A firm foundation

I've been going through a filing cabinet and being reminded of things I haven't thought about for some time. In 1993, I served as President of the Seventh Day Baptist General Conference. The office is elected, and its primary responsibilities are planning the Conference week, including its theme, and presiding over the business sessions. The greater part of the week was filled with worship, Bible study, workshops, and fellowship. Conference that year was in Riverside, California. Below is the text of my introduction to the theme for that Conference. It appeared in the denominational magazine, The Sabbath Recorder in April,1993. 

 

Sabbath morning worship, SDB General Conference, 1993

This year's Conference theme is "A Firm Foundation," with Hebrews 12:28 as the key verse: "Since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe."

Our theme hymn will be How Firm a Foundation.

God is utterly reliable. His purposes cannot be frustrated. His kingdom cannot be shaken. Because of His love for us in Christ, we are subjects of that kingdom and joint heirs with His Son. When we face difficult circumstances, frustrations, or weaknesses, our confidence comes from remembering who He is, that He does not change, and that He does not forsake His people. He is the only sure foundation.

Worship and Bible Study themes for Conference week:

Monday, August 9: "Our Foundation is His Word"

"How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord,

Is laid for your faith in His excellent Word!

What more can He say than to you He has said,

To you who for refuge to Jesus have fled?"

Our foundation is God's Word. In the Scriptures we find the record of God's actions toward mankind and His self-revelation in the Law and the Prophets, in His Incarnation, and in the Church. We can find all we need to know in His revelation of Himself.

"Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has gone through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin. Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need" (Hebrews 4:14-16).

Tuesday, August 10: "Our Foundation is in His Strength"

"Fear not, I am with thee, O be not dismayed;

For I am thy God and will still give thee aid.

I'll strengthen thee, help thee, and cause thee to stand,

Upheld by my gracious omnipotent hand."

When we are confronted with hardship, uncertainty, and persecution, we cannot prevail by our own strength—and we do not need to if our god is the Lord. He is strong, and His strength is sufficient to uphold us.

"Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will be joyful in God my Savior. The Sovereign LORD is my strength; He makes my feet like the feet of a deer, He enables me to go on the heights" (Habakkuk 3:17-19).

"If God is for us, who can be against us? ...in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us" (Romans 8:31b, 37).

Wednesday, August 11: "Our Foundation is His Presence"

"When through the deep waters I call thee to go,

The rivers of sorrow shall not overflow.

For I will be with thee, thy troubles to bless,

And sanctify to thee thy deepest distress."

Christians are not promised lives of ease. We are promised that we will not be overwhelmed. If we let Him, He will use even those things which seem most tragic and unfair to serve His purposes. Moreover, we have the assurance of His presence with us, whether or not we feel it.

"And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to His purpose" (Romans 8:28).

"Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith brings perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so you can be mature and complete, not lacking anything" (James 1:2-4).

"I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us" (Romans 8:18).

Thursday, August 12: "Our Foundation Is His Purpose"

"When through fiery trials thy pathway shall lie,

My grace, all sufficient shall be thy supply.

The flame shall not hurt thee;

I only design Thy dross to consume, and thy gold to refine."

Each of us suffers. Some suffering is simply an aspect of living in the world. Some is self-inflicted, some the result of the actions of others, some is Satanic, some is apparently sent by God. Believers are hardly immune, but we do know that suffering is not purposeless. God will use it to our benefit.

"Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God" (2 Corinthians 1:3-4).

"Endure hardship as discipline... No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it. Therefore, strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees" (Hebrews 12:7a, 11-12).

"Blessed is the man who perseveres under trial, because when he has stood the test, he will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love Him" (James 1:12).

Friday, August 13: "Our Foundation Is in His Promise"

"The soul that on Jesus hath leaned for repose,

I will not, I will not desert to his foes.

That soul, though all hell should

endeavor to shake, I'll never, no, never, no never forsake!"

If we have placed our faith in God, we have nothing to fear. He will never desert His people. He has proven His love and His reliability again and again. He died for us. We have already been saved.

"Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or terrified because of them, for the LORD your God goes with you; He will never leave you nor forsake you... The LORD Himself goes before you and will be with you; He will never leave you nor forsake you. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged" (Deuteronomy 31:6,8).

"God has said, 'Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.' So we say with confidence, 'The LORD is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can man do to me?' " (Hebrews 13:5b-6).

Sabbath, August 14: "Our Foundation Is the LORD"

Our citizenship is in the kingdom of God, a kingdom which is not subject to the uncertainties of this world. It is important that we always remember where our allegiance lies. If our foundation is the Lord, we will have the strength to serve Him in this world. If our foundation is the Lord, we will permit Him to use us and make us as He wills.

"For He has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son He loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins" (Colossians 1:13-14).

"Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire" (Hebrews 12:28-29).

"At a particular time and in a specific place"

Yesterday I quoted from Paul Johnson's Modern Times. Johnson was an historian, a graduate of Oxford, a student of C.S. Lewis, and a Christian. The quotations below are from two of his essays I once posted here, neither of which I could find online when I searched today. If anyone does find the sources, please let me know where.

