Hieronymus
2d ago
Prosperity-gospel televangelists exist, but evangelicals broadly regard them as heretics and scammers. For example, Mike Winger has a whole playlist condemning Benny Hinn.
Evangelicals didn’t support Trump in the 2016 primary but did support him in the 2016 general election. Appointing Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe bought him some political loyalty among us, though.
Hieronymus
3d ago
UTF-16 and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. But having typographically correct characters and the ability to casually mix languages are very nice.
Hieronymus
3d ago
This may be a personal aesthetic thing. I don't like the dash to connect to the strokes of the adjacent letters. Depending on the individual letter shape, that may require a touch of kerning.
Hieronymus
3d ago
In running text, it's reasonable to use an em dash without spaces and an en dash surrounded by spaces the same way. The latter may get you your typographic fix. Em dashes on screen often collide with the adjacent words anyway.
Hieronymus
4d ago
Just to clarify, is this because she met someone new, or is that her vague expectation on how she'll proceed?
She's engaged to be married, but whether they have set a date I do not know.
Hieronymus
4d ago
Yes, of course; that's why I mentioned it. It's a funny story, and in some ways the pastor made nerdy, clumsy me feel like a paragon of social grace by comparison. It's not an example to imitate.
And yet... I don't know. The whole service was so incredibly earnest in a way most weddings, even Christian weddings, are not. It wasn't a show. It wasn't just a party. It wasn't a chance for the bride and groom to show off. Great is Thy Faithfulness may never have been sung more sincerely.
The liturgy would not have impressed Cranmer. The preaching would not have impressed Edwards or Baucham. But God was glorified anyway.
Hieronymus
4d ago
I mean, I agree. It was weird. But looking back on it, it’s kind of adorable nonetheless.
Hieronymus
4d ago
I usually wonder about this kind of thing in a different sense, because men in spheres bemoaning lack of trad values often mention virginity but I'm never clear on if they're offering the same virginity themselves. And also if they're offering to respect their (prospective) girlfriend's desire for virginity until marriage and would indeed marry her without having sex.
I am reminded of a pastor who praised a groom during his wedding for bringing his bride to the altar a virgin. The pastor’s homily was kind of tacky, and his exegesis wasn’t great, but I think his heart was absolutely in the right place.
Hieronymus
4d ago
A big change happens in the social environment when you achieve a critical mass of family, friends, and neighbors who will hold you to what you and they believe to be right.
If you are a social conservative in a progressive setting, you can expect that a majority of your friends are more liberal than you, even if they are very conservative by local standards; a majority of their friends are more liberal than they, and so on along the gradient until you hit the local norm. Difficult sacrifices are always difficult; but they get a lot harder when your friends don’t respect them, instead encouraging you to do the easier thing that they sincerely believe would be good for you.
An example:
A couple of my college friends got married. They weren’t a great match in terms of temperament, but they genuinely loved each other and could have made it work. They were on the socially conservative end of their church. They were gender egalitarian, but that’s true of almost their whole denomination, and it’s one of the rare churches where for historical reasons this is not a predictor of broader liberalism. The wedding was consciously traditional in a way that expressed the joy and solemnity of the occasion and acknowledged the givenness of the institution.
They had a kid. ADHD, and later a stroke, made it difficult for him to hold down a job. Eventually he found a crummy job that he kept for a long time. If you knew him, you would know that this reflected heroic effort on his part out of deep love for his wife and child, but most people just saw him being less flaky. It wasn’t enough to provide a middle class lifestyle on a single income as your family and I might prefer, but she didn’t expect it to be. She is very type A, and she made more money than he did in a customer service job, later landing a manager role until stress caused her to step down.
They fought. She obviously felt for years that he wasn’t doing enough for the family, but it’s not clear to me how much of that was fair and how much was his failing to carry out her orders; I suspect some of both. Eventually she left him and got a tattoo symbolizing it as a rebirth. She told him (as I found out later) that the divorce would be good for the kid. To her credit, she tried to follow through with good-faith co-parenting. Without his family, he lost his job and his living situation made joint custody impractical; child support has not made things easier. Now she is planning to remarry.
