Vocation

Tomorrow is Labor Day in the US. As I have done in the past for Labor Day, I re-post part of a 1942 address by Dorothy L. Sayers: "Why Work?" (pdf):

I HAVE already, on a previous occasion, spoken at some length on the subject of Work and Vocation. What I urged then was a thorough-going revolution in our whole attitude to work. I asked that it should be looked upon—not as a necessary drudgery to be undergone for the purpose of making money, but as a way of life in which the nature of man should find its proper exercise and delight and so fulfill itself to the glory of God. That it should, in fact, be thought of as a creative activity undertaken for the love of the work itself; and that man, made in God's image, should make things, as God makes them, for the sake of doing well a thing that is well worth doing. ....

It is the business of the Church to recognize that the secular vocation, as such, is sacred. Christian people, and particularly perhaps the Christian clergy, must get it firmly into their heads that when a man or woman is called to a particular job of secular work, that is as true a vocation as though he or she were called to specifically religious work. .... It is not right for her to acquiesce in the notion that a man's life is divided into the time he spends on his work and the time he spends in serving God. He must be able to serve God in his work, and the work itself must be accepted and respected as the medium of divine creation. ....

Where we have become confused is in mixing up the ends to which our work is put with the way in which the work is done. The end of the work will be decided by our religious outlook: as we are so we make. It is the business of religion to make us Christian people, and then our work will naturally be turned to Christian ends, because our work is the expression of ourselves. But the way in which the work is done is governed by no sanction except the good of the work itself; and religion has no direct connexion with that, except to insist that the workman should be free to do his work well according to its own integrity. ....

Dorothy L. Sayers, Creed or Chaos?" Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1949, pp. 46-62.

Repent!

Paul Kingsnorth writes "I Found Freedom Along the Alaska Highway," sometimes quoting from Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance as here:

Pirsig’s 1968 road trip took place in a revolutionary year. There were fires all around him in America, but he could see where the real enemy lay:

Programs of a political nature are important end products of social quality that can be effective only if the underlying structure of social values is right. The social values are right only if the individual values are right. The place to improve the world is first in one's heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.

There’s a Greek word for this: metanoia. In English, it is usually translated as “repent.” It’s the first word Jesus of Nazareth is recorded as saying as he begins his mission. Sometimes we think it means “say sorry to God or get cast into hell,” but actually it means “turn around.” It means “change yourself”—your heart, your mind, your way of seeing. It all starts there. We all know this really, but simply accepting it would leave all the overthinkers with nothing to do.

Paul Kingsnorth, "I Found Freedom Along the Alaska Highway," The Free Press, August 28, 2025.

"Footprints on the sands of time"

In its weekly "Things Worth Remembering" essay, The Free Press publishes "Life Is Real! Life Is Earnest!" quoting from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1838 poem “A Psalm of Life.” From the end of that essay:

“A Psalm of Life” is a call to meaning. A call to action. A call to be good. A call to try to make a difference—for yourself and for others. A reassurance that we matter. A reassurance that although we return to dust, our soul lives on.

That’s why I read it to my sons. That’s the lesson I want to pass along, a footprint I am trying to leave behind for them now, so that they might draw on it in some moment of struggle far in the future. So that they can always remember why we are here:

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,

Is our destined end or way;

But to act, that each to-morrow

Find us farther than to-day.

One foot in front of the other. One small act after one small action. One little thing that makes a difference, for us and for others. (more)

Ryan Holiday, "Things Worth Remembering: ‘Life Is Real! Life Is Earnest!’," The Free Press, July 13, 2025.

At the still point of the turning world.

I've never read Boethius (but I have read T.S. Eliot). Thomas Ward has read Boethius, and Rick Kennedy reviews his book in "The Wisdom of Hope in Boethian Times." From that review:

Our happiness lies in God, Boethius’s Philosophia ultimately argues: “In the sublimest and most difficult image of the whole Consolation, Lady Philosophy imagines God as the still center, or axis, of turning concentric circles.”

This image is the foil to the wheel of Lady Fortune—this “still center” is where the Consolation shows the Christian hope that can only come after Stoicism. Philosophia teaches that “We are creatures of the peripheries, invited to come closer to the center… We have the capacity, not only in thought but through the pursuit of virtue, to ‘seek the center of things.’” Ward then quotes from Lewis’ Perelandra: “We have come, last and best, / From the wide zone through dizzying circles hurled, / To that still centre where the spinning world / Sleeps on its axis, to the heart of rest.”

