Watching The Father, the stage play of which was first produced in 2012, I found Zeller’s depiction of entrapment frighteningly familiar — he captures perfectly the horror of mindless repetition and inhabiting a quickly shrinking world. Sinéad O’Connor writes with striking clarity about the agoraphobia she now feels having spent a long period in solitude, and how despite her best efforts to try to socialise she would rather be at home. Bo Burnham ends his special by dramatising his exit from the claustrophobic space in which he has laboured for a year on his material, only to be found cringing before a spotlight when he tries to leave the door.

Ironic, maybe, that these studies of psychosis, misery and brain malfunction should have resonated far more powerfully than the clanging hoopla that is now accompanying our return to normal life. I shuddered as I read New York magazine’s exhortation on “The Return of FOMO”, a recent cover story dedicated to the return of the pre-pandemic social anxiety that you might be “missing out”.

“FOMO might have gone into hibernation for a while,” writes Matthew Schneier, “but we may now be on the way to a new golden age as we try to make up for the year we lost by doing more than ever . . . The city runs on FOMO, a connoisseurship of opportunities and possibilities; the catechism of “Did you get invited, are you on the list, can you get a table?”; the performance of plans.” Eurgh. While Sinéad O’Connor left me feeling quite euphoric, the anticipated buzz of being on the right list made me suddenly depressed.

In the US, or maybe it’s a particularly New York mindset, the pandemic is now regarded almost as old news. “Now that Covid is behind us . . . ” have read numerous emails from my US colleagues in recent weeks. America, it is assumed, has vaxxed the virus out of mind. For the more robust of constitution, we can now anticipate a #hotgirlsummer like no other. If the new underground advertising hoardings are to be believed, we will now commence a roaring summer in scenes reminiscent of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s new film musical In the Heights.

For now, I’m far more comfortable in the company of outcasts.

Read it all (subscription).

The beauty of the unquiet mind.

Madness, creativity and the post-pandemic world. https://t.co/KH5njS4PZq

— James Fitzgerald (@jamesfitz2) June 20, 2021

Who am I? What am I? Humans have been asking these questions almost from the moment they were first capable of framing them. For the Christian, they are questions with added dimensions to them, because our faith prompts us to ask, who am I, and what am I before God, the Originator of everything that is? And those added dimensions include ethical ones, as we ask the further question: How am I to become the person that God wishes me to be?

Such reflections prompted members of the Doctrine Committee of the Scottish Episcopal Church to explore how we might respond to them in our current circumstances: in short, how we might start to frame a twenty-first century Christian anthropology.

As someone who has been engaged (Michael Fuller) at different times both with scientific research and with ordained ministry in busy parishes, and who now teaches in a university in the field of science-and-religion studies, the question Who am I? is one I have been privileged to look at from a number of different perspectives as I reflect on my own experiences, and on those of the people around me. The Church, as the community of the faithful, has many wonderful resources to help people considering the question, Who am I? – from the Scriptures, to the writings of theologians, sages and mystics, to the lived experience of walking in the footsteps of Jesus. Those lived experiences, and the internalised wisdom of our tradition, are perhaps what help us most in forming a response to the question. But it seems to me that we should not neglect the knowledge that comes from outside our tradition in shaping such responses. In particular, the sciences have generated a huge amount of knowledge about what it is to be a human being: they show us to be evolved, biological creatures, formed by our genetic heritage and by our environment to behave in particular ways.

My thoughts centre on the ways in which the sciences place parameters around how we think of ourselves as living beings, in particular when we come to think about ourselves as somehow ‘special’ within the created order (which our being in the ‘Image of God’ surely suggests). How are we to think of ourselves in such terms when we share so much genetic information with other creatures (including our prehistoric hominin ancestors)? Are there particular aspects of our behaviour that mark us out as unique – are we the only creatures on our planet capable of prayer, for example (or, indeed, of sin)? Is it likely that life forms like ourselves might exist elsewhere in the universe, and if so what would that tell us about ourselves? As we create more and more complex, and more and more capable, artificial intelligences, what does that tell us about ourselves? And what might we say regarding the possibility of a ‘post-human’ future, in which people might be genetically and cybernetically enhanced to achieve feats completely beyond those of which we are currently capable? And would such people even be ‘human’?

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(CEN) Michael Fuller and David Jasper-Being human in the 21st century UK https://t.co/6T6LV2iSft #books #anthropology 'our faith prompts us to ask, who am I,+what am I before God, the Originator of everything that is? And.. How am I to become the person that God wishes me to be?' pic.twitter.com/aadcSvDkYa

— Kendall Harmon (@KendallHarmon6) June 15, 2021

Trust God’s Spirit. Allen accuses western missionaries of failure to trust the work of the Holy Spirit in sanctifying and maturing new believers in China or Africa. He reminds his readers that the same Holy Spirit indwells these new national Christians and us. If God is at work in them, then we must assume that they, too, have all the necessary gifts for the leadership and life of the church. There is no need for us to remain in charge of everything. Allen notes that the apostle Paul did not stay unduly long in any one place, but quickly trained and taught new believers, appointed leaders and moved on. He trusted the Holy Spirit to use them and lead them, so that the church flourished and grew. Allen contrasts this apostolic pattern with contemporary systems in which many missionaries remain for many years in one place, dominate the national church and thus prevent natural development under the Spirit of god. Allen seems to be a prophet before his time, for in more recent years the charismatic renewal has taught us that all Christians have gifts for the edification of the church and, therefore, we do not need to be mere pew-dusters saying ‘amen’ to a dominant minister.

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Steven Richard Rutt writes about Roland Allen's life and theology on his two books Roland Allen A Missionary life and Roland Allen A Theology of Mission #rolandallen #stevenrutt #books #lutterworthpress #lutterworthbooks #amissionarylife #atheologyofmission pic.twitter.com/H4EoIPVuph

— Lutterworth Press (@LuttPress) January 5, 2020

It’s early in the morning in the Glasgow-born US citizen’s home in northern California, and we can hear his young children having their breakfast. Sun streams through the windows, but we’re cheerfully discussing war, famine, pestilence and death. The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse gallop across the pages of Ferguson’s new book, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe, but he is less concerned with the proximate causes of disasters – a mutated virus, a crop failure, a military conflict – than with the ways in which societies act to increase or mitigate the deaths that ensue.

Ferguson’s title is lifted from “We’re doomed!”, the catchphrase uttered with relish by fellow Scot Private Frazer in the classic BBC sitcom Dad’s Army. “Ultimately our relationship to death is a strange one. We’re a bit in denial about it and we’re a bit obsessed with it.” We’re particularly obsessed, he says, with mass disaster. “Because the end of the world is such an interesting idea. And yet when an actual disaster happens, we act shocked and surprised.”

