with the account of Luke and Cleopas encountering Christ on the road to Emmaus. But I think I missed a lot about it in my years as a low-brow, then middle-brow, Protestant.

For one thing, the “between the lines” message of Luke 24:27, which is echoed in the story of the Ethiopian Eunuch:

The Old Testament is full of Christ, but a lot of it is typological, and thus easily overlooked.
We cannot rightly interpret scripture on our own, without a guide and without Christ as the interpretive key.
The details of Christ’s explanation to Luke and Cleopas, and of Philip’s explanation to the Eunuch, are surely important but are not given in scripture; that, along with John 21:25 suggests an important tradition that was not enscripturated, but passed down (from Luke and Cleopas to Philip, perhaps) in the Church, the pillar and foundation of truth.

Later, in Luke’s narrative, the double mention of Christ becoming know to the Apostles “in the breaking of bread” hints at the Eucharist. Perhaps Christ “broke bread” in a distinctive way both in the upper room and in Emmaus. I’m not now, and perhaps never, going to try to unpack that very far. Suffice that Roman Catholic and Orthodox teachers focus on different aspects of that in ways that feel complementary to me, but I sense treacherous ground here.

Orthodoxy and Syncretism

Being Orthodox in mind requires that one accept ambiguity, uncertainty, mystery, and paradox. Perhaps this encourages humility before God. We cannot rely on clever explanations or beloved definitions, and we must accept that we cannot completely explain or fully understand our faith. Therefore, we must rely solely on the grace and mercy of God. Perhaps this allows us to focus less on the mind and more on the heart, which is where we encounter God.

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox.

This is an amazing book, which captures better than I thought possible the experience of being Orthodox. I know that because I had been officially Orthodox for some 20 years when it came out, and had (because I’m my parish’s Cantor) attended more services that just about anyone besides Priests and Deacons, and thus was beginning to get the hang of things. But reading it and trying to think the way it describes will not make you Orthodox. Becoming Orthodox requires reception into a Parish and a lot of humble attention. Anything less will make you a syncretist.

One of the little mysteries

Yesterday I gave a friend a ride to church. She is a scholar in town this week to do some research. Because of a serious injury in a car accident last year, she can’t drive. Her ability to speak is greatly diminished, and I had to listen closely to understand what she said. After liturgy, though, her speaking was normal again. What?!

“This happens after I receive the Eucharist,” she said. “Everything is normal again, for a while.”

Rod Dreher

Propositional truth, practical results, efficiency

Discourses that could speak of the value of uncertainty and of belief as opposed to certainty, of the repetitive shaping of the self rather than a deterministic operation according to natural tendency, and of personal interaction with a God not operating according to predetermined, fixed laws-these were in a very real sense swallowed up by Western modernity’s esteem for propositional truth, practical results, and efficiency, and the languages in which these were valued.

Lori Branch, Rituals of Spontaneity.

“The repetitive shaping of the self” is why being parish Cantor, which requires my presence in services that are sparsely attended, is such a blessing.

A lay Orthodoxen encounters Calvinism

I had to make a long drive yesterday, and took my reading of historian Carlos Eire’s Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450–1650 to audiobook.

…

The long chapters on Zwingli and Calvin were amazing — but they put a chill on me. Eire explains that the dispute between Luther and the Swiss Reformers had a lot to do with metaphysics. The Reformed were strongly anti-sacramental. They believed that there was no real correspondence between the realm of the spirit and the material realm. Listening to Eire’s explanation of Reformed theology, and its fruits, I thought that this is the Perfect System designed by brilliant men who don’t understand what it means to live in a body.

Rod Dreher

For what it’s worth

Context matters

Wives, therefore, are called to submit to their husbands—not that they had much choice within the Roman Empire. What is radical, however, about Paul’s statements on marriage for this era is his command that husbands love their wives and do so self-sacrificially.

Stephen De Young, Saint Paul the Pharisee

Everything matters

I was brought up in a Christian environment where, because God had to be given pre-eminence, nothing else was allowed to be important. I have broken through to the position that because God exists, everything has significance.

Poet Evangeline Paterson (H/T Mark Noll)

An antichrist

Niebuhr counseled in Christianity and Power Politics that the “man of power is always to a certain degree an anti-Christ.” Such a sentiment would be entirely alien to TheoBros, who want nothing more than to be men of power.

Ed Simon, Where Have All the Protestants Gone?.