Now, I don’t know what concrete advice she got from her friends. Knowing some of them and knowing her actions, I suspect it was often, “You don’t have to suffer like this.” But I have to wonder: what if they’d had friends and a church that were more conservative than they were?
Maybe someone could have explained that the relationship dynamics that were cute when they were dating would keep them from communicating love and respect once they were married. (I wanted to beat this into them so badly for years, but I wasn’t close enough to either one that a bachelor’s unsolicited marriage advice would be listened to.) Maybe somebody could have convinced them of the goodness in headship and submission and shown how to apply it in a way that recognized her gifts while encouraging him to take a more active role in leading the family. Maybe a friend good with family finances could have run the numbers to see if she could work part time and invest the rest in ways they could live more frugally. Maybe a sympathetic business owner could have found work that suited his abilities and let him provide better. Maybe she’d have heard, “Divorce is not good for your child!” until she either listened or went deaf.
So, a couple of thoughts:
I don’t know how things are in your community. It sounds like they are by and large better off, and I am grateful for that. In mine, the friend gradient toward the norm makes this kind of thing sadly familiar. I hope to figure out what I can do to make the situation better.
Social conservative “converts” are usually in an even more difficult place than my friends when it comes to support. They don’t have the social encouragement to do the hard, countercultural thing; they don’t have someone to help them fit the pieces together in practice; and there is no one to explain the next step in muddling through. I suppose the exceptions are those literal converts lucky enough to find themselves in churches that can provide these things to get them reoriented while it is all fresh and new.
In some cases the possibility of child support can keep men from just cutting and running or give them some skin in the game. But in my friends’ case its function is to make it easier for a woman to leave her husband because she thinks he’s a drag on her, while still demanding some of the (modest but heroic) financial support he provided as her husband. I doubt that the availability of child support caused this divorce, but it has made things worse, and it’s patently unjust. I wonder what socially conservative child support reform would look like.
Hieronymus
4d ago
The majority decision in Dobbs pretty well lays out the development of abortion law in the U.S., and it got stricter across the nineteenth century as the quickening standard was left behind. I don’t think it would have been as hard to make that case as you say.
Hieronymus
6d ago
The ancient Greek system of slavery he was familiar with was closer to "employee who can't quit" than it was to "living under absolute constant terror." ... It should be noted that actual plantation life wasn't like that either. There were black slaves better off than some poor white people.
I've been reading some American slave narratives on and off (not the more politically loaded pre-war ones). One of the most striking things about them is just how much they vary. When you give an individual near absolute power over another group of people, it reveals a tremendous amount about his character.
(That's not to deny the influence of social customs or economic incentives, both of which are also quite visible in the narratives.)
Hieronymus
7d ago
As somebody way to your right, this is encouraging to read.
I agree that the Motte has moved somewhat right over its existence as society has moved left. While the median Mottizen has long been unwoke, some posters have moved to assuming an antiwoke consensus, and that is unfortunate.
But I think that there are some social dynamics that make the Motte appear further right than it is. Every time somebody has collected data on this, it has turned out to be so. If you polled Mottizens on, say, gay marriage, I am confident that you’d find a supermajority in support even if you only polled posters. We socons are more comfortable casually expressing our views than social conservatives were back in the /r/SSC culture war threads, but we’re still a minority.
Hieronymus
9d ago
Religious leaders did not adequately stand up against the mass movement. Although many conservatives see value in religious institutions as a cultural defense, ...
I think this depends on whether you are judging from the perspective of Christian conservatives or secular ones. If you are a secular conservative hoping to see the churches hold back the woke tide, you are going to be disappointed; we no longer have that kind of influence. Secular old-school liberals may see it as more of a mixed bag, but many of them seem to suffer from the same misunderstanding.