From "A Historian Looks at Jesus":

Christianity, like the Judaism from which it sprang, is a historical religion, or it is nothing. It does not deal in myths and metaphors and symbols, or in states of being and cycles. It deals in facts. It presupposes a linear flight in time, through a real universe of concrete events. It sees humanity as marching inexorably from an irrecoverable past into an unprecedented future. The march is not haphazard. It proceeds according to a divine plan, in part revealed to us. Christians believe that certain specific, historical events occurred, and that, in time, certain other specific historical events will occur, bringing humanity’s sojourn in this world to a climax. Then, to use Shakespeare’s phrase, “time must have a stop." There the Christian’s perception of the timeless world of eternity—the nonhistorical afterlife—is much less clear. But the Christian notion of historical time is very definite, and central to the faith.

Jesus, the Son of God, was born of a virgin, at a particular time and in a specific place. He was God and man. He was crucified for our sins, but rose again the third day. The incarnation and the resurrection are not metaphors but actual, historical events. A man or woman cannot reject their historicity and remain a Christian. To accept the message of Christ, the teaching, the ethics, the example, the human perfection of Christ, is not enough. It is necessary to accept the Godhead as well as the manhood, to believe that the incarnation and the resurrection actually occurred. Without them, Christianity is nothing; it becomes a mere fantasy, a delusion. .... (more)

And from one about Evelyn Waugh:

The truth is that all of us are Jekyll and Hyde creatures, part saint, part beast. The great strength of Christianity is that, while insisting that man is made in the image of God, it accepts that there is a radical flaw in the reproduction. From time to time, God's image is reflected in man's face as in a hideous distorting mirror. Theologians call this the doctrine of Original Sin. But this is merely to rationalize what we can all observe but cannot explain. Shakespeare, in his marvelous play Hamlet, in which he tried to pour everything he knew of man's ambivalent nature, has his hero say: 'What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculties! In form and moving, how express and admirable! In action, how like an angel! In apprehension, how like a God!' And yet, he adds, man is the quintessence of dust. Man can be, and often is, the most destructive, cruel and malicious of creatures. When Dr. Samuel Johnson was touring the Scottish Highlands with James Boswell, Lady Macleod of Dunvegan Castle asked him if no man was naturally good. He replied: 'No madam, no more than a wolf!' Boswell: 'Nor no woman, Sir?' Johnson: 'No, Sir!'

Dr. Johnson's listeners were shocked by his rigor, but what he meant was obvious enough. We have a propensity to evil in our natures which cannot be entirely corrected from our own resources. We need external help to keep our dark side under control.... (more)

Paul Johnson's approach reminds me of Dorothy L. Sayers.

"Thus the modern practice of genocide was born"

If you wish to understand the 20^th century, you could do much worse than starting with Paul Johnson's Modern Times (revised edition, 2001). I discovered today that the full text is available online in a variety of formats, but the physical book is worth owning. The following is from the second chapter, which deals mostly with the regimes Lenin and Mussolini created. The "Cheka" referred to below was Lenin's secret police, leading to various successors: MVD, OGPU, NKVD, KGB, Putin's Federal Security Service. Putin himself was trained by, and rose through, the KGB.

In the first six months of 1918 the Cheka executed, according to its official figures, only twenty-two prisoners. In the second half of the year it carried out 6,000 executions, and in the whole of 1919 some 10,000. W.H. Chamberlain, the first historian of the revolution, who was an eyewitness, calculated that by the end of 1920 the Cheka had carried out over 50,000 death sentences.

However, the most disturbing and, from the historical point of view, important characteristic of the Lenin terror was not the quantity of the victims but the principle on which they were selected. Within a few months of seizing power, Lenin had abandoned the notion of individual guilt and, with it, the whole Judeo-Christian ethic of personal responsibility. He was ceasing to be interested in what a man did or had done — let alone why he had done it — and was first encouraging, then commanding, his repressive apparatus to hunt down people, and destroy them, not on the basis of crimes, real or imaginary, but on the basis of generalizations, hearsay.... The watershed was Lenin's decree of January 1918 calling on the agencies of the state to 'purge the Russian land of all kinds of harmful insects'. This was not a judicial act: it was an invitation to mass murder. Many years later, Alexander Solzhenitsyn listed just a few of the groups who thus found themselves condemned to destruction as 'insects'. They included 'former Zemstvo members, people in the Coop[erative] movements, homeowners, high-school teachers, parish councils and choirs, priests, monks and nuns, Tolstoyan pacifists, officials of trade unions' — soon all to be classified as 'former people'. Quite quickly the condemned group decree-laws extended to whole classes and the notion of killing people collectively rather than individually was seized upon by the Cheka professionals with enthusiasm. Probably the most important Cheka official next to Dzerzhinsky himself was the ferocious Latvian M.Y. Latsis. He came nearest to giving the Lenin terror its true definition:

The Extraordinary Commission is neither an investigating commission nor a tribunal. It is an organ of struggle, acting on the home front of a civil war. It does not judge the enemy: it strikes him.... We are not carrying out war against individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. We are not looking for evidence or witnesses to reveal deeds or words against the Soviet power. The first question we ask is — to what class does he belong, what are his origins, upbringing, education or profession? These questions define the fate of the accused. This is the essence of the Red Terror.

Once Lenin had abolished the idea of personal guilt, and had started to 'exterminate' (a word he frequently employed) whole classes, merely on account of occupation or parentage, there was no limit to which this deadly principle might be carried. Might not entire categories of people be classified as 'enemies' and condemned to imprisonment or slaughter merely on account of the colour of their skin, or their racial origins or, indeed, their nationality? There is no essential moral difference between class-warfare and race-warfare, between destroying a class and destroying a race. Thus the modern practice of genocide was born. ....

Paul Johnson, Chapter 2 "The First Despotic Utopias," Modern Times, 2001.

