Chateau Lloyd

My path from wretched "live and let live" sinner to the Catholic Church was not a direct one. 

My military-issue dog tags chronical the path I took, from "Non-Denom. Christian" to "Lutheran" to "Roman Catholic."

The stopover in Protestantism was no accident.  My mother was raised Catholic and raised me to despise the Church.  My father's parents were very devout Methodists, which meant that they also disliked Catholicism.

With the Church out of the question, I had to go through the alternatives and the process inexorably led to the Tiber.

I say this because I have a great deal of sympathy for Carl Trueman's desire for "good Protestant ethicists."

The problem, as he describes it, is that Protestantism has always relied on a culture of Christianity to sustain it rather than developing its own particularly system of ethics:

Today the situation is far different. In the space of a few decades, the moral intuitions of society have not simply parted company with those of Christianity—they have come to stand in direct opposition to many of them. That changes the pedagogical dynamics of church life. The churches now need to teach Christian ethics more explicitly and more thoroughly, because that is where the wider culture will challenge Christian discipleship most powerfully. Indeed, it is already doing so, and orthodox Protestantism seems ill-equipped to address this.

I agree completely.  The problem is that Protestantism by its very nature is incapable of creating this.  Protestantism was born out of the rejection of Catholic authority, insisting that scripture alone had the answers to all of life's questions.  It went further to insist that each person was entitled to their own interpretation, ensuring that the various denominations were spectacularly ill-equipped to maintain theological discipline within their own denominations.

The result is a continued fracturing of Protestant churches.  Don't like what the leadership says?  Make your own church!

Further complicating matters is the Protestant concept of Jesus Christ as a personal savior, one that denies the need for anything more than worshipper's intent.  Since justification is by faith alone, a family utilizing IVF to create one child at the cost of many has every confidence that it will be forgiven for they (and their children conceived through IVF) believe, and that is all one needs.

Some months ago I attended a Baptist funeral, and all present confidently asserted that the recently departed was "saved" because he believed in Jesus.   This is how you get Yard Sign Calvinism.

That being the case, how does a Protestant ethicist argue that using IVF is evil and will have repercussions in the afterlife?  "Yes, pastor, I suppose that is bad, but we love Jesus, want children and we will raise them to love Him.  Surely, God gave this way to raise a family on purpose!"

Catholics have a much easier time of this because they have a clear ethical system built over centuries.  They understand that good intentions are no excuse for committing acts of evil.  Sometimes what we want isn't what God wants, and this acceptance (which Protestants consider fatalism), provides a much stronger anchor for one's faith and actions.

There is also the fact that American Protestants derive much of their identity from not being Catholic.  They don't kneel before statues, give up meat on Fridays during Lent, fast before Easter or have to confess their sins to a priest in order to be forgiven.

This last element (in my opinion) is one of the biggest differences.  Having to confess sin to another human being is entirely different from silently telling God you're super sorry and promise you won't do it again.  And then doing it again.

Priests ask questions, like: "How often do you sin?"  "Have you confessed this before?"  "Why haven't you given up this sin?"

This is a very effective way to give up sinful behavior.  Sins that had dogged me for decades fell before the piercing questions of my confessors, and the (wholly deserved) shame and guilt motivated me to make life-changes for the better.

I don't see a mechanism within Protestantism that has the same effect because faith alone justifies anything to them.  In my time as a Protestant, I never felt the same sting of conscience that I did as a Catholic.

As Trueman admits, Protestantism was at its strongest when social pressure did the heavy lifting, and absent that advantage, both mainline and evangelicals seem to be struggling to define their ethics.

Five years ago, I almost died.

It was the Tuesday after Labor Day, and I was feeling awful.  The weekend started well, and I had a slight fever on Saturday, but by Sunday it had cleared up.

In the interim my kids managed to break first the washing machine (by overloading it) and then the dryer (by filling it with dripping wet clothes).  With school about to hit high gear, my wife implored me to fix the situati  Ion by Tuesday.

