Tag: faith

Belated Sunday post

Somehow, Thomas Sunday got away from me.

Headstrong and mis-shapen

It seems odd to open a Sunday post with a quote from a neuroscientist philosopher who has not yet found himself able to profess forthrightly any active Christian faith. If and when he does, it almost certainly will be Orthodox, as I believe he himself once acknowledged.

I open with it nonetheless because it … well, I hope you’ll see:

Unfortunately, reason on its own will lead you astray very, very quickly …

People detect from what I wrote in The Master and His Emissary that I am not a huge admirer of the [left-hemisphere inspired] Reformation … Unfortunately, it brought with it a kind of headstrong view that ‘now we’re in the clear. Everything must be made explicit. The word triumphs over the image’ and so on. …

The trouble with the left hemisphere is … it tends to be headstrong. It tends to think it knows far more than it does.

Iain McGilchrist in a YouTube video with Freddy Sayers of Unherd.

I expect to chew on this for a long while, hoping to digest it and build some new intellectual tissue with it, so that I think by it rather than about it.

If you’re unfamiliar with Iain McGilchrist, this book blurb for one of his smallest books may help:

Attention is not just receptive, but actively creative of the world we inhabit. How we attend makes all the difference to the world we experience. And nowadays in the West we generally attend in a rather unusual way: governed by the narrowly focussed, target-driven left hemisphere of the brain.

Forget everything you thought you knew about the difference between the hemispheres, because it will be largely wrong. It is not what each hemisphere does – they are both involved in everything – but how it does it, that matters. And the prime difference between the brain hemispheres is the manner in which they attend. For reasons of survival we need one hemisphere (in humans and many animals, the left) to pay narrow attention to detail, to grab hold of things we need, while the other, the right, keeps an eye out for everything else. The result is that one hemisphere is good at utilising the world, the other better at understanding it.

Absent, present, detached, engaged, alienated, empathic, broad or narrow, sustained or piecemeal, attention has the power to alter whatever it meets. The play of attention can both create and destroy, but it never leaves its object unchanged. How you attend to something – or don’t attend to it – matters a very great deal. This book helps you to see what it is you may have been trained by our very unusual culture not to see.

The extent to which Protestantism neglects to “attend” to the Christian Gospel with the right hemisphere not only makes it “headstrong,” as McGilchrist has it, but oblivious to much that is precious and edifying.

Reductionism

Weber clearly thought that modern people are disenchanted because they believe that, in principle, a scientific explanation can be given for natural phenomena, with no need for recourse to magical means to invoke spirits or gods. As an explanation of the natural world, Weber thought that science was replacing religion, and empirical fact was replacing belief.

William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry.

(Note that “scientific explanation” is fundamentally a left-hemisphere explanation.)

Anti-Institutional

The American evangelical tradition may not be as “liberal,” in the nineteenth-century or classical meaning of the term, as it sounds, but the focus on individual action — sans church, sans family, sans social structures of whatever sort — has predominated since the days of Whitefield. The enduring contribution to evangelicalism of the republicanism of the Revolutionary era was the undermining of hereditary trust in institutions. The enduring contribution of the Great Awakenings in the colonial and early national periods was to substitute the voluntary society for the church.

Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.

Many Americans would read this and say “Damn right! Institutions just get between me-and-Jesus!”

I intend it as an indictment. One might define the offense as Headstrongness.

Institutional failures in my mind are outweighed by personal failures. An institutional Church (at least one of them, anyway) is a near-infinitely safer guide to spiritual health than oneself is.

Barmen Declaration

Jesus Christ, as he is attested for us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death. We reject the false doctrine, as though the Church could and would have to acknowledge as a source of its proclamation, apart from and besides this one Word of God, still other events and powers, figures and truths, as God’s revelation.

Karl Barth, The Barmen Declaration (Germany, 1934), quoted by Stanley Hauerwas in Resident Aliens.

Somehow the Barmen Declaration seemed especially timely when I stumbled across it again. If I’m not careful, I’ll become “WEAK on Crime and terrible on foreign policy.”

Great Schism

The centuries succeeding that day in 1054 have yielded two very different visions of what it means to be truly Christian, what it means to be the Church. These differences are not only in terms of mindset and vision, but also in core doctrines that are regarded as central to salvation itself.

Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick, Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy, (“that day in 1054” being the conventional dating of the Great Schism, the separation of the Patriarch of Rome (i.e., now the modern Pope) from the rest of the Church).

Step in the right direction?

I am not at all convinced that a move from, say, atheism to Wicca is necessarily “a step in the right direction” — i.e., once you’ve entered the genus-town of “religion,” you’re closer to the species-house of Christianity than you were before. Indeed, I wonder whether many people might be less interested in Christianity as a result of such a move, since they might plausibly think that as long as they’re operating within the genus, does it really matter what species they prefer? (The “We all get to God in our own way” line has had a very long run and doesn’t show any signs of slowing down.)

Alan Jacobs

Angry and vengeful

It is sinful to ascribe to God the characteristic features of fallen man by alleging, for example, that God is angry and vengeful, and therefore He must be propitiated and appeased. Such an attitude wants to make it appear that it is God Who needs curing, and not man. But this is sacrilegious. The sinful man, who is characterized by egoism and arrogance, is offended. We cannot say that God is offended. . . . Consequently, sin is not an insult to God, Who must be cured, but our own illness, and therefore we need to be cured

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

Everybody’s got their schtick

Today’s leading Christian personalities podcast, YouTube, Tweet/X, TikTok, Instagram and exert their presence through every form of social media. The audience is less national. There may never be another Billy Graham about whom everybody knows. Today’s influencers may have millions following them but are typically unknown outside their niche.

Everybody, Christian or not, is increasingly siloed. We self-collate, listen to and watch those who entertain us and typically tell us what we want to hear. Of course, the most popular influencers are usually provocative, outrageous, extremist, often hateful. The cerebral, thoughtful, reflective and courteous are less captivating.

[Megan] Basham, like all successful influencers, has her schtick. Her Shepherds for Sale targets evangelicals who supposedly have betrayed conservative Christianity in favor of leftist dollars or secular approval. Her tweets continue this theme and offer a robust MAGA Christian perspective, hammering non-MAGA Christians as weak sisters or worse. Every day is a new cosmic drama. In this regard, she is very talented.

Mark Tooley, America’s Most Influential Baptists?.

Basham has obsessively targeted so many evangelicals for literally selling out, mostly implausibly, that I suspect projection of her own financial motivations.

Nominalism, Realism, Human Rights

Most menacing of all was the United Nations. Established in the aftermath of the Second World War, its delegates had proclaimed a Universal Declaration of Human Rights. To be a Muslim, though, was to know that humans did not have rights. There was no natural law in Islam. There were only laws authored by God.

Tom Holland, Dominion.

Preliminary research suggests that the absoluteness of Holland’s indictment is unwarranted — that things are a little more complicated than “humans [do] not have rights.” There’s also more than a grain of truth to it.

There are, sadly, sectarian Christianities who come close to this. You can get to that position from Christianish premises filtered through philosophical nominalism.

An hypothesis

I quoted a few days ago: Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion. (Francis Bacon via Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions).

Hypothesis: the works in the spiritual realm, too. Thus I, a Calvinist, was more open to Orthodoxy than some “spiritual-but-not-religious” addlepate.

IVF

One of my unpopular opinions is that there’s something dodgy about IVF. Thoughtful Protestant Matthew Lee Anderson makes The Biblical Case Against IVF.

I’m not going to try to anticipate and rebut any reaction that my position is cruel. I just wanted to drive a stake in the ground as a memorial against the Technological Imperative. Not all of us have decided that if something is inevitable, we should relax and enjoy it.

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.

Pascha 2026

Christ is Risen!

This post is kinda late because I was feasting until 7 hours ago and slept until after 8 am.

What do we know about God?

I believe that Christians make a serious mistake when we begin to speak first about God rather than first about Christ and His death on the Cross and resurrection from the dead. It is a mistake because it presumes we know something about God that is somehow “prior” to those events. We do not, or, if we think we do, we are mistaken. The death and resurrection of Christ are the alpha and the omega of God’s self-revelation to the world. Nothing in all of creation is extraneous or irrelevant to those events.

Fr. Stephen Freeman

I love prayer books

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

Tom Howard, Evangelical is Not Enough.

When, as a Reformed Elder, I occasionally had to lead worship in the Pastor’s absence, I unfailingly went to the Book of Common Prayer to structure the “Pastoral Prayer” for the morning. I did so because I didn’t want to lapse into “Father we just” (this) and “Father we just” (that), the faux fervency I heard too often.

I don’t know why it never occurred to me to use prayer books in my private prayers, but as I approached Orthodoxy, the Church’s prayers, in its Prayer Books, indeed taught me how to pray.

Gnosticism is insidious

Abigail Rine Favale echoed Mohler when she published an article in First Things in 2018 titled “Evangelical Gnosticism.” I teach in a great books program at an Evangelical university. Almost all students in the program are born-and-bred Christians of the nondenominational variety. A number of them have been both thoroughly churched and educated through Christian schools or home-schooling curricula. Yet an overwhelming majority of these students do not believe in a bodily resurrection. While they trust in an afterlife of eternal bliss with God, most of them assume this will be disembodied bliss, in which the soul is finally free of its “meat suit” (a term they fondly use). Upon reading Favale’s article, a Grove City professor said on Twitter, “I did not believe this was true of my students,” so he decided to poll them during class. He then announced, “I was floored (and dismayed) to discover the vast majority don’t believe in the bodily resurrection.”