In part, Doom is a rebuke to the overuse of words like “unprecedented” and phrases such as “a year like no other”. It offers a sweeping compendium of the many appalling catastrophes that have befallen us throughout human history. Covid-19 seems a bit of a damp squib by comparison.

“The perception that 2020 was a year like no other was essentially based on an ignorance of history,” Ferguson says. “The 1950s saw some pandemics that were global in scale and comparable in their impact on population. It’s just that we’ve forgotten about them.” Doom specifically compares the “Asian flu” of 1957. “In terms of excess mortality, its impact was almost exactly the same as 2020.”

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"Doom is a rebuke to the overuse of words like 'unprecedented' and phrases such as 'a year like no other'. It offers a sweeping compendium of the many appalling catastrophes that have befallen us throughout human history." https://t.co/7PaJqPh1og

— Niall Ferguson (@nfergus) June 6, 2021

Worshiping the God who is triune makes a substantial difference to what true worship actually is. The doctrine of the Trinity means that Christian worship is a sharing in the Son’s union with his Father, through the Holy Spirit. Our union with Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit is the basis for this sharing of God’s people together in the divine life of God. We stand to worship God by means of the mediatory ministry of Jesus before the Father, to which we are drawn by the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. As our great high priest, he sanctifies us by his blood, which he himself offered. This understanding of our relationship to the triune God was in part responsible for the Reformation’s rejection of the medieval concept of priesthood—since Christ is our supreme and exclusive mediator before God. As Torrance puts it, “The doctrine of the Trinity is the grammar of this participatory understanding of worship and prayer.”

–Michael P. Jensen, Reformation Anglican Worship:Experiencing Grace, Expressing Gratitude (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2021), p. 42

“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then—to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn….”

–T.H. White, The Once and Future King

A drawing a day.
Day 437. Merlyn and Archimedes. “The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails…Learn why the world wags and what wags it.” (T. H. White was born OTD in 1906.) pic.twitter.com/rqWiPAegaT

— Edward Carey (@EdwardCarey70) May 29, 2021

Louis Menand’s panoramic portrait of the Cold War years begins with a succinct overview:

This book is about a time when the United States was actively engaged with the rest of the world. In the twenty years after the end of the Second World War, the United States invested in the economy of Japan and Western Europe and extended loans to other countries around the world. With the United Kingdom, it created the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to support global political stability and international trade. It hosted the new United Nations. Through its government, its philanthropic foundations, its universities, and its cultural institutions, it established exchange programs for writers and scholars, distributed literature around the globe, and sent art from American collections and music by American composers and performers abroad. … Works of literature and philosophy from all over the world were published in affordable translations. Foreign movies were imported and distributed across the country.

The preface continues with this reminder of the Utopian efforts of the immediate postwar era, remarking on the exponential rise in college attendance, the closing of the income gap, the absence of substantive difference between the two major political parties, and the collapse of colonial empires around the world. “Most striking was the nature of the audience: people cared. Ideas mattered. Painting mattered. Movies mattered. Poetry mattered. The way people judged and interpreted paintings, movies, and poems mattered. People believed in liberty, and thought it really meant something.”

I read these words with a shock of recognition because the years in question marked my own coming of age: I graduated from high school in 1949, college in 1953, and received my PhD in 1965. I recall only too well those days when studying literature was considered an important and valuable pursuit, when – yes – ideas mattered, poetry mattered. But I also remember the downside to which Menand turns next. Soon, he suggests, the beautiful cultural dream was fading, what with McCarthyism at home and military interference abroad, the continuing dominance of white men in all spheres of life, the widening of the income gap, the commodification of culture – and a “foreign war of national independence from which [the United States] could not extricate itself for eight years”. After the sorry tale of Vietnam, large-scale disillusionment about the character and role of the US set in, both at home and abroad, even as its assured military position and dominance of the global art world remained secure.

How and why did so momentous a change occur in so short a period? The Free World does not attempt to formulate answers to this difficult question: Menand’s narrative is more descriptive than analytic.

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'I recall only too well those days when studying literature was considered an important and valuable pursuit, when – yes – ideas mattered, poetry mattered. But I also remember the downside to which Menand turns next.' – Marjorie Perloff https://t.co/qrnpZKNpnr

— The TLS (@TheTLS) June 2, 2021

Writing a history of the English Church from earliest times(200AD) until the outbreak of the pandemic last year was a project which gave pause for thought. I did it for three reasons.

Firstly, it had not been done for at least forty years. As an ordinand I read a book by the Bishop of Ripon, J.R.H Moorman, entitled A History of the Church in England first published in 1963 and ending in the post WWII era. And, a little more recently David Edwards, one-time Provost of Southwark Cathedral, had published a three-volume work entitled Christian England in 1984. His work ended with WW1. So, it seemed that it was time for a new work bringing the church’s story (by which I mean all denominations and none) up to date; and at the same time extending its remit. Like them, I kept it to the English Church, not thinking myself competent to include and write about the varied histories of the Welsh, Scottish and Irish Churches too.

The second reason was that in recent years there has been a great deal of interest in what it means to be English, connected of course with the political question of the destiny of England in or outside the EU. Much ink has been spilt on the meaning of being English, by the likes of Jeremy Paxman The English or the historian Robert Tombs The English and Their History, Andrew Marr, The Making of Modern Britain and A.N.Wilson’s Our Times . Given this upsurge of interest in being English I thought it timely to re-state the thesis that you cannot understand our history, our nation without understanding the profound influence of the church and of Christianity on it, and, to be more explicit, the teaching and life of Jesus.

Indeed, it was a monk, the Venerable Bede, who first gave the name English to the Saxon kingdoms. And over time, Vikings, Norman French, the Huguenots, the Irish and Jews would be added to the mix before 20thcentury immigration got going: while the Celts would be pushed to the West (Wales), and South West of Scotland marching with the Picts. And even now, as a nation goes to the polls (on so called Super Thursday), we can see the delineation of these ethnic groupings today. But to understand the English you must understand the history of the church in this nation: the illumination and coherence it brought to a group of warring Saxon kingdoms; as well its struggles, its sins, its failures, its aspirations and its deep divergences which can be very hard to understand. In all this we have recently been vividly helped by Tom Holland’s Dominion which demonstrates, from a shrewd and sympathetic observer, the profound and seemingly permanent shaping of our national life by Jesus of Nazareth.

