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