What color is your church?

For the last four years, I’ve been part of a church that some would describe as “purple.” I don’t like this term because it suggests a blending that doesn’t accurately portray the relationships I experience there. Still, the faithful who gather in the pews and serve elbow to elbow do sit along the political spectrum. Even more curiously, the church itself is part of a denomination in which the clergy skews more politically progressive than the laity—by a wide margin. Despite these differences, I can honestly say that I’ve never before experienced the kind of belonging I now experience in this church. I don’t think that is incidental.

Hannah Anderson, Will Politically Moderate Christians of Both Parties Work Together?

For the last twenty-nine years, I’ve been part of a church that some would describe politically as … heck, I don’t know.

I’m not interested in my fellow-believers’ political leanings. Sitting in coffee hour, I just don’t hear people talking politics. I knew one Greek fellow who detested American gun culture, but he had a pretty good reason: a disgruntled graduate student hunted down his brother (a professor) at UCLA and shot him to death. I suspect that some of our Greeks, and Romanians, and Russians, and Ukrainians, and our Serb, may be somewhere to my left if only because their roots are in Europe and Europe is generally left of the USA. Heck, most of the developed world is to our left.

So what? Are you really going to let political differences trump Christian unity? The only reason I would consider bringing politics up is to hear how and why someone else perceives the “fit” between their politics and their faith in order to expand my own understanding. And that seems more like a topic for “would you like to meet up for coffee sometime this week?” than for church coffee hour.

I became particularly sensitive to this sort of question when someone pointed out the chronic tendency of the New York Times, which famously does not “get” religion, to treat religion (or at least Christianity) as crypto-politics. I’m not really thrilled with the Dispatch for following suit.

So I guess I won’t have Hal Lindsey to kick around any more

Following up a hunch, I posed to AI a question about whether dispensational premillennialism is on the wane (I’ve lost track because it was never a thing in Orthodox Christianity, my home for 29 years now). The answer was “yes, decisively,” explicitly citing Daniel Hummel’s 2023 book The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism, which concludes that dispensationalism is no longer considered a viable option among most Christian leaders or institutions.

That’s intrinsically good because dispensationalism is a relative novelty (~200 years, not 2000) and leads people to focus on lurid speculations, not on Christ.

Better yet, AI tells me that younger evangelicals are increasingly embracing amillennialism and postmillennialism; amillennialism is where I arrived 20 years before discovering Orthodoxy, and it’s one aspect of my mental living space where I didn’t have to rearrange any furniture on becoming Orthodox.

Postmillennialism is a little iffier. It comes in at least two flavors:

Christian Reconstructionist theocracy — Christians (usually Calvinists) ruling in accordance with God’s word. (Think of the “iconoclastic hammers and scraping-tools of conviction Protestantism” as described in Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars)
Social Justice ushering in the Kingdom.

Forced to choose between 1 (jackboots) and 2 (squishes), I’d take 2, but I’m glad there is no forced choice.

Blessing and curse

American Orthodox theologian Thomas Hopko once remarked: “As the grandson of Carpatho-Russian immigrants to the United States, I cannot imagine my life in any other society, and I feel extremely grateful for my personal destiny. But as an Orthodox Christian . . . I cannot imagine a way of life more insidious to Christian Orthodoxy and more potentially dangerous to human being and life.”

John P. Burgess, Orthodoxy at War

Unintended Reformation

The best known and most successful modern example is probably the American polygamist and putative prophet Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in early nineteenth-century upstate New York. Smith’s assertions about the significance of the revelatory vision he claimed to receive … are strikingly similar to claims made by the Quaker George Fox: the confusing cacophony of competing Christian groups and their countervailing claims characterized New York’s “burned-over district” during the Second Great Awakening no less than it had England’s “world turned upside down,” in which Fox started preaching in 1647.

Brad Gregory, The Unintended Reformation.

I was taught to distrust a short list of putatively pseudo-Christian “cults” because of, among other things, their demonstrable novelty:

Mormons
Jehovah’s Witnesses
Christian Scientists
Seventh Day Adventists

But I was taught that as a 20th-century American Evangelical, whose departure from Reformation Protestantism (itself a departure from the Roman Catholic departure from the original undivided Church) dates to the same period and from some of the same sort of impulses, with an unhealthy democratic egalitarianism — heck, call it “populism” — thrown in. Their theorists would tell you they were recovering the uncorrupted early church.

