Feeling attuned to the world is possible only when we relax our compulsion to control it.
Matthew Crawford, reviewing Rod Dreher’s Living in Wonder.
This rings true, doesn’t it?
Another substack post made public by its author, but by no means on the same theme as Ted Gioia’s post: Paul Kingsnorth, The Moses Option.
This one, I suggest, is only for practicing Christians.
A bold claim, pursued subtly
I’ve been reading Fr. Stephen De Young’s book St. Paul the Pharisee, which I hoped would focus on this bold claim:
Mostly it doesn’t, or it doesn’t do so explicitly except for that quote.
But Fr. Stephen’s “interpretive translation” of Paul’s epistles subtly undermines the tendency to view them as theological treatises rather than pastoral guidance.
I found Ted Gioia’s latest very thought-provoking: 15 Observations on the New Phase in Cultural Conflict.
The author made it public.
The write-in votes in my County have been tabulated. The top two?
83: Jill Stein, the Green Party nominee, received the most write-in votes.
79: Peter Sonski, the American Solidarity Party nominee.
There are 78 kindred spirits out there somewhere.
A personal pilgrimage
Today is the 27th anniversary of my formal entry into the Orthodox Christian Faith. Unlike my departure from frank evangelicalism for Calvinism two decades earlier, this felt like a conversion, not an incidental change of denomination.
Part of that feeling may have been that the evangelical-to-Calvinist transition was largely invisible to observers: I didn’t quit our Baptist church and go to the tiny PCA startup in town; instead I moved across the country to go back to school, so of course I had to find a new church; I graduated, moved, and began practicing law in my hometown, so again I had to find a new church.
That each of those steps was away from evangelicalism and toward Calvinism would have been apparent only to someone for whom the permeability of denominational walls in Protestantism seems odd, and I think most Protestants take that permeability for granted. Indeed, during this transition, I published a law journal note titled Church Property Disputes in an Age of Common-Core Protestantism, based on the premise that someone who became a Presbyterian or Methodist or Episcopalian was unlikely to be buying into denominational ownership or control of the local church’s temporalities that he (or she) now donated to maintaining.
But another part of the “conversion” sensation certainly was that I had to be catechized to enter Orthodoxy. Its walls are not permeable. I became an “ecclesial Christian” as Richard John Neuhaus described it: one for whom faith in Christ and faith in His Church is one act of faith, not two. I finally believed that the one holy, catholic and apostolic church is visible and distinct, not invisible and amorphous.
Today, I’m more interested in a question one could phrase in an article title as Church Discipline in an Age of Permeable-Wall Protestantism. Others have doubtless gone deeper into the topic of how there can be effective church discipline, how can flagrant sinners be brought to repentance, when they can just move to another church before the heat melts their hearts? But in a largely Protestant nation, it’s hard for an ecclesial Christian not to dabble in other people’s business.
David Brooks looks at many of the ways the pre-election expectations (of how groups would vote) were dashed. Why We Got It So Wrong (unlocked article)
Gaetz as Attorney General will do petty, flamboyant, stupid things in clumsy ways. Some of those things will be very bad. But clown shoes are preferable to jackboots. We’d be in much more trouble if someone evil in a smart and competent way who understands how the machine works — say, Jeff Clark or Ken Paxton — took over. That would be terrifying.
Popehat (Ken White)
Pardon Trump’s Critics Now
President Biden has a moral obligation to do what he can for patriotic Americans who have risked it all.
It appears that this posted even before Trump announced Matt Gaetz as his Attorney General. It’s more important after that.
Depressing thought for the day:
Trump … is winning culturally in shaping America’s manners and mores.
I will pray for America and its rulers, but I could not in good conscience tell a child to look up to 47 as an example of goodness or manliness.
They will do so anyway.
Reading a recent Ted Gioia post, it occurred to me that we are swimming against the stream trying to teach children to love the true, the good and the beautiful because great swaths of our society idolize bullshit, transgression and power.
Lafayette Symphony Orchestra has a new, black, artistic director/conductor. His inaugural concert, “Pleased to Meet You,” included Michael Ellis Ingram’s Overture to Jubilee, Mendelssohn, Debussy, and William Grant Still’s Symphony No. 2, Song of a New Race. Promising start, stretching the audience.
Reading Fr. Stephen De Young, St. Paul the Pharisee. 📚I only recently learned that it existed, and knew immediately that I needed to read it.
It somehow feels appropriate to end this week with the news that a bunch of monkeys escaped from an Alpha Genesis research facility in South Carolina.
I have theories on why more people voted against Harris than voted against Trump, but there’s no shortage of other theories.
The only ones I tend to reject reflexively are ones that blame racism, sexism, misogyny or such — i.e., blame the deplorable voters.
Responding to a question someone raised somewhere within the last 36 hours: The Dispatch will be fine because it’s not just anti-Trump. The Bulwark will reinvent itself or die, and I’ll not cry.
And I’ll gratuitously volunteer that the Free Press, in a rather different category, should be fine, too.
My guilty secret: I visited my moribund X.com account Monday. I found all kinds of crap in my feed. Searched for how to filter out people I’m not following, and I now think I might be able to tolerate it.
It may be worth pondering that that despite Trump’s constant stream of lies, confabulations and bullshit, Harris may have lost from perceptions that the Democrats were dishonest (covering up Biden’s incapacity, engineering a substitute candidate undemocratically, dodging questions, etc.)
One of my least endearing traits is to hector people about something they haven’t figured out yet but that I finally figured out day-before-yesterday. I’m not going to do that yet with my latest big “Aha!” It’s duly noted in my diary.
This is hard-core counter-cultural: Who Says You Can’t Live Off the Grid in Manhattan? (unlocked)
Portal-to-portal voting, arriving right as the polls opened, took more than an hour. No apathy problems here.
With apologies to the pollsters who can’t say who’s winning (outside a margin of error), I’m hoping that whoever wins does so decisively enough that the election is over.
David Post: Two Sentences I Never Thought I’d Write