The third reason for writing is that, as an historian of some academic training, I have been around the subject for fifty years since degrees in history and theology from Oxford and Durham- reading up since then some four hundred titles on English history whilst working for forty years as a stipendiary clergyman in suburban, urban, rural and Urban Priority parishes….

Read it all and you can read more about the author there.

(CEN) Patrick Whitworth–A new history of the English church https://t.co/u3uzzVJwUd 'I notice that it is dangerous to lead. 5 archbps lost their lives. Alphege, first a hermit from my old parish outside Bath, was captured by the Vikings when Archbishop of Canterbury…' #books pic.twitter.com/60FYmKtkp0

— Kendall Harmon (@KendallHarmon6) May 21, 2021

“It would be hard to imagine a more disparate group than the business woman, the slave girl and the [jailer]. Racially, socially and psychologically they were worlds apart. Yet all three were changed by the same gospel and were welcomed into the same church …It is wonderful to observe in Philippi both the universal appeal of the gospel (that it could reach such a wide diversity of people) and its unifying effect (that it could bind them together in God’s family) … The wealthy business woman, the exploited slave girl and the rough Roman [jailer] had been brought into a brotherly or sisterly relationship with each other and with the rest of the church … We too, who live in an era of social disintegration, need to exhibit the unifying power of the gospel.”

–John Stott, The Spirit the Church and the World: The Message of Acts (Downer’s Grove, Ill.: InterVaristy, 1990),p.270, quoted by yours truly in the morning sermon

John Stott Would Want Us to Stop, Study, and Struggle https://t.co/Uf79ZeX7aR via @CTMagazine

— Jen Pollock Michel (@Jenpmichel) May 4, 2021

White Americans are divided into almost equal numbers of Ambassadors, Accommodators, Resisters, and Rejecters. African Americans, however, are more supportive of Christian Nationalism than whites—65% of all African-Americans are Ambassadors or Accommodators, the largest proportion of any racial group. Hispanics are mainly found in the two middle, moderate groups, as are Asians and other races (41). All of this indicates that socially conservative views, and a general comfort with a Christian-influenced culture, are not positions exclusively held by white people. Many non-whites are religious, traditional, and conservative in their orientation and shy away from progressive political views that are highly negative and critical of America, its ideals, and its past.

Another surprise is that, while about 50% of the Christian nationalists are evangelicals, nearly 25% of the strong Resistors or Rejecters are also evangelicals.This shows that evangelical beliefs do not automatically cause Christian Nationalism. They can also be the basis for its rejection. Therefore, Christian Nationalism is far more “ethnic and political than it is religious” (10). It is not an inevitable or logical result of traditional, biblical beliefs. It uses the Bible selectively, mainly appropriating for America promises like 2 Chronicles 7:14 (that are given to Israel), promising prosperity if they obey their covenant with God. It ignores the Old Testament passages demanding justice for the poor and the immigrant, and it never deals with New Testament calls to love enemies and turn the other cheek.

And so Christian Nationalism “isn’t localized within [any] particular religious tradition” (13). It doesn’t arise from strongly-held Christian beliefs of a Protestant evangelical, Catholic or any other group. “In fact…religious commitment [to a particular theology] and Christian Nationalism appear to foster distinct moral worldviews that differ in critical ways” (13). That is—Christian Nationalism ignores much of Christian teaching and puts together a highly selective pastiche of biblical texts with commitments to nativism, white supremacy, and so on.

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"The term “Christian nationalist” is now being used to describe white evangelicals. Is that accurate?" My review of Perry and Whitehead's excellent book "Taking America Back for God." https://t.co/s6vgnov22i

— Timothy Keller (@timkellernyc) March 10, 2021

Every child in a Church in Wales School in north-east and mid Wales is to receive a gift from the Bishop of St Asaph to celebrate the work of the Welsh Bible Translators, more than 400 years ago.

It is part of plans by the Diocese of St Asaph to mark the 400th anniversary of Edmund Prys’ 1621 translation of the Psalms into Welsh suitable for congregational singing. Prys and seven out of the eight Bible Translators were born in the Diocese of St Asaph and are commemorated by a memorial outside St Asaph Cathedral.

In partnership with the Pocket Testament League UK, a charity which promotes the distribution of St John’s Gospel, the Bishop of St Asaph has commissioned a bespoke edition of the Gospel in Welsh and English to be given to all 6,000 church school pupils. The book includes an introduction from the Rt Revd Gregory Cameron and information explaining the importance of the Bible translators.

Bishop Gregory said, “Christians believe that the Bible contains God’s message to humanity, summed up in the person of Jesus Christ. The translation of the Bible into Welsh is a remarkable story of how people can achieve something great through their joint commitment and their desire to make the story of Jesus known more widely. The story of the translation is very much part of our story too, as it is rooted here in the diocese of St Asaph.

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Fujimura believes that the Crucifixion reveals this theological vision in powerful ways. As he writes, “Christ’s redemptive work on the cross, Christ’s bloodshed, becomes an entry point of faith for all of us.” Artists, he argues, are uniquely able to witness to the hope of redemption amid brokenness by letting their artistry emerge from the traumas and tragedies of living in a fallen world:

Art literally feeds us through beauty in the hardest, darkest hours. … Through this wine of New Creation we can be given the eyes to see the vistas of the New, ears to hear the footsteps of the New, even through works by non-Christians in the wider culture.

Metaphors like “new wine” are among the key ways Fujimura expresses his vision. He draws heavily on the image of soil as a regenerative space where even our brokenness can testify, over time, to new creation. And he attests to the invaluable gift of tears as expressions of sanctification and consecration.

This theme of suffering is central to the book, as it is to Fujimura’s work as a fine artist. Art and Faith gives particular focus to the Japanese art form of Kintsugi, in which broken pottery is reformed using precious metals. The result, writes Fujimura, is a work of newly created beauty, “which now becomes more beautiful and more valuable than the original, unbroken vessel.”

In many insightful moments, Fujimura relates this redemptive vision of Kintsugi to experiences of suffering in his own life.

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What acclaimed painter and writer Makoto Fujimura wants you to know about creativity and faith. https://t.co/Nd7VuQE3mH

— Christianity Today (@CTmagazine) May 2, 2021

Steve Bruce, Professor of Sociology at the University of Aberdeen, is a leading proponent of the secularisation thesis. Religion has been in decline in Britain for 150 years, he argues, and there is little reason to think this process is going to be halted. Religious believers will not find his new book a comforting read but it does have lessons to teach us. Members of the Church of England concerned with evangelism and church growth would do well to read it.

