Zaccheus Sunday 2026

Explanation of the title.

History

Theology the authorities can work with

Predictably, secular authorities convinced by the reformers’ truth claims liked the distinction drawn between the necessity of obedience to them and of disobedience to Rome. They liked hearing “the Gospel” accompanied by such “good news”—it would allow them, for starters, to appropriate for themselves all ecclesiastical property, including the many buildings and lands that belonged to religious orders, and to use it or the money from its sale in whatever ways they saw fit. In two stages during the late 1530s, seizing for himself the vast holdings of all the hundreds of English monasteries and friaries, Henry VIII would demonstrate how thoroughly a ruler could learn this lesson without even having to accept Lutheran or Reformed Protestant doctrines about grace, faith, salvation, or worship.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

The long shadow of Puritanism

Long after Puritans had become Yankees, and Yankee Trinitarians had become New England Unitarians (whom Whitehead defined as believers in one God at most) the long shadow of Puritan belief still lingered over the folkways of an American region.

David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed

Human Rights

Most menacing of all was the United Nations. Established in the aftermath of the Second World War, its delegates had proclaimed a Universal Declaration of Human Rights. To be a Muslim, though, was to know that humans did not have rights. There was no natural law in Islam. There were only laws authored by God.

Tom Holland, Dominion.

That’s pretty terrifying if Holland is correct and if a lot of Muslims are still faithful to that command ethic.

Salvation (“Soteriology”)

Hacking Eternity

I’m glad the authors or editors at Dispatch Faith came up with that “Hacking Eternity” title for a little bit of musing on Scott Adams’ (creator of Dilbert) self-reported deathbed conversion. It’s perfect:

For whatever reason, Adams delayed his conversion … In that January 4 X post, only nine days before his death, Adams said, “So I still have time, but my understanding is you’re never too late.” His final message, read by his first wife after his death, confirmed his plans: “I accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior … I have to admit, the risk-reward calculation for doing so looks so attractive to me. So here I go.”

I cannot categorically rule out the sincerity of Scott Adams’ “conversion,” but with all the Pascal’s wager trappings, and delaying claiming Christ as Lord until the very last minute (when the formulaic Lordship carried no practical meaning, no period of following Christ’s example or commandments) I can’t not put conversion in precatory quotes, either.

I recall one classmate in my Evangelical boarding school who declared his intent to become a Christian some day, but not before he’d whooped it up as much as possible. Last I knew, he was whooping it up at age 50+ with pneumatic wife #2. His declaration was so consistent with the logic of evangelical soteriology (study of salvation) pervasive in that time and place that the only refutations I can recall were:

  1. That he might be murdered, or have a fatal car collision, or otherwise die too suddenly to effectuate his last minute “conversion.”
  2. That refusing salvation for too long risked “hardening of the heart” to where could not repent.

Better would be this, I think, though it would probably be dismissed as “works righteousness”:

Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting.

Galatians 6:7-8.

Yeah, that’s a proof-text, taken without context. But I’d still say it fits.

The current milieu

The denominations

A new era of martyrdom

The Episcopal Church of New Hampshire is ready for frickin’ war. The Episcopalians are amped up. Bishop Rob’s reflection from earlier this month: “We are now, I believe, entering a time, a new era of martyrdom.” Of his priests: “And I’ve asked them to get their affairs in order—to make sure they have their wills written, because it may be that now is no longer the time for statements, but for us with our bodies to stand between the powers of this world and the most vulnerable.” These guys are not kidding around anymore. They are ready to die. And there will be cookies after the sermon.

Nellie Bowles. Bishop Rob’s letter has to be seen to be disbelieved. It features an ecclesiology straight from the lowest-church fever swamps:

As soon as the Christian church became linked to the empire by Constantine in the year 325 or so, the church immediately became corrupt.

(Italics added)

Ummmm, that’s just not credible. I don’t even think that educated clergy of low-church persuasion would defend that if pressed. To hear it from a Bishop of a high church is shocking but evocative. After all, what authority does a corrupt church have to tell Bishop Rob,

a man of profound historical privilege, … one who has made statements that, [he has] to say, have been really good and eloquent,

that he can’t innovate like mad to drive out that millenia-long corruption?

I’m still trying to figure out if “Rob” is his last name or if it’s an aw-shucks affectation. (Googles the question) Of course: it’s affectation.

Ostensibly Protestant; functionally, what?

There is another obvious fact that few denominational Protestants in the SBC or PCA seem willing to admit: The growth in these ostensibly traditional denominations stems almost entirely from the work of the Non-Denom churches. As already mentioned, pan- or pseudo-denominational organizations now own the church planting space. All church plants, to a great extent, utilize the methods and mores of Non-Denom Church. Most no longer even have their host denomination in their names. Therefore, I wager that whatever growth exists in the SBC and PCA is almost entirely the result of the Non-Denom churches growing within the husk of the world of traditional Protestantism.

Casey Spinks, Does Traditional Protestantism Have a Future?

Christianity and nationalism

Christianity does not simply fade away with the rise of nationalism; the process is more one of the reconfiguration of Christian elements to fit within a nationalist framework. When the holy migrates from the church to the nation-state, the church does not disappear but generally takes a supporting role to the creation of national identities.

William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry

The nondenominations

Nondenominational Protestantism

Douthat: Right. But I’m going to ask you to generalize. … For people who aren’t familiar with that world, what is nondenominational Protestantism right now?

Burge: They’re evangelical. Not all of them, but the vast, vast majority are evangelical in their orientation and theology and practice and all the things that we would call evangelical.

One thing is, they’re anti-institutional. They’re anti-authority in a lot of ways. Where does your money go when you put it on the plate? Well, it goes right here. It stays right here in these four walls. So what we’re going to have is a very fragmented Protestant Christianity, where you’ve got a little fiefdom here of 15,000 people in this church, and 20,000 people in this church.

I think the problem is, it’s going to be harder to conceptualize, to measure, to really understand what these groups look like, because now you’ve got these little pockets. You’ve got Joel Osteen in Houston, Texas. He’s an evangelical, but he doesn’t interface with most other evangelicals. You got Paula White down in Florida, whom Trump loves, but she’s Pentecostal and believes in the gifts of the spirit. And other evangelicals, like Franklin Graham, would never talk to Paula White.

You’ve got all these little pockets, and they don’t add up to a cohesive “What is evangelicalism?” In 30 years, that question is going to be almost impossible to answer. Not that it’s easy now, but it’s going to be 10 times harder because of this amorphous nature of nondenominationalism.

Ross Douthat and Ryan Burge (shared link). Ryan Burge is the most interesting social scientist focused on religion that I know. The transcript of his podcast is worth reading in full; I both listened and then read, highlighting heavily.

For my money, “amorphous” and “fiefdom” are the keys to nondenominational evangelicalism, and the two are related. The substantive religious content of the nondenominational religious landscape is amorphous, despite the shared term “evangelical,” because they are individual fiefdoms. The pastors may well be untutored and unorthodox, and they certainly are unaccountable to any higher authority.

But be careful: Burge leaves the impression, inadvertently I think, that these nondenominational churches typically number in the thousands. I’d be surprised if the median number of members or attenders was as high as 200. Burge no doubt would know the numbers on that if asked directly.

Orthopathos

Because of the divorce from the historic Church, Evangelicalism has sought for a new way to satisfy the need for materiality. This is why such believers have welcomed pop music and rock-n-roll into their churches. It is why emotion is mistaken for spirituality. It is why sentiment is substituted for holiness. Sincere feeling is the authenticator. Instead of icons of Christ, whose piercing stare calls you to repentance, the Evangelical can go to a Christian bookstore and buy a soft-focus, long-haired picture of Jesus. He’s a “nice” Jesus, but it is hard to believe that He is God.

Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick, Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy

I bang on a lot about Evangelicalism, my former affiliation, and specifically about the difficulty of defining it so as to be able to say “no, that’s not evangelical.” Ken Myer, founder of Mars Hill Audio Journal, once offered the possibility that while evangelicals don’t really share a coherent common doctrine, an orthodoxy, that they do share a common feeling or sentiment, an “orthopathos.”

