Chateau Lloyd

I know that the anniversaries ending in "5" and "0" are supposed to be the important once, but all of them count for something.

I entered the Catholic Church on Pentecost all those years ago, and I am still a work in progress.  There is a lot going on in the faith, and just when you think you've got it all, you find even more.

I get why my grandparents continued to study religion right up until the end.  There was so much to learn.

To put it another way, I have changed a lot since 2006, and that applies to faith as much as anything else.

Religion did not particularly interest me when I was young.  It was boring, judgmental and anyway God was probably a nice guy and cut us all some slack.

I don't that view was purely a function of youth, by the way.  I think society was objectively more moral than it has become.  Back then, transvestites were mocked and men who entered the women's rest room were subject to arrest, not praise.

Things happen for a reason, and it's increasingly clear that we all needed an awakening of sorts.  We certainly got one.

I will say that the pontificate of the late Francis showed how damaging a bad pope could be, but also the limits to that damage.  Pope Leo is a completely different sort, very much his own man, but his faith is deep, profound and respectful.

He is the type of pope who would have been unremarkable but for Francis, and so we are treasuring him all the more.

I think that is true of a lot of our traditions and prayers.  There is a hunger to get back to basics, and rediscover what has been temporarily misplaced.  I see that Europe is now seeing huge crowds of young people hiking to cathedrals and record numbers of conversions.  That's the hunger we need.

I'm more than halfway through Brant Pitre's The Case for Jesus: The Biblical and Historical Evidence for Christ, and I'm already speed-running it.  Normally, I do that on something that I don't really enjoy and want to just get out of the way, but in this case, Pitre's arguments are so solid, so well-reasoned, that I need only glance at them to see how valid they are.

What draws me forward is a desire to see the next way he will take a rhetorical axe-handle to the arguments of bogus "Bible scholars" like Bart Ehrman.

Four years ago the Lord of Spirits podcast highlighted the intellectual dishonesty and obvious bias of these fake academics, and it's refreshing to see them get pulverized using chapter and verse.

This continues to irritate me, in large part because if the same "scientific" method were applied to secular histories, nothing could be authenticated.

One of the critiques Erhman and his cohorts use against the Gospels is the (shaky) assumption that they were written long after the fact, and therefore suspect.

I hate to break it to Herrdoktorprofesser Erhman, but most histories are like that.  There is no reason to doubt the factual content of Walls of Men simply because I wasn't alive 4,500 years ago.  There are things call "sources" and also oral traditions that are extremely valuable in determining what happened in the past.

I swear, these knuckleheads what photos of the Apostles holding up a newspaper from AD 34 to verify their claims.

Anyhow, it's a quick read, and worth the effort, especially if one wants to shut down an modern know-it-all atheist.

Regular readers will no doubt have noticed that posting has been unusually erratic this spring.  There are a couple of reasons for this.

This first is that I have been unusually busy, mostly with the house and yard.  This year we are making significant improvements and considerable investments in Chateau Lloyd, both within and without.

When one starts to focus on such things (especially after years of neglect), projects tend to snowball.  After fixing a small nagging issue that has lingered for years, others become apparent, and pretty soon a major overhaul is underway.

More and more, I find myself ignoring the laptop entirely, perhaps checking an account or placing an order, but then immediately turning it off to attend to the business at hand.  

This becomes even more pronounced in the spring, when there is so much to do to ensure a satisfactory summer and autumn.  Good weather is fleeting in Michigan, and this year I want take full advantage of it.

Building on this is my unwritten policy of only blogging when I have something to say.  I don't like "checking the box" in terms of putting content out.  Either it's worth doing well or it's not worth doing.  Not all my posts are immortal works of literature, but they usually make a point and add something to the reader's knowledge.

Thus, if I've had a long day, I'm not going to log in merely to throw something up on the site.  

My usual goal is to post about three times a week, usually 2-3 days apart.  Obviously, I'm compressing that schedule today, but that is because I have the time and also think this is worth writing.

In an age of unending thoughtless content production, I stand in resistance of that.  If that means you have to wait a week, so be it.

I am, after all, only human - which seems to be an increasingly rare characteristic.

The other day I saw a report that Xi Jinping's daughter is a Harvard grad who now lives in Massachusetts.

Given the current friction between the two nations, this is somewhat remarkable, and I think it points to the fact that for a great many mainland Chinese, the US (and Canada) are being viewed as sanctuaries as well as geopolitical rivals.

