Last week I was in Palm Beach and had the privilege of visiting Raptis Rare Books. Its beautiful gallery space is filled with books—rare, signed, some beautifully rebound—tucked into floor-to-ceiling walnut shelves and cabinets. One of the most expensive items on offer is a first-edition Hobbit inscribed by the author, priced at $475,000. For more than double that price, you can own an original (one of only two) of George Washington’s 1775 commission from the Continental Congress appointing him Commander in Chief of the United Colonies.

My ambitions were far more modest. I purchased a 35th anniversary edition of Norman Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth, original dust jacket, inscribed by the author. It’s one of the cleverest children’s stories you’ll ever read and equally entertaining for adults.

In the spirit of my rare book digression comes this week’s Two Things.

(1) Smells Like Teen Mozart

The Strad reports that a string trio dated to Mozart’s early teenage years has been rediscovered in a library in Leipzig, Germany:

A previously unknown string trio from Mozart’s early years has been discovered in the archives of the music library of the Leipzig Municipal Libraries, according to a statement from the institution, one of the largest public music libraries in Germany.

Consisting of seven miniature movements for two violins and bass (including two minuets) and lasting a total of some twelve minutes, the C major trio ‘is thought to have been written in the mid to late 1760s’, the researchers posit – likely during the composer’s earliest teenage years and pre-dating his first visit to Italy in 1769….

The source was evidently Mozart’s sister, and so it is tempting to think that she preserved the work as a memento of her brother. Perhaps he wrote the Trio specially for her….

(Thanks to Brad Hale for the pointer to this story.) The Strad goes on to report that the musical piece, which has been named Ganz kleine Nachtmusik, “received its much-belated modern premiere on 19 September 2024 in Mozart’s native Salzburg.” This was followed “by the German premiere at Leipzig Opera on 21 September, with Vincent and David Geer playing the violin parts and Elisabeth Zimmermann on cello.” Watch it here and listen to the end, where the piece becomes even more lively and light-hearted:

(2) Most ancient Hebrew book, discovered in Afghan cave

The Free Press has this one:

In 2019 a curator from the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., and an elderly scholar from Jerusalem were at work on an odd manuscript: a pocket-sized Hebrew book of uncertain age and origin….

Some of the pages contained a previously unknown poem for the Jewish festival of Sukkot. On one page, an untrained scribe, perhaps a child practicing lessons, wrote out the Hebrew alphabet. Other pages had a version of the Haggadah, the text read by Jewish families at the festive Passover meal.

The Jerusalem scholar, Malachi Beit-Arié, had a hunch that the book’s story was other, and older, than it seemed…. When the radiometric results finally came back from the lab, they proved him right: The parchment dated to between 660 and 780 CE. This result didn’t mean a minor chronological adjustment. It meant that the mysterious little book had just been catapulted into a different league of antiquities.

The new date meant that the text of the Passover Haggadah wasn’t just ancient—it was the most ancient known to scholars. The book predated the first standardized Jewish siddur, or prayer book, by more than a century. The research team was holding, in fact, the oldest bound Hebrew book ever discovered.

Just as remarkable as the age of the codex is where it was found:

The book’s true place of origin, it seemed, was not Cairo, or Babylon, as some scholars thought, but Bamiyan, in the Hindu Kush 80 miles northwest of Kabul.

Bamiyan served for centuries as a stop along the great east-west trading routes known collectively as the Silk Road, and unlikely as this may seem now, Jews once lived here as a minority, not among Muslims but among Buddhists. At the same time the book was made by artisans cutting, folding, and binding animal skins in the 700s CE, Islam was surging across the region from Arabia, but had yet to conquer these mountains.

It goes on display, starting tomorrow, at the Museum of the Bible.

Other Things

• Mark your calendars for Wednesday, October 30, at 6:00 p.m., when Dr. Brad Hale delivers a lecture on C.S. Lewis as part of a First Pres lecture series.

• Scholars continue to “virtually unwrap” ancient scrolls using X-ray tomography and computer vision. A trove of charred scrolls at Herculaneum (near Pompei) is a gold mine.

• Hezbollah has begun targeting Nazareth and Galilee, “threatening countless holy places.” Cue the Christian condemnations? Not so much. Leftist Anglican clerics still think the problem is … (do I need to complete this sentence?).

Hope to see you Friday.

I write on September 11, 2024, the 23rd anniversary of that horrific day that changed the world, and the United States’ relationship to it, in ways that history is still unfolding. The anniversary this year comes on the heels of Hamas’s despicable murder of six hostages, including an American, Hersh Goldberg-Polin (may their memories be a blessing). That tragic event deserved more elevation in the public conscience, but it was quickly overshadowed by Tucker Carlson’s interview of a historian (so-called) sounding in historical revisionism, Holocaust denialism, and Nazi apologetics. Then there was last night’s presidential debate, in which we gained little additional insight on either candidate except perhaps that Vice President Harris is capable of clearing the exceedingly low bar that has been set for her.

And onward we march through the increasingly chaotic political present, which leaves me groping for waymarkers, the sort of “You Are Here” analyses that offer historical perspective and situate us in the moment and the place we find ourselves. I try not to “do politics” in this newsletter, but I do seek to understand the cultural, civilizational undercurrents that undergird our politics. So, this week’s Two Things is really many things grouped under two headings.

(1) 10/7, 9/11, and WW2

Today, The Free Press reprints, under the title “What September 11 Revealed,” a November 2001 essay by Jonathan Rosen, prefaced with the bracing observation: “Today it is possible to see the outline of the October 7 massacre nested in the mass murders of September 11, and to recognize, in the justifications and celebration of October 7, the portents of future barbarism.”

Stretching further back, the same outlet last week published an essay by (actual) WW2 historian Niall Ferguson on “The Return of Anti-History,” refuting in detail the claims of Tucker’s interviewee:

I have spent most of my adult life writing history books, most of them addressing in one way or another what still seem to me among the central questions of modern history: Why did the Germans, who in the 1920s appeared to be the most scientifically and culturally advanced people in the world, fall under the spell of Adolf Hitler and perpetrate the most odious crime of all: industrialized genocide? Why did the economic and intellectual success of the Jews after their nineteenth-century emancipation arouse such hatred? And why did the British Empire, for all its flaws, not succumb to the seemingly irresistible force of Nazism in 1940?

“I have never argued that Churchill was a saint,” Ferguson continues, but he “was the savior of Western civilization. Had he not stiffened British resolve … the repulsive, blood-drenched empire that was the Third Reich might conceivably have won the war.” And yet Ferguson cannot help but fear for the future:

It is surely the epitome of professional failure to have spent more than three decades writing, teaching, and speaking about these matters, and to have achieved so little that a nasty little Nazi apologist like Darryl Cooper can win an audience of millions. But that is apparently what happens when podcasts drive out books and anti-history drives out history.

(2) The West’s Civilizational Moment

At Providence, Robert Nicholson begins a fresh look at Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, a book whose last sentence in 1996 foretold that, “[i]n the emerging era, clashes of civilizations are the greatest threat to world peace, and an international order based on civilizations is the surest safeguard against world war.” It was an idea widely panned at the time but which, Nicholson argues, history is bearing out:

To see civilizationally is to see the currents, not the waves. And with threats mounting on every side, we can’t afford to do otherwise. The Russia-Ukraine war; the Israel-Iran conflict; the rise of China; the self-immolation of the Islamic world; the nativist-migrant struggle in Europe; the identity crisis here in the US—in all these cases, a civilizational analysis does more than merely explain. Applied to real situations, it offers the basis for better policy.

Nicholson extends his analysis in a second installment at Providence, critiquing Netanyahu’s July 24 speech to Congress in which he called the Israel-Iran war “not a clash of civilizations” but “a clash between barbarism and civilization.” For Nicholson, this is a “small erro[r] in perception” that promises “huge strategic mistakes.” The aftermath of 9/11 is a case in point:

The simple awareness that bin Laden’s call for jihad against “crusaders and Zionists” was anything but fringe, being grounded in mainstream Islamic theology and popular among regular Muslims, would have helped President Bush grasp the limits of his freedom agenda without total victory and long-term occupation.

In the aftermath of 10/7, will we make the same mistake? “Our enemies are not barbarians. They are highly-intelligent defenders of a rival civilization,” Nicholson writes.

There are pragmatic reasons to pretend that hatred of Israel and the US isn’t ubiquitous in the Islamic world and to portray our enemies as deranged philistines raving at the gates of progress. The implications of the alternative are certainly depressing. But in a moment of global upheaval, it is much better to build our foreign policy strategy on a sober assessment of the truth….

Most societies are organized around some spiritual tradition which constitutes the moral core of a transnational civilization…. To pretend as if hundreds of millions of Muslims who see the Hamas massacre as morally justified—and who condemn the US preoccupation with Israel’s security—are depraved savages is to insult both them and ourselves.

Finally, deepening our engagement with the history of the West more broadly, two new projects are worthy of mention. The first is a new podcast from Tikvah, The Pillars, a weekly, two-year-long exploration of “Jerusalem, Athens, and the Western Mind” covering “the profound impact of Abraham and Moses, the enduring legacy of Hesiod and Homer, the philosophical inquiries of Plato and Aristotle, the virtues of Cicero and the vices of the Roman Empire, the intellects of Maimonides and Aquinas, the art of Michelangelo and Raphael, the literature of Shakespeare and Cervantes, the music of Bach and Mozart, and the poetry of Blake and Byron.” At every turn, Rabbi Rocklin examines “how the Jewish understanding of man as covenantal, sacrificial, and redeemable”—concepts central to Christianity, too—“was integral to the development of Western civilization.”

Second, the Daily Wire serves up Foundations of the West, a 5-part documentary series with Dr. Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Spencer Klavan, Jonathan Pageau, and Bishop Robert Barron exploring the ancient cities that shaped the West—Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome—and seeking to “uncover the profound legacies of these civilizations and their lasting impact on the modern world.”

As our public spaces increasingly become a great battlefield of civilizational war, we are being forced to confront anew the question that Lincoln posed nearly 161 years ago: whether our nation “or any nation” conceived in liberty and dedicated to equality “can long endure.”

Hope to see you at coffee.