Boethius in Consolation, like Dante in Paradiso .... and Lewis in his books, teaches a further-up-and-further-in type of centering on the sovereign, loving, beautiful, and happy God of Christianity. Having transcended Stoicism, Augustine and Boethius stand at the foundations of an Age of Faith. ....

Ward wants his readers to think of the implications of the Consolation’s insistence that “God is happiness.” Seek God. Seek the center. Ultimately, Ward wants his readers to have a reason to pray. “When I pray,” he writes, “I sometimes realize that I am doing the best thing I know how to do, which is just what Jesus taught his disciples to do.” Indeed, the Consolation is an account of a thoughtful person at prayer. .... (more)

Rick Kennedy, "The Wisdom of Hope in Boethian Times," Mere Orthodoxy, May 30, 2025.

"A long obedience in the same direction"

Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941) on Christian discipline:

MANY people seem to think that the spiritual life necessarily requires a definite and exacting plan of study. It does not. But it does require a definite plan of life and courage in sticking to the plan, not merely for days or weeks, but for years. New mental and emotional habits must be formed, all our interests rearranged in new proportion round a new centre. This is something which cannot be hurried; but, unless we take it seriously, can be infinitely delayed. Many people suggest by their behaviour that God is of far less importance than their bath or morning paper, or early cup of tea. The life of co-operation with Him must begin with a full and practical acceptance of the truth that God alone matters—and that He, the Perfect, always desires perfection. Then it will inevitably press us to begin working for perfection; first, in our own characters and actions; next, in our homes, surroundings, profession and country. We must be prepared for the fact that even on small and personal levels this will cost a good deal; frequently thwarting our own inclinations and demanding real sacrifice.

Evelyn Underhill, "The Order of Love," from The Spiritual Life (1936), excerpted in An Anthology of The Love of God from the Writings of Evelyn Underhill, 1953.

"Love one another"

Kevin DeYoung:

.... If you've never heard the term, it's not Monday-Thursday (which always confused me as a kid), but Maundy Thursday, as in Mandatum Thursday. Mandatum is the Latin word for "command" or "mandate", and the day is called Maundy Thursday because on the night before his death Jesus gave his disciples a new command. "A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another" (John 13:34).

At first it seems strange that Christ would call this a new command. After all, the Old Testament instructed God's people to love their neighbors and Christ himself summarized the law as love for God and love for others. So what's new about love? What makes the command new is that because of Jesus' passion there is a new standard, a new examplar of love.

There was never any love like the dying love of Jesus. It is tender and sweet (John 13:33). It serves (John 13:2-17). It loves even unto death (John 13:1). Jesus had nothing to gain from us by loving us. There was nothing in us to draw us to him. But he loved us still, while we were yet sinners. ....

"As in a dream"

Jake Meador, in an email to subscribers of Mere Orthodoxy:

.... It is not a question of knowing what is right. It is a question, rather, of one’s commitment to the right.

This is something Peter Jackson never understood about Tolkien, incidentally, and is perhaps the single biggest problem with the Lord of the Rings movies, much as I do love those films. Jackson seems to only understand one sort of moral dilemma: Will I choose the good or the bad? Tolkien understood that one, of course; it’s central to how he treats Boromir and Denethor.

But the question that really seems to have most preoccupied Tolkien was something more like “can a person persist in the good, past the point of all hope and even unto death?” That is the problem Aragorn, Faramir, and Theoden all confront in different ways and, of course, is also near the heart of Frodo and Sam’s journey. ....

[Meador is reminded] of the opening sentence in Richard Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, a text that Lewis knew well and praised in his scholarly work. Hooker, writing at a time when the fate of the Church of England was unclear and when it was far from certain that his particular flavor of Anglicanism would endure, opened his great masterwork with this line:

Though for no other cause, yet for this; that posterity may know we have not loosely through silence permitted things to pass away as in a dream, there shall be for men's information extant thus much concerning the present state of the Church of God established amongst us, and their careful endeavor which would have upheld the same.

In other words, Hooker wrote, if for no other reason than simply for this: That those who came after him would know that he and his colleagues had not allowed what they believed to be true and right to pass away “as in a dream.” ....

What Lewis and Tolkien both force their readers to do, in different ways, is ask themselves “if you are called to a cause that is both just and hopeless, what will you do?” Neither of them want us to desire hopelessness, obviously. That can be an easy thing to do for people of a certain turn of mind. It is a vice I am sometimes prone to myself.