Robin Phillips and Fr. Stephen De Young, Rediscovering the Good of Creation

Young, restless and …

Interesting observation from Julia Yost in the Washington Post: the blogosphere gave a relative edge to discursive Protestantism; TikTok and Instagram to liturgical Christianity. “Young, Restless and Reformed” giving way to “Young, Restless and Roman.”

Via the grapevine, I understand the Parish associated with the Roman Catholic chaplaincy at University of Illinois received 130 at Easter. My little Orthodox parish baptized five and chrismated three more. We have added the Paschal Troparion (Hymn) in Spanish as a result.

These dogs don’t hunt

Other influential myths also invite reevaluation: the memory of medieval Christendom as the “Dark Ages,” the decline narrative of the church’s “Constantinian fall,” or the dismissal of Christian orthodoxy as “Hellenized” by alien Greek philosophy.7 More work can and should be done on the legacy of these flawed narratives—notably, all reflecting anti-Catholic and antimedieval biases—in American history.

Paul Gutaker, The Old Faith in a New Nation (Epilogue)

Conundrum

Many evangelicals knew the Christian right had become deeply unpopular with most Americans and that evangelicals had become thoroughly identified with the Christian right.

Frances Fitzgerald, The Evangelicals.

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.

Fifth Sunday of Great Lent

Christian America

One of the reasons I have long been hostile toward the idea of Christianizing America is that the variety of Christianity that would be in instantiated would be what Ross Douthat has called “Bad Religion” in a book subtitled “How We Became a Nation of Heretics.” I don’t trust power-hungry American heretics to treat Orthodox Christian better than secularist progressives would.

That concern has only grown

  1. the more deeply I am shaped as an Orthodox Christian (and see how that differs from mainstream American Christianities), and
  2. the more particularly sinister figures like Lance Wallnau appear to be leading Christian Nationalism.

These are not C.S. Lewis’s “Mere Christians.” They are ideologues with plans for how to get power and how to (mis)use it once they have it.

Of course they’re not alone. Other groups seek power for illiberal ends, too. (To the best of my knowledge, none are Orthodox Christian and I would be surprised if they were.)

I don’t toss and turn in agony over these groups, but it leaves me in the camp of liberal democrats, and if you think “liberal democrats” means I’m a crazy lefty, you’re part of the problem. (Relative to today’s political spectrum, I think I’m positioned center-right because of deal-killer differences with those to my left.)

Alas, the hopes for liberal democracy do seem dim, and I pray daily “If this is the end of liberal democracy in America, guide us into a beneficial different path ….” I also thank God for my “living in a civilization where beliefs, texts, symbols, and ethical standards of Christianity are still woven into our common life.”* All it takes to assure that continues, I think, is for people to live as Christians — no political program required.

* Many, including even notorious atheist Richard Dawkins, looking soberly at the cultural alternatives, now call themselves “cultural Christians.”

Something for rumination

Both Dostoevski and Tolstoi made me cling to a faith in God, and yet I could not endure feeling an alien in it. I felt that my faith had nothing in common with that of Christians around me.

Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness.

[Here I typed my pedantic gloss, but then deleted it to let readers ruminate on their own.]

What a well-formed Catholic believes about Jews and Irael

The Catholic position on matters of ‘Zionism,’ to which I fully subscribe, is as follows: all forms of antisemitism are to be unequivocally condemned; the state of Israel has a right to exist; but the modern nation of Israel does not represent the fulfillment of Biblical prophecies and hence does not stand beyond criticism.

Bishop Robert Barron, admonishing antisemitic “Catholic Mean Girl” Carrie Prejean Boller who was delusionally claiming that her ouster from the White House Religious Liberty Commission was anti-Catholic.

Stirring things up at Yale

A few years after I left Calvinist Protestantism for Eastern Orthodoxy, the great Yale historian of religion, Jaroslav Pelikan, left Lutheranism for Orthodoxy. I mentioned it to a friend who had attended Yale in Grad School.

“Well, that will stir things up,” he opined.

Me: “Why? I had no idea that Yale still had some strong religious tradition to offend.”

Him: “It will stir things up because people won’t understand taking religion seriously enough to change it.”

I thought of that as a read sociologist Ryan Burge’s recent post Inertia Still Rules American Religion.

“Inertia” has bad connotations. I encourage everyone to take a good hard look at Orthodox Christianity, but I also tend to cast at least a little bit of side-eye at people who switch Churches. I cannot entirely reconcile that except for the possibility that I’m a censorious ass. But try as a might, somehow, there seems to me to be something not entirely unhealthy about not looking at the grass on the other side of the fence if you’re being nourished on your side. (Have I equivocated enough?) Anyway, if your teeth are on edge where you are, come take a look at us.

(My experience pre-Orthodoxy clashes a bit with Burge’s definitional “If someone moves from one type of Protestant to another type of Protestant, that’s not a switch.” When I left generic Evangelicalism for Calvinism, it felt like a switch. The change from Calvinist to Orthodox, of course, was orders of magnitude “switchier.”)

The Ark of Salvation

[I]t’s worth thinking about the Church (Orthodox) as an ark of salvation and safety. It is an ancient image of the Church, a place where God gathers those who are being rescued. The ark is not an instrument of flood management, however. It is a raft. Modernity imagines itself as the manager of the world and its historical processes. It is an idea that is itself part of the destructive flood of our time.

…

From onboard the ark, we view things a bit differently. First, we trust that God is the Lord of the tsunami just as surely as He is Lord of the sparrow and the lillies in the field. The mystery of how He works all things for our salvation is summarized in His crucifixion. Most of that mystery is simply opaque. It is a confession of faith that the Cross represents the interpretation of all things. It is what I learned on board the ark.

That being the case, it is for us to give thanks for all things, try to stay dry, and wait for the waters to recede.

Fr. Stephen Freeman, Riding the Tsunami of History

Gratuitous

Having adopted a method of investigation which in its nature precludes the perception of spiritual qualities, it is gratuitous, to say the least, to pronounce that the object one investigates is to be explained in non-spiritual categories alone.

Yet it is the conclusions achieved by this kind of [circular] reasoning which for the last 300 years or more have been regarded as constituting knowledge in a virtually exclusive sense and which moreover have been termed scientific.

Philip Sherrard, The Rape of Man and Nature

“I don’t believe in anything,” answered Pendragon very briskly, with a bright eye cocked at a red tropical bird. “I’m a man of science.”

G.K. Chesterton, The Absence of Mr. Glass, a Father Brown mystery.

Fleeing the world

As St. Paisios (1924–1994) put it, “The monk flees far from the world, not because he detests the world, but because he loves the world and in this way he is better able to help the world through his prayer, in things that don’t happen humanly but only through divine intervention. In this way God saves the world.”

Robin Phillips and Stephen De Young, Redicovering the Goodness of Creation

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.

Saint John Climacus Sunday, 2026

Our inescapable reality

Nor does this allow for any kind of Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox triumphalism, whereby the historical continuity and unity of the institutions can be presented as an antidote to Protestant fragmentation. To be a Roman Catholic today is to make a choice. Thoughtful Roman Catholics may object to this claim by pointing to the sacramental power that they ascribe to baptism. But that does not really address the matter of lived experience: every faithful cradle Catholic has still made a decision to live his or her Christian life as a Catholic amid a world of other possible options, from atheism to Islam to Bible churches and Pentecostalism. When it comes to how we think of ourselves, we are all expressive individualists now, and there is no way we can escape from this fact. It is the essence of the world in which we have to live and of which we are a part.

Carl Trueman and Rod Dreher, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self

Provincial

A giant in the Evangelical world, John M. Perkins, has died at age 95. I clipped two obituaries for later reading. When I got around to reading the first, I was struck by the provincialism of an indictment Perkins handed down in 1987:

I think that makes a difference between whether or not that church is an action church or whether it’s just become a self-centered worshipping congregation. And I think most churches are sort of self-centered worshipping. They see the church as ‘meeting my need, meeting my need,’ and the church doesn’t have a ministry, and a concept of ministry, and a philosophy of ministry, and a statement of mission to the world.

(Italics added.)

Perkins was an evangelical, and one mark of evangelicalism is activism (to the neglect of so much else, in my opinion). His indictment is of evangelicals, and for not living up to an intentional and full-orbed activism — not living up well to his vision of how things should be.

Self-centered worshipping congregation is an oxymoron (hypothetical self-worship aside). To worship is to ascribe high worth to another. So this indictment starts off wrong-footed.

The he shifts voice, from talking about a congregation to the demand of each individual member — “meeting my need, meeting my need.” And there is where he, and much of evangelicalism, miss the boat.

They really have made Church about “meeting my felt need” in an effort geared more toward growth than toward making disciples.

Frederica Matthewes-Greene wrote of inviting a friend to her Orthodox Church. At the end of the Liturgy, her friend exclaimed “Wow! That was soooo not about me!” And I’d say Church in the 21st Century can be perceived as “meeting my need” by the masses only if it’s pandering to something other than real human needs, the foremost of which is to move from the image of God to the image and likeness of God, to grow God-ward.

Unfortunately, that’s not on evangelical radar.

Overlearned

Freddie DeBoer had a post this week on “overlearning,” which he descibed as:

the error … that learns too much, that overfits the curve, that extrapolates irresponsibly, that takes a genuinely correct observation and rides it so far past its destination that it ends up somewhere just as wrong as pure ignorance, only with more confidence.

