This is not a day when the Orthodox Church remembers all saints, but I thought a reminder that Halloween is the eve of All Saints Day in the Latin Christian world would be timely.
What is Church for?
In the vast, overwhelming majority of places around the Western world that refer to themselves as a “Christian church,” the men and women who lead these assemblies frame themselves primarily as weekly teachers.
The pastor is expected to spend the week:
Studying Scripture.
Communicating various theological concepts.
Providing practical applications in their sermon for their congregants to take to heart.
Addressing various contemporary cultural and political issues of the day.
Delivering a stirring message that will leave congregants feeling like they “got something from the message.”…
An Orthodox priest’s primary job is not to deliver a homily every week that ministers theology, inspiration, and a type of motivational message to his congregation that will stir the congregants to come back again week after week.
The two different traditions, Orthodox Christianity and modern Evangelical Protestantism, exist side by side with two entirely different assumptions:
The Sunday Divine Liturgy is not a lecture.
The priest is a spiritual father, not a professor.
Discipleship is experiential, not something I simply receive by way of a message.…
If there is anything that I see differently than I did when I was a young man, it is this: being a Christian is primarily not about the theological information I learn; it is about learning to confess my sins before God and clothe myself in humility.
When I was a young man, I viewed my relationship with Jesus Christ primarily as one in which I amassed knowledge about God, the Bible, theology, etc.
However, the longer I am in the Orthodox Church, the more I begin to realize that a relationship with God begins and ends with humility.
Kenneth B., The 14-Hour Sermon: Have We Forgotten What Church is For? He wrote it, but I’ve experienced the same thing.
How are we to live in an AI Age?
In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”
In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors—anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.
This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.
C.S. Lewis via Martin Shaw
Wild and wasted virtues
The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.
G.K. Chesterton via Fr. Stephen Freeman, Hope: The Unashamed Virtue
Enabling lies, activating lies
The problem is that all too many Christians are in the grips of two sets of lies. We’ll call them the enabling lies and the activating lies. And unless you deal with the enabling lies, the activating lies will constantly pollute the body politic and continue to spawn violent unrest.
What’s the difference between the two kinds of lies? The enabling lie is the lie that makes you fertile ground for the activating lie that actually motivates a person to charge a thin blue line at the Capitol or take a rifle to a pizza parlor.
Here’s an enabling lie: America will end if Trump loses. That was the essence of the Flight 93 essay in 2016. That was the core of Eric Metaxas’s argument in our debates this spring and fall.
Here’s another enabling lie: The fate of the church is at stake if Joe Biden wins.
And here’s yet another: The left hates you (this sentence sometimes concludes with the phrase “and wants you dead.”)
I could go on, but the enabling lies that have rocketed through the church for years share important characteristics. They not only dramatically exaggerate the stakes of our political and legal disputes, they dramatically exaggerate the perfidy of your opponents. Moreover, when the stakes are deemed to be that high, the moral limitations on your response start to fall away.
This may look political, but that’s not my intent. Believing those enabling lies corrodes your soul. Refusing to dwell on them is a matter of spiritual health.
Nice Summary
Their job is to be silent in a world that doesn’t stop talking.
Catherine Bauer, Director of Development and Marketing for the Carmelite Sisters of Fairfield, an Order that is building a stone monastery in Pennsylvania with a vision of it lasting a thousand years.
Not four bare walls and a lectern
… I had this kind of Protestant idea that one should beware of beauty ….
Dr. David Bradshaw in his account of why he became Orthodox
Beautiful church buildings respect the mysteries that occur within, chiefly the transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. If we have a high view of the Eucharist, then just as we will want to use a beautiful chalice to show respect to Christ’s sacrifice, we will also want to have a beautiful temple in which these sacred mysteries occur. By contrast, a low view of the Eucharist often finds expression in church buildings that proclaim a type of architectural Docetism: God is everywhere generally but nowhere in particular.