The point is, rather, that one should have an answer to that question because once you’ve answered it something has been decided. Obviously the good can and often do triumph. Tolkien and Lewis both wrote many morally admirable characters who win great victories. But I suspect both would also say that the ability of a character to remain good amidst their glory is a consequence of their resolve to hold to the good even in defeat. If you persist in what is right in the face of defeat, then you love the good more than you love temporal success, which is precisely the thing that allows you to handle success with maturity and wisdom when it comes.

Jake Meador in a Mere Orthodoxy email.

Giftedness and godliness

From a good essay about "Preventing a Failing Faith":

...[D]on’t confuse giftedness with godliness. We live in a culture that prizes giftedness, while godliness is often overlooked and ignored. In our results-driven culture, this inverted value system makes sense. Giftedness produces immediate results. People are drawn to those who are gifted. Giftedness is outwardly noticeable and impressive. Godliness is less noticeable. People who are godly but not extraordinarily gifted are often ignored. The church has a tendency to follow our culture in prizing giftedness over godliness. That is one reason why people have been stunned to see Lawson’s sin. He was without question highly gifted, but that giftedness has no connection to whether he was godly.

We see Jesus highlight the irrelevance of giftedness to godliness in Matthew 7:22-23. He warned His hearers that on the day of judgment many would say to Him, “Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and cast out demons in Your name, and do many mighty works in Your name?” The abilities of prophecy, exorcism, and miracle-working are extraordinary gifts, and people who can do such remarkable feats are extraordinarily gifted. Jesus, however, tells these gifted individuals, “I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.” Their giftedness was not combined with godliness; therefore, it brought them no spiritual or eternal benefit. Jesus was not concerned with how gifted they were but how godly they were.

We can judge ourselves or others by the wrong standard, evaluating giftedness rather than godliness. We thank God for the people He has given the church who have immense gifts, but we must be careful not to assume that because we or someone else is highly gifted that we are necessarily godly. In our personal lives, if we would be faithful, we must be more concerned about our godliness than our giftedness. .... (more)

Robb Brunansky, "Preventing a Failing Faith," RealClear Religion, September 27, 2024

The sound of silence

"Confessions of a Music User" was linked today at a blog I visit often. I use music as background much less than I once did. From the essay:

.... I seemed to always need background music, something to offset discomfort, or to provide a rush of adrenaline. Some songs I listened to provided that ember of transcendence, yet they lost their flare when I put them on repeat, trying to squeeze the dopamine out of them. .... Music yielded instances of healing, grace, and beauty, but I also used it to manufacture emotions and escape the burden of silence. And I used it a lot. ....

Roger Scruton, the late British philosopher, believed much of modern music had devolved into a vacuum of senseless chatter: “For the most part, the prevailing music is of an astounding banality. It is there in order to not be really there.  .... AI has exacerbated this problem by divorcing music production from human expertise. “Music is no longer something you must make for yourself, nor is it something you sit down to listen to,” Scruton continues. “It follows you wherever you go, and you switch it on as a background. It is not so much listened to as overheard.” ....

...[L]etting music wash over every moment of life without cultivating places for quiet is like reading the classics and never pausing to reflect on their meaning. We become chronic skimmers, afloat in the ocean of noise with our eyes sleeplessly staring into space.

Beautiful music has tended to hit me at unexpected times. As I said earlier, those times can’t be controlled or manufactured. I’ve never been able to wrangle a transcendent experience like a cowboy ropes an elusive bull. Every time I’ve tried, I’ve ended up restless and in an emotional flux – focused on myself instead of on the divine. One thing any of us can do, perhaps, is to choose to listen not only to music but to the silence. .... (more)

Peter Biles, "Confessions of a Music User," Plough, August 7, 2024.

Christianity and work

On this Labor Day I once again quote from a 1942 address by Dorothy L. Sayers, "Why Work?" (pdf):

I HAVE already, on a previous occasion, spoken at some length on the subject of Work and Vocation. What I urged then was a thorough-going revolution in our whole attitude to work. I asked that it should be looked upon—not as a necessary drudgery to be undergone for the purpose of making money, but as a way of life in which the nature of man should find its proper exercise and delight and so fulfill itself to the glory of God. That it should, in fact, be thought of as a creative activity undertaken for the love of the work itself; and that man, made in God's image, should make things, as God makes them, for the sake of doing well a thing that is well worth doing. ....