So that's what I did.  I went online, found a local store that had both machines in stock ordered them to be ready for same-day pickup, and set about dismantling the old ones and hauling them out of the basement.  That done, I picked up the replacements (which required two trips), and got them installed and running by 5 p.m.  

Not a bad day's work.

The next morning, I drove the kids to school, and I was not feeling well at all.  I'd already made up my mind to call in sick, but even driving was a strain.    My arms were tingling, my chest was tight, breathing was difficult and by the time I got home, there was an edge of darkness around my eyesight.  I laid down on the floor and suggested my wife might want to dial 911, which she did.

It wasn't a heart attack, though it presented as one.  It was instead an attack of myocarditis, an obscure affliction in those days before Covid "vaccines" spread it far and wide.  The ambulance crew was polite and professional, and I quickly rallied.  After every test imaginable over the next two days, no clear cause for the attack was established.  One of the nurses in the cardiac unit suggested it was a combination of physical exertion, general exhausting and whatever bug or virus I was fighting off.

It was during my convalescence that I began the research for Long Live Death and the pleasure (and success) of that project inspired me to write Walls of Men.

If nothing else, my literary output benefited from those extra five years.

I've also lived to see all my kids finish high school and welcome two wonderful grandchildren into the world.  I've lost a few friends along the way, made new ones, and reconnected with others.  My faith has grown by leaps and bounds, which is kind of surprising because I thought I was in a good place back then.

Maybe I was, but now I'm in a better one.

Death has its own schedule, and no society in history has expended so many resources and developed such extensive technological means to forestall its arrival.  And yet we also are craving it to a greater degree than ever before, murdering unborn babies, harvesting their best parts and encouraging the old, the disabled and the depressed to kill themselves.

It is something of a paradox.  The world is worse than it was five years ago, but maybe that was also necessary to people to return to God.  I notice Mass is filling back up with younger people.  The vocations in my area are strong and healthy.

As for me, I'm more attuned to my health, and have had to reluctantly accept that I'm not in my 30s anymore.  This is a realization that is also a paradox because knowledge of my limitations has made me more reasonable about getting word done and I stress less on things outside my control.

In any event, I think it's a good idea from time to time to pause and consider where we are and what else we could be doing.

Amazon Prime's desecration of J.R.R. Tolkien's work continues with the release of the second season of The Rings of Power.

A stunning (but at the same time predictable) development is the decision to "humanize" the orcs.  Tolkien's villains were cruel, cowardly, cannibalistic monsters who lived a debased existence.  They were a twisted mockery of elves created by Morgoth to serve as the foot soldiers for his war against the Valar.

These creatures immediately struck a nerve in the popular culture and were part of the original elements of Dungeons and Dragons and are now a staple of fantasy environments.

Alas, in our decadence, people have decided that what was once obviously evil must now be seen as good, so just as sodomy is the highest form of sex, so orcs are just misunderstood and must be rehabilitated into yet another People of Color oppressed by white bigoted imperialists.

I've dealt with the whole question of whether they are supposed to be an allegory for actual people, and the short version is "yes and no."  Yes, they represent human vices and were written with bloodthirsty and battle-crazed soldiers of World War I in mind.  No, they are not a racial caricature of anyone.

As the old saying goes: if you hear a "dog whistle," you're the dog.  Anyone who looks at misshapen, homicidal, cannibals who delight in cruelty and says:  "You know who this reminds me of..." is the bigot, not the guy who made them up.

It is yet another milestone on our civilization's downward path, and their utter rejection gives me comfort and hope for the future.

In Michigan, August of weather is something of a paradox.  It is often the hottest time of the year, when temperatures test the 100 degree mark and humidity becomes next to unbearable.

Yet it is also the time when evening temperatures touch in to the mid-50s, a hint of the change of the seasons to come.

Such shifts can be deceiving.  I recall heat waves in late September that overwhelmed our air conditioner and running the a/c into October.

At the same time, there have been years where September is remarkably moderate and October sees the first snowfall.

Such are the joy of living in the Great Lakes State.