But what if the faith of the early church was always maintained in a visible Church and didn’t need to be recovered?

History Rhymes, of course

Most Church leaders—conscious that to condemn Nazis for blasphemous kitsch might prove risky—opted to bite their tongues. Some, though, actively lent it their imprimatur. In 1933, the year that Hitler was appointed chancellor, Protestant churches across Germany marked the annual celebration of the Reformation by singing Wessel’s battle hymn. In Berlin Cathedral, a pastor shamelessly aped Goebbels. Wessel, he preached, had died just as Jesus had died. Then, just for good measure, he added that Hitler was ‘a man sent by God’.

Tom Holland, Dominion

A heartening convergence

Orthodox theology defines only what is necessary and always leaves unspoken that which cannot be explained. This approach was part of the Christian faith from the beginning. But the Western [mindset] often suppresses, dismisses, minimizes, or ignores this stance. The Western mind is compelled to define and explain everything, since without a rational explanation a concept or fact cannot be considered true, or, conversely, all truth can be proven rationally.

Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

One of the interesting convergences I’ve noticed is between Orthodox apophaticism and the importance of the right hemisphere (versus the more analytical left) as explicated by Iain McGilchrist. I feel affirmed.

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.

Thoughts on American religion and Orthodoxy

[John Williamson] Nevin and [Philip] Schaff also discerned certain common intellectual patterns and reflexes beneath the rampant pluralism of American Protestantism. They attributed the breakdown of theological coherence to attitudes that American Christians had assumed. These two felt that a radical Bible-centeredness was the reigning theory among Protestant sects. After surveying the statements of belief of fifty-three American denominations, Nevin surmised that the principle “no creed but the Bible” was the distinctive feature of American religion.

…

Despite the variety of Christian idioms that flowered in the early republic, most seemed to spring from the common conception that Christian tradition since the time of the apostles was a tale of sordid corruption in which kingcraft and priestcraft wielded orthodoxy to enslave the minds of the people. Ties with Catholic and Protestant traditions were severed, with a heady sense that a restoration of the primitive church was at hand. Men such as Benjamin Randal, founder of the Freewill Baptists, called for a new dispensation of gospel liberty. According to Francis Asbury, the apostolic order of things was lost in the first century, and the Reformers had beat off only part of the rubbish of intervening centuries. Methodism claimed emphatically to reinstate the apostolic form of the church in doctrine, discipline, conversion, and sanctification. In John W. Nevin’s view, the American republic had given free reign to an “abstract supernaturalism” empowering believers to transcend the corruptions of eighteen hundred years and return to the simplicity, authority, and power of the age of the apostles. “Every congregation has power to originate a new Christianity for its own use,” Nevin concluded, “and so may well afford to let that of all other ages pass for a grand apostasy.”

Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (Kindle Edition pp. 166-167, italics added.)

So what are we to make of these new “Christianities”?

If you find yourself in bars, as I sometimes rarely do, and if you find yourself in heated conversation therein with people hostile to religion, as I often do, you may have a strong desire, as I always do, to establish a widely agreed-on way of distinguishing between what you believe and what Colorado Springs believes. Well at long last I’ve done it:

If someone were to shorten the field by forty yards, widen it by twenty, give you thirteen downs to advance twelve yards for a first down, and award you six points for doing so, you’d rightly object to his calling this new game “football.” You’d say to him, “that one’s taken. Find another name.”

I think the same applies to that fairly old, solid, and stately religion known as “Christianity.” Those who have altered the faith beyond recognition should come up with a new name for what it is they’re practicing. I suggest “Krustianity.”

Jason Peters, sometime in September of 2009 at Front Porch Republic, at a link that’s now dead. I used “Krustianity” and “Krustian” a lot in my blogging back then, but the usage never got any traction and I pretty much gave it up. But the impulse remains, and I sometimes feel guilty using the term “Christian” to refer to the “new Christianit(ies)” concocted by those who think they know better than the Church that gave them their beloved Bible.

So what’s the alternative?

