Category: Longform
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If humans hadn't sinned, would Christ have still come?
I love this bit from Ilia Delio in The Not-Yet God, summarizing a thought from Franciscan theologian Duns Scotus:
The reason for the incarnation, then, is not sin but love. Christ is first in God’s intention to love. The incarnation is the unrepeatable, unique, and single defining act of God’s love. Thus, even if sin had not entered the universe through the human person, Christ would have come.
That’s good news, my friends.
Chris Arnade on American vs European values and "the good life"
Highly recommend Chris Arnade’s latest Substack discussion of the legitimate difference in human values between Europe and America and how that plays out in cultural priorities and what we think of as “the good life”.
An excerpt:
There is a genuine comprehension gap between the US and Europe. There really are two different minds with two different understandings of what it means to be a human, and that manifests in different rules, regulations, and priorities, since policy is a result of a society’s cultural preferences….
While the US and Europe share a broad commitment to classical Liberalism, and Democracy, we have very different definitions of the Public Good, which means different views of what we want out of life, and what we consider fulfilling. In broad and simplistic terms, the US emphasizes material wealth, opportunity, and individual liberty while Europe values community health, a shared common good, and a sense of place.
From the European perspective the US has a cult of the individual, and that’s why it has too many guns, obscenely large cars, can’t build a public transportation system, and has dysfunctional public spaces. From the US perspective Europeans are unmotivated unproductive slackers who would rather sip coffee all day than work, and their idea of a shared common good means stealing from the successful to give to the losers.
This difference isn’t simply about things such as tax policy, health care, and worker rights (although those matter), but about how we understand the good life, and how our built environment reflects that.
As with any of Arnade’s posts, the associated photographs really are a must-view to fully appreciate his perspective. Worth reading and subscribing.
My talks at Christ Episcopal Church Adult Forum, May 2025
The past two Sundays I had the opportunity to talk at my church’s Sunday morning Adult Forum. The first Sunday I spent most of an hour just telling my story of growing up in Evangelicalism and eventually leaving it and becoming Episcopal. It’s a long talk, but was good to tell my story and to feel like I finally have enough space and distance from it to start to be able to tell it clearly and fairly.
As I was writing my story for week 1, I had multiple topics that came up where I thought “that’s an important thing about Evangelicalism, and if you didn’t live in it for a while it might not be obvious at all”. So I compiled those into a short list and spent Week 2 talking about them. These topics included:
- Biblicism
- Congregational independence
- Entrepreneurialism
- Gender hierarchy
- Insular cultural environment and the influence of Christian media
- Opposition to Christian Tradition
One of the folks who attended week 1 sent me a link to an Ann Patchett interview with the hope that I’d respond to some comments near the end (starting about 26:20 in the link) where she asks whether what religion you pick really matters at all. It was a perfect final question to respond to and tie off my two weeks of discussion. I won’t give away my answer but I’m happy with where it landed.
State champ!
Super proud of our youngest daughter, Katie, who earlier today won first place for National History Day in the Senior Individual Presentation category at the Iowa state-level competition. To accomplish this she spent months researching her chosen topic and then wrote a 10-minute monologue portraying different historical perspectives on the topic.
It was a timely topic: “Watergate: Presidential Right to Confidentiality v. Responsibility for Justice”.
Next up: the national competition at the University of Maryland (just outside Washington, DC) in June.
Wanting to be anti-Trump while disavowing culpability
Twice this week now I have run across columns from anti-Trump Republican Christians who are doing their darnedest to disavow the role that the Christian Right they were involved in has played in getting us to our current fascist regime. One is a sample, two is approaching a pattern. Let’s review.
First up
Example 1 comes from Jake Meador over at Mere Orthodoxy. In his essay titled “Evangelical Political Life after the Religious Right”, Jake boldly claims that “the religious right is dead”. To those of us who look around and see an evangelical Speaker of the House, a conservative Catholic VP, a President who claims Christianity, and an Attorney General who is running a task force to root out “anti-Christian bias” whose first witness is Michael Farris from Patrick Henry College and Scott Hicks from Liberty University might be surprised at Jake’s claim. Turns out that there are only two Religious Right life signs that Jake is looking for: abortion ban language in the Republican platform, and language in favor of “natural marriage”, by which he means opposition to anything LGBTQ+.