(1) Into the religious void

Over the summer, I was struck by Russ Roberts’ account of his recent trip to Prague, in which he mourns the decline of Judaism and Christianity in the cultural life of Europe. “It’s a bit ironic for a Jew to sit in a church in Prague and reflect on what has been lost with the demise of Christianity in Europe,” Roberts writes. “You look at the statuary and the frescoes and you see an attempt to inspire human beings to rise above themselves and aspire to greatness. You see a vision of what humanity can be and of a better world…. Christianity was a revolution in how we human beings see ourselves.” But now, he notes, “the soaring music and soaring cathedrals are, like the synagogues of Prague, ancient history, a remnant of what once was.”

Paul Kingsnorth picks up the same theme in an essay last month titled “Into the Void.” The West isn’t “repaganizing,” he argues. It’s worse than that. We no longer believe in anything.

Say what you like about modern paganism, but however you quite define the word, it implies religious belief…. If we were really ‘re-paganising’, then, we would be returning to the worship of the old gods. And yet, despite all the Satanic witchery of popular culture, we are not actually doing so. What we are seeing [instead] is an aesthetic. Nobody would die for it. Nobody would fight for it. It is LARPing and play-acting. Rather than signifying a sinister new development or threatening new faith, it is a flimsy veil drawn over a gaping void.

“Exhibit A” for Kingsnorth is the drag-queen parody of the Last Supper from the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics. The creators of this grotesque display aren’t pagans, he argues, because when criticized, they backtracked and crawfished:

They did that because they did not, in fact, believe in or respect the ‘gods’ that they were portraying. They were just playing with images that meant nothing to them, … blaspheming against the God of a long-dead culture, but not believing in the ones they pretended to put in its place….

In the West today, that means that we have to live in a culture without faith. Without faith in the Christian God, obviously, but without faith in anything else either. We are not pagans because pagans, like Christians, believe in something. We believe in nothing….

[N]o, this is not an atheist age either. It is not, I would say, any kind of ‘age’ at all. It has no shape. It has no centre. Nobody sits on its throne. It is, taken in the round, simply a vacuum. There is nothing here at all.

It is a void.

(2) Plankton, “atoms of the ocean”

Moving from the big ideas that form and deform civilization, we zero in on the tiny, unseen building blocks of ocean life: plankton. Ferris Jabr writes in The Guardian that “[p]lankton are so tiny and ubiquitous, they sometimes seem less like creatures within the ocean than atoms of the ocean itself. Without plankton, the modern ocean ecosystem – the very idea of the ocean as we understand it – would collapse.”

Plankton are also literal building blocks:

In fact, the vast majority of chalk and limestone formations on Earth, including large sections of the Alps, are the remains of plankton, corals, shellfish and other calcareous sea creatures. Every imposing edifice that humans have constructed with limestone, including the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Colosseum and the Empire State Building, is a secret monument to ancient ocean life.

And they play a key role in our planetary thermostat:

Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere continuously dissolves into the ocean’s surface, where sun-loving phytoplankton incorporate it into their cells during photosynthesis…. When they die, they bump into each other, form little clumps and begin to sink, along with the fecal pellets of zooplankton, carrying carbon to deep, cold, dense water, where it may remain for thousands of years…, accumulating in layers of muck that eventually petrify and trap carbon for millions of years.

In parallel, carbon dioxide spewed by volcanoes combines with water vapour in the atmosphere, forming carbonic acid that falls to land in rain. Due to its slight natural acidity, rainwater reacts with and dissolves the planet’s crust. The chemical reactions involved in this weathering produce various minerals, salts and other molecules, which flow to the ocean via rivers, nourishing marine life. Certain types of cyanobacteria, plankton, corals and molluscs use calcium and bicarbonate ions produced by weathering to construct shells, sheaths, skeletons, reefs and stacked microbial mats called stromatolites. When such creatures die, their carbon-rich remains gradually accumulate in layers of compacted limestone sediment on the seafloor. Over great spans of time, tectonic activity subsumes and transforms the sediments, returning the carbon they contain to the planet’s surface in the form of new mountains or erupting volcanoes, thereby completing the cycle.

If Earth enters a torrential hothouse state, intense and frequent rainfall weathers rock more quickly than usual, flooding the ocean with minerals, nourishing life in the sea and removing carbon from the atmosphere faster than volcanoes can replenish it. Over hundreds of thousands to millions of years, this feedback loop cools the Earth.

Conversely, if ice smothers most of the sea and land, the water cycle effectively stalls, the productivity of plankton and other ocean life drops, and carbon dioxide builds up in the atmosphere, eventually warming the planet. This entire process is therefore largely controlled by life and ultimately allows life to exist on Earth….

Another treat of perusing this piece: the magnified images of microscopic plankton, and a sideways journey into Ernst Haeckel’s mesmerizing 1904 book Art Forms in Nature, which you can browse in full here.

Other Things

• Sky2K: Airlines are running out of flight numbers.

• Magazines are dying, and so are book publishers as authors become more independent.

• Radio Caroline, the pirate radio station broadcasting from sea, turned 60 years old this year.

• Christian virtue class starts next Thursday night, September 12. Sign up here.

(1) The anti-Israel ideology behind the campus protests is coming for America.

The canard that Israel is a “settler colonialist” state is easy enough to refute if one knows even a little history. But the broader theory of settler colonialism is less easily dislodged. At the Wall Street Journal, Adam Kirsch explains that “in recent years, theorists and writers inspired by the idea of settler colonialism have created what amounts to a new countermyth of American history,” one that aims “to change the way Americans understand the history of their country”:

For a long time, Americans were taught that the creation of the United States was a great and providential event. More was at stake in American history than America itself; … it was a test of the human capacity for self-government….

Of course, … the land of freedom was built in part by enslaved people from Africa, on territory conquered from Native Americans. But these parts of the American story were tacitly agreed, by the official tellers of that story, to be inessential. That was the price of sustaining the belief that the history of America was synonymous with the history of liberty.

For the ideology of settler colonialism, too, the United States is the hinge on which world history turned. The difference is that, for this new school, it was a turn toward damnation, not redemption…. Because settlement is not a past event but a present structure, every inhabitant of a settler colonial society who is not descended from the original indigenous population is, and always will be, a settler, rather than a legitimate inhabitant.

Lurking behind this ideology is Rosseau’s concept of the “noble savage” and an ahistoric fundamentalism. After all, people do not sprout from the land like so many plants. They always come from somewhere—by design, by accident, because they were driven out or drawn in. They mix their labor with the land so that it yields its increase. They build societies that are, by degrees, just or unjust. They protect and defend their land; sometimes they abandon it for another place. They conquer and are conquered.

These are the real and complex facts of human history that explain and justify patterns of migration, settlement, civilization, and flourishing. Settler colonialism flattens all of it into the same sort of binary—oppressed/oppressor, inhabitant/settler—that characterizes so much of faddish academic theory. Kirsch highlights the broader political currents, too:

It is no accident that the ideology of settler colonialism is flourishing today at the same time as right-wing populism. Both see our turbulent political moment as an opportunity to permanently change the way Americans think about their country. And as is often the case, the extremes of right and left are united in disparaging the compromises of liberalism, which they see as weakly evasive. In the case of settler colonialism, this means rejecting the understanding of American history that has been mainstream since the mid-20th century—that it is a story of slow progress toward fulfilling the nation’s founding promise of freedom for all.

(2) Fertility is contagious.

Speaking of population growth and decline, it turns out that infertility is socially contagious. At the Washington Examiner, Timothy P. Carney criticizes the notion, common among economists, that low birthrates will self-correct. “[A]ll recent history around the world points in the opposite direction. The past few decades have shown us that low birth rates cause even lower birth rates.” It’s not hard to understand why: “A culture with fewer children … is a culture less welcoming to children.”

But fertility rates can also spiral upward:

[There are] subcultures that are resisting the trend — where more babies lead to more babies. In these places, pregnancy seems to be contagious.

Israel or Utah are two such places where larger families seem endemic. Obviously, the values of Judaism and the Church of Latter Day Saints nudge women and men to be more open to parenthood and large families, but even non-Jews and non-Mormons in these places are abnormally fecund.

Secular Jews in Israel have lower birthrates than the more religious Israelis, but with a birthrate of 1.96 in 2020, they still have far higher birthrates than the average European woman…. [L]ikewise, … Catholics in Utah have a higher birthrate than the Catholics in any other state.

Kemp Mill is a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C., anchored by two modern Orthodox synagogues. Kemp Mill looks very different from other neighborhoods in Montgomery County, not only because the residents eschew driving on Saturday but also because families of six, seven, or more are a common sight.

… If you pass through Kemp Mill on a weekend or a summer afternoon, you will see little gangs of children roaming the neighborhood and this hints at the feedback effects. The more children roaming the streets, the easier it is for any individual parent to let his or her children roam the streets, which makes parenting easier and makes having a little platoon of your own more imaginable.

Also, the more neighbors and friends you have who have a toddler and a newborn, the easier it is to have a semblance of a social life while you have a toddler and a newborn. Coffees planned around naptime replace lengthy boozy brunches, and playground picnics replace dinners at fancy restaurants.

Other Things

• Virtues in the Christian Life: Adam Pelser’s Thursday night course runs September 12 - October 24, 6:30-8:00 pm at The NLD Commons (332 N. Tejon St.). Sign up here.

• Religious Freedom Institute launches Campus Faith Alliance to enable religious students to live out their faith and “model peaceful pluralism” on campus.

• Intelligent plants?

• After Most Reluctant Convert, a second Lewis movie aims to portray the middle period of his life, including his rise to fame and “strange” domestic setup.

Hope to see you Friday.

Let’s meet this Friday, August 23, at 6:30 am at Loyal North (Voyager/Ridgeline). It will be good to see many of you, catch up on your summers, and learn what fall has in store. We have some incredible newcomers who will be welcome additions to our number.

Remember our guiding principle of 0-1-2: zero commitment, one hour (or so), and Two Things. Let’s get to it.

(1) Lewis’s Life at Oxford

Given our love of Lewis, it seems only appropriate to inaugurate this season’s Two Things with a new book on his life as an Oxford don. At The Critic, Armand D’Angour reviews C.S. Lewis’s Oxford by Simon Horobin. Are there yet more stones of his personal and professional life to overturn and examine? It seems there are:

[Lewis] initially rejected the offer of the Cambridge professorship owing to a reluctance to leave his home in Oxford, … saying that he was precluded from moving by his “peculiar domestic setup”…. The domestic setup was indeed peculiar since, in addition to [his brother Warnie’s heavy drinking], the house was home to Mrs Jane Moore and her daughter Maureen, whose welfare Lewis had undertaken to oversee after Jane’s son, Paddy Moore, had been killed in action in 1918…. The nature of his relationship with Mrs Moore has been a subject of speculation….

