Astrology talks a lot and says nothing

 

 Trifling futility appears in their signs of the zodiack, and their mutual relations and aspects.

 

-- Richard Bentley

Primarily the barnacle goose and the Atlantic puffin were permitted on fish-days

 

 Some birds, inhabitants of the waters, whose blood is cold as fishes, and their flesh is so like in taste, that the scrupulous are allowed them on fish-days.

 

-- John Locke 

Peter Thiel thinks with Benedict XVI that the Antichrist's slogan will be peace and safety

The Pope and the Antichrist

Peter Thiel & Sam Wolfe First Things

 

Unfortunately Jesus never imagined an Antichrist.

 

Jesus was an eschatological prophet for whom there was hardly enough time left to repent, follow him, and escape the imminently coming last judgment, let alone enough time for any more history to unfold and a figure to arise such as an Antichrist, or even a Paul to predict an Antichrist's coming.

 

Jesus' son of perdition was Judas (John 17:12).

 

But Peter Thiel would rather talk about Paul's son of perdition, a fantastic boogeyman from II Thessalonians 2:3, whose ticket to power, amusingly, will be the promise of totalitarian peace and safety (I Thessalonians 5:3 lol), as if the world has never had any of either, and as if Paul wasn't already living and thriving in such a period of peace and safety of his own when he wrote those very words, a totalitarian one even.

 

We Americans hardly know or care about the 100-year Pax Britannica of 1815-1914. We were too busy with Manifest Destiny and Civil War and The Gilded Age.

 

Most have never heard of the 300 years of peace in East Asia known as the Confucian Peace of 1598-1894, let alone of the 200 year Pax Romana from 27BC to 180AD.

 

A more reflective Paul might have expressed what a gift the latter had been to the success of his own Christian missionary activity, but instead he was consumed with visions and revelations of the Lord.

 

Like Jesus Paul misread his own time as the end of the world, as most people misread their own times, when its peace still had roughly another 130 years left in it.

 

The Lord is at hand.

 

-- Philippians 4:5 

 

Paul was writing when the Pax Romana was in its 78th year. The Enlightenment Peace of 1715-1789, another one we know nothing about, and are damn proud of it, too, lasted only 74 years.

 

No Antichrist brought these periods of peace and safety to the world, and when they ended the world did not end.

 

Our own Long Peace since 1945 matters less and less to us with every passing year, consumed as we are with our own prosperity and decadence. But it is in its 81st year. The odds that it won't last much longer are pretty good considering that human nature doesn't change.

 

But American institutions are notable for curbing human nature, and for dividing power so that no single one can have its way for very long. Any radical change to them means the odds of the peace ending only increase. A president who flouts their standards is particularly troubling, even more so when his party does nothing about it, and even more so yet when an opposition party openly runs on dismantling the institutions.  

 

You don't have to be a religious fanatic to figure out that our days are numbered. You just have to pay attention.

 

But the world will still be here, pace Thiel. 

 

And the LORD smelled a sweet savour; and the LORD said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake; for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done.

 

While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.

 

-- Genesis 8:21f.   

Inquiring minds find few friends among dogmatists

 He that considers and enquires into the reason of things, is counted a foe to received doctrines.

 

-- Isaac Watts 

Episodes of terminal lucidity seriously challenge the materialist paradigm for some researchers

 The Strange Phenomenon of ‘Terminal Lucidity’: As they near death, some dementia patients recover mental faculties assumed to be long lost. Researchers want to know why. 

 In the spring of 2000, while completing his degree in psychology at the University of Vienna, Alexander Batthyany received an unusual call from his mother. She had just gotten off the phone with Batthyany’s grandmother. “I do not know what happened — but you should call,” his mother told him. “Somehow, she’s back again.” Batthyany was confused: His grandmother, who lived in a nursing home in Switzerland, had vascular dementia and, for the past year, had hardly been able to speak — let alone pick up the phone and initiate a conversation, as his mother claimed had just occurred.

Doubting his mother’s story, Batthyany nevertheless said he would call. He dialed his grandmother’s number. When she answered, it was in the refined, elegant German he remembered her speaking in his childhood. In shock, he found himself wanting to shout: Oh, you can talk!

His grandmother greeted him affectionately. She told him that for the past few months, she hadn’t really been herself. She had been, she said, “very, very, very tired.”

At the sound of his grandmother’s voice, memories came back to Batthyany, flashes of things they did together when he was a boy: hiking in the Alps, skiing trips in St. Moritz, a visit to the famed puppet theater of Geneva. His grandmother remembered it all. For 10 minutes, they reminisced in what Batthyany called “the most lovely conversation.” Almost whispering, his grandmother told him, “You brought so much joy to our lives.” This was his grandmother — gentle, caring, warm — the same as he knew her before she fell ill. But as the call ended, he sensed beneath the joy a painful finality — that this conversation would be their last. Several days later, his grandmother died. ... 