Bruce is adept at dismissing those who have argued in defence of the persistence of religion. Grace Davie has spoken of vicarious religion in which a small proportion of the population are seen as carrying out religious activities on behalf of a larger number of people who are not directly involved. The role clergy often play when disaster strikes could be seen as an example of vicarious religion but Bruce argues clergy are candidates to act as honest brokers because they no longer have religious significance. ‘Like eunuchs working in a harem,’ he writes, ‘the clergy are invited to play significant social roles because they are impotent’.

For many Christians the charismatic movement is an important sign of renewal. Bruce argues this has not brought many new members into the churches. Most of those who have been at attracted were already Christian. Only 1 per cent of those who attend Alpha courses have not at some time been regular church goers. Bruce sees dangers for Christianity in the way the charismatic movement prefers feelings over doctrine and moves away from a distinctive culture of church architecture, liturgy, dress, ritual and hymns. In some ways it represents a secularisation of Christianity. Examining New Age beliefs and practices Bruce, correctly argues, they are not widespread enough to take the place of Christianity.

When it comes to new African or West Indian churches, Bruce maintains that their language and style is too alien to enable them to be effective carriers of the gospel to the white, British population. He may have a point here but he is mistaken in arguing that church growth in London is only fuelled by the immigration. The Diocese of London has seen significant growth and John Wolfe has analysed why this has happened. David Goodhew has also written of growing churches in London and elsewhere but Bruce nowhere refers to his work.

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“Most books you write after you have gone through an experience, but in this case what was so strange was I was having the experience while writing the book,” he told PW. “When you realize this may be the end and you have this abstract belief in heaven and the promise of Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross, you have to ask, do I really believe this? So writing the book was really a struggle with that question.”

It’s not much of a spoiler to say that the 70-year-old Keller, founder of the Redeemer Presbyterian Church in the sodom known as Manhattan does believe in a literal resurrection of Jesus. While writing, he spent extra time in prayer and “experiencing the presence of the risen Christ,” as he put it. “I was just shocked at how much more experience of God there was than I found before. So I have grown and I have confidence in the resurrection after a combination of faith and experience.”

Keller has buckets of experience as an author. His first title, The Reason for God: Belief in the Age of Skepticism (Dutton, 2008) hit number five on PW’s Bestseller List and sold more than 150,000 copies in its first year. That was followed by more than 20 titles on everything from love to suffering, Christmas to church planting. He hit PW’s twice more, with Prodigal God (Dutton, 2008) and Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God (Dutton, 2014), both of which hit the 100,000 copies sold mark. Hope in Times of Fear is intended as a bookend to Hidden Christmas, a holiday book published by Viking in 2016. In between books, Keller became one of the pioneers of the now-standard megachurch model of multi-site worship. Before retiring in 2017, he spent years of Sundays hopscotching across Central Park, going uptown and down, giving three or more sermons a day at Redeemer’s five different sites. Today, there are Redeemer-affiliated churches in Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Throughout his publishing career, he has been with one editor — Brian Tart, president and publisher of Viking Penguin. Tart heard about Keller and his popular church in 2006 and headed there one Sunday to hear him preach. “Obviously, he knew the Bible inside and out, but he also took a lot of examples from stories and myths and movies and books. He was really engaged in the cultural conversation of the moment and there wasn’t a barrier of entry for people to understand him. He reached people where they were,” Tart told PW. “That Tim is talking about cancer makes his personal journey to God helpful to people. He is saying ‘I’ve been through a dark time, we all been through a dark time, and yet I feel this great reservoir of hope.”

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Tim Keller on his latest book https://t.co/wMBXE1n8Mc

— Daniel Silliman (@danielsilliman) March 26, 2021

Among historians of evangelicalism it has long been an article of faith that the movement they study was an Enlightenment phenomenon. Rooting its self-examination in Lockean empiricism, its offers of salvation in consumer-driven individualism, and its optimism about an imminent millennium in notions of human progress, David Bebbington, David Hempton, Phyllis Mack, and others have situated early evangelicalism squarely within the wider Anglo-American and European intellectual universe. But has anyone else noticed?

Thanks to J.G.A. Pocock, J.C.D. Clark, and others, we no longer think of Enlightenment as the rise of modern paganism. Indeed, recent scholarship is coming to emphasize continuity: Enlightenment as late humanism, with the “new” philosophy sharing many of the concerns of the “old,” and borrowing many of its intellectual tools, too. Sermons remained probably the most popular single literary genre in a print sphere dominated by divinity. But even so, among social and cultural historians what may be termed the Roy Porter view predominates: that if religion still mattered it was because it hitched itself to the coat-tails of the political order; and that if it was still taken seriously intellectually it was because it was prepared to dilute itself with enough rationalism to make it palatable to polished literati. Enthusiasm was the province of a few extremists. And few were more enthusiastic than John Wesley, George Whitefield, and their ilk, who are therefore assumed, according to this view, to be fundamentally anti-enlightened. Exhibit A for exponents of the Porter view is William Hogarth’s Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism: A Medley (1762), which depicts an unhinged preacher – possibly Whitefield – ranting about witches and demons to a congregation of drooling misfits.

Bruce Hindmarsh’s magnificent new book underlines how misleading that over-reliance on hostile caricatures has been. “The rise of evangelicalism,” he states crisply at the outset, “occurred in tandem with the rise of modernity and in the midst of a hugely consequential turn away from transcendental frames of reference to the authority of ‘nature’ in multiple fields” (p. ix). Lockean sensibility, Newtonian physics, Shaftesburian politeness, and the growth of the public sphere, he argues, opened up fresh cultural and intellectual space for more personal, emotional and individualistic forms of belief, allowing and indeed impelling figures like Jonathan Edwards in New England and Whitefield and the Wesleys in Old England to pose an urgent question: “Is it possible to experience the presence of God in the modern world?” Their answer was urgent, disruptive and democratic, offering the possibility of spiritual rebirth to all, not as the result of incremental, ordered contemplation, but as an immediate, transformative and potentially explosive experience: “be born again”; “expect it now” (pp. 2-3). Wesley preached on the “one thing needful” more than fifty times, while Whitefield’s pious mnemonic, “one thing is needful,” scratched onto a friend’s window with a diamond, was still visible a century later (p.3). The simple but fervent piety thus produced overtopped denominational and national boundaries, as Methodists in England and Wales, “New Lights” in North America, evangelicals in the Churches of England and Scotland, Moravians, and evangelical nonconformists strove to experience God for themselves.