Christianity Today

Sometime within the past year, I subscribed to Christianity Today. It is a magazine whose founding described it as “A fortnightly journal of evangelical persuasion” or something very like that.

I thought very highly of it. Just as I was an Intervarsity Christian Fellowship guy instead of a Campus Crusade for Christ guy, so I was a CT guy instead of a Moody Monthly guy. I even wrote a very cringe item they published. (I’ll give you no further hints whereby to unearth it.)

By and large, CT today has been a big disappointment, and I do not intend to renew.

The main part of the disappointment has been less the content of their articles (which certainly need a critical filter for evangelical bias), but the banality (it seems to me) of the topics of their articles. We’re just not remotely on the same wavelength any more. This “dumbing down” began nearly 50 years ago, and even then I took that as a sign that the evangelical appetite for chewing on meaty topics was waning.

But Thursday past, they finally floated on their RSS feed a story the topic and timeliness of which got my attention: How to Know If You’re Growing in Patience—or Just Giving Up.

Yes, it should be “whether” instead of “if,” but I’ll not dwell on that. It just seems to me as we, to whatever degree, watch the ICE terrorism and murders in Minneapolis, powerless to do anything, the spiritual line between patience (with prayer and trust in God’s providence) and giving up is an important one.

Jaw-dropping nadir

Majorities of white evangelicals favor deporting undocumented immigrants to foreign prisons in El Salvador, Rwanda, or Libya without allowing them to challenge their deportation in court (57 percent), and approve of placing immigrants who have entered the country illegally in internment camps (53 percent).

“It has become virtually impossible to write a survey question about immigration policy that is too harsh for white evangelicals to support,” Robert P. Jones, the president of the Public Religion Research Institute, recently wrote.

Tobias Cremer is a member of the European Parliament. His book The Godless Crusade argues that the rise of right-wing populism in the West and its references to religion are driven less by a resurgence of religious fervor than by the emergence of a new secular identity politics. Right-wing populists don’t view Christianity as a faith; rather, Cremer suggests, they use Christianity as a cultural identity marker of the “pure people” against external “others,” while in many cases remaining disconnected from Christian values, beliefs, and institutions.

…

The Trump administration has gone one step further, inverting authentic Christian faith by selling in a dozen different ways cruelty and the will to power in the name of Jesus. It has welcomed Christians into a theological twilight zone, where the beatitudes are invoked on behalf of a political movement with authoritarian tendencies. This isn’t the first time in history such things have happened.

…

Huge numbers of American fundamentalists and evangelicals—not just cultural Christians, but also those who faithfully attend church and Bible-study sessions and prayer gatherings—prefer the MAGA Jesus to the real Jesus. Few of them would say so explicitly, though, because the cognitive dissonance would be too unsettling. And so they have worked hard to construct rationalizations. It’s rather remarkable, really, to see tens of millions of Christians validate, to themselves and to one another, a political movement led by a malignant narcissist—who is driven by hate and bent on revenge, who mocks the dead, and who delights in inflicting pain on the powerless. The wreckage to the Christian faith is incalculable, yet most evangelicals will never break with him. They have invested too much of themselves and their identity in Trump and what he stands for.

Peter Wehner

Sacraments or notions?

Christianity that has purged the Church of the sacraments, and of the sacramental, has only ideas to substitute in their place. The result is the eradication of God from the world in all ways other than the theoretical.

Fr. Stephen Freeman, Everywhere Present

Orthodoxy

Rescue

He is Jesus, the name chosen before his birth. The angel spoke separately to Mary and Joseph, and told them that the baby’s name would be Jesus, “because he will save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21). The name Jesus means, in Hebrew, “God will save.” When Gabriel says “he will save his people” the Greek verb sozo means “save” as in rescue, like “saved you from drowning.” That kind of “saved,” not “intervened and paid your debt.”

I had been a Christian decades before it occurred to me that this means Jesus can rescue us from our sins, not merely from the penalty for our sins. He can free us from the sins themselves. We will still fail over and over to take his outstretched hand and be lifted from the mire. We like mire. But he can do it, and make us not merely debt-free in his Father’s sight, but transformed and filled with his light.

Frederica Matthewes-Green

Repentance

Repentance is everything you do to get sin, those inborn passions, out of you. It’s reading, thinking, praying, weeding out disruptive influences in your life, sharing time with fellow Christians, following the guidance of the saints. Repentance is the renunciation of what harms us and the acquisition of what is beneficial to us, writes a holy counselor.

Dee Pennock, God’s Path to Sanity

A glimpse into an Orthodox mind

The Protoevangelium of James is not a text that itself holds a position of authority in the life of the Church. Indeed, the West formally rejected it well before the Great Schism. Nevertheless, the Church preserved the text through centuries of copying and recopying. It stands as the earliest written witness to the antiquity of a number of important traditions related to the New Testament Scriptures regarding the lives of the Theotokos, St. James, and their family. The Protoevangelium of James did not originate these traditions, nor does it provide their authority. Their authoritative form exists in the liturgical life of the Church, in hymnography and iconography.

Fr. Stephen DeYoung, Apocrypha (bold added).

All the well-educated Orthodox teachers agree on this. If you hear an Orthodox layman answer “How do you know that?” with “We get it from the Protoevangelium of James,” know that s/he’s got that backwards.

Darkness and Light

As Stephen Wormtongue Miller pronounces from the White House that the way the world works is by force, I’m very glad to be in a church where every Sunday we sing the Beatitudes, which tell us the way blessedness works.

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Thursday, 1/22/26

Political Theory

The next two items, though illustrated by our present political circumstances, are intended to make points that will continue to be important in new circumstances.

Integrity matters

The health of the American experiment rests far more on the integrity of any given American president than we realized.

We trusted that presidents would impose accountability on the executive branch. We trusted that presidents wouldn’t abuse their pardon power — or, if they did, then Congress could impeach and convict any offenders. And so we manufactured doctrine after doctrine, year after year, that insulated the executive branch from legal accountability.

It’s hard to overstate how much this web of immunities — combined with the failure of Congress to step up and fulfill its powerful constitutional role — has made the United States vulnerable to authoritarian abuse.

In Federalist No. 51, James Madison wrote some of the most famous words of the American founding. “If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” Madison wrote. “If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

David French (shared link)

The Prerogative State

The David French column continues. I broke it in two because I thought it was important, once again, to warn against ever again electing high officials of such low character.

But there’s a specific ramification I hadn’t identified:

[Y]ou can see the emerging dual state in action in Minneapolis right now. In much of the city, life is routine. People create new businesses, enter into contracts, file litigation and make deals as if life were completely normal and the rule of law exists, untainted by our deep political divide.

But if you interact with ICE, suddenly you risk coming up against the full force of the prerogative state. One of the most heartbreaking aspects of the ICE agent’s video of the fatal encounter between Renee Good and ICE is that it’s plain that Good thinks she’s still in the normative state. She has no idea of the peril she’s in.

She seems relaxed. She even seems to have told the agent that she’s not mad at him. In the normative state, your life almost never depends on immediate and unconditional compliance with police commands.

But she wasn’t in the normative state. She had crossed over the border to the prerogative state, and in that state you can be shot dead recklessly, irresponsibly and perhaps even illegally, and no one will pay the price. You might even be rewarded with more than $1 million in donations from friends and allies.

David French (shared link)

Competing, revealing, metaphors

In February … I spoke at a gathering of conservatives in London called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship …

As the conference went on, I noticed a contest of metaphors. The true conservatives used metaphors of growth or spiritual recovery. Society is an organism that needs healing, or it is a social fabric that needs to be rewoven. A poet named Joshua Luke Smith said we needed to be the seeds of regrowth, to plant the trees for future generations. His incantation was beatitudinal: “Remember the poor. Remember the poor.”