Pope Sixtus V renewed the excommunication of Queen Elizabeth I in 1588 in support of the Spanish Armada

 

 In 1588 there sat in the see of Rome a fierce thundering friar, that would set all at six and seven, or at six and five if you allude to his name.

-- Francis Bacon 

Pride will have a fall

 Pride will have a fall: the beautiful trees go all to the wreck here, and only the misshapen and despicable dwarf is left standing.

 

-- Roger L'Estrange 

He that keepeth the law, happy is he

 

I don't know which is sillier, the pursuit of happiness by Jerusalem Demsas, or by Arthur M. Schlesinger

 

Your God-given right to be happy

 Jerusalem Demsas

 

Jerusalem Demsas much relies on a 1964 line from Arthur M. Schlesinger (1888-1965) which describes happiness as a natural, not a God-given, right:

 

... In short, none of these spokesmen of the American cause thought of happiness as something a people were entitled simply to strive for but as something that was theirs by natural right. ...

 

The word God and the divine do not make an appearance at all in Schlesinger's very short The Lost Meaning of "The Pursuit of Happiness".

 

But Schlesinger does examine the words from the American Declaration of Independence as if they were indeed a sort of Holy Writ, and amusingly calls it vital to argue for the meaning of the word pursuit as practice, as a thing not simply chased but actually ready to hand and indeed graspable.

 

One of his authorities for this is the new and almighty OED of 1888ff., which tells him "it has borne both meanings since at least the sixteenth century".

 

This isn't the main thrust of Schlesinger's argument, which is that the revolutionary conception of the pursuit of happiness was far less idealized than it became, but it is revealing for what the progressive esteems, and for what he eschews.

 

On this Demsas is quite right to suggest that Micah 4:4 is what numerous colonists meant by happiness:

 

But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid: for the mouth of the LORD of hosts hath spoken it. 

 

Nothing very fancy about that.

 

Meanwhile it simply never occurs to the modern, scientific Schlesinger to consult the dictionary used by all Americans for more than a century before his own time, including quite avidly by none other than Thomas Jefferson himself, Samuel Johnson's (1709-1784) Dictionary of the English Language (1755), which shows at least five shades of meaning for pursuit and pursue, including the two cited by Schlesinger.

 

And the pursuit of happiness itself is right in there, and Thomas Jefferson had most probably read it, and snipped away the parts that he didn't like just like he did with the miracles in the New Testament. 

We happiness pursue; we fly from pain; 

Yet the pursuit, and yet the flight is vain.

 

-- Matthew Prior (1664-1721)

 

 

Which are the schismaticks?

 

When a schism is once spread, there grows at length a dispute which are the schismaticks: in the sense of the law the schism lies on that side which opposes itself to the religion of the state.

-- Jonathan Swift 

 

June 30th:

Pope Begs Breakaway Trad. Group to Back Off Bishop Consecrations

AP News

 

... “I plead with you and ask you with all my heart: please turn back!” Leo wrote in a letter to the Rev. Davide Pagliarani, the superior of the Society of St. Pius X. ... “Far be it from us to separate ourselves from the Roman Church. We desire, on the contrary, to serve her by means that are extraordinary, as one would assist a mother in distress who requires particular help, even if such help is not understood by everyone,” Pagliarani wrote. ...

 

July 2nd:

Vatican Declares SSPX in Schism, Excommunicates Bishops

AP News

 

... By declaring a schism and extending excommunications to potentially thousands of Catholics, the Vatican’s doctrine office went above and beyond the minimum sanctions foreseen by the church’s canon law to respond to the consecrations Wednesday of four new bishops.

 

The society, known by its acronym SSPX, celebrates the ancient Latin Mass and opposes the modernizing reforms of the Catholic Church, which it considers to be rife with heresies and errors. While a fringe movement on the Catholic right, the SSPX has been a thorn in the Vatican’s side for five decades because it claims to be even more Catholic than the Holy See.

 

... The SSPX doesn’t have an exact count but estimates around 400,000-600,000 people attend its Masses, meaning Thursday’s decree could potentially involve the excommunications of thousands of rank-and-file SSPX faithful. 

 

... The Vatican responded so aggressively in part because the group poses something of a threat by representing a parallel, ultra-Catholic, pre-Vatican II church that has grown in the decades since its original break from Rome. While representing a fraction of the 1.4-billion strong Catholic faithful, the SSPX now has six bishops, 751 priests, 264 seminarians, 145 religious brothers, 88 oblates and 250 religious sisters representing 50 nationalities, according to SSPX statistics. 

