Steve Robinson:

The irony of proclaiming to have no creed but the Bible and to “speak where the Bible speaks” while quoting theologians and commentators (but passing it off as my own “bible study” and never attributing the sources) in classes and sermons was not lost on me. 

I became fully aware that “we must obey God rather than men” was actually, “we must obey God as interpreted by my favorite men.” […]

If we substitute “sola scriptura” with “sola patristics” we have the same issues. The “sola” is about infallibility and a perfect message that can be perfectly interpreted and thus we can be assured we are right before God and can judge others. Sola scriptura has to prove the inerrancy and perfect harmony of scripture in order to stand. Sola patristics seeks to prove absolute inerrancy and lock step unity of “The Fathers” in all things dogmatic, pastoral and ecclesial to stand. (Why inerrancy in an imperfect world is so important to us is another blog post some day….)[…]

We are called to be craftsmen of the spiritual life, building the household of God according to the gifts we are given, not just scholars. 

How do we know we have the “phronema of the Spirit”? Jesus said, by your fruits you shall be known: The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. (Galatians 5:22-23). If your dogma is not manifested in this way, your dogma is serving the phronema of your flesh: vainglory, conceit, provoking, engaging in fruitless disputes, and not restoring the lost in a spirit of gentleness, looking to your own sins. (Galatians 5:24-26, Timothy, Titus). 

The Orthodox phronema, explicated over 2000 years through creeds, canons, liturgy, sacraments, holy elders, bishops, monastics and laity is simply this: Salvation is not a passing grade on a dogmatics seminary exam, it is the life you learned to live after you were offered a mysterious, free cure for your cancer from your Creator who loves you to death.

In the end, it is not wrong to study the cure, it is wrong to not take the medicine.

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Frederick Buchner:

In the year 1831, it seems, this church was repaired and several new additions were made. One of them was a new steeple with a bell in it, and once it was set in place and painted, apparently, an extraordinary event took place. “When the steeple was added,” Howard Mudgett writes in his history, “one agile Lyman Woodard stood on his head in the belfry with his feet toward heaven.”

That’s the one and only thing I’ve been able to find out about Lyman Woodard, whoever he was, but it is enough. I love him for doing what he did. It was a crazy thing to do. It was a risky thing to do. It ran counter to all standards of New England practicality and prudence. It stood the whole idea that you’re supposed to be nothing but solemn in church on its head just like Lyman himself standing upside down on his. And it was also a magical and magnificent and Mozartian thing to do.

If the Lord is indeed our shepherd, then everything goes topsy-turvy. Losing becomes finding and crying becomes laughing. The last become first and the weak become strong. Instead of life being done in by death in the end as we always supposed, death is done in finally by life in the end. If the Lord is our host at the great feast, then the sky is the limit.

There is plenty of work to be done down here, God knows. To struggle each day to walk the paths of righteousness is no pushover, and struggle we must, because just as we are fed like sheep in green pastures, we must also feed his sheep, which are each other. Jesus, our shepherd, tells us that. We must help bear each other’s burdens. We must pray for each other. We must nourish each other, weep with each other, rejoice with each other. Sometimes we must just learn to let each other alone. In short, we must love each other. We must never forget that. But let us never forget Lyman Woodard either, silhouetted up there against the blue Rupert sky. Let us join him in the belfry with our feet toward heaven like his, because heaven is where we are heading. That is our faith and what better image of faith could there be? It is a little crazy. It is a little risky. It sets many a level head wagging. And it is also our richest treasure and the source of our deepest joy and highest hope.

A summary I wrote for a writing class around 2016, of Jennifer Bagelman’s article “Sanctuary: A Politics of Ease”:

Gideon Lewis-Kraus:

In Seoul, an endless, futuristic sprawl of Samsung- and LG-fabricated high-rises, an imminent shortage of people seems preposterous. The capital city’s metropolitan area, home to twenty-six million citizens, or about half of all South Koreans, is perhaps the most densely settled region in the industrialized world. When I visited, in November, I was advised to withdraw my phone from my pocket on the metro platform, because it would be impossible to do so once on board the train. Fuchsia metro seats are reserved for pregnant women. Those who aren’t yet showing are awarded special medallions as proof of gestation. A looping instructional video reminded passengers of the proper etiquette. Even amid the rush-hour crush, these seats were often left vacant. They seemed to represent less a practical consideration than an act of unanchored faith—like a place for Elijah at a Seder table.