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Check out this recent review from the Harvard Divinity School Bulletin of Dr. Bruce Hindmarsh's "The Spirit of Early Evangelicalism: True Religion in a Modern World" https://t.co/EnRw8awQwa @OxUniPress pic.twitter.com/GRNuF0UiHf

— Regent College (@regentcollege) June 25, 2020

From there:

The global crisis of forced displacement is growing every year. At the same time, Western Christians’ sympathy toward refugees is increasingly overshadowed by concerns about personal and national security, economics, and culture. We urgently need a perspective that understands both Scripture and current political realities and that can be applied at the levels of the church, the nation, and the globe.

In Refuge Reimagined, Mark R. Glanville and Luke Glanville offer a new approach to compassion for displaced people: a biblical ethic of kinship. God’s people, they argue, are consistently called to extend kinship—a mutual responsibility and solidarity—to those who are marginalized and without a home. Drawing on their respective expertise in Old Testament studies and international relations, the two brothers engage a range of disciplines to demonstrate how this ethic is consistently conveyed throughout the Bible and can be practically embodied today.

New Release: 'Refuge Reimagined: Biblical Kinship in Global Politics' by @markrglanville and @luke_glanville.

Order now: https://t.co/47vZ3D2pSy #RefugeReimagined pic.twitter.com/c89XTY1acL

— IVP Academic (@ivpacademic) February 16, 2021

An exploration of the relationship between compassion and the womb was declared the winning talk at the third Theology Slam final, on Thursday evening.

It was given by Imogen Ball, who is a final-year ordinand and MA student at Trinity College, Bristol. For a second year running, the final took place online.

The Theology Slam — a competition to find engaging young voices who think theologically about the contemporary world — was organised jointly by the Church Times, SCM Press, and the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity (LICC).

In her talk, Ms Ball noted that the Hebrew words racham (to have compassion), rachum (compassionate), and rachamim (compassion) all share the same three root words as rechem: R-H-M. “Rechem is uniquely reserved for the female reproductive organ, the womb.”

She continued: “Now, just because these words share the same three foundational letters does not mean they have the same meaning. But there is something that catches my attention, a depth of meaning to be mined, when we mirror these strangely related terms. By mirroring the womb and compassion, we reveal glimpses of creative compassion.”

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“Creative compassion builds relationships beyond a one-off handout: it invites people in rather than transferring a tenner. Creative compassion is active imagining; it is envisaging and enacting a future that is better” https://t.co/kRrbbNJL25

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) March 19, 2021

Theologically, while John held a very orthodox Christian position, he had a capacity to engage with people from across the broad Christian spectrum. Another rare gift. In my opinion his book that expresses that orthodoxy most eloquently is Science & Christian Belief: Theological Reflections of a Bottom-up Thinker based on his 1993–1994 Gifford Lectures. Here John reflects on the Nicene Creed both theologically and scientifically in the light of the best of modern science. As well, he placed much emphasis on the centrality of the resurrection as a strong basis for hope. Aspects of his thought here may be found in Tom Wright’s Surprised by Hope.

John was also able to engage with other faiths without compromising Christian faith. He often reminded us that different faith traditions actually make rather different truth claims. But for him that was a reason to keep dialogue open.

John’s other books are all, of course, excellent in their own way. They are all deliberately relatively short and address one or more specific issues. This makes them readable and accessible resources.

After 1979, John focussed on encouraging and enabling good conversation and dialogue amongst and between scientists and theologians. Establishment of the ISSR was consistent with this and he served as its first President.

John certainly believed in the the unity of knowledge and one reality: the world of our experience that we seek to describe scientifically. Further, he was a critical realist believing that truth, whether scientific or theological, needs to be carefully assessed. This is a big theme and there is not space to deal with it in any detail here.

In the following we get a taste of some of his key insights.

If we are seeking to serve the God of truth then we should really welcome truth from whatever source it comes. We shouldn’t fear the truth. … The doctrine of creation of the kind that the Abrahamic faiths profess is such that it encourages the expectation that there will be a deep order in the world, expressive of the Mind and Purpose of that world’s Creator. It also asserts that the character of this order has been freely chosen by God, since it was not determined beforehand by some kind of pre-existing blueprint … As a consequence, the nature of cosmic order cannot be discovered just by taking thought … but the pattern of the world has to be discerned through the observations and experiments that are necessary in order to determine what form the divine choice has actually taken. (Quantum Physics and Theology: An Unexpected Kinship, 2007).

Read it all.

The remarkable life of the Anglican priest who bridged the gap between science and faith, from one who knew him.https://t.co/UeARKPe8RN

— Eternity News (@EternityNews) March 16, 2021

Unperson: “A public figure, especially in a totalitarian country, who, for political or ideological reasons, is not recognized or mentioned in government publications or records or in the news media. A person accorded no recognition or consideration by another or by a specific group. . . . Introduced in George Orwell’s novel 1984 (1949)”—Dictionary.com

It seems somehow fitting that the great beat poet and artist Lawrence Ferlinghetti, departed this mortal realm (at the age of 101) on February 22, 2021, the day after Amazon.com digitally unbooked When Harry Became Sally. Authored by Ryan T. Anderson, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and founder of Public Discourse, When Harry Became Sally offers a critical assessment of the transgender movement.

Anderson is an honest and careful scholar, one who makes a real effort to understand his opponents’ arguments and answer them with charity and rigor. Anderson’s views are not in ascendancy among elites these days, as is evident by the vitriol hurled at him by activists as soon as When Harry Became Sally was published. These critics, I am afraid to say, are not at all interested in debate, discussion, or a careful sifting through the evidence and arguments. What they seek is absolute unquestioned conformity to their views, policed by roving cyberspace inquisitors whose mission is to extract confessions from their targets and to inculcate in them the habit of unforgiving social justice scrupulosity. This is not to say that Anderson does not have some serious academic critics who raise penetrating questions about the quality of his sources, the strength of his arguments, and the nature of his project. Here I am thinking of two critical reviews that appeared in the Journal of Medical Humanities and Studies in Christian Ethics.

But that’s all the more reason why Amazon’s removal of Anderson’s book from its catalog is so pernicious: it marginalizes from the public conversation an intelligent and informed voice that should be confronted and taken seriously by those who disagree with him. As my esteemed Baylor colleague, Alan Jacobs, points out:

The censors at Amazon clearly believe there is only one reason to read a book. You read a book because you agree with it and want it to confirm what you already believe. Imagine, for instance, a transgender activist who wants to understand the position held by Ryan Anderson and people like him in order better to refute it. That person can’t get a copy of the book through Amazon any more than a sympathetic reader like me can.