Lewis was by his own admission less successful as an administrator than as a scholar. His year as vice-president of Magdalen in 1941 involved sitting on “all college committees”…. Lewis did not enjoy dealing with such minutiae…. He was required to write an official account of his term, and did so as a five-act drama in blank verse entitled “The Tragi-Comicall Briefe Reigne of Lewis the Bald”. It survives in the college archives, as does a large corpus of his letters and book drafts written in his neatly slanted handwriting (the illustrations in this book are a pleasure to peruse).

“Friendship was key to Lewis’s life,” writes Horobin. “His ideal evening was staying up late in a friend’s college room, ‘talking nonsense, poetry, theology, metaphysics over beer, tea, and pipes’.”

(2) The Death of the Magazine

This account by Ted Gioia on why magazines, as a business, “almost always get smaller, not bigger” is an insightful look at the depressing economic trends and why even beloved periodicals are in a downward death spiral.

In the year 2024, the traditional magazine is rarely the best platform for serious journalism—and that’s true for both print and digital media. The legacy outlets are all chasing short form ‘content’ (ugh!) now, and have lost confidence in good writing.

But here’s the strange thing. Readers are hungry for the longer, smarter writing that these periodicals refuse to publish. As a result, readers increasingly bypass the magazine and deal directly with writers [such as via Substack and other platforms].

That’s the new reality in media. Readers are now more loyal to writers than they are to periodicals. They seek them out. They trust them more. The magazine as an aggregating concept is increasingly irrelevant….

So if you see a newsstand filled with magazines, go and enjoy it now. Because in the future, you will only see something like that in a museum of defunct media.

I’ll mourn their passing. But those who work in journalism can’t waste too many tears on these dinosaurs—these disappearing magazines of the past. That’s because we all need to get to work building something solid to take their place.

Other Things

• Thursday nights: Adam Pelser’s Thursday night course returns this fall, likely starting the second week of September. The book we’re studying is TBD, probably something on virtue ethics. Stay tuned.

• Biblical archaeology roundup: Giant Second Temple period quarry uncovered | Long lost church altar rediscovered, casually leaning against a wall | 3,300-year-old ship, the oldest ever found in deep seas, discovered off Israeli coast

• Re-enchantment: Apparently, record numbers of pilgrims are journeying to see holy sites around the world. Our little project here to document and visit Colorado’s holy places made some modest gains this summer. We hiked Notch Mountain to see Holy Cross in late June, and I added Christ of the Mines in Silverton, CO to the list.

Hope to see you Friday.

Don’t forget: our guided tour of Grace & St. Stephens Episcopal Church is tomorrow, May 16, at 1:00 pm. We have a group of about ten thus far. Let me know if you’re planning to make it. Would love to see you there.

(1) University Reformation

We follow a few trends in this newsletter. One is the steep decline—call it a hollowing out, a nosedive, a moral bankrupting—of the American university, or at least of the “mainstream” American university. Solveig Lucia Gold at First Things points the finger at the DEI regime, which “splinters communities” by design, drains esprit de corps, and kills any sense of a larger institutional identity:

The keffiyeh-clad students who run around campuses shouting “Intifada!” while celebrating the cancellation of in-person classes are activists first and students a very distant second. Those who have occupied Beinecke Plaza, right outside Yale’s Civil War Memorial, do not see pro-Israel students as their fellow Yalies—they scarcely see them as their fellow humans….

As the protests continue and university presidents cling to their jobs, they keep trying to appeal to common values and community—to (in the words of Columbia’s Minouche Shafik) “rebuild the ties that bind us together.” But after decades of deliberate balkanization, the rhetoric rings hollow. To the left-wing majority in academia, institutional loyalty is meaningless, if not deplorable. And the conservatives who do value the role of institutional loyalty in civic life have nevertheless deservedly lost trust in these particular institutions.

And so, unfortunately, our universities are getting the commencement season they deserve. Columbia’s being forced to cancel its university-wide graduation ceremony is the logical outcome of DEI’s ongoing attack on institutional spirit, tradition, and camaraderie. Instead of caps and gowns, keffiyehs. Instead of silly inflatable lions, inflatable tents. Instead of “Stand, Columbia,” “From the river to the sea.”

Over the weekend, Tikvah’s CEO Eric Cohen called for an “Exodus Project”—a renewal of the American covenant, a return to the nation’s biblical roots, with Jews and Christians rebuilding together, starting with the university:

American Jews will need a paradigm shift in our political, moral, and civilizational imagination. We will need to build deeper friendships and alliances with patriotic Americans—especially Christian Americans—who love Israel, share our Hebraic values, and seek our guidance in renewing the moral center of American culture. We will need to relocate in large numbers to new and more welcoming parts of the country—including the Southeast, the Southwest, and other more conservative regions of the country that protect religious freedom and promote religious education.

And bigger changes are already afoot—there are reasons to hope. The University of Austin will welcome its first undergraduate class this fall. Hildegard College is wrapping up its first academic year. Other Christian and classically-oriented institutions are popping up, like Trinity College of Louisville and New Aberdeen College. And Hillsdale College, Southern Methodist University, University of Florida, Colorado Christian University continue to exhibit strength, civic vitality, institutional promise.

The genius of what Irving Kristol once called the “Protestant impulse” of America is its ability to self-correct. When the mainstream becomes polluted, reformers dig new canals, reroute flows, refresh the waters of civic and institutional life. Perhaps what we’re seeing in education is a new reformation—itself perhaps the headwaters of a larger cultural revival. One dares hope.

(2) “I think you are a Christian.”

Recent Christian convert Ayaan Hirsi Ali and self-proclaimed “cultural Christian” Richard Dawkins sat down for a debate earlier this month at the inaugural Dissident Dialogues conference in New York. UnHerd reports on the conversation. Dawkins admits he “came here prepared to persuade you, Ayaan, that you’re not a Christian.” Yet he is the one who left persuaded: “I think you are a Christian,” he told her. Dawkins still thinks “Christianity is nonsense,” though he considers himself on “Team Christianity.”

For her part, Ali offered “a more personal glimpse into her conversion experience. Her belief in Christ, she said, is separate from the belief she shares with Dawkins — that Christianity is a useful, pro-civilisational force.” Yet “good for civilization” is neither a criterion of truth nor a durable ethical principle:

“What you value in Christianity is something that really is absolutely necessary to pass on to the next generation,” [Ali] told Dawkins. “And we have failed the next generation by taking away from them that moral framework and telling them it’s nonsense and false. We have also not protected them from the external forces that come for their hearts, minds and souls.”

Other Things — Summer Haps

• June 18: Lewis & War Lecture: My friend Marc LiVecche, scholar of war, ethics, and public life, will be in Colorado Springs June 18. I’m hosting him for a lecture and dinner on C.S. Lewis and war. Please mark your calendar. I’ll send details soon.

• June 22: Holy Cross Hike: On Saturday, June 22, please join me for a hike along Fall Creek to the top of Notch Mountain to glimpse Colorado’s famous Mount of the Holy Cross. We’ll trek out and back about 10 miles, gain and then lose about 2,800 feet, and marvel at the cruciform geology. The hike will be strenuous, and the cross of snow is not as distinct today as when Thomas Moran rendered it in watercolor over a century ago. But the payoff will be divine! Mark you calendar. I’ll share details with those who express interest.

Subscribers to this newsletter received via email last week a special invitation to a guided tour of Grace & St. Stephens Episcopal Church in downtown Colorado Springs, part of our Holy Places series. The tour begins at 1:00 p.m. on Thursday, May 16. Please let me know if you can make it.

Now, on to Two Things….

(1) Legacy of the Essenes: Two weeks ago, I began a deep dive into the Essenes, the ascetic Jewish community that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls. It all started with a Tablet article about 20th-century literary critic Edmund Wilson, who, besides hating Tolkien, helped to popularize the significance of the Scrolls in a lengthy 1955 New Yorker essay, “The Scrolls of the Dead Sea.” It was that essay’s discussion of the Essenes, and their resemblance to early Christianity, that arrested my attention:

[T]he thing that we are immediately struck by is the resemblance of the Essenes to the Christians. You have the doctrine of human brotherhood; you have the practice of ritual washing, of which baptism is a prominent feature; you have communism, which the early Christians practiced among themselves. You have phrases that bring Christian echoes…. It seems obvious that the monastic tradition of the Christians must ultimately have derived from the Essenes….

Taken together, Wilson writes, these similarities “constitute a very impressive whole.”

Now, here I need to cop to some ignorance: even though the Scrolls were rediscovered almost 80 years ago and scholars since then have steadily excavated their insights—particularly what they reveal about both first-century (and earlier) Judaism and the origins of Christianity—almost none of this ever hit my intellectual radar.

So, to remedy the situation, I picked up and quickly devoured a book titled Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls by John Bergsma, a theology professor at Franciscan University of Steubenville. Bergsma marches steadily through early (and extant) Christian practices—baptism, the Eucharist, marriage, celibacy, priesthood, and even the concept of “the Church”—and draws striking parallels to the Scrolls and the practices of the Essene community, particularly at Qumran, which is near the caves where the Scrolls were discovered.

Bergsma suggests, for example, that Essene theology and practice shed light on the teachings and lifestyle of John the Baptist, who Bergsma thinks was raised in an Essene community. The Scrolls also help explain unique features of the gospel and epistles of John the Apostle, including characteristic Johannine expressions like “Spirit of truth” and “children of light.”

One of the more interesting chapters in the book is “When Was the Last Supper?”, in which Bergsma points out that the Essenes followed a different liturgical calendar than mainstream (Pharisaical) Judaism, resulting in different dates for Passover in the first century—not unlike the differences between Eastern and Western Christians in the dating of Easter. The calendrical difference, Bergsma suggests, explains discrepancies between the Synoptics and John’s gospel in dating the events of Passion Week. (Bergsma also thinks the “Upper Room,” the site of the Last Supper, was an Essene “community house” in Jerusalem, and he points to a number of “provocative parallels” between the Last Supper and the ritualistic meals of the Essene community at Qumran.)

