Historical inquiry-- that incisive scalpel in the hands of modern debunkers-- need not serve the "critical mode" to demystify the past (as if to break us from a bad habit).  Perhaps, more alienation from our surroundings in the name of a fabled "rationalism" is not what we need.   What we need is less alienation, more integration with our past in search of home.

In more amiable hands of a loving son then, the study of history can serve as a penitential recovery of the virtue of piety -- of old gods, of the hearth, and of the ancestors. 

It is piety, or what Dr. Samuel Johnson termed "the only proper and adequate relief of decaying man", that is in short supply in our decaying world.   As modern institutions lose their legitimacy (and even their efficacy), this sense of "decay" doesn't need much illustration.  The point of this blog is not to offer more diagnostics for the "Crisis of Modernity", much less prognostics about the future, but to remind the reader about what we already lost in the hopes of a recovery.

 

With its locus in the Divine Liturgy, the life of the Sacraments, the gesta of the Saints and Holy Dead, historical inquiry among Apostolic Christians can serve a far more specific purpose of restoring a Fallen Nature for a modern society that has gone far to reject piety. 

This virtue of piety, as the foil of liberalism in many respects, is what Johnson called "discharge of duty to God" and, by extension "duty to parents or those in superiour relation" in his magisterial Dictionary of the English Language (1773), published just years prior to the onset of the "Age of Revolutions."

 

The modern age has been "liberated"--- or so we are told--- from superstition of received truths, including Biblical wisdom, and the imposed constraints of tradition in the more promising openness to future possibilities.

That is the premise of the modern age that was only dimly emerging in Johnson's time before the conflagrations of the French Revolution.

 

Knowing that many desire something else entirely than the advertisement of a futurist's vague promises or the call for some "man on horseback" to rescue us from our excesses, this blog is an ecumenical way of displaying the unique features of a genuine alternative towards the modern experience of life-- the Catholic tradition-- against a world of religious inobservance that prompts the reemergence of the Occult, pseudo-spirituality, techno-barbarism and all subtle and manifest forms of magical thinking that have filled the vacuum following the welcomed but not uncomplicated demise of the "Enlightenment" and its false mechanistic depiction of reality since Johnson's days [More on that later...]. 

Hardly arbitrary, this historical interest in "culture" as a kind of inheritance of both spiritual and material goods handed down from one generation to the next is due in part to a more fundamental insight into what lay theologian Frank Sheed dubbed Man's "second nature". 

According to Sheed, the deviation from man's true nature through Original Sin (a fundamental dogma that once united all Trinitarian baptized Christians) follows the fact that "we are no longer as God made us; [and further] the generations have introduced distortions at this point or that, habits and ideas [that] have taken root and grown into a second nature, silencing nature's first utterance." [Theology for Beginners, Ch. VIII: "The Nature of Man", p. 80]. 

Our age is no different --- save that knowledge of what I term the ur-historical fact of all facts is itself fading. 

The metaphysical givenness of Original Sin met by the redemptive Sacrifice upon Calvary where Jesus Christ the Son of God shed His blood for many (Matthew 26:28) opening up a reconciliation between Creator and creature were once cornerstone beliefs of Western civilization even up through much of the 20th-Century.  Now, there is a downtick in the number of young who are baptized, while fewer couples enter into sacramental and lasting marriages.  Indeed, the idea of normative coupling and mating bonds is itself becoming displaced, not to mention ideas of what sex and sexuality fundamentally are for.

Sadly, we do not have to look far in historical memory to see the proof of Sheed's pronouncement.  Most of us who are capable of reading this blog have lived through enough of the retreating of our own cultural horizons, the debasement of societal standards, and the ongoing revolution of our background assumptions about others that most do not need much convincing about the doctrine of Original Sin.

Our language itself anticipates the normalization of cultural editing: We live in a society where people have "living arrangements", not homes.  Where people have "partners", not husbands and wives.  Where people equate pets to children.  Where people rent and do not own. 

Everything in short is increasingly temporary, contingent, in a state of constant revision--- and this is largely why our language reflects these new realities so much that it anticipates an unfinalizable vocabulary.