But others relied on military metaphors. We are in the midst of civilizational war. “They”—the wokesters, the radical Muslims, the left—are destroying our culture. There were allusions to the final epochal battles in The Lord of the Rings. The implication was that Sauron is leading his Orc hordes to destroy us. We are the heroic remnant. We must crush or be crushed.

The warriors tend to think people like me are soft and naive. I tend to think they are catastrophizing narcissists. When I look at Trump acolytes, I see a swarm of Neville Chamberlains who think they’re Winston Churchill.

David Brooks, I Should Have Seen This Coming, April, 2025.

Occasionally, I achieve a complete mind-meld with Brooks. This was one of those times, at least for the first third of his article; after that, he notes some things that I hadn’t noticed until he pointed them out.

Sanctuary City primer

So-called “sanctuary cities” and “sanctuary states” choose not to assist the federal government in finding or deporting illegal aliens, and they have a constitutional right to make that choice.

What does noncooperation look like on the ground? A flash point involves immigration detainer orders, which call on state and local law enforcement agents to transfer into ICE custody illegal aliens who are about to be released from state custody.

…

The administration says that Minnesota is refusing to honor ICE detainers and has released hundreds of illegal aliens “onto the streets” instead of turning them over to ICE. Minnesota denies this accusation and insists that it’s honoring all immigration detainers.

Whichever side is correct, federal courts have held that ICE detainers issued to state agencies are “requests,” not “orders.” …

…

The federal government does have a mechanism for getting states and cities to voluntarily do what they can’t be forced to do. It’s called money. Congress could deny states or cities certain funds unless they abolish their sanctuary policies. There are limits to this strategy: Washington can’t shut off unrelated funds that states or cities need to keep functioning. But immigrant-related federal funding—for example, money devoted to sheltering new, legal immigrants—could presumably be denied to states and cities that maintain sanctuary policies.

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump declared that after February 1, “We are not making any payments to sanctuary cities or states having sanctuary cities.” But while Congress could condition state and local funding on cooperation with ICE, the president’s powers are more limited. Trump has tried this strategy before. Both in his first term and second, he issued executive orders calling for sanctuary states and cities to be denied federal monies. Except in narrow circumstances, courts have not been receptive, holding that without congressional approval, the president could not unilaterally deny states money that Congress had already appropriated for them.

Jed Rubenfeld

The name “Sanctuary City” has always struck me as a bit preening, but the principle that that cities and states are not (normally, though if there are exceptions, I can’t think of one) obliged to assist in enforcement of federal law or in advancement of federal priorities. A non-immigration example is marijuana legalization by the states, whereas marijuana remains illegal in national law. If and when the DEA comes to bust up a dispensary, local officials presumably won’t help, but the principle doesn’t allow them to interfere, either.

Of being a conservative radio talk-show host back in the day

So for years, when someone sent me something that was a conspiracy theory, or false, or just misleading or unfair, I would be able to push back and say “this is not true; there are not bodies stacked up in the Clinton warehouses; no this is not happening over here,” and people would say “thank you, Charlie for setting me straight” …

[I]n 2015 and 2016, what I found, very gradually but very forcefully, was that it became harder and harder to push back; it became harder and harder to give them any information that would change their mind.

And that’s when I realized that we had been too successful, that we had destroyed all the immune system to false information, to this kind of propaganda. And this was kind of an “Oh, shit!” moment for me.

Charlie Sykes, interviewed by Andrew Sullivan.

Morality, Law and Religion

The public should be absolutely concerned about whether a nominee for judicial office will be willing and able to set aside personal preferences. That’s not a challenge just for religious people. That’s a challenge for everyone.

Amy Coney Barrett (italics added)

Pet peeve: The idea that “separation of church and state” requires religious public officials and employees to set aside their religious beliefs when conducting public business. The tacit message in that is either that (1) morality and law are completely separate or (2) that religion is inherently irrational whereas other moral beliefs are not. In truth, there is no neutral, preference‑free judicial standpoint, and the available standpoints all are larded with moral intuitions that either can be accused of irrationality.

Yes, I have advocated in public meetings where I wished that others on “my side” would shut up if all they had to contribute was dubiously-applicable Bible proof-texts. But those kinds of folks never get nominated for any federal bench, and they’d be eaten alive if they were.

Consequences

The yield spread between three-month Treasury bills and 10-year bonds has widened by some 0.6 percentage points since early November. “The Fed may want lower interest rates, but the market ain’t buying it,” said Willian Adler, an Elliott Wave technical analyst.

He warns that the conditions are in place for a serious sell-off across risk assets. It could be similar to the bond rout that spooked Trump after the “liberation day” tariffs.

This rising spread may simply reflect fears of resurgent inflation as front-loaded stimulus from the “one big beautiful bill” juices the economy over the coming months, with the risk of full-blown overheating if Trump hands out $2,000 a head as a pre-electoral bribe.

But it may also be the first sign that America is starting to pay a price for the collapse of political credibility.

(Telegraph UK via John Ellis)

Unpopular opinions

I keep a private list of my truly unpopular opinions – opinions so far outside the Overton Window that I could lose friends if I voiced them.

I review and supplement the list occasionally, but never before have I decided that something doesn’t belong on the list any more (or maybe never belonged on it in the first place). This one probably never belonged on the list:

1. Subsidies for pro sports, including stadium construction, are damnable boondoggles. I would vote against every one of them until the franchise-owning billionaires ran me out of office.

While I’m at it, these too can come off the list:

2. Abolitions I supported that may well have hurt America:

  • The military draft Politicians who have anything to do with war policy should have skin in the game, even if it’s the skin of their descendants.
  • The Fairness Doctrine. We opened Pandora’s box before cable TV and the internet obliterated it. I don’t see a way back to sanity through reinstating the policy.

While I’m on a roll, here’s one that’s never been on the list:

3. The states should stop running primary elections. Neither major party is worth the powder to blow it up. Let them run their own elections or go back to “smoke-filled rooms” (which incidentally yielded better candidates than crackpot “base voters” have been yielding).

Logic mincing

Q: Which is better: a ham sandwich or complete happiness in life?
A: A ham sandwich, of course! Nothing is better than complete happiness in life and a ham sandwich is better than nothing.

  1. Something must be done!
  2. This is something.
  3. This must be done!

Shorts

  • No one is really working for peace unless he is working primarily for the restoration of wisdom. The assertion that “foul is useful and fair is not“ is the antithesis of wisdom. (E.F. Shumacher) Small Is Beautiful is a classic for good reason.
  • The national emergency is avoiding a national emergency. (Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, citing the president’s authority to impose tariffs in an economic emergency, arguing that America’s supposed need to control Greenland is a national emergency.)
  • The health of the American experiment rests far more on the integrity of any given American president than we realized. (David French)
  • The pervasiveness of legal sports gambling can make an undefeated season and a 6-point victory in the national championship game feel like a loss if “the margin” was 7.5. (Moi)
  • At some point, we’ll reach the bottom of this dystopian populist abomination, but no one thinks we’re there yet, do they? (Nick Catoggio)
  • “The Trump Denmark letter is his Biden debate moment,” one Twitter user claimed.
  • Donald Trump is a peacock among the dull buzzards of American politics. (Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium).
  • A clown with a flame thrower still has a flamethrower. (Charlie Sykes to Andrew Sullivan)
  • When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow. (Ursula K. Le Guin)
  • TikTok is still a danger. America no longer cares.
  • The souvenir is a fetish object that substitutes for the finite experience of the destination. (William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

A devil is no less a devil if the lie he tells flatters you and stands to help you defeat your enemies and achieve power.

Rod Dreher

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.