(2) It wasn’t Adam’s rib: A Christian and a Jew walk into a podcast … and talk biblical anthropology. This month, Rabbi Dr. Ari Lamm hosted Christian actor Nathaniel Buzolic (“Nate Buzz”) on the latest episode of Good Faith Effort for an attentive exploration of the Book of Genesis. Their discussion of the account of Eve’s creation in Genesis 2 yields up interpretive insights I hadn’t encountered before. My partial transcript, starting about 42:30, follows (all essentially R. Lamm at this point):

[When a suitable mate isn’t found for Adam,] what’s the next thing that happens? ... What everyone says [is that] God puts Adam to sleep, takes his rib out of his body, and makes Eve. That’s what the Bible says? No, it’s not what the Bible says! It’s one of the most famous mistranslations in the history of biblical storytelling.

[Genesis 2:21 says] the LORD God caused a great sleep to fall upon Adam ... and God took a tzelah from Adam and made it into Eve. Now, that word tzelah, the King James Bible famously translates as rib.... That little bone becomes Eve, so Eve is somehow lesser than Adam.

… [Yet] never in the entire Bible does [tzelah] mean rib…. During the time of the Bible, it’s a very specific term. It’s not even anatomical.... It’s an architectural term, and what it means is side. The next time we meet that word is [Exodus 25:12, where God commands the Israelites to fashion the Ark of the Covenant “with two rings on one side and two rings on the other”]. The Ark of the Covenant has two sides…. That’s what tzelah means—a half, a side.

So what happens [in Genesis] is God … puts that first human being to sleep, splits that human being in half. “Half of you is gonna be Adam, the other half is gonna be Eve.”

How do we know that’s the case? ... [The literal sense of the next verse, verse 23, is that] God built a rib. What does it mean, God built a rib? ... The answer [is that] it’s not rib.... God built the other half, that half of Adam, into Eve.

[Verse 24 then says] “Therefore, a man will leave his father and his mother and cleave to his wife and they will be one flesh.” What does that “therefore” mean? Just because God made Eve from Adam’s rib, therefore people get married? No! ... It’s because [God] splits that first human being, and splits them apart into halves.... So men and women ... spend their entire lives looking to reunite those halves, to recreate that first moment of creation when humanity was whole.

Other Things

• “The UK has been quietly emerging and advancing as a global leader on the issue of international religious freedom.”

• “This is the freshman class of 2020 reaching its graduating year. That year, they came for the statues. Today, they are coming for the Jews, and tomorrow it may be the rest of us.”

• TV has a backstory problem. Backstories themselves have a trauma problem.

(1) The Distributed City of the Future: Walter Russell Mead’s essay this month at Tablet is “The Rise of the Cyber City,” and it’s a tour de force. Mead traces the rise of the great American railroad cities—centralized urban cores built around factories and tenements—and their subsequent decline as the automobile widened the pattern of development, creating the suburb. Now, Mead says, we’re on the cusp of another major transition—from the car city to the cyber city:

The rise of the cyber city is going to be at least as disruptive as the move from rail to car cities, and many of our social and political institutions may not survive the shift. Nevertheless, for social, economic, and environmental reasons it is something to welcome.

The suburban (and increasingly exurban) car city creates what Mead calls the daily Great Migration: “Morning and evening, five to six days a week, hundreds of millions of commuters have long swarmed into and out of the world’s central business districts.” Maintaining the infrastructure to accommodate these commuters—office buildings, restaurants, public transportation networks, parking facilities—“employ[s] tens of millions of people around the world and consume[s] a significant portion of the world’s daily energy and financial expense.”

The cyber city, driven by the work from home (WFH) phenomenon, will disrupt all of this, threatening “a massive dislocation in the life of the American city, a shift that is likely to be much more far reaching than the shift between the rail and car cities that the 20th century witnessed.” Mead thinks we should embrace it:

The distributed city of the future, in which communications technology, 3D printing, autonomous vehicles, delivery by drone, and other technologies that allow the near-universal expansion of work, will largely transcend geography…. The city and the countryside will be integrated, with human beings able to live anywhere from dense urban cores to remote rural retreats while fully participating in the economic, cultural, and political dimensions of urban life.

We are not there yet, and WFH alone won’t get us there, but embracing WFH where practical is an important step with significant benefits.

Among these benefits: slashing the cost of the commuting infrastructure, less auto emissions, reducing unproductive commute time, less vulnerability to centralized catastrophes (earthquake, flood, terrorism), and most importantly, “a return to stronger communities and a recentering of human life on neighborhoods and families.” Mead elaborates on the latter:

The era of the car city was an era of bedroom communities that emptied out during the working day, and an era of rapid mobility as workers followed their careers from city to city. Loosening the power of geography over our working lives will give us more freedom to live where we choose, enabling people to put down roots without giving up the opportunities that, in past decades, came only with mobility. The distributed city will allow human civilization to synthesize the blessings of rural and urban life, and allow the reintegration of school, work, and community life in ways that strengthen the bonds connecting relatives and neighbors.

(2) Digital Defrocking: Catholic Answers, a San Diego-based ministry, claims to have “the world’s largest database of answers about the beliefs and practices of the Catholic faith.” So it created “Father Justin,” an AI chatbot-priest designed to synthesize this information and answer user questions about the Catholic faith. But as The Pillar reports, “the experiment quickly became controversial”:

Some said the priest avatar was inappropriate, misleading, or just plain creepy. Some said the priest simulated virtual sacraments — indeed, “Fr. Justin” gladly heard The Pillar’s, “confession,” before giving some spiritual guidance and reciting the words of absolution. And some said that an AI apologetics project leans too heavily into unreliable, controversial, and still-confusing technology.

The author of The Pillar report experimented with the chatbot himself:

First, I asked ‘Father Justin’ to hear my confession, and it did so, simulating a ‘virtual confession,’ all the way to giving me absolution and a penance.

Second, I asked if I could baptize my baby with Gatorade in an emergency, and ‘Father Justin’ said yes — and of course, that’s not true. I can’t baptize my baby with Gatorade.

Catholic Answers doesn’t think a chatbot-priest is too impersonal:

[W]e get tons of questions from people. We get more than 2 million visits a month at catholic.com, and a video from a Catholic Answers apologist like Trent Horn might get 50,000 views soon after it comes out — so the vast majority of our contact with people is not really interpersonal.

I would prefer that all of our work was directly personal, but we don’t have enough people. And we don’t have the money to hire enough people to answer the number of questions that come in.

So we are just looking for creative ways to help people learn more about their faith. 

Since The Pillar interview, however, Catholic Answers has essentially laicized its cyber-cleric. “Father Justin” is now just “Justin.” The chatbot is still available at Catholic.com, but Catholic Answers promises to “continue to refine and improve the app” based on user input.

Other Things | Community Haps

• Our next Holy Places tour will be Grace & St. Stephens Episcopal Church on Thursday, May 16, at 1:00 pm. An email with more details is forthcoming.

• Paul Kingsnorth will present the 2024 Erasmus Lecture for First Things.

• AI deciphers ancient scroll to reveal Plato’s burial place.

• “Dignitas Infinita Betrays Catholic Just War Doctrine,” promoting “pacifist idealism.”

• Students at Columbia are now morphing into proto-terrorists in the mold of those they openly praise. Meanwhile, something different is happening at Christian universities. At Liberty U, “there were no arrests, no anti-Israeli or anti-Jewish sentiments. Instead, the massive crowd joined together to pray, worship, and read the Bible.”

(1) Worse than pagans? (Better?): At First Things, N.S. Lyons reviews and critiques John Daniel Davidson’s new book Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, suggesting that ours is not an age of repaganization but of the full flowering of modern, post-Christian materialism. Lyons’ essay is a grab-bag of debatable insights:

“Nothing is true, everything is permitted.” This is the slogan [Davidson] repeats many times throughout the book to encapsulate the core proposition of paganism, ancient and modern. This, it strikes me, is wrong. The pagan of the ancient world may have held a moral worldview alien to ours, but he was no nihilist….

It is not, then, the slogan of paganism, but something else entirely: the worldview of materialist modernity, produced by the centuries of metaphysical drift that first pushed God out of the world and then pushed the Western mind deeper and deeper into cold rationalism….

C. S. Lewis, for one, was always skeptical of such claims…. In fact, he pointed out, “Christians and Pagans had much more in common with each other than either has with a post-Christian. The gap between those who worship different gods is not so wide as that between those who worship and those who do not.”…

What is happening? Citing a recent wave of religious conversions by formerly atheistic public intellectuals, Jordan Peterson has argued that we are experiencing the beginning of a “Counter-Enlightenment.”… I think he is right: The whole edifice of modernity is in crisis. But this should be a cause for Christian hope, not panic. In fact, it seems possible that our time may witness a transition not into Davidson’s new “pagan dark age,” but out of what Lewis called the true dark age of modern materialism.

(2) Analog nostalgia: “Things used to work in this country,” proclaims Pennsylvania writer Clare Coffey in her essay at The New Atlantis. She writes eloquently of the beauty of old analog machines over against our new technocratic devices:

The GE radio is not a family heirloom for its design features, however. It is an heirloom because it has accompanied us through three generations of baseball games and school closure announcements and Saturday morning public radio folk hours. And it has accompanied us not because it had any particular emotional significance to begin with, but because it just works, and has worked, and continues to work. You can take it anywhere, plug it in anywhere….

[W]hen I say “things used to work,” the object of inherited nostalgia is not only manufacturing standards before planned obsolescence and offshoring. Things used to, literally, work. You turned a knob, and sound came on, because the knob controlled the mechanism that tuned the radio to the broadcast that the big metal radio towers dotting the landscape beamed at you. I am not a gearhead of any description and don’t care much about how the insides of electrical devices work, but I know exactly what I, personally, have to do to operate my end of the GE radio. There are no downloads, no platforms, no passwords, no little pull-down menus, no verifications or account recovery protocols. There is no streaming. Personal technology used to be a machine. Now it’s a bureaucracy.

Other Things

• Passover is biblical … and American: “a source of faith for those seeking freedom for the benefit of all.”

• Biblical archaeology: Scarlet, purple, and sapphire hues used in the Temple in Jerusalem “likely came from sea snails processed at a 3,000-year-old dye factory in modern-day Haifa.”

• Colorado’s 14ers get a height adjustment from new NOAA data: “Pikes Peak is two feet shorter at 14,107 feet.”