It is the business of the Church to recognize that the secular vocation, as such, is sacred. Christian people, and particularly perhaps the Christian clergy, must get it firmly into their heads that when a man or woman is called to a particular job of secular work, that is as true a vocation as though he or she were called to specifically religious work. .... It is not right for her to acquiesce in the notion that a man's life is divided into the time he spends on his work and the time he spends in serving God. He must be able to serve God in his work, and the work itself must be accepted and respected as the medium of divine creation. ....

Where we have become confused is in mixing up the ends to which our work is put with the way in which the work is done. The end of the work will be decided by our religious outlook: as we are so we make. It is the business of religion to make us Christian people, and then our work will naturally be turned to Christian ends, because our work is the expression of ourselves. But the way in which the work is done is governed by no sanction except the good of the work itself; and religion has no direct connexion with that, except to insist that the workman should be free to do his work well according to its own integrity. ....

Dorothy L. Sayers, "Why Work?," was published in the collection Creed or Chaos? in 1949 and can be read here as a pdf.

Humility and hope

Re-posted.

Many books have contributed to my understanding of Scripture and clarified what it means to be a believer — and especially, perhaps, what it means to live as a believer. C.S. Lewis, no doubt, has influenced my understanding of the faith more than any other author. But there have been many others: Chesterton, Sayers, Stott, Philip Yancey — particularly his Disappointment With God. Decision Making and the Will of God, by Garry Friesen came to my attention at an important moment.

I was reminded of another important book by a reference to Ben Patterson in something I posted recently. One of his books is Waiting: Finding Hope When God Seems Silent. It is one of the books of which I own multiple copies because I give it away. The title accurately describes the subject, and the problem is one that every believer confronts — and always has. Mother Teresa's experience seemed to surprise, shock, or even gratify many of those who reviewed or read the new book of her letters, but most Christians understood it. If, by some chance, someone doesn't, Patterson's book would help.

The experiences of Job and Abraham are central in the book. They had to wait for God's promises to be fulfilled -— and wait and wait — without much evidence that the fulfillment would ever come apart from their faith—trust—in God. When things are very difficult, Patterson argues that the required attitudes are not so much patience and perseverance, as humility and hope.

The epilog sums it up superbly:

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." ....

Ben Patterson, Waiting, 1990.

The everyday acts of ordinary people

Re-posted because I agree even more strongly today than I did then. From Alan Jacobs on "A Long Defeat, A Final Victory":

.... The phrase “long defeat” comes from J.R.R. Tolkien, who in The Lord of the Rings puts it in the mouth of Galadriel, and in a letter uses it himself: “I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’ — though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory.” ....

.... Perhaps the chief problem with the “culture wars” paradigm that governs so much Christian action and reflection, in the North American context anyway, is that it encourages us to think in terms of trophies rather than testimonies. It tempts us to think too much about whether we’re winning or losing, and too little about the only thing we ultimately control, which is the firmness of our own resolve. ....

It seems to me that the most important political acts I can perform do not involve siding with one of the existing parties, or even necessarily to vote at all, but to try to bear witness through word and action to this double vision of the earthly city: a long defeat followed by a longer joy.

We are too prone, I believe, to think that voting is the definitive political act. That would be true only if politics simply belongs to the government. There is a far vaster sphere of politics — the life of the polis — that belongs to everyday acts of ordinary people. In this maybe Gandalf is a pretty good guide: “Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.”

A Long Defeat, A Final Victory – Snakes and Ladders

How to argue

Kevin DeYoung has some good advice about how to be more persuasive:

Of all the memorable statements uttered by Charles Spurgeon, this advice from Lectures to My Students has stuck in my head as much as anything the great preacher said or wrote:

The sensible minister will be particularly gentle in argument. He, above all men, should not make the mistake of fancying that there is force in temper, and power in speaking angrily.... Try to avoid debating with people. State your opinion and let them state theirs. If you see that a stick is crooked, and you want people to see how crooked it is, lay a straight rod down beside it; that will be quite enough. But if you are drawn into controversy, use very hard arguments and very soft words.

So many wise sentiments in these few sentences. We could talk about how “the Lord’s servant,” even as he rightly contends for the faith, “must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness” (2 Tim. 2:24–25). We could talk about the folly of mistaking forcefulness for true spiritual power. We could talk about the wisdom of avoiding protracted debates, by stating your opinion and then moving on. All of that is pure gold.