Yes, our language appears to be the greatest victim of such hyper-mercurial times and is becoming at once more capacious and abstract to accommodate an open ended future--- e.g. 'birth parent' instead of mother (because new bio-technologies will one day, we are told, replicate a womb), "unhoused person" instead of homeless (presumably because houses and homes have nothing in common), "person of color" instead of historically-used terms like Black, Filipino,  Chicano, or what have you, and yes, even "lived experience" instead of life (probably because life itself means little more than a blank slate that it needs to be filled in my experience) --- where the intent to be "inclusive", "equitable", "scientifically precise", or simply just different (and yet only superficially so), ends up swallowing up every foreseeable difference and nuance, thus flattening identity into categories so pre-templated, so homogenous, and void of feeling as to be as riveting as a statistical chart.  A mere trivial placeholder or vector plot for something to come which will only further obscure what is being tracked over time when language becomes overly rationalistic, programmable and prescriptive at the expense of the historical and descriptive. 

The result is a world that is difficult to follow further exacerbated by a dwindling attention span that requires constant handling. 

In many ways, the discursive overlay of our social reality resembles the drug-induced colorless scenes of Louis Lowry's "The Giver" that inadequately blankets the growing inarticulable conflagration of political rage all around us.

The suppression of candor and open debate for the sake of a "Noble Lie" will do that to a society. 

The more such a "Noble Lie" becomes apparently ignoble, as appears the case with the post-war consensus in our own times, the more desperate the beneficiaries of that narrative will police its doctrines.  That desperation of an increasingly decadent regime, both at the political and cultural level of what we term "liberalism", is what we are living through. 

Things are shaky right now on many fronts, problems appear that do not suggest an easy resolution, and few people know where to find shelter in the wake of a collapse. 

But what if the seismic event has already happened?  And what we are really talking about are the consequences of its aftershocks?

 

 

We live through the denouement of what the liberal sociologist Daniel T. Rogers called "The Age of Fracture" --- a kind of pandemonium of the public sphere --- given its overfondness of the particular, the contingent, and the outlier.  As a result, what Aristotle claimed was the highest of goods and the perfection of happiness--- namely, harmonious integration of a responsible and free self into the polis--- is increasingly unlikely when less and less holds that polis together.  Political theorist Patrick Deneen (in)famously said that the failure of liberalism is to be attributed to its success.  It is at root, the Notre Dame academic pointed out, an "anti-culture" that aspires towards the total atomization of historical societies.

The purpose of this blog then is to document these generational events of recent memory that have more often advanced the development of this "second nature" with an explicit attention focused on certain fundamental and well-attested changes to this newest scarification in our "second nature": first, the decline in formal observance of the Lord's Day and, second, the Liturgical Feasts that once characterized the Western calendar.  In practical terms, this means that I will document Americana that was composed at a time when religious observance was a cultural norm paying attention to leisure (the contents of a Sunday's rest) and the public quality of religious feasts.

Time is said to be the scarcest of resources in the modern era.  So, taken in aggregate, the secularization of time and the triumph of liberal modernity over our calendars required in some sense the abandonment of religious observance as a matter of public concern.  That taken together with increasing hostility to the Divine Law and now even the Natural Law is an indication to the faithful that the guardrails of what theologians once termed the katechon have been blow off.   The role of this blog is to connect the generation and decay of ideas that inform the Common Good with either direct or indirect religious observance.

It is the main thesis of this blog that the moral restoration of Christian society (against the continued development of what is known as "oikophobia" or fear/hatred/aversion of home) must be heralded by a politically recognized restoration of liturgical time. 

There seems to be a tall order behind such 10-dollar wording.  To be blunt, that means laws that recognize Sundays as holidays.  That means laws too that safeguard the High Feasts of the Liturgical Year so that people, especially the most economically vulnerable, may freely worship without fear of privation or retaliation (especially the former).  It also means the increasing public visibility of these feasts and fasts in the public sphere.

Not only days like Christmas and New Year's, which are exceptions to the rule (and in themselves signs of hope), but also Good Friday (indeed, all of Holy Week to some extent), Ascension Thursday, All Saints, and even the Assumption and the Feast of the Immaculate Conception given that Mary under her aspect of the Immaculata as the patron saint of the United States. 

Before a liberal objects, know that Christmas is already recognized as a Federal holiday.  The question is not whether that is a fact, which it is, but why?   Upon what purely rational grounds, is the governmental recognition of Christ Mass (where we get Christmas) justified?  Why isn't Hannukah, Eid, Kwanza, or the Wiccan Winter Solstice?

 

One cannot begin to face such historically inconvenient facts without first acknowledging that the United States, along with every other nation in the Americas, is originally a Christian nation (something that this blog will also document up through surprisingly recent times).