Jake says that the “understandable” conclusion that the new Christian Nationalist movement is a successor and continuation of the Religious Right is wrong, but his only apparent support for that assertion is that lack of explicit platform language against abortion and gay people. (We’ll ignore for the moment the fact that the entire Republican Party platform back in 2020 was just “whatever Trump wants”.) He then says that “the Christian influence on actual Republican policy items… is going to be exceedingly negligible going forward”. Again I would like to inquire what reality Mr. Meador is living in.
When you have people like Speaker Johnson and Christopher Rufo driving Republican political approaches, to make Meador’s statement true, you either need to redefine “Christian” or redefine “negligible”. Clearly there are Christians influencing Republican politics these days. A lot of them. Many of them largely ideologically aligned with positions Meador and Mere O have historically taken. That Meador now wants to disavow it is farcical. I’ll stop there for now.
Batting second…
Example 2 comes today from David French in the New York Times. In his column “The Anti-Woke Right Has a Lot to Answer For”, French recounts his initial support and hopes for “the Anti-Woke Right” - that they would contend for broader freedom of speech and expression and combat what he saw were the anti-liberal tendencies of Left-leaning ideology. But then he sounds completely surprised about where the Republican Party has landed:
It turns out that when they said, “Let us speak,” they weren’t embracing free speech as a universal value, but rather as an instrumental value — free speech is important only so long as they get to say what they think. The left? It’s too dangerous to be heard.
Throughout the column French wants to continue to blame this move on something he calls “the authoritarian right”. Again, this appears to be a convenient way to distance himself from a movement that he strongly supported for the past two decades. French has consistently championed Christian religious liberty and free speech, but apparently let his optimism blind him to the warning signs of impending authoritarianism. The same powers at play in the Republican Party were also at play in the conservative resurgence in the Baptist and Presbyterian churches that French has associated with. It’s all the same game. So he can claim to be surprised and disappointed now that we’re here, but God forbid he acknowledge any of his own responsibility.
There is a profound difference between liberty and power. When you have power, you certainly experience it as freedom. You can do what you want to do. Liberty, by contrast, protects people against power. Liberty is what grants you freedom of action even when you are not in control. The anti-woke right spoke the language of liberty when its freedom was under threat, but now we know the terrible truth: The movement was about power all along.
Let me find my shocked face.
Is Anybody Actually Responsible?
On one hand I am happy to see David French use his NYT platform to acknowledge that the right wing is just after power and willing to trample all our liberties to get it and keep it. And I’m happy to see Jake Meador acknowledge that the current regime is Christian Nationalist. But when Jake’s solution is that we need a slightly different flavor of Christianity to influence government, and David’s is just to say they’ve got some explaining to do, it all falls short.
If members of the Religious Right have a change of heart and want to help improve things, it has to start by acknowledging their own complicity in how we got here. And some introspection to realize that preferring and embedding specifically Christian tenets into our laws will inevitably again march us toward either oppressive, government-enforced religious fundamentalism (think Iran) or Christian Nationalist fascism.
Tim Walz recently put it this way: “If you say you love freedom, but you don’t believe it is for everyone, the thing you love is not freedom, it’s privilege.” Myself, I want freedom. I think David French does, but he hasn’t found the right direction yet. To read Meador, I suspect he really wants privilege. For those who want freedom, we must be willing to understand and acknowledge the ways we (and the systems we supported) contributed to us getting to this point. And then we need to change.
Freedom from the compulsion to pretend: Mtr. Kelli Joyce on gender traditions and the fruit of the spirit
Continuing from yesterday’s post, I want to excerpt one more wonderful section from the conversation between Fr. David W. Johnston and Mtr. Kelli Joyce. This time it’s about ’traditional masculinity’, freedom in Christ, human flourishing, and the Fruit of the Spirit. (Emphasis throughout is mine.)
Johnston: And so what I hear you saying is that for for any any young men who might be watching this, if you want to if you want to go have a beer with your friends and tell jokes, do it unto the glory of God, right?