 

... “He’s brought the hammer down,” said Joseph Shaw, head of the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales, which is in communion. Shaw expressed sympathy with the plight of ordinary SSPX faithful, saying the invalidation of marriages especially is going to cause “massive” pastoral problems. “It’s a sad day.” ...                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                Update O.M.G. ↓

 

Vance: Christianity Can Help Overcome Divisions

Matthew Schmitz, Washington Post

 

The three-day weekend cannot be far behind the Judeo-Christian weekend

There are 4 million Muslims in America, 7.5 million Jews, and 223 million Christians.

 

The Rabbis Who Gave America the Weekend: How two Orthodox rabbis refused to compromise Jewish law and helped reshape American life

 

... After decades of failing to convince Americans to honor the Jewish Sabbath, Drachman proposed something audacious. Instead of forcing every citizen into the same religious calendar, why not create two days of rest? Let Jews observe Saturday and Christians Sunday and encourage America to adopt a shorter workweek altogether.

 

... if each religious community could preserve its own sacred day with dignity, while workers gained additional time for family and rest, American society itself would benefit.

 

... Today, as America celebrates its milestone birthday, the weekend has become so ordinary that almost no one asks where it came from. The answer in part is two Orthodox rabbis who refused to move Shabbat to Sunday. What they were doing, without quite knowing it, was the unfinished work of American religious freedom. They did not set out to give America the weekend. They simply would not give up Shabbat. And precisely because they would not bend, America eventually bent around them.

What say the augurs?

They would not have you stir forth to-day:

Plucking the entrails of an offering forth,

They could not find a heart within the beast.

 

-- William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act 2, Scene 2 

 

Christ rightly shunned death

 

 Consider death in itself, and nature teacheth Christ to shun it.

-- Richard Hooker 

Unconditional surrender

 

Gustave Doré Death on the Pale Horse (1865)

 

 Surrender up to me thy captive breath;

My pow'r is nature's pow'r, my name is Death.

 

-- Walter Harte 

Rod Dreher calls dishonest essay honest, I guess because it features him

"Wonderful essay. Really honest and thoughtful."

Does an honest person claim to be charismatic when only his parents were?

The author was never a charismatic Christian like his parents became. He was raised as a dispensational Baptist kid whose parents then moved on from that and became charismatics and embarrassed him. He was preoccupied with the end of the world, not with the gifts of the Spirit.

Dispensationalists, of course, were not charismatics before the so-called neo-charismatic movement. They were instead strong cessationists. They believed the gifts of the Spirit ceased with the deaths of the apostles, whose job it was to be guided into all the truth by the Spirit and write it all down in the Bible. The Southern Baptists were a stronghold of cessationists, among the least likely to be . . . open. 

Ryan Zickgraf's essay was originally entitled "I was a charismatic Christian", but he changed it to 

 My father went to war with a demon bird: I miss my parents’ enchanted world .

... I had trouble hiding my incredulity. I was in college at the time, studying journalism, and had already begun the long, self-conscious process of distancing myself from the faith I’d been raised in. I told him he was embarrassing himself. Are you seriously going to drive three hours to fight a mythological demon bird? ... The quasi-megachurch we first attended, Calvary Temple in Springfield, was one of many congregations that got swept up by the Third Wave. It was once a more staid Southern Baptist church ...  I shudder when I recall being haunted by A Thief in the Night, a quartet of evangelical films released across the ’70s and ’80s, the precursor to the Left Behind novels of the ’90s. I was one of tens of millions of kids who saw them at church watch parties, disturbed to see characters unlucky enough to sleep through the Rapture and wake up in the Great Tribulation, where the United Nations was running guillotines for anyone who refused the Mark of the Beast. I didn’t need Freddy Krueger or Friday the 13th movies; that was fake. I had eschatology, and it was real; at times, it was difficult not to approach every service with a sense of both thrill and fear. Would someone at church prophesy that the Rapture would occur next week? Maybe. ... By my teen years, I was forced to attend three-hour revival services ... There is a reason why I felt like an outsider in my tight-knit religious community until I left the church at age 30. ... What my parents had, what they tried to give me, what I received and then rejected, and what I am still sorting through wasn’t a set of beliefs that happened to be wrong. It was a way of inhabiting the world, a posture of openness to the possibility that the world might be, in some sense that resists clean explication, for you. ...

 

https://unherd.com/2026/06/i-was-a-charismatic-christian/?edition=us

 

While it's hard to say what will become of Ryan Zickgraf, one thing sure has stuck with him from his childhood Southern Baptist days.

