St Mary Mead

The New Criterion has published an excerpt from Theodore Dalrymple's soon-to-be-published book about Agatha Christie. I always enjoy reading Dalrymple, and I enjoy reading about Christie. If you have ever been a reader of Christie's mysteries, I think you would enjoy this. A few excerpts from the excerpt:

The literary critic Fredric Jameson captures the difference between English and American crime fiction in his book about Agatha Christie’s detractor Raymond Chandler:

the murder in the placid English village or in the fogbound London club is read as the scandalous sign of an interruption in a peaceful continuity; whereas the gangland violence of the American big city is felt as a secret destiny, a kind of nemesis lurking beneath the surfaces of hastily acquired fortunes, anarchic city growth, and impermanent personal lives.

With the destruction of gentility as an ideal in England, it is not surprising that crime writing in England should come to resemble its American equivalent, exceptions being made for the backward-looking or nostalgic stories set in a world that no longer exists. Murder has been democratized, or at least made demotic.

For myself, I have had enough to do with real murder in modern England to prefer the gentrified type in Agatha Christie. Most murder is merely sordid, unmysterious, stupid, and not infrequently drunken, or alternatively engendered by passions of a crude culture, of which I do not wish to be reminded when I read for pleasure. ....

The whole point of the murders in Agatha Christie is that they are committed in a milieu where they are least expected, a milieu in which people generally behave with refinement, carry no cosh, and do not stab each other to death in stupid drunken arguments.

She is aware that under any surface, however polished it may be, human nature remains the same. ....

She is always ready to draw an analogy between the events in her quiet, delightful, seemingly idyllic village of St Mary Mead, full of hollyhocks and climbing roses, and the criminality that she is investigating. When Mrs. Van Rydock first tells her that she (Mrs. Van Rydock) had a bad feeling about the atmosphere at Stonygates, Miss Marple at once recalls something that happened at St Mary Mead.

“I remember,” said Miss Marple thoughtfully, “one Sunday morning at church—it was the second Sunday in Advent—sitting behind Grace Lamble and feeling more and more worried about her. Quite sure, you know, that something was wrong—badly wrong—and yet being quite unable to say why. A most disturbing feeling and very very definite.”

The next day, Grace Lamble’s father, an old admiral with whom she lived, attacked her with a coal hammer and nearly killed her, claiming that she wasn’t his daughter at all, but the Antichrist posing as such.

Mrs. Van Rydock asks Miss Marple whether she had a premonition that something of the kind was about to happen, the implication being that there is, perhaps, a kind of mental faculty unrecognized by science. Miss Marple provides a rational explanation: “I wouldn’t call it a premonition. It was founded on fact—these things usually are, though one doesn’t always recognise it at the time.”

Grace Lamble, it turned out, had been wearing her hat the wrong way round that Sunday, and she was normally a most precise and careful woman. ....

Mrs. Van Rydock expresses surprise that such things go on in St Mary Mead, which she had imagined as a kind of paradise. Miss Marple replies: “Human nature, dear, is very much the same everywhere. It is more difficult to observe it clearly in a city, that is all.” .... (more)

Theodore Dalrymple, "Agatha Christie & the metaphysics of murder," The New Criterion, May, 2026.

For nonestablishment

In the introduction to this essay, the editor notes that "Christian nationalists... [contend that] the antidote to declining religiosity and deteriorating morals is a state-established church (either tacitly established or more formally)." On the contrary:

...Walker made the case that when a state declares itself the arbiter and defender of religion, the results are both predictable and regrettable. “The historical record is unbeaten,” he concluded, “in nationalized Christianity corrupting true religion.” A far better scenario, Walker suggests, is religious nonestablishment.

A Baptist theologian critiquing state religion is not exactly newsworthy: Baptist support for religious nonestablishment is, after all, a rich tradition. It’s no coincidence that when Thomas Jefferson wrote to assure a group of religious minorities that government should erect “a wall of separation between church and state,” he was writing to a group of Baptists. ....