(1) Miscalculation: Israel, the United States, and other allies intercepted about 99% of Iranian missiles and drones aimed at Israel on Saturday night. Brian Carter and Frederick W. Kagan write at the Institute for the Study of War that Iran’s goal was indeed to harm Israel—and it miscalculated:

The Iranian April 13 missile-drone attack on Israel was very likely intended to cause significant damage below the threshold that would trigger a massive Israeli response. The attack was designed to succeed, not to fail. The strike package was modeled on those the Russians have used repeatedly against Ukraine to great effect….

Ukrainian air defenses have averaged interception rates of only about 16% of Russian ballistic missiles during recent large strikes. The Iranians likely expected that Israeli rates would be higher than the Ukrainian rates but not above 90% against such a large ballistic missile salvo—the Russians, after all, have never fired close to that many large ballistic missiles in a single strike against Ukraine…. The Iranians thus likely expected that at least some of their drones and cruise missiles would interfere with Israeli targeting of incoming ballistic missiles, whereas apparently none did….

Israel’s air defense system has a number of obvious advantages over Ukrainian air defense, but the full implications of some of those advantages might well have been unclear to Iranian strike planners…..

The other hopeful sign emerging from the weekend was the assist Israel got from Sunni Arab states in the region, including Jordan and, to some extent, Saudi Arabia. As Judith Miller writes at City Journal, “Jordan’s assistance suggests that what Israelis and Americans are calling the Middle East’s ‘new security architecture’—the strategic alliance of moderate Arab states and Israel against Iran and other members of the so-called ‘Axis of Resistance’—may continue to expand.” But Carter and Kagan urge continued vigilance: “Iran will learn additional lessons from the failed April 13 attack that it can leverage to launch more successful attacks in the future…. Israel and its partners should not emerge from this successful defense with any sense of complacency.”

(2) Marriage: I attended a talk last night, part of the Lighthouse Voices series, by Dr. Brad Wilcox, Director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and author of Get Married: Why Americans Should Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families and Save Civilization, published this year. Dr. Wilcox is doing remarkable scholarly work on the benefits of getting married and having kids, what makes marriages and families strong, and how a culture that denigrates marriage especially harms young men. One of his most intriguing concepts is what he calls the “inverse hypocrisy” of elites—sexually faddish in public but normies at home. He explains at The Public Discourse:

[Patrick T. Brown]: … [S]ome left-leaning provocateurs have rolled their eyes at the idea that getting married is “defying the elites.” They point out, I think fairly, that college-educated Americans who skew left and make up a large share of what we might consider “the elite” do get married, and often more stably, than Americans without a college degree. What are they missing?

[Brad Wilcox]: I laughed when I saw this point making its rounds on Twitter. I’ve written a ton about elite marriages, so I know that elites, in their private lives, tend to get and stay married.

The problem is what they do in their public capacities as cultural, business, and political leaders. Our elites often “Talk Left, Walk Right” when it comes to marriage and family, privately embracing a marriage-minded way of life even as they deny the importance of marriage and the two-parent family in public. And there are now good polling data showing that no group of Americans is less marriage-friendly than college-educated liberals when it comes to their public attitudes.

The pushback was especially funny because the very people who objected to this phrase from the book’s title, like the journalist Matt Yglesias, were exactly the elites I was thinking about in writing the book…. If our elites used their power to tell the truth about marriage—in schools, universities, media, pop culture, and on social media—we’d have a much healthier family culture.

Other Things and Community Haps

• Tour of Holy Theophany Orthodox Church: this Thursday, April 18, at 12:30 p.m., part of our “Holy Places” series.

• A Brief Tour of C.S. Lewis’s Moral Philosophy: a lecture by Kirk Cherry at First Congregational Church (20 E. St. Vrain 80903), this Sunday, April 21, at 11:00 a.m.

• The new secular blasphemy law took effect in Scotland this month, promising jail time for saying things that “stir up hatred.”

• Tyler Vigen is the “Spurious Scholar,” using AI to dredge up correlations between random variables, like the strong statistical connection “between air pollution in sunny San Diego, California, and the popularity of the name ‘Kirk’” and the “intriguing relationship between milk consumption and the divorce rate in Colorado.”

(1) Make America Analog Again: I’m returning from a conference in Orlando on artificial intelligence, so technology is on my mind. At National Affairs, Brad Littlejohn and Clare Morell lament the “soft tyranny” of the smartphone, document how increasingly ubiquitous and nearly mandatory it is, and suggest public-policy solutions:

Left to itself, the market will always pursue the most efficient outcome. Yet this is not necessarily the most humane outcome, or the one that consumers themselves would choose. The smartphone is indeed a powerful and valuable tool, and it is clearly not going away. But that doesn’t mean we should allow this tool to become a tyrant. We should not accept a world in which consumers and parents have no choice but to own one; we must push back.

…

To protect the most vulnerable in our society — notably the elderly (who may not be tech-savvy) and the under age (whom it would be wise to safeguard from smartphone saturation) — federal officials should adopt laws that prevent places of public accommodation from requiring customers to use digital platforms to access analog goods and services.

…

A world in which smartphones are more difficult for children to access, in which burgers and concert tickets are easier to purchase without this device, need not be a big-government dystopia. It is unlikely to come into being, however, without prudent government action. Some problems are simply too widespread, have gained too much momentum, or are too nearly inescapable for individual families, community institutions, or businesses to overcome them on their own. The soft tyranny of the smartphone is one such problem. In these situations, the state's role is to step in and protect the traditions, institutions, and values of society that new technologies threaten to erode and supplant.

(2) The unbearable lightness of “cultural Christianity”: It’s not another high-profile conversion, but it was noteworthy nonetheless when Richard Dawkins, the infamous polemical atheist, called himself a “cultural Christian” earlier this month, saying he’s happy there are fewer Christians about while admitting he enjoys cathedrals, “beautiful parish churches,” and Christmas carols. Rod Dreher wins Hot Take of the Year for sarcastically noting that Dawkins might as well have said he “greatly enjoys eating, but is also glad that farms in his country are closing and that gardens are not being planted.” Cambridge scholar Esmé Partridge deepens our historical understanding of Dawkins’ quixotic pronouncement:

That the fruits of Christianity can be saved while its roots are severed speaks to a naivety that is perhaps typical of Dawkins’s generation. Baby boomers wanted to tear down the conventions of traditional society and yet, at the same time, overwhelmingly benefitted from them. They championed the sexual revolution, for example, but have themselves enjoyed the stability of monogamous marriage. Dawkins’s belief that it is possible to reap the cultural benefits of Christianity while publicly undermining its legitimacy is perhaps an expression of this generational mentality.

But it is also a belief — and a naivety — that goes back to the European Enlightenment. Though Dawkins’s embrace of “the Christian ethos” might seem surprising given the extremity of his anti-religious polemics, his position is remarkably similar to that of modernity’s founding fathers. Like him, the liberals of the 17th and 18th centuries believed it was possible to renounce the truth claims of Christianity while still upholding its social and cultural mores.

Partridge goes on to cite Locke and Montesquieu as examples, but calls them, like Dawkins, naive. “Without public religion, their legacy has mutated into something very different: anarchic systems of self-interest which undermine the virtues upon which liberalism was originally premised.”

Other Things

• Denver Art Museum keeps its indigenous art collection, rebuffs tribal claims for repatriation. (Its own website admits it has “benefited from … the removal and historical misrepresentation of [indigenous] arts,” causing “deep harm.”)

• Death and typos: Reflections of an online obit editor

• Catholics and evangelicals together

(1) Religious glass half full: I drove to and from church Easter Sunday morning, and the streets and sidewalks seemed unusually quiet. I expected more bustle, more Christians streaming into and out of church buildings, even if many of them are only “C&E” (Christmas and Easter) types. Yet it felt different this year. Emptier. This is anecdotal, to be sure. But statistics point in the same direction. Religious participation in America continues to decline, though the effect isn’t uniform across denominations. At The Dispatch, Chris Stirewalt notes:

At the start of this century, 42 percent of U.S. adults attended religious services “weekly or nearly every week.” Now it’s 30 percent. But, again, that’s not the fault of non-believers. That’s within members of various denominations. Roman Catholics, down 12 points, and Orthodox Christians, down 9 points, saw the sharpest declines since 2000, while Protestants dipped 4 points.

Only two major sects, Judaism and Islam, saw increases over the same period, with Jews climbing 7 points and Muslims up 4 points. Mormons basically held steady.

But Stirewalt wants us to see the religious glass (chalice?) half full:

If 30 percent of Americans go to their church, mosque, synagogue, [or] temple [weekly], that’s 78 million people or so in an adult population of about 260 million. Add in the monthly worshippers, and you have more than 106 million souls gathering together on a pretty regular basis.

That’s 57 percent more than the number who bet on the Super Bowl, more than triple the number who watched this year’s State of the Union address, and more than double the number of daily active TikTok users in the U.S.

[I]t is worth saying that 106 million people is a lot of people, and that in America they can choose who, how, and where to worship. Indeed, the resilience of communal worship in the face of an onslaught of competition for our attention says something important about Americans and our faiths. After all, it could be worse. You could be in the movie theater business.

(2) Conservative politics of Dune 2: Speaking of movies, political science professor Kody W. Cooper argues at Law & Liberty that Dune: Part Two resonates with conservative themes about human dignity, faith and reason, and political faith.

As the story progresses so does Jessica’s pregnancy, and the audience sees Paul’s fully human sister develop with striking visuals inside the womb, portraying Alia from her embryonic to later stages. At one point on the threat of death, Lady Jessica is forced to ingest a poisonous substance that the Fremen call the “Water of Life,” which sends her into life-threatening convulsions. But the Fremen did not know she was pregnant. When they realize they unwittingly endangered the baby girl, they lament: What have we done!?

Rarely has the silver screen featured such a powerful, if subtle, moral condemnation of chemically-induced abortion. Dune sends a clear message that human life has dignity from the moment of conception.

On the tension between faith and reason, Cooper writes:

Paul’s love interest and teacher in the Fremen ways, Chani, takes a Machiavellian view of things. From her perspective, the [religious prophecies] are manmade lies and the tools of those interested in power. … [T]he unquestioning faith of the fundamentalist is most dangerous when it is concentrated in the savior, who then becomes their master and a despot.

Meanwhile, Paul’s mentor-turned-disciple, Stilgar represents the perspective of faith. While he has witnessed Paul’s humanity, he also sees signs of divinity or a divine mission…. [Yet Stilgar errs toward] fideism, a sort of excessive or blind faith unresponsive to reason…. Dune suggests there is a need to balance faith and reason to avoid the pitfalls of fideism and rationalism. This is a deeply conservative religious message.