Portents of desolation are everywhere. Middle-aged Koreans remember a time when children were plentiful. In 1970, a million Korean babies were born. An average baby-boomer classroom had seventy or eighty pupils, and schools were forced to divide their students into morning and afternoon shifts. It is as though these people were residents of a different country. In 2023, the number of births was just two hundred and thirty thousand. A baby-formula brand has retooled itself to manufacture muscle-retention smoothies for the elderly. About two hundred day-care facilities have been turned into nursing homes, sometimes with the same directors, the same rubberized play floors, and the same crayons. A rural school has been repurposed as a cat sanctuary. Every Korean has heard that their population will ineluctably approach zero. Cho Youngtae, a celebrity demographer at Seoul National University, said to me, “Ask people on the street, ‘What is the Korean total fertility rate?’ and they will know!” They often know to two decimal places. They have a celebrity demographer.

Frederick Buchner:

Not at every moment of our lives, Heaven knows, but at certain rare moments of greenness and stillness, we are shepherded by the knowledge that though all is far from right with any world you and I know anything about, all is right deep down. All will be right at last. I suspect that is at least part of what “He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness” is all about. It means righteousness not just in the sense of doing right but in the sense of being right—being right with God, trusting the deep-down rightness of the life God has created for us and in us, and riding that trust the way a red-tailed hawk rides the currents of the air in this valley where we live. I suspect that the paths of righteousness he leads us in are more than anything else the paths of trust like that and the kind of life that grows out of that trust. I think that is the shelter he calls us to with a bale in either hand when the wind blows bitter and the shadows are dark. 

Allison J Pugh:

Paul was a gig worker in the San Francisco Bay Area. Formerly a project manager in tech until several companies in a row laid him off, he started working entirely for platforms like Lyft, Uber and TaskRabbit. He managed to eke out a living, but the jobs posed a different problem.

‘Honestly, a lot of times, I go out and the person doesn’t even know my name, even though I introduced myself as Paul,’ he told me. ‘Instead, customers just point and say: “OK, yeah, just put it over there,” and then I drop off the stuff, and they just tap it. I think they see it as more of an – I think they see it as automation. They see you as just a system.’ He paused. ‘I have friends that tell me: “You’re essentially working as a vending machine.”’
[…]
It is this contradictory knot of ambivalence that brings people back, again and again, to find interactions on these platforms, whose billionaire owners have a continued interest in stoking the so-called loneliness crisis. Marketers know: ‘Sell the problem you solve, not the product.’ This aphorism captures their one-two punch: before consumers will buy your solution, they first have to be convinced that they need it. Perhaps that is why Meta’s own research teams studied Facebook’s impact on loneliness, only to conclude that the platform was a ‘net positive’. The New Yorker recently quoted the tech entrepreneur Avi Schiffmann, whose startup is creating an AI wearable device dubbed ‘Friend’, as saying: ‘I do think the loneliness crisis was created by technology, but I do think it will be fixed by technology.’ Just like the purveyors of ‘feminine hygiene’ products, educational toys or body deodorant, then, technologists both sell a widely touted crisis and profit from its solutions. They have become merchants of loneliness.

When we understand the problem as loneliness, then it might make sense to assert that all kinds of connections, even those with machines, might help. But when we understand the problem as depersonalisation, the mechanised relationship becomes a harder sell. Of course, technologists do their best, apparently recognising the widespread yearning to be seen; their solutions, however, invite even more data and technology to step in.

They urge a strategy that is widely called ‘personalisation’, involving a process of ever more precise tailoring, in which data is harnessed by technology to analyse a person’s health history, how a person likes to drive, or even the content of someone’s sweat. ‘Personalised medicine’ and ‘personalised education’ – perhaps better called ‘customised’ – are each an effort to assess someone’s needs and produce recommendations tailored to the individual: akin to being seen, but by a machine.

… Somehow, we have found ourselves at a particularly absurd moment in the industrial timeline, when people are too busy for us while machines have all the time in the world.

David Zahl:

“Self-optimization” has become a go-to euphemism for what used to be known as self-help. The word’s evolution foregrounds the perfectionism that was always inherent in more rigorous forms of self-help while deftly leveraging the therapeutic element of self-care, thereby lending the whole operation a moral sheen. […]

You and I love optimization because we love the control it promises. What is the allure of measurement if not the allure of personal dominion? That if I can study my data closely enough I can manipulate its direction? Alas, once that line starts heading south, we all know where it ends. It stops in the graveyard.