Orthodox Christianity reads the account of Christ on the road to Emmaus more often than I ever encountered in the Protestant world. I mused on that narrative thirteen years ago.

Excerpt:

How do you suppose Christ expounded the Old Testament that day? It turned these disciples from disconsolate to rejoicing, so it must not have been what they were used to hearing. It made simultaneous sense of His sufferings and his Messiahship. It removed the scandal of His being numbered among sinners, and crucified — a particularly scandalous way to die.

Some of His interpretation has come down even into Protestantism, or else Protestants would be unevangelized as they learned Old Testament. For instance, we Christians all understand Isaiah 53 as referring to Christ — contrary to typical Jewish understanding.

I suggest that He interpreted the Scriptures in a way that’s preserved not only in subsequent Apostolic writings called the Gospels and Epistles, but in the interpretive tradition of the Orthodox Church, including its hymns, prayers and service texts. I can’t prove it, but I … can prove that the New Testament writers didn’t write down everything that was important.

Therefore, brethren, stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle.

That’s why we call it “the fullness of the Christian faith.”

And you can only get the fulness of the faith in an Orthodox Church. You can’t get it by reading about it or watching YouTube videos from Orthobros, because we’re not disembodied brains. You need to get your body to Church — again and again and again.

Those who sell you shortcuts are ravening wolves.

⁠⁠Those of us in Western Culture have been reared with what I believe is an entirely incorrect framework; we’ve been taught that knowledge is somehow related to holiness.

Nowhere is this more apparent than the throngs of young people who have been flooding into Orthodox Churches the past few years, many of them coming from various Protestant and Evangelical traditions, where “knowing the Bible” and “knowing theology” are often considered very central to their faith.

Amongst the converts to Orthodoxy, especially among the young men, though not limited to them, there is this thirst for knowledge and all things related to the mind⁠⁠ …

…

⁠⁠A few years ago, a number of young men were received into our parish, in what was really the first small wave of converts that I began noticing in recent years.

All of them were obsessed with Orthodoxy.

A couple of them would stay after the Liturgy with me and talk for hours on end about Orthodox Christianity.

They kept obtaining icons the way young people obtain Pokemon cards, and they would rush to show me their newest acquisitions, proud of how many images of saints they could display on their wall and how many stories about saints they could retell.⁠⁠

⁠⁠Yet not all of these young men wanted to meet regularly with our spiritual father.

They didn’t like that he spent precious little time teaching them theology or teaching them church history. What they wanted was for him to teach them the kind of Orthodox Christianity they were familiar with seeing online; as though that was truly representative of the faith.

My spiritual father is positively a saint. Nobody will ever be able to convince me otherwise, and he could see what these young men needed was not to be educated in the mind about Orthodox Christianity, but rather they needed to learn;

how to be calm
how to meditate on Jesus
how to quit focusing on the external and how to learn to be more aware of the internal

They needed to learn how to be present. Both present before God and present with others. Because at the core of their place in life was an obsession with the external; on knowing things, on material knowledge, as opposed to building a deeper personal relationship with Jesus Christ through the Church.⁠⁠

Kenneth B

The Orthodox Church is not a denomination serving an ethnic niche, nor is it one of many Christian communions that happens to have certain emphases, oddities, or decorative extras; rather, it is simply and merely the historical Christian Church.

Michael Shanbour, Know the Faith

Only wonder understands anything.

St. Gregory of Nyssa

Leavetaking of the Dormition

Sorry for a bit of a hodge-podge today.

Leavetaking of the Dormition

Most Orthodox Christians in North America are today “taking leave” of the feast of the Dormition of the Mother of God — the death of Mary, who we honor precisely because the child she bore, after telling the Angel Gabriel “be it unto me according to your word,” was more than merely human.

It is amusing, and annoying, to read modern historical critics of the New Testament who come away from those documents arguing that the notion of Christ’s divinity was a later development. Somehow they manage to read the New Testament and miss the most obvious thing: the writers all believe that Jesus is divine. They fail to notice that the very existence of the “Jesus material” of the New Testament exists solely because its writers believed He was God. Every line flows from that belief.

Fr. Stephen Freeman, Why Mary Has Always Been Honored

What would a Christian society be like?

