If you like the Great British Baking Show, do not miss the opening music for season 9 episode 1.
Starting to get on-point book recommendations from Amazon, but not (so far as I can recall) because of anything I did or clicked on the Amazon site. That makes me even more anti-Amazon (not claiming 100% boycott; there are a few occasions when I shop there still).
The short version is that fewer than 50% of Evangelicals attend Church at least weekly. The longer version is that a lot of people with no theology and no real religion started calling themselves “Evangelical” after 2016.
Religious polling ain’t easy.
(H/T David French)
Well, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar now has a Substack — on sports, politics and pop culture.
If English Departments were shut down and their students given jobs driving cabs and given the classics to read while they wait for fares, this would be a step forward.
Garrison Keillor, Women: don’t read this, for men only
The Dispatch currently has a 30-day free trial going on. I’ve subscribed almost from the beginning, and especially enjoy the Advisory Opinions podcast and the daily “Morning Dispatch.”
Reasons not to invest in crypto:
- Invest is a euphemism. “Speculate” is more like it.
- For me, it’s worse because I don’t even understand why I’d want to speculate.
- To know that it’s B.S. when I get these daily (or so) emails.
Seven Days on the Roads of France, June 1940
Finished Seven Days on the Roads of France, June 1940 by Vladimir Lossky. 📚 Selected highlights:
Preface to the original French edition of 1998, by Nicholas Lossky
- To begin with, it must be made clear that for this Russian Orthodox theologian - who remained very authentically Russian in many respects - France was not, as it was for many émigrés, simply a land of asylum. To be sure, it was that; but above all, in this case it was a land chosen quite deliberately. Indeed his great love for the country began in childhood. It came first of all from his governess ….
- On the notion of dogma from an Orthodox perspective, [Olivier] Clément writes as follows: “For Orthodoxy, Lossky insists, a dogma is not an attempt to explain a mystery or even an attempt to make it more comprehensible. Rather, it seeks to encircle the ineffable and to compel the mind to surpass itself by a clear minded sense of wonder and adoration. […] Thus a dogma is not a solution to a problem but the protection of a mystery, in the Christian sense of Revelation of the unfathomable, the inexhaustible, the personal. In defining a dogma, the sole aim of the church is to preserve the possibility for each Christian of participating in revelation with his whole being; that is, of communicating with the very life of the One who reveals Himself.“
Day 1: Thursday 13th June 1940
- Those who resigned themselves to staying in their homes, their streets, their quartier, their city - now become a prey to enemy invasion - were right. Equally right were those whose conscience dictated that they should set out on the great adventure of the open road.
- “We shall conquer,“ we were told, “because we are the strongest, because we are the richest. We shall conquer because we have the will to do so.“ As if bons d’armement in themselves could bring about victory. As if war were nothing other than a vast industrial undertaking, a mere matter of capital. Such a war - a war of equipment and weaponry, inhuman, materialistic - yes, we have no doubt lost such a war. We must have the courage to say so. What is more, France could never have won such a war. Otherwise, she would no longer have been France, preeminently humane. If she had won such a war - one without a human face, a war of equipment (the kind of war being presented to us) - she would have lost the most precious thing she possesses, the essential characteristic of her very being. She would have lost that which makes her France, that which differentiates her from every other country on earth. (emphasis added)
- There was another heresy, too -spiritual, this time - one which sought to superimpose itself on the materialism of the ‘war of equipment’ argument, to infuse into it an artificial soul. This was the ideology of a ‘holy war’, ‘crusade’. It came in several varieties: the struggle for democracy, for freedom, for human dignity, for western culture, for Christian civilization, even for divine justice itself. I say ‘heresy’ because such ideas, often just in themselves, were not based on lived experience. They did not well up from a deep, wholesome spring, which alone could have transformed them into ideas having a motivating force. Moreover, such words rang false, like all abstractions. They rang false above all since they sought to present as absolutes, concepts and values that are secondary, relative … No, war is not waged for absolute values. This has been the mistake of all so-called ‘religious’ wars, and the main cause of the atrocities associated with them. Nor is it waged for relative value that one endeavors to turn into absolutes, nor yet for abstract concepts which have been lent a religious character. Even if one were to set against the idol of a ‘pure race’ the more benign idol of Law, Liberty and Humanity, they are still idols - concepts that have been personified and made into absolutes. This would still result in a war of idols. The only just war - in so far as a war may ever be styled just - is a war for relative values, for values known to be relative. A war in which man – a being destined for an absolute end – sacrifices himself spontaneously and without hesitation for a relative value that he knows to be relative: his native soil, his land, his country. It is the very sacrifice that acquires a value that is absolute, incorruptible, eternal. (emphasis added)
Day 3: Saturday June 15th
Suddenly I was struck by the sound of a hoarse, muffled voice. I was not alone, after all. A tall old man with a stoop, wearing an old-fashioned fin-de-siècle frock coat, was waving his arms about, threatening and cursing someone. He had a fine face, the look of a well bred provincial gentleman, a devout and God-fearing type. I drew nearer to see who he was so angry with. He was going round the cathedral, stopping before each statue of a saint. It was to them that he was addressing his curses, his cries, his threats. “Alors, quoi?” Damn it all, then! Don’t you want to help us? Can’t you help us?“
I left the cathedral, quite overcome. You really need to have a faith that was deep and sincere, a genuine inner freedom before God and his Saints, to be able to talk to them like that. No, he wasn’t a madman. Rather, a noble Christian soul, seized with despair and bitterness, pouring out his pain to the Saints, who remained motionless and silent, guides of the divine ways that are so painful for us to follow.