Tomorrow night college football will open its season in my leafy university town.  I frankly dislike this business of Friday night season openers, preferring the warm afternoons of the late summer.  For one thing, the climate isn't very favorable to it.  I can recall more than one Friday night game delayed by lightning or marred by Biblical deluges.  Definitely not my thing, and it's a choice forced on the sport by the soulless demands of television marketing.

That being said, I am looking forward to football starting up again, with its silly traditions and semi-corrupt economics.  I've booked my slot in the Alumni Band and am making halting efforts to practice the songs and steps I learned three decades ago.  Indeed, one of the most powerful aspects of the experience is slipping back through time.

The most resilient aspects of the human experience are those that resonate, and I think this is why the college football game day continues to have such a strong hold on us.  It is a thoroughly modern tradition, one that hearkens back to earlier rituals and while it has a secular gloss, there is unquestionably a spiritual component to it.

Modernity has emphasized youth over maturity, recoils from the mere mention of mortality, and yet is there anything more representative of momento mori than gathering with the most aged members of one's fellow graduates to look back on what has been?

I'm reading up on the Saipan campaign in June of 1944, and it underlines the theme of one of my earlier posts about the 'rules of war.'

Spoiler alert: there are no rules.

The Japanese defenders of the island breached just about every custom of war they could find. 

They used civilians as literal human shield (herding them in front of their attacking columns). 

They targeted medical corps personnel and would purposefully leave wounded G.I.s in the open so that they could pick off troops trying to treat them.

They even went so far as to boobytrap their own casualties and also taught their wounded to have a grenade, so they could kill American medics trying to treat them.

Because Americans weren't stupid, they came up with countermeasures, which basically boiled down to: kill everything in sight.

What this meant was that wounded Japanese who might have wanted to surrender never got the chance.  Innocent civilians who just wanted to be left alone were pulverized along with everything around them because the Japanese could not be trusted to respect any of the rules of war which were designed to prevent such savagery.

The paucity of Japanese prisoners has led to the myth that the Japanese were everywhere and always fanatical in their courage and devotion, which simply isn't true.  We cannot for certain say how many Japanese troops wanted or even tried to surrender, only to be shot down by disbelieving Americans who may have actually witnessed earlier fake attempts.

The thing is, Japan had previously followed the rules of war, and achieved victories over China and Russia.  By throwing them away, they gained a fleeting tactical advantage but its price was hundreds of thousands of dead and total defeat.

Margaret Thatcher once said that everyone is conservative about what he knows best.  There's some truth to it, but I think a more accurate take is that we tend to assume what we grew up as the "true" thing.  It doesn't matter if it was just introduced, as we grow older, that becomes the "old-fashioned" thing we know and love.

Vatican II went down before I was born, and I converted to Catholicism in part because I found the Mass more mystical, meaningful and rooted in history than Protestant practices.  However, the current movement within the Church to roll back the excesses of Vatican II has brought about renewed interest in older forms of worship.

One of the most visible ones is the treatment of the Eucharist.  Like everyone else of my era, I got used to receiving it on the hand, but there's a strong push to receive the Host on the tongue, either standing or kneeling.  

For me, this was a bit awkward because the hand-delivery method is what I know.  However, this past week I decided to try it the other way.

I will say this: it is much more efficient.  Indeed, I'm told that the Communion rail (where the faithful knelt along a barrier that ran the length of the altar) was far faster than the current system.  No long lines stretching to the back of the sanctuary, just a continuous replacement along the rail, with the priest moving back and forth.

For those unfamiliar with the practice, receiving the Host in the hand requires you to take it into one palm, draw it forth from the other hand, and then place it in your mouth.  Only then can you move (either to resume your seat or to receive the Precious Blood).

With the older method, one simply sticks one's tongue out and the Host is deftly deposited by the minister.  It goes much quicker.

I've yet to try a Traditional Latin Mass, but I'd like to when I have a more flexible schedule.

In the meantime, I've now inched a bit closer to the TradCath lifestyle.

It being an election year, the usual debate is going on within the Christian (and especially Catholic) community about which candidate is least odious and therefore deserving of the observant religious vote.