But I want to focus on the last sentence in the paragraph above. I want to suggest two ways we can make our arguments harder, which in this case means better, more careful, and more persuasive. .... (more)

Kevin DeYoung, "How to Make Better, More Careful, More Persuasive Arguments," Clearly Reformed, April 30, 2024.

Freedom and friendship

Anthony Esolen's "Word of the Week" is "Friend":

Cicero wrote a charming treatise on friendship, in which he says, among many other things, that a friend is someone in whose presence you can think out loud. ....

Because we are friends, and true friendship can only be founded in virtue, we delight in one another’s company, and friends don’t abandon one another when that delight is overshadowed by danger, or sadness, or misfortune, or even the threat of death. In that world, it meant a lot to call someone your friend. That’s why Jesus, who had befriended his apostles for three years, says at the Last Supper that he no longer calls them his servants, but his friends: not because of any greater love that he feels, but because he has chosen to be entirely open with them. “All that the Father has made known to me,” he says, “I make known to you.” ....

If you love someone, you do not make a bondslave of him; he is free; hence we get Welsh rhyddid, freedom, as they sing in that great fight song “Men of Harlech,” and we get Germanic freo, free. Now, if you’re really free in the company of someone, it means that you needn’t worry that your next word will cause him to leap upon the table and put a knife to your neck. .... (more)

Anthony Esolen, "'Friend,' Word & Song by Anthony Esolen," April, 22, 2024.

"Above all earthly powers"

Carl Trueman:

I recently revisited a book that I had not read for many years: Robert P. Ericksen’s Theologians Under Hitler. It is a study of how three intellectuals, Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus, and Emanuel Hirsch—scholars of the Old Testament, Luther, and Kierkegaard, respectively—came to support Hitler in 1933 and ultimately be identified with an evil ideology that cost millions of lives, both in the death camps and in the war that German expansionism precipitated.

It is a troubling book because, while Hirsch was always a nasty anti-Semite and remained so after the Third Reich collapsed, Kittel and Althaus started as what we might call orthodox, patriotic conservatives. The story of their corruption by Nazi ideology is a sad and disturbing one. ....

It is an interesting thought experiment to wonder how Christians today might have voted in Germany in the early 1930s. Hindsight grants great privileges. It not only gives us all 20/20 vision, but also exempts us from the difficult moral trade-offs and compromises that all voting booths contain in a manner unavailable to those at the time. We should not be so certain that we would have necessarily acted as we might like to imagine. It was a world where it seemed that either the Nazis or the Communists must triumph and where the full evil of both was as yet not fully visible. But even as we can acknowledge these difficulties, it is important to note that there were still theologians who did see the problem in 1933 and who refused to strike a deal with the devils on either side of the political spectrum. ....

The Bethel Confession has recently been reprinted and is well worth study and reflection. It makes clear that the reason Bonhoeffer and Sasse were able to understand their times was that they placed the transcendent God, his Word and sacraments, and his church above all earthly powers. They understood that the church was not to confuse itself with the state nor with worldly forms of power. ....

They did not collapse the transcendence of God into the immanence of political exigency. And it was that very concern for the transcendent that made them wise actors in the world of the immanent.

This points to their value in today’s debates. One of the striking lacunae on both the right and left wings of the Christian political spectrum is the general absence of any reference to the transcendence of God and the supernatural nature of the church. Immanent concerns rule the day. ....

And this leads to an odd, though very Pauline, conclusion: The secret to political integrity and discernment for Christians is a high view of God, his Word and his gospel. Only when this world is set in context of the next can we hope to avoid allowing the perceived demands of our political moment to overwhelm our fidelity to God and, by way of consequence, to those made in his image.

Carl Trueman, "The Gateway Drug to Post-Christian Paganism," First Things, April 18, 2024.

"Defining deviancy down"

Russell Moore:

.... [S]ome of the very people who advance the myth of a "Christian America," in which the American founders are retrofitted as conservative evangelicals, now embrace a view that both the orthodox Christians and the deist Unitarians of the founding era would, in full agreement, denounce. From The Federalist Papers to the debates around the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, virtually every Founding Father—even with all their differences on the specifics of federalism—would argue that constitutional procedures and policies alone were not enough to conserve a republic: Moral norms and expectations of some level of personal character were necessary.