Sunday, 1/18/26

Ecclesiology 101

  • When Cardinal Newman was asked at a dinner party why he became a Catholic, he responded that it was not the kind of thing that can be properly explained between soup and the fish course.
  • An ecclesial Christian is one who understands with mind and heart, and even feels with his fingertips, that Christ and his Church, head and body, are inseparable. For the ecclesial Christian, the act of faith in Christ and the act of faith in the Church are not two acts of faith but one.
  • Across the street from the parsonage of St. John’s [Missouri Synod Lutheran Church] was an evangelical Protestant church. Also across the street lived my best friends, the Spooner brothers, who with their devoutly Catholic family attended St. Columkil’s Cathedral. I am sure it was unarticulated but self-evident to me by the time I was five years old that St. John’s and the cathedral had more in common than either had with the evangelical chapel. For one immeasurably momentous thing, our churches baptized babies. Then too, our being saved was something that God did through His Church; it was a given, a gift. It did not depend—as it did for Dougy Cahill, our evangelical friend—upon feelings or spiritual experience. It depended upon grace bestowed through things done.

Richard John Neuhaus

Trendiness

One thing I’ve never quite understood about our Evangelical friends is why they are so susceptible to trendiness. A reader of this blog with whom I corresponded earlier this year told me that she and her family recently left their Evangelical megachurch to join an Orthodox congregation. A big part of it was that the church fell all over itself trying to accommodate the Next Big Thing in worship trends, and theological trends, to keep growing the church, and to keep people interested so they wouldn’t leave. Discipleship was neglected, and theologically, it became decadent. Though my correspondent is non-white, she became frustrated at how this multicultural megachurch’s leaders began putting race consciousness at the center of that congregation’s life. But then, that’s the contemporary trend.

Rod Dreher

Mile wide, inch deep

What the Fathers decried as schism is now regarded as normal church growth. So long as the new church does not make a point of denying the Trinity, it remains a part of the una sancta.

Fr. Lawrence Farley

Counter-hegemonic thinking

The dominant system today is built on analysis. And it’s worth remembering that the root meaning of analysis is the reduction of things into parts.

Holistic thinking, in contrast, is always inherently Romantic. You can also call this visionary thinking.

Ted Gioia’s Substack is consistently good. Sometimes it’s great, as in 25 Propositions about the New Romanticism, which he made a public post.

This is one of the best things I’ve read in a long while – an unironic analysis of our tendency to analyze everything to death (“we murder to dissect”).

Iain McGilchrist would approve.

(And no, I don’t think this is out of place in a Sunday post. Getting caught up in rationalistic analysis of everything is spiritually stultifying.)

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Friday, 1/16/26

I apologize for all the politics in this post. I’m torn between (a) ignoring it all for the sake of my soul and (b) not being a good German as our Nazis threaten.

“Nazi” is a figure of speech, but it feels as if Trump is pushing things to Hitlerian lengths, and I’m having trouble ignoring that. History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes.

But first, one item that’s not political

Taking no risks, exercising no imagination

You can tell how stagnant things have become from the lookalike covers. I walk into a bookstore and every title I see is like this.

They must have fired the design team and replaced it with a lazy bot. You get big fonts, random shapes, and garish colors—again and again and again. Every cover looks like it was made with a circus clown’s makeup kit.

My wife is in a book club. If I didn’t know better, I’d think they read the same book every month. It’s those same goofy colors and shapes on every one.

Of course, you can’t judge a book by its cover. But if you read enough new releases, you get the same sense of familiarity from the stories. The publishers keep returning to proven formulas—which they keep flogging long after they’ve stopped working.

And that was a long time ago.

Ted Gioia, The Day NY Publishing Lost Its Soul

How can so many publishers go wrong at once? Whaddya mean “so many”?

“They” wanted Charlie Kirk dead

“They wanted the guy who was controlling our minds to be dead,” she said. “He had so much power over our generation.” When I asked who “they” were, she breezily suggested I do my own research. “We know who’s running the game,” she went on, glancing at her phone. I couldn’t tell how serious she was being. “You know, it’s a bigger picture. 9/11. MLK. JFK. Charlie Kirk.”

Lesley Lachman, President of Turning Point USA at Ole Miss, via Simon van Zuylen-Wood, Who Will Replace Charlie Kirk? The Takeover of TPUSA..

The first weird thing about that utterance is the insouciant phrasing that Charlie Kirk was controlling her mind, with “so much power” (with him gone, she sometimes turns to Nick Fuentes for mind-control). It’s kinda pathetic that the TPUSA President at a major university needs fixes of ideology.

But the most ominous thing is accusing an unidentified “they” (a “they” that has been around since at least the early 60s) of the murder. This kind of talk started while Charlie Kirk’s body was still drifting down toward room temperature. It is perhaps why Rod Dreher calls Kirk’s death the Radical Right’s Reichstag Fire.

These kids are very much a reverse mirror-image of lefist loonie like Antifa. They’re looking for meaning in politics. They’re so open to conspiracy theories that their brains have fallen out. They’re fools, whose only excuse (youth) is tempting to disregard since they think they’re so slick.

None of which is to deny that they may do a lot of damage.

Charlie Kirk was a time traveler?

Charlie Kirk was a time traveler? Even I draw the line at certain conspiracy theories. That’s why Candace Owens is so helpful, because she reminds me I’m actually not crazy—she is! Her latest is that Charlie Kirk was a time traveler. “Why did Charlie Kirk think he was a time traveler? He said, as I showed you in earlier messages, that he was a time traveler and he had to find me. . . . And again, not anything that I would have placed so much emphasis on back when he was saying it, but it came to fruition. The other parts. . . . I’m totally occupied by this. I tell you, I read these messages and I’m going,, what is this, what is reality, actually?” She alleges that there were “agents” who had Charlie Kirk “monitored. . . since he was young.” What is reality even, Candy? Actually, don’t answer that.

Nellie Bowles

Not-so-shorts

  • “The woman and her friend were highly disrespectful of law enforcement … Law enforcement should not be in a position where they have to put up with this stuff,” – President Trump asked if deadly force was necessary in the ICE killing of Renee Good.
  • “Seeing Vance’s comments about Minneapolis, I lived a similar moment 19 years ago in a Russian courtroom hearing a judge state that the police officer’s testimony had to be trusted over our video evidence because ‘he was wearing the uniform.’ Total immunity beats reality in a police state,” – Garry Kasparov.
  • “Heritage Americans: ‘You’re less American than I am because my ancestors built this country.’ Also Heritage Americans: ‘Don’t blame me for slavery or segregation. I’m not responsible for what my ancestors did,’” – Avik Roy.
  • “For years, I kicked against the image of the ‘ugly American.’ Nothing burned me more, when I was in Europe, as a student and after. I have written on this often. And now — there is nothing to say. There is only … bewilderment, anger, and shame,” – Jay Nordlinger on Trump’s thuggery over Greenland.

Via Andrew Sullivan

Shorts

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

A devil is no less a devil if the lie he tells flatters you and stands to help you defeat your enemies and achieve power.

Rod Dreher

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.

Tuesday, 1/13/26

Jerome Powell and the Fed

I know, I know—as a conservative, I’m required to hate the unaccountable administrative state. But in this case, Jerome Powell’s unaccountability is the only thing making it safe-ish for him to call foul on the more sinister unaccountability of Trump’s gangster regime.

The institution that Powell leads has a special role in America’s international preeminence and therefore also arguably a special duty to resist when a Peronist president goes about trying to smash that preeminence on a rock. Divorcing monetary policy from national politics helped make the United States a safe haven for global investors, a place people could park their cash without needing to worry that some dummy in the White House would slash interest rates irresponsibly to goose hiring in an election year. In trying to undo that, Trump is now following in the footsteps of economic basket cases like Argentina, Turkey, Russia, Zimbabwe, and—ta da—Venezuela.

“One of the biggest hurdles for developing nations getting foreign investment is demonstrating they are stable, and their economies aren’t run on rampant, capricious corruption,” former Biden economic adviser Jesse Lee wrote last night after news of the criminal probe of Powell broke. “Trump weaponizing DOJ against the Fed Chair is the loudest possible signal we aren’t a place to invest.” Powell isn’t even the only Federal Reserve director facing trumped-up accusations (pun intended) from the administration, for cripes sake.