Every single one of [Christ’s] teachings, were we to follow them, would make the building of a civilization an impossibility. So what we’re really hearing about, then, when we hear talk about defending or rebuilding Christian civilization, is not Christianity and its teachings at all, but modernity and its end-game. It’s the idol of material progress, the progress which has shredded both culture and nature, which is causing such grief everywhere.

Yankee Athonite, Crucify Your Mind (Link unavailable)

I’m not certain I agree, but I flirt with this idea occasionally. It seems consonant with Alastair MacIntyre:

… such a society would not make the kind of material progress that our society has. But then again, to believe that wealth is the only significant measure of the worth of an individual, a family, or a community is to reject the teaching of nearly every religion and wisdom tradition that ever was.

Mark Mitchell and Nathan Schlueter, The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry.

Charisma collection

Past

Evangelicalism is not so much a religion as a series of fast-moving personality cults.

Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God

Evangelicalism revivals were “direct, personal, popular, and dependent much more on a speaker’s ability to draw a crowd than upon that speaker’s place in an established hierarchy.”

Mark Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

They wanted a dramatic faith too, full of spectacle. They were all big personalities, which they used to compensate for their lack of training, expertise, and experience. Faith, for them, was not the act of extending one’s self beyond the realm of what could be known to trust in what one hoped could be true. They had more certainty than anything. Christianity was true, no questions asked. For them, faith was a belief that they could call down miracles from heaven to heal the sick or predict the future or change world events. Leaders like Tomczak, Engle, and Ahn didn’t come across as charlatans. They were very sincere. But early on in their lives, they got locked into a particular type of faith ministry, and they built audiences and followings based on that brand and that kind of faith. At that point, their livelihoods and incomes became dependent on catering to those same types of Christians. Personal evolution or growth became constrained by their business model.

Jon Ward, Testimony

Present?

At this point, tens of millions of believers—about 40 percent of American Christians, including Catholics, according to a recent Denison University survey—are embracing an alluring, charismatic movement that has little use for religious pluralism, individual rights, or constitutional democracy.

Stephanie McCrummen, The Army of God Comes Out of the Shadows.

I’m an old fogey, long living a somewhat counter-cultural life, who consequently misses what’s going on fairly often. So take it with a grain of salt when I say I’m incredulous about the startling 40 percent figure in that Denison University survey.

The topic is the “New Apostolic Reformation” movement, which I thought, upon first encounter, resembled hyper-Calvinist “Theonomy” or “Christian Reconstruction” (i.e., integralism for “conservative” Protestants), until I saw that is is led by Charismatic leaders claiming “Apostolic” office and authority. I don’t think you’d get 40% even if you combined the hyper-Calvinist and NAR polity adherents.

For more about the New Apostolic Reformation from a fairly discerning journalist, Julia Duin, see The Charismatic Christians prophesying Trump’s victory (and not backing down) and When covering the Trump prophets, listen up: ‘Heavenly inauguration’ is in the wings, both about the 2020 Presidential election.

Bad things can start off very small. And Americans have long been suckers for charismatic figures, especially glib ones.

But for now I think these self-appointed apostles and their followers are smaller by far than 40% of us. And if historic patterns hold, the “evangelical” culture will soon move on to The Next Big Thing.

The lure of power

… Cal Thomas and Ed Dobson, who had been Falwell’s chief lieutenants in the Moral Majority, published a book questioning not just the efficacy of political action but the righteousness of the enterprise. In Blinded by Might they argued that in the process of trying to win elections conservative Christians had been seduced by the lure of power. What had begun as an effort to restore Christian values to the nation had degenerated into an unbridled partisan struggle, creating an atmosphere in which it was assumed that Democrats could not be Christians and that Bill and Hillary Clinton were the Antichrist.

Frances Fitzgerald, The Evangelicals (hyperlink added)

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

I sense a parallel between Jerry Falwell Sr. and Simon Magus and those who used the name of Christ as if it was a magic incantation, only to be mocked by the demons they were trying to cast out.

There’s always a temptation to try to use some variety of magic to make god(s) do what one wants, and it’s healthy for me to remember that at least two Evangelicals recognized what was happening.

