Tag: faith

Commendation and Critique

Commendation

Evocation 1

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

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

Evocation 2

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

Kyriakos Markides, The Mountain of Silence

A Wise Policy

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

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

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

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

Critique

America’s Ancestral Sin

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

  1. Avarice was refashioned as a virtue, and
  2. Community was sacrificed to the solitary individual.

…

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

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

Terry Cowan, Predestinated America

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

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

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

Lori Branch, Rituals of Spontaneity

If you’re skeptical about Puritans being that influential:

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

Mark A. Noll, America’s God

And again:

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

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

Tim Keller on Fundamentalism

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

Dale Coulter, Remembering Tim Keller

Creationism

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

Mark A. Noll, America’s God

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

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

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

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.

June 7, 2026

First, become human

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

Kyriacos Markides, The Mountain of Silence

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

What should we do?

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

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

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

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

It’s not about rules

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

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

Going to the well and finding it shallow

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

Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

Humility

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

James Gleick, Chaos

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

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.

7th Sunday of Pascha

Everything mysterious and marvellous is proscribed

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

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary. (For related thoughts, though I didn’t plan a sequence on this general topic.)

Conscientious objector to arbitrary binaries

An Irish teacher at my grammar school used to tell this joke: A rabbi was wandering the streets of Belfast late one night and was confronted by an armed member of one of the local paramilitary organizations. “Are you a Catholic or a Protestant?” the armed man demanded. “I’m a Jew,” the rabbi replied. “Well, are you a Catholic Jew or a Protestant Jew?” came the response. Now, this may not be that amusing as a joke, but it makes an important point: societies have categories for thinking about people and identity, and a real problem occurs when those categories are simply not adequate or appropriate.

Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self

Only one sacrament?

How many sacraments does the Orthodox Church have? This is a question that an inquiring 16th century European might have posed. The Catholics had seven, while the Lutherans (and some other Protestants) said there were only two. “Of course,” thought the Orthodox in struggling to answer a question that had never been spoken in the Orthodox world, “We surely can’t have fewer than the Catholics.” So, “Seven.” Someone else in the Orthodox world thought, “But we’re more excellent.” So, the answer came back, “Nine.” Then, in the modern world of flourishing Orthodox thought a patriarch said, “The whole world’s a sacrament.” The counting of sacraments risks reducing them to moments of ritual, the concern of priests and churchly events: “We need to get the baby done…” I once heard as an Anglican. However, to say that “the whole world is a sacrament” runs the risk of saying nothing at all.

At its core, all of these statements beg the question: what is a sacrament? In the Orthodox world of the past, the term “sacrament” is missing from its vocabulary. Instead, Orthodoxy speaks of a “mystery.” It is well spoken, in that what is described is something hidden that is being made manifest. What we find, I think, is the very life of Christ being given to us. That is the mystery hidden from before the ages.

…

[R]ather than saying that the “whole world is a sacrament,” it is more accurate to say that there is only one sacrament – that of union with the death and resurrection of Christ.

Fr. Stephen Freeman

Theodicy in a nutshell?

At this point, it might be objected that the problem of evil casts doubt on this claim; for if God is good, why hasn’t he eliminated the evil that obviously exists in the world? But there are several problems with this objection. First of all, it could only undermine Aquinas’s argument for God’s goodness if we assumed that a good being could not possibly have a reason to allow evil. But it is notoriously difficult to show that such a being could not possibly have such a reason, and even most contemporary atheist philosophers would not make such a strong claim.

Edward Feser, Aquinas

Cheap evangelical dates

From the outset of his brief political career, Trump has viewed right-wing evangelical leaders as a kind of special-interest group to be schmoozed, conned, or bought off, former aides told me. Though he faced Republican primary opponents in 2016 with deeper religious roots—Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee—Trump was confident that his wealth and celebrity would attract high-profile Christian surrogates to vouch for him.

Mackay Coppins. The photo illustration to the article vindicates Trump’s cynicism about “high-profile Christian surrogates.”

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.

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.