Two Things
Good tidings and merry Christmas! I hope your day has been filled with light, love, and laughter. Among the gifts I received today is a “smart” birdfeeder with a solar-powered camera that will capture the many house finches, piñon jays, and mountain bluebirds that frequent my backyard—certainly in spring/summer, but we’ll see what winter brings, too.
Coffee this Friday, December 29, at the usual time and place, hosted by Brad Hale.
(1) Another high-profile conversion (2 years old): Paul Kingsnorth’s Substack, Abbey of Misrule, first caught my attention during Covidtimes, with its clear-eyed insights about the worldview and motivations that drove the technocratic tyranny of those days. Yet somehow I missed Kingsnorth’s 2021 First Things essay—republished today by The Free Press—titled “The Cross and the Machine,” describing his spiritual journey through atheism, Buddhism, and Wicca, until he found himself unexpectedly landed upon a Christian shore. The narrative of his conversion is compelling—part Paul on the Damascus Road (dreams and visions), part C.S. Lewis (reluctant compulsion), part Francis Thompson (“Hound of Heaven”).
None of this is rationally explicable, and there is no point in arguing with me about it. There is no point in arguing with myself about it: I gave up after a while. This is not to say that my faith is irrational. In fact, the more I learned, the more Christianity’s story about the world and human nature chimed better with my experience than did the increasingly shaky claims of secular materialism. In the end, though, I didn’t become a Christian because I could argue myself into it. I became a Christian because I knew, suddenly, that it was true….
I am not a joiner, but I accepted, eventually, that I would need a church. I went looking, and I found one, as usual, in the last place I expected. This January, on the Feast of Theophany, I was baptized in the freezing waters of the River Shannon, on a day of frost and sun, into the Romanian Orthodox Church. In Orthodoxy I had found the answers I had sought, in the one place I never thought to look. I found a Christianity that had retained its ancient heart—a faith with living saints and a central ritual of deep and inexplicable power. I found a faith that, unlike the one I had seen as a boy, was not a dusty moral template but a mystical path, an ancient and rooted thing, pointing to a world in which the divine is not absent but everywhere present, moving in the mountains and the waters. The story I had heard a thousand times turned out to be a story I had never heard at all.
From historian Tom Holland in 2020, to Kingsnorth in 2021 (and reiterated today), and Ayaan Hirsi Ali this year … something is happening. Are scientific materialism, expressive individualism, and cultural Marxism finally shipwrecking themselves on the shores of a God-shaped reality? (One suspects, however, that their assaults are not ended.)
(2) Demand for private security grows: It was clear after 2020 that law enforcement was a demoralized and dying profession. Our local KOAA News5 reported last week that Colorado Springs Police have a recruitment and staffing problem. And WORLD Magazine has a story about “anxious urbanites” turning to private security firms because public law enforcement is slow or nonexistent:
More than 1 million people work as security guards in America, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and that number has doubled in the past 20 years. Since 2020, neighborhoods like Federal Hill have started hiring private security services. In Minnesota, for example, the number of licenses approved for new private security firms rose from 14 in 2019 to 27 in 2021, according to the state’s Board of Private Detective and Protective Agent Services. In Oregon, 1,635 private security guards had a license to carry a gun in September 2019. Today, that number has grown to 2,268.
The dynamics vary per city, but the underlying drivers are largely the same as in Baltimore: People are worried about police understaffing and rising crime. National crime rates, particularly the homicide rate, rose dramatically in 2020, even as law enforcement agencies shrank—and continue to do so. Police officer resignations spiked 47 percent in 2022 compared with 2019, according to a survey of 182 police agencies by the Police Executive Research Forum. Retirements rose 19 percent.
Hope you can join coffee on Friday.