Coming of age

From another essay in The Free Press series, "Things Worth Remembering." I do remember a time when my parents didn't really care what I was doing so long as I turned up for meals. I also remember the time in my adolescence when our parents were perfectly willing to let a bunch of us high-school-age guys take the train down to Chicago without any adults going along. We wandered around the Loop, took the "El" to the Science and Industry Museum, visited some bookstores, and returned by train that evening. About Stand by Me and times already gone before the movie was made:

Three adolescent boys are gathered in a ramshackle tree house—the kind you might have built yourself as a kid, if you were born before 1990, using scrap wood and a bucket of nails; the kind that would get you an unpleasant visit from your homeowners association were your own kids to attempt the same thing today.

This, the opening scene of Rob Reiner’s film Stand by Me, is the first indication that this story takes place in a very different time; the second, in case you missed the first, is that the boys are smoking cigarettes, playing cards, and listening to Bobby Day on a transistor radio. But this is only the setup for a punch line that arrives moments later, as another boy bursts into the tree house with a breathless question that will alter the trajectory of the rest of their lives:

“You guys want to go see a dead body?”

The answer, obviously, is yes. ....

This was a world in which it was still possible for a group of kids on the cusp of 13 to simply disappear for a period of 36 hours, during which their parents were not just unaware of but also not even curious as to their whereabouts, and if they got into trouble somewhere along the way, they would simply have to get themselves out of it. More than that: The act of extricating yourself from a mess of your own making was understood to be valuable, even essential, fueled by an unspoken consensus that growing up is a thing kids could only truly do in moments when they were on their own, out of adult view. Your upbringing was your parents’ responsibility, sure, but your coming-of-age? This was none of their business. You knew it, and so did they. ....

In hindsight, 1959 was the beginning of the end for this boundless, archetypal American adolescence. If it had been set just a decade later, this same story might have come to an abrupt conclusion after the boys’ parents were reminded of their existence by one of those by then standard public service announcements on the evening news: “It’s 10 p.m. Do you know where your children are?!” Ten years after that, the kidnappings of Etan Patz and Adam Walsh ushered in an era of skyrocketing anxiety over the safety of children and with it, far less freedom for wanderlust-afflicted preteens. ....

Meanwhile, this year, a poll from the Institute for Family Studies revealed that a majority of 14-year-olds aren’t allowed to leave the street where they live without adult supervision. .... (more)

Kat Rosenfield, "A Time Capsule of Free-Range Childhood," The Free Press, August 14, 2026.

God is God, and I am not

I was recently reminded of Ben Patterson's Waiting: Finding Hope When God Seems Silent, a book that has been important to my understanding, so I repost this from "The Epilog" of that book:

Does it strike you as odd that a book on waiting has scarcely mentioned the word patience? Or perseverance? Aren't those the virtues that we are to exercise when we are forced to wait? They are, but they are secondary to what really is needed to wait with grace. More basic than patience or perseverance are humility and hope. These two are the attitudes, the visions of life, that make patience possible. Patience is a rare and lovely flower that grows only in the soil of humility and hope.

Humility makes patience possible because it shows us our proper place in the universe. God is God, we are his creatures; he is the King, we are his subjects; he is master, we are his servants. We have no demands to make, no rights to assert. I can be impatient only if I think that whatever it is I want is being withheld or delayed unfairly. As Chuck Swindoll put it, "God is not in your appointment book; you're in his." His superiority is not only in power and authority, it is in love and wisdom as well. He has the right to do whatever he wants to do, whenever he wants to do it, but he also has the love to desire what is best for all his creatures and the wisdom to know what is best. He is superior to us in every conceivable way—in power and love and wisdom. To know that is to be patient.

Hope makes patience possible because it gives us the confidence that our wait is not in vain. Hope believes that this God of love, power and wisdom is on our side. It exults in the knowledge that, in the delays of life, he knows exactly what he is doing. If he moves quickly, it is for our good; if he moves slowly, it is for our good. No matter how things look to us, God is the complete master of the situation. There is an old theological word for this—providence. The venerable Heidelberg Catechism defines God's providence as:

The Almighty and everywhere present power of God; whereby, as it were, by his hand, he upholds and governs heaven, earth, and all creatures; so that herbs and grass, rain and drought, fruitful and barren years, meat and drink, health and sickness, riches and poverty, yea all things come not by chance, but by his fatherly hand.

There are no accidents, no glitches with God. He does all things well. Everything that comes to us comes by his hand and through his heart. He provides for our needs and fulfills our deepest desires in the fullness of time, not a moment too late, nor a second too soon. Hope assures us that in all things, even in the delays of life, God is working for our good. To know that is to be patient.

One of the surprise "goods" that God is working for us as we wait is the forging of our character. What we become as we wait is at least as important as the thing we wait for. To wait in hope is not just to pass the time until the wait is over. It is to see the time passing as part of the process God is using to make us into the people he created us to be. Job emerges from his wait dazzled and transformed. Abram becomes Abraham and Sarai becomes Sarah.

Hope invites us to look at our waitings from the grand perspective of God's eternal purposes. In fact to be a believer is, by definition, to be one who waits. When Jesus won his victory over sin and death, he ascended into heaven, promising one day to return. We Christians wait for that return, poised between the times, in the "already, but not yet." We look back to his victory and strain forward to see its consummation.

