Yes I do. But it doesn't all follow from there unfortunately because the church is built on much more than just Jesus' passion, resurrection, and death. It's largely built on Pauline interpretations of the Gospels, and the entirety of the Old Testament which is largely contradictory to the New Testament. It's not as simple as just "repent and believe the gospel" because so many things have been grafted on top of that are required to be part of the church.
I think you're reading me extremely uncharitably here (as the other catholics that I complain about do too), and actually makes me want to leave more than I already do (which is perhaps what you would want anyway, which I have some sympathy with). Things empirically do not just follow from reading the scriptures (or else why would there be so many denominations of Christianity). I believe in Papal Authority and church hierarchy which is one of the reasons why I am catholic. The Jesuits' have a much more open interpretation to theological problems where I struggle with the Dominican positions.
thejdizzler
20d ago
Reading the second book in "La Saga de Los Confines" by Liliana Bodoc. Trying to only reading in Spanish until my DELE exam in May.
thejdizzler
20d ago
Maybe better suited for the culture war thread, but I think I'm leaving the Catholic Church. I converted in 2022 for a number of reasons. I had already felt drawn to Catholic literature/aesthetics for almost as long as I could remember (I loved Silence and A Canticle for Leibowitz), was incredibly dissastisfied with the secular attitude towards spirituality and morality, and was drawn to the simplicity of Jesus' simplification of the Jewish Law: Love thy neighbor as thyself, and Love God. I choose the Catholic Church over other denominations because it was not woke, open to revising stances on scripture (evolution), and concerned more with works over just belief.
It's been three years since I went through RCIA and converted, and a combination of contradictions between the church and my other beliefs about the world has become difficult to resolve. This center around two big areas. The first revolves around veganism/animal rights/environmentalism. Although this certainly wasn't always the case historically within the church (St. Francis and the Benedictines come to mind), there seems to be this attitude at least in my parish that animals and nature were only created for us to do with as we please. This is backed up by an interpretation of Genesis that suggests that God created man to rule over animals and nature. Not only do I think this is wrong ethically, we know many animals have conscious experiences and shouldn't be treated "however we want" (not to say that they should be treated like humans necessarily), but it also seems to have led to disaster in relationship to our environment. Even if you don't believe Climate Change is a serious issue, we have replaced most of the vertebrate biomass on land with us and our (maltreated) farm animals. Certainly there are many in the Church who would see this as wrong (the Pope included), but it doesn't seem to be so in parishes I've been to, and to justify it scripturally it seems like you have to jump through a bunch of hoops.
The second issue has to do with the relationship between divine revelation, philosophy, and science. It's not the church hasn't historically changed its position on things (slavery, evolution, not doing everything in Latin), it's that any change has to conform to certain core dogma and be based in an interpretation of scripture. But the more I read of philosophy, the more I've started to believe that certain tenets of catholic theology don't agree with objective reality and are poorly argued for by the "greats" (Augustine, Aquinas). The problem is not necessarily that these tenets are wrong: more so that they can't be interrogated in a reasonable philosophical manner because divine revelation is unquestionable.
The final unrelated reason that I'm leaving is the people. When I first joined the parish, we had a much more vibrant young adult community that actually did stuff together, had interests beyond theology, and generally was much more concerned with works than beliefs. Through a combination of people moving away and/or leaving the church, it seems the only people really left are trad-caths who I find boring, close-minded, and fail to see the core of what Jesus was trying to say. The Dominicans who run the parish, while being excellent administrators, and kind people, aren't much better when it comes to intellectual openness.
Anyway, I'm open to coming back to the church when/if I move away from the current parish I'm in to more Jesuit-friendly pastures. But without massive reform, both philosophically and practically (being much more concerned with environmentalism and non-human life on this planet), I think this era of my life is over. I'm not sure where to go next spiritually, but hopefully that will come with time.
thejdizzler
22d ago
Yup I think that's a big part of it! I should know better about spaces like the one I got burned in (alt right biohacking is not exactly an intellectually open environment).
thejdizzler
22d ago
Thanks man for the sanity check. I know I'm fit and I know I don't look like an old man at the ripe age of checks watch 27.