  ... Pastor Johnson preached constantly about the coming Rapture, once speculating that the Antichrist would be incredibly gay ... 

 

Freely ye have received, freely give

 The liberal are secure alone,

For what we frankly give, for ever is our own.

 

-- George Granville 

The baleful influence of Norman Vincent Peale and Paula White on the thinking of the president of the United States is in evidence almost everyday

The Strait of Hormuz is open.

Iran is in submission.

He calleth those things which be not as though they were, as if he were God.

 

Pope Leo XIV's encyclical is sadly political not theological, apologizing for slavery without mentioning Pope Leo X's role in the transatlantic slave trade

 

Not all the Leos were lions, I guess.

On the problem of Just War, the author comes close to concluding that this pope is guilty of immanentizing the eschaton, which is about right. 

The more I watch this new pope the more I sense that he's not filling the big shoes any more than the previous guy did.

The story of our times. 

 

Contra Pope Leo in “Magnifica Humanitas,” Just War Theory Is Not Outdated

... Fully aside from its length—245 paragraphs and 42,300 words—one is justified in questioning the overall coherence of the document. ... he injects other topics that appear unrelated. Among these are ... the Church’s past complicity in slavery and slave trade (no. 176).

In a footnote, Leo identifies four papal bulls from the years 1435, 1442, 1452 and 1455 that are said to have expressly “relativized” the “problematic incompatibility of slavery with the Christian conscience” (n. 174). Not included in this list is one of his earlier namesakes, Pope Leo X, who in 1514 renewed the authority of earlier papal bulls that had granted Portuguese authorities the right to subjugate non-Christians and reduce them to slaves. This, in turn, would help lay the foundation for the transatlantic slave trade.

As it concerns the Church’s formal complicity regarding slavery, in the encyclical Leo confesses, “I sincerely ask for pardon” (no. 176). But if such confession, repentance, and need for pardon were a true and heavy burden that the Vatican actually carries, it would then seem appropriate that, at minimum, an entire encyclical in fact be devoted solely to the excruciating problem of the Church’s complicity in such evil. Perhaps such will be forthcoming. ...

 

Jesus expected his disciples to imitate him in the sense of itinerant preaching and being vilified for it just like him, not sitting around living a holy life in isolation

And as ye go, preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand. ... But when they persecute you in this city, flee ye into another: for verily I say unto you, Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel, till the Son of man be come. The disciple is not above his master, nor the servant above his lord. It is enough for the disciple that he be as his master, and the servant as his lord. If they have called the master of the house Beelzebub, how much more shall they call them of his household?

-- Matthew 10:7, 23ff. 

The Sure Physician

 One that's sick o' th' gout, had rather

Groan so in perplexity, than be cur'd

By the sure physician death.

 

-- William Shakespeare, Cymbeline, Act 5, Scene 4 

Yesterday's astrologers looked to the heavens for signs of good or ill fortune, today's fortune tellers just read the charts of the S&P 500

 

 The stock market just did something eerily similar to the dot-com bubble top in 2000

... On Friday, just 20 of the index members hit a record. Of those 20, just seven were not directly related to artificial intelligence. Michael Hartnett at Bank of America pointed out in a note to end last week that it was just 20 stocks that hit new highs at the very top of the internet bubble in March 2000. While the widely followed strategist said the “speculative price action” is likely not over yet, this occurrence is the latest sign that it is nearing. ...

Advance-decline lines, which show the number of stocks rising compared with the number falling, have exhibited a similar trend, surging at the end of March and then falling back in a bearish sign since the middle of April. ...

"Poor breadth is often a sign of underlying stock market vulnerability,” BCA strategists led by Arthur Budaghyan said in a May 20 report. ...

Elections have consequences

 Fools into the notion fall,

That vice or virtue there is none at all:

Ask your own heart, and nothing is so plain,

'Tis to mistake them costs the time and pain.

 

-- Alexander Pope 

No, the story of the Good Samaritan is not meant to bless taking the gospel into the way of the Gentiles

 

 

 

 

 

For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother.

-- Mark 3:35 

Jesus thought the Torah was good for eternal life, but Christianity Today doesn't want to mention it

 

What Do Christians Do with the Law of Moses?

Brad East, Christianity Today:

... if what you want is the eternal life manifested in the resurrection of Jesus, then fix your eyes on him. Whatever else the Torah is good for, it can’t give you that. What then is the Torah good for? ...

 

 

What did Jesus do with the Law of Moses?

 

And, behold, a certain lawyer stood up, and tempted him, saying, Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life? He said unto him, What is written in the law? how readest thou? And he answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself. And he said unto him, Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live.  

 

-- Luke 10:25ff.