The apostle Paul says the pain of our waiting is like the waiting of childbirth. It is the tension and groaning of labor (Rom 8:22-25). I attended my wife in the births of each of our four children. One thing struck me as odd about each event: that the time when she was required to exert her greatest effort and push the baby out was the time when she was least able. She was exhausted from hours of labor and now she was to summon all her strength and push. How could she? Hope made it possible: the hope of giving birth to the child. When human strength was gone, something beyond the purely human took over and gave her the strength she needed.

The Bible said it would be this way for those who hope in God. "Those who hope in the LORD will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint" (Is 40:31). Likewise for our Lord Jesus and his cross, "who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him...so that you will not grow weary and lose heart" (Heb 12:2-3).

My wish is that we might gain the humility and hope to not grow weary and lose heart. I hope that you and I might be able to say, with full hearts, what Henrietta Mears said near the end of her life. This wonderfully eccentric and indefatigable saint accomplished great things for God in her life. When asked if there was anything she would have done differently, had she her life to live over, she said without hesitation, "I would trust God more."

Ben Patterson, Waiting: Finding Hope When God Seems Silent, 1989, pp. 167-170.

Though the fig tree do not blossom,
nor fruit be on the vines,
the produce of the olive fail
and the fields yield no food,
the flock be cut off from the fold
and there be no herd in the stalls,
yet I will rejoice in the LORD,
I will joy in the God of my salvation.  (Hab 3:17–18)

A vocation rather than a career

Jay Norlinger, in his blog "Onward and Upward," quoted a speech delivered by long-term GOP representative from Illinois, Congressman Henry Hyde, who served in the House from 1975 to 2007. He addressed newly elected Republican members:

This may sound odd, even ironic. You are here in the flush of victory. And yet it is precisely now that I ask you to contemplate the possibility of defeat—perhaps even the necessity of defeat.

Edmund Burke, in 1774, set forth a model we should all emulate when he told his Bristol constituents: “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement, and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”

Let me put the matter plainly: If you are here simply as a tote board registering the current state of opinion in your district, you are not going to serve either your constituents or the Congress of the United States well.

Your constituents expect you to represent their interests, and that you should certainly do. But you are also a member of the Congress, and your responsibilities are far greater than those of an ombudsman for your district. You must take, at times, a national view, even if, in taking that view, you risk the displeasure of your neighbors and friends back home.

Indeed, I feel obliged to put the matter more sharply still: If you don’t know the principle, or the policy, for which you are willing to lose your office, then you are going to do damage here.

This institution needs more members willing to look beyond the biennial contest for power, more committed to public service as a vocation rather than merely a career.

Jay Nordlinger, "Taking Sides," Onward and Upward, August 13, 2026.

"If we had but...""

Hail Caesar! (2016) was one of the less commercially successful Coen brothers films, perhaps because it demanded too much audience familiarity with the cultural and political environment of the 1950s. It is set in a Hollywood film studio of that era and focuses primarily on the production of a Biblical epic about "the Christ." I like most of the Coen films, and I enjoyed most of this one (I'm always a fan of films in which the Coens cast George Clooney as an idiot). A month or so ago, Alan Jacobs wrote about one particular scene:

Baird Whitlock as Autolochus: This Hebrew is son of the one God, the God of this far-flung tribe. And why shouldn’t God’s anointed appear here, among these strange people, in this strange place? Here, Gracchus, in this sundrenched land. Why should he not take this form — the form of an ordinary man? A man bringing us not the old truths, but a new one.

Gracchus: A new truth?

Autolochus: A truth beyond the truth that we can see. A truth beyond this world, a truth told not in words but in light. A truth that we could see if we had but … if we had but — but —

Director: Cut. CUT! Faith. Had but faith.

Baird Whitlock: Faith. Faith! FAITH!! Goddamn! Isn’t it —

Director: They changed it. ....

Jacobs:

.... The next scene is one of the climactic scenes in the movie — both the Hail, Caesar! that he is filming and the one that we are watching. He speaks his lines very well. They are vivid words, and he gives them power. As the speech quoted above moves gathers rhetorical momentum, the people on the set sit up and take notice. The script girl, the grip, cameramen, sound men — they hear this message delivered eloquently, compellingly. Like Gracchus, they respond in their souls to this “new truth,” this promise of a beautiful revolution in their lives and in the world. “It is a truth,” Antoninus Autolochus says, “that we could lay hold of, had we but…”

“Had we but…” And then we realize that Baird Whitlock is a wonderful actor, but to him, the words he’s been given to speak are just his lines. They do not sink any deeper into his consciousness than that. He says them very well; he says them as though he means them. But he doesn’t mean them. He can’t remember what it is that would enable us to lay hold of this new truth — and indeed, the filmmakers aren’t so sure either, because when Baird learned his lines some other word had been there in place of “faith”....

As Baird Whitlock speaks, people are moved primarily by words and voice. Some screenwriter(s) wrote these words, and then Baird Whitlock says these words with conviction and eloquence. He’s an actor; he inhabits the language, and that alone is enough to draw the audience in — the audience in this case being simply the crew. But the Coen brothers play a little trick on us here, because as Baird Whitlock is speaking, we start to hear music, swelling orchestral music that undergirds and amplifies his words. But of course, that wouldn’t be audible on set — indeed, the score wouldn’t yet have been composed. ....

You get a sense that the crew are imaginatively supplying an orchestral score appropriate to the scene. And when you add that music to well-chosen words enunciated skillfully by an actor with real personal presence, well — disbelief doesn’t stand a chance, does it? .... (more)

Alan Jacobs, "If we had but faith," The Homeward Sympathy, July 1, 2026.

