Today, the Orthodox Christian world celebrates Christ’s presentation in the Temple on the 40th day after His birth. And after 76 years on earth, I notice for the first time that “the righteous Simeon” who received Him and prayed the Nunc dimittis was not a priest in the Temple, but a righteous man who was there frequently and was led there by the spirit that day.
UPDATE: One of the hymns in Matins calls him a Priest, though that fact doesn’t appear in Luke 2. So I stand corrected.
Nondenominationalism and crypto-baptists
I stand corrected: not every non-denominational church is functionally Baptist.
Oh, I could quibble and say the LARPing Anglicanism without a bishop is sort of Baptist-adjacent. But when it includes an organized vestry and infant baptism, I wave the white flag.
Dechurching
[T]here are more people who dechurch into a kind of right-wing political religion than into a left-wing political religion.
Jake Meador, The Rise of the Right-Wing Exvangelical, citing The Great Dechurching
Race and the Bible
The problem with race and the Bible was far more profound than the interpretation of any one text. It was a problem brought about by the intuitive character of the reigning American hermeneutic. This hermeneutic merged three positions: (1) The Bible was a plain book whose meanings could be reliably ascertained through the exercise of an ordinary person’s intelligence; (2) a main reason for trusting the Bible as true was an intuitive sense, sealed by the Holy Spirit; (3) the same intelligence that through ordinary means and intuitions could trust the Bible as true also gained much additional truth about the world through intuitive processes that were also deliverances of universal common sense. The first position was a traditional Protestant teaching intensified by the American environment; the second was historically Protestant and Reformed; the third was simply a function of the American hermeneutic.
Mark A. Noll, America’s God
“Religion”
Just as colonial officials and missionaries, travelling to India, had imposed the concept of ‘religion’ on the societies they found there, so did agnostics colonise the past in similar manner. The ancient Egyptians, and Babylonians, and Romans: all were assumed to have had a ‘religion’. Some peoples—most notably the Greeks—were also assumed to have had ‘science’. It was this that had enabled their civilisation to serve as the wellspring of progress. Philosophers had been the prototypes of scientists. The library of Alexandria had been ‘the birthplace of modern science’.26 Only Christians, with their fanatical hatred of reason and their determination to eradicate pagan learning, had prevented the ancient world from being set on a path towards steam engines and cotton mills.
Tom Holland, Dominion
Belonging nowhere
Yesterday my family and I went to a wedding in Dublin. We got up in the dark, lit the candles, heated water on a gas stove I’d set up in the garden and washed in a plastic tub in the bath. Then we put our best duds on and drove out of the darkness. [They were in a storm-caused power outage of several days’ duration.] There was light in the city, of course. The wedding was beautiful. I’d never been to an Orthodox wedding before. Our friend, the groom, was lit up from within.
After the ceremony I got talking to another guest, a Romanian woman now living in Ireland. ‘When I go home now’, she said, ‘I feel like a stranger. It doesn’t feel like home, really. But I am not Irish either. I don’t belong anywhere.’ It could have been the familiar lament of the immigrant, but it was not that. ‘Except here,’ she went on, gesturing about her. ‘In the Church, there are people from all sorts of countries, but we all come together and everything makes sense. Nothing seems to make sense outside it any more.’
I nodded my head and agreed. I feel the same these days. My secular friends, my atheist relatives: I love them, but some of them think I’ve gone mad, or already was. This journey of prayer takes you away from the world, lifts your feet slightly above the ground, away from the electric spectacle, with its currents that drag you down. They can’t see that. How could they? It can’t be accessed through argument. It’s nobody’s fault, but the river that runs between us is real.
Later, my wife and I got talking to a priest we know around the dinner table. Here we were, an English Christian convert to the Eastern Church, a British-Indian Sikh, a Romanian Orthodox priest, all of us talking about religion in the capital of Ireland, and all of us agreeing on one thing: that we could understand and connect much better, on some deep level, with each other, and with other religious people, whatever their faith, than we could with people from our own culture who had no religion at all.
The English, said the priest, seem to be a very irreligious people. I told him he was right. It makes me sad, but there it is. I could talk more easily now, I think, to an African Christian, an Indonesian Muslim or an Indian Hindu than I could to a secular British atheist immersed in what passes for culture in my homeland. I’m not judging. I’m just laying it out.
You can aim towards God, I think now, or you can aim somewhere else. You can open up all of your inner rooms and say, come on in, Father, clear out all the crap I have stored in here, and fill these rooms with light. You can say that in a lot of different languages, in a lot of different dialects, with a lot of different approaches. Or you can keep the doors closed.
We shall not cease from exploration
“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in,” Richard Dawkins has argued. “Some of us just go one god further.” The idea behind this aphorism is that every serious religious worldview is a closed system and that to really practice and believe in one is to necessarily reject all the rest as incredible and false.
…
Dawkins is simply wrong about the requirement for believers to disbelieve in every other faith. The bookstore of all religions isn’t necessarily a library of total falsehoods with one lonely truth hidden somewhere on the shelves, and embracing one revelation doesn’t require believing that every other religion is made up.
…
Consider the story of religious pilgrimage offered recently by the British novelist Paul Kingsnorth. Raised to experience his isle’s Christianity as a hopeless antiquarianism, he found that spiritual interests grew naturally out of his environmentalism, which led into a commitment to Zen Buddhism, which lasted years but felt insufficient, lacking (he felt) a mode of true worship.
He found that worship in actual paganism, and he went so far as to become a priest of Wicca, a practitioner of what he took to be white magic. At which point, and only at that point, he began to feel impelled toward Christianity — by coincidence and dreams, ideas and arguments and some stark mystical experiences as well.
But it would have been unimaginable to him at the start of the journey that the Christian faith imparted to him weakly in his childhood — that “ancient, tired religion” as he put it — could have possibly been his destination in the end. Only the act of questing delivered him back to the initial place, no longer old and tired but fresh and new.
“We shall not cease from exploration,” wrote T.S. Eliot in “Four Quartets.” “And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” That’s a nice encapsulation for Kingsnorth’s journey. But for the general obligation imposed upon us all, as time-bound creatures in a world shot through with intimations of transcendence, a different Eliot line is apt: “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”
Ross Douthat, excerpted from his forthcoming book Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.
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
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 