What does all this have to do with Ferlinghetti? More than you may think. Founder of the small press City Lights Books, he published in late 1956 Howl and Other Poems, authored by the beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Soon after the book was published, Ferlinghetti was arrested on obscenity charges. The reason? The book’s poems included lines that contained graphic descriptions of sex acts, and thus, the government reasoned, it was legally obscene.

Read it all.

Baylor philosophy professor Francis Beckwith on Ryan Anderson: "Anderson is an honest and careful scholar who makes a real effort to understand his opponents’ arguments and answer them with charity and rigor." https://t.co/rFmVA3edtD

— Robert P. George (@McCormickProf) March 18, 2021

This progress in facial recognition and big data is all part of the other development in the Chinese digital world, the social credit system. This is a credit score analogous to those which are run in the West by credit reference agencies such as Experian and Equifax. The complete view of our lives and finances owned by these firms seems largely to escape attention in the West, but it hasn’t escaped the attention of the CCP, which has multiple trials running of social credit systems that build on and expand the existing Western model. The Chinese pilots look not at consumer creditworthiness but at social behaviour, with the criteria for desirable behaviour defined by the party. Strittmatter cites a pilot in Rongcheng, where citizens get points – not a metaphor, they actually are awarded points – for helping aged neighbours move house, giving calligraphy lessons and offering use of their basement for a CCP singalong. Conversely they lose points for pouring water outside their house so it turns into ice, letting their dogs shit on the pavement, driving through red lights and so on. In some versions of these schemes, your social credit is affected by the social credit of the people you hang out with; a bad reputation is contagious.

At the moment, the main impacts of people’s social credit are on activities such as travel: people with bad social credit can’t fly, can’t book high-speed train tickets or sleeper berths; they have slower internet access and can’t book fancy hotels or restaurants. It isn’t difficult to project a future in which these sanctions spread to every area of life. The China-wide version of social credit is scheduled to go live in 2020. The ultimate goal is to make people internalise their sense of the state: to make people self-censor, self-monitor, self-supervise. Strittmatter quotes Discipline and Punish: ‘He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.’ The Chinese version of social credit is the closest thing we’ve ever seen to Foucault’s system in action at a national level.

Put all this together. Imagine a place in which there’s a police post every hundred metres, and tens of thousands of cameras linked to a state-run facial recognition system; where people are forced to have police-owned GPS systems in their cars, and you can buy petrol only after having your face scanned; where all mobile phones have a state app on them to monitor their activity and prevent access to ‘damaging information’; where religious activity is monitored; where the state knows whether you have family and friends abroad, and where the government offers free health clinics as a way of getting your fingerprint and iris scan and samples of your DNA. Strittmatter points out that you don’t need to imagine this place, because it exists: that’s life in Xinjiang for the minority population of Muslim Uighurs. Increasingly, policing in Xinjiang has an algorithmic basis. A superb piece of reporting by Christian Shepherd in the Financial Times recently told the story of Yalqun Rozi, who has ended up in a re-education camp for publishing Uighur textbooks in an attempt to preserve the language. One of his crimes was using too high a percentage of Uighur words. The system allows a maximum of 30 per cent from minority language sources; Rozi had used 60 per cent Uighur, and ‘China’ had appeared only four times in 200,000 words. Uighurs get into trouble for attending mosque too often or too fervently, or for naming their children Mohammed, or for fasting during Ramadan. There are about 12 million Uighurs in Xinjiang: 1.5 million of them have either spent time in a re-education camp or are in one right now.

China has​ been a dictatorship for seventy years. The idea that prosperity and the internet would in themselves make the country turn towards democracy has been proved wrong. Instead, China is about to become something new: an AI-powered techno-totalitarian state. The project aims to form not only a new kind of state but a new kind of human being, one who has fully internalised the demands of the state and the completeness of its surveillance and control. That internalisation is the goal: agencies of the state will never need to intervene to correct the citizen’s behaviour, because the citizen has done it for them in advance.

Read it all (my epmhasis).

'The project aims to form not only a new kind of state but a new kind of human being, one who has fully internalised the demands of the state and the completeness of its surveillance and control' https://t.co/KLfbexQ0eQ #china #books #21stc

— Kendall Harmon (@KendallHarmon6) March 15, 2021

Harari’s claim that has drawn the most media attention is that we may be on the cusp of an era of super- (or possibly sub-) humans, with newspapers running such sensationalistic headlines as “Humans ‘will become God-like cyborgs within 200 years’” and “The age of the cyborg has begun.” He seems to believe that the “Singularity” is a certainty; that some “Dr. Frankenstein” will likely create “something truly superior to us, something that will look at us as condescendingly as we look at the Neanderthals.” But here again there are practical and technical obstacles that Harari overlooks. As Steven Pinker, of all people, has recently pointed out, most features of organisms, including senescence, are built deep into their genomic structure. If there were easy fixes to mortality and many other conditions, they would have been low-hanging fruit for natural selection, which will always prevail in the long run over the kind of “intelligent design” Harari envisions us undertaking in the near future.

Harari tends to think that it’s onward and upward for the modern project to master nature through technology, though he doubts whether the trajectory is really “upward” in the sense of involving genuine improvement in the human condition. But it may be that the golden age of technological progress has already passed. As Peter Thiel and others have observed, the development of new technology has arguably slowed in recent decades, a fact disguised by the dissemination of old technology in the form of consumer goods like personal computers and smart phones.

Still, Harari is right to suggest that scientific advancement potentially threatens much of what we now hold dear, including our humanity as we traditionally understand it. He is also right to point out that questions about the moral character of scientific experimentation always meet with the response that it is being done to “cure diseases and save human lives.” Harari says that “nobody can argue with” such a response. He is right, up to a point: given the value that modern societies put on health, it can be very difficult to question research conducted in the name of medicine. But arguments can still be made against some forms of experimentation and “enhancement.” One could also point out that science itself provides no reason to save human lives or care about curing diseases, whereas moral principles do. One might also ask whether physical health and longevity are the highest goods.

But Sapiens provides us with no resources for answering questions about the moral implications of scientific and technological change. A commitment to a reductionist, mechanistic view of Homo sapiens may give us some insight into some of the aspects of our past most tied to our material nature. But Harari’s view of culture and of ethical norms as fundamentally fictional makes impossible any coherent moral framework for thinking about and shaping our future. And it asks us to pretend that we are not what we know ourselves to be — thinking and feeling subjects, moral agents with free will, and social beings whose culture builds upon the facts of the physical world but is not limited to them.

Read it all.