Joyce: Absolutely. I mean, this is the thing. Jokes are great. Cruelty is not. You can do unfunny cruelty and you can do uncruel jokes, right? A cold one with the bros? Go for it.
Johnston: With any of those things that are traditionally masculine or feminine, like you know, if you like working out or mixed martial arts, I mean, yeah, that’s fine. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, self-control.
Joyce: No one thing can get a seal of approval as “that’s good” or “that’s bad”. That’s the whole point of the freedom in Christ: I can’t tell you for sure if beer and jokes are fine because it might be and might not be depending on how you’re doing it, who you’re doing it with, what your relationship to alcohol is, you know, these kinds of things. Same with mixed martial arts or whatever. If you are doing it from a place that is compatible with those fruits of the spirit, do it to the glory of God. And if you’re doing it in some way that is making you less joyful or making you afraid or making you feel insecure, right, then those are things to look at, not because mixed martial arts is bad, right? But because God wants you to have abundant life.
Johnston: From my point of view as somebody who in a lot of ways embodies a lot of very stereotypical uh, masculine traits, still remember like wondering like, well, is there something wrong with me? Cuz I could not care less about cars. I have a son who’s like, “Oh, that’s a cool car.” And I’m like so bored. I’m like, “My favorite car is affordable, predictable, good gas mileage, public transportation.”
…What I see that’s getting coded or trying to Trojan horse into some of that “this is traditional masculinity” is a pass for things that are not the fruit of the spirit. For cruelty, demeaning people, pride, looking at women with lust, you know objects to puff up male pride… I think Christianity does offer us a way of life like you’re talking about, that abundant life. And so that if one wants to embrace very traditional masculinity or femininity, that is okay. And Jesus has shown us what that looks like. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, self-control.
Joyce: I think that sometimes there is slippage between conversations about what kind of person one may be, is allowed to be, and what kind of person one must be. I think for me the important thing is of course there’s room to like cars, but there’s room to not like cars. The thing that is important is not that one deny interests because they’re masculine or pretend to have them because they’re masculine. Right? Like, what if we could be free of feeling compulsion to pretend in either direction, right? That we don’t like what we do, that we do like what we don’t. What if we were our whole, full, authentic selves, exactly as we were created to be, in relationship, but not competing and not trying to become someone over and against somebody else, just being who we are?
Mtr. Kelli Joyce on the Fruit of the Spirit and gender expression
If you’ve got 45 minutes to listen to a couple Episcopal priests talk about Galatians, the Fruit of the Spirit, and gender expression, by all means spend it on this video:
Fr. David W. Johnston and Mtr. Kelli Joyce have some wonderful thoughts here. There are a couple portions I want to highlight over a couple of blog posts. First, on the “crisis of masculinity” and gender expression, here’s what Mtr. Kelli has to say (36:40 - 39:00 in the video, minor transcript edits for clarity, emphasis mine):
In terms of the crisis of masculinity, it seems like this could be understood almost like how Paul talks about the law. There was this thing that was provided when we needed it, which told us “here’s how you be”. And now there’s freedom, and it’s a freedom we didn’t have before, which is not some new homogenized other way of being that says you have to stop being everything you were, but that says what is important here is that whatever you are is following Christ.
And so I think, to me, I think that there are healthy and Christ-honoring ways of expressing something that looks like traditional masculinity, and healthy and Christ-honoring ways of expressing something that looks very much like traditional femininity. I think that there are sinful and sin-warped ways of doing both of those things. And so what seems important to me is not about pursuing or avoiding a certain kind of gender expression, or restraining that to a certain kind of person or a certain kind of body, but about saying “who has God made me to be?”, “what brings me joy?”, “What feels like I am living out the self I was given by God in creation?”, and “how does that enable me, personally, in my context as who I am, from where I’m standing, to follow Christ?”.
So, to me, there can be virtuous masculinity, virtuous femininity, kind of a virtuous gender neutrality. But the important piece there is the virtue, and not that there is some sort of binding need to have one or the other kind of gender expression. Because nobody has a perfectly anything gender expression. Everybody has traits that are from a mix of these two big categories that we talk about and think about. And that’s OK. In Christ those things are not what define our relationship to God or our relationship to other members of the body. It is who we are together by the power of the Spirit.
