One of the most arcane rituals surrounding the death of Queen Elizabeth II, in September 2022, and one of the most affecting in its homeliness — affecting enough that I’m still thinking about it, almost four years later — was the royal beekeeper’s visit to the royal bees, to tell them of their mistress’s passing …
Unfortunately, reason on its own will lead you astray very, very quickly …
People detect from what I wrote in The Master and His Emissary that I am not a huge admirer of the [left-hemisphere inspired] Reformation … Unfortunately, it brought with it a kind of headstrong view that ‘now we’re in the clear. Everything must be made explicit. The word triumphs over the image’ and so on. …
The trouble with the left hemisphere is … it tends to be headstrong. It tends to think it knows far more than it does.
I hadn’t thought of Protestantism that way before.
It’s “Bright Week,” a no-fasting week after Orthodox Easter. But I only wanted a little breakfast, and don’t want to pork up (as has been known to happen). So it’s back to PB&J on a Wasa cracker, just like Lent. It almost felt like I was cheating.
Long day ahead. Liturgy in an hour (with Let All Moral Flesh Keep Silence). Then 5 baptisms and 3 Chrismations (we’re concentrating more of them on Great & Holy Saturday instead of “whenever catechesis is complete.”) Then Vigil overnight.
My voice has held up so far.
We sing that Christ is “…trampling down death by death” in the troparion of Easter. This phrase gives great meaning to Holy Saturday. Christ’s repose in the tomb is an “active” repose. He comes in search of His fallen friend, Adam, who represents all men. Not finding him on earth, he descends to the realm of death, known as Hades in the Old Testament. There He finds him and brings him life once again. This is the victory: the dead are given life. The tomb is no longer a forsaken, lifeless place. By His death Christ tramples down death by death.
Great and Holy Saturday (OCA)
I believe that Christians make a serious mistake when we begin to speak first about God rather than first about Christ and His death on the Cross and resurrection from the dead. It is a mistake because it presumes we know something about God that is somehow “prior” to those events. We do not, or, if we think we do, we are mistaken. The death and resurrection of Christ are the alpha and the omega of God’s self-revelation to the world. Nothing in all of creation is extraneous or irrelevant to those events.
The 15th Antiphon from the Matins for Great and Holy Friday, in the version I sing.
I had no idea that my friend Bethany had a YouTube channel, or that she recorded this, more beautifully than I could. I think our Cantor duties are safe when I “buy the farm” or otherwise can’t carry on singing.
Datapoint: In 2025, birthrates for women in their late 30s exceeded those for women in their early 20s for the first time.
Finished George Eliot, Middlemarch. 📚Looking forward to a Plough article on “The Moral Beauty of Middlemarch.”
A small consolation: Be it noted that the NCAA Men’s Tournament Champion was defeated by Purdue in the Big 10 Tournament Championship.
A pressing question is whether there is some reform achievable with bipartisan support that could help protect against the “new normal” of a department that answers reliably to a president’s personal and political demands. There may be—if one accepts that, even if it can accomplish only so much, modest reform is better than none at all.
Bob Bauer, DOJ’s Bleak Future and Modest Paths for Reform.
Our President greeted Easter at 8:03 am, on his bespoke X alternative, with an obscene tirade against Iran. (See here, for instance), closing with “Praise be to Allah.”
What will it take for him to lose his putatively Christian supporters?
Anil Dash, Endgame for the Open Web.
It had not occurred to me that asking AI a simple question, without demanding its sources, not only exposed me to untraceable hallucinations but made me complicit in theft of intellectual property.
Did everyone but me know this?
Am I the only one for whom voice recognition on iPhone is suddenly garbage – so bad that it would be unintelligible to the recipient (my older brother, via Signal).
Damon Linker, Trump as the Great Destroyer (shared link).
Linker’s piece is openly and most deeply indebted to another:
John B. Judis, Trump as Alexander the Great: A Theory That Explains Iran (And Everything Else)
Still digesting. I think it’s time to update the old curse, variously attributed: May you live in interesting times. The new version is *We’re living in epochal times. There’s no return to the old normal.” And that’s really hard to stomach.
Dash Crofts has died. Few here may remember him, but Seals & Crofts made distinctive, gentle music in the late 60s, early 70s. They weren’t my first exposure to Bahai, but they were appealing enough for me to say back then “if I weren’t a Christian, I think I’d be Bahai.”
Just finished listening to this week’s The Dispatch Podcast, titled A Strategic Stalemate in Iran. I definitely came away feeling better-informed (they fleshed out my skeletal knowledge) about what’s going on, though what’s going on isn’t very encouraging.
Baffling: How did 2 bulletins for an All Saints Day Service November 2, 2022, at Christ the Redeemer Anglican Church in Danvers, MA just surface in the basket by my easy chair? One of them is marked up, even.
That’s a rhetorical question, but hilarious theories are welcome.
There is value in reticence. When you are in a group discussion, you can listen without “disappearing.” In an online conversation, you disappear if you aren’t always contributing.
(Nicholas Carr on Mars Hill Audio Journal Volume 167, on how social media affects our brains and our relationships).
I have never before seen anything like that dark blue band running from west-southwest to East-northeast as two fronts collide
Spring cleaning a little early. Dropped 20%+ of my Substack subscriptions. Most were “Meh.” One has become offensive.
Oh, my! More Boomer Music! Judy Collins will be swinging through My Fair City November 1 on her farewell tour!
A week ago, I would not even have picked Purdue to get to the Big 10 final. After a really crappy regular season end, they just handed Michigan its second loss of the year, winning the Big 10 Championship - decisively. I smelled a win at halftime, but not by this margin.
Our federal judges are longsuffering, but this one has run out of mercy: “If the Defendants Continue the Practice, It Will Not End Well for Them”.