He gives many examples, such as extrapolating a dismissal of all social science research because much of it fails replication.

Without looking for them, I found a few artifacts of overlearning in Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind:

The wood and stone from which idols are made do not deserve to be worshiped; because God made them, however, they deserve to be studied as wood or stone.

And:

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. (Irish poet Evangeline Paterson)

A book note

A few years ago, I tried to read The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, but I quit because it felt voyeuristic for me, an Orthodox convert from Evangelical and Evangelical-adjacent Christianity, to read it. But my interest shifted from finding fodder for schadenfreude to figuring out how it came to pass that something went scandalously wrong with one of America’s most visible and vocal Christian traditions. So I read it afresh, finishing this past week.

As the author, Mark Noll, wound down, he had this summary:

The scandal of the evangelical mind seems to be that no mind arises from evangelicalism. Evangelicals who believe that God desires to be worshiped with thought as well as activity may well remain evangelicals, but they will find intellectual depth — a way of praising God through the mind — in ideas developed by confessional or mainline Protestants, Roman Catholics, or perhaps even the Eastern Orthodox. That conclusion may be the only responsible one to reach after considering the history sketched in this book. Even if it leaves evangelical intellectuals trapped in personal dissonance and the evangelical tradition doomed to intellectual superficiality (or worse), the recent past seems to point in no other direction.

A fair clarification of that paragraph, in context, is that there seems to be no mind that arises from what is distinctly evangelical about evangelical Christianity: conversionism, activism, biblicism and crucicentrism (in a classic and widely-accepted taxonomy), to which Noll crucially adds intuitionism, a dogmatic reverence for “common sense.” It is particularly intuitionism that must be set aside for an evangelical even to have the patience to engage in the sustained, intense study of a subject that characterizes a life of the mind.

So evangelicals can live the life of the mind by adopting what I’d call “methodological mere Christianity,” much as, I’ve come to suspect from outside the sciences, a scientist who hopes to contribute to specifically scientific knowledge, will need to adopt methodological naturalism even if his personal convictions are not naturalist.

That’s not a conclusion I anticipated when I decided return to Noll’s book and finish it, and it leaves me with the kinds of personal questions that make the reading worthwhile.

An unexpected answer to fervent prayer

I pray fervently that Mr. Dreher will return to the Catholic Church—not only for his sake, but for ours. I’m afraid the Benedict Option project will remain incomplete until Mr. Dreher commits to restoring the Holy Catholic Church as the central pillar of Western Christianity.

Michael Warren Davis, September 25, 2020.

Within four years of this plea, Michael Warren Davis left the Catholic Church and entered the Orthodox Church. He currently writes a Substack.

A Contrast

Shortly before he died in 1860, George Croly penned the prayer “Spirit of God, Descend upon My Heart.” In its second stanza Croly described what he felt would happen if he were to experience a deeper walk with the Spirit:

I ask no dream, no prophet ecstasies,
No sudden rending of the veil of clay,
No angel visitant, no opening skies;
But take the dimness of my soul away.

For Croly, to know God better would make our vision of the world clearer. In 1922, Helen H. Lemmel wrote the words and music to a gospel song that is as moving as it is characteristic of the fundamentalist-Holiness outlook:

Turn your eyes upon Jesus,
Look full in His wonderful face,
And the things of earth will grow strangely dim
In the light of His glory and grace.

While the essentially Christian motivation of this song is clear, its ironic meaning can be understood better now than when it was written — under the influence of fundamentalism, evangelicals turned their eyes to Jesus, and the world grew very dim indeed.

Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

The “science” of theology

“The Bible is to the theologian what nature is to the man of science. It is his store-house of facts; and his method of ascertaining what the Bible teaches, is the same as that which the natural philosopher adopts to ascertain what nature teaches…. The duty of the Christian theologian is to ascertain, collect, and combine all the facts which God has revealed concerning himself and our relation to Him. These facts are all in the Bible.” On the basis of these assertions, [Charles] Hodge then went on to suggest that “the Theologian [is] to be guided by the same rules as the Man of Science.”

Mark A. Noll, America’s God. I am dumbstruck by the arrogance of this, and humbled at the thought that 30 years ago I probably would have applauded it.

It is very difficult to make our contemporaries see that there are things which by their very nature cannot be discussed.

René Guénon Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World.

Satan at work

The accusation that Haitian immigrants in a small Ohio city are abducting and eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs relies not on one falsehood but on a web of them. The rhetoric evokes racist tropes about “savages” who do not conform to our civilized Western world. There’s also a religious angle: the idea that Haitian refugees are voodoo occultists who might be worshipping the devil. As an evangelical Christian who actually believes in the existence of Satan, I agree that we can indeed see the work of the devil at play here, only it’s not on the menu of the Haitian families but rather in the cruelty of those willing to lie about them.

…

To sing praise songs in a church service while trafficking in the bearing of false witness against people who fled for their life, who seek to rebuild a life for their children after crushing poverty and persecution, is more than just cognitive dissonance. It’s modeling the devil himself, whom Jesus called “the father of lies” (Jn 8:44). That’s especially true when the lies harm another person. “Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer,” the apostle John wrote, “and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him” (1 Jn 3:15).

Russell Moore, Trump’s Lie Is Another Test for Christian America.

I have a beef with Moore: if memory serves, this was JD Vance’s lie before Trump picked it up with delight and ran with it.

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.

Ides of March

Literacy versus Immersivity

The problem with Catholics is that they are bad Catholics; the problem with Protestants is that they are also bad Catholics. But perhaps they do not consider themselves Protestant anymore. Perhaps the word is an anachronism; perhaps the word is a slur. Protestantism rose with the printing press and fell with immersivity. It inhabited one specific form of literacy: in a world where people can no longer read—with attention and depth—you can only have post-Protestants. That there are Christianities focused again on a single form of literacy does not make them Protestant, if the single form is different. It does not make them Catholic either, of course—that is, it makes them bad Catholics.

Ross McCullough, The Body of This Death: Letters from the Last Archbishop of Lancaster.

Some explanation is in order. This quote is not — at least not directly — a diagnosis of our present situation, because the book is fiction, set in a dystopian future. (See the book notes at Bookshop.org for more detail.)

That said, the idea that “Protestantism rose with the printing press and fell with immersivity” is striking (it was new to me at least) even if the “immersivity” referred to is beyond our current Virtual Reality headsets. It also meshes with Brad East’s provocative suggestion that Evangelicalism is not Protestant:

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

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

To my mind, what McCullough adds to East is the causality by which Protestantism disappeared: the neglect of reading and the valorization of spectacle and feeling — media literacy over print literacy.

Pernicious delusion

Buddhism, like hesychasm, begins with the search for inner stillness, which it sees as a necessary precursor to understanding the delusions we tend to call ‘reality.’ This is entirely in accordance with Christian teaching, and indeed with modern understandings of human psychology.

The thing is, once you begin to examine those delusions, you see that one of the most pernicious is the construction of a self-identity. This is necessary to survive in the world, probably, but soon enough it becomes a yoke around the neck. This construction labelled ‘Paul Kingsnorth’, for example, now has a public reputation as a writer with certain opinions and a particular history. His future work, and indeed his income, is in some way reliant on keeping this fiction going. It is not a ‘fiction’ in the sense of it being a deliberate falsehood, but it is a construction, which means it is a story, which means that the actual me has ended up stuck inside it, as we all do with our stories in the end.

Things are particularly bad for this ‘Paul Kingsnorth’ character, because he makes his living writing articles like this one. Not only does he need to do this to eat, but more existentially, he has written for so long that he now sees the world almost entirely through the lens of the written word. Even if he wasn’t getting paid to write things down, he would be writing them down anyway, which would just continue to encrust the artificial world around the artificial self, and make it harder to escape from both.

Whether we are writers or not, we create these personal fictions we call ‘identities’, and the older we get, the harder it is for that simple, primal stillness which is the precursor to true prayer to break back through. Back when I practiced Buddhism, I remember seeing with crystal clarity, at a level far deeper than the intellect, that if I wanted to progress spiritually I had to stop pumping out all these words. This was not because language itself was inherently bad – it is hardly avoidable – but because of something at once fuzzier and clearer, which even now I find it hard to explain. It was that words were part of the fiction of the world. It was so clear then – and it remains clear now – that spiritual progress, that work of theosis, requires us to drop all of our illusions. To smash through the cement of words and concepts and identities and opinions. To see ourselves naked before God. To make ourselves simple again.

Paul Kingsnorth, In the Desert of the Heart.

Where are our spoils?

Speaking of the retreat of print literacy, above, I’m reading Mark A. Noll’s classic book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.

I tried to read it a few years ago and quit about 20% into it because I felt like a voyeur, peeking in on a family’s internal quarrel (and maybe feeling a bit of schadenfreude as I did). I’ve come back to it now because my interest now is less salacious and more about how it came to pass that the dominant American Christian tradition of my adult lifetime has so little interest in cultivating excellence in scholarship, the sciences and other “mind” activities, even as it exults in big-name athletes, actors and musicians (exemplars of excellence in their fields) who profess evangelical Christian faith.

That “scandal” ramifies: there are no evangelical Nobel Laureates, no evangelical Supreme Court Justices, and, as Noll put it, “not a single evangelical periodical in the United States or Canada that exists for the purpose of seriously considering the worlds of nature, society, politics, or the arts in the way that the Atlantic, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Sunday Magazine, or the Washington Post’s National Weekly Edition do for the general public.”