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg

American Religion at 250

DBH’s take on American Religion

On the whole, religion inevitably fails in this country. We may have the greatest number of religious adherents, at least per capita, of any “developed” nation, but there is something about American culture that is relentlessly corrosive of genuinely spiritual values. Our indigenous forms of Christianity in particular are essentially shams and perversions, not only in the bizarre universe of white Evangelicalism, with its hospitality to blasphemous nationalism, diabolic militarism, and lunatic chiliasm, but also in many mainline Protestant denominations and increasingly in Catholic and Orthodox circles as well. America’s principal religion is America, and it tends to extinguish or subvert any rivals to its supremacy. One way or another, the myth of America insinuates itself into the sacred memories preserved in the faith and practices of Christian creeds and communities, and the sanguinary gods of patriotism manage to force their way into the company of Christ and the saints. Our civic pieties, moreover, are morasses of saccharine sentiment spiced with crass belligerence.

David Bentley Hart, Running in Circles

American Sketchbook

I regaled them with tales of Johnnie Lou, the rough-and-tumble lesbian from my hometown whose Facebook posts—which I followed in the last year of her life—were usually on one of three themes: female athletes and celebrities she thought were hot, inspirational verses from Scripture, and reasons why Hillary Clinton is a bitch. My mother loved Johnnie Lou. To this day, every time there’s bad news, especially when jihadists get up to something, Mama will remind me, “Johnnie Lou and I studied Revelations”—with an s—“for 30 years. I’m telling you, we in Revelations!” Translation: This news item was clearly predicted in the Book of Revelation, thus indicating that Jesus is coming soon, maybe the day after tomorrow.

Rod Dreher, My American Homecoming in the Free Press.

The fringe

In a real sense, the Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and so on all represent a sort of “outer rim” of Protestantism.

Fr Andrew Stephen Damick, Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy

What to call American Religion

The deeper I get into Orthodox Christianity, the more alienated from American Christianity I tend to feel. I now realize that’s partly a problem with me.

But that aside, I struggle with how to characterize American Christianity. I very recently called it “heretic”. But despite its technical meaning, “heretic” connotes something too uncharitable.

Saturday morning, on America’s 250th birthday, I was reminded of an alternative adjective that I want to keep in front of mind as I write about America. It acknowledges that something’s more than a bit “off” about America’s religion without the lack of charity.

“Christ-haunted.” That’s the ticket. It acknowledges the good — a good that extends even to heretics who are quite thoroughly skewed in their Christology, like the JWs and LDSs — while alluding to the deficit.

I hope that writing this little item will facilitate my remembering of it until and unless I find something even better.

Against instrumental religion

Does the church exist for the world?

The problem I see in the idea of the Church as the catalyst for cultural and/or civilizational renewal — even if it should become that in our time — is the erroneous implication that the Church exists for the sake of the world. She doesn’t. She stands more often than not — as the Bride of Christ, wedded to one Bridegroom — as a counter to the world, marked as the world order is by transient powers, constant instability, “freedoms” that aren’t true freedom, dubious ethics (“For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, is not of the Father but is of the world”; 1 John 2:16), “wars and rumors of wars,” and all the rest.

Addison Hart, How I Wandered Into Orthodoxy: An Uncharacteristically Personal Reflection

Pride in the saddle

“From that day to this, the Christian religion has been made a stirrup to mount the steed of popularity, wealth and ambition.”

Paul Gutaker, The Old Faith in a New Nation. Gutaker is referring, of course, the Emperor Saint Constantine’s establishment of the Christian faith in the Roman Empire. This is so standard a Protestant trope that it’s almost embarrassing, but Gutaker’s nice figure of speech elevates it ever so slightly.

Revealed preferences

Have you noticed how many people claim to respect gentleness, humility, forgiveness, service, and love as great ideals, while in practice they disdain these as ineffective? They reject such virtues in the day-to-day struggle of this world, being driven to win, bent on self-aggrandizement, and set on personal advancement. The truth is that the evangelical virtues require enormous spiritual reserves.

Dynamis devotional for June 29, 2026 (PDF), the feast of SS. Peter & Paul, reflecting on the Epistle reading, II Corinthians 11:21-12:9.

Final Judgment

The Final Judgment is not extrinsic and judicial, based on whether individuals broke certain rules of behavior and then are sentenced to various punishments; rather, it is revelatory.