Robin Phillips, Rediscovering the Goodness of Creation: A Manual for Recovering Gnostics
Scholasticism
The more I studied, the more I saw the Scholastic tradition as an effort to cling to the god of the philosophers while somehow saying of God that which Christians know they must.
Nathan Jacobs, My Wild Ride to Orthodoxy (around the 21 minute mark)
I have just discovered Nathan Jacobs and I’m pretty enthusiastic about it.
The Crusades
The Crusades, for instance, could not have taken place in a world in which the principles of the Christian religion were fully understood: from the Christian point of view, the ‘events’ of Christ’s life are repeated wherever and whenever members of the Church participate in the Mysteries, and the notion that it was important to ‘liberate’ one particular place where they had occurred in one particular time could only have developed to the extent it did as a consequence of extraneous, or what one might call superstitious, influences.
Philip Sherrard, The Greek East and the Latin West
The Christian East did not participate in the Crusades, and in fact suffered particularly in 1205 A.D. from rampaging Crusaders. Some historians of Christianity mark that as the point beyond which the Great Schism of 1054, when the Pope severed the West from the rest of the Church, became permanent.
Really?!
Even though Pope Leo XIV is recovering well from lung cancer surgery and is going ahead with a big trip to Latin America next week, the diagnosis is “a bit of a game-changer” for the Vatican and Leo’s still-young papacy, a top Vatican official said Tuesday.
Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher, the Holy See’s foreign minister, said there had been a temptation to think that Leo was a “Superman, a Superpope” after he was elected in 2025 and “hit the ground running” following the drawn-out illness and death of Pope Francis.
“The fact that he has fallen ill with, in many ways, one of the most common illnesses of our age means that he is a poor mortal like the rest of us. And I think that that is going to change how we see him and possibly how he sees himself as well,” Gallagher told reporters at the Italian foreign press association.
Top Vatican official says pope’s cancer diagnosis a ‘game-changer’ for the papacy (emphasis added).
Is Abp. Gallagher a Protestant mole or something? Why would he think that Catholics, and the Pope himself, had such idiotic ideas?
My antidote to beating dead horses
Having left the Protestant religious world finally and officially 29 years ago this month, I nevertheless remain interested in its goings-on — sometimes horrified, sometimes filled with schadenfreude, occasionally pleasantly surprised — because America is deeply Protestant and I cannot entirely escape that fact short of getting me to an Orthodox monastery and forever eschewing news and political involvement.
But I’ve become increasingly aware that, in David Foster Wallace terms, because Protestantism is not the water I deliberately swim in, there not only are things about it that I’m better equipped to see than those in it but also important currents I’m oblivious to.
My version of Protestantism has scarcely been updated since 1997 and a lot of my version is shaped by my experiences in the 1960s and early 1970s, when I was caught in a backwater of Wheaton-style evangelicalism — a strongly dispensationalist milieu adjacent to a broader mainstream. So I’m still beating a dispensational premillennialist horse, though I see glimpses that it’s virtually dead.
That evangelical fads of my youth should be gone by my dotage, replaced by other fads, is a proof, I think, that Protestantism in general and Evangelicalism in particular are built on shifting sands, not solid rock, despite the gospel song to the contrary (which probably nobody under 50 even knows these days).
But mocking or gently critiquing the fads of my youth doesn’t do much good for people living today. So I’m updating my understanding of Protestantism through reading The Protestant Mind, a blog-like project of First Things with a grant from the John Templeton Foundation.
In this epoch when “Evangelical” is almost synonymous with “MAGA” in the popular press, The Protestant Mind’s principal author, Dale Coulter, helpfully provides a taxonomy of the Christian Right in America 2026 (“The Two Evangelical Rights”). The major rubrics are New Protestant Right” and “new evangelical populism.”
It helped me clarify a lot. I was tempted to speculate about which one I’d likely be in were I still Protestant, but that’s just a counterfactual too far.
The early Church had no Scripture of its own, and the Jews had no defined canon of Scripture; therefore, sola scriptura as the foundation for what Christians believed was absolutely impossible.
Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.