This struck me for a couple of reasons. First, it runs counter to everything I believe as a Christian about the ideal relationship between church and state. To be clear, I am not a strict separationist. I believe the First Amendment protects religious individuals and groups, allowing them to engage the public square without government interference. And the best method for guaranteeing a thriving relationship between church and state is a robust and generous nonestablishment of religion, inasmuch as it keeps the government far away from religious traditions and institutions.

But the second reason—and why I’m writing this essay—is that it runs counter to everything I know as a social scientist about why and when religion flourishes in a given society. ....

...[N]onestablishment provides more benefits for American religion than any establishment regime ever could. Conservatives should grasp this more easily than anyone, with our healthy (and justified) skepticism of government power and influence over the lives of its people. We should cheer legal decisions that keep the state out of the business of religious traditions, denominations, and worshippers. Cultural pressures, real and disruptive as they are, are nothing new to the church and its history of resilience in proclaiming the gospel. .... (more)

Daniel Bennett, "A State Church Isn’t a Panacea for Cultural Problems," The Dispatch, April 26, 2026.

My kind of conservatism

Like many of my conservative friends who once felt comfortable in the GOP, I've felt homeless and alienated for the last decade. I endure the Trump era and hope for a restoration of what is known as "fusionism" in American conservatism. I'm not particularly optimistic (that may be a conservative trait). From "The Enduring Lessons of Fusionism":

The last decade was unkind to pro-freedom conservatives. Those of us who still find merit in the Reagan-era synthesis of free markets, limited government, moral traditionalism, and global leadership increasingly look like anachronisms. In the age of MAGA, a variety of insurgent factions—including new right populists, postliberals, national conservatives, and antisemitic groypers—compete for influence in a right united less by shared principles than by a common hostility to both the left and the conservative mainstream of the late 20^th century.

This is not the first time the American right has been little more than a loose collection of competing dogmas. In the years following World War II, the American right encompassed a jumble of ideological impulses. One faction included traditionalists such as Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver, who themselves disagreed on fundamental questions. Pro-market thinkers like Friedrich Hayek exerted enormous influence, despite insisting they were not conservatives at all. Ayn Rand’s anti-religion Objectivists, the remnants of the Southern Agrarians, and conspiracy-minded cranks like Robert Welch likewise all occupied space within the broader right-wing ecosystem.

The eventual consolidation of several of these factions into a recognizable conservative movement was neither automatic nor inevitable. It required intellectual leadership, institutional development, and a willingness to draw lines. Figures like William F. Buckley Jr. of National Review were indispensable in this endeavor. Conservatives sought to build a tent large enough to contain a winning coalition, but not so large that it welcomed figures and beliefs antithetical to the movement itself.

The postwar conservative intellectual movement never lacked disagreement, but it eventually established a framework capable of containing and promoting its best elements. The political approach that was eventually named fusionism played an important role in maintaining an uneasy but influential coalition. Fusionism’s leading proponents also provided a principled argument against one of the right’s most persistent temptations: populism. Their arguments have largely been forgotten. They are worth recovering.

Fusionism, most associated with National Review editor Frank Meyer, emerged as the most successful effort to give the postwar right-wing movement coherence. .... (more)

National Review and The Dispatch remain home to many fusionist conservative writers.

George Hawley, "The Enduring Lessons of Fusionism," The Dispatch, April 24, 2026.

Positive thinking

This reminded me of the argument that optimists are often disappointed while pessimists may be happily surprised. From "Don't Worry, Be Unhappy":

In the years since Sigmund Freud discovered the couch, Americans got the strange idea that happiness is the natural human condition. Unhappiness, they decided, is a psychological problem. “Unhappiness is both a political state and a mental health crisis,” wrote Tara D. Sonenshine in The Hill in 2024. In a Guardian piece last month, therapists described patients who became “depressed” by political stress.

Despite the narrative that it’s a disease to be treated, unhappiness is totally normal.

Humans aren’t designed to be happy all the time. ....

In recent decades, there’s been an obsession with improving “mental health.” But the concept of “mental health” has so many vague definitions that anyone the least bit unhappy is presumably “mentally unwell.” Therapy culture has taught us to attend closely to our emotions because anything negative supposedly might be the early sign of something serious and merit professional intervention. ....