Permanent things

“How has it come about,” C. S. Lewis once asked, “that we use the highly emotive word ‘stagnation,’ with all its malodorous and malarial overtones, for what other ages would have called ‘permanence’?” It is, Lewis suggests, because the dominance of the machine in our culture altered our imagination. It gave us a “new archetypal image.”

Ken Myers, All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes

Only wonder understands anything.

St. Gregory of Nyssa

Sunday, August 16, 2026

From “High church” perspective

The man who is entirely convinced

It is very hard for a man to defend anything of which he is entirely convinced. It is comparatively easy when he is only partially convinced. He is partially convinced because he has found this or that proof of the thing, and he can expound it. But a man is not really convinced of a philosophic theory when he finds that something proves it. He is only really convinced when he finds that everything proves it. And the more converging reasons he finds pointing to this conviction, the more bewildered he is if asked suddenly to sum them up.

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Anselm’s god

It is nothing short of blasphemous to base an understanding of salvation on the idea that God gets angry or has a brittle ego. Anselm’s god is not the God of the Church, but a medieval monarch projected into the heavens.

Clark Carlton

Theotokos

Yesterday, the Roman Catholic and Orthodox celebrated the Assumption (Catholic)/Dormition (Orthodox) of the Theotokos, the Mother of God — a title we recognize for good reason:

Mary was not just a temporary or purely physical conduit of the Incarnation. The relationship between Jesus and his mother was transpersonal and transcendent to biology. She was truly the mother, and not simply the “bearer,” of God’s Son.

Patrick Henry Reardon, The Jesus We Missed: The Surprising Truth About the Humanity of Christ

I have heard this important truth dismissed, with Mary discussed as if she were a pipe and Jesus were water flowing down from heaven to earth through her, disguised as a human I guess. In fact, I heard it on WMBI, the flagship station of mainstream Evangelicalism in my day.

And no, I’m not exaggerating. Granted, it was a kind of devotional show, not deeply theological, and aimed at women, which may or may not have contributed to such slop passing whatever filters Moody Bible Institute had. If this were actually a firm opinion of the speaker, she would be a heretic.

The early Ecumenical Councils were all focused on the person of Christ. One such Council rejected calling Mary “Mother of Christ” in favor of “Mother (birth-giver) of God,” the point being to give no quarter to those who would divide Christ’s humanity from his deity. But Mary gets a lot of glory reflected onto her from her Son.

Nietzsche

Nietzsche was limited in his understanding of Christianity by the forms it assumed following the eleventh-century Papal Reformation and the later sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation. He therefore suffered, as have all Westerners since the Great Division, from a deficit in the experience of Orthodoxy. For hundreds of years, Roman Catholicism and Protestantism were the only Christian options known to Western thinkers. The old Christendom of the first millennium was forgotten, and the new Christendom that evolved from the Great Division was separated from Eastern Christendom.

John Strickland, The Age of Nihilism

I would not suggest that Nietzsche would have dropped all objection to Christianity had he encountered the first millennium expression, preserved in the Christian East, nor that his critique of Christianity is like rain off the back of a duck to Eastern Christians. He’s still an acid test for the Christian profession of anyone of a philosophical bent.

From, loosely speaking, middle church

Spittle-flecked modernism

[Ralph] Elliott said his liberal professors knew how not to run afoul of the more conservative base by knowing just how to speak: one way in the doctoral seminar, another at a revival meeting. I once heard one professor of this generation speak, a biblical scholar who taught his graduate students the then-standard historical-critical view that the Book of Isaiah was written by two or three or many people, centuries apart, one of whom may have been the actual Isaiah.

In the pulpit, though, this scholar said, “Some people get all sidetracked over whether there was one Isaiah or more. I say, if one Isaiah is good, two’s better! Amen! And if two Isaiahs are good, then three’s better! Amen! In this fallen world in need of Jesus, we need every Isaiah we can get.” The crowd roared in approval, none the wiser that they had just amen-ed modernist biblical criticism.

… Elliott concluded the doublespeak was about power, not truth. People employed theological jargon precisely because it enabled them to camouflage what really mattered to them: organizational power.

Russell Moore, Blasphemy Laws Are Blasphemy.

For what it’s worth, Orthodoxy doesn’t choke on modern biblical scholarship as much as fundamentalists and evangelicals do. That’s a long story, and I’m pretty sure I’m not qualified to tell it. But I benefit from it.