Fr. Stephen De Young, Apocrypha

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg

Summer Solstice

A pervasive error

…the most pervasive error one encounters in contemporary arguments about belief in God—especially, but not exclusively, on the atheist side—is the habit of conceiving of God simply as some very large object or agency within the universe, or perhaps alongside the universe, a being among other beings, who differs from all other beings in magnitude, power, and duration, but not ontologically, and who is related to the world more or less as a craftsman is related to an artifact.

David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God

Well I don’t believe in that God, either

[V]ery often the God who’s being attacked and questioned by the Dawkinses and the Graylings and the Pullmans of this world is a God I don’t believe in, either: an individual who sits in the remote parts of the universe and treats the rest of the universe as an intriguing hobby for himself, rather than the God who is much more like the ocean that soaks through everything that is and yet is infinitely beyond it.

I found recently in the work of a 17th-century Welsh Catholic writer, Augustine Baker, a wonderful image: that the soul without God, the soul cut off from God, is like a whale stuck in a pond. It longs for the ocean, he said. It can’t be in the depths where it belongs. Now, I don’t hear very much of that sense in the New Atheists. They come up with all sorts of very neat and, as far as they go, perfectly rational arguments about how difficult it is to believe in some chap out there in midspace.

I want to say, “Well, yeah. I have no interest in a chap out there in outer space, none at all.” But I am quite interested in what the infinite, unconditioned life of generosity is within which I and everything else live. And I have every interest in the story of how that life astonishingly comes to fruition in the middle of our history in the life of Jesus. Now, that’s something I do think I can spend my life thinking and praying about and something that transfigures the horizons in which we live.

Rowan Williams

Making sense of Creation

Christians make sense of Creation doxologically and liturgically. Christian liturgy and worship unfold and illumine spiritual knowledge and wisdom about Creation that modern life forgets.

Vigen Guroian, The Melody of Faith

Infinitely burdensome and earnestly enforced

[T]he Reformation meant not the elimination of the Church’s control over everyday life, but rather the substitution of a new form of control for the previous one. It meant the repudiation of a control which was very lax, at that time scarcely perceptible in practice, and hardly more than formal, in favour of a regulation of the whole of conduct which, penetrating to all departments of private and public life, was infinitely burdensome and earnestly enforced.

Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

I first heard an observation close to this during law school, when another older student (I entered law school at 30) explained why, improbably to me, he had left Protestantism and entered Roman Catholicism. His version had a Pope far away in Rome who claimed all kinds of authority but left people alone in practice versus a pompadoured tyrant who claimed only to be interpreting and applying the Bible but micromanaged personal lives.

The limits of rejoicing

Waugh, taking stock of the Church in America, was impressed by her variety, her energy, her schools and colleges, her magazines, her convents and monasteries. He was struck especially by the experience of Ash Wednesday in New Orleans, where, across the street from his hotel, which was full of Mardi Gras revelers, “the Jesuit church was teeming with life all day long; a continuous, dense crowd of all colors and conditions moving up to the altar rails and returning with their foreheads signed with ash.… All that day, all over that light-hearted city, one encountered the little black smudge on the forehead which sealed us members of a great brotherhood who can both rejoice and recognize the limits of rejoicing.”

Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own. I like that “can both rejoice and recognize the limits of rejoicing.”

Today marks the completion of week 2 of a 3-week limitation of rejoicing (i.e., a fast) in the Orthodox Church.

Latent consciousness of wrong

While bishops and emperors did not legally abolish slavery, Child observed throughout the patristic and early medieval era a “latent consciousness of wrong” reflected in Christian practices—especially the frequent practice of Christians freeing their slaves upon baptism or when nearing death.

Paul J. Gutaker, The Old Faith in a New Nation. Be sure to note that he’s speaking of the patristic and medieval periods; I somehow missed that and thought at first glance that he was talking about practices among American slaveholders.

I’m surprised how often quotes from this book rise to the surface of Readwise because, subjectively, I didn’t like it all that much. Objectively, I highlighted the heck out of it.

America the the self-sufficient

Against the background of the new national culture emerging in the United States, the insistence by such capable spokesmen that genuine Christianity required organic deference to the historic episcopate could only be a provocation.

Mark A. Noll, Assumptions and Assertions of American Theology in America’s God

The Beatitudes, tell us the way blessedness works. I’ll take that over political “strength,” “force,” or “power” any day of the week, not just Sundays.