Cooper concludes with a final theme, on the inadequacy of politics to sate the human desire for transcendence. This is the weakest part of the essay. There’s a half-handed swipe at Judaism as a “temporal” and “political” faith, which felt both oddly out of place and in tension with his concluding quote from the Jewish prophetic tradition. More basically, seeing in Dune 2 an embodiment of “conservative teaching” on “political moderation, prudential compromise, and incremental change” overargues the evidence. The piece is insightful nonetheless.

Other Things:

• American college campuses continue to be safe spaces for vile antisemites and the feckless leaders who enable them.

• Forget nationalism. Aaron Renn says that Christians living in what he calls the “negative world” have to do “institutional triage,” adopting a “transactional mindset toward” American institutions.

• Italian officials are clamping down on refrigerator magnets, souvenirs, and T-shirts featuring famous masterpieces, like Michelangelo’s David, even though they’ve been in the public domain for centuries.

Hope to see you Friday.

(1) Protestant Reconquista: Several months ago, Christianity Today reported on a movement by theologically orthodox Gen Z Christians to reform mainline Protestant denominations and arrest their theological drift. The piece, penned by a nondenom Missouri pastor, is titled “Meet the Zoomers’ Martin Luther.” Like much of CT’s recent reporting, it’s peppered with vaguely woke-ish virtue-signaling, insisting that, despite “superficia[l]” “allusions to violent conquest,” the movement is “radically different” from the “very online” “political right” “manosphere.” (Which seems obviously true, so why bring it up?) Setting aside the preachy editorializing, the piece is worth a read:

[On Reformation Day, October 31, Denver-based Episcopalian Jake Boston] is reenacting that old story by tramping through the Colorado snow from mainline church to mainline church—60 in total—to post his own theses on their doors.

The lists, tailored to the seven American mainline denominations, critique their drift from orthodoxy into theological liberalism, challenging them to reaffirm the Resurrection, the divinity of Jesus, the authority of the Bible, and much more besides….

Their interest is institutional renewal in the mainline church, and their method—as detailed in a video explaining their Reformation Day activism—is calling young, theologically conservative Christians to reform and revive the denominations that their Christian forebears sweat and bled to build. Beyond the Reformation Day event, this primarily looks like mapping theologically conservative mainline congregations and encouraging Gen Z peers to join and serve in those communities.

The explainer video by Redeemed Zoomer elaborates on the movement’s goals, as does the website, Operation Reconquista. The group seeking reform within the United Church of Christ—heir to the congregationalist tradition—goes by the name “Puritans of the UCC,” which succinctly captures the insistence on internalized reform over separatism.

(2) Your own digital twin: What if “every aspect of life could soon be modeled in a parallel digital simulation,” where “[e]verything happening in our lived reality would be tracked and monitored and fed into software … to create a high-fidelity real-time digital representation of the world”? With advances in hardware and AI, creating such “digital twins” of everything, from factories to airplane wind tunnels to weather systems, is becoming possible. The real promise, according to this Noema article, may be in healthcare:

In 2018, a group of scientists … started a spinoff company called ELEM Biotech. The company’s tagline is “the virtual humans factory,” and its ultimate mission is to create highly advanced digital humans that can be used for medical experiments….

In the beginning, they wanted to create a highly complex and hyperrealistic computer simulation of the average human heart. That involved doing a lot of physics, from the electromechanics that determine a heartbeat to the fluid dynamics that determine blood flow. After that, they collaborated with a local hospital to gather as much cardiac data as possible, and they took heart scans of everyone who worked at the company. Eventually, they had a highly realistic average model that could be tweaked and adjusted based on personal data to create a whole range of virtual hearts that mirrored the diversity of sizes, shapes, ages and health levels that one might find in a random group of real people….

ELEM’s new ambition … is to create precise digital twins of specific people’s hearts right down to the cellular level…. Any medicines or therapies or devices (like a pacemaker) that you need to receive could be designed around your unique anatomy and then tested in your twin heart to gauge effectiveness and possible side effects. Surgeons, should you need them, could rehearse an operation in this risk-free zone.

Of course, the promise comes with peril: heightening awareness of our bodies even while alienating us from them, widening the disparity between rich and poor, deepening the dilemma over our personal data (who owns it, can use it, etc.?). More fundamentally, “what does it mean to be human? What does it mean to have a physical body? Would a digital body part feel like a prosthesis or like an extension of the self?”

Other Things:

• It’s not just the mainlines that are dying. Religion itself is losing its influence in American public life.

• Reflecting on Purim, CCU Chancellor Don Sweeting encourages Christians to “read and re-read the book of Esther. Remember what happened. Memorialize it … and do not be silent.”

• Brad Littlejohn, building on work by, says it’s time to recover the rich Christian vocabulary of virtue and vice.

Hope to see you Friday.

(1) The kids are not all right: I’m in the middle of Abigail Shrier’s latest book Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up, already an Amazon and NYT bestseller. The book is a witty and insightful exercise in sacred-cow-tipping. Shrier criticizes the rise of therapy, “trauma-informed” everything, “gentle parenting,” over-reliance on psychotropic medication, and much more. Her ultimate target is the growing industry of mental health professionals and therapists—an industry now starting to attract venture capital (not kidding). Martha Dunson has this review at American Reformer:

Shrier argues that therapy can often introduce iatrogenesis (i.e. treatment itself creates harm). Therapeutic interventions also undermine parental authority, fracturing countless family relationships, and create anxious, needy children who grow to adulthood unable to cope with basic life problems. Shrier recounts interviews with psychologists, therapists, school counselors, parents and children, and provides academic studies, school survey results, and more for overwhelming evidentiary support. And the evidence is powerful. Shrier surmises that individual therapy has very little proven benefit for kids, and rather sows self-doubt among parents and an over-reliance on “experts.” Bad Therapy is the slap in the face needed to wake parents up so that they will course correct.

…

[A] theme repeated throughout the book [is that] kids don’t need to be coddled; they need to have the freedom to fail, make mistakes, or do hard things and then to learn from their experiences. Hard times, difficult experiences, and risk, all tend to make people more resilient….

One of the more insightful critiques in Bad Therapy is that resilience—not “trauma”—is the norm for most people, especially kids. But the therapy industry has kneecapped the natural human tendency toward resilience by insisting that kids dwell on negative experiences and transitory emotions. Not coincidentally, there’s financial self-interest at play here, too. Therapists get paid to have patients, not to not have patients.

(2) What’s wrong with a Christian worldview? Well, Carl Trueman doesn’t like the term. In a recent conversation with John Stonestreet on the BreakPoint podcast, he explains why:

I’m open to the possibility that the differences between us may be more terminological than substantial…. These would be my two “beefs” with the terminology.

One of them is [that] Christian worldview language can claim too much.... When I hear talk of Christian worldview, it is typically singular and that perturbs me…. [A]cross the small-o orthodox Christian spectrum, … there are significant differences of theological opinion [such as differences among Christian traditions on the reality and significance of the Eucharist: purely symbolic vs. spiritual presence vs. real presence vs. mystical presence]. [These differences] rest on how you think about the world, how you think about bodies, how you think about the Incarnation…. I’d be more comfortable … with talk about Christian worldviews.... If we’re going to talk about Christian worldview, we’re really going to end up with a fairly insubstantial and narrow take on Christianity relative to the world around us.

The second concern [is that] Christian worldview claims too little in the sense that it really does, I think, prioritize ... the cognitive, intellectual aspects of the faith.... Much of the way we relate to the world is intuitive, and intuitions are not just shaped by arguments. They’re actually shaped by other things: social practices [and art and culture].… [These] feed into the way we think about the world. And that has led me to think that Christian apologetics ... or the formation of Christian discipleship has to be more than argument. The liturgy is important, what we sing is important, how we relate to each other is important.… My fear is that by overemphasizing the cerebral, we miss some of the most powerful forces in society shaping the way we think....

I also think we can end up overburdening ourselves.… For me, the best argument for traditional marriage is a traditional marriage. One of the reasons why my wife and I love to open our home and have students in for hospitality [is that] I want their imaginations to be gripped by what they see and what they experience. I think, as a teacher, those open houses are as influential on the way they behave and think about the world as any argument I give them in class.

Other Things:

• My friend Phil Dolitsky argues for Providence that military ethics must account for both the “seen” and “unseen” consequences of a given action across all groups. Case in point: Israel vs. Hamas.

• Cabrini, Angel Studios’ biopic on the first American to be canonized, is the inspiring story of an indomitable Christian woman and her commitment to the poor. But the movie downplays the deep faith that drove and sustained her.

• Biblical archaeology round-up: 2,500-year-old silver coin is one of the oldest ever found. Galilean hike yields up 2,800-year-old Assyrian scarab. 3,000-year-old earring confirms Bible’s account of Phoenician presence in Jerusalem.

Hope to see you Friday.

(1) Irish voters fight cultural tides: One of the intriguing developments of the past quarter-century in the West is the way the sexual revolution wedded itself to a corporatist agenda and, in the process, came to identify the “liberation” of women with her profit-producing capacity within a capitalistic system. Arguably, Paul Kingsnorth () writes, “the pre-modern woman, working in her home with her husband and family, had more agency and power than her contemporary counterpart whose life is directed from outside the home by distant commercial interests.” The irony is that women’s overall happiness has steadily declined even as her educational and economic opportunities have advanced—a trend noted by conservatives (early on) and liberals (more recently). The 1937 Constitution of Ireland, rooted in its historic identity as a Catholic nation, stood against this cultural tide in certain ways. It contains explicit protections both for the family (“the natural primary and fundamental unit group of Society” and “a moral institution possessing inalienable and imprescriptible rights”) and for women—and not just for women generally, but for “mothers” in particular, who, the Constitution declares, “shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.” Last week, Irish voters rejected, by 2-to-1 and 3-to-1 margins, efforts to redefine these constitutional protections:

The 39th amendment would have clarified [“clarified”?] that the definition of family extends to both “marriage” and “other durable relationships” and removed the text identifying marriage as the institution “on which the Family is founded.”

…

The proposed 40th amendment would have replaced the portions of Article 41 describing the role of women and mothers with a statement reading, “the State recognises that the provision of care, by members of a family to one another by reason of the bonds that exist among them, gives to Society a support without which the common good cannot be achieved, and shall strive to support such provision.”