A purely positive attitude, meanwhile, isn’t always a cognitive asset. Research on goal achievement finds that total optimists who fantasize about success often underperform those who realistically imagine obstacles. College graduates who fantasized about getting a job, for example, got fewer offers and earned less two years later than graduates who were filled with more doubt and worry. .... (more)

Carolyn D. Gorman, "Don't Worry, Be Unhappy," The Wall Street Journal, April 23, 2026.

On this day in 1775

"The sword glitters"

I only possess a few of Chesterton's thirty-some books: Heretics and Orthodoxy, of course, his Autobiography, and The Man Who was Thursday. I also have a couple of collections of quotations. He was eminently quotable. He was admired by C.S. Lewis, and that was what first brought me to him. In a very good essay, "Chesterton's Radical Sanity," Rachel Lu on his great strength and some of his weaknesses:

The only possible excuse for this book,” wrote G.K. Chesterton at the outset of his 1908 book Orthodoxy, “is that it is an answer to a challenge. Even a bad shot is dignified when he accepts a duel.”

This is vintage Chesterton: witty, memorable, charmingly self-deprecating. Just two lines into the book, he already has readers fully engaged, hungry for further explanation. It’s a great lead-in to Orthodoxy, but also to Chesterton’s work more broadly.

Building on his intriguing start, Chesterton relates how the reviewers of his previous 1905 work, Heretics, had complained that it was unreasonable for him to engage in armchair criticism of their philosophies when he had yet to explain his own. “It was perhaps an incautious suggestion to make,” he notes, “to a person only too ready to write books on the feeblest provocation.” But though Orthodoxy is pitched as an answer to this challenge, Chesterton offers an important qualification. “I will not call it my philosophy; for I did not make it,” he explains. “God and humanity made it; and it made me.”

With a vast corpus and a wide range of interlocutors, Chesterton did a lot of shooting in his lifetime, hitting some targets and missing others by wide margins. He was winsome, whimsical, profound but also preposterous, maddeningly unsystematic, and often in error. Somehow even his bad shots feel dignified. And he himself reveals the reason here in the first lines of Orthodoxy. Chesterton understood his entire public career as a kind of answer to a challenge: the challenge of reductive, rationalist, soul-destroying pathologies of modernity. ....

...[H]e provides a wonderful conceptual framework to explain how tradition can help us cope with reality’s paralyzing complexity. If the world is large and chaotic, what is needed is an anchor, or perhaps a root, to attach human society to something firmer and more permanent than the whims and fantasies of a given moment. Tradition can be that root. A firm grounding in the wisdom of the past can enable the living to hold seemingly-conflicting truths in a dynamic tension, drawing stability and nourishment from the root in order to engage the world with confidence. More than just explaining this theory, Chesterton lived it, delineating a space much like what the humanist Lee Oser calls “the radical middle,” in which the strong root of Christian tradition and orthodoxy enables believers to hold a “center of sanity” that looks radical to observers from many different angles mainly because it reveals a reality that is in fact wonderfully strange. .... (more)

Rachel Lu, "Chesterton's Radical Sanity," Law & Liberty, April 1, 2026.

“Either Jesus never was or he still is"

From "Malcolm Muggeridge’s Journey to Christian Belief":

Muggeridge was one of the top journalists of his time. A British newspaperman who became an influential television broadcaster, he was a natural skeptic. This trait served him well in the Soviet Union, where the Manchester Guardian sent him in the fall of 1932. Like many young socialists, the 29-year-old Muggeridge was drawn to the supposed warmth of collectivism. In the cold of winter, however, he heard rumors of deprivation. During Lent in 1933, he defied a travel ban on journalists, sneaked aboard a train and searched for the truth in Ukraine.

As Easter loomed, Muggeridge observed the horror of the Holodomor, a famine imposed by Stalin through state-run farming and the seizure of harvests. He witnessed starving peasants, empty villages and “hard-faced” soldiers. Years later, in his autobiography, he called it “a nightmare memory.”

Then came the wonder. On a Sunday morning in Kyiv, acting on an impulse, Muggeridge entered a church. “It was packed tight, but I managed to squeeze myself against a pillar,” he wrote. The devotion of the people amazed him. “Never before or since have I participated in such worship; the sense conveyed of turning to God in great affliction was overpowering . . . I felt closer to God then than I ever had before, or am likely to again.” ....