A Reductionist History of Humankind … https://t.co/JF54mBVSf2

— Philosophy Matters (@PhilosophyMttrs) January 4, 2019

Many in…[Paul Avis’s] position might now decide that this was enough and it was time to hang up his or her pen, as it were. Not Avis. This volume represents the first part of a multi-volume project on the theological foundations of the Christian Church.

With impressive ambition and energy, Avis is now embarking on a great undertaking and widening the scope of his scholarly investigations, from what has been mainly an exploration of the ecclesiology of the Reformation and modern eras, back to the sources and character of the Church as a whole, which in this instance means an engagement with the writings of the New Testament as well as some recent theology from Roman Catholic and Protestant sources. Using a phrase from F. D. Maurice, his concern is to dig for the foundations of the Church as a whole.

The purpose of this first volume is to explore in what ways the Church is rooted in the life and teaching of Jesus Christ, undoubtedly a key question. As Avis puts it, when one looks at the history of the Church over 20 centuries, with “the emergence of its power structures, hierarchies and bureaucracies, the fact of its divisions and bloodshed, its sins, crimes and mundane human failings — we may well exclaim, ‘What has all that to do with Jesus of Nazareth?’”

Read it all.

(Church Times) Stephen Spencer reviews (the new book) Jesus and the Church, by Paul Avis, and asks whether #missiology now trumps #ecclesiology https://t.co/HUqjS9AceI #books #theology #church #anglican #21stc [Picture: AMZN] pic.twitter.com/r6WatSWgve

— Kendall Harmon (@KendallHarmon6) March 12, 2021

In the end, Sandel flinches: in spite of accusing the new ruling order of “tyranny,” he fails to locate any tyrants. This silence on the meri­tocracy’s self-deception, in what is otherwise a singularly powerful critique of the pathologies of meritocracy, is telling. Sandel is remark­ably incurious about whether meritocrats’ justifications of their moral eminence might in fact shroud the deeper “will to power” one would expect to find among tyrants.

For instance, Sandel evinces a lack of suspicion when listing a string of dubious actions by the meritocrats, concluding simply that they “have not governed very well”—not that they have governed with malevolence. He cites a string of failures from 1980 to the present, includ­ing “stagnant wages for most workers, inequalities of income and wealth not seen since the 1920s, the Iraq War, a nineteen-year, incon­clusive war in Afghanistan, financial deregulation, the financial crisis of 2008,” and so forth (29). In each instance, however, these were not “failures” if you were a member of the meritocracy. Almost to a person, the ruling class benefited from these crises, or at the very least, were not harmed by their consequences, even as they collectively diminished the prospects for flourishing among the meritocracy’s losers. Sandel regards these outcomes as failed policies of otherwise well-intentioned leaders, rather than identifying them as the expected outcomes of a ruling class’s efforts to maintain its position.

We return to where we began. At its outset, meritocracy, like most regimes, was defended as a just and beneficent new departure. It would replace the injustice of the ancien régime by encouraging and rewarding people for their talents. If inequality was to be an inescapable result, nevertheless the “industrious and rational” would afford benefits to the society as a whole. Prosperity, progress, and enlightenment would spread even to the “quarrelsome and contentious”: as Locke wrote, the life of the day laborer in England was better than the mightiest king of the Indians in America. Unlike in a vicious regime, the ruling meritocrats would govern not (merely) for their own advantage, but for the advantage and even common good of all.

Although it has barely been a century since Conant began his transformation of Harvard, and about a half century since the full realization of the new meritocratic regime celebrated by Gardner with the ascent of the “best and the brightest,” overwhelming evidence suggests that the meritocracy’s claims are altogether unbelievable, useful mainly as the self-serving subterfuge of an oppressive ruling class. For those outside the charmed meritocratic winner’s circle, prospects for flourishing have precipitously declined in recent dec­ades, as documented in such works as Charles Murray’s Coming Apart and Robert Putnam’s Our Kids. Among the noncredentialed, life spans are declining, deaths of despair increasing, material circumstances have worsened, social stability and moral formation have cratered. By their own admission, meritocratic elites have failed to improve race relations in America. The meritocrats’ claims to benefi­cence might once have been widely believed before this accumulating evidence, but now they largely function as a form of self-deceit among the rulers. Awareness of the potential for malevolent, even tyrannical intention behind these developments seems to be missing in Sandel. Yet such evidence seems increasingly apparent: approximately half the country showed its disbelief and contempt for elite ruling claims by voting for a demagogic anti-elitist. The reaction of the ruling class was four years of denying the legitimacy of the election, denouncing those who dared to vote for the demagogue, and unremitting efforts to “resist”—with hardly a moment to spare to reflect about their complicity in bringing about this wrenching period in our national history.

Sandel’s title, The Tyranny of Merit, is arguably more accurate an assessment of meritocracy than the ultimate thrust of his book. Ac­cording to the classical definition, meritocracy is a tyranny because its ruling class accrues benefits for itself while causing material, social, and spiritual impoverishment among those it governs. Sandel states that “merit can become a kind of tyranny,” but avoids discussing the motivations of the tyrants.

Read it all.

As college acceptances roll out, I'm recalling #MichaelSandel's humble & provocative idea about merit: “Insisting that my success is my due makes it hard to see ourselves in other people’s shoes” The tyranny of merit (Michael Sandel|TED2020)https://t.co/jZgWHJzKbv via @TEDTalks

— Ben Courchesne (@bdcme) March 7, 2021

What does it look like to cultivate a theology of the senses?

We live in a world of experience, and this is a core aspect of our faith. It’s not that faith is on one side, with everyday experiences on the other. These actually go together. Within our daily lives, there are many touch points: the food we eat, the music we listen to, the people we meet, and the nature we encounter.

I hope my book conveys the idea that the world, and our lives within it, are crammed with heaven. Heavenly activity doesn’t just occur during transcendent moments, like seeing the northern lights or hearing a beautiful concert. Even amid the mundane, we can encounter God’s presence. And this isn’t a matter of doing something new so much as changing our perspective within the space we already occupy.

Enjoying God through our senses opens up a larger experience of the world and life in Christ. Scripture is full of the language of desire, and we are called to worship the Lord in the beauty of his holiness. Our intellect and senses work together toward the end of loving God with our whole hearts.

In the book, I argue that we love and desire beauty because beauty begins and ends in God, as manifested through the whole of creation. Ephesians 2 says that we are God’s “masterpiece” (v. 10, NLT). The Greek term, poiema, is associated with making, with creating. God is a creator, and to deny the value of creativity, of beautiful things, is actually to limit our vision of who God is and the works he might call us to do.

Read it all.