Storytelling

Last year I posted about two books I wanted to read that were to be published in 2026. One of them, Michael Dirda's The Great Age of Storytelling: The Glory Days of Adventurers and Rogues, Time Travelers and Great Detectives, is now for sale at Amazon, although the expected publication date isn't until December. From Dirda's description of the contents:

In it, I reintroduce many influential, if now too seldom read, classics of adventure, mystery, horror and romance. Some of my favorites include the three ornately written mysteries in M.P. Shiel’s Prince Zaleski, Richard Marsh’s astonishingly transgressive horror novel, The Beetle, J.M. Barrie’s multiverse play, Dear Brutus, and a shelf of swashbucklers such as Rafael Sabatini’s Captain Blood, Emmuska Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel and P.C. Wren’s Beau Geste, as well as E.F. Benson’s “spook stories” and Saki’s sardonic Beasts and Super Beasts. There are also long essays on Robert Louis Stevenson, H. Rider Haggard, H.G. Wells, Edith Nesbit, Rudyard Kipling, P.G. Wodehouse, John Buchan and Algernon Blackwood, among others.

I'm particularly interested in what Dirda says about the authors listed in the last sentence above.

Michael Dirda, "Disillusioned by politics, I read these books to get out of my slump," The Washington Post, May 9, 2025

"Let him who has my word speak..."

Old Testament Reading

23 “Am I a God at hand, declares the LORD, and not a God far away? 24 Can a man hide himself in secret places so that I cannot see him? declares the LORD. Do I not fill heaven and earth? declares the LORD. 25 I have heard what the prophets have said who prophesy lies in my name, saying, ‘I have dreamed, I have dreamed!’ 26 How long shall there be lies in the heart of the prophets who prophesy lies, and who prophesy the deceit of their own heart, 27 who think to make my people forget my name by their dreams that they tell one another, even as their fathers forgot my name for Baal? 28 Let the prophet who has a dream tell the dream, but let him who has my word speak my word faithfully. .... Jeremiah 23:23-28 (ESV)

The Daily Liturgy, Mere Orthodoxy, August 8, 2026.

May I be ardent to obey

I have subscribed to The Daily Liturgy offered by Mere Orthodoxy. It is available as a morning newsletter, online, or as a podcast and can be subscribed here. It is free. I get the newsletter. One subscriber says he listens to it as he drives to work every day. I like it. It includes an Old Testament passage, one from the New Testament, a Psalm, and prayers. Today this was the "Prayer of Confession":

Merciful Father, although you have promised me everlasting joy, I am often lazy, apathetic, and hard-hearted. Deliver me, O God, from a slothful mind, from all lukewarmness, and all dejection of spirit. I know these cannot but deaden my love to you; mercifully free my heart from them, and give me a lively, zealous, active, and cheerful spirit; that I may vigorously perform whatever you command, thankfully suffer whatever you choose for me, and be ardent to obey your holy love in all things.

The Daily Liturgy at Mere Orthodoxy,

"A different country"

"The Two Types of History" contrasts two approaches typified by reactions to the recent film, Odyssey:

.... Both in the run-up to the film’s release and now as it commands Homeric box office numbers, why and how we delve into the past has become a live topic among academics and cultural commentators of late—and on display in the Musk-Holland dispute are two different approaches to this subject. The Rest Is History Festival was Holland’s approach on the podcast made manifest: a humble curiosity about the past that invites people in. It is a dynamic (and attractive) approach that contrasts mightily with both the chauvinism and sentimental nostalgia that can curdle an enthusiasm for history into something toxic and divisive. ....

...[O]n the Rest Is History podcast, Holland and Sandbrook are not deploying history to take down a rival ideological camp. A typical episode is more of an exploration of the past than a polemical exercise. Their version of history knows its own limits as a discipline, both as a prognosticating tool and as a roadmap. ....

Both at the festival and on their podcast, whether Sandbrook and Holland are talking about the Battle of Little Bighorn, Joan of Arc, or ancient Rome, the focus is on humanity rather than civilization writ large. And no one could accuse them of undervaluing the latter in their work. But they are not interested in arguing that a civilization is good because it is powerful, or that it is powerful because it is good. Holland’s book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World sees Western civilization and its intellectual tradition as worth preserving precisely because a Christian society upholds the human person’s inherent dignity and worth.

For the people who view history as an unerring road map to civilizational glory, the past is a cautionary tale: We have to learn from the great empires’ failures to avoid decline.

But Sandbrook and Holland are pursuing something more interesting than retrofitting the past to suit their ideological priors. ....

The Rest Is History contemplates the past as a different country, but without indulging in the temporal hubris of people who simply happen to be alive, flattering themselves that they are superior to their predecessors. The result is something refreshingly apolitical and convivial. ....

Sandbrook summed it up best: “The past is ultimately unknowable,” he said. And it is because Holland and Sandbrook keep this last part always in mind that they approach the past less as a “how-to” manual and more as a humbling reminder that one day, much of the way we live will be unknowable to future generations. As the popularity of both the podcast and the festival shows, The Rest Is History has found a winning formula in a study of history that is more interested in understanding the past than proving the present wrong. (more)

There is an archive of The Rest is History podcasts here.

 

Maggie Phillips, "The Two Types of History," The Dispatch, August 3, 2026.

"If you're ever confused..."