Still, having lived in an anti-“modernist” world for almost two-thirds of my life, I found this anecdote interesting. You could do worse than reading Moore’s whole column.

Something to cling to

To know that the Biblical stories have a phenomenological truth is really worth knowing. The poor fundamentalists are trying to cling to their moral structure. I understand why, because it does organize their societies and their psyche. So they’ve got something to cling to, but they don’t have a very sophisticated idea of the complexity of what constitutes truth. They try to gerrymander the Biblical stories into the domain of scientific theory—promoting creationism, for example, as an alternative scientific theory. It’s like, that just isn’t going to go anywhere. The people who wrote these damned stories weren’t scientists to begin with. There weren’t any scientists back then—there’s hardly any scientists, now.

Jordan Peterson, Biblical Series I: Introduction to the Idea of God Transcript.

I’m not endorsing Jordan Peterson as a Bible interpreter or as anything else. My personal fascination with him is long over — because logorrhea wears me out, I think. So I don’t even know whether he’s broadly right or broadly wrong about things.

But he’s at least directionally right here about the protestant fundamentalist approach to the Bible.

The sects and the Bible

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

Panning low church

Sundry flakes

Ellen Davis, who teaches theology at Duke Divinity School, recounts how one of her students “had a job interview at a Christian school in California where staff members cited the lack of recycling bins as an expression of their faith: by using up ‘resources’ as quickly as possible, they were hastening the coming of the Lord.”

Robin Phillips, Rediscovering the Goodness of Creation

Granted, that’s nut-picking, but it’s a “truth is stranger than fiction” nut. Much commoner is to watch conflict between Israel and its neighbors with unseemly intensity because one is convinced that “the coming of the Lord” becomes more imminent particularly as peace goes south in the Bible lands.

I “followed” Phillips, the author of Rediscovering the Goodness of Creation, on his journey to Orthodoxy through Calvinism — superficially like my journey, but Phillips was far more philosophically inclined than I. He was fretting about gnosticism infiltrating putative Christianity while still Protestant, penning one pivotal piece titled Are Calvinists Also Among the Gnostics?. I don’t know how he would modify it were he to write on the topic again from an Orthodox position.

Reductionist Evangelicalism

Rod Dreher recounts his argument with a nondenominational Evangelical who contended that church in the Metaverse is the wave of the future:

At one point, I asked him if there was, to him, any spiritual difference between worshiping in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and doing so in a tent church set up in a Wal-mart parking lot. He said no. At that point I gave up. For him, churchgoing was about nothing more than exchanging information and being in the company of like-minded worshipers. You could do that in the Metaverse, he said; there was no meaningful difference between fellowshipping in person, and virtually.

This reductionist view was not one I can recall holding, and my not holding it may have contributed to my separation from what I call “frank evangelicalism” to a Reformed faith that was occasionally evangelical-adjacent. I hope it’s a fringe position, but I catch a whiff of it every time someone says Orthodox and Catholics spend too much money beautifying the places where they worship.

Not just a little manipulation, but a deeply pernicious manipulation

Here’s a typical Friday night youth group meeting. After the songs had been sung and the sermon had been preached and the eyes were closed (by most) and the mood was soft, the pastor would come up on stage and lay it on thick. “How many of you are still holding something back from God? He wants all of you!” The problem is, he would say this to thirteen-year-olds who had no clue who they were yet. So to say, “I give all of myself to God” can easily morph into “I give all of myself to whatever the leaders tell me to do.” Talk of surrender is more credible, and a lot more respectful of each child’s humanity, if leaders are also giving young people critical thinking skills. Why not teach them Bible basics and the creeds while giving the child space to think for themselves, without emotional manipulation? Well, I can think of a reason. It’s harder to control kids that way.

Jon Ward, Testimony (bold added)

I knew long ago that the wheedling “evangelists,” who Ward portrays accurately (though my encounters were in evangelistic crusades, not regular Friday night youth groups) were engaged in a kind of psychological manipulation. But Ward, in the italicized portion, heightens my understanding of the perniciousness of that manipulation.

Only wonder understands anything.

St. Gregory of Nyssa

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

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