And yet there are worse places to find oneself than in a cemetery, surrounded by symbols of heavenly rest. Given the fumes of optimization we’ve been inhaling, we may find that the good news emblazoned on so many tombstones shines much brighter. Who knows, we may come across an epitaph or two that speaks of a God whose specialty lies in the sanctification of unoptimized souls. We may read of a Lord who does not deal with any of us according to our productivity but according to the generosity of grace. We may even overhear words from the burial service about a Father who welcomes into arms of mercy sinners of his own redeeming.

Speaking for himself alone, the confessing subject ends up saying nothing that a discerning reader can take seriously.

Fascinating essay from Olga Litvak. A couple brief thoughts:

Some translation problems that she refers to are at least partly addressed when we consider that Garry Wills, for example, who insists on referring to Augustine’s Confessions as “The Testimony,” has argued convincingly that the word/title “confessions” is less a translation than it is a transliteration of the word confessiones or confiteri, which has a much wider and richer resonance than what is captured, particularly by our modern ears, in the word “confessions.”

And, both to and against Litvak’s point about confession and epistemological modesty, and as Gilbert Meilaender has often pointed out, a complete reading of Augustine’s “Confessions” concludes not with the “authenticity” of the confessor, but with his admitted inability to be authentic.

What then am I, my God? What is my nature? A life various, manifold, and quite immeasur­able. Imagine the plains, caverns, and abysses of my memory; they are innumerable and are innumerably full of innumerable kinds of things… Through all this I range; I fly here and I fly there; I dive down deep as I can, and I can find no end.

So when Litvak says that Rabbinic law “operates on a normative assumption that self representation—testimony given on one’s own behalf—is not to be trusted, because people are not, as it were, sufficiently detached from themselves to attest confidently to their own behavior,” and that “confession therefore enjoys no privileged status in Jewish law,” she is at least partly agreeing with Augustine.

My sense, too, is that if some of this was taken into account, Latvik’s reading of M.L. Lilienblum’s Errors of Youth as “anti-confessional polemic” might make space for Augustine’s Confessions as at least overlapping (admittedly less humorously) with the genre of “authorial skepticism” rather than being diametric to it.

All that being said, Latvik’s exposure of “confession” — what we do usually understand and practice as confession, autobiography, authenticity — to often be little more than “compulsive truth-telling as a cover-story (an alibi) for narcissism and personal entitlement” is scathing and, I think, on target.

Sarah Reardon:

In order to achieve a culture that encourages reading, we need to build sub-cultures that do not normalize ease – the ease of flipping through TV channels or scrolling through social media – but instead recognize the value of difficult delights. Such work begins in the home, with the culture of the immediate family, and moves outward to the neighborhood and then to the church or school community. 

By difficult delights I do not mean only those found within the pages of a book, but also the delights of work in the garden or garage, or the delights of time spent at the piano bench in front of sheet music or on a ladder with a paintbrush in hand. 

For the enchantment of literature to become once again a force in our culture, we must become disenchanted with the latest offers of a passive and difficulty-free life mediated by screens and feeds. We must become disconnected from the consumerist mindset that dominates our society. When a sub-culture, however small, connects instead with gladhearted gratitude around pursuit of the good, true and beautiful – not the easy, crass and self-gratifying – children will be blessed in all variety of ways, including a fondness for good stories. 

In other words, for children to love reading again, they must be shown and learn how to love life – real, embodied life, as God has given it, with all its difficult delights. 

Paul Sellers:

George always made me think for myself. He posed questions to me all day long and then waited for answers. And it wasn’t just about wood but all kinds of things. He would reinforce the need to query what we did, what was happening around us and what was happening in the world. “Always question authority.”

How much had been passed to him was never made clear. Owning knowledge for the main part was to take ownership of it when it was ‘given’ to you. This was the way of word-of-mouth learning, where seldom were things written down in text but perhaps a few lines in a drawing on a piece of pine you were working on or the inside of a cigarette packet, an envelope or whatever was close to hand.

Making an apprentice think was critical to ownership. “Why do we leave a gap at the bottom of a mortise hole, Paul?” or, “Uh oh, why is that haunch tight cut?” Thinking about the reasoning, reasoning it out, gave you better ownership of knowledge without being told the reason why. It’s different. Just different.