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.

Commendation and Critique

Commendation

Evocation 1

But how could we ever relate to God or, even more challenging, truly unite with Him? Of all religions, only Orthodox theology emphasizes union with God—in a real and actual sense—as the goal and purpose of all human life. We rarely speak of “going to heaven,” as though it were a destination. We do not speak of experiencing a “beatific vision” of God, as though God could be viewed but remained at some distance from us. Rather, Orthodox Christianity speaks of theosis, the divinization of the human person. We expect, hope, and strive for actual union with the perfect, infinite, eternal, omnipresent, and changeless God. But we are flawed, limited, and come into existence for a brief time; we are confined to one place at one time, and we are constantly changing. So how is union with God possible? The Incarnation, the enfleshment of the Son of God, gave us the ability to truly connect to God and become united with Him, transformed and illumined by Him, not simply because He died for us but because of the way He lived among us.

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

Evocation 2

“Yes, but Christ lived in the world. He did not lock himself into a monastery.”
“Let me ask you something Thomas,” father Maximaus replied. “How many years did Christ live in the world? Thirty-three years right? How many years did he preach?”
“Almost three”
“Right. Of the Thirty-three years, he preached for only about two and a half. What was he doing the previous thirty or so years?”
“Well there is the apocryphal life of Jesus that we don’t know much about,” Thomas replied.
“That means,“ father Maximos went on to say, “for that for thirty years Christ maintained a life of silence. …”

Kyriakos Markides, The Mountain of Silence

A Wise Policy

I’m starting at St. Tikhon’s Orthodox Theological Seminary this autumn. By your prayers, I’ll be ordained a priest in about three years.

Wisely, St. Tikhon’s does not allow seminarians to “teach.” That includes blogging and podcasting about the Faith.

Michael Warren Davis. What a wise policy! If memory serves, Davis is a fairly recent convert to the Orthodox faith from a reactionary Catholic stance — which is a second good reason why he shouldn’t be teaching (so why was I subscribing to his Substack?).

I wish we could put an effective ban on all newly-illumined Orthodoxen blogging or otherwise yammering about the faith for three years after conversion. My impression, from YouTube (since my social media practice is very narrow these days), is that, unrestrained, new converts can spew a lot of nonsense into the cybersphere.

Critique

America’s Ancestral Sin

Many say that slavery is our ancestral sin. I’m not so sure that it isn’t Puritanism. In fact, I can make a case for the outgrowth of Puritanism putting the wind in the sails of slave owners. Instead, I will lay two charges at the feet of the Calvinistic Puritans in America:

Avarice was refashioned as a virtue, and

Community was sacrificed to the solitary individual.

…

The sine qua non of Calvinism was their peculiar understanding of Predestination. The word does indeed exist, a time or two, in Scripture. But in over 1500 years, the Church never constructed an entire theological edifice upon this foundation. But to these novice Protestant interpreters of Scripture, no longer bound by the received teachings of the Church, the concept bespoke a sovereign God who had foreordained everything, and whose justice must be satisfied. Gone was the loving God of mercy, the Father in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, etc. Gone was the forgiveness inherent in the sacramental cycle of liturgical life. In its place, a wrathful God, in His sovereign omnipotence, had decreed the fate of every living thing, and there was simply nothing that any individual could do to add or subtract from this judgment.

This doctrine was as cold and unforgiving as concrete. If that was all there was, if everyone’s fate was already cut and dried, as it were, then the best response would be to simply live the best life, with as much enjoyment and pleasure as possible, for in the end, nothing you did really mattered. There certainly wouldn’t be any need to go to church, as it wouldn’t move the needle an iota. There would be no need for preachers to pound pulpits, and no need for anyone to show up to listen to them even if they did.

Terry Cowan, Predestinated America

Like Terry, I’ve never read Max Weber’s famous The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, but I own it now and plan to cure my unwarranted reduction of it to being something about the “Protestant work ethic.” It seems, per Cowan, that it’s more about Puritans than about Protestantism in general.

English Puritans in particular sought to shore up religious meaning by grounding it solely in the Bible and in a literalist approach to its interpretation.