Again, from Noll’s “indictment”:

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.

Nevertheless, I have now seen a call for a kind of affirmative action in the worst sense:

Evangelicals are 23 percent of U.S. adults and one of the most loyal Republican voting blocs, with 81 percent backing Donald Trump in 2024. Yet despite six of the nine Supreme Court justices being appointed by Republican presidents, there are no evangelicals on the Supreme Court.

Aaron M. Renn, Evangelical Christians help the Supreme Court and elite institutions.

If you don’t earn it, maybe you can just demand it, as in We’re big and we helped elect you: where are our spoils?

Affirmative action for Evangelicals! The horseshoe theory of politics lives!

(The Washington Post has several letters to the editor noting the irony as well.) This was not Aaron Renn’s finest hour.

Not unrelated to DEI for Evangelicals

The religious right of a previous era really was trying to bring biblically based convictions into the political realm, with the aim of moving the latter into greater conformity with the former. Today, by contrast, “biblically based convictions” have been replaced, among many voters who would normally be defined as members of the religious right, by blatantly partisan convictions that are given a theological gloss.

Damon Linker’s hypothesis about the religious right. Beware, especially, the latter kind of “biblically based convictions.”

Wary of Contentment

A friend of mine was ordained to the Diaconate in the Orthodox Church last Sunday. He’ll probably become a Priest in a few more years.

The burdens of the Priesthood are great, even apart from a shortage of Priests. The foremost burden is that Priests (and Bishops) must one day answer to God for their parishioners as well as for themselves.

[I]f we have learned anything at all in our theological education, spiritual formation and pastoral service, we have learned to beware, and to be wary, of all contentment, consolation and comfort before our co-crucifixion in love with Christ. We have learned that though we can know about God through formal theological education, we can only come to know God by taking up our daily crosses with patient endurance in love with Jesus. And we can only do this by faith and grace through the Holy Spirit’s abiding power.

The late Fr. Thomas Hopko, 2007, via Fr. Stephen Freeman.

As the current national government explicitly exults in its lethality, I’m very glad to be in a church where every Sunday we sing the Beatitudes, which tell us the way blessedness works.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Second Sunday of Lent, 2026

We are not alone

Paradise is closed (vs. 3:24) but God never forsakes mankind, providing us with a means of survival through birth, growth, and human labor (vs. 4:2). He exposes sin in all its vicious ugliness and deadliness – and yet, to prevent despair, God also discloses that His image remains within us. Despite sin, the grace of God abounds.

Dynamis devotional for March 2, reflecting on Genesis 3:21-4:7.

I mention this to contradict the (prevalent? After learning that dispensationalism is waning, I realize I’ve lost touch with America’s religious notions) idea that God cursed Adam, Eve and their descendants because of sin. It’s not humans God curses. You can look that up.

God does not withdraw His blessing from us despite our expulsion from Paradise, nor on account of our sinfulness and the consequent distortion of God’s likeness within us. We hear of God’s continuing love for us “while we were still sinners” (Rom 5:8) in this morning prayer to the Holy Trinity: “Because of the abundance of Thy goodness and long suffering, Thou was not wroth with us, slothful and sinful as we are; neither hast Thou destroyed us in our transgressions, but in Thy compassion raised us up as we lay in despair, that at dawn we might sing the glories of Thy Majesty.”

Dynamis devotional for 3/5/26.

Returning from Schism

I had quite lost track of this gem-of-a-blog:

I have come to see that the biggest difference of all—and for some the biggest hurdle to true interior conversion—was our different understandings of the Church itself.

Orthodoxy’s ecclesiology is dramatically different from that of everyone … in the Protestant world, and unless this difference is understood and embraced, conversions will be incomplete and half-baked at best. It is important, in other words, that the former erroneous ecclesiology of Protestant converts be decisively dismantled. If it is left intact the door of apostasy from Orthodoxy may be left invitingly ajar.

What is this erroneous ecclesiology? In a word Protestantism regards “the Church” as the conglomeration of all Trinitarian denominations.

…

Given the problems afflicting the western church in the medieval period following its schism from the Orthodox east, one understands the insistence of the Protestant Reformers that separation from the papal west was imperative. The early Reformers regarded the Pope as the eschatological Antichrist, and this could not help but make schism from the papal church an urgent necessity. Nonetheless the ultimate result was the acceptance of schism as a defining feature of the Protestant churches. That is, schism from the papal church was accepted as normal and necessary, for the papal church (they thought) was not the true Church, but Babylon the Great, the Mother of harlots and the abominations of the earth (Revelation 17:5). For them the choice seemed to be either schism or apostasy.

Protestantism thus gradually came to lose the primitive Christian horror of schism.

What the Fathers decried as schism is now regarded as normal church growth. So long as the new church does not make a point of denying the Trinity, it remains a part of the una sancta.

…

Orthodoxy regards the Protestant denominations (and, come to that, our Roman Catholic friends as well) as in schism from the one, united, and indivisible Church. The root ecumenical problem therefore is not simply difference of doctrine, but schism. The Orthodox believe that they are the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church confessed in the Creed. Converts to Orthodoxy are not only invited to agree with its teaching, but to join its family. In converting to Orthodoxy they are not simply joining a different denomination, but returning from schism.

Fr. Lawrence Farley, The Necessary Revolution.

(Yes, this means among other things that I detest the insouciant journalistic trope, when dealing with church history, that the Orthodox Church broke from the Roman Catholic Church.)

Liturgies of the Wild

(I finished Martin Shaw’s Liturgies of the Wild this week. At the request of a “friend” on my social medium, I summarized it and now share that with you. Nobody ever taught me how to write a proper book review, and this is a book that evokes as much or more than it tutors, so I hope I achieved an evocative portrait of a book full of evocation, if not a book review proper).

Shaw was raised as a Baptist in Great Britain, but wandered off and had no institutional or ideational connection to any kind of Christianity. He was converted/reverted roughly five years ago, ending up Eastern Orthodox.

There’s a fair amount in the book about his “reversion” (my word, not his) but very little about the distinctly Orthodox shape it took. To my relief, there’s no effort to tutor the reader in Christian doctrine:

After a few months he offers some advice: Stop reading for a bit. Orthodoxy is first for the body not the intellect. That’ll come quite naturally. Stay focused on the Encounter, not the theology. Stay focused on the Presence not the history. There’s nothing wrong with study, but don’t rush there too quickly.

Instead:

This is a book that rescues lost stories. Many come from the fairy-tale and mythic traditions of the world, relegated these last hundred years to children’s books or a therapist’s couch.

Shaw rescues those lost stories under 13 rubrics, each a chapter:

  1. On Thrownaway Stories
  2. On Bones
  3. On Initiation.
  4. On Death.
  5. On Passivity.
  6. On Passion.
  7. On Prayer.
  8. On Guilt.
  9. On Envy
  10. On Dream.
  11. On Limit.
  12. On Evil.
  13. On Praise Making.

Then an epilogue: On the Ancient Good.

I can’t say I have “effable” takeaways because that doesn’t seem to be how stories and myths work:

It’s no good to go chasing after meaning as an abstraction; meaning comes in the doing of things … There are robbers stealing the horses of your imagination: Kick them out. This book has been full of hints as to how to do that. If I’m too explicit you will be left with a pamphlet not a story.

But I’m glad to have read it, and I think it’s the kind of book I may reread periodically, especially because we have thrown away so many stories and it’s not an easy job to get them back in a way that’s integral to our gut-level worldview.

Tradition

Protestant: Tradition X is wrong because nobody even mentions it until the Nth century.

Orthodox: How do you know that? Don’t you mean that we have no surviving written records of Tradition X until the Nth Century? That’s not the same thing, y’know.

Just sayin’.

Religion

If you pick up a translation of almost any ancient text of appreciable length, chances are you will find the term “religion” somewhere in the translation. There is also no shortage of books on the topic of this or that “ancient religion.” It is no wonder, then, that many people have the impression that the modern notion of religion is present in our ancient sources.

Brent Nongbri, Before Religion

Orthocardia

Put simply, if the primary American divide is between right and left, then [Texas Democrat U.S. Senate nominee James] Talarico isn’t that interesting. There’s a long history of progressive religious activism in the United States, just as there is a long history of conservative religious activism. White evangelicals might be overwhelmingly Republican, but American Christians are remarkably diverse politically, and we’ve been arguing with one another for a long time.

Yet if the primary American divide is between decent and indecent, then the equation changes. Talarico shines.

Or, to put it another way, Talarico is one of the few openly Christian politicians in the United States who acts like a Christian, and by acting like a Christian he reveals a profound contrast with so many members of the MAGA Christian movement that’s dominated American political life for 10 years.

…

It does really matter whether a politician is pro-life or pro-choice, but there is no spiritual or political scenario where you can abandon Christian virtue for the sake of the alleged greater good, and if a Christian politician abandons Christian virtue, then Christian believers should abandon him or her.

David French, James Talarico Is a Christian X-Ray (shared link because there’s a lot more stuff worth considering)

Ontology, not morality

The beatitudes have a single purpose, to help humans on their path to theosis. They are not about humanly conceived morality or about behaving properly. They have a deeper, ontological meaning.

Kyriacos C. Markides, The Mountain of Silence (hyperlink added).

This evokes one of my favorite aphorisms from Fr. Stephen Freeman: Christ did not come to make bad men good but to make dead men live.

