Sunday stuff
Where does patience come from?
O Lord and Master of my life,
Take from me the spirit of sloth, despair, lust of power and idle talk.
But grant rather the spirit of chastity, humility, patience and love to Thy servant.Yea, O Lord and King,
grant me to see my own transgressions
and not to judge my brother …
(Prayer of St. Ephrem the Syrian, recited over and over and over again, with prostrations, by Eastern Orthodox Christians during Lent.)
I’ve tended for many decades now to discuss things, outside of clearly religious contexts, in non-religious terms. It’s not from any effort to deceive, but instinctive. I guess I’ve absorbed by osmosis the Rawlesian dogma that public discourse requires public reason.
(Lest I now deceive, I acknowledge that many of the terms in the preceding paragraph are debatable, starting with the dubious category of “religion.”)
But I caught myself the other day attributing my increasing patience to my advancing (age and thus the accumulation of anecdotes where I was wrong, someone else right).
But I’m not so sure. Two geezers within the past week or two have impatiently shot innocent people who mistakenly approached their homes. Apparently “older” and “more patient” don’t necessarily go together.
Might my increasing patience have something to do with now 25 years of that prayer?
I’ve only got one life to live. I cannot scientifically separate those prayers, and a quiet divine response, from all else that has accompanied my life. But the concept of “crotchety old man” makes me suspect that mere aging, even self-reflective aging, does not alone explain patience and tolerance.
Socrates, Plato, Lao Tzu
Even the staunchest Christians in Greece refer to Socrates as “the Apostle to the pagans.” The best-loved Greek saint of the 20th century, St. Nektarios of Pentapolis, said that Socrates and “divine Plato” were at times “inspired by God.” If the Greek philosophers can be honored in this way, cannot also Lao Tzu, who came even closer than they to describing the Logos, the Tao, before he was made flesh and dwelt among us?
Hieromonk Damascene, Christ the Eternal Tao
Hard words
The stringency of Christianity’s sexual teachings gets most of the press, but the commandment against avarice, if taken seriously, can be the faith’s most difficult by far. You can wall yourself off from pornography and avoid people who tempt you into adultery, but everybody has to work—and every day in the workplace is a potential occasion of sin. The prosperity gospel does away with this anxiety. Like most heresies, it resolves one of orthodoxy’s tensions by emphasizing one part of Christian doctrine—in this case, the idea that the things of this life are gifts from the Creator, rather than simply snares to be avoided, and that Christians are expected to participate in the world rather than withdraw from it.
Ross Douthat, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics
Why didn’t God simply declare us righteous?
The Egyptian church father next explains why God did not merely save mankind by way of a simple declaration of a clean bill of health. Our cure, Athanasius declares, requires more than merely a spoken word. Salvation, for Athanasius, is not just an external or nominal matter; it is a participatory – or real – event.
Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation
Emotivism
If you don’t know who Eric Metaxas is, you may just want to skip this one as I’m not sure you need to know.
The thing is, a heck of a lot of Americans, both on the Left and the Right, have done the same thing. Over forty years ago, Alasdair MacIntyre identified “emotivism” as the default moral reasoning position of the contemporary West. That is, we have become the kind of people who believe that truth is what we feel it is. By now, we have created a culture built on emotivism. In one extreme expression of it, we say that an individual can determine his or her sex based not on their body and their genetic profile, but entirely on their feelings. I hope Eric Metaxas and Caitlyn Jenner met in a green room somewhere, and were friendly, because they have a lot more in common than either might have thought.
If you make the pursuit of truth your telos, you might not ultimately find it — truth can be elusive — but you stand a good chance of keeping your integrity, even if you fall into deceit. But if you place fear of the crowd above the pursuit of truth, as Fox did, or live by an emotivist epistemology in which you never analyze your emotional response, as Eric Metaxas did, well, it’s likely to cost you plenty.
On the other hand, last September, Eric released a book titled, Letter To The American Church, in which he goes all Bonhoeffer in calling on US Christians to resist evil. Hey, that’s a message I can endorse! But coming from him? The Upper East Side dandy who exhorted American Christians to shed blood to defend Donald Trump’s election lies?
Rod Dreher, Eric Metaxas And The MAGA Inner Ring. I bought Metaxas’ latest book out of curiosity, and it is truly very bad. My eyes don’t light up at the utility of “emotivism” to explain it, but I have no better summary.
If there is any coherent philosophy behind Metaxas’ strange and vehement Christianish fixations, it must be akin to that of the New Apostolic Reformation folks:
- that the offices of Apostle and Prophet still exist; and
- that those offices come willy-nilly on whomever the Lord chooses, not by any orderly and ecclesial process.
The NAR folks, however and so far as I know, don’t write letters “to the American Church” haranguing their fellow-Christians that they’re stupid, evil, complicit, crypto-Nazis if they don’t believe the writer’s private revelations.
Other stuff
Game recognizes game
Trump seemed to feel a kinship with prosperity preachers—often evincing a game-recognizes-game appreciation for their hustle.