…

With a turnout of 44.36%, the proposed 39th amendment to the Irish Constitution was rejected by 67.69% of voters, while 32.31% approved of the constitutional changes. The proposed 40th amendment was rejected by an even larger margin, with 73.93% of voters expressing support for keeping the constitutional language as is and 26.07% supporting the proposed changes.

…

The rejection of both amendments represents a sea change in Ireland, which has recently approved progressive referendums by large margins.

(2) Texas cows “as red as an Irish setter”: Numbers 19 requires, for a certain purification ritual associated with the Temple, the ashes of “a red heifer without spot, wherein is no blemish, and upon which never came a yoke.” But at least since the destruction of the Second Temple, a qualified red heifer had not been found in the Holy Land—that is, until Texas cattle ranchers in the Nineties realized they had something to offer: Texas Red Angus, a breed “as red as an Irish setter,” according to a 1998 New Yorker article. Last week, CBS News reported that red heifers “now graze at a secure, undisclosed location in the Israeli-occupied West Bank”:

Instrumental in bringing the heifers to the Holy Land was Yitshak Mamo, of Uvne Jerusalem, a group committed to seeing a new temple built in Jerusalem’s Old City.

…

Finding the red heifers took years. The quest led Mamo not to Jewish breeders but to Christian ranchers thousands of miles away.

“After a long search, we found them in Texas,” he said. “Texas red angus.”

To bypass strict laws in place at the time that banned the export of U.S. cattle to Israel, the heifers were classified as pets, Mamo said with a laugh. But to those following biblical commandments, the cows are no laughing matter, he added, stressing that it was no publicity stunt.

“Harry Potter is a good story. The Bible is not a story,” he said. “The Bible is a way of God to lead us.”

But while they’re classed as pets, there are no plans to let the red heifers live out long happy lives.

A massive white altar awaits, where they are to be burned on a plot of land overlooking the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.

Community Haps:

• First Pres Lenten Lecture Series: Wednesdays of Lent, First Pres is hosting its Lenten Lecture Series exploring “what it means to love God and others as Jesus loved.” This Wednesday, March 13, Dr. Brad Hale will give the fourth lecture, “Love and Sex in a Time of Crisis.”

• C.S. Lewis Lecture by Kirk Cherry: Mark your calendar for Sunday, April 21 at 11:00 am, when Kirk Cherry will give a lecture at First Congregational Church on C.S. Lewis. Details will follow in coming weeks.

Hope to see you Friday.

(1) Holy sites: I posted earlier today about a new project I’ve embarked upon within this Substack, seeking to collect and catalog Colorado’s holy places. I’m asking for your feedback on what places should be on the list and, relatedly, what criteria should be used. I also plan to visit or make pilgrimage to some of these places; I hope you can join me. Here’s an excerpt from the still-under-construction Holy Places page section, highlighting a place I’ve never been but that—for reasons I’m happy to share over coffee—is top of mind for me:

Mount of the Holy Cross

✟ Christian | Holy Cross Wilderness Area (Eagle County), CO

Between Vail to the north and Leadville to the south, in the Sawatch Range, rises this unusual 14,005-foot mountain featuring a 1500-foot couloir (vertical cleft) intersected by a 750-foot horizontal bench, forming a Christian cross that keeps snow well into July. Because of its remote location, Mount of the Holy Cross was known largely in rumor and seen by very few until the celebrated western photographer William Henry Jackson took the first-ever photo of it. It became an American sensation. Jackson’s photo inspired a famous painting by Thomas Moran (now in the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles) and a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in memory of the tragic death of his wife. Pilgrims flocked to see the cross by climbing a ridge on nearby Notch Mountain, where a stone hut was constructed in the 1920s to shelter hikers and host Sunday masses. According to a Summit Daily article, this was also the birthplace of “handkerchief healing.” At the urging of a Denver pastor, sick people around the country began mailing in handkerchiefs, and the pastor carried them up Notch Mountain, prayed over them, and mailed them back to their owners. In 1932, he schlepped 2000 handkerchiefs, enlisting two rangers to help carry the load. Between 1929 and 1950, there was a Holy Cross National Monument, but after a rock slide that marred the cross’s right arm, visitation declined, and the area was stripped of the designation and returned to the Forest Service. Today, Mount of the Holy Cross is the centerpiece of the Holy Cross Wilderness Area, created in 1980. Hikers summit the mountain to “bag” one of the state’s many fourteeners, or they climb a ridge on Notch Mountain for the iconic view and shelter. Pilgrims still journey here for inspiration, solitude, and prayer.

(2) Holy cites: My former pastor has posted a fantastic resource, “66 Chapters of the Bible to Know.” The story of the Bible, he notes, “is so large that it is easy to get lost. Or overwhelmed. Or both. And so it can be helpful to have mile-markers for the journey, waypoints that help us know where we are and where we’re going.” Glenn highlights 66 must-know chapters (“appropriate considering the number of books in the Bible”), coupled with a brief, one-sentence summary of each. As with any list—but especially one of biblical proportions—some caveats are necessary. First, Glenn “left out the entire book of Psalms because, well, that would be another post in itself!” Second, he’s careful to remind that “all Scripture is inspired by God not just a handful of chapters and verses,” and sometimes “the character and will of God only become clear and obvious in the broad strokes of the canvas—when we zoom out and see the whole thing.” Bearing these in mind, I’m confident you will find this post a blessing to your Bible study and prayer.

(3) Wholly-new sights: I’m breaking the tradition of Two Things and posting a third, because it’s too good to pass up. An international group of scientists, led by Dr. Javier Sellanes of the Universidad Católica del Norte, has discovered scores of new species living on seamounts—massive underwater mountains—off the coast of Chile. The recent expedition, under the auspices of Schmidt Ocean Institute, has turned up some truly wonderous sights, including a “living constellation” that resembles an underwater tumbleweed and a new species of sea toad (or coffinfish) whose skin resembles a crocheted garment. The colors, textures, and utter strangeness of these creatures are mesmerizing and beautiful. Watch this incredible 4-minute video.

Community Haps

• First Pres Lenten Lecture Series: Wednesdays of Lent, First Pres is hosting its Lenten Lecture Series exploring “what it means to love God and others as Jesus loved.” Next Wednesday, March 13, Dr. Brad Hale will give the fourth lecture, “Love and Sex in a Time of Crisis.”

• C.S. Lewis Lecture by Kirk Cherry: Mark your calendar for Sunday, April 21 at 11:00 am, when Kirk Cherry will give a lecture at First Congregational Church on C.S. Lewis. Details will follow in coming weeks.

Hope to see you Friday.

(1) Ukraine and the future of the American-led order: In the wake of Tucker Carlson’s bizarre fascination with Russian grocery stores, and with Sweden’s impending accession to NATO, NY Times columnist Bret Stephens and former Defense official Elbridge Colby joined Bari Weiss’s Honestly podcast for a debate on continuing U.S. aid to Ukraine—an issue now enmeshed with politics on the southern border and other geo-strategic issues (Israel, Taiwan). Their debate was wide-ranging, and the entire episode is worth a listen. Both Stephens and Colby seem to assume we’re on the cusp of a third world war, one that won’t so much as “start” suddenly as grow gradually out of uncontained regional conflicts. Where Stephens and Colby differ is what America should do about it, a disagreement ultimately grounded in what they think America’s role in the world should be.

Stephens is a biting critic of the isolationist turn in the GOP—and in the American body politic more generally. This sentiment, he says, is what led to the Second World War. We ought not abandon our role as guardian of the post-war liberal international order. Stephens concedes this means the U.S. must play “global policeman,” though selectively. Here he is at the NY Times a couple weeks ago:

The point of helping Ukraine defend itself against its despotic foe — like the point of defending Israel, or Taiwan, or NATO members rich or poor — isn’t altruism. It’s self-interest rightly understood, the kind of understanding that prewar isolationists like Vandenberg gained only from the ashes and agony of a world war. For the G.O.P. to now lose that understanding is as much a disgrace to it as it is, potentially, a disaster for us all.

Colby, for his part, thinks the U.S. has to be selective, too, but his eyes are fixed on China, which he regards as a far more serious threat. He wants to see Ukraine deprioritized in favor of a build-up of industrial and military capabilities focused on the Western Pacific. Here he is in Time last July:

It is critical to think clearly and realistically through this prism about how to prevent Russia from subordinating Ukraine. Crucially, this must be done with a forthright, clear-eyed recognition that China and Asia must be the priority for our military, geopolitical, and economic efforts. A war in the Western Pacific is distinctly possible in this decade, losing it would be catastrophic, and we are not preparing for it with the urgency, scale, or focus needed.

…

It is in America’s interest to … ensur[e] Ukraine can defend itself effectively, but we must pursue that interest in a manner consistent with our highest priority of restoring a formidable denial defense along Asia’s first island chain. There is a way to do that.

As I listened to their debate and what’s at stake, I was struck by the utter absence of American leadership—real political leadership—on these issues. Whether you take Stephens’ or Colby’s side, there is a deep, yawning chasm between what must be done and what the American people seem willing to do. To mobilize a nation—economically, militarily, and morally—requires the kind of statesmanship that doddering old men and demagogic narcissists are incapable of.

(2) From disenchantment to desecration: Carl Trueman comments at First Things on that funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York:

One obvious question is why an atheist man convinced that he is a woman and committed to a life of prostitution would wish to have a funeral in a church. One answer is that the struggle for the heart of a culture always takes place in two areas: time and space. As the Christian transformation of the Roman Empire was marked by the emergence of the liturgical calendar and the turning of pagan temples into churches, so we can expect the reverse to take place when a culture paganizes. The pagans will respond in kind. And so we have a month dedicated to Pride and church buildings used for the mockery of Christianity. Time and space are reimagined in ways that directly confront and annihilate that once deemed sacred. A funeral in a Catholic cathedral for an atheist culture warrior is a first-class way of doing this.

This goes to a point I have made before: Our age is not marked so much by disenchantment as by desecration. The culture’s officer class is committed not merely to marginalizing that which previous generations considered sacred. It is committed to its destruction. Disenchantment has passive connotations, a dull, impersonal, somewhat tedious but inevitable process. But desecration speaks to the exultation that active destruction of the holy involves. When Gentili is celebrated as a “great whore” … in a eulogy greeted with wild applause, then “desecration” seems the only word that captures both the blasphemy and the exhilaration of the moment.