thejdizzler
23d ago
How I can I be less bothered ad hominem attacks by randos online? I recently was pushing back against some seed-oil sophistry on substack (not even advocating for no-meat/veganism like you might assume, there isn't actually good evidence that vegan/vegetarian is better than the mediterranean diet), and some dude told me my profile picture looked like that of a prematurely aged teenager (for reference, here is the picture). I know this is bait because most of the time seed-oil sophists don't have any real arguments, but I couldn't prevent it from really bothering me. I've had similar experiences with non-appearance comments about intelligence, personal character, etc. and they all bother me to some extent. In real life this isn't really an issue because it's faux pas to make these kinds of comments (or at least has been since I graduated high school). Maybe a sign of some underlying insecurities I need to work through, or that I need to get a bit more sleep. Thoughts the motte?
thejdizzler
24d ago
Nothing wrong with LARPing as a Victorian gentleman, and in many ways a worthy goal for an individual in a world that is decidedly against many aspects of that. As a goal for an educational curriculum that's supposed to prepare youth to be citizens, leaders, and humanistic contributors to be members of Western society, I'm less sure. It's almost certainly better than what we have now, but it's also a system that produced, in large part, the generation that allowed Europe to commit collective suicide in the First World War. Maybe it's not fair to pin the blame on the war on the education system, but the way the European elite were educated during that era certainly influenced the propaganda, mass hysteria, and doubling down that allowed the war to get so out of hand.
All this being said, I think your LARP is good for both you and for the community. It is good to go church, the Opera, museums, play sports, and read old books. There are plenty of countervailing influences in society that want to shove the things I believe are absent from these lists in your face (although they never seem to choose actually good books/media from any of these categories). I just worry that as an ethic to guide society it's incomplete, which is perhaps true of any system we could come up with (José Ortega y Gasset seemed to think so at least).
In terms of the first novel, may I introduce the "Golden Ass" by Apuleius as another contender. It as episodic as Don Quijote, but also contains an overarching plot that I think would qualify it as a novel. And it was published in the 2nd century AD. It has elements of what we might consider post-modernism (nothing new under the sun), while still forming a bridge between antiquity and more modern novels.
thejdizzler
25d ago
This is a good point. Things have fallen further than I might like to think.
thejdizzler
25d ago
We know from studies of memory formation that interleaving (i.e. mixing your study sessions for two subjects) improves retention and cross pollination of different subject matters. Studying multiple strands of literary culture I think would same to have the same effect. Same with languages. High-school and university students are plenty fluent in English to start an L2 (if not L3), without having to worry about mixing up the two languages which often occurs when one is at low levels in multiple languages.Since I started studying Spanish seriously I know my own knowledge of English has grown immensely.
thejdizzler
25d ago
I think I came off too harsh against St. John's in my post. I haven't attended the college and so I don't know what the experience is like on the ground, and from what you and other's have said, it seems like I'm missing quite a bit of what they do there. What I'm more frustrated with is people using this list on substack to peddle a way to become a well-read, well-rounded humanistic individual. It's part of the path to be sure, and if you don't read any of these books I think that's not a good sign. But merely checking the box isn't enough. You need to move beyond the curated list. Which hopefully these kinds of things actually spur people to do. So maybe there's not a real problem after all...
thejdizzler
25d ago
This is an aspect of these lists that I hadn't considered, because my own high-school education looked quite a bit like the St. Johns list. I graduated public (although rich, white, and suburban) high school in 2016, and we had at least one Shakespeare every year, various English classics (Austen), Robert Penn Warren, Kafka, Camus, etc. There was some woke stuff too, but nothing that actually really challenged the Liberal, Modern worldview. But I suppose that things have likely become significantly worse since then.
thejdizzler
25d ago
I think this is probably what St. John's as an institution that you actually attend does this well, re:creating a shared knowledge-base that can be expanded on individually. I think what I am frustrated with, which maybe didn't come across here, is how this is presented by secondary sources (i.e. substack). Read these 100 books and become based, you HAVE to read these books in order to be a learned individual, etc. etc.
