What the wrath of God looks like

I was nurtured on stories as a child that contrasted Christ’s “non-judging” (“Jesus, meek and mild”) with Christ the coming Judge (at His dread Second Coming). I was told that His second coming would be very unlike His first. There was a sense that Jesus, meek and mild, was something of a pretender, revealing His true and eternal character only later as the avenging Judge.

This, of course, is both distortion and heresy. The judgment of God is revealed in Holy Week. The crucified Christ is the fullness of the revelation of God. There is no further revelation to be made known, no unveiling of a wrath to come. The crucified Christ is what the wrath of God looks like.

Fr. Stephen Freeman, The Bridegroom and Judgment

Why Jordan Peterson thrives

Contempt for the “working class” by North America’s “liberal educated elite,” is a major reason for his popularity, he says. “There aren’t very many people with an encouraging voice,”[Jordan] Peterson says. “Most of the things you read by intellectuals—not all, but it’s a failing of intellectuals—most of it is criticism. Look what you’re doing to the planet. What a detestable bunch of wretches you are, with your rapacious structures and your endless appetite and your desire for power. . . . Look at what your ambition has done to the planet. How dare you!”

Mr. Peterson doesn’t directly challenge the substance of these dreary criticisms. Rather he protests that they’re unnatural and unhealthy. “The proper attitude toward young people is encouragement,” he says—“their ambitions, their strivings, their desire to be competent, their deep wish for a trustworthy guiding hand. I think our culture is so cynical that it’s impossible, especially for the established intellectual chattering critics, to even imagine that encouragement is possible.”

When I ask what he thinks is driving the effort to destroy him and others who hold heterodox views, he diagnoses his persecutors as though they’re exactly the sort of young people who wander into his lectures or buy his books looking for structure and purpose. His admirers and his fiercest detractors are, in his mind, not so different from each other.

Barton Swaim, The Man They Couldn’t Cancel

From an essay on atheism with lots of insights:

I can’t tell you how often … commenters on liberal blogs would preface a denunciation of Richard Dawkins by reassuring everyone that they themselves were agnostic or otherwise unaffiliated. “Of course Christianity isn’t literally true,” they would always say before excoriating arrogant atheists. What they never seemed to understand is that the “of course” was a more grievous insult to sincere Christians than Christopher Hitchens could ever come up with. What the atheists felt they needed to prove, the anti-atheists simply assumed away. They took as given that traditionally religious claims about the world were so ridiculous that they could dismiss them with a footnote. The difference is stark. Angry atheists think religion is wrong. Anti-angry atheist liberals think religion is not even wrong.

…

Since I begin writing about this topic – that is, since the very beginning, as the first thing I wrote online that more than a dozen people read was about being a certain kind of atheist – I have been known by religious people as a nice atheist, a respectful atheist. I am never sure how to feel about this condition. I still define my orientation the same way: that to come to atheism honestly and constructively you must come to it in loss and pain. You don’t accept atheism, when it is genuine. You surrender to it. Either way, I am an atheist. I think all metaphysical claims of religious are false. I think religion on balance has been a detriment to human life and human flourishing. And I think the gradual attrition of believers into nonbelievers, through apathy and distraction more than anything else, would be good for the world.

Freddie deBoer, ‌What Became of Atheism, Part One

"I think all metaphysical claims of religious are false" is a sentence that may be worth my returning to some day, as the metaphysical content deBoer describes elsewhere in his essay is not true of all religion, and not (very) true of Orthodox Christianity. If I were being flippant, I could say "well, I don’t believe in that God, either."

Stake in the ground: Two sexes

Here’s what the science says: there are only two human sexes. That’s because there are only two types of gamete (the sex cells — egg and sperm). Humans (like all mammals) can develop along one of two pathways: towards making eggs (female) and towards making sperm (male). If anyone ever finds a third sex it would be a discovery on a par with finding a new continent — with a guaranteed Nobel prize. Until you see those headlines, you can rest assured there are exactly two sexes.

…

Biological sex exists and it matters — most obviously because the existence of the human race depends on it. You can’t make a human baby without a male and a female — yet the sex-denialists hardly ever mention reproduction. Which is odd since that’s precisely why sex exists.

Nathan Williams, Sex deniers are the new flat earthers

How our press covers Hungary

“You are sitting next to the Fifth Avenue of Budapest,” he said, referring to nearby Andrassy Avenue. “The only people Western journalists ever seem to talk to live within a two-mile radius of this street.”

Later, as I was headed home from work, I thought about how someone could stand on Andrassy holding a sign saying, “Viktor Orban, Go To Hell,” and nothing would happen to them. What do you think would happen to someone standing on the corner of Fifth and 45th in Manhattan, holding up a sign saying, “Black Lives Matter Sucks,” or “Homosexuality Is A Sin”? …

But remember your catechism: countries like Hungary are the real illiberal democracies.

Rod Dreher

Surprise Orthodox Anglicans

There has been talk in my neck of the internet about Prince Philip having reconnected with his Orthodox Christian roots, and here’s a sign, which I’m surprised hadn’t surfaced earlier, that he had:

There was one clear sign of this complex heritage during the funeral. Prince Philip had requested that, just before his body was lowered into the Royal Vault, the choir sing the famous Kiev setting of the Orthodox Kontakion of the Departed.

"Give rest, O Christ, to thy servant with thy saints: where sorrow and pain are no more; neither sighing but life everlasting," the singers chanted. "Thou only art immortal, the creator and maker of man: and we are mortal formed from the dust of the earth. … All we go down to the dust; and weeping o’er the grave we make our song: Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia."

Terry Mattingly, Wish for the ‘Orthodox Kontakion of the Departed’ — A Hint at Prince Philip’s Complex Faith History

Note, too, this:

Prince Charles also has frequented Mount Athos. One Athonite monk told The Guardian newspaper that there is "no question" that Charles is "Orthodox in his heart. Sadly, he is very constrained by his position." The Prince of Wales has maintained ties to the Vatopedi Monastery and, like his father, to the Friends of Mount Athos.

Id.

Western civilization

The older I get, and the more I learn about history, the more convinced I am that Western civilization committed suicide with World War I. The rubble is still bouncing from that unparalleled catastrophe.

Rod Dreher

Contrariness

The function that herbivores play, for example, in stimulating biomass accumulation is both powerful and real. Chickens have historically converted kitchen scraps into eggs. Pigs have historically scavenged domestic waste products as varied as whey, offal, forest mast, and spoiled grain. That a large percentage of landfilled material is animal-edible food waste should strike us as criminal. Rather than showering landfill administrators with greenie awards for injecting pipes into the anaerobic swill to collect biogas, we should be cycling all that edible waste through chickens and pigs so that it never goes to the landfill in the first place.

Joel Salatin, Folks, This Ain’t Normal

Food safety is completely subjective. I don’t think for a minute that most of what’s in the supermarket is safe. But it’s been deemed safe because it only kills you slowly. While thousands of people die due to unnatural food and nutrient-deprived food, the food police go after a cottage-industry cheesemaker because two people got diarrhea.

Joel Salatin, Folks, This Ain’t Normal

Why I (sorta) miss the New York Times

Chauvin Was Convicted. Something Is Still Very Wrong reminds me that I not only miss much of what Ross Douthat and David Brooks write these days by dropping the New York Times, but I also miss Elizabeth Bruenig (and Frank Bruni).

It’s tough when an institution is the pinnacle of professional ambition in a field yet has become boycottably corrupt.

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