Community Haps

• First Pres Lenten Lecture Series: Wednesdays of Lent, First Pres is hosting its Lenten Lecture Series exploring “what it means to love God and others as Jesus loved.” On Wednesday, March 13, Dr. Brad Hale will give the fourth lecture, “Love and Sex in a Time of Crisis.”

• C.S. Lewis Lecture by Kirk Cherry: Mark your calendar for Sunday, April 21 at 11:00 am, when Kirk Cherry will give a lecture at First Congregational Church on C.S. Lewis. Details will follow in coming weeks.

Hope to see you Friday.

(1) American Ark: Just in time for Washington’s birthday, America’s Rabbi, Meir Soloveichik, takes a fresh look at Emanuel Leutze’s famous 1851 painting, “Washington Crossing the Delaware.” Soloveichik critiques alleged “errors” in the work and urges us to understand them “as deliberate artistic choices”:

Leutze, an avowed abolitionist, featured a member of the integrated 14th Regiment as a model for what America could be. The painting deliberately depicts a diverse group of rowers. In addition to the Black man, there is a man wearing a Scottish hat—apparently an immigrant, like Leutze—and a Native American on the other end of the craft. The boat, for Leutze, is America itself….

Putting so many soldiers in a tiny boat was also a symbolic choice. At a time when many in Europe were excluded from civic life and many in America were enslaved, “Washington Crossing the Delaware” urges Europeans to embrace democracy while reminding Americans, as Fischer put it, that they were all in the same boat.

As we mark the birthdays of Washington and Lincoln this year, Leutze’s remarkable painting shows us how not to idolize or idealize the past but to celebrate its best aspects, in order to inspire us as we face the future.

(2) Evil isn’t extra-ordinary: Summing up the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the major organizers of the Holocaust, Hannah Arendt famously coined the phrase “the banality of evil.” At one level, the phrase encapsulates how ordinary people can commit, even justify, heinous atrocities. At another level, it describes how evil can be encoded in laws, processes, and algorithms such that it becomes endemic, programmatic, and normalized. “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness,” the prophet Isaiah warned. In this spirit, Trevin Wax writes for The Gospel Coalition that “Evil Doesn’t Always Show Up Waving a Flag”:

Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland is a deeply unsettling book about WWII. Browning reminds us of the sheer scale of the killing that took place in Eastern Europe, much of it outside the concentration camps and most of it done by ordinary people without much investment in the fight—simple men and women conscripted into Hitler’s killing machine. Browning claims the majority of individuals in this particular battalion weren’t zealous Nazis. They were ordinary, middle-aged, working-class men who nevertheless perpetrated heinous acts.

Browning’s book shows three distinct groups emerging within the battalion: a core of enthusiastic participants, a majority who executed their responsibilities reliably but lacked initiative, and a small minority who avoided involvement in the acts of violence but were engaged in other activities that did nothing to diminish the battalion’s overall efficiency in carrying out atrocities. Hardly anyone seriously resisted. Ordinary Men shows how easy it is for people to yield to the influences of those around them, leading to actions they’d never consider otherwise….

[Social critiques often imply that] evil individuals are monstrous, belonging to an entirely different class of humanity than the enlightened and good. But surely history teaches us it’s self-deception to believe that evil is confined to “monsters” or that malevolent beliefs reside exclusively in one political party or in a distinct class of humanity. The unsettling truth about evil is its pervasiveness, often manifesting in subtle and seemingly normal circumstances.

Community Haps

• First Pres Lenten Lecture Series: Over the next five Wednesdays, starting this week (Feb. 21), First Pres hosts its Lenten Lecture Series exploring “what it means to love God and others as Jesus loved.” On Wednesday, March 13, Dr. Brad Hale will give the fourth lecture, “Love and Sex in a Time of Crisis.”

Hope to see you Friday.

(1) Which river? What sea?: Thanks to the Colson Center’s The Point commentary today, I learned of this WSJ opinion piece, a few months old, by UC Berkeley poli-sci prof Ron Hassner. Hassner surveyed 250 college students who say they support the genocidal slogan “From the river to the sea”:

But only 47% of the students who embrace the slogan were able to name the river and the sea. Some of the alternative answers were the Nile and the Euphrates, the Caribbean, the Dead Sea (which is a lake) and the Atlantic. Less than a quarter of these students knew who Yasser Arafat was (12 of them, or more than 10%, thought he was the first prime minister of Israel). Asked in what decade Israelis and Palestinians had signed the Oslo Accords, more than a quarter of the chant’s supporters claimed that no such peace agreements had ever been signed. There’s no shame in being ignorant, unless one is screaming for the extermination of millions.

The good news is that education—real education—seems to help:

Shown on a map of the region that a Palestinian state would stretch from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, leaving no room for Israel, [a Latino engineering student from a southern university] downgraded his enthusiasm for the mantra to “probably not.” Of the 80 students who saw the map, 75% similarly changed their view….

In all, after learning a handful of basic facts about the Middle East, 67.8% of students went from supporting “from the river to sea” to rejecting the mantra. These students had never seen a map of the Mideast and knew little about the region’s geography, history or demography. Those who hope to encourage extremism depend on the political ignorance of their audiences. It is time for good teachers to join the fray and combat bias with education.

(2) Christendom’s what-if: Tom Holland’s magisterial book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World has anchored many of our discussions, at coffee and beyond. The book is barely over three years old, but one has a sense that we will all be “downstream” of it—drinking of its insights, shaped by its currents—for decades. Fresh critiques are thus welcome. Here’s one over at The Public Discourse from The Witherspoon Institute’s John Doherty. (Thanks again to Kirk Cherry for the pointer.) Doherty’s conclusory section, on how unity within Christendom could have avoided the excesses of the various traditions, is the most insightful:

Holland’s account also raises the question whether the rupture of the different elements of Christian civilization had something to do with divisions within the Church proper. Holland praises Pope Gregory VII for distinguishing the realm of the state from that of the Church, and for holding public institutions to universal moral standards. But he also notes that Gregory’s zeal could be excessive, and eventually led to the medieval papacy’s claim … that it was good for civil authorities to prosecute heresy at the Church’s direction. Was Gregory more prone to such excesses because he was one of the first popes not to reign in formal communion with the Eastern patriarchal bishops, who had separated from Rome just twenty years before his pontificate? Had the medieval popes had to keep more in mind the authority and judgments of their Greek-speaking brethren, they might have asserted their own authority with more caution.

Moreover, had the East, with its instinctive reverence for God’s transcendent authority over men’s lives, remained in communion with the West, the West’s confidence in reason might not have rushed so quickly into secularism, nor its love of human dignity and freedom devolved into today’s identity politics and moral anarchy. On the other hand, if Eastern Christianity had remained anchored to the papacy, it might have been able to defend itself from the Byzantine and Russian emperors who turned the Church into an arm of the state. This “caesaropapism”—the inverse of papal theocracy—persists to this day in parts of Eastern Europe, sapping the Church of evangelical energy and leading it to acquiesce in the reigning autocrat’s policies, no matter how brutal.

Hope to see you Friday.

Putting together Two Things (almost) every week is a great privilege. And in the age of information, there’s an embarrassment of riches. Culling discussion-worthy topics down to two per week is never an easy task. The task was made easier this week with provision from members of our company.

(1) Christianity vs. liberalism: Kirk Cherry alerted me to this short essay at Public Discourse, where classical educator Joshua Pauling reflects on J. Gresham Machen’s small but prescient book Christianity and Liberalism, now a century old:

Perhaps Machen’s most prescient and provocative claim is that “the great redemptive religion which has always been known as Christianity is battling against a totally diverse type of religious belief, which is only the more destructive of the Christian faith because it makes use of traditional Christian terminology.” This was a “modern non-redemptive religion” that Machen called “modernism” or “liberalism.” By liberalism, Machen [meant] … “modern liberal religion” that is “rooted in naturalism.” The defining characteristic of theological liberalism is “the denial of any entrance of the creative power of God ... in connection with the origin of Christianity.”

…

The thesis of Christianity and Liberalism still has surprising relevance…. In Machen’s day, the challenge was primarily theological, as modernists questioned doctrines like the virgin birth, the deity of Christ, and biblical authority. Today, however, the challenges frequently come in the realm of anthropology, ethics, and sexuality, which one could argue are even more foundational to what it means to be human and to live in community.

…

Committed Protestant that he was, Machen also noted that despite disagreements, there was a “great common heritage which unites the Roman Catholic Church, with its maintenance of the authority of Holy Scripture and with its acceptance of the great early creeds, to devout Protestants today.” While to Machen the Catholic–Protestant gulf was still profound, it seemed “almost trifling compared to the abyss which stands between us and many ministers of our own Church.” This makes for some interesting alliances in our day, too. Frequently there are progressive and orthodox wings within church bodies, which means we might be more closely aligned on foundational issues with those from orthodox wings of other church bodies than with the progressives in our own.

(2) Politics is local: At Colorado Politics, our very own Michael Tsogt has published an op-ed highlighting why local governments succeed where states and the federal government fail:

At a time when Americans’ trust in the federal government is at rock bottom, citizens in Colorado and across the country are increasingly relying on local government to tackle today’s toughest problems, including homelessness, mental health and crime.

Tsogt highlights three examples across the Front Range: Springs Rescue Mission’s partnership with the City of Colorado Springs to address homelessness with a “treatment-first” model that contrasts with the failed “housing-first” policies of other communities; Douglas County’s Mental Health Initiative that pairs law enforcement with mental health professionals to achieve better outcomes for those struggling with mental-health crises; and Aurora’s proactive efforts to reduce auto theft in the face of state legislative paralysis. “[L]ocal government, being closer to its constituents, immersed in challenges neighborhood by neighborhood—and hearing directly from residents—often can act in a more rapid, agile and creative fashion to craft practical solutions that work.”

Community Haps:

• “The Soul of Civility”: Center for the Study of Government and the Individual at UCCS hosts Alexandra Hudson on February 7 to talk about the necessity of civility to social and civic flourishing. Free to the public. RSVP here.

• Ash Wednesday services, February 14:

  • New Life Downtown (at Palmer HS): 6:30 pm

  • St. George’s Anglican: 8 am, noon, 5 p.m.

  • First Pres: 6:30 pm

  • Holy Trinity Anglican: 7 am, 6:30 pm

• Abolition of Man course at New Life Downtown Commons, Feb. 15-Mar. 21: Sign up here. The $30 fee covers a copy of the book and food (including a return of my famous “cereal bar”).