Re:histories vs. historical accounts. I think there is a place for both, but a good history book will a). introduce you to many other primary sources about the period and b). take a step back from some of the bias that is inherent in a primary source account (although you can't really get rid of bias completely). Of course pop history often fails to this, which is why I think trying to read more academic history (Battle Cry of Freedom is my favorite axe to grind here) is the way to go.
thejdizzler
25d ago
Yup fair. This was me talking out of my ass about something I haven't read very much of. Thanks for the correction.
thejdizzler
25d ago
Ayn Rand is the sore thumb that sticks out to me, but the anglo-centrism is the real problem. There should be far more Latin American and continental authors on there.
thejdizzler
25d ago
Two prominent book lists seem to be making the rounds on my vaguely conservative substack feed. The MENSA reading list for high school students, and St. John's Great Books curriculum. While these two lists are pretty different from each other, and I generally find the St. John's list to be more broad, I find both to be vaguely unsatisfying and narrow in a way that I can't really put my finger on.
I'm reminded of Sam Kriss's critique of a similar kind of list on the /lit channel on 4chan. There's a certain kind of anglo-centrism to this list, an anglo-centrism that is focused on a specific type of worldview. I can't quite put the feeling I have into words here, but if I were to try, I would describe this list as emphasizing a modern (in reference to the modern era of history), Western, progressive (as in history as progress, not woke), Liberal, and individualist perspective of the world. A few big gaps I see below
-No Eastern Bloc/communist authors. Communism might be bad, but it is an ideology that determined the course of the 20th century. Why not add some Soviet Science fiction, or one of the works of Stanislaw Lem.
-No East Asian literature. Journey to the West is something that sticks out, but if you wanted to be more "edgy" you could add some Yukio Mishima, who certainly is quite different from the general theme of this list.
-No post-modernism. Yea, yea insert comment about degenerates, drugs, and nihilism, but this should be something that the youth should decide for themselves. Camus is on here which is borderline, but I would recommend some DFW (Infinite Jest is the best), Italo Calvino, Michel Houellebecq, or David Mitchell.
-No Latin American literature (on the MENSA list, St. John's seems to have Borges and Gabo) The fact that Gabo isn't on here is a crime. Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a great, short one that could easily be added to this list, but Ficciones (Borges), The Invention of Morel (Bioy Casares), or The House of the Spirits (Allende).
-No environmentalist literature. Lord of the Rings sort of counts, but I would add Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, or some Wendell Berry.
-Very little history. One of the big problems I see on both the left and the right is a complete ignorance of who we are and how we got here. The Oxford History of the US (although incomplete) would be great to ad to this list, but I'm not sure what else to add that would give more than a basic survey of history which I don't think is useful.
At the end of the day I think lists like these are counter-productive. Rather than encouraging independent thinking, I think they just create another shibboleth on the right to stand opposed to the shibboleth on left: post-modernism and marxism are evil and wrong, the answers to all our problems can be found in the past, and the Western, Modern, Liberal worldview is probably correct. Rather I would suggest reading widely, and with things you disagree with. As Haruki Murakami once said, if you only read what everyone is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. This is just as true for this MENSA list as it might be for the slop that we've normalized.
Now that being said, if you want to build a university degree/program of study, you need to have some kind of reading list. In that sense St. John's list isn't too bad. But to really develop as an independent humanistic thinker, reading the books on their list is not enough. You need to cultivate independent seeking out of literature beyond the "lists" and beyond the slop that is peddled to us by popular culture. You also need to kill the anglocentrism, preferably by learning to read in one or more languages outside of English. If I were in charge of St. John's curriculum, I would cut back these reading lists by about 50%, add in a language requirement, and some kind of independent reading requirement. We had something like the later in my Global Voices (world literature) class in high school, where you had to pick a non-Anglo author and write an essay/give a presentation on its plot/themes/character.
Man I should have gone into the humanities instead of into the sciences. I am so much more passionate about this stuff than STEM.
thejdizzler
25d ago
Lilliana Bodoc's Saga of the Borderlands. Vague retelling of the Spanish Conquest of the Americas, but the Spanish are Sauron. I've only read the first one and am making my way through the other two but it's good. Ecological twist on Lord of the Rings with some pretty unique races of people that I don't think I've seen anywhere else in fantasy.
Also have to recommend Wizard of Earthsea. Best character development I've seen in fantasy by far.
I have thought about it before and will see if there are any Orthodox churches near me.
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