McKay Coppins, Trump Secretly Mocks His Christian Supporters
Enduring, competing myths
There are few ideas, tropes, narratives, myths—whatever you want to call them—more enduring than the notion that very rich people are villainously pulling strings behind the scenes to do villainous things.
I want to be clear: It’s a bipartisan tendency. But the chief difference between right-wing and left-wing versions is that the left-wing versions are treated as serious theories by establishment journalists, academics, and experts while the right-wing versions are usually dismissed as paranoid or bigoted fantasies by those very same academics and experts. “The Koch brothers are behind this!” is acceptable political rhetoric, but, “Soros is behind this!” is antisemitic paranoia. (Yes, antisemites use Soros as a foil, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t meddling in American politics.)
Race
Is equality in America’s DNA?
There’s a story about the USA being dedicated to human equality and dignity from (at least) the time of the Declaration of Independence.
The story is nearly universal, and it’s rhetorically useful in politics, and I dare say denying it would be a political kiss of death in almost every congressional district in the country.
But it is false.
The Declaration of Independence was not a statement about human rights in the abstract; it was not a declaration of concrete human rights, either. As the title tells us, it is not about rights at all; it is about independence. It was written at a specific moment and for a specific purpose, designed to do two things: to announce that the American colonists were throwing off allegiance to the British Crown and to justify that act.
Kermit Roosevelt III, The Nation that Never Was
Thus the 3/5 clause (slaves counting as 3/5 of a person) in the Constitution was not a solecism on the grammar of the Declaration. If you can face up to that, you can take solace that we now are formally dedicated to equality, as a result of the Civil War amendments and Reconstruction. (I would even say we are so madly dedicated to equality that we ignore truly relevant distinctions and increasingly ignore several rights that entitle people to opt out of the equality regime. But that’s a topic for another day.)
I’m not 100% on board with Roosevelt on everything, but having just finished, at age 74, my first actual reading of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, that block quote dovetails not only with the vision of the little woman who wrote the book that started [a] big war, but with some threads of legal realism I’d previously picked up. When you see multiple “data points” pointing in the same direction, you can’t help but feel that you’re onto something.
It was always the race problem
God, it was always the [race problem], now, just as in 1883, 1783, 1683, and hasn’t it always been that since the first tough God-believing Christ-haunted cunning violent rapacious Visigoth-Western-Gentile first set foot here with the first black man: the one willing to risk everything, take all or lose all, the other willing just to wait and outlast because once he was violated all he had to do was wait because sooner or later the first would wake up and know that he had flunked, been proved a liar where he lived, and no man can live with that. And sooner or later the lordly Visigoth-Western-Gentile-Christian-Americans would have to falter, fall out, turn upon themselves like scorpions in a bottle.
Respect for roots
We owe a cornfield respect, not because of itself, but because it is food for mankind. In the same way, we owe our respect to a collectivity, of whatever kind—country, family or any other—not for itself, but because it is food for a certain number of human souls.
Simone Weil, The Need for Roots
A brief digression
I had paid exactly zero attention to the Dylan Mulvaney kerfuffle. It had peripherally thrusted itself onto my attention a time or two — just enough that I probably could have told you that Dylan Mulvaney was a “trans woman” who did a Budweiser ad, and the some people had their knickers in a knot over it.
But then Andrew Sullivan weighed in, and my default position is that if he takes the time to write about something, it’s probably worth a little of my time to read it.
I won’t say that I was richly rewarded, but I learned some more about Dylan Mulvaney including Andrew’s theory:
There is, in fact, a perfect word to describe Dylan Mulvaney. She isn’t trans or queer or subversive so much as a minstrel. She’s performing a deeply misogynistic version of a Disney princess for an audience that is uncomfortable with actual transgender people whose appearance is not monetizable and whose lives are more than gay parodies of blonde ditzes. But minstrelsy has always been lucrative — and I don’t fault Dylan for seeing an opening here, and succeeding beyond what must have been his/her wildest dreams.
What I worry about is what happens to Dylan as this buzz eventually wears off. She’s only 26, and has a lifetime to live after her 12 months of TikTok fame. The future may not be as pretty as she currently is.
I shall now, I hope, be able to return to ignoring this constellation of unedifying provocations and counter-provocations.
Johnny Cashesque
H/T Andrew Sullivan
Medical Assistance in Dying
MAID is inexpensive, completely effective, and easily delivered. If we do not resist it, the system will, as if pulled by gravity, increasingly provide suicide and euthanasia instead of healing for the poor, elderly, and severely ill.
Ideology defined
[A]n ideology is a conceptual system that oversimplifies reality while claiming to explain it comprehensively, and that justifies its political rule by insisting that, if social and political reality could just be made to conform to its conceptual schema, all problems would be resolved … Part of the “real nature of all ideologies” is that, not only do they misrepresent reality, but they are necessarily in active conflict with it.
Mark Shiffman via Matt Crawford
For all its piety and fervor, today’s United States needs to be recognized for what it really is: not a Christian country, but a nation of heretics.
Ross Douthat, Bad Religion
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 