Nick Catoggio

On ICE

Video as proxy war

We’re fighting over a shooting video as a proxy for the fight over whether ICE is doing normal law enforcement work or something more fascistic and extreme.

At the moment, regardless of your interpretation of the video evidence, I don’t think there’s a way to establish the normalcy of intense interior enforcement without some concessions to ICE’S nonradical critics. Concessions like agents’ no longer going masked in so many public situations. Or operations being slowed and training extended to encourage professionalism and cut down on harassment. Or allowing a full investigation of any agent-involved shooting before the White House or its agencies denounce the shooting victim.

The administration would presumably characterize some of these concessions as surrender. Longer training would not make the protests stop, unmasked ICE agents could indeed face more danger, and the most reckless protesters might be emboldened by any hint of retreat.

But if you are trying to build a stable immigration enforcement policy, you need backing from the conflicted middle of the country, even if that comes at some cost to your ideal approach.

Ross Douthat

Put on a tie!

Allow me to address the ladies and gentlemen at ICE in what apparently is their mother tongue: Take off the masks and put on a f—–g tie.

…

[W]e dress them up like the world’s most slovenly stormtroopers. 

And then we are surprised when they act like the world’s most slovenly stormtroopers. 

…

[T]here are a dozen ways for a professional law enforcement agent to deal with a vehicle blocking a public street, and none of them involves screaming obscenities at the driver or giving her contradictory orders. That the ICE agents on the scene do not seem to have been able to agree among themselves what should be done about the lurking menace of … an unarmed woman in a Honda who was poking fun at them … suggests very strongly a lack of credible command on the scene. 

…

This isn’t one of those colorable disagreements—the story that Trump, Vance, Noem, et al. are trying to tell—that Good was a rioter and terrorist who was trying to run down ICE agents—is a lie. A dumb, easily disproved lie. 

But Donald Trump has built a movement on dumb, easily disproved lies. 

… It is worth keeping in mind that in the lead-up to the attempted coup d’état of January 2021, Trump’s people retailed even more ridiculous stories about Venezuelan hackers messing with U.S. election results. (Possibly in cahoots with the North Koreans or Bigfoot or Elvis.) Trump understands something about his base: They enjoy being lied to.

Kevin D. Williamson

Artist unrelated to blogger

Precisely the point, n’est çe pas?

In essence, the rap on Churchill is that he was a 19th-century man parachuted into the 20th.

But is that not precisely to the point? It took a 19th-century man—traditional in habit, rational in thought, conservative in temper—to save the 20th century from itself. The story of the 20th century is a story of revolution wrought by thoroughly modern men: Hitler, Stalin, Mao and above all Lenin, who invented totalitarianism out of Marx’s cryptic and inchoate communism (and thus earns his place as runner-up to Churchill for Person of the Century).

And it is the story of the modern intellectual, from Ezra Pound to Jean-Paul Sartre, seduced by these modern men of politics and, grotesquely, serving them ….

Charles Krauthammer, Things that Matter

Bruni Sentences

  • Also in The New Yorker, Benjamin Wallace-Wells considered a riot of reflections on the military operation in Venezuela: “Key administration personalities have taken to network television and social media, offering their own post-facto theories of the case. They have been like the sweepers in curling, trying to coax a runaway stone onto an advantageous track.” (Maxwell Burke, Seattle, and Barbara Douglas, Manhattan)
  • In The Washington Post, Chuck Culpepper saluted those who follow and love the Indiana University football team, which, after many decades of mediocrity, suddenly shot to glory: “They’re quite possibly the happiest fans anyone ever saw — steeped in amazement while still free of the poison of expectation.” (Joe Bellavance, Indianapolis)
  • And in The Wall Street Journal, after Indiana walloped Alabama in the Rose Bowl, Jason Gay admitted: “I’ve given up trying to understand this Indiana turnaround. We’ve crossed the river from Cinderella to Whathehella.” (Bruce Newman, Santa Clara, Calif.)

Items from Frank Bruni’s “For Love of Sentences” (shared link). The first part of his post is very perceptive as well,

Shorts

  • The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism. (Hannah Arendt via @jonah on micro.blog)
  • A devil is no less a devil if the lie he tells flatters you and stands to help you defeat your enemies and achieve power. (Rod Dreher, 2021)
  • The news industry is Society’s appendix – permanently inflamed and completely pointless. You’re better off simply having it removed. (Rolf Dobelli, Stop Reading the News)
  • Trump Is Not Playing Five-Dimensional Chess in Venezuela. After a strong first move, he’s eating all the pieces. (Garry Kasparov)
  • Richard Russell, the arch-segregationist senator …: The Civil Rights Act only passed, he groused, because “those damn preachers got the idea that it was a moral issue.” (Ross Douthat, Bad Religion)
  • For all the administration’s screeching about swarthy immigrants, it ain’t Somalis in Minnesota who are making the federal government run like that of a “sh-thole country.” It’s Trump who’s to blame for that. (Nick Catoggio)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld:

A devil is no less a devil if the lie he tells flatters you and stands to help you defeat your enemies and achieve power.

Rod Dreher

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.

Sunday, 1/11/26

Quitting First Things

I think I’m a charter subscriber to First Things. I was following Richard John Neuhaus’s publication from the Rockford Institute before he started First Things and was on board soon if not immediately. I’ve been a subscriber ever since.

But I’m quitting. Part of it is that the magazine has too much MAGA in its leadership these days. Time may prove Rusty Reno right and me wrong, but I’m not going to wait for it or subordinate my judgment to his..

I think another part is that I’ve moved on. I was Reformed when First Things started; I’ve been Orthodox now for 28+ years. When I was Reformed, the catholicity of First Things was a sort of tonic; now, it varies from “Yawn!” to too Latin Catholic. (The MAGA these days is less tonic, more burr-under-the-saddle.)

The renewal form went in the bin just before I typed this paragraph.

I suspect I’ll get more from Plough, which has been pretty ascendant these days. Maybe even more catholic, which if true of an Anabaptist-grounded publication, would be an interesting twist.

Enchantment in Religion

Taylor says that enchantment is essential to some forms of religion, but not to others, such as Christianity that has gone through Reform, in both its Protestant and Catholic varieties. Such kinds of religion have gone from being more embodied to being more in the mind; they have changed but not disappeared.

William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry

Bodiless Angels

It is not therefore a contradiction that Orthodox Tradition often calls the angels “bodiless,” but we should understand bodiless to be in comparison to human beings. In comparison to God, they are embodied. While we do not understand what angelic bodies are or how they work, nor can we see them as they truly are, angels nevertheless have form, limitation, and location, which are known to God.

Frs. Andrew Stephen Damick and Stephen DeYoung, The Lord of Spirits

Confession

When I became a Catholic in 1993, I was frightened about confession. After the first one, though, I loved it. I tend to be a man who perseverates on his sins. I wouldn’t say that I’m guilty of what Catholics call “scrupulosity” — a pathological obsession with one’s sins — but I do think a lot about my moral failures. After I had come to believe in Christ, but before I was a Catholic, I would ask God for forgiveness, but would torment myself with “How do you really know you were forgiven?”

It is possible that God forgave me the moment I asked, seeing the sincerity in my heart. But I couldn’t know that, and me being me, I worried about this all the time. What the rite of confession did, on a purely psychological level, was free me of that worry. When I would go to confession, as I did every two or three weeks, I could leave the confessional certain that I had been forgiven. That is so, so powerful — the deed, which has sacramental power, released me at a purely psychological level.

I carried this over with me into Orthodoxy, which I joined twenty years ago. It turns out that Orthodoxy today takes confession more seriously than contemporary Catholicism does ….

Rod Dreher.

We converts to liturgical Christianity, it seems, come at things from different directions. I wondered about whether I was forgiven because habitual sinning suggested that my episodic repentance was mostly an effort to avoid consequences, lacking meaningful resolve to stop. The resolve to stop finally came early in my pilgrimage to Orthodoxy, proximately caused by an epiphany upon re-reading C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce, not some canonical Orthodox source.

