Coffee this Friday, February 2, at the usual time and place.
(1) Watering down bureaucratic power: A little over a week ago, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a pair of cases challenging the power of federal bureaucrats to issue binding rules when Congress has left a law ambiguous. The cases center on a new federal agency rule that requires herring fishermen to pay for federal monitors aboard their vessels to watch for fishing violations, something Congress never specifically legislated. While this agency rule affects very few Americans, the doctrine undergirding it, called Chevron deference after the 1984 case originating it, could be on the chopping block:
Chevron deference … requires courts to defer to an agency’s interpretation of an ambiguous statute, so long as the agency’s interpretation is “reasonable.” Courts owe such deference to the agency’s interpretation even if there is a more reasonable interpretation of the statute, a court had previously interpreted the statute in a contrary way, or the agency had previously interpreted the statute differently.
In other words, federal bureaucrats can override federal judges. They can even override their agency predecessors, a particular problem when political control of the executive branch changes hands. As Paul Clement, attorney for the anglers, said:
[T]he current system means Congress never has to weigh in and reach a compromise on the toughest policy questions, because one side or the other can just wait for a change in the executive branch every four or eight years, and the rules will swing back and forth based on the views of the political party in power.
“I think it’s really as simple as this: which is when the statute is ambiguous, and the tie has to go to someone, we think the tie should go to the citizen and not the government,” Clement added. “And one of the many problems with the Chevron rule is it basically says that when the statutory question is close, the tie goes to the government, and that just doesn’t make any sense to us.”
Commentary on the cases has been a veritable ocean of wordplay clickbait. “Supreme Court could reel in power of federal agencies with dual fights over fishing rule,” the CBS News headline read. NPR quoted a commenter who, gesturing toward the larger implications of the cases, called the fishing rule a “red herring.” The Federalist’s headline was pretty good, too: “How Disgruntled Fishermen Could Prompt SCOTUS to Capsize the Administrative State.”
(2) Shrouded in mist and mystery: I went down a rabbit hole over the weekend on the origin of Christianity in Ireland and the alleged connections between Coptic (indigenous Egyptian) Christianity and Celtic Christianity. It’s often said that St. Patrick brought Christianity to Ireland, but this is a myth, as the historical evidence of pre-Patrician Christianity in Ireland is strong. According to Seamus MacManus’s The Story of the Irish Race, in AD 431, the year before Patrick arrived, the Pope dispatched Palladius, himself possibly an Irishman, to become bishop “ad Scotus in Christum credente”—to the Irish who believed in Christ. That there were enough believers there to warrant sending a Roman bishop bespeaks a deep Christian presence in the Emerald Isle well before Patrick’s arrival.
Intriguingly, though, no one seems to know how Christianity got there in the first place. Some argue it came by way of Roman Britian, but if that were true, why does Celtic Christianity look so ... un-Roman? Others have suggested a Coptic-Celtic link—that Christianity arrived among the Celts by way of Coptic missionaries from Egypt. It’s a plausible theory. Alexandria, Egypt was an important cultural and commercial hub of the ancient world and a major center of early Christianity. (Coptic Christians date their origins in Egypt to St. Mark the Evangelist around 33 AD.) Given the known contacts between the Mediterranean world and the British Isles at the time, it’s not unreasonable to suppose that Alexandrian Christians dispatched missionaries to evangelize far-flung lands like Ireland. That in turn would explain why Celtic Christianity looks more Coptic and Eastern Orthodox than Roman. Paul Kingsnorth elaborates further (which, as you can probably guess, was the start of my tumble ad leporem foraminis):
[T]here is growing evidence for the presence of Egyptian Coptic Christians in the country before [Patrick]. Their presence has been cited to explain specifically Irish curiosities like early Christian handbells (those found here look similar to those from Egypt), monastic round towers (which look somewhat like Coptic bell towers), the binding of certain gospel books, and even Irish place names. ‘Kil’, for example (as in Killybegs) could be a corruption of ‘cell’, while names like Dysert - a strange place name which pops up all over the country - may be a corruption of ‘desert.’
My favourite historical mystery here is the case of the Irish high crosses. These monuments were raised across the country to teach an illiterate population the Christian story…. The two most popular saints on the crosses, by an overwhelming margin, are two Egyptians: St Anthony the Great and St Paul of Thebes.
The notion that Irish Christianity originated in the Egyptian desert, rather than in Rome or Constantinople … is significant for a lot of reasons. If it is true, it means that the original Christian stream here in northwestern Europe (including neighbouring Britain, which was first Christianised by Irish monks) was the Christianity of the Desert Fathers. If that much blurbed ‘Celtic Christianity’ was a faith of the wilderness rather than the city, of monks rather than bishops, of the hermit’s hut rather than the urban church, then our original practices in these islands start to look quite different….
Community Haps
Renewed Minds Learning Community: Dr. Adam Pelser’s spring course on C.S. Lewis’s Abolition of Man starts February 15. Sign up here (spots are limited).
The story of Irish Orthodoxy is a pretty fascinating one. Your article spurred me to dig a little deeper and I found this article: https://orthochristian.com/52572.html
“ The unprecedented upsurge of Christianity in this part of the world can be witnessed from the fact that in the first 250 years following St Patrick’s arrival, Eire produced around 500 recognized saints. None of them was martyred, except on the Continent, which confirms the existence of a close affinity between the ancient Christian Faith and traditional Irish spirituality.”
Last night I watched a new film produced and directed by members of Holy Theophany Orthodox Church, “Sacred Alaska”—it described a very similar connection between the Yupik and Inuit native Alaskans and the Orthodox faith which they gladly and freely received from Russian missionaries in the 18th century. The documentary details how their nature-centric pre-Christian religion provided fertile soil for their people to joyfully receive the gospel of Christ as loving creator and sustainer of the cosmos, such that even after the Russians left, the Orthodox faith remained fixed firmly in their culture and lives.
Appreciate your work on Two Things!