Tag: Wisdom

New Year’s Day 2024

I have come to care very little about a writer’s politics. I only care whether the writer appears to be sane and a truth-teller. There are many truth-tellers on the Left and there are many deranged and vile liars on the Right (where my reflexive sympathies lie).

You could call that my epigram today.

Rejecting bitterness

Why is a bitter “I told you so” so much more gratifying than finding agreement? Abigail Shrier’s Three New Year’s Resolutions for Americans is a challenging start to the year:

Like those who opposed the lockdowns, the masking of children, vaccine mandates, our southern border and immigration policy, or Woke racial intolerance, those of us who applied reasonable skepticism to pediatric gender transition were treated shabbily. The coercive tools of social ostracism and censorship were wielded against us with smug pride. Then, in 2023, our positions became conventional wisdom, but we were still unacceptable. It was all so obvious, suddenly, even to members of the MSM. They’d arrived where we’d long been, but seemed to think they’d discovered the land by dint of their own wisdom, preferring to ignore the grotesque inhabitants.

…

The transparently reckless progressive policy vision should have been a nonstarter with centrists and liberals. It didn’t take a PhD to know that cutting the breasts off teen girls in mental distress was a disastrous failure of psychology and medicine.

…

Here is a humbling truth, which all conservatives must face: If you have been shouting anything from the rooftops for years, it is not to your credit that no one listened. That you did not change minds. That you did not form a winning alliance. That you instead earned attaboys online from the same crew who pledged you loyalty from the start. Bitterness is deeply unattractive; that may have been one reason the more rational side sometimes fails to win enough support.

(Emphasis added). I plan to re-read this at least once after it rests a while.

Chastity belts of ideology

Rather than dwelling in their own thoughts, being a human being, living and experiencing things and gaining wisdom, people restrain all of their wisdom faculties with these chastity belts of ideology. If ideology becomes one’s identity, having impure thoughts is not thinking, it is a blow to your sense of self and therefore dangerous.

Simon Sarris, Are We Still Thinking?

Listening to our betters

A new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.

Bari Weiss, in her resignation letter to the New York Times. (Source)

The scourge that dare not speak its name

The brief annual preoccupation of Western societies with the so-called homeless (more accurately described as the family-less) is a good deal better than nothing … But why are there destitute people at all in our great 21st-century cities? The consequences of a society that has simultaneously licensed the dismantling of lifelong marriage and the widespread use of mind-altering drugs might have something to do with that. But who will put this right? Nobody, so far as I can see. These are causes so lost as to be almost unmentionable among the polite.

Peter Hitchens, The Christmas Spirit Rests on Fear

How many regiments does the Truth have?

Even when Fundamentalists set out to defend the truth, their temptation was to rally large constituencies to the cause rather than to prepare for scholarly exchange.

Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity

… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Sunday, 10/2/22

Wordview

Well, do tell! I had no idea that anyone had put the popular Christian idea of “worldview” under a microscope and dissected it. What’s So Bad About “Worldview”? – The Davenant Institute.

What he says rings true about the people I know who’ve been through Christian “worldview camps.”

The author commends wisdom over worldview, but that would only fly if wisdom were as easy to get as an off-the-rack “worldview.”

Getting what you want or wanting what you need?

I think still, in sort of a modernist worldview, people look at this conversation and think, “This will help me get what I want,” instead of understanding that this will change what you want.

Paul VanderKlay

Banning politicians from Communion

[A] direct attempt at a communion ban [of President Biden] will inevitably be interpreted as a partisan intervention, at a time when the partisan captivity of conservative Christianity, Protestant and Catholic alike, is a serious problem for the witness of the church.

By this I mean that however reasonable the bishops’ focus on abortion as a pre-eminent issue, in a polarized nation it’s created a situation where Republicans can seemingly get away with a vast accumulation of un-Catholic acts and policies and simple lies — many of them on display in Donald Trump’s administration, which was amply staffed with Catholics — and be perpetually forgiven because the Democrats support Roe. v. Wade.