In this literalist approach, ritual acts such as baptism were no longer trusted as working or signifying salvation; rather, to be saved, one must believe-in propositional, clear, biblical language-in God’s sole and definitive action in salvation, at most looking for evidence that this has taken place …Configuring salvation in these terms, the Reformation religious subject gradually became less a participant in communal, bodily ritual action, and more and more the Cartesian cogito, an individual, inward-looking possessor of knowledge drawn from evidence and analysis. If the “Cartesian moment” is that moment when as Francis Barker has asserted the self can be conceived of without the body, it is also the moment when it can be conceived of without ritual; by what might be called a Cartesian logic, the later English Reformation places efficacious signs of salvation elsewhere than church ritual, first in a literalist reading of Scripture, and ultimately in the individual conviction of the particular truths of Scripture and in the self who experiences it.

Lori Branch, Rituals of Spontaneity

If you’re skeptical about Puritans being that influential:

Puritanism is the only colonial religious system that modern historians take seriously as a major religious influence on the Revolution.

Mark A. Noll, America’s God

And again:

Conflating prosperity with providence and opting for acquisitiveness as the lesser of two evils until greed was rechristened as benign self-interest, modern Christians have in effect been engaged in a centuries-long attempt to prove Jesus wrong. “You cannot serve both God and Mammon.” Yes we can.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

Tim Keller on Fundamentalism

Keller wanted evangelicals to recognize the difference between sound doctrinal convictions and what he called the “sociological location” of churches—the cultural attitudes and practices that are merely social characteristics of Christians in particular places, not theological doctrines. Keller was no fundamentalist. He saw the return of fundamentalism in the form of the Moral Majority as part of the problem. In 2022, he began speaking of the six social marks of evangelicalism, which he essentially equated with fundamentalism. These were moralism over gracious engagement, individualism over social reform, dualism over a comprehensive vision of life, anti-intellectualism over scholarship, anti-institutionalism over accountability, and enculturation over cultural reflection.

Dale Coulter, Remembering Tim Keller

Creationism

The word creationism by rights should define all who discern a divine mind at work in, with, or under the phenomena of the natural world. Yet by a most unfortunate set of events, the term has come to mean only the view that God created the world ten thousand or fewer years ago and that God used a worldwide flood in the days of Noah to form the geological conditions that most modern scientists think reveal an ancient earth with evolutionary changes over great expanses of time.

Mark A. Noll, America’s God

I agree with Noll. I applied the term “creationist” to myself until, sometime during law school (where lunchtime bull sessions were far-ranging), I learned that “creationism” had become a term of art for “young-earth creationism” — a position I’m not sure I ever held (though it’s likely I did hold it as an adolescent in an evangelical boarding school).

I wonder whether the young-earth creationists themselves contributed to that narrowing by calling guys like me CINOs (Creationist in Name Only) or something like that.

The Beatitudes, tell us the way blessedness works. I’ll take that over political “strength,” “force,” or “power” any day of the week, not just Sundays.

June 7, 2026

First, become human

“Not too many years ago,” I read, “a young monastic aspirant went to Mount Athos. In talking with the venerable Abbot of the Monastery where he wished to stay, he told him, ‘Holy father! My heart burns for the spiritual life, for asceticism, for unceasing communion with God, for obedience to an elder. Instruct me, please, holy father that I may attain spiritual advancement.’ Going to the bookshelf, the Abbott pulled down a copy of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. “Read this, son,“ he said. “But father!“ objected the disturbed aspirant. ‘This is heterodox Victorian sentimentality, a product of the western captivity! This isn’t spiritual; it’s not even Orthodox! I need writings that will teach me spirituality!’ The Abbot smiled, saying, ‘Unless you first develop normal, human, Christian feelings and learn to view life as a little Davey did – with simplicity, kindness, warmth, and forgiveness – then all the Orthodox spirituality and patristic writings will not only be of no help to you – they will turn you into a spiritual monster and destroy your soul.’”

Kyriacos Markides, The Mountain of Silence

When I entered Orthodoxy, several years before Markides wrote this book and before I can recall hearing this (or similar) stories, I was intrigued by the teaching that theosis, deification, was the goal of the Christian life — even the very meaning of salvation. But somehow I discerned, and said, that my goal for the foreseeable future was the more modest one of becoming human. This story gives me hope that I was right.

What should we do?

I am not remotely shocked that Fr. Stephen Freeman, in the beforetimes, lived in a Christian commune:

Our questions were framed in the only language we knew: what does the Bible say? The questions and answers of that dialog were informative. With those questions in mind, we became aware of a steady stream of admonitions in the New Testament urging believers towards a life of asceticism. Fasting, vigils (praying through the whole of a night), sacrificial giving, radical forgiveness are all considered commonplace and normative. We had no tradition to draw on, and thus we practiced such things without guidance. We learned many things the hard way. There is now a long string of decades that separate me from those fervent years.