Yes and amen.
Choir performance this weekend!
With all the chaos in the world I’m gonna spend some time away from social media this week and blessedly focus on being the best dang tenor I can be in this weekend’s concerts. The Mozart Requiem isn’t gonna sing itself, folks.
I joined the Orchestra Iowa choir last fall when they had an open audition call and I had a little bit of free time. I’ve done all sorts of music stuff in my life but very little actual choir singing, so I was a little bit nervous. But I made it through the audition and it’s been a delightful experience singing with the choir. Maestro Tim Hankewich runs a tight and effective rehearsal, and I’ve never been the best singer in the group but I’m a dang good sight reader (thanks, decades of piano playing!) and I’m not pitchy (thanks, years of listening to my dad tune pianos!).
Tonight we head to the first rehearsal with the orchestra; tomorrow the same; Saturday night and Sunday afternoon we perform. There are still tickets available if you’re in Eastern Iowa and want to attend.
Self-justification is the heavy burden because there is no end to carrying it
Further on in Rowan Williams’ Where God Happens he recounts a saying attributed to the desert father John the Dwarf:
We have put aside the easy burden, which is self-accusation, and weighed ourselves down with the heavy one, self-justification.
That is, as they say, a word. It may seem counterintuitive, he says, but it’s not:
Self-justification is the heavy burden because there is no end to carrying it; there will always be some new situation where we need to establish our position and dig a trench for the ego to defend. But how on earth can you say that self-accusation is a light burden? We have to remember the fundamental principle of letting go of our fear. Self-accusation, honesty about our failings, is a light burden because whatever we have to face in ourselves, however painful is the recognition, however hard it is to feel at times that we have to start all over again, we know that the burden is already known and accepted by God’s mercy. We do not have to create, sustain, and save ourselves; God has done, is doing, and will do all. We have only to be still, as Moses says to the people of Israel on the shore of the Red Sea. [Emphasis mine.]
Williams then takes that individual application and scales it up to the church:
Once again, we can think of what the church would be like if it were indeed a community not only where each saw his or her vocation as primarily to put the neighbor in touch with God but where it was possible to engage each other in this kind of quest for the truth of oneself, without fear, without the expectation of being despised or condemned for not having a standard or acceptable spiritual life. There would need to be some very fearless people around, which is why a church without some quite demanding forms of long-term spiritual discipline—whether in traditional monastic life or not—is going to be a frustrating place to live. [Emphasis mine again]
This put me in mind of a lunch I had with a pastor several years ago. Over chips and salsa I was expressing concern over some area of my life, I don’t remember which, and I despairingly ended up quoting Romans: “should I continue in sin that grace should abound?”
He took a sip of his iced tea, smiled at me and responded “well, that’s generally been my experience, yes.” In generosity of spirit and freedom from fear he encouraged me not with any judgment, but with acknowledgement that he, too, was in need of God’s forgiveness.
This is the fearlessness I aspire to in my own life and interactions with others. Not to diminish the significance of sin, but to acknowledge that no amount of self-justification will suffice to make it right, and that I should put that heavy burden down.
Something has happened that makes the entire process of self-justification irrelevant
I’m reading Rowan Williams’ Where God Happens: Discovering Christ in One Another, and this bit is just beautiful:
The church is a community that exists because something has happened that makes the entire process of self-justification irrelevant. God’s truth and mercy have appeared in concrete form in Jesus and, in his death and resurrection, have worked the transformation that only God can perform, told us what only God can tell us: that he has already dealt with the dreaded consequences of our failure, so that we need not labor anxiously to save ourselves and put ourselves right with God.
The church’s rationale is to be a community that demonstrates this decisive transformation as really experienceable. And since one of the chief sources of the anxiety from which the gospel delivers us is the need to protect our picture of ourselves as right and good, one of the most obvious characteristics of the church ought to be a willingness to abandon anything like competitive virtue (or competitive suffering or competitive victimage, competitive tolerance or competitive intolerance or whatever).”