Ross Douthat, The Bishops, Biden and the Brave New World

A stain

Russian soldiers who die in the line of duty in Ukraine have all of their sins forgiven, the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church proclaimed in a sermon ….

Religion News Service

Remembering not only lurid versions of what Islamic Jihadists are promised if they die in jihad, but that Popes also said such things to Crusaders, always appalls me. That Patriarch Kirill says it now to Russia’s rag-tag conscripts is a stain on my Church, but let my readers be aware that he stands alone, and is widely criticized by Orthodox laity and leaders outside Russia.

Judging from the Loyalty/Betrayal axis of Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Foundations test, I likely suffer from a deficit of patriotism, at least in comparison to a typical conservative. So statements like the patriarch’s particularly grate on me.

I would feel the same if a Bishop of the Ukrainian Church promised forgiveness of all sins to soldiers dying in defense of the homeland.

It’s a fearful thing to be a clergyman. Orthodoxy holds that Priests, Bishops and Patriarchs will be judged by God for misleading the faithful. Does Patriarch Kirill really believe that?

Paul vs. James

Martin Luther had “issues” with Saint James’ Epistle, and reportedly wanted to kick it out of the Bible. Calvinists aren’t too crazy about it, either. The response isn’t that complicated once you see it:

Saint James’s Epistle is unique on several levels. While the Pauline Epistles speak of Christ primarily theologically, explaining the significance of who Christ is and what Christ has accomplished in the Cross and the Resurrection, St. James teaches in a way that is redolent with the teachings of Christ in His earthly ministry.

Fr. Stephen De Young, Religion of the Apostles

Mind and body

Over the course of his long book, Haidt builds up a case file of evidence from neuroscience, psychology and other fields to demonstrate that the objective, rational mind, magically divorced from the clumsy, emotional physical body, is a fiction. One of the founding myths of modernity has no basis in reality. Haidt compares the relationship between intuition and reason to the relationship between the US president and his press spokesman. The spokesman’s job is to explain to the world what the president has already decided to do; to rationalise it and to justify it, however unjustifiable it may sometimes be.

Paul Kingsnorth, In the Black Chamber

Toxic Shame

I have noted through the years, that some people (including some priests) are convinced that a soul can only be saved with disciplinary slaps and corrections from time to time. If there are such corrections needed in a human life, then it is likely only God who has the wisdom to know when and how such correction should take place. My experience as a priest and confessor is that I simply need to be consistent in sharing God’s love and be patient with what might be a process of healing that takes years. I would add that, in my experience, spiritual abuse is almost always a case of manipulating toxic shame against someone. If that happens, we are not asked to tolerate it.

Fr. Stephen Freeman, When Shame Becomes Toxic

Liberation theology for white people

For the social-gospel-oriented left wing, Christianity exists to build a social order in step with the upward progress of humanity. For the Christian nationalist right wing, Christianity exists to build a social order in step with national or ethnic identity. The gospel is the means for a forward-looking utopianism in the one case and a backward-looking nostalgia in the other. Christian nationalism is a liberation theology for white people.

Russell Moore (H/T John Brady)

Compel yourself to love

When you accuse someone of being judgmental, you’re doing the same thing.

Practice at all times compassion for those you disagree with. Try to understand their reasoning, which is different from yours. Perhaps they have had life experiences that you have not had.

Never distort what they are saying in order to make it sound more outrageous. That’s a form of lying. Deal with what they are actually saying, not a parody of it.

With a contentious issue, the goal is to persuade those on the other side. Judging and denouncing does not persuade. No one was ever humiliated into changing their opinion.

We live in a paradoxical time when condemning and judging is severely condemned and judged. It seems like an effective way to stay on the right side of correct opinion is to identify people saying the wrong things, and denounce them. This is not love.

For your own sake, compel yourself to love your opponents (they are not your enemies; we have only one Enemy). Compel yourself to love, for your soul’s sake.

Frederica Mathewes-Green (emphasis in original)

[S]ubordinating truth to politics is a game which tyrants and bullies always win.

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge

The Orthodox "phronema" [roughly, mind-set] cannot be programmitized or reduced to shibboleths.

Fr. Jonathan Tobias

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.