I have never cared much about Boy George. In fact, I doubt I would recognize any of his songs. But the lyrics of a recent one came to my attention. It's called "We will dance again," a title that became "a motto that symbolizes renewal and recovery following the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas that left 1,200 dead, about 364 of them concert-goers at the Supernova Music Festival, where the dancing was interrupted by rockets and then murder."

You say genocide, I say war
When you're attacked, that's what the army's for
Does it get ugly? You bet it does
When I know you wanna kill
Every last one of us
Every last one of us
Every last one of us
You never mention October 7
Young girls raped against trees
Murdered brutally
For the crime of dancing
You condemn the Jews, with selective memory
Musicians holding flags, mouthing like sheep
Propaganda fuelled by the Internet feels so weak

[Chorus] But trust me, we will dancе again
We will dance again
We will dancе again
And there will be no war
But if you're ever confused
I stand with the Jews
I don't feel brave, I just need to behave like a human
But trust me, we will dance again
We will dance again
We will dance again
And there will be no war
But if you're ever confused
I stand with the Jews
I don't feel brave, I just need to behave like a human.
"Sometimes It Takes a Boy (George)," Jonathan S. Greenwald, July 30, 2026.

Master of suspense

Those who follow this blog know that one of my favorite authors is John Buchan (1875-1940). I have posted about him, his thrillers, and other writings many times. Last evening I came across this BBC documentary, "John Buchan Master of Suspense," from 2007. If you've read Buchan at all, you will find it interesting. If you haven't, ignoring my recommendations, you may find it encourages you to give him a chance. It is quite good, primarily about his thrillers featuring Richard Hannay, the first of which was The 39 Steps, as well as the author's biography.

Ann Widdecombe, one of the commenters, was the former Conservative parliamentarian who was brutally murdered by a suspected terrorist this summer.

"John Buchan Master of Suspense," BBC, 2007.

The lust to dominate

I have only tangentially experienced a domineering pastor: I once learned I was on a pastor's enemies list. I never knew why. I have more than once known of churches destroyed or badly wounded by that kind of leadership, two by the same guy. Of course that sort of leadership appears in secular settings too, probably far more often. But a Christian church ought to be different. From "Protecting the Sheep from Domineering Pastors":

Every generation produces its version of the holy tyrant. The names change but not the pattern. Even the titles can vary: senior pastor, ruling elder, or influential layman with the loudest voice in the room. What they share is a widening circle of personal authority and the slow accumulation of wreckage that follows them: broken relationships, silenced dissent, fleeing members, shattered congregations.

This pattern should not surprise us. Augustine identified this impulse 16 centuries ago and gave it a name: the libido dominandi — the lust to dominate.

In “The City of God” (14:28), Augustine drew the defining contrast between two cities, two loves, two images of self. The earthly city is built on love of self and contempt for God. The heavenly city, on the other hand, is built on love of God and contempt for self. In the earthly city, men are ruled by libido dominandi. In the heavenly city, by the love of serving.

Augustine added a twist that every church leader should read slowly: the proud are made subject to their own desire. The lust to dominate becomes the lust that dominates. The man who sets out to control others ends up enslaved to the need. ....

Jonathan Edwards defined pride as a man “having too high a thought of himself” – something imperceptible to someone so afflicted. That interior miscalibration is where the libido dominandi germinates. Before the tyrant fires anyone, rewrites the bylaws, or silences the first dissenter, he has already concluded in the unexamined recesses of his own heart that his judgment is superior to other people’s.

The lust to dominate rarely begins with naked ambition; it usually begins with real competence. The leader who can preach, cast vision, manage a budget, or simply outwork everyone in the room comes to a reasonable-sounding conclusion: I know what I’m doing. These people don’t. My judgment is better than theirs. I need to take charge of the situation.

This conclusion may even be true in some cases, but pride always demands more. I’m smarter than they are. I see what they can’t see. I have a better grasp of the mission, theology, and the future of this church. And because I know better, my authority to direct them is righteous. And opposing me obstructs God’s work.

Scripture tells a different story:

Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others” (Philippians 2:3–4). ....

What makes libido dominandi so insidious in church settings is that it can wear the face of sacrifice.

The domineering pastor is often genuinely hardworking, passionate about the mission, and willing to absorb personal cost in service of the vision. He may honestly believe that the people resisting him are spiritually immature, self-interested, or deceived, and that the loving thing is to override them. (It’s not always the pastor. Sometimes, the pastor is the victim.) ....

Augustine’s two cities are not hypothetical. They are the competing realms chosen by every leader, elder, session, and every one of us. The earthly city runs on the lust to dominate. The heavenly city runs on the love of serving. .... (more)

Steven J. Willing, "Protecting the Sheep from Domineering Pastors," byFaith (PCA), July 27, 2026.

Something deeper

English vicars have noticed increasing numbers of young people in their congregations. The Church of England commissioned a report to discover "what was drawing 18 to 30-year-olds to it. .... It investigated those who had come to Christianity from lapsed or atheist English upbringings, and also from migrant backgrounds and other faiths." It was released with "a lack of fanfare," perhaps because it wasn't really what they wanted to hear. From The Telegraph yesterday:

.... It is clear that the spiritual needs of the young, as articulated in the report, are in severe tension with the Church’s own direction.

One notable finding is that many of the young were prompted to start their journey towards Christianity by its literary and intellectual heritage.