For a long time, these decisions were made during the primary election season and the general rule was that of Nixon - run to the extreme during the primary and the center during the general.

The Right to Life movement in particular has been something of a cheap date for my entire adulthood.  Roe v. Wade was established law, so it was easy for an aspiring GOP contender to swear their Pro-life allegiance and then do nothing because "their hands were tied."

When Roe fell, the battlefield opened up, and I think the Right-to-Lifers got a bit high on their own supply, figuring that the old bans would revert and their work was done.

They have been proven disastrously wrong in a string of campaigns that left them flat-footed and badly outspent.  Put simply: these people are terrible at electoral politics.

While the Jesuits have taken things a bit far, there is something to be said from studying one's opponents and learning from their tactics.

Incrementalism works.

Too many orthodox religious voters want moral absolutes, and short of that, see little point in engaging.  The opposite is true - spiritual warfare is an attritional conflict, not to be won by the passage of a law or even an amendment.   It must be attended to daily, both within and without.  Incremental victories can become strategic ones, and this requires both prudence and an understanding of the theological principles of subsidiarity properly applied.

Thus: people who suggest tanking the least worst candidate in favor of the worst in order to "teach the party a lesson" are effectively saying that more abortion now, more souls lost now can somehow be made up for less in some hypothetical future where their emboldened enemies don't manage to lock in their gains.

I disagree with that.  I think offering stout resistance in every way and on every front - both within and without one's party - is the only option.  And at the end of the day, half a win is better than no win at all, especially when there is zero guarantee that our increasingly secular society won't blame the loss on disloyal or alienating "religious nuts."

When people behold disastrous results from their counsel, "My hands are clean" is scant comfort to the others who are suffering.  We must remember that God will judge us by our fruit, not our intentions.

Like everything else, the sports world is in something of a strange place.  The elites in society have decided that a person's sex is now unknowable, hence the spectacle of men dominating Olympic women's boxing.

The Olympic authorities confess that they are at a loss to find a reliable "scientific" way to tell men and women apart.  This is nonsense, but that's the official lie.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote how honesty is in short supply, and this is a great example of it.

Another example also emerged this week as the NCAA finally released the report of its earlier investigation into the University of Michigan's football program.  For those not following the story closely, there are two scandals at the university, the first involving impermissible recruiting during the Covid period, the second involving on-field cheating via prohibited in-person scouting.

The report for the former offenses is finally available and it is quite telling.  To many commentators, recruiting rules are an annoyance and violations regularly occur.  The NCAA digging into this is therefore a "nothingburger," unworthy of much attention.

However, the antics of now-former Michigan Head Coach Jim Harbaugh elevated it to one of national importance, in part because Harbaugh claimed the whole affair was the result of him buying a hungry kid a cheeseburger.

As the report makes clear, this was a bald-faced lie.  In the first place, Harbaugh bought two recruits (and their fathers) meals one two different occasions.  The only cheesburger consumed was the one Harbaugh himself ordered for breakfast.  Far more significant was the fact that this was during a national "dead period" for recruiting which was imposed to try to limit Covid exposure imposed in 2020.  Harbaugh violated this, brought recruits on campus, worked out with them, and in the end was rewarded with one of them joining his team.

Two other schools (Arizona State University and the Air Force Academy) also violated these rules, but what set Harbaugh apart was how he not only lied to investigators, his program as a whole did as much as possible to obstruct the investigation.  Indeed, Harbaugh (a self-identified Catholic) out did St. Peter by lying four times rather than three.

Moreover, they were stupid, easily disprovable lies.

The significance of this is the reaction to the University of Michigan and its fanbase: they are 100% behind Harbaugh, so much so that he has been invited to be an honorary team captain for their season opener in three weeks.

This is a truly remarkable development.  Not long ago, someone this publicly dishonest would be shunned by society.  

Instead, he is venerated and the reason is that in his final three years as Michigan's head coach, he defeated their hated rival Ohio State, and won three conference titles and a national championship.

These achievements are tainted by allegations of cheating, and the initial report into that is due shortly, but apparently cheating no longer matters.  Winning is what matters.

