Last month while I was hiking in the mountains, I had this idea of doing an “old things and new things” sequence, with a thematically paired series of essays. I liked the obvious, perhaps even moronic, simplicity of the format, which spoke to the purpose of Christendom Reborn. I’m trying here to find a sweet, dynamic space where tradition meets innovation and discovery. Why not just embrace that in a very straightforward way?

I’ve enjoyed it! Over the past month I’ve written about great books and traditional sexual morals (old things!), then about free markets and feminism. In between we had America Week, which is appropriate too perhaps since the United States also combines the traditional and the new in some unique ways. Clearly there’s much more to be explored here! But hopefully I’ve succeeded in marking out a certain territory, showing how I go about seeking that dynamic, traditional-but-not hidebound space.

This week also included a brief discussion of my friend Erika Bachiochi’s Sex-Realist Feminism, and the story of how I originally got into the orbit of the left-of-center America magazine. It was a wacky series of events. The life of a writer is strange.

Recapping the Conversation

The conversation about Christian feminism is still actively rolling, so feel free to drop in and participate! To entice you, I’ll drop in a sampling of quotes. From my mother, Merina Smith, on the expansion of opportunities for women:

Friedan’s life was probably not so meaningless and trivial as she made out in order to make her point, but there was definitely a problem for women who needed to support their families. When my Mom started teaching in the early 60s for example, she was paid less than male teachers because they were supporting families, except that she also was supporting a family. When I was growing up the big three (low-paid) professions for women were teacher, nurse and secretary. There is nothing wrong with these professions, but that is waaaay too limiting given the considerable talents and desires of women. So feminism has done a lot of good.

There’s more to that reflection, by the way, and well worth reading.

From David Upham on the realities of sex-based “social assignment”:

What of the alleged “assignments”? Neither maternity nor paternity is assigned or imposed on female and male--it’s natural, true, and facilitating such a human good, so necessary to human flourishing, is more important than teaching literacy. The encouragement, facilitation means much. 1. Of course it will be expected that women become familiar with work that allows for pregnancy and proximity to babies soon therafter. 2. Of course it’s more important for the male to play an equal role in the household which requires that he do more of the acquisition further from the house. 3. Finally--and this is missed--friendship. There is a big need for single-sex conversations, intimacy, so in a fishing community, the boy who really would prefer to sit and tend the nets, and not go out with the fathers all day is properly encouraged to suck it up, and so too with the girl who’d prefer to fish and not tend nets.

Tamara Salazar opines:

Abortion rates will get better when we put policies in place that support families. We say we are pro-family, and yet do not support families with our policy-making. We should be ashamed.

And there’s more! Lively discussion of all of these points on Christendom Reborn this week.

Finally, a comment from Reepicheep, on my Tuesday post on markets:

The wicked nation is characterized as a place where “fraud and oppression does not depart from the marketplace.” Unfortunately, by the time that has happened, the fraud and oppression has already consumed the magistrate, who was supposed to be setting the good example for the merchants and the hoi polloi. At this stage, “the market” and the magistrate have just become the Beast with two backs.

So, a good reason to oppose government intervention in markets isn’t necessarily “we aren’t getting conned by merchants, leave us alone!” more likely, it’s triage; we are just trying to halve the conning, if possible, since the magistrate’s answers to the merchant’s injustice usually amplifies the oppression, or merely guarantees its perpetuity, since the magistrate has an income stream to protect based upon pretending to protect the people.

That sounds to me like left-libertarian talk to me, but you can see the response when I asked about it.

Looking Ahead

I have a lot of ideas for the rest of the summer: a week on other world religions (about which I’ve said almost nothing so far), one on “philosophy’s toolkit” (what good stuff does Christian philosophy offer that we can still use?), and some deeper looks into the political theology of the Middle Ages. Next week though, I may do some essays on American traditionalists. Recent events involving the SSPX have stirred up discussion of that topic, so it might be a good time to dive in and answer questions like: Do I think liturgical traditionalism has value for other Christians? (Yes. Very much so.) Have I ever personally attended a Mass at an SSPX chapel? (Yes. A few times, actually.) Do I have advice for modern women considering entering such a community? (I do, in fact!) Come back next Thursday to hear more. Or just subscribe, and get the story in your inbox!