It is extremely difficult to get reliable news out of China.  When I was working on Walls of Men, I deliberately avoided doing any kind of detailed analysis of Communist China's equipment or capabilities because these are simply unknown.  The recent aerial combat between Pakistan and India generated more smoke than light.  We know aircraft were downed, but not how many or how.  There are competing versions all over the place.

Similarly, the Chinese government has been increasingly evasive with official numbers, to the point that its total population is now in dispute.  Economic measures like GDP, unemployment, industrial output, are all increasingly vague.

What we do know is that the mainland faces strong headwinds, both politically and economically.  China's government bases its legitimacy on economic development, and plants being relocated to the US greatly weakens that.  After the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, the CCP has been openly embracing traditional culture and the greatness of past Emperors, and the Mandate of Heaven is once more in play.  Should China's export-driven economy start to come apart, the strain may be too much.

The death of Pope Francis also brings additional challenges, since the shameful concordat engineered by Cardinal Parolin will likely not be renewed.  At that point China will have double down on repressing Catholic converts, which will result in protests and disruptions.

There are veteran China experts who have been predicting collapse for decades, but just because the time frame is off doesn't mean they were wrong.  The Soviet Union was assumed to be permanent right before it collapsed, proving all the alleged experts wrong.

Clearly the ideological divide is not as great as it was in the Cold War.  There is also far greater economic integration, but that is clearly fading.  Much is made about how China's industrial might now surpasses that of the US, but this can (and is) being slowly reversed.  In the mean time, how will Chinese factory towns adapt to the coming Rust Belt?

Whenever overt Christian themes are included in popular entertainment, there is always a risk that the project will veer into heresy if not blasphemy.  The key question is whether it is intentional, and how damaging it actually is.  Minor simplifications for kids' programs are fine, because the point is to give them wholesome entertainment that makes them thing more about God and their faith.

I've watched a couple of seasons of The Chosen and while it was bumpy at first, I liked it.  I'm holding off on watching the rest until the series ends, which just seems prudent, however I'm fine with people who are watching it in 'real time.'

I haven't seen new animated The Greatest Story Ever Told, but it gets high marks and did well.  I see the success and popular impact of both of these films to be a victory for Christianity and a welcome change to popular entertainment and our culture.

This is why I think German Saucedo's column in First Things is way off base.  It's one thing to pick apart various elements of theology or think that production quality in a given show is poor, but his larger point seems to be that we shouldn't have Christian-themed entertainment at all, effectively ceding control of the culture to degenerate secular materialists.

Some would argue that, whatever their imperfections, these shows and movies are valuable tools of evangelization. It is said that one-third of The Chosen’s 280 million viewers are not religious. But I would argue that the good they do in introducing non-believers to the gospel is outweighed by their distortions of the gospel narrative. Reading the Gospels is not—should not be—easy or entertaining. The sobriety of the written word challenges us. For the evangelists set down no fluff, only what God wanted us to hear. [emphasis added]

This whole line of argument begs the question - how does one get children (or the larger public) interested in reading the Gospels in the first place?  Maybe by telling their story in an easy to understand format?

I've touched on this before - American culture was far healthier when big-screen epics based on the Bible were regular features.  Movies like Ben Hur and Quo Vadis helped underpin the Christian foundations of the nation.

Saucedo is presumably a Catholic, but he's making essentially the old Protestant argument that icons and religious art are a waste of money and the funds should instead be used for the poor.  Instead of an elaborate cathedral, people should just pray in a room with four bare white walls and a cross.

But what about religious artists?  What about people who want to create religious stories and share their faith?  I don't think it enters Saucedo's thought that there are people who want to make music and movies to glorify God, and that without that, they would not be fulfilled or following their vocation.

Storms swept through my state last week and my leafy college town took heavy damage from straight-line winds.  Several houses in my neighborhood had trees blown on top of them.  Chateau Lloyd was unscathed, but did lose power for about 20 hours.

The whole experience, from wailing sirens in the middle of a storm-tossed night to the eerie silence after it passed, free of any electric buzz, made a profound impression on my grandchildren, who were staying with us.

When the sun rose, I want to start our venerable generator but the fuel line had dried out and cracked (it uses propane) and so after fruitlessly calling about replacement parts, I went out to buy a new one.

By noon the replacement was up and running, and I breathed a sigh of relief that the foods in our refrigerator and freezer would survive.  After those appliances ran for while, we contemplated shifting the power elsewhere, since my generator is not a "whole house" variety.

The upshot of this time was a discussion about prioritizing power use, and how to best expend our limited fuel supply.  Should the outage last, we would turn the generator off overnight, knowing that the rejuvenated appliances would easily sustain and 8-hour pause.