Do these norms keep people of bad character from ascending to high office? Not at all. Hypocrites and demagogues have always been with us. What every generation of Americans have recognized until now, though, is that there is a marked difference between some leaders not living up to the character expected of them and leaders operating in a space where there aren’t expectations of personal character. You might hire an accountant to do your taxes, only later to find that he’s a tax fraud and an embezzler. That’s quite different from hiring an open fraud because you’ve concluded that only chumps obey the tax laws. ....

...[W]hat conservatives in general, and Christians in particular, once knew is that what is normalized in a culture becomes an expected part of that culture. Defending a president using his power to have sex with his intern by saying, "Everybody lies about sex" isn’t just a political argument; it changes the way people think about what, in the fullness of time, they should expect for themselves. This is what Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously called "defining deviancy down." ....

What happens long-term with your policies in a post-character culture is important. What happens to your country is even more important. But consider also what happens to you. "If individuals live only seventy years, then a state, or a nation, or a civilization, which may last for a thousand years, is more important than an individual," C.S. Lewis wrote. "But if Christianity is true, then the individual is not only more important but incomparably more important, for he is everlasting and the life of a state or a civilization, compared with his, is only a moment." .... (more)

Russell Moore, "Why Character Doesn’t Matter Anymore," Christianity Today, March 21, 2024.

Christians in an anti-Christian culture

From Kevin DeYoung's review of Life in the Negative World: Confronting Challenges in an Anti-Christian Culture:

...Renn’s “three worlds” thesis isn’t a way to grade the overall Christianity of the country. It’s a framework for understanding how society views the reasonableness of Christian truths, the validity of Christian arguments, and the obligation we all have to live up to a basic standard of Christian virtue. Renn claims that we are living in a negative world, one that is deeply suspicious of Christianity (especially when it comes to issues of sexuality). He makes a persuasive case. ....

Renn argues that none of the familiar models of Christian engagement works in the negative world. The “culture war” strategy, as he calls it, specialized in decrying the erosion of our moral character. This strategy is truly effective only if our views are in the majority. In the positive world, it might be possible to raise the standard of Christian virtue and hope that a winning coalition will rally to our side. By contrast, the “seeker sensitivity” strategy argued for maximum personal and ecclesial flexibility so as not to turn off the suburban would-be churchgoer. This strategy often functioned as if aesthetic style and personal relationships were all that stood in the way of non-Christians’ embracing Christianity. Meanwhile, the “cultural engagement” approach sought to alleviate the concerns of educated city-dwellers: a kind of seeker sensitivity for skeptical cosmopolitan elites. Today’s cultural engagers, Renn believes, have morphed into another form of culture warrior, except that their war is not against the world but against other evangelicals. Renn acknowledges that all three approaches have something to teach us (insofar as courage, kindness, and understanding the people we mean to reach are Christian values); but as all-encompassing strategies, they are outdated.

I was also helped by Renn’s observation that Trump and wokeness are two key polarizers at work in re-sorting evangelicals. At least, if you take “Trump” to be less about voting for Trump (which some evangelicals may do while holding their noses) and more about an aggressive, populist, the-old-rules-don’t-work-anymore approach to cultural transformation, then Renn has hit upon an important point. Evangelicalism is being scrambled along those two axes: Are you opposed to wokeness, and are you opposed to Trumpism? It’s relatively straightforward to be opposed to one and for the other (or at least not terribly bothered by the other); the difficult space for Christians and churches is when you are opposed to both. ....

...[C]onservatives need a new way to talk to men and a new way to relate to the Republican Party. With both critiques, Renn doesn’t provide many answers, but he is right to highlight (concerning the former) how traditional complementarian discourse was tailored to second-wave feminism. Regarding the Republicans, he argues that evangelicals have gotten little for their political loyalty except pro-life judges. As he points out, the base of the Republican Party is increasingly made up of non-Christians and post-Christians, and gathers its energy from the dissident right—and from the growing ranks of “barstool conservatives,” who embrace coarse language and a locker room bro culture as much as they oppose left-wing hectoring and nanny-state conformity. This presents a challenge for conservative evangelicals who will never vote for Democrats, but who may find themselves in a party that pays lip service to the Religious Right while becoming more irreligious. ....

Kevin DeYoung, "Antifragile Faith," First Things, April, 2024.

Courage

According to Western tradition:

"...the seven Christian virtues or heavenly virtues refers to the union of two sets of virtues. The four cardinal virtues, from ancient Greek philosophy, are prudence, justice, temperance (or restraint), and courage (or fortitude). The three theological virtues, from the letters of St. Paul of Tarsus, are faith, hope, and charity (or love).