His moment of conversion came in 1967, while filming a BBC program on the Holy Land. It happened in Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity.

As at the church in Kyiv, the faith of others stirred him. “Seeing a party of Christian pilgrims at one of these shrines, their faces bright with faith, their voices as they sang so evidently and joyously aware of their Saviour’s nearness, I understood that for them the shrine was authentic,” he wrote. “I, too, became aware that there really had been a man, Jesus, who was also God.” His faith was still a work in progress. It “remained rather abstract, a useful counterpoint to his attacks on secular liberalism,” wrote his definitive biographer Gregory Wolfe. ....

In his last years, Muggeridge wrote about his deepening faith, culminating in the 1975 publication of Jesus: The Man Who Lives. The frontispiece of the original edition is a photo from a Spanish abbey of what may be a touchstone image for Muggeridge: doubting Thomas touching the wound of Christ in a stone bas-relief.

The Resurrection “seems to me indubitably true,” wrote Muggeridge at the book’s end. “Either Jesus never was or he still is. As a typical product of these confused times, with a skeptical mind and a sensual disposition, diffidently and unworthily, but with the utmost sincerity, I assert that he still is.” .... (more)

John J. Miller, "Malcolm Muggeridge’s Journey to Christian Belief," The Wall Street Journal, April 7, 2026.

Miserable offenders

Alan Jacobs:

In our church, during Lent we use the old language from the Book of Common Prayer, in which we confess ourselves to be “miserable offenders.” Many people, I have learned over the years, dislike that language because it sounds self-degrading or self-abnegating. But the word “miserable,” which comes from the Latin miserere, simply means “in need of mercy.” And an “offender” is just a person who has sometimes done what is wrong. Aren’t we all people who have done things wrong and are, therefore, in need of God’s mercy? ....

...[M]y comfort as a reliably bad Christian, an inconsistent and often hapless follower of Christ, is that nothing I do, no matter how bad, surprises or discourages God. As J.I. Packer wrote in his classic Knowing God:

There is unspeakable comfort — the sort of comfort that energizes, be it said, not enervates — in knowing that God is constantly taking knowledge of me in love and watching over me for my good. There is tremendous relief in knowing that his love to me is utterly realistic, based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me, so that no discovery now can disillusion him about me, in the way I am so often disillusioned about myself, and quench his determination to bless me.

So, in the light of that Good News, let’s welcome the Christmas and Easter Christians with open arms. To those of you who are Christmas and Easter Christians: Come without guilt, without shame, and without hesitation. We are all people who have gone astray; we are all in need of God’s mercy. Christmas and Easter tell us that we’ve got it. In Christ God has dealt definitively with our offenses, and if that’s not something to celebrate, I don’t know what is. So here’s something each of us can say to our neighbors in the church: Greetings, fellow miserable offender!

Alan Jacobs, "Welcome to the Party, Christmas and Easter Christians," The Dispatch, April 5, 2026.

He is risen!

An Easter prayer:

Brightness of God's glory and exact image of God's person, whom death could not conquer nor the tomb imprison, as you have shared our frailty in human flesh, help us to share your immortality in the Spirit. Let no shadow of the grave terrify us and no fear of darkness turn our hearts from you. Reveal yourself to us this day and all our days, as the first and the last, the living one, our immortal Savior and Lord. Amen.

The day in between

The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb by Hans Holbein the Younger

Russell Moore:

Good Friday is terrible, but it is also dramatic and full of passion. Easter Sunday is triumphant, radiant, and full of song. But Holy Saturday is quieter and thus harder for us to inhabit. It asks us to remain near the tomb and to resist the urge to hurry toward resurrection before we have reckoned with the weight of Christ’s death and burial.

The Apostles’ Creed confesses that Jesus “was crucified, died, and was buried; he descended to the dead,” while the Nicene Creed declares that the eternal Son “became man” and, for our sake, “suffered death and was buried.” We should not mistake these as spare liturgical phrases placed between cross and resurrection merely to mark the passage of time between Friday and Sunday. They are the church’s way of insisting that the gospel is anchored in history, with a real flesh and blood body in a real tomb.