We had been through this before, in the great ice storm of 2013, but of course winter is different than summer.  In winter, the fear is cold, not heat spoiling food.  The furnace was the primary focal point.

In both cases, though, we were forced to live with new constraints.  Power now had to be distributed via extension cord, and budgeted against the generator's capacity.

It is all too easy to take the flip of a switch for granted, and assume that our machine-dominated life is both normal and natural.  In the scope of human history, it is neither.

When the power came back - ahead of schedule - I led the family in a prayer and they embraced it with joy.  Certainly it was a welcome reminder to me to walk through life with much more gratitude for the little things.

The Episcopal church in the US never ceases to amuse.  In January, a parish priest decided to deny Communion to his congregation because he considered society to be too racist.

Now comes the news that the bishop in charge of refugee resettlement has decided it would be better to shut the whole thing down than fund the resettlement of a few dozen white South Africans.  They have a history, you see, and one the Episcopalians feel disqualifies them from aid.

Theologically speaking, this is not a recent development.  Particularly during the age of the slave trade, there was a Christian heresy that argued that black Africans carried the "mark of Cain" and were therefore accursed, fully deserving enslavement.  The Mormon Church adopted this concept and stuck with it until the 1970s, when a "new revelation" declared it to be void.

The concept is fully in alignment with predestination, and if people think the Problem of Evil is a tough nut to crack, the notion that a loving and merciful God has consigned most of humanity to hell without any possibility of escape is insurmountable.

It is one think to argue that evil exists because of free will and the constant tendency of humans to rebel against God.  Simply asserting that God is good in spite of the obvious injustice of damning people regardless of their actions is a much tougher argument to make, and in fact, I utterly reject it.

But it is of a pace with the complete collapse of the Church of England, which has been without an Archbishop of Canterbury since early January.  A vacancy that long in the Catholic Church would be a crisis and a scandal, and that it gets so little coverage proves just how irrelevant the Anglican Communion has become.

We're almost halfway through May, and it's unclear which yards are participating in No Mow May and which are simply victims of a vigorous spring and/or overdue mower maintenance.

Until yesterday, I was in the latter category.  The battery on our venerable riding mower had been getting weak, and a charged it for several days, but it failed to start.  Further efforts with a battery charger failed, and in despair I jumped it with my car, which worked.

I have this problem with not realizing how old batteries are, and as a result run them to the point where they need constant recharging and/or boosting.  I did this with my car and now I'm doing it with the mower.

There are a few No Mow May signs up, but previous participants have dropped out.  My neighbors have a toddler now, and the prospect of the little squirt emerging from the grass covered in bug bites has convinced them that virtue signaling has its limits.

And the rapid onset of spring, with balmy temperatures and plentiful rain has caused a surge of growth, and if the mower is still being serviced, things can get awkward.

For a brief moment, my wife even seemed sympathetic to the cause of the pollinators, but then the first yellow jacket showed up and required immediate elimination.  Similar disregard for pollination potential occurred when a wasp was discovered in the Great Room.

I'm guessing next weekend will see the garden go in, and then the first pesticide application will be uncorked.

Summer is just around the corner.

It was interesting to see the reaction to Pope Leo XIV's election yesterday.  It was something of a masterclass of distortion, click-bait and ill-informed pronouncements.  I figured it best to wait a day and let the chaff be separated from the wheat so that I could form an informed opinion.

Not that it matters, but I think he will do well.  Despite constant spamming and distortion, he is not a rabid progressive but a thoughtful Catholic steeped in the Augustinian tradition.  This sets him very much apart from his predecessor, who disdained tradition and rejoiced in chaos.

Leo has thus far been his polar opposite, using traditional vestments and even conducting his first Mass in Latin (albeit using the Novus Ordo) format.

It's been interesting seeing people who initially panicked over his selection come around to realize that he's quite orthodox and always has been.  Of course, there is now a permanent group of Catholic media whose only source off income is convincing its audience that the pope is a communist.

If nothing else, his elevation has helped to conclusively demonstrate which conservative Catholics are serious and which are just their for the hot takes and clickbait.

And for what comes next, I remain resigned to God's will and filled with hope that better days are at hand.

For Catholic media, the imminent conclave is a combination of the Super Bowl and an old-school political nominating convention.  Everyone has a favorite team, preferred outcomes and wants to find some way to keep score.

I'm going to turn this over the Holy Spirit because that's who ultimately gets to call the shots.  A lot of the coverage seems to be talking for the sake of talking.

That said, I do hope that we get a pope who will calm things down, lift the restrictions on the Traditional Latin Mass and perhaps heal the ancient schisms with Copts and Orthodox.

Is that too much to ask?