The facts, including God's presence on our currency and our Pledge of Allegiance or the practice of school prayer up to 1962, cannot be wished away under some illusion that is the "Separation of Church and State" (that phrase by the way does NOT appear in the U.S. Constitution). 

 

"Christian nationalism", of course, is a bugaboo of progressive circles but it really is not something invented.  This is painfully obvious to anybody with any antique knowledge of the country as a whole.  The point of this blog then is to point out that nationalism of any kind is, yes, unchristian but that Christian patriotism is the heart of our nation's story.  It informs not only what we call our "folk traditions" (including marginalized groups) but also our legal traditions which is why the 10 Commandments belong in every courtroom in the country.  In due course, we will distinguish idolatrous nationalism from true patriotism in an elaboration of a common civic theology held between all of the baptized.

 

What liberals have exploited in their quest to push religion fully into the "private sphere" of American society and other societies (with the help of certain denominations) where it can wither away (as it has) are those theological and ecclesiological fissures of the Reformation and the resulting loss of the Christian oikumene's recognition of the Church's institutional authority. 

Logically, these fissures can only be filled through the recognition of the Divine Magisterium, the unity of the Christian Faith, and the teaching authority of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.  Nothing short of that recognition in some way, shape, or form will save Christendom from both internal and external foes (but especially the former). 

 

Until then, this is the "practical" end of this blog: to highlight how such allowances regarding the sacredness of certain moments as a Christian nation cohere in the possibility of what Aristotle had envisioned for human flourishing reflecting the social nature of our human condition and the need to "fit in" to an alignment with both a metaphysical and historical group. 

 

This means an identity (yes, bear with this much abused word) that is rooted both in historical memory of inter-generational tradition (with its "handings off") passed from fathers to sons, from mothers to daughters on this side of Eternity counterbalanced by a contrasting anti-identity (for lack of a serviceable term) that is tied to a far deeper mystical promise than can even be realized supernaturally on the less familiar side of death itself. 

Without both inheritances-- the identity of a patia in this world where an understanding of self is shaped by our earthly fathers and the promise of fulfillment in God's Heavenly Kingdom in the next life of glorification--- there can be no path to lasting happiness.  The competition with this superior promise of the Gospel (which attests of the Resurrection to all nations) is a regime of endless consumerism and a society whose anti-Gospel is rooted in the pursuit of comfort.

 

Such conditions on both ends of human life--- one by the familiarity of the crib and the other by the Great Unknown of the grave--- are at once actual and non-negotiable for a sense of proper human proportions in the face of our unique modern evils necessary for any sense of continuity in the highest purpose that would connect the past to the future in the present moment.  What I am speaking of is the means by which we can recover our morale against the onslaught that we have witnessed and will continue to witness.

 

Without our existence being held in common by each and all, where the most brutal truths present themselves but never to discourage and divide every man for himself, as it were, we literally cannot speak in the first-person plural in any comprehensive sense.  Why?  To be a person, or more specifically a human person, is to be born and to die at particular times and places -- and, more poignant still, to come to terms and be conscious of it all.

Christianity is the only religion that centralizes this meta-biographical truth of the human condition and actually resolves it. 

To my knowledge, this psychologically compelling focus is why it is the only true religion among competitors that speak to God's might at the expense of His relationality to us on the one hand (making Him into a kind of Monstrosity by contrast) or to a kind of anti-Theistic aestheticized rapprochement of the Grand Illusion we ordinarily call "existence."  By either extreme, humanity has little value to an inhuman Cosmos where either a Monster or Nothingness stands at the helm.

In Christianity, by contrast, a man IS the center of the Cosmos and this is why "humanism" and its handmaiden "secularism" which jealously hoards all the moments of human breath are both post-Christian heresies (that is, doctrinal excesses and deficits, which is to say imbalances) that could not have been possible elsewhere.  Why?  Because Christianity *through the Incarnation* centralizes the human experience.  It makes a god of a man and a man of God.  What the heresies forget is not the impression that human life deeply matters (as is the meta-ethic of "the West"), but the why of the Incarnation that made it fully comprehensible as such in the first instance.  Yes, as readers of Tom Holland's Dominion know, the critics of Christ are remarkably incurious about what made their own most treasured values possible in the first instance.

 

Attending Mass corrects this fatal defect and serves as the justification for reparations that are due through the neglect of these facts.