Have a great weekend, all.

The Weekly Wrap-Up is back! I’m summing up a very active week here at Christendom Reborn in which I discussed some of the Christian tradition’s “keepers,” in particular great books and traditional sexual morals. (Not a complete list.) Next week will be America-themed in honor of her 250th, and the week after that I’ll consider some new things that I also regard with favor.

Here’s the quick summary of how the week unfolded:

Last Sunday I reflected on fathers and divine vengeance (in that order).

Monday I laid out my “Old Things/New Things” theme and recommended a Law & Liberty forum on coping with modernity.

Tuesday I made the case for the Great Books and why we should still study them.

Wednesday I recommended a superb essay from Elizabeth Anscombe on Christian sexual ethics and why it extends to artificial contraception.

Thursday I unrolled my essay on why sex, by nature, is unsafe.

Friday featured a “from the archives” on Great Books in the Lu household. It’s a fun little piece from Education Next in which I explained how and why I read to my own kids. The major take-away is that I do, in fact, share the books with them that I myself think are most vitally important.

Stay tuned for New Things week (Rerum Novarum?) coming soon.

Closing Quote

What people are for is, we believe, like guided missiles, to home in on God, God who is the one truth it is infinitely worth knowing, the possession of which you could never get tired of, like the water which if you have you can never thirst again, because your thirst is slaked forever and always. It’s this potentiality, this incredible possibility, of the knowledge of God of such a kind as even to be sharing in his nature, which Christianity holds out to people; and because of this potentiality every life, right up to the last, must be treated as precious. Its potentialities in all things the world cares about may be slight; but there is always the possibility of what it’s for. We can’t ever know that the time of possibility of gaining eternal life is over, however old, wretched, “useless” someone has become.

In my initial 6-week plan for Christendom Reborn, this week was scheduled for politics. I was planning to talk about “God and Caesar,” my Second Key of Christian dynamism. I was a bit distressed therefore when I noticed that the week began on Memorial Day. Memorial Day is for solidarity among Americans, appreciating our country and those who died for it. It didn’t seem fitting to open a particularly contentious topic on that day.

So I adjusted, and instead posted a short reflection on President James Garfield’s Memorial Day address, delivered at Arlington Cemetery in 1868. It’s a moving speech, which does touch on some of the themes for the week, but in ways appropriate to the occasion. “The voices of these dead will forever fill the land like holy benedictions.” A lovely sentiment, which Garfield no doubt felt keenly, as a former Union officer and fervent believer in the anti-slavery cause.

Tuesday I moved into the substance of the week with an essay on “Why I Am Not a Postliberal.” I wrote this essay after lengthy reflection on how to start talking about politics without constantly shadow-boxing postliberals. I’m aware that I look like a postliberal in some important ways. There are reasons for that, and yet, I very self-consciously chose not to align myself with that camp, and there are reasons for that too. It seemed important to clarify those lines. After musing for some time on how to approach this, it finally occurred to me that this is the beauty of a personal Substack: There’s no need to angle around other people’s editorial lines. You can just sit down and explain yourself. Which I did. I explain in this essay how I became the last lonely soul on the right to come around to a kind of Buckleyite fusionism (just after the mainstream moved on from it).

After that I needed a bit of a mental recharge, but Wednesday I did post a recent essay from Law & Liberty on “The Young Oikophobes,” a review of Antonia Senior’s book on the Cambridge 5. I read this as a harrowing example of what can happen when young people grow up hating their own country. Patriotism is undoubtedly a very complex love, but there are actually reasons why we should love our own land and people (as much as circumstance allows), and teach our children the same.

Thursday I posted my second major essay of the week, “A Template for a True Christian Politics.” This title is… a little tongue in cheek. I’ll leave it at that for now.

To finish the week, an old essay from National Review on “Confessions of a ‘Christian Nationalist’,” looking now to the left, and the secular liberals’ blind spots in the God-Caesar terrain.