Apophasis Today

Five years ago today, I was baptised. It was an icy cold day, the ground covered in hoar frost, and I was due to walk in to the River Shannon to be reborn. The covid pandemic was raging, and officially we probably shouldn’t even have been outside, but one reason I chose to enter the Orthodox church is that they have their priorities right. Christ comes first: everything else then falls into place.

So I went under the water three times, and when I came out I was an Orthodox Christian, swimming in a stream of wisdom and truth that is two millennia old. I came out unable to speak, for reasons both spiritual and physical. A dip in the Shannon in January will generally do that to you.

I could say a lot about what has happened since then – I have said a lot on this Substack – but I could also say nothing and it would perhaps mean as much. Words have their uses and their limits. God is not heard in whirlwind or thunder, but as a still, small voice.

Paul Kingsnorth.

I love “I could … say nothing and it would perhaps mean as much.”

Occasionally, I envy pagan converts a teensy-weensy bit because of the vividness of their experience. The fact is, I remember nothing significant from before “I asked Jesus into my heart” as a very young child (maybe 5, but younger I think), after however few years of living with parents who had something more like Kingsnorth’s experience between the War and my birth.

Chinese Evangelicals becoming Orthodox

ThemeDescription
Intellectual SearchAcademic study leads to discovery of early church history and theological depth missing in evangelicalism.
Spiritual HabitsEmphasis on habitual prayer and spiritual discipline over emotional spontaneity.
Historical ContinuityDesire for connection to a faith rooted in the first millennium of Christianity.
Ecclesial FragmentationConcern about diversity and lack of unity in Protestantism leads some to seek Orthodoxy’s consistency.
Personal TransformationConversion results in deeper spiritual formation rather than rejection of previous faith.
Social ChallengesConverts face varying responses within their communities, including misunderstanding.

I can’t personally say that’s how it’s happening in China, but it’s similar to my own experience, converting from Evangelical-adjacency to Orthodoxy, and the source of the article the chart summarizes is Christianity Today, which isn’t exactly carrying water for Eastern Orthodoxy.

Real-time ICE

ICE don’t care about da law

Minneapolis resident today:
I watched a young man get snatched by ICE outside yoga this morning. I filmed the whole thing.
His name is Lucio Fabian Navos Nietos.
I know this because they just left his passport and all other identification in his car. And left his car.
They don’t care who he is. They will deport him anyway.
12:50 pm

Indiana resident (not me)
They just left it all??? Lord almighty. They’re not even pretending anymore. Thanks for filming it.
1:27 pm

Minneapolis resident
Yep. Allowed me and others to find out a lot about him in a short amount of time, get the info to immigration attorneys, etc.
He has a wife who’s 5 months pregnant.
At least she’ll know what happened to him. Why he went to work in the morning and never came home.
I’m so sad and angry.
1:34 pm

Me:
I wish that, just this once, POTUS would admit “I overpromised. We can’t deport a million per year in ways consistent with American law and ethos.”
1:59 pm

Another respondent:
@patrickrhone these fascists need to be sent to Nuremberg
2:19 pm

(Actual Social Medium exchange January 10)

Block that Metaphor!

I need to get “Even a broken clock is right twice a day” in the front of my mind. I reflexively go to “Even a blind pig finds an acorn now and again” even though it’s (a) kind of Appalachian and (b) stupid (scent, not sight, is the primary way pigs find acorns, as prototypical Appalachians doubtless know).

What am I missing?

Nellie Bowles turns over the soil to reveal something weird:

  1. Biden puts a $25 million bounty on Venezuela’s Maduro.
  2. Trump raised it to $50 million.
  3. The Trump sends in the armed forces, with a soupçon of DEA, and takes Maduro to the US in handcuffs and masked.
  4. “Dems are aghast. What did they think bounties meant? Vibes? Papers? No, of course they understood it was fake!”

Too big a tent

The Heritage Foundation made a strategic choice to adapt to the current political moment by refusing to exclude anyone from its boundless tent. That led Heritage to depart from its principles and embrace people who have no credible claim to conservatism, even at the expense of pushing out the brains that built the foundation. By obsessing over “what time it is,” Heritage lost sight of hard lessons learned from the past.

For more than half a century, the Heritage Foundation’s work has rested on five ideological pillars listed in its mission statement: “free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense.” Yet in recent years Heritage has drifted from these precepts. Its trade policy centers on protectionism. Efforts to limit the federal government’s powers no longer seem like a priority. American values are shifting in unexpected ways. In 2024 Heritage flew the American flag upside-down to protest Donald Trump’s conviction in a New York criminal case. In foreign policy, the foundation has criticized longstanding alliances and is tending toward isolationism.

Josh Blackman, Ed Feulner, Ed Meese and the Heritage Foundation’s Exodus

Confabulation

If you don’t know how to explain something, why not just make it all up? Welcome to another important feature of the left hemisphere’s world: confabulation.

Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things, describing the left hemisphere when the right hemisphere is impaired or disabled.

Sounds a lot like AI, doesn’t it? McGilchrist has done wonders disenthralling me of AI techno-utopianism.

America is not authoritarian

“You’re not living in an authoritarian country. Except for the part where the president seizes unprecedented powers. And the part where he orders sham prosecutions. And the part where he invades countries to take their oil. And the part where his White House rewrites the history of his coup attempt,” – Will Saletan.

And the part where his masked anonymous agents gun down unarmed civilians in their cars. (Via Andrew Sullivan)

Panama, Venezuela

Our 1989 operation in Panama to capture Noriega was called “Operation Just Cause.” Our 2026 operation in Venezuela could be called “Operation … just cuz.” (H/T Carlos Lozado)

Shorts

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld:

Thursday, 1/8/26

Carrying Coals to Newcastle

I seldom agree so strongly with anything R.R. Reno writes, in First Things or elsewhere, as I agree with this:

Along with online sports betting, marijuana legalization is an instance of the grotesque misgovernance by leaders in the West. Instead of promoting the welfare of citizens, our elites accommodate our vices. More than that, they turn them into industries and revenue producers. Historians writing of this period will note that the policy response to catastrophically high levels of drug overdose deaths was to legalize marijuana. And the response to the inability of younger people to buy homes (the “affordability crisis”) was to legalize easily accessible and addictive gambling.

A Provocative Observation

A couple of years ago, I was at city hall in my little town when I got caught in a conversation with our assistant city manager. I mentioned that I was a professor at EIU at the time, and that we had a lot of students studying public administration and public policy. In fact, many of our recent graduates wanted to do exactly what he was doing for a living.

He said something that’s really stuck with me — and I think it highlights one of academia’s biggest problems. The kinds of questions we try to answer in the ivory tower just don’t line up with the ones people in the field actually need answered.

For example, he wanted to know: How much money should a city keep in reserves to supplement its general fund during an economic downturn? What a practical and important question. Yet, despite earning a concentration in public administration in grad school, I’d never seen a single article about that topic.

Ryan Burge, introducing a post on money in one prominent Protestant denomination (emphasis added).

Unwinding the revolution

The Bolshevik nationalization of property had, in a real sense, placed a curse on the Soviet regime. Unless it could find a way to divest itself of the exclusive property rights its founders had seized, it would be torn asunder. It could no longer return property to the individuals who once had owned it, most of whom were dead, and there were no legitimate claimants other than the nation as a whole to the assets that had been created during the Soviet period. Nevertheless, if it was to survive, the regime needed to find a way to empower its citizens to own and administer property directly. The state bureaucracy, theoretically a trustee for the people, had proven to be not merely inefficient but faithless and corrupt as well.

Legends of the curse carried by ill-gotten property are staples in many cultures. Whether it is a stolen gem or the gold of the Rhine immortalized in Richard Wagner’s cycle of operas or one of the many other variants, one invariable feature is that the greed of the illegitimate owner blinds him to the danger of possession.