... mainstream Catholicism and Protestant denominations did not substantively address the social justice craze.
I can't speak to the experience of the last few years within Catholicism, as I am not a Roman Catholic. But I think that any proper understanding will have to start from the realization that the Roman Catholic church is in practice a very big tent and it is necessary to distinguish movements within it.
As an evangelical, though, I can say that evangelical churches did often address this internally. My pastor, whom I would describe as a moderate social conservative, talked about the dangers of the woke movement quite a lot. Evangelical groups produced a lot of woke defectors (or ideological refugees, to be more generous) during this period, demonstrating that wokeness was being vigorously rejected in the bodies they left. But external advocacy was indeed more selective, reflecting a need to pick our battles.
In some cases they placated or even promoted it.
The mainline went woke, yes. They've been progressive for a very long time. But what may not be visible from the media coverage is that they are also dying.
Anyway, I think it's too early to hold a postmortem of the woke movement. It's still very much alive and kicking.
Hieronymus
20d ago
Arthur, heir to the throne, Henry's elder brother and Catherine's husband, was married at the age of fifteen and died six months later of (presumed to be) the sweating sickness. There are allegations that he had been growing weaker and more sickly since the wedding in the period leading up to his death. Doubts about the consummation of the marriage are therefore not unreasonable.
That is a fair point.
It was Henry VIII who later had the scruples about "oh I must have inadvertently married my brother's widow, which is incest, and the Old Testament says God punishes that, this is why I have no living male heirs and must annul this illegal marriage so I can marry my current mistress", and put the pressure on the pope of the time to do so.
Well, yeah. It was a misreading of Leviticus – if it were correct then levirate marriage, commanded to Jews in the same book, would make no sense. But it was a misreading that underlay canon law. And you can see why the issue would obsess him.
You can believe she was lying because she was a jealous, spiteful woman...
She'd certainly have understandable reasons for jealousy. And if she had originally felt that lying was a minor offense made as much for Henry's sake as for hers, it wouldn't be at all shocking if she refused to come clean so that he could look justified in betraying her.
Hieronymus
20d ago
Yes, but Catherine was obviously lying. The kings of England and Aragon had scholars go through her first marriage with a fine-toothed comb looking for a reason to annul it so that Catherine could marry Henry and maintain the alliance. When they came back saying that the only way to annul the marriage was if it hadn’t been consummated, Catherine said that she had never slept with her husband. That’s not terribly plausible under the circumstances, and if it were true all of the canon lawyers would have been unnecessary in the first place.
The pope actually refused to annul her second marriage for political and military reasons.
Hieronymus
20d ago
… for not committing in the way she prefers.
Without the sexual revolution, there are expectations put on her too.
I agree that trying to roll back the sexual revolution by constraining men without constraining women is insane and unjust. Any workable attempt to do so would have to involve both sexes, unlike the “yes means yes” push.
Hieronymus
25d ago
Your point's a strong one, but I don't think your last sentence lands as the flourish you probably intended.
Hieronymus
27d ago
This is an excellent summary. I'd add that while dispensationalism is common among American evangelicals, it's losing ground.
Dispensationalists often frustrate me, but I wouldn't call them heretics unless they move beyond dispensationalism into dual covenant theology. Dual covenant theology holds that while gentiles are saved only through faith in Christ, Jews can be saved by keeping the Mosaic Law. Since this is approximately the least evangelical take it is possible to have, and since dispensationalism is an evangelical phenomenon to begin with, this is mercifully rare.
Hieronymus
28d ago
Christian understanding does not end at the Bible. Indeed the Bible says not to use itself that way (2 Thessalonians 2:15).
If you have another reliable record of apostolic teaching, you should listen to it. But you don't – both Rome and Constantinople have a history of backdating later innovations to ascribe apostolicity to them. Tradition can be useful, but to call it authoritative is an error.