Recapping the Conversation

Dan Hugger added an interesting note this week by asking about left postliberalism, a topic I’ve never gotten around to exploring in depth. He did though, and suggests that it offers “interesting historical and theological narrative that was strongly critical of state power but also took the more humanistic elements of Marx seriously.”

Blake expressed some sympathy with my “post-Christian template” (or rejection of the same) but suggested that I may not have taken seriously enough the postliberal argument that “the ideology of liberalism (at least in its modern, postwar form) is crumbling.”

All I would say to that for right now is that I’m all in favor of learning from the mistakes of the postwar era, but I also want us to learn from their insights and successes. It seems to me that the postliberals have locked themselves, to an unfortunate degree, into a “hermeneutic of rupture,” a hard, rejectionist stance towards the 20th century conservative tradition that makes reasoned discourse rather difficult. But it’s also true that liberal ideology (including in its modern, postwar form) includes some real errors. By all means, let’s correct those.

Nathan Smith raised some interesting questions about whether Jesus commanded Christians to give Caesar loyalty or just obedience. I’m still reflecting on that one, but my favorite Nathan Smith comment from the week was in response to my “Young Oikophobes” column:

Just kind of underscores the egregious contradictions within post-liberalism. They want to be for tradition, but actual traditions favor liberalism, so they tie themselves in crazy knots. They want to be for community, but the community people actually believe in and feel part of is rooted in natural rights and freedom and constitutionalism... So the post-liberals have to sacrifice actual community to some sort of imagined community projected from their ideology, and usually very clumsily imagined, too.

Oikophobes that are so mad about Americans not being neighborly enough, that they have to move to Europe to get away from it.

Indeed.

As a reminder, I have set up this Substack so that subscribers have the option to receive only this weekly digest, not the mid-week posts. Feel free to do that if the volume of email gets overwhelming! And come back next week for the Third Key of Christian dynamism: Christian personalism.

Or, we could just call it “Love Week.”

Final Quote

The American premise is that the state is not the whole of society, still less the whole of human life. The state is only a part of society... Therefore the state is a limited order of action. The Church, on the other hand, exists in the totality of human life. She is not a part of the state; she is entirely distinct from it, and she is free.

John Courtney Murray, We Hold These Truths

I began this week with a somewhat workmanlike essay on the Three Keys of Christianity, and why they are the “engine of optimism” behind Christendom Reborn. As I wrote on that day, “The world has real problems. And I think we can solve them. At any rate, we’re better positioned for it than anyone else.” It’s a kind of transition point from Autopsy Week (my exploration of the collapse of Christendom) to the positive project of rebuilding. And it ends on this note:

Faith and reason. God and Caesar. Love. Those are my grounds for optimism. We’ll go from there.

The Love of Wisdom

Tuesday I posted some inspiring quotes from the pontiffs on the value of philosophy.

That set up my second major essay for the week, “Selling Water in the Desert.” I reflect back on my days in academic philosophy and wonder: Why are so few people interested in philosophy when we so desperately need it? That leads into a discussion of what philosophy can do for us, and why the Christian philosophical tradition is so precious. Also, why we need to keep doing philosophy, grappling with new truths and integrating them into the tradition.

On Thursday I connected those themes to some recent work from Law & Liberty on AI and the relevance of metacognitive strengths, especially judgment, in an AI-shaped world.

I capped the week by revisiting my review of Carl Trueman’s book on the Frankfurt School and critical theory. This is in many ways a very good book! And yet, I was puzzled by Trueman’s reluctance to move beyond the role of critic and build up Christian thought in response to the challenges of critical theory. Shouldn’t we try to answer bad arguments with good arguments?

Recapping the Conversation

Nathan Smith and I have been chatting about religious epistemology and what “faith” means. Interested readers are welcome to read or add their own thoughts! I think this is a discussion likely to be ongoing, but, since he sees himself very much aligned with C.S. Lewis, I’ve selected the final quote as a hat-tip to him.