In fact, media reports indicate that while the university is willing to admit wrongdoing and accept various penalties, vacating the games is not among them.  They desperately want to cling to a tainted record which absolutely no one else will respect.

I am curious as to how the academic side of the university feels about this, especially their schools of medicine and law, which are widely respected.  Surely the faculty and alumni would not want to be associated with a school that believes cheating is okay so long as it works, but these are strange times.

Is any movie a better distillation than 1990s youth culture than Wesley Snipes' Blade?  It's got a bit of everything - the brash anti-hero, vampirism as a decadent (secular) lifestyle, and of course that sexy soft-core lesbian porn that was just starting to creep into the popular consciousness.

Indeed, in retrospect that was a clever marketing ploy by Hollywood, because while two men having sex is disgusting, two women having sex is merely absurd - and far more aesthetically pleasing.

In any event, I hadn't watched it in many years, which may strike people as surprising given my (fairly) recent authorship of The Vampires of Michigan.   To a certain extent, Blade was the Ur-text of that book insofar as it treated vampirism as a morally neutral biological phenomenon.  Obviously, the blood drinking was bad, but religious symbols and sacred objects were specifically mentioned as useless.

Garlic and silver were instead the primary threats to the vamps.

The storyline is unremarkable, and what sells the picture are the actors and the remarkably slick aesthetic.  Wesley Snipes is just so damn cool.  He oozes cool, personifies it - women want him, men want to BE him.  Modern movies simply cannot produce that level of charisma.

Put simply, it knew what it wanted to be and became that thing.  

That being said, there is a spiritual void at the heart of the picture which I had not noticed before - in part because it has been so long since I saw it.  When you are in your 20s, partying and lots of sex seems all that one could want in life.  Later on, other priorities emerge.

That was a large part of what inspired my take on vampires.  I very much enjoyed (and incorporated) fight scenes with cool weapons and people capable of dishing out (and taking) absurd amounts of damage, but the real heart of the matter to me was how one kept going after 100 years of orgies.  There had to be something more.

Anyhow, the film has held up remarkably well.

For the last few weeks Billy Joel's "Honesty" has been running through my mind.  The scope and quantity of lies in public discourse is simply overwhelming.

As the title of the post says - everyone is so untrue.

It is no accident that Man's from grace began with a lie.  Lying comes natural to evil people and often reaches the extent that they lie about everything, no matter how trivial or self-defeating.

We're to the point where once-respected organizations are now rejecting their own reportage in order to toe the Party line.  It's completely self-defeating, but so is evil.

As the song says:

I can always find someone who says they sympathize if I wear my heart out on my sleeve, but I don't want some pretty face to tell me pretty lies.  All I want is someone to believe.

Apparently, pretty lies are in great demand these days.

There is a strain of thought - popularized by Hollywood and contemporary culture - that lies indicate intelligence, and clever lies are the sign of a superior kind of person.  This has obvious appeal to prideful people lost in their vanity, and is of a piece with the elevation of cowardice to a virtue as well.

None of this is new, Chesterton and Belloc wrote about it more than a century ago, and Waugh's writings also address the issue.  A key plot point in his Sword of Honour trilogy is how an otherwise admirable British officer convinces himself that the smart thing to do is abandon his men on Crete and save himself, only to realize that while lip-service is paid to such cleverness, in practice society finds it despicable.  

The scandal is so great that punishment is out of the question, and he is hustled off to the Pacific theater, where he finds redemption through conventional acts of bravery and courage.

Of course modern society also rejects the notion of redemption or forgiveness.  There are only the Yard Sign Calvinists and everyone else.    As I noted a couple of weeks ago, one of the most consequential shifts in American culture was when progressive Christians decided that their mission was to condemn rather than convert.

If one isn't trying to draw people to eternal truth, duping them with lies seems a reasonable thing to do, especially if you merely want to keep them in line.

It's a self-limiting tactic, but siding with evil has always been a sucker's bet.  That's because the biggest lie of all is that one can somehow escape divine judgement.