No one told us to do the things we did, and no one told us to read the Scriptures in the manner we undertook. What we did was to read the Scriptures with the question in mind, “What should we do?” That stands in stark contrast to the typical question, “What should we believe?” Had our study been primarily directed to matters of doctrine, I think we would have lost our way. Strangely, our instincts were correct.

The teachings of Christ are not, primarily, metaphysical pronouncements about the nature of things. Instead, they are commandments regarding what we should do – based on who God is. “Love your enemies – because God is kind to both the good and the evil.” This pattern holds throughout Christ’s teachings. It is a directive that intends to shape our lives such that our lives themselves become a “living theology,” a revelation of the nature of God made known in the shape of our actions.

It’s not about rules

Orthodoxy is not about following rules but about inner transformation. Extremists and schismatic Orthodox are not Orthodox, in spite of any Orthodox appearance and rigorous observances, because they lack an Orthodox phronema.

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

Going to the well and finding it shallow

What J. S. Bach gained from his Lutheranism to inform his music, what Jonathan Edwards took from the Reformed tradition to orient his philosophy, what A. H. Francke learned from German Pietism to inspire the University of Halle’s research into Sanskrit and Asian literatures, what Jacob van Ruisdael gained from his seventeenth-century Dutch Calvinism to shape his painting, what Thomas Chalmers took from Scottish Presbyterianism to inspire his books on astronomy and political economy, what Abraham Kuyper gained from pietistic Dutch Calvinism to back his educational, political, and communications labors of the late nineteenth century, what T. S. Eliot took from high-church Anglicanism as a basis for his cultural criticism, what Evelyn Waugh found for his novels in twentieth-century Catholicism, what Luci Shaw, Shirley Nelson, Harold Fickett, and Evangeline Paterson found to encourage creative writing from other forms of Christianity after they left dispensationalism behind — precious few fundamentalists or their evangelical successors have ever found in the theological insights of twentieth-century dispensationalism, Holiness, or Pentecostalism.

Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

Humility

Shallow ideas can be assimilated; ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility. … Tolstoy: “I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.”

James Gleick, Chaos

The Beatitudes, tell us the way blessedness works. I’ll take that over political “strength,” “force,” or “power” any day of the week, not just Sundays.

Pentecost

Yes, in the Christian East, it’s Pentecost. It’s a long story.

Taking God more seriously than Caesar

The cross is not a symbol for general human suffering and oppression. Rather, the cross is a sign of what happens when one takes God’s account of reality more seriously than Caesar’s.

Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens

A Virtuous Circle

Orthodoxy has always known that attention is not neutral. What you repeatedly give your mind to begins to shape what you love. And what you love begins to shape who you become.

Frederica Matthewes-Green, commenting on this video.

Lumped together

In the present age it is fashionable to lump Jesus with the prophets and the Buddha, with Confucius, Lao-tze, and Zen, with the mystics and Spinoza-sometimes even with the French Enlightenment and Freud-as if everybody who had been at all attractive must, of course, have been a humanist, and only Hitler, Stalin, Calvin, and the Catholic Church had been authoritarian.

Soren Kierkegaard, The Present Age

Start with a bad premise, end with confusion

A similar, but more sophisticated, complaint of monograph length came from John W. Nevin in 1849 when he rounded on what he called the sect system. According to Nevin, “This professed regard for the Bible” was what “distinguishes the sects in general.” But to Nevin the difficulty in that profession was as manifest as it was stupendous: “If the Bible be at once so clear and full as a formulary of Christian doctrine and practice, how does it come to pass that where men are left most free to use it in this way…they are flung asunder so perpetually…instead of being brought together?” This anomaly showed that the principle of “no creed but the Bible” was “absurd and impracticable”; it breathed “the spirit of hypocrisy and sham.”

Mark A. Noll, America’s God.

I don’t know how I ignored this stupendous and manifest difficulty for almost 50 years, but I did. Others still do.

Insofar as such epiphanies are the reason for my conversion (and I periodically read very plausible suggestions that such rational observations are not how we humans roll our major life decisions), this one was foremost.

Is Evangelicalism really Protestant?