Peter Kreeft:

The four cardinal virtues – justice, wisdom (prudence), courage (fortitude), and moderation (self-control, temperance) – come not just from Plato or Greek philosophy. You will find them in Scripture. They are knowable by human nature, which God designed, not Plato. Plato first formulated them, but he did for virtue only what Newton did for motion: he discovered and tabulated its own inherent foundational laws.

These four are called "cardinal" virtues from the Latin word for "hinge." All other virtues hinge on these four. That includes lesser Virtues, which are corollaries of these, and also greater virtues (the three "theological virtues"), which are the flower of these.

Courage may not be the greatest of virtues but it is the necessary one:

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality.
— C.S. Lewis

Courage is the greatest of all the virtues. Because if you haven't courage, you may not have an opportunity to use any of the others.
— Samuel Johnson

Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all others.
— Winston Churchill

Screwtape on the usefulness of social media

Mere Orthodoxy imagines a recent letter from Screwtape to Wormwood. Gets it right, too:

My dear Wormwood,

I’m pleased to hear that your patient has begun thinking of his Twitter use as a kind of chivalric act, equivalent to taking part in an actual war. Sloth and wrath are powerful weapons on our side, as, of course, is self-righteousness.

Not seeing the face of the man he speaks to will encourage him to give vent to contempt and hatred against another of his kind with a much greater degree of freedom—there’s nothing so frustrating to our efforts in this area as the sense of shame which the Enemy often allows to be kindled in the breast of such a man when he hears himself speak aloud in ways that he has habituated himself to on Twitter. One moment of that shame has been enough to lose us many who were well on their way to being firm adherents of our cause.

As I wrote you earlier, war—actual war—is not nearly as helpful to our purposes as you (somewhat naively, I am sorry to say) seemed to think. In war men may exhibit courage; many soldiers die literally laying down their lives for their friends, and are lost to us.

Culture war, however, is a much more helpful tool. It can promote all the jingoism and hatred of an enemy, all the sense that since one is on the right side, that makes all one’s actions justified, that one gets in a real war, but without the attendant dangers. ....

The crucial thing in these matters is for your patient to never look at his own words in terms of basic courtesy. “But is it discourteous, is it bad manners, to speak in this way?”— that is the one question which he must never raise to himself. He must be encouraged to think of himself as “forceful” or “bold” and never once suspect that he may in fact simply be breathtakingly rude. .... (more)

Susannah Black Roberts, "Screwtape Considers the Culture Wars," Mere Orthodoxy, January 9, 2024.

Heroes and Saints

From a sermon preached on All Saints' in 2019 by Ben Dueholm:

People naturally get defensive and indignant when their heroes are shown to have had feet of clay. This can take the form of saying that we judge people in the past by an unfair standard. But there’s really only one standard where cruelty and viciousness are concerned, whether it’s in the 1970s, the 1860’s, or the first century A.D. ....

It’s hard to look at the full picture of a prominent, influential person because we want them to represent something for us. The mixture of good and evil, insight and foolishness, courage and villainy that can be found in almost every human life needs to be boiled down to something simpler in order to be useful, in order to be worthy of an admiration we need to feel toward someone. ....

In the end, that’s the difference between a hero and a saint: The saint does not need to be defended because the saint is the person who will take God’s side against him or herself. The saint does not need to be justified because the saint relies entirely on God’s righteousness. The saint does not validate us. The saint validates God. The saint does not need our admiration, because the saint is exactly the person who would rather be cursed or slandered or forgotten by all the world than to lose God. The saint does not need our pedestals, because the saint has been fully rewarded already. No one can give them anything or take anything away from them.

The hope of our faith, here in the readings today, is that in the end God will be all in all. Just as God was in the beginning, but with company. And in that company will be many we do not expect to see. There will be many lost and forgotten by the world who were held and treasured by God. There will be the veterans of struggles that looked final and hopeless. There will be the world of our own failures, our own inadequacies, our own inconstant following, made good only for the sake of Jesus Christ and his love for those who set out to hear him. And those who led us there, with their words and deeds, with their presence and love, with their continual prayers, will be overjoyed to be just part of the great cloud. (more)

Benjamin Dueholm, "In Search of a Useable Communion of Saints," The Parish Bulletin, November 2, 2023.