This modest proposal for Sundays as the Christian Sabbath, a day of rest, is also a feasible and time-attested safeguard against the excesses of a society totally structured by the impositions of the State and the dynamics of Market Society which, if unchecked, will continue to corrode the institution of the family and married life both.*  

And trends do not bode well.

(These forces, as you probably know, are responsible for the prospects of "demographic collapse" across the Globe.)

To remind ourselves of the baseline of normalcy, the blog covers a few items:

(1) There are Ecclesiological Criteria for True Religious Observance.

• To speak nothing of morals and dogmatic instruction about how to synthesize from Scripture, which is really an entire library of books, each with different authors and perspectives, why must the institutional Church exist in order to structure the liturgy and public worship to fulfill our fundamental obligations to worship God (see the First Commandment)? 

• And why when disregarded does the resulting antinomianism necessarily lead to the death of the Christian life of the nation as a whole?

• These questions and many related ones are addressed in the section "The Gospel's Authority", "The Holy Face Devotion", and "Holy Days of Obligation"

 

 

(2) The Bible-- the "Good Book" as Americans once often called it--- is not a mere Historical Record, but the Font of Prayer.

• Holy Scripture is without question the oldest font of civilization and this sourcing's purpose is oriented towards a devotional and liturgical life of prayer as the arch-rule of human life (Psalm 119:164). 

• Since the first emergence of the synagogues, these venues where the Scriptures were publicly read were always houses of prayer and the churches that emerged afterwards inherited this same understanding that the People of God's prayer was not centrally private and devotional, but public and liturgical.  This is complemented by the fact that God always spoke of the religious obligations of "His chosen people" as a whole -- not particular individuals.

• Despite this consensus (upheld until recently), the Bible's supernatural provenance is attested not only by the events described historically therein, but by its depth and various levels of divine reading through which deeper truths of the spiritual life of the Trinity are conveyed. 

• With its jealous assault on monastic life (and the immense theft that occurred), a millennia's spiritual heritage was gradually elided in the Protestant world (especially the English-speaking world).  For this reason, this blog will also diligently document the history of monasticism in the English-speaking world of the post-Reformation.

• How has this profundity of spiritual reading and rule-based Christian living where the Gospel can be implanted into the heart been overlooked when Scripture is divorced from Tradition?  Why do we see tradition invoked in the course of American religion in the institution of particular churches just as often as it devolves by an individualistic call to break from mere human conventions?  Importantly, how does this strengthen Americanism as the post-Christian civic religion of the United States?

• Sadly, this is the untold story of America since the beginning.  Reflections on the forgotten aspects of Holy Writ as evidence of a watering down of Christianity can be found in the sections "Reading as Prayer", "Sacred Philology", "Thomistic Semiotics", "The Parables of Christ", "Great Sermons of American History", etc.

 

 

(3) Leisure is not entertainment, but a distinctive good in its own right.

• The prospect of the Sabbath *from the beginning* was to safeguard the profit of rest, both for the body and for the mind.  But what does the latter entail?  Is there any evidence from Americana?

• To find answers, what would we find if we looked to historical precedent of the spiritual side of Americana when there were still God-fearing men who made proper use of their rest? 

• And what of the holidays/holy days and how they were practiced in the hearth and home, through the streets and squares, that once gave the years of men their endearing sense and form? 

• These questions are addressed in the sections "The Religion of Food", "Touchstones of Americana", and more.

 

 

(4) Work is not something to be "balanced" against Life --- rather, Work is a Form of Sacrificial Prayer and an Intrinsic Good in Itself and A Major Testament to Man's Dignity.  Societies have an obligation to ensure that future generations (especially our sons) have access to honest work.

 

[Just as this blog discusses the Sabbatical as a cultural element of modern American story, so too would it make sense to discuss how the other Six Days of Work are to be lived.]

• We live in an age of imbalance and that is recognized by the secular term "work-life balance" and yet we are also told that we are in a productivity crisis that explains the stagnation of real wages.  What are we to make of this predicament?  

• While the intentions of the concept of a "work-life balance" are good (especially when used against 'workaholics'), the effects seem to reduce our time to an economistic calculation for balancing an equation that makes all moments into undifferentiated commodified exchangeable units we call "seconds", "minutes", and "hours" by which we measure our commitments in relation to one another (as if "quality time" was not a thing that categorically differentiated different days, hours, weeks, etc.).   