Throughout 1990 and 1991, as I witnessed repeated futile efforts to reform the economy, I was often reminded of these legends. Unless the state could find a way to divest itself of control over most income-producing property, reform could not take hold since no real market system of economic interchange would be possible. Unless Gorbachev could find a way to terminate the central government’s possession of most property in the Soviet Union, his own position would crumble under the pressure of newly empowered republics that were no longer willing to have their economic fate decided by bureaucrats in Moscow. Yet, like the protagonists of countless legends, he seemed oblivious to the curse. He could not bear the thought of some of his authority passing to others. By clinging to the power over property, he doomed his own office and the state he headed.

Jack F. Matlock, Autopsy on an Empire. I’m quite interested in Russia, partly because it occasionally claims that it is the “Third Rome” as leader of the Church after Rome and Constantinople, partly because I know many Russian immigrants. I enjoyed this book a lot, as it avoids the cartoonish simplifications of the popular press.

Chosen troubles

Every generation has its burdens to bear, and many of Americans’ burdens—9/11, COVID, etc.—are not burdens of Americans’ choosing. But some of those burdens Americans have chosen: the national debt, inflation, the unresolved problems in our immigration system and in urban administration, the cozy crony capitalism that has contributed to economic stagnation, a class of elected political leaders that range from time-serving mediocrities (Nancy Pelosi, Mike Johnson) to corrupt authoritarians (Donald Trump) to elderly incompetents who used to be middle-aged incompetents (Joe Biden). Some of our troubles have been dropped upon us as though by some malevolent storm cloud, but others we have chosen. Into every nation’s life a little rain must fall, but the decision to spend all our umbrella-and-galoshes money on gelato and strip clubs while letting the gutters clog up and the storm sewers go unmaintained—that is on us.

…

In September, we will be a quarter-century on from 9/11. And though the idea may seem alien to many Americans right now, 25 years is more than enough time to grow up and get your act together.

Kevin D. Williamson

I’ve spent much of my adult life attending or teaching at elite universities. They are impressive institutions filled with impressive people. But they remain stuck in the apparatus that Conant and his peers put in place before 1950. In fact, all of us are trapped in this vast sorting system. Parents can’t unilaterally disarm, lest their children get surpassed by the children of the tiger mom down the street. Teachers can’t teach what they love, because the system is built around teaching to standardized tests. Students can’t focus on the academic subjects they’re passionate about, because the gods of the grade point average demand that they get straight A’s. Even being a well-rounded kid with multiple interests can be self-defeating, because admissions officers are seeking the proverbial “spiky” kids—the ones who stand out for having cultivated some highly distinct skill or identity. All of this militates against a childhood full of curiosity and exploration.

David Brooks, How the Ivy League Broke America. Every so often, I am reminded that Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society ought to be read more widely, taken more seriously.

Second-hand

Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker, is buying a lot of second-hand items these days, even for gifting:

For a start, you are immune to AI slop, which is now flooding the market, especially for books and music. Technology is empowering scams and frauds at an unprecedented rate.

I now pay close attention to dates. I just can’t trust any cultural artifact made after 2023. I hear from other people who have the same concern. They don’t want slop, and the people peddling it refuse to put warning labels on it. So your only sure way to avoid it is by picking the vintage secondhand object.

Why Secondhand Is Now Better Than New

Artifacts of an extinct way of life

Cultural conservatism originated in the experience of a way of life that was under threat or disappearing. The memory of that way of life could be preserved, and its spiritual meaning enshrined in works of art. But the way of life itself could not be so easily protected.

Roger Scruton, Conservatism

Frustration

I’d really like to link book recommendations to Bookshop.org instead of to the Bezos empire. But too often, books that have formed me do not appear at Bookshop.org.

Shorts

  • Journalism is the art of translating abysmal ignorance into execrable prose. At least, that is its purest and most minimal essence. (David Bentley Hart, of Adam Gopnik)
  • It is impossible to study the radical right without noticing its profound suspicion of Christianity… (Matthew Rose, The World After Liberalism)
  • The Democratic Party has evolved into a group that signals virtue but lacks real values. It’s a group that panders but never produces. (Evan Barker, I Raised $50 Million for the Democrats. This Week, I Voted for Trump.)
  • When the traffic lights go out during a storm, it sometimes feels like waking up from a long slumber. We realize that we can work things out for ourselves, with a little faith in one another. (Matthew B. Crawford, Why We Drive)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld:

Autogulpe Day

I’m fully aware that today is Epiphany in Western Christianity, Theophany in Orthodox Christianity. But it’s also the 5th anniversary of one of the darkest days in American history, the attempted autogulpe of 2021.

In some ways, I think 1-6-21 is worse than 9-11: we did this to ourselves, and to this day there are tens of millions of Americans who will insist that it was a great patriotic outpouring of love rather than an attempt to overturn a Presidential election that ousted the incumbent.

Baloney!, say I to keep this post as family fare.

With friends like this …

What I remember very well about that day was my own failure of imagination. I did not, to my knowledge, see Dempsey—he had positioned himself at the vanguard of the assault, and I had stayed near the White House to listen to Trump—but I did come across at least a dozen or more protesters dressed in similar tactical gear or wearing body armor, many of them carrying flex-cuffs. I particularly remember those plastic cuffs, but I understood them only as a performance of zealous commitment. Later we would learn that these men—some of whom were Proud Boys—believed that they would actually be arresting members of Congress in defense of the Constitution. I interviewed one of them. “It’s all in the Bible,” he said. “Everything is predicted. Donald Trump is in the Bible.” Grifters could not exist, of course, without a population primed to be grifted.

After the riot, Dempsey returned to California, where he was eventually arrested. In early 2024, he pleaded guilty to two felony counts of assaulting an officer with a dangerous weapon. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Six months later, in the summer of 2024, Trump, who would come to describe the January 6 insurrection as a “day of love,” said that, if reelected, he would pardon rioters, but only “if they’re innocent.” Dempsey was not innocent, but on January 20, 2025, shortly after being inaugurated, Trump pardoned him and roughly 1,500 others charged with or convicted of offenses related to the Capitol insurrection ….

Jeffrey Goldberg, MAGA’s Foundational Lie. Subtitle: “The movement claims to stand with the police. Trump’s decision to pardon the cop-beaters of January 6 exposed his movement for what it is.”

And what have we gotten from the incorrigible electorate’s insistence on re-electing Trump four years after his defeat?

Defining “sedition” down

One indicator of a polity’s health is whether a citizen can be punished merely for telling the truth about the law. The signs for American democracy are not good.

This morning, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that he has begun the process to demote Mark Kelly, a retired Navy captain and NASA astronaut, and reduce his pension pay. The operative facts here, naturally, are not Kelly’s past service but his current rank and service: a Democrat serving in the U.S. Senate and a political adversary of President Donald Trump.

“Six weeks ago, Senator Mark Kelly—and five other members of Congress—released a reckless and seditious video that was clearly intended to undermine good order and military discipline,” Hegseth wrote on X this morning. He cited two articles of the Uniform Code of Military Justice; Kelly, unlike the other five, holds retired military status, which makes him subject to sanctions from the Defense Department.

What Hegseth did not cite was what Kelly and his colleagues actually said in the video, and for good reason. Doing so would expose the absurdity of the charge and the abuse of power involved in the attempt to demote him. “Our laws are clear: You can refuse illegal orders,” Kelly said. No one in the Trump administration has disputed that this is true. A more agile or even-keeled administration would have smoothly dismissed the video as irrelevant: This is true, but of course we would never issue an illegal order. (As Kelly and his lawyers have noted, Hegseth has cited the same law about disobeying illegal orders in the past.) Instead, Trump and his aides threw a fit, dubbing the Democrats the “Seditious Six.”

…

Members of the armed forces, and retirees like Kelly, are particularly susceptible to Hegseth’s abuse of power, because they can be punished by the Defense Department internally. But the chilling effect does not end with those who are serving or have served, or with the particular question of illegal orders. The administration has told the other five Democrats that it is investigating them as well. The core belief underlying all of this is as plain as it is dangerous: Criticizing Donald Trump and defending the rule of law is sedition.