Respondents described encounters with C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, Dostoyevsky, and David Bentley Hart, the Orthodox theologian. One 28-year-old, who had not been to university, was engaged by his interest in J.R.R. Tolkien, when he came to understand the role that Christian thought played in The Lord of the Rings. ....

The report dismisses the idea that the young will be attracted simply by slick visuals and hollowed-out presentations of the faith. They are looking for a rigorous understanding of life and morality. Many are put off by the shallowness of modern secular culture and are looking for something deeper.

The beauty of the Church’s artistic heritage was for others the first hint of this deeper world. One 21-year-old spoke of visiting a church in York and finding the light “streaming through” the ancient stained glass windows “and casting rainbows everywhere” as being “the most beautiful thing” he had ever seen. The historic buildings, for the young, can be a powerful form of evangelism.

It is likewise for the centuries-old Book of Common Prayer. “You have a connection to something that…however many generations of your ancestors would recognise and understand, the same liturgy that you’re reading. [It’s] immensely powerful,” said one 25-year-old. ....

These findings are almost a complete catalogue of what the Church is moving away from. .... (more)

Bijan Omrani, "Gen Z craves full-fat religion while the Church acts like a secular NGO," The Telegraph, July 26, 2026.

Surrendering judgement

Gary Saul Morson, on a consequence of short (or no) historical memory:

A zombie is haunting America, the zombie of communism. Pronounced dead and discredited after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is back. ....

...I cannot help wondering: How is this possible? Do these people really have no problem with the history of the ideology they’re claiming? With Joseph Stalin’s Gulag that took the lives of millions, his artificially induced famine that deliberately starved several million peasants, and the secret police’s form of interrogation that routinely included torture? Do they actually want to revive Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution and the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror that claimed the lives of a quarter of Cambodia’s population?

Three quarters of a century ago, questions like these led to one of the most important volumes to emerge during the Cold War. Now largely forgotten, The God That Failed (1949) was once so widely read that the volume’s title became a catchphrase for any movement that attracted intellectuals to a quasi-religious ideology claiming infallibility.

The God That Failed brought together several prominent European and American writers who had once either been members of the Communist Party or sympathetic to the Soviet Union, but had eventually grown disillusioned. Each writer explained what initially attracted him to, and what eventually repelled him from, communism. The star-studded cast included Arthur Koestler, an Hungarian-born British writer now best known for his brilliant novel about communism, Darkness at Noon; French novelist André Gide; the Italian Ignazio Silone, author of Bread and Wine; British poet Stephen Spender; and two Americans, journalist and author Louis Fischer, and African American writer Richard Wright. ....

The supreme virtue of the Soviet Union was called partiinost (partyness). Partyness begins with the readiness to give up one’s own judgment—not only about politics but also about people, including one’s most intimate friends—whenever it conflicts with the judgment of the Party. Slogans and formulas became the means to this end, wielding hypnotic power when repeated over and over again, especially in the presence of others doing the same thing. This approach puzzled the authors of The God That Failed: They wanted to conclude on their own that communism is true, but they were told that one must only see what the Party saw and think what it thought. ....

Several of The God That Failed contributors remark on a particular moment that should have given the game away. When Silone, as part of an Italian delegation to the Soviet Union, asked to read a document he was told to condemn, he was told: “You haven’t yet understood what politics are all about.” Surprised at how the word “Trotskyite” was thrown around, Wright asked a communist man: “‘If you found me reading Trotsky, what would that mean to you?’ ‘Comrade, you don’t understand,’ he said in an annoyed tone. That ended the conversation.”

They had not yet “understood” the Leninist idea of truth: There is no such thing as neutral, objective truth, irrespective of political interests. Truth was whatever was useful for the Party to regard as true. “This way of thinking canceled out all experiential objections,” Spender explains: “The thousands of people in prison camps.... Do these exist? Whether or not they do, it is bourgeois propaganda to maintain so. Therefore one must deny that there are any slave labor camps in Russia,” and that’s all there is to it. .... (more)

Gary Saul Morson, "The Return of the God That Failed," The Free Press, July 24, 2026.

Dangerous dreamers

Patrick Kurp begins his post today quoting Samuel Johnson:

How small of all that human hearts endure

That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!

Still to ourselves in every place consign’d,

Our own felicity we make or find.

Kurp continues:

A reader complains about the absence of politics at Anecdotal Evidence, and I thank him for noticing. It’s not a compelling subject. Busybodies with big ideas, unafraid to impose them on others, are dangerous. In Reflections on a Ravaged Century (2000), Robert Conquest — poet and historian, Jeremiah of Communism and its evils — writes:

[I]t is no part of its culture that a government elected by a bare majority, or even by a fairly large majority, is thereby empowered to totally reconstruct the social and political order by sacrificing the minority. That great political philosopher Michael Oakeshott notes that for some people government is ‘an instrument of passion; the art of politics is to inflame and direct desire.’ For others, which is to say, in general, for those who have a traditional regard for the unity and continuity of a culture, the business of government is something different: ‘to restrain, to deflate, to pacify, and to reconcile; not to stoke the fires of desire, but to damp them down,’ on the grounds that, as Oakeshott puts it, ‘the conjunction of dreaming and ruling generates tyranny.’

Conquest is quoting Oakeshott’s Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (1962; rev. 1991). .... (more)

A contemporary example: "I Was in the DSA. Here’s What They Really Believe"

Patrick Kurp, "The Conjunction of Dreaming and Ruling," Anecdotal Evidence, July 21, 2026.

Five cups a day...