Postscript

[W]e … live in a democratized world. We challenge walls of every sort and shout approvingly whenever they come tumbling down. In a strange manner of speaking, democracy is the maximization of narcissism. Where there are no walls, everything is me and mine.

Fr. Stephen Freeman

As the current national government explicitly exults in its “strength,” “force,” and “power,” I’m very glad to be in a church where every Sunday we sing the Beatitudes, which tell us the way blessedness works.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Zaccheus Sunday 2026

Explanation of the title.

History

Theology the authorities can work with

Predictably, secular authorities convinced by the reformers’ truth claims liked the distinction drawn between the necessity of obedience to them and of disobedience to Rome. They liked hearing “the Gospel” accompanied by such “good news”—it would allow them, for starters, to appropriate for themselves all ecclesiastical property, including the many buildings and lands that belonged to religious orders, and to use it or the money from its sale in whatever ways they saw fit. In two stages during the late 1530s, seizing for himself the vast holdings of all the hundreds of English monasteries and friaries, Henry VIII would demonstrate how thoroughly a ruler could learn this lesson without even having to accept Lutheran or Reformed Protestant doctrines about grace, faith, salvation, or worship.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

The long shadow of Puritanism

Long after Puritans had become Yankees, and Yankee Trinitarians had become New England Unitarians (whom Whitehead defined as believers in one God at most) the long shadow of Puritan belief still lingered over the folkways of an American region.

David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed

Human Rights

Most menacing of all was the United Nations. Established in the aftermath of the Second World War, its delegates had proclaimed a Universal Declaration of Human Rights. To be a Muslim, though, was to know that humans did not have rights. There was no natural law in Islam. There were only laws authored by God.

Tom Holland, Dominion.

That’s pretty terrifying if Holland is correct and if a lot of Muslims are still faithful to that command ethic.

Salvation (“Soteriology”)

Hacking Eternity

I’m glad the authors or editors at Dispatch Faith came up with that “Hacking Eternity” title for a little bit of musing on Scott Adams’ (creator of Dilbert) self-reported deathbed conversion. It’s perfect:

For whatever reason, Adams delayed his conversion … In that January 4 X post, only nine days before his death, Adams said, “So I still have time, but my understanding is you’re never too late.” His final message, read by his first wife after his death, confirmed his plans: “I accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior … I have to admit, the risk-reward calculation for doing so looks so attractive to me. So here I go.”

I cannot categorically rule out the sincerity of Scott Adams’ “conversion,” but with all the Pascal’s wager trappings, and delaying claiming Christ as Lord until the very last minute (when the formulaic Lordship carried no practical meaning, no period of following Christ’s example or commandments) I can’t not put conversion in precatory quotes, either.

I recall one classmate in my Evangelical boarding school who declared his intent to become a Christian some day, but not before he’d whooped it up as much as possible. Last I knew, he was whooping it up at age 50+ with pneumatic wife #2. His declaration was so consistent with the logic of evangelical soteriology (study of salvation) pervasive in that time and place that the only refutations I can recall were:

  1. That he might be murdered, or have a fatal car collision, or otherwise die too suddenly to effectuate his last minute “conversion.”
  2. That refusing salvation for too long risked “hardening of the heart” to where could not repent.

Better would be this, I think, though it would probably be dismissed as “works righteousness”:

Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting.

Galatians 6:7-8.

Yeah, that’s a proof-text, taken without context. But I’d still say it fits.

The current milieu

The denominations

A new era of martyrdom

The Episcopal Church of New Hampshire is ready for frickin’ war. The Episcopalians are amped up. Bishop Rob’s reflection from earlier this month: “We are now, I believe, entering a time, a new era of martyrdom.” Of his priests: “And I’ve asked them to get their affairs in order—to make sure they have their wills written, because it may be that now is no longer the time for statements, but for us with our bodies to stand between the powers of this world and the most vulnerable.” These guys are not kidding around anymore. They are ready to die. And there will be cookies after the sermon.

Nellie Bowles. Bishop Rob’s letter has to be seen to be disbelieved. It features an ecclesiology straight from the lowest-church fever swamps:

As soon as the Christian church became linked to the empire by Constantine in the year 325 or so, the church immediately became corrupt.

(Italics added)

Ummmm, that’s just not credible. I don’t even think that educated clergy of low-church persuasion would defend that if pressed. To hear it from a Bishop of a high church is shocking but evocative. After all, what authority does a corrupt church have to tell Bishop Rob,

a man of profound historical privilege, … one who has made statements that, [he has] to say, have been really good and eloquent,

that he can’t innovate like mad to drive out that millenia-long corruption?

I’m still trying to figure out if “Rob” is his last name or if it’s an aw-shucks affectation. (Googles the question) Of course: it’s affectation.

Ostensibly Protestant; functionally, what?

There is another obvious fact that few denominational Protestants in the SBC or PCA seem willing to admit: The growth in these ostensibly traditional denominations stems almost entirely from the work of the Non-Denom churches. As already mentioned, pan- or pseudo-denominational organizations now own the church planting space. All church plants, to a great extent, utilize the methods and mores of Non-Denom Church. Most no longer even have their host denomination in their names. Therefore, I wager that whatever growth exists in the SBC and PCA is almost entirely the result of the Non-Denom churches growing within the husk of the world of traditional Protestantism.

Casey Spinks, Does Traditional Protestantism Have a Future?

Christianity and nationalism

Christianity does not simply fade away with the rise of nationalism; the process is more one of the reconfiguration of Christian elements to fit within a nationalist framework. When the holy migrates from the church to the nation-state, the church does not disappear but generally takes a supporting role to the creation of national identities.

William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry

The nondenominations

Nondenominational Protestantism

Douthat: Right. But I’m going to ask you to generalize. … For people who aren’t familiar with that world, what is nondenominational Protestantism right now?

Burge: They’re evangelical. Not all of them, but the vast, vast majority are evangelical in their orientation and theology and practice and all the things that we would call evangelical.

One thing is, they’re anti-institutional. They’re anti-authority in a lot of ways. Where does your money go when you put it on the plate? Well, it goes right here. It stays right here in these four walls. So what we’re going to have is a very fragmented Protestant Christianity, where you’ve got a little fiefdom here of 15,000 people in this church, and 20,000 people in this church.

I think the problem is, it’s going to be harder to conceptualize, to measure, to really understand what these groups look like, because now you’ve got these little pockets. You’ve got Joel Osteen in Houston, Texas. He’s an evangelical, but he doesn’t interface with most other evangelicals. You got Paula White down in Florida, whom Trump loves, but she’s Pentecostal and believes in the gifts of the spirit. And other evangelicals, like Franklin Graham, would never talk to Paula White.

You’ve got all these little pockets, and they don’t add up to a cohesive “What is evangelicalism?” In 30 years, that question is going to be almost impossible to answer. Not that it’s easy now, but it’s going to be 10 times harder because of this amorphous nature of nondenominationalism.

Ross Douthat and Ryan Burge (shared link). Ryan Burge is the most interesting social scientist focused on religion that I know. The transcript of his podcast is worth reading in full; I both listened and then read, highlighting heavily.

For my money, “amorphous” and “fiefdom” are the keys to nondenominational evangelicalism, and the two are related. The substantive religious content of the nondenominational religious landscape is amorphous, despite the shared term “evangelical,” because they are individual fiefdoms. The pastors may well be untutored and unorthodox, and they certainly are unaccountable to any higher authority.

But be careful: Burge leaves the impression, inadvertently I think, that these nondenominational churches typically number in the thousands. I’d be surprised if the median number of members or attenders was as high as 200. Burge no doubt would know the numbers on that if asked directly.

Orthopathos

Because of the divorce from the historic Church, Evangelicalism has sought for a new way to satisfy the need for materiality. This is why such believers have welcomed pop music and rock-n-roll into their churches. It is why emotion is mistaken for spirituality. It is why sentiment is substituted for holiness. Sincere feeling is the authenticator. Instead of icons of Christ, whose piercing stare calls you to repentance, the Evangelical can go to a Christian bookstore and buy a soft-focus, long-haired picture of Jesus. He’s a “nice” Jesus, but it is hard to believe that He is God.

Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick, Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy

I bang on a lot about Evangelicalism, my former affiliation, and specifically about the difficulty of defining it so as to be able to say “no, that’s not evangelical.” Ken Myer, founder of Mars Hill Audio Journal, once offered the possibility that while evangelicals don’t really share a coherent common doctrine, an orthodoxy, that they do share a common feeling or sentiment, an “orthopathos.”

Christianity Today

Sometime within the past year, I subscribed to Christianity Today. It is a magazine whose founding described it as “A fortnightly journal of evangelical persuasion” or something very like that.

I thought very highly of it. Just as I was an Intervarsity Christian Fellowship guy instead of a Campus Crusade for Christ guy, so I was a CT guy instead of a Moody Monthly guy. I even wrote a very cringe item they published. (I’ll give you no further hints whereby to unearth it.)

By and large, CT today has been a big disappointment, and I do not intend to renew.

The main part of the disappointment has been less the content of their articles (which certainly need a critical filter for evangelical bias), but the banality (it seems to me) of the topics of their articles. We’re just not remotely on the same wavelength any more. This “dumbing down” began nearly 50 years ago, and even then I took that as a sign that the evangelical appetite for chewing on meaty topics was waning.

But Thursday past, they finally floated on their RSS feed a story the topic and timeliness of which got my attention: How to Know If You’re Growing in Patience—or Just Giving Up.