Terrorwhelming contributed the best line of the week, however, pointing out that “We need to retrieve Thomism the activity, and not just Thomism the fixed system.” Indeed.

Next week we’ll start talking about politics, the Second Key, and the separation of God and Caesar. Stay tuned!

Final Quote

If all the world were Christian, it might not matter if all the world were uneducated. But, as it is, a cultural life will exist outside the Church whether it exists inside or not. To be ignorant and simple now -- not to be able to meet the enemies on their own ground -- would be to throw down our weapons, and to betray our uneducated brethren who have, under God, no defense but us against the intellectual attacks of the heathen. Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.

C.S. Lewis

It was Autopsy Week at Christendom Reborn, in which I examined several popular accounts of the decline and fall of Christendom. We didn’t clearly solve the mystery, but perhaps some progress was made. In the end, I think all of these familiar narratives contain some measure of truth. They should all be “left on the table” as it were, as we think further about the rebuilding of Christendom. But they all have shortcomings too, and my final conclusion is that none gives us sufficient reason to sit wallowing in despair.

Next week I’ll finally get into the good stuff: Why think that Christendom has the capacity to rebound? I’ll explain in three essays released across the week. For now let’s recap Autopsy Week:

Knives Out!

On Monday, I set up the week by wondering: Why are people still so riveted by the question of when, how, and why Christendom crumbled? I suggest that many people feel a deep yearning for a more harmonious relationship between Christian faith and the state or society at large. That’s easily channeled into a fascination with “Christendom.”

Tuesday was dedicated to the sexual revolution. I call this the “blunt force trauma” explanation. The sexual revolution destabilized marriage, which destabilized family life, which destabilized Christianity, which destabilized the West. Mary Eberstadt and Louise Perry were the star witnesses for this day.

Wednesday offered a look at expressive individualism, drawing on testimony from Carl Trueman. This is “the cancer diagnosis.” I note that expressive individualism seems to be a kind of descendant of “moral relativism,” the hated foe of religious conservatives in the 80s and 90s, as though the same problem has been growing and metastasizing for decades. Both stem from the denial of objective realities such as truth, nature, tradition, and God. Though I find much of value in Trueman’s exposition of “the rise of the modern self,” I also ask: Doesn’t Christianity also celebrate the uniqueness of human persons?

Thursday broached the question: Did liberalism kill Christendom? I muse on the relationship of Church and state over the past few centuries and say a few words about Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed.

Friday eased into literary and spiritual questions, considering whether the world has become disenchanted and spiritually desiccated. I dub this the “starvation theory,” with Paul Kingsnorth as the key witness. I acknowledge that the modern world has deep spiritual deficiencies. Nevertheless, I think Kingsnorth’s despairing diagnosis is far too grim (and perhaps a bit self-indulgent as well). The world is still full of beauty and joy! On that note, I gave the final word for the week to Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Recapping the Conversation

Nathan Smith has been immensely valuable in helping me hone each of these threads, and we set the stage this week for what I hope will be further lively debates about liberalism, proto-liberalism, and whether John Locke’s influence on Western politics is something to celebrate or something to mourn. (Or maybe it’s some of each?)

Shawn Buell raised some interesting questions about what the past few decades have shown us of the revealed preferences of women in particular. In what ways has the post-sexual-revolution era fulfilled or thwarted their wishes? And how does that relate to their real good?

Kristin White wondered whether sexual morals feature too prominently in Christian culture today, and argued that “radical financial egalitarianism” is more central to Christianity in its earliest forms. That led to a further discussion of chastity and its significance and logic.

Duane McMullen remarked on Chinese parallels to the Paul Kingsnorth phenomenon, drawing on his memories from living in China.

And Dan Hugger reminded us, quoting Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, that, “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” To my mind, that’s essentially the core of modern conservatism, and certainly very relevant to the project here at Christendom Reborn.

Thanks to all for a fun week! I can’t wait to hear people’s thoughts on next week’s essays on Rebuilding Christendom!

Final Quote

Christendom has had a series of revolutions and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.

–G.K. Chesterton