Good news! Perhaps my healthiest beverage:

There is good news for coffee drinkers: Up to five cups of the brew a day are safe for most adults and may even have benefits for heart health, according to a new scientific statement by the American Heart Association.

Downing between about three to five 8-ounce cups of joe daily, or around 400 milligrams of caffeine, is linked to a lower risk of heart disease, heart failure, stroke and Type 2 diabetes, according to the AHA’s statement, which was published Monday in the journal Circulation. ....

The potential benefits of coffee, however, can be diluted or eliminated by the stuff many people add to it, the authors said, like sugar, syrups and creamers with a lot of saturated fat. .... (more)

Andrea Petersen, "Five Cups of Coffee a Day Is Fine for Most Adults, Heart Association Says," The Wall Street Journal, July 20, 2026.

Drifting away

Ryan Burge, who does statistical research about religion in America, was curious about why individuals become "nones." Once it seemed politics was the most important reason, but now not so much. The quotations below are from his conclusions based on the research. The article includes statistics and additional charts like the one above. Burge:

In the late 1990s, about 15% of liberals were nones compared to 5% of conservatives—a clear divide, but not an impassable chasm. That’s no longer true. Now, 43% of ideological liberals say they have no religious affiliation compared to just 12% of conservatives. A ten-point gap has tripled in size, and there’s no evidence these trend lines will converge anytime soon. ....

Among Catholic “stayers,” 39% are Republicans and 36% are Democrats. For Protestants who stuck around, those numbers are 47% and 29%, respectively. But among those who switched from Protestant to Catholic or Catholic to Protestant, a clear pattern emerges: switchers inside Christianity are consistently the most Republican of any subgroup examined here. ....

And here’s where I had a “holy cow” moment. The types of nones who are the least Democratic are those who have been non-religious their entire lives. Only 38% say they are Democrats, 42% identify as politically Independent, and 20% align with the GOP. In contrast, among ex-Christians who become nones, roughly 45% say they are Democrats—seven points higher than the “always nones.”

This is fascinating because it suggests a mismatch between what drives people to leave Protestantism or Catholicism and what it means to have never been religious at all. People who actively exit a faith tradition aren’t just drifting; they’re making a decision, and that decision appears correlated with a particular political worldview. Leaving a church isn’t religiously neutral; for many people, it seems to be a political act.

The “always nones” tell a different story. They weren’t pushed out of anything; they simply never had a religious identity to begin with. Without that experience of exit, there’s no corresponding political signal. They’re secular by default rather than conviction, and their politics reflect that—more Independent, less reliably Democratic, and harder to categorize. ....

...[A]mong those born in the 1990s and 2000s who left Christianity behind, only about a third identify as Democrats. The political premium that came with religious exit has nearly vanished. These younger “dechurchers” don’t look like political refugees; they look more like people who simply stopped going—gradually, quietly, without it meaning much ideologically one way or the other. ....

The story of the nones, in other words, has changed. The first wave left with conviction. The second wave just drifted out the door. (more)

Ryan Burge, "The First Wave Left with Conviction. The Second Wave Just Drifted," Graphs About Religion, July 16, 2026.

Mistaking suspicion for sophistication

Bryan A. Garner agrees that conspiracies do happen, but:

For some people, a bad outcome is never just a bad outcome, and a coincidence is never just a coincidence. There must always be a hidden hand behind it, coordinating events that, on the surface, look random or trivial.

Not long ago, this instinct seemed like harmless eccentricity. Conspiracy theorists lived at the margins, alongside doomsayers and end-time prophets. Most people treated them as curiosities rather than participants in serious argument. Today, though, that boundary has eroded. Conspiracy thinking hasn’t just survived into the present — it has moved into the mainstream of political and cultural life, shaping how large numbers of people interpret ordinary events. ....

Conspiracy thinking didn’t become mainstream because people suddenly became irrational. It became mainstream because habits that once signaled intellectual seriousness — skepticism, independence, distrust of authority — have mutated into forms that are less disciplined and less self-correcting.

Consider skepticism in its healthier forms. A skeptic is supposed to withhold belief until evidence justifies it. But conspiracy thinking often inverts that discipline. Official explanations are treated as suspect by default, while unofficial ones are treated as credible precisely because they’re unofficial. The burden of proof is quietly upended. Instead of asking what would make a claim true, people ask what would disprove it — and the claims are structured to resist disproof.

A healthy mind doesn’t begin with suspicion; it arrives there. It starts with a provisional willingness to accept ordinary explanations, then shifts toward doubt only when specific features of the evidence justify it — persistent anomalies, independent corroboration of misconduct, patterns that resist simpler accounts. Suspicion is an earned response, not a default posture, and it remains tethered to standards that allow it to be revised or abandoned when contrary evidence appears. Conspiracy thinking breaks from this discipline by treating suspicion of traditional sources as the starting point and then insulating that mindset from the kinds of evidence that would ordinarily dispel it.

What makes this especially strange is that conspiracy thinking often presents itself as the most skeptical stance available. Yet it routinely demands greater leaps of faith than the explanations it rejects. ....

Conspiracy thinking isn’t going away. It’s too deeply rooted in how human beings respond to uncertainty, scale, and loss of control. The real question isn’t whether it will persist but what conditions we might normalize around it. A society that mistakes suspicion for sophistication, and disbelief for intelligence, may feel more critical, but it’s actually becoming easier to persuade with less and less evidence. (more)

Bryan A. Garner, "The Heart of Conspiracy," National Review, June 11, 2026.