Yes, it should be “whether” instead of “if,” but I’ll not dwell on that. It just seems to me as we, to whatever degree, watch the ICE terrorism and murders in Minneapolis, powerless to do anything, the spiritual line between patience (with prayer and trust in God’s providence) and giving up is an important one.

Jaw-dropping nadir

Majorities of white evangelicals favor deporting undocumented immigrants to foreign prisons in El Salvador, Rwanda, or Libya without allowing them to challenge their deportation in court (57 percent), and approve of placing immigrants who have entered the country illegally in internment camps (53 percent).

“It has become virtually impossible to write a survey question about immigration policy that is too harsh for white evangelicals to support,” Robert P. Jones, the president of the Public Religion Research Institute, recently wrote.

Tobias Cremer is a member of the European Parliament. His book The Godless Crusade argues that the rise of right-wing populism in the West and its references to religion are driven less by a resurgence of religious fervor than by the emergence of a new secular identity politics. Right-wing populists don’t view Christianity as a faith; rather, Cremer suggests, they use Christianity as a cultural identity marker of the “pure people” against external “others,” while in many cases remaining disconnected from Christian values, beliefs, and institutions.

…

The Trump administration has gone one step further, inverting authentic Christian faith by selling in a dozen different ways cruelty and the will to power in the name of Jesus. It has welcomed Christians into a theological twilight zone, where the beatitudes are invoked on behalf of a political movement with authoritarian tendencies. This isn’t the first time in history such things have happened.

…

Huge numbers of American fundamentalists and evangelicals—not just cultural Christians, but also those who faithfully attend church and Bible-study sessions and prayer gatherings—prefer the MAGA Jesus to the real Jesus. Few of them would say so explicitly, though, because the cognitive dissonance would be too unsettling. And so they have worked hard to construct rationalizations. It’s rather remarkable, really, to see tens of millions of Christians validate, to themselves and to one another, a political movement led by a malignant narcissist—who is driven by hate and bent on revenge, who mocks the dead, and who delights in inflicting pain on the powerless. The wreckage to the Christian faith is incalculable, yet most evangelicals will never break with him. They have invested too much of themselves and their identity in Trump and what he stands for.

Peter Wehner

Sacraments or notions?

Christianity that has purged the Church of the sacraments, and of the sacramental, has only ideas to substitute in their place. The result is the eradication of God from the world in all ways other than the theoretical.

Fr. Stephen Freeman, Everywhere Present

Orthodoxy

Rescue

He is Jesus, the name chosen before his birth. The angel spoke separately to Mary and Joseph, and told them that the baby’s name would be Jesus, “because he will save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21). The name Jesus means, in Hebrew, “God will save.” When Gabriel says “he will save his people” the Greek verb sozo means “save” as in rescue, like “saved you from drowning.” That kind of “saved,” not “intervened and paid your debt.”

I had been a Christian decades before it occurred to me that this means Jesus can rescue us from our sins, not merely from the penalty for our sins. He can free us from the sins themselves. We will still fail over and over to take his outstretched hand and be lifted from the mire. We like mire. But he can do it, and make us not merely debt-free in his Father’s sight, but transformed and filled with his light.

Frederica Matthewes-Green

Repentance

Repentance is everything you do to get sin, those inborn passions, out of you. It’s reading, thinking, praying, weeding out disruptive influences in your life, sharing time with fellow Christians, following the guidance of the saints. Repentance is the renunciation of what harms us and the acquisition of what is beneficial to us, writes a holy counselor.

Dee Pennock, God’s Path to Sanity

A glimpse into an Orthodox mind

The Protoevangelium of James is not a text that itself holds a position of authority in the life of the Church. Indeed, the West formally rejected it well before the Great Schism. Nevertheless, the Church preserved the text through centuries of copying and recopying. It stands as the earliest written witness to the antiquity of a number of important traditions related to the New Testament Scriptures regarding the lives of the Theotokos, St. James, and their family. The Protoevangelium of James did not originate these traditions, nor does it provide their authority. Their authoritative form exists in the liturgical life of the Church, in hymnography and iconography.

Fr. Stephen DeYoung, Apocrypha (bold added).

All the well-educated Orthodox teachers agree on this. If you hear an Orthodox layman answer “How do you know that?” with “We get it from the Protoevangelium of James,” know that s/he’s got that backwards.

Darkness and Light

As Stephen Wormtongue Miller pronounces from the White House that the way the world works is by force, I’m very glad to be in a church where every Sunday we sing the Beatitudes, which tell us the way blessedness works.

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

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

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

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

2026!

The best thing about New Years Day 2026 is that it means 2025 is over. President Ozymandias really hit the ground running for his second term, having surrounded himself with evil, shrewd, and power-hungry operatives this time instead of Republican normies who muted his bellowing. It’s hard to imagine (knocks on wood) that the worst of the self-aggrandizing vandalism isn’t over now.

Wordplay

Aphorisms

A platitude is a placebo for the mind; an aphorism is a wake-up call. Aphorisms provoke debate; they don’t promote dogma. Though they’re short, aphorisms spur considered reflection, not Pavlovian partisanship. At a time when polarization is so amped up, aphorisms can serve as psychological circuit breakers, interrupting our comfortable assumptions and prodding us to open our minds, unclench our fists, and think for ourselves.

Adapted from The World in a Phrase for an Atlantic article.

Selected sentences of the year

  • In The Washington Post, Dana Milbank responded to some Republicans’ suggestion that the D.C. Metro be renamed the “Trump Train”: “It’s a great idea. Qatar will donate the subway cars, which will be powered by coal. Passengers will pay for fares with cryptocurrency after first showing proof of citizenship. And the trains will reverse themselves regularly and without warning — never quite reaching their original destination.” (Mary Ellen Maher-Harkins, Orwigsburg, Pa.)
  • In The Atlantic, David A. Graham processed the addition of “Trump” to “Kennedy” in the moniker for Washington’s premier performing arts center: “He asks not what he can do for his country, but what his country can name for him.” (Darrell Ing, Honolulu)
  • In Esquire, Dave Holmes acknowledged that Senator Lindsey Graham was maybe joking that Trump should be the next pope — but maybe not: “You can’t be tongue-in-cheek when you are actively licking the boot. There is just not enough tongue for both jobs.” (Susan Fitzgerald, Las Cruces, N.M.)
  • In The Wall Street Journal, Jason Gay rued the effect of obsessive replays on the determination of what, in pro football, constitutes a catch. “It’s the affliction of overthinking: If it walks like a duck, and talks like a duck, wait, hold on, it must be a chandelier,” he wrote. “It’s further evidence humans can ruin the spirit of anything, if given the time and technology.” (Bill Sclafani, Rockport, Mass.)
  • \[I\]n The Washington Post, Ron Charles assessed “The Little Book of Bitcoin,” by the supremely self-confident pitchman Anthony Scaramucci: “In one passage, he touts the convenience of transporting $500 million in Bitcoin on a thumb drive, which is the best news I’ve heard since my yacht got a new helipad.” (Stephen S. Power, Maplewood, N.J., and Hannah Reich, Queens, among others)
  • Charles also observed that the scolds who ban books have taken issue with “Maurice Sendak’s ‘In the Night Kitchen,’ which has been proven in the state of Florida to turn straight white Christian boys into polygender Marxists who eat only quinoa.” (Jill Gaither, St. Louis, and John Jacoby, North Andover, Mass.)
  • In The Times, Kevin Roose worried that when it comes to regulations, the stately metabolism of institutions is no match for the velocity of A.I.: “It feels, at times, like watching policymakers on horseback, struggling to install seatbelts on a passing Lamborghini.” (Conrad Macina, Landing, N.J.)
  • In The Times, A.O. Scott sang a similar song: “Occam’s razor, the venerable philosophical principle that the truest explanation is likely to be the simplest, has been thrown away. We’re living in the age of Occam’s chain saw, when the preferred answer is the one that makes the loudest noise and generates the most debris.” (Charles Kelley, Merrimack, N.H., and Trisha Houser, Durham, N.C., among others)

Frank Bruni, The Best Sentences of 2025 (shared link)

I saved three of Bruni’s best as personal favorites:

  • Also in The Times, Matt Hongoltz-Hetling considered the importance of an annual communal feast to a Vermont town’s special fellowship: “Whether a vibrant community created the potluck or the potluck created a vibrant community is like asking which came first, the fried chicken or the deviled egg.” (Stacey Somppi, Cottonwood, Ariz., and Hillary Ellner, Durham, N.C., among others)
  • In The Times, James Hamblin parodied the typical message and script of a television drug ad: “You will frolic on the beach at sunset psoriasis-free, with a golden retriever, smiling into the distance. You also may experience sudden loss of cardiac function, seizures of the arms or intermittent explosive ear discharge. Talk to your doctor.” (Susan Casey, Palm City, Fla.)
  • In The Dispatch, Kevin D. Williamson gave thanks for academia, despite its flaws: “The American university system is the envy of the world, and we are burning it down because there’s a couple of nonbinary gender studies professors at Bryn Mawr who say crazy stuff from time to time and there is a brain-dead gaggle of Jew-hating weirdos at Columbia. Of course, there is room for reform. But you don’t have to love every feather on the goose when it is laying golden eggs.” (Dan Markovitz, Corte Madera, Calif.)

The first just feels perfect; “explosive ear discharge” in the second was the only thing in the list that made me laugh uncontrollably; Kevin Williamson captures perhaps the single most tragic thing about what “we” are doing, (purely by coincidence, of course, during the second reign of the orange barbarian).