David A. Graham, Hegseth’s Appalling Vengeance Campaign

Kelly responds tartly:

“My rank and retirement are things that I earned through my service and sacrifice for this country. I got shot at. I missed holidays and birthdays. I commanded a space shuttle mission while my wife,” former Representative Gabby Giffords, “recovered from a gunshot wound to the head—all while proudly wearing the American flag on my shoulder,” he said in a statement on X. “If Pete Hegseth, the most unqualified Secretary of Defense in our country’s history, thinks he can intimidate me with a censure or threats to demote me or prosecute me, he still doesn’t get it.”

Remember that Hegseth purports to be a devout Christian. He should bear in mind that “taking the name of the Lord in vain” has a deeper meaning than “don’t cuss.”

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg.

[A] critical mass of the American people … no longer want[s] to govern themselves, … are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise.

Nick Catoggio

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.

January 4, 2026

Rationality

If you believe that all reactions ought to be ‘rational’, which means open to examination by calculative reason, then all reactions which stem from felt intuition, but which reason has trouble explaining, are at a disadvantage. This explains why a mystic will never win a debate with an atheist: he may have a truth on his side, but it will not be demonstrable through anything other than personal experience, and that doesn’t count. Therefore, he loses.

Paul Kingsnorth, In the Black Chamber.

I understand why we developed a social convention that one is only obligated to believe things that can be rationally proven. But I do not understand the irrational corollaries that one is barely permitted to believe what one cannot rationally prove and certainly may not try to persuade others of it.

I don’t think those corollaries are straw men, but I have no rational proof at hand that they’re real.

(Yes, I’ve been reading Iain McGilchrist again.)

Vainglory

One person seeks to be admired for the clothes he is wearing; another seeks the same admiration in priestly vestments. One wishes to be admired for singing on stage, another for chanting in church. One wants to be thought of as tough and cool, another as prayerful and humble. It is the same vainglory in them all.

Vassilios Papavassiliou, Thirty Steps to Heaven

More Anecdata

A congregation that is overflowing. On Christmas Eve morning we baptized 25 adults and 2 babies. We borrowed a second adult-size immersion “font” (actually, a Rubbermaid cattle trough) from a neighboring church, and the two priests just kept baptizing side-by-side till they got through them all.

Also, you can see that the majority of the baptized, wearing white, are young. This is going on all over the country. It’s a fine time to be Orthodox, just as a wave is rising. It’s not always been this way in the past, and may not always be this way in days to come; but right now, it’s pretty terrific.

Via Frederica Matthewes-Green, whose husband is the retired priest of the parish.

Monks and Nuns on Iona

Iona remained a place of pilgrimage, until the Protestant Reformation snuffed out its monastic life. The abbey was dissolved, and its traditions dispersed.

The Monk Bringing Orthodox Christianity to an Island at the Edge of the World.

Nothing makes me angrier at the Protestant Reformation than two sentences like this, which recur depressingly in history.

Orthodox Christianity is the branch of the Christian faith that split from Roman Catholicism in the Great Schism of 1054.

Nothing makes me angrier at lazy journalists than a sentence like this, which recurs depressingly in stories about Orthodox Christianity.

The Orthodox side had four patriarchs. The Roman Catholic side had one patriarch, who had increasingly claimed supremacy over the four others. Prima facie, if you know nothing but that, who’s likelier to have been schismatic: the one or the four?

The Journalist even knows better, though he hasn’t bothered connecting the dots:

[Orthodox Christianity] retains the early creeds, sacraments, and saints of Western Christianity; but where the Western faith has diverged, its theology, liturgy, and rhythms of life have remained unchanged.

UPDATE: I left a thought hanging. The second sentence makes me angry because the Protestant Reformation sometimes bore an uncanny resemblance to ISIS, destroying anything “religious” it didn’t understand, including genuine and venerable Christian practices and symbols its bad religion disallowed. See Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580.

Reaching the lost as a journeyman trade

Finney’s Lectures on Revivals of Religion (1835), which is discussed at greater length below in chapter 15, was important for summarizing a new approach toward reaching the lost. Since God had established reliable laws in the natural world and since humans were created with the ability to discern those laws, it was obvious that the spiritual world worked on the same basis. Thus, to activate the proper causes for revivals was to produce the proper effects: “The connection between the right use of means for a revival and a revival is as philosophically [i.e., scientifically] sure as between the right use of means to raise grain and a crop of wheat. I believe, in fact, it is more certain, and there are fewer instances of failure.”

Because the world spiritual was analogous to the world natural, observable cause and effect must work in religion as well as in physics. The wine of revival—confidence in God’s supernatural ability to convert the sinner—may have looked the same in antebellum America as it had in earlier centuries, but the wineskin was of recent manufacture.

Mark A. Noll, America’s God.

This account of Finney’s stunningly presumptuous theory of revival is in a section of Noll’s book titled “Assumptions and Assertions of American Theology.” I strongly suspect that this theory is how we got the foregrounding of manipulative rhetorical technique:

  • The rising and falling of the preaching voice; the shouting followed by the whisper
  • dimmed lights
  • “every head bowed and every eye closed” altar calls,
  • saccharine music (The Savior is waiting to enter your heart was the biggie in my teenage years)
  • and the rest.

If manipulating people to an emotional climax, to get insta-saved, is your metric for “revival,” I suppose Finney was right. But I’ve lived too long and seen to much to think that such manipulated response is in any very meaningful sense a conversion to Christian faith. The wiser course is the Orthodox catechumenate.

What St. John Chrysostom knew that Jefferson Davis wanted to forget

Chrysostom’s Homilies posed problems for slaveholders, as elsewhere in this work the bishop instructed Christians to educate their slaves and manumit them as soon as possible.

Paul Gutacker, The Old Faith in a New Nation. I had never heard of St. John Chrysostom until I entered an Orthodox Church for a Sunday observance of his Liturgy. He was perhaps the greatest preacher in Christian history — in the 4th century.

Credit where credit is due: though Gutacker is neither Orthodox nor Roman Catholic, he knows of Chrysostom.

Is Christianity a Religion?

I recall the formulation, uttered many times in my presence (or written many times in sources I read), that “Christianity is not a religion; it’s a relationship.”

As best as I can recall, I thought that was facile, though not entirely worthless, and was formulated in response to a then-current cultural bias that religion was bad (which bias I think I never shared).

But here’s a weightier explanation of why Christianity is not a religion:

Nowhere in the New Testament, in fact, is Christianity presented as a cult or as a religion. Religion is needed where there is a wall of separation between God and man. But Christ who is both God and man has broken down the wall between man and God. He has inaugurated a new life, not a new religion.

Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World

Schismatic

Unlike immediately after the Protestant Reformation, almost all Christians today are happy to affirm that Protestants or Catholics or the Orthodox are truly Christians—and are thereby burdened to explain why their differences actually matter. The partial success but overall failure of the modern ecumenical movement has meant that many members of churches, especially Protestant, have become fundamentally post-denominational in their outlook. When churches can acknowledge that other churches from whom they are separated are equally valid as Christian churches, but don’t overcome the actual divisions, the unintended message is that the divisions are evidently not so theologically important after all, and the result is a church culture of consumer choice about where to worship and what to believe. But a faith decision based on preference is no faith decision at all—it permits no authority. The agony of those with faith is to respond to authority in this situation of choice.

Matthew Burdette, Zero Gravity. I struggled with “the unintended message is that the divisions are evidently not so theologically important after all.” It seemed to me that the unintended message is that that divisions are important — almost like we’re just being polite when we acknowledge that other traditions are Christian, too. But he said “that the divisions are … not so … important,” not “that doctrine is not important.” We’re too dismissive of the grave sin of schism seems to be his meaning.

I’m going to forego my temptation to theorize why we’re dismissive of schism.

No, on second thought, I’m going to give the short answer: we’re “making a virtue of necessity.” We can’t stop doing it, and we’re good people, aren’t we? So how can it be all that bad?

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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