God making the world
As Peter Geach puts it, for Aquinas the claim that God made the world “is more like ‘the minstrel made music’ than ‘the blacksmith made a shoe’”; that is to say, creation is an ongoing activity rather than a once-and-for-all event. While the shoe might continue to exist even if the blacksmith dies, the music necessarily stops when the minstrel stops playing, and the world would necessarily go out of existence if God stopped creating it.
Edward Feser, Aquinas
Sitting with the dead
Walking backwards into our own graves, so filled with denial because we lived not really once thinking that such a thing could one day happen to us. We miss the needed consciousness that sitting with a dead body will sober and sanctify us into. We haven’t been done a favour by having the end of life ushered out of sight.
Part of getting made into a human is the final part. Getting un-made. That preparing for death is not the same as what was before it. Denial is not just a river in Egypt. It’s not my time is not the appropriate mantra of a grown up. One day, any day, it will be my time, is better.
Martin Shaw, On Death
“American Christianity”
After playing whataboutism with the Manicheanism of the Seven Mountain Mandate and shrill progressives like Anne Applebaum, R.R. Reno sums up:
A friend recently argued that “evangelicalism” is a spent label. It gained currency during the postwar era, but cultural changes, not just in American society at large, but within conservative Protestant churches have made the term impossible to define. Better, he said, to speak of “American Christianity,” the free-wheeling, entrepreneurial, and populist form of Bible-only Christianity that has its roots in the Second Great Awakening and was supercharged by the Pentecostal revivals of the twentieth century.
American Christianity has always been deeply embedded in and responsive to the social realities that shape the lives of non-elite Americans. We’re in a populist moment in our politics, because these non-elite Americans have decided to use their votes to fight back. The same thing is happening in our home-grown American Christianity. I may dismiss the reasoning behind the New Apostolic Reformation (not least because it is anti-theological) and rue its blustering political biblicism. But I won’t criticize the activist spirit. Why should the great American tradition of reformist zeal be the sole possession of secular progressives?
I tend to agree with the uselessness of the “evangelical” label, though I’m not ready to cede “American Christianity” to the sectarians.
I think I’ve tacitly undertaken to undermine the the free-wheeling, entrepreneurial, populist and anti-intellectual aspects in which, for lack of a better term, American evangelicalism specializes — in hopes that evangelicals who love Christ more than political power will wise up and come take a look at Orthodoxy.
How to work up a crusade
The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of a good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with a good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your behavior “righteous indignation”—this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.
Aldous Huxley via R.R. Reno. Surely this concept is behind Mafia Don’s campaign promise “I am your retribution.”
I’ve known for decades that there’s something corrupt about an economy based on competitive acquisitiveness and the promise of endless growth. The politics of retribution is no less corrupt.
I’m using “corrupt” in the third adjectival sense.
God sees the heart
There was once a monk who lived on Mount Athos, in Karyes. He was drinking and getting drunk every day, scandalizing the pilgrims. After a while he died and this relieved some of the believers who went and told elder Paisios they were pleased that finally this huge problem was resolved.
Father Paisios replied that he knew about the monk’s death, because he saw a whole battalion of angels who came to pick up his soul.
Relgio-Political wisdom
A devil is no less a devil if the lie he tells flatters you and stands to help you defeat your enemies and achieve power.
Rod Dreher, Something Demonic Is In The Air, 1/13/2021
There’s more than thinking to life
Contemporary western Christianity trained us how to think and what to think; whereas Christ himself, as did Lao Tzu before Him, taught us how not to need to think.
Christ the Eternal Tao
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 