Finally: “Some of you should walk a mile in my shoes, because then you would be a mile away from me. Keep the shoes.” (Encountered by my wife on Pinterest)

My 2025

Reading

As I always note in my footer, I blog and socialize at micro.blog in addition to here. One of my friendlies at MB, an uncommonly sane Evangelicalish pastor in Chicagoland (very keen on racial reconciliation is he), posted his 2025 reading list and inquired about what others read this year.

My response:

At 77, I feel the Grim Reaper breathing down my neck, and I already own more books than I’ll get read before he wins. Further, I’ve read many, many books in my life already, including multiple books on many perennial themes. And although I love poetry, I either had poor teachers or was too barbarian to learn how to read demanding examples.

So I don’t have much toleration for books that are cumulative of what I already understand, or are neither pleasurable nor (so far as I can tell after reading a bit) profitable, including ones that many good people were raving about.

To avoid performative listing, then (e.g., Geoffrey Hill poetry, which defeated me utterly), I’ve eliminated all the books I abandoned part way in. Finally, listing a volume of poetry doesn’t mean I’ve read it all yet.

BookAuthor
Rings TrilogyTolkien
Albion’s SeedDavid Hackett Fischer
The World After LiberalismMatthew Rose
CoracleKenneth Steven
Table for TwoAmor Towles
Till We Have FacesC.S. Lewis
GodricBeuckner
StalingradAnthony Beever
Small Is BeautifulSchumacher
Rilke PoetryRilke
ApocryphaStephen De Young
The Greek East and the Latin West: A Study in the Christian TraditionPhilip Sherrard
A Time of GiftsPatrick Leigh Fermor
The New Science of the Enchanted UniverseMarshall Sahlins
Bread & Water, Wine & OilFr. Meletios Webber
Lost in the CosmosWalker Percy
Giovanni’s RoomJames Baldwin
The Long LonelinessDorothy Day
The innocence of Father BrownG.K. Chesterton
Against the MachinePaul Kingsnorth
You Have Arrived at Your DestinationAmor Towles
The Air We Breathe: How We All Came to Believe in Freedom, Kindness, Progress, and EqualityGlen Scrivener
The Year of Magical ThinkingJoan Didion
The Old Man and the SeaHemingway
The Wisdom of Father BrownChesterton
IstanbulOrhan Pamuk
The Wizard of the KremlinGiuliano da Empoli
The Irony of American HistoryNiebuhr
Golden Hill: A Novel of Old New YorkFrancis Spufford
The Bovadium FragmentsTolkien

On deck for 2026: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (along with Christmas gift books and a few dozen others).

Strange doings

Extra pills are piling up across America. Excessive refills by U.S. pharmacies cost Medicare and patients $3 billion between 2021 and 2023, according to a WSJ analysis of Medicare prescription data.

WSJ. Based on my own rigorous anecdata, this is 1000% true. Which means that although mail-order pharmacies may have started it, brick-and-mortar local pharmacies are in the game now, too.

I really would rather not manually refill every prescription, but my pharmacy seems incapable of waiting 90 days to refill a 90-day prescription, and when I get a text that a prescription is ready for pick-up, I go pick it up (with rare exceptions, like a post-op opioid painkiller I definitely did not need).

Tech

Deepfakes

2025 appears to have been the years when deepfake videos became convincing. Ted Gioia sees all kinds of problems coming from that:

Sam sans souci

Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, said in a recent podcast he can see ways that seeking companionship from an AI chatbot could go wrong, but that the company plans to give adults leeway to decide for themselves.

AI Chatbots Linked to Psychosis, Say Doctors. I can scarcely see ways that seeking companionship from an AI chatbot could go right, because friendship is a right-hemisphere sort of thing that AI sucks at.

Politics

MTG Repents

Nothing in her political career before September inclined me to cut Marjorie Taylor Green any slack whatever, but something has happened since then.

Her political conversion story, if you can call it that (it’s not about changing from MAGA to progressive or any other political position), rings true.

It started at the Charlie Kirk Memorial service:

What stayed with Greene long afterward were the last two speakers who took the stage. First there was Kirk’s widow, Erika, who stood in white before the crowd filling the Arizona stadium, lifted her tear-filled eyes and said that she forgave her husband’s killer. And then there was President Trump. “He was a missionary with a noble spirit and a great, great purpose,” he said of Kirk. “He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them.”

“That was absolutely the worst statement,” Greene wrote to me in a text message months after the memorial service. And the contrast between Erika Kirk and the president was clarifying, she added. “It just shows where his heart is. And that’s the difference, with her having a sincere Christian faith, and proves that he does not have any faith.”

Inside Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Break With Trump and MAGA – The New York Times — Original profile (gift link).

I thought at the time that should have been a wake-up call for every “Christian” Trump supporter in America. I still do. It speaks ominous things about our religious and political culture that it seems to have awoken so few.

But Marjorie Taylor Green, of all people, recognized it! And it appears that she has genuinely repented of her role in stoking hatred and division!

Time will tell; she’s been taking the potent MAGA pill for a long time, and withdrawal may prove too hard. But it’s looking good so far.

I wish her what I wished for Jimmy Carter on January 20, 1981: a long and happy and private life — plus a sustained repentance.

Paganism with worship music

We seem to be entering a pagan century. It’s not only Trump. It’s the whole phalanx of authoritarians, all those greatness-obsessed macho men like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. It’s the tech bros. It’s Christian nationalism, which is paganism with worship music. (If you ever doubt the seductive power of paganism, remember it has conquered many of the churches that were explicitly founded to reject it.)

David Brooks, How to Survive the Trump Years with Your Spirit Intact (gift link).

That last sentence is golden.

Christianity without Christ

“If you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post-religious right,” Ross Douthat warned presciently at the dawn of Trumpism in 2016. … What Douthat calls the “post-religious right” certainly is more obnoxious and morally degenerate than its Bush-era forebear was, but it’s not correct to call a movement that’s developed its own alternate morality “post-religious.” It’s not even correct to call it “post-Christian,”…

The modern right is boisterously Christian, but without Christ. It extols Christianity aggressively but has ditched most of the moral content …

…

The purest expression of Christianity without Christ came from Trump himself, not coincidentally. At Charlie Kirk’s memorial service, shortly after Kirk’s widow, Erika, moved viewers by publicly forgiving her husband’s killer, the president strode to the mic and said, “That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponents, and I don’t want the best for them. I’m sorry.” That’s the literal antithesis of Christian morality …

But there were no mass defections by Christians from the president’s camp after his heresy. Erika Kirk herself remains a loyal Trump ally in good standing. And why not? Hating one’s enemies is squarely in line with the three purposes of post-Christ right-wing Christianity. The first is establishing the right’s cultural hegemony over other American factions; the second is narrowing the parameters of the right-wing tribe to exclude undesirables; and the third is deemphasizing morality as a brake on ruthlessness toward one’s opponents.

When populist chuds taunt Jews like Ben Shapiro by hooting “Christ is king” or walk onstage at political rallies brandishing their rosaries as if they’re trying to repel Dracula, they’re not expressing earnest Christian witness. They’re signaling that there’s a hierarchy in America and that Christians properly sit atop it.

…

That’s Christianity without Christ.

Nick Catoggio

Alt-Right

Almost everything written about the “alternative right” has been wrong in one respect. The alt-right is not stupid; it is deep. Its ideas are not ridiculous; they are serious. To appreciate this fact, one needs to inquire beyond its presence on social media, where its obnoxious use of insult, obscenity, and racism has earned it a reputation for moral idiocy.

Matthew Rose, A World After Liberalism

At the outset of debate

If we are willing to grant, at the outset, that the people we’re debating agree about ends—that they want a healthy and prosperous society in which all people can flourish—then we can converse with them, we can see ourselves as genuine members of a community. And even if at the end of the day we have to conclude that we all do not want the same goods (which can, alas, happen), it is better that we learn it at the end of the day than decide it before sunrise.

Alan Jacobs, How to Think

WASPs

Would we necessarily say that government, civic life, the media, or high finance work better now than in the mid-20th century? We can scorn the smug WASP blue bloods from Groton and Choate—and certainly their era’s retrograde views of race and gender—but their leadership helped produce the Progressive movement, the New Deal, victory in World War II, the Marshall Plan, NATO, and the postwar Pax Americana. After the meritocrats took over in the 1960s, we got quagmires in Vietnam and Afghanistan, needless carnage in Iraq, the 2008 financial crisis, the toxic rise of social media, and our current age of political dysfunction.

David Brooks, How the Ivy League Broke America

The contumely of allies

We are also offended by the contumely of allies as well as foes, who refuse to regard our prosperity as fruit and proof of our virtue but suggest that it may be the consequence of our vulgar Philistinism.

Reinhold Niehbur, The Irony of American History

Read the fine print

On the surface, it would seem that the assurances given in the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia were clear and unequivocal. But lurking in the shadowy annals of communist polemics there was a catch. To paraphrase, but not distort, Lenin’s position, nations have the right to self-determination, but only the proletariat has the right to decide. And, as if that were not enough, only the Communist Party can speak for the proletariat.

Jack Matlock, Autopsy on an Empire

Raising the bar for Tinhorn Dictators

Ramsey’s intolerance for dissent has created what former employees call a cultlike environment, where leaders proclaim their love for staff and then fire people at a moment’s notice.