Fortunately that's not needed here, because the Bible speaks to the issue. If Cruz gets it wrong, well, Cruz gets it wrong.
For non-Protestant Christians, having so many Protestants in political power is bemusing, frustrating, and sometimes terrifying.
I'd like to respond with some clever remark about Roman Catholics in power, but that'd be silly because, like Protestants, they are too varied a group to generalize about that way. As far as I'm aware of Eastern Orthodox politicians in traditionally Orthodox countries, they seem more driven by ethnic nationalism than by any particularly Christian concerns.
Hieronymus
30d ago
Close the loopholes and make it harder for Dem presidents to not enforce the law. Have more of their executive orders get shredded in the courts like DAPA did during Obama's tenure, and like a lot of Trump's EOs always do.
I don't think this is possible, either in principle or in practice. The president has wide discretion not to enforce laws for a variety of reasons. And federal judges, who are routinely blue tribe even when right-leaning, will mostly be looking for reasons to allow a Democratic or neocon Republican president to skip out on his side of the bargain.
We've tried things like this before, and the pro-illegal-immigration factions have successfully defected at the first opportunity. I don't see any reason for optimism that the compromise will be honored in an even more divided country.
Hieronymus
1mo ago
Upvotes and downvotes really have no place on a political discussion site like this, as all they do is add unnecessary heat and a "boo outgroup" button for partisans to click. ... Forcefully ignoring the upvotes has made the site much more tranquil in my eyes.
That's a fair take and I respect it, but it's different than my experience. I am often surprised which of my posts get upvoted and which are controversial or unremarkable. I find the feedback kind of interesting, although I don't update on it much.
The mods on this site, while better than on many sites, are still pretty arbitrary and capricious. It's not uncommon for them to modhat leftists or centrists for things right-leaning commenters get away with all the time.
For any site above tiny the modding can never be perfectly even. I disagree with your judgment on balance, though I'm sure there are valid examples, and evaluating their salience is kind of subjective.
One thing I have noticed is that long-time quality contributers do sometimes get more slack than most. But I think this applies regardless of one's political and social positions. Darwin got at least as much slack as Hlynka did.
Maybe she'll return baptized and born again.
I've been unironically praying for that – except that I presume, given her childhood faith, she is already baptized.
I have two reasons in particular to wish her well. One is that, like most, I know people who have made the normie-tier mistakes of which she has made the epic-tier versions, and I pray for their repentance. The other is that when she is talking about her (sometimes very difficult) evangelical childhood, she makes an honest effort to be fair as she understands fairness.
If she repented of her sin, then reconciled to her father such that they forgave one another, I think that would justify making the world endure a little cringeposting for a while. I'm not holding my breath, but I am praying from time to time.
Hieronymus
1mo ago
Surely we can deadname an influential rationalist court prostitute when her name has so much metaphorical import?
I don't care about "deadnaming." But unless she actually changed her name to Aella, I prefer the social norm that avoids casual and unnecessary doxxing.
Hieronymus
1mo ago
Seventy year olds are fully capable of caring about the generations to come. Indeed, financially secure seventy year olds (which presumably describes the elderly in the political class) are among those best suited to think in generational terms. If they don't, that's a deep cultural problem, and electing younger folks may mitigate it but will not solve it.
The Reader’s Digest condensed version: The Old Testament ritual for purifying Jewish priests to serve in the temple requires the ashes of a spotless red heifer. Rabbinical tradition adds a bunch of criteria to the biblical law (as rabbinical tradition is wont to do) such that qualifying cows are absurdly rare.
Some Jews who want to restore the temple would like to breed qualifying cattle. A few eccentric dispensationalist Christians, who believe that the rebuilding of the Jewish temple is part of the unfolding of biblical prophecy, want to help them. This isn’t a common thing, but it has geopolitical relevance, as rebuilding the Jewish temple would require tearing down the Al Aqsa mosque.
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