Reading James Davison Hunter’s Democracy and Solidarity rekindled a feeling that I’ve had many times before in reading books like this. Every time I read a book that describes the religious history of America that talks about the nature of Protestantism in the country, it strikes me that the Protestantism of the American past is alien to today’s evangelicalism. They are different enough to raise the question as to whether or not American evangelicalism is actually Protestant in important ways.

Hunter writes in his book:

For most Americans—whether deist or Calvinist, rationalist and intellectual or revivalist and popular, high church establishmentarian or sectarian—there was a God more or less active in the universe and in human affairs. Indeed, this God was, for most, Christian and, even more, Protestant. Though hegemonic and certainly oppressive to those who dissented, this belief nevertheless provided a language and an ontology that framed understandings of both public and private life. And yet this was also a culture, following Weber and so many others, that was inner-worldly in its orientation and ascetic in its general ethical disposition, an ethic that shunned extravagance, opulence, and self-indulgence and prized hard work, discipline, and utility. In ethics it was individualistic, to be sure, but informed by biblical and republican traditions that tempered individual interest and moved it toward the public interest and common goods. [emphasis added]

It’s certainly hard to argue that contemporary American culture generally, or evangelicalism in particular, are ascetic and oriented towards a traditional disciplined WASP ethic. Undoubtedly, they are if not opulent, consumerist in orientation. I’d be lying if I said I were any different.

Aaron Renn, Is Evangelicalism Really Protestant? (emphasis in original)

God and Man at Anthropic

What follows isn’t Orthodox Christianity; it’s not orthodox Christianity; it’s not Christianity in any robust sense, nor is it Jewish in a robust sense.

But it is evidence that there are people in the AI world who are morally serious, and that it’s not all hubristic atheists thinking they literally are “building God.”

From outside San Francisco, the joke is sometimes heard as a reflection of spiritual lacking—that the pursuit of AGI (artificial general intelligence) is a stand-in for a God-shaped hole, that clever technologists who reasoned their way out of the old faith are now building an idol to fill the vacancy. I do not think that is quite what is happening. People need meaning, and intense, world-shaping work is one of the oldest ways to find it; that part is not new and often not sinister. What is different here is that this particular work sits so close to the old questions—what are we, where did this come from, what comes after—that you cannot do it long without staring into them. They are not building God because they miss Him. They are building something that has brought them, unexpectedly, to the edge of where He would be.

…

The reason the God-shaped-hole critique lands a glancing blow rather than a clean one is that the Bay Area’s irreligion is not quite the absence of religion. You cannot stand this close to questions of omniscience and immortality without being pulled toward the territory religion has always occupied.

Consider what people in this city expect AI to do, in roughly decreasing order of certitude and arrival time: cure all diseases, solve aging, widen science until we know how the universe began and whether we are alone in it . . . and also, potentially, cause cataclysms of various kinds. And so a community of materialists has ended up—without anyone intending it—inside something with many of the working parts of a faith.

It starts with conversion stories. Ask almost anyone when they got “AGI-pilled” and they will tell you the year, the paper, sometimes the conversation—if they have not already written a blog post on it.

…

When I tell people I am attending churches and synagogues, the response is almost always: “It’s great to have community.” But I do not go for the community. I want what happens when we are silent, or praying, or singing. I want communion with that greater, stranger thing—a transcendent sense of meaning, a call to be better than I am.

…

If Chesterton could see us now, I think he would feel vindicated, but the larger part would be sorrow. He said religion provided a frame that suited us as creatures. Many of us decided we could see more clearly without it. Now we are neither astonished at the world nor at home in it; perhaps the two came as a package, and we returned the package.

And in this city, we are building something unprecedented inside a spiritual and moral frame that many feel is inadequate to the weight. Many of the builders sense this. Few have the vocabulary for it. They try to rationalize it, to confine it to the map, and they go back to work, and they build.

Avital Balwit, Searching for God in Silicon Valley.

Balwit is the Chief of Staff to the CEO of Anthropic, which is currently my chosen AI because it at least talks a reasonably good game of thinking deeply about what they’re doing, and how it affects humans.

Kudos to the Free Press for publishing it. I overlooked it until others cited it because I’ve generally ceased expecting very much from Free Press.

The Beatitudes, tell us the way blessedness works. I’ll take that over political “strength,” “force,” or “power” any day of the week, not just Sundays.