Bob Smietana, Is Dave Ramsey’s empire the ‘best place to work in America’? Say no and you’re out

Shorts

  • A new crop of moderate Democrats is trying to counter both President Trump and progressive influence in their own party. (WSJ) May their tribe increase.
  • And so we have before us one of the characteristic political necessities of our time: to take seriously what we cannot respect. (Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America)
  • Conservative and mainstream media were drifting apart, not just ideologically but epistemically… (Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge) This epistemic drift (of the Right, I think, not the mainstream) tempts me to despair.
  • “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” … was a damned funny thing for Franklin Roosevelt to say in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power. (Kevin D. Williamson)
  • The face of my fear is not a new Hitler but the Old Adam. It is the face in the mirror. (Kevin D. Williamson)
  • One category I used to apply to some of my posts became obsolete almost overnight around 1/20/2017: Zombie Reaganism. You never see that any more, and I miss it more than I thought I would.

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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.

Feast of St. Stephen …

… in the Christian East, that is. The West commemorated him yesterday.

A profitable political pairing

Two Right-coded voices, Glenn Loury and Ilya Somin, take up recent events, emblemized by Tucker Carlson’s softball interview of Nick Fuentes, and reach similar conclusions: a fundamental rift in the Right is between universalists and particularists/nationalists.

For figures such as Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University and perhaps the single most influential moral philosopher within conservative intellectual circles, conservatism begins with the claims of natural law. Its founding premise is the inherent dignity of every human being—an anthropology that descends from classical philosophy, Christian theology, and the Enlightenment. For George, conservatism is first a moral project: It safeguards life, liberty, marriage, family, and religious freedom because these institutions reflect universal truths about the human person. George has spent his career articulating these principles in philosophy, public policy, and constitutional thought. His is an approach to conservatism that emphasizes the primacy of the permanent things, the universals that transcend time and place.

Opposing this universalist strand is the ascendant nationalist wing of the right—a coalition influenced by the populist energies that surged after 2016 and represented by Tucker Carlson, Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation, and polemicists such as John Zmirak. This faction sees conservatism less as an expression of moral philosophy than as a defense of Western civilization: a concrete culture, a historical inheritance, with its own people, faith, memories, and vulnerabilities. This conservatism is particularist rather than universalist. It begins not with abstract principles but with cultural loyalties. Whereas George begins with human dignity, Carlson begins with civilizational survival. Whereas George sees imperatives and violations of the moral law, Carlson sees a beleaguered West beset by global elites, porous borders, and cultural disintegration.

Glenn C. Loury, Tucker and the Right

[T]he root of the problem is the Trump-era shift of most of the American right towards ethno-nationalism. For reasons outlined in detail in my recent UnPopulist essay on this topic, nationalist movements are inherently prone to anti-Semitism and other forms of racial and ethnic bigotry. It is not surprising that anti-Semitism among MAGA conservatives has risen alongside nativism and bigotry towards other minority groups, such as Indian-Americans.

As I explained in the UnPopulist article, the only sure way to avoid this problem is to reject ethnic nationalism and instead recommit to the universalist principles of the American Founding, which the Heritage Foundation once claimed to stand for, but has more recently betrayed ….

Ilya Somin, Lessons of the Heritage Foundation’s Implosion

As I skimmed Lourie’s article (which I’m pleased to see in First Things, which under R.R. Reno has been leaning increasingly toward particularist nationalism), I felt a flush of shame (or was it the shiver of a near-miss?) as I looked back on my admiration of “paleoconservative” thinkers and commentators — guys who now appear to be the ancestors of today’s ethno-nationalist types.

Even now, I sense the fortress America appeal of the nationalist appeal. But when I watch ICE trying to evict putative undesirables from the fortress before we pull up the drawbridge, and see antisemitism rising among the nationalists as well, I can’t help coming down on the side of human dignity: Fiat justitia ruat caelum.

Slouching Toward Something Worse

[Ben] Shapiro originally hired [Candace] Owens at The Daily Wire, thereby helping to launch her career into the stratosphere. The fact that he now feels the need to try and drive a stake through her heart “contains the entire story of the conservative movement within it,” in the words of Substacker John Ganz.

…

[Rod] Dreher longs for Vance to take a firm stand against Fuentes and his followers. But will he?

So far, there’s no sign of it. And yes, that includes in the recent UnHerd interview, where Vance told Fuentes (in the debased public rhetoric favored by populists) to “eat shit.” The vice president made clear that his rightward volley was provoked, not by any of Fuentes’ political views, but by him insulting Vance’s (South Asian) wife. “Anyone who attacks my wife,” Vance declared, will be attacked in turn, “whether their name is Jen Psaki or Nick Fuentes.”

That’s right: the sitting vice president of the United States made clear he was equally inclined to rise up in defensive anger against a former White House Press Secretary from the mainstream opposition party and a man who regularly proclaims his admiration for Adolf Hitler and loathing for Jews.

I’m afraid anyone placing their hopes in Vance serving in the role of gatekeeper or force for moderation is going to be sorely disappointed.

…

It’s not clear a right-populist political movement needs policy intellectuals at all. After all, intellectuals are elites who think they sometimes know better than the elected Leader of the People. That is unacceptable. What a right-populist political movement needs, instead, is propagandists to justify what the Leader already intends to do.

Damon Linker

In case you’ve forgotten, do not trust any high-generality assessment of JD Vance by Rod Dreher. Dreher “discovered” Vance’s book, Hillbilly Elegy, and his discovery elevated mediocre sales to stratospheric sales. He and Vance are now friends, Rod feels a personal investment in him, and Vance probably feels a debt of gratitude to Rod for launching his explosive political rise.

So Dreher is just not capable of objectivity about his friend, and that’s probably to his credit; dissecting friends is kinda reptilian — and certainly is a deviation from the conservative tendency on Jonathan Haidt’s Loyalty/betrayal moral foundations axis.

Too ad hoc to be fascist

Take the word fascism, properly applied to Franco’s Spain or Mussolini’s Italy, and to some extent beyond. The fasces were the bundles of rods carried by Roman lictors: symbols of punishment and magisterial authority, but in modern times also of a tightly unified society controlled from above, and organized in corporate form. The desire of totalitarians everywhere is to achieve harmonization, with all of society marching in military cadence under the guidance of an omnipresent government.

But the Trump administration is more interested in blowing up the state than in extending its power.

…

He is, to be sure, cruel and malicious, but unlike the others, has no real governing vision.

…

Trump himself is not Mussolini, or Hitler, or Orbán ….

Eliot A. Cohen, America Needs a Mirror, Not a Window

French Integrity

The headline read, “What It’s Like to Experience the 2016 Election as Both a Conservative and a Sex Abuse Survivor.”

Nancy French, Ghosted. As the book blurb has it, “when she was unwilling to endorse an unsuitable president, her allies turned on her and she found herself spiritually adrift, politically confused, and occupationally unemployable.”

Part of the reason for David French and Nancy French becoming personae non grata in much of the North American white Evangelical world was candor, like in the cited article Nancy wrote, and their various relatively unflinching looks at topics like sexual abuse at a very popular Evangelical summer camp for kids. I learned recently that they fairly quietly have moved out of their deep red part of Tennessee to the Chicago area (I was aware that Tennessee Evangelicalism exhibited pretty unrelenting and vocal antipaty to Frenches). That move won’t do much for Nancy’s work as a ghost-writer in Evangelical and Conservative circles, but they should at least be able to find a Church whose Christianity matches theirs (Reformed-tinged Evangelical) without the political tribalism. (That’s my read on it.)

(I have speculated that David might be on the road to Rome, too.)

The differences between their Evangelical/Reformed piety and my Orthodoxy manifests in my ill-ease with some of their takes on things (I will never again trust a David French endorsement of a movie or television series, for instance), but I’ll give them high marks for trying to act with integrity (which endears them to me despite reservations).

Quantum physics

Quantum entanglement blows my mind. How do they even find the entangled needles in the cosmic haystack to study entanglement?

That they manage to find and study them makes me sympathetic to the predictions that we’re going to figure out everything — predictions I nonetheless think are ultimately delusional.

Trying to deal with things like this has sent me back to Iain McGilchrist for a second round of mind-bending, this time via The Matter with Things.

I’m outvoted

A few days ago, I objected to the emerging cult of Charlie Kirk.

For what it’s worth, one of America’s top religious news experts, Terry Mattingly, thinks Kirk’s assassination was the top (American) religion story of the year, even higher than the selection of an American Pope (because, if I understood Mattingly, Kirk’s death liberates sinister tendencies on the political Right, like antisemitism and political violence, that Kirk was restraining).

The mixture of politics and religion in this theory makes my head hurt, and my eyes avert, but I suspect that Mattingly knows more about Kirk, and about the consequences of his assassination, than I do.

Jingoists and Patriots

The worst jingoes do not love England, but a theory of England. If we love England for being an empire, we may overrate the success with which we rule the Hindoos. But if we love it only for being a nation, we can face all events: for it would be a nation even if the Hindoos ruled us.

G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Shorts

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

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.

[A] critical mass of the American people … no longer want[s] to govern themselves, … are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise.

Nick Catoggio

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.

Snowed in

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

Learning to pray as we ought

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

Tom Howard, Evangelical is Not Enough.

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

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

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

Music in the House of Love

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

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

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

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

Emily Ruddy, Music in the House of Love

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

Ruddy continues:

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

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

Nicea and its Creed

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ed Simon, The Legacy of Nicaea.

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

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

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

Averting our eyes

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

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

Martin Shaw

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

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

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

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.