Day 4: Sunday 16th June
[R]evolutionaries are always in the wrong since, in their juvenile fervour for everything new, in their hopes for a better future and a way of life built on justice, they always base themselves on theories that are abstract and artificial, making a clean sweep of living tradition which is, after all, founded on the experience of centuries.
Conservatives are always wrong, too, despite being rich in life experience, despite being shrewd and prudent, intelligent and sceptical. For, in their desire to preserve ancient institutions that have with stood the test of time, they decry the necessity of renewal, and man’s yearning for a better way of life.
…
The Royal Court, grouped round the Imperial Chapel and, seized with theological fervour, sought to ensure the triumph of a novel teaching concerning the procession of the Holy Spirit. Pressure from the Frankish empire caused this strange teaching to triumph in the West. After resisting for a while, the Popes were in the end obliged to alter the traditional, sacred text of the Creed. From then on, schism from the Eastern Patriarchates became inevitable. (Byzantium, on the other hand, never experienced such an extreme case of Caesaropapism.)
Day 5: Monday 17th June
- Faced with Latin Christianity and its tendency to abstractions, to homogenization and sterilization; faced with a pagan and only too concrete pan-Germanism founded upon a mystique of “blood and soil“ that seeks to refashion the world according to its creed, France could then become a focus of regeneration for Western Christianity in a Europe that is becoming de-Christianized.
I had forgotten, if ever I knew, that this world includes things called “MG Magnette ZB Varitone.” I am smitten.
It takes a special kind of gall for Dominos to make me pass a Captcha to unsubscribe from daily+ emails touting their specials.
I thought about not writing about today’s anniversary … because it seems … banal.
… I think the banalization … must be a part of healing … If we stayed in that moment … we would never have been able to get on with life.
Well this is new. We’re watching a documentary on John James Audubon, and when the live birds on screen sang, our cat perked up, watched the TV, and even strained forward a bit toward them.
The perfect fictitious charity benefit, for “Rich People Who Wish To Help Poor People Without Having To Be In Physical Contact With Them,” joins up with the perfect limerick for a well-nigh perfect blog post from Garrison Keillor.
It is a signal characteristic of “hermeneutic philosophy” to say we can no longer believe in something rather than arguing that it is false.
R.R. Reno, Return of the Strong Gods
A close and long-time friend was deathly and painfully ill. Finally they figured out Lyme disease. This morning arrives an embellishment of the diagnosis: her opthalmologist says “I haven’t seen a case of Lyme Meningitis since med school.”
Next visit will be extra sweet.
Reading Seven Days on the Roads of France, June 1940 by Vladimir Lossky. 📚 Having fled to Paris from the Bolsheviks in 1922, Lossky now must flee Paris from the Nazis.
One of my Mac’s endearing eccentricities is randomly switching into French, particularly on e-commerce sites. The patterns of information sought are so standard that, unless I see an errant “/fr/” in the URL, I just ignore it and do the Order. It’s nice to see “Merci, Roger!”
Taking a break between nonfiction books to savor various poets. 📚 For some reason, I cannot get into Cavafy (a gift from my poet God-daughter). Halfway through, I abandoned it (shhhhh!)
Between the Woods and the Water 📚
I had meant to live like a tramp or a pilgrim or a wandering scholar, sleeping in ditches and ricks and only consorting with birds of the same feather. But recently I had been strolling from castle to castle, sipping Tokay out of cut-glass goblets and smoking pipes a yard long with archdukes instead of halving gaspers with tramps. These deviations could hardly be condemned as climbing: this suggests the dignity of toil, and these unplanned changes of level had come about with the effortlessness of ballooning.
Patrick Leigh Fermor, Between the Woods and the Water, which recounts one leg of his walk across Europe — this time, central Europe — in the 1930s, before storm clouds of war were notably mounting.
The passages describing his sojourns among the patricians of Middle Europe are among the happiest in the book, but among the saddest too: for we know, as the author knows, but as the young traveller never did, that all that happy, reckless and cultivated society, which answered his knocks at the door with such instant generosity, was doomed. Within Paddy’s own lifetime, it would be eliminated.
(Introduction to the book)
They know the words “insurrection” and “coup”
It’s OK that our babies may not have learned all their times tables. They learned resilience. They learned survival. They learned critical-thinking skills. They know the difference between a riot and a protest. They know the words insurrection and coup.”
I was a young fan of Bill Buckley’s polysyllabic erudition, and cheered when Buckley threatened to “sock [Gore Vidal] in the goddam mouth.” But things, and people, change. Vidal’s later conspiracy theorizing is looking surprisingly prescient.