  • "Don't let a second go to waste!  Make good use of your time!" all seem on the surface to be good maxims, but they also are enemies of the Sabbath a la actionism and its contempt for the underlying precept to rest.

  • Otherwise, this might seem to be a good in a sense that it encourages productivity but it is an invitation to blurring the distinction between commitments which the day of rest gives us pause to consider. 

    • EXAMPLE: The effect of making these units interchangeable is similar to a dad who keeps on looking at his phone while his kid plays in a basketball tournament (that is, the dad is physically there in body but not fully there in mind).  The dad is trying to make the most of his time but ends up satisfying neither work nor familial role as father.   As a worker, he is unable to be at his more productive place of work.  As a father, he is distracted from the doings of his son.

  • That is, the phone undermines both of his commitments through the false option of synchronicity and the double applied cheating of his time as both work and family life.  How does this calculus tend to undermine both work, duty and sacrifice and encourage "cheating" in this sense?  How does it invite both avarice and sloth depending on circumstances and personalities when we can play with our time usage at whim?

• How has the nature of work changed since the advent of the digital age?  How has social time changed when the venues and schedules of work change? How has the relation of work to rest, leisure, and entertainment changed as both technology and work underwent transformations of their own?  How have hobbies changed?  Are they less common?  And do they even still exist?

• What of AI's potential to disrupt man's dignified call to labor and to provide for himself?  How can Christian families chart a path forward for their children?

• This section of the blog is devoted to the patronage of St. Joseph the Worker.  How has St. Joseph, the Patron of the Universal Church, of Fathers, and of Workers, grown as a devotion in modern times?  How have theologians made sense of his growing prominence?  How does he relate to the Virgin Mary, to the Holy Family, and ultimately to the Sacred Humanity of Jesus Christ?  What are we to make of his most prominent quality--- his silent action in relation to his authority (Luke 2:42)?

• If curious, please refer to sections such as "Ad Te: Tales of Patrons and Workers", "The Productivity Crisis as a Spiritual Crisis", "The Metaphysics of Liminal Spaces" and others.

 

(5) Heresy is (Sadly) a historical reality of the "American Experiment", but the Nation's story is not over yet!

• Such destructive beliefs include the idolatrous notion that a nation is an idea, or that maximizing "freedom" is and end-in-itself and the spiritual realization of man, among others must be confronted if frustrations are to be discontinued.  What can the condemnation of Americanism mean when the spiritual side of the nation as a whole is considered not only from the remote viewpoint of the Holy See (with its own European assumptions about modernity), but from below among the American Catholic laity?  How have they lived as Americans and as Catholics?

• The changes as proposed by the blog will not unfold easily or at all without the spiritual virtues and motherly intervention of the Immaculata under whose patronage the United States remains indebted.  What is the history behind this patronage?  How were Marian devotions practiced and understood in modern America?

• Through Mary, the full incarnational truth of Christ's hypostatic union of the God-Man is disclosed and will only be fully appreciated as the most important events upon which civilizational calendar is oriented: the Incarnation of the anni domini (vs. B.C. of "before Christ"). 

  • Here, I want to explore the Mariological insights about American religious history and how Protestantism, defined as a kind of cohesive anti-Catholicism that is rooted in protest and secularized in the aftermath of the English Civil War and the Glorious Restoration, increasingly has a blurred understanding of Christ's personhood and, thus, the Gospel the further it "purifies" itself in the mold of John Winthrop.  This is why I explore here the application of heresiology to American history from the days of the Shakers to Joel Osteen's "Prosperity Gospel."

• By contrast, America seems to believe it is in the year 249 of the American Experiment but such arrogance betrays its deep civilizational debts to Christendom.  How has the legal fabric of our nation shown this dynamic tension between the particularity of the nation's history and the far older civilization within which it finds itself?  How can we correct this nationalist self-infatuation with genuine patriotism or love of our homeland that looks at our history for what it is and nothing more, nothing less?

• While such a prospect, as envisioned by the martyr of charity, St. Maximilian Kolbe (the patron saint of this blog), does seem remote.  "For all things are possible with God." (Mark 10:27).  To see posts on these sorts of topics, please refer to "Knight of the Immaculata", "Historical Theology of the Holy Mass", "Instructions in the School of Mary", "Historical Devotions to the Holy Dead", among others.

 

Thank you for your time, dear reader!  May the Lord bless and preserve you!