Heaven isn't just something we feel we glimpse in those rare transcendent moments.

It's something we can attune ourselves to experiencing each ordinary day we're alive https://t.co/XIxdTKqZJ7

— Christianity Today (@CTmagazine) March 5, 2021

Britain needs to reset its compass in a political climate in which “we’ve learned to accommodate things that we know are wrong”, the archbishop of York has said.

Stephen Cottrell, who was enthroned in October, told the Observer: “Our compass has slipped; we’ve allowed ourselves to believe that things can’t change, that this is just the way the world is. Politics has, I think, shrunk. There’s a loss of vision about what the world could be like.”

As the number two in the Church of England, he said that he wanted the church to have a louder political voice. “I simply don’t accept a separation between the church and politics, faith and politics or, for that matter, anything and politics. It’s about how we inhabit the world – and everybody and every organisation and every community has a voice and a stake.”

Read it all.

Britain must reset its compass, from housing to wages, says archbishop of York https://t.co/PUTpAq3zc1

— The Observer (@ObserverUK) February 28, 2021

Who do you write for?

The book is primarily for the guides, the pastors and theologians. They are inclined by vocation to reflect on these things in detail, and my systematic theology tries to clarify things by showing the interrelation of different beliefs.

I’m working on a book tentatively entitled An Introduction to the Christian Faith. It’s a write-up of a course I teach to undergraduates here at Davidson College. It will be keyed to the Apostles’ Creed, the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, and the Lord’s Prayer. That was the introductory catechetical setup for much of Christianity in the West. It’s a starter set that is inherently more accessible than my systematic theology or any other.

But I’d also like to revisit the theme of teachers. I once called Father Nicholas Ayo to thank him for translating a book of Aquinas’s sermons. He accepted my thanks, but he added that we’re all indebted to St. Thomas. Well, that’s right. Theologians stand in relation to people who have gone before. When I teach Aquinas or Luther, they’re not in the room. I try to let students encounter them through their writings. That’s what my teachers did for me, and I try to thank them by encouraging my students to do the same.

Read it all.

(CC) Stephen Healey interviews Douglas F. Ottati–Teaching theology in anxious times https://t.co/hxXC6K6l90https://t.co/uMNbJLBeXE

— Kendall Harmon (@KendallHarmon6) February 20, 2021

On December 22, 1849, a group of political radicals were taken from their prison cells in Petersburg’s Peter and Paul Fortress, where they had been interrogated for eight months. Led to the Semenovsky Square, they heard a sentence of death by firing squad. They were given long white peasant blouses and nightcaps—their funeral shrouds—and offered last rites. The first three prisoners were seized by the arms and tied to the stake. One prisoner refused a blindfold and stared defiantly into the guns trained on them. At the last possible moment, the guns were lowered as a courier galloped up with an imperial decree reducing death sentences to imprisonment in a Siberian prison camp followed by service as a private in the army. The last-minute rescue was in fact planned in advance as part of the punishment, an aspect of social life that Russians understand especially well.

Accounts affirm: of the young men who endured this terrible ordeal, one had his hair turn white; a second went mad and never recovered his sanity; a third, whose two-hundredth birthday we celebrate in 2021, went on to write Crime and Punishment.

The mock-execution and the years in Siberian prison—thinly fictionalized in his novel Notes from the House of the Dead (1860)—changed Dostoevsky forever. His naive, hopeful romanticism disappeared. His religious faith deepened. The sadism of both prisoners and guards taught him that the sunny view of human nature presumed by utilitarianism, liberalism, and socialism were preposterous. Real human beings differed fundamentally from what these philosophies presumed.

People do not live by bread—or, what philosophers called the maximalization of “advantage”—alone. All utopian ideologies presuppose that human nature is fundamentally good and simple: evil and apparent complexity result from a corrupt social order. Eliminate want and you eliminate crime. For many intellectuals, science itself had proven these contentions and indicated the way to the best of all possible worlds. Dostoevsky rejected all these ideas as pernicious nonsense. “It is clear and intelligible to the point of obviousness,” he wrote in a review of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, “that evil lies deeper in human beings than our social-physicians suppose; that no social structure will eliminate evil; that the human soul will remain as it always has been . . . and, finally, that the laws of the human soul are still so little known, so obscure to science, so undefined, and so mysterious, that there are not and cannot be either physicians or final judges” except God Himself.

Read it all (emphasis mine).

His naive, hopeful romanticism disappeared. His religious faith deepened. https://t.co/6ka4j3frZO

— The New Criterion (@newcriterion) January 14, 2021

Father Richard’s engagement in political activism never led him to messianic politics. He died after Barack Obama’s election but before his inauguration, and long before the current president came down the escalator at Trump Tower. He was suspicious of the messianic dimension of Obama’s candidacy and would have been troubled by those who regarded Donald Trump as having some kind of messianic anointing.

Father Richard would have been dismayed at the apocalyptic tone of politics today. The future of the republic does not hang on a presidential election, let alone a senate election in Georgia. Elections have consequences, sometimes, grave consequences, but electoral politics does not heal a corrupt culture.

“Moral progress is far from being self-evident,” Father Richard wrote. “We should at least be open to the possibility that we are today witnessing not moral progress but a dramatic moral regression.”

That possibility was the risk of freedom, and Father Richard knew well that the great American experiment in ordered liberty was just that, an experiment, which would be tested. His commitment to the pro-life cause made him all too aware that that test could be failed….

Read it all.

Father Neuhaus, who died in 2009, Father Richard had great faith in the American people, but he would have been worried these last years, and last Wednesday.
via @fatherdesouzahttps://t.co/o2oOEX3hLB

— National Catholic Register (@NCRegister) January 11, 2021

My own feeling is that writers who see by the light of their Christian faith will have, in these times, the sharpest eyes for the grotesque, for the perverse, and for the unacceptable. In some cases, these writers may be unconsciously infected with the Manichaean spirit of the times and suffer the much-discussed disjunction between sensibility and belief, but I think that more often the reason for this attention to the perverse is the difference between their beliefs and the beliefs of their audience. Redemption is meaningless unless there is case for it in the actual life we live, and for the last few centuries there has been operating in our culture the secular belief that there is no such cause.

The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs as you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock, to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind, you draw large and startling figures.

—Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969) pp. 33-34 [my emphasis]

The Nativity
Ottonian parchment
ca 1025 – 1050 ADhttps://t.co/EakZVRroWY Virgin Mary reclines on a luxurious bed pic.twitter.com/51kP4NCXFP

— Ticia Verveer (@ticiaverveer) December 15, 2015