A few fireworks at a year's end

Welcome to 2025

This slapdash dispatch is a year old now. A bit more than that, actually, but not much. As I look back, I can’t help but feel very grateful to its readers. There exist many better curated, more frequently productive Subs out there, I know. My baseline has been at least one monthly entry. And I do intend to increase that number over this next year, especially during the second half of 2025. Nor have I accomplished all I laid out in my 2024 agenda. Still, you have kept with me for replies to critics, draft translations, postmortems on universalism debates, pleas for the end of the ongoing massacre of the Palestinians, reflections on faith, and ghosts (naturally). My thanks to you! It’s so heartening to know my meanderings might aid others in theirs.

Below I close 2024 with five evidently random observations that come to mind when I scan the year behind, followed by five aspirational aims for the year ahead. These observations and aims are admittedly cerebral. A few are firecrackers. I do plan to try being a good husband and father, and maybe even a decent professor and human being. But one must have priorities, you know.

OBSERVATIONS

1. A religious tradition’s critics and apologists often require the worst version of that tradition.

Like you, I’ve spent too much time online this past year. It’s a shame, no doubt. Now and then, though, if you squint for long periods until a migraine sets in, you glimpse some insight amid the silent-screen fracas. One I’ve noticed this year: two supposedly opposed demographics, the jaded post-Christians and the self-appointed (and often self-published) champions of orthodoxy, equally need the worst version of Christian tradition to be the truth of Christianity. The jaded need to justify the wholesale rejection of the faith that now defines their “new” identity and underwrites their new resignation never again to forge a new identity. The online knights need to prove their valor against those vile infiltrators who wield history, philosophical and theological consistency, and the supposedly illicit notion of “development of doctrine” (upon which, of course, they depend entirely). Unlike the pseudo-faithful, these champions embrace obedience to authority (except when the authority deviates; then the knight must, it seems, remind his king of his duties—which is obviously so different than those other people who question authority). In fact, they display their obedience by defending the most offensive aspects of the faith they’ve mastered—say, the various genocides commanded in parts of scripture (except, again, when they don’t: the current Pope’s doctrinal development around the death penalty, for instance, is no test of obedience; or rather here the test is exactly the opposite: one must oppose the authority to display one’s obedience, preferably in a well-crafted Twitter post). My guess is this is true of many traditions. Whether to justify one’s lack of faith or to prove one’s abundance of it, both need a faith frozen in time, bounded in self-evident propositions, and, above all, utterly and entirely dead. Both require a corpse and cannot under any circumstance admit a living Body. Do they ever notice that they’re beating a dead horse together, that they need each other to maintain the façade of a great battle in which they reveal themselves valiant?

2. There is a desperate and widespread longing for God’s actual goodness.

“God is light, and in him there is no darkness whatsoever” (1 Jn 1.5). I recall realizing years ago, particularly after reading James Alison’s stellar The Joy of Being Wrong, that this really is the gospel’s beating heart. But it’s also at the heart of very many hearts out there. So many people are positively desperate to hear some good news in this tragedy-ridden, trauma-laden, chaos-inducing life. I sense their longing in the face of my students when they read Gregory of Nyssa on Hell’s harrowing, or in the many messages that fill my various inboxes from Christians who long to believe in the final restoration, or in the watery eyes of those who ask if their past trauma or sin might really be unmade. There’s a truism afoot to the effect that mere moral laxity is the underlying pathology of our time. This is false. In my experience, at least, self-hatred runs far deeper, with much wider reach. It amazes me, really, the jarring dissonance of hearing the same person insist both that the Good, the True, and the Beautiful are self-justifying and so self-attracting while also assuring us that without the threat of perpetual torment “What’s the point of being a Christian?” – something Rod Dreher recently uttered aloud. I’m sure the days of the reactionary will persist yet longer. But his era is long dead, thank God. While so many lament the corrosion on those monuments of terror that once kept the wayward masses obsequious, divine providence is working to manifest the very heart of the gospel as its own sole motive. Only God’s own beauty, only God’s actual goodness and love, will yet draw all to God. Some hear the drums of civilizational war. I hear the sacred heart of Jesus Christ.

3. The youth crave synthesis.

Vestiges of the religion vs. science debates yet linger among my students, mostly in an unreflective and, to be honest, remarkably unanxious mode. When I challenge them on their unreflective materialism or on their uncritical equation of mind and brain, for example, they mostly don’t protest overmuch. When they read Augustine or Origen or Gregory of Nyssa not reading Genesis 1–3 as a straightforward account of primeval history that, were it to be shown inaccurate in that sense (as it has been), would in no way undermine its divine inspiration—they generally welcome the realization that there therefore exists no necessary rivalry between faith and reason, metaphysics and history, inspiration and criticism, theology and everything else. True, they’re also not very eager to make definite claims. But the very idea of an overall synthesis, even if we’re nowhere near it, isn’t immediately anathema to them. It seems to them plausible, even. They don’t fear that such a synthesis automatically issues in intellectual colonization (a mere “totality”). Nor do they regard it as the mere wish-fulfillment of a deluded humanity. When presented as an ongoing synthesis, and indeed as the very dynamics and demands of the human spirit itself, they tend to ease their defenses and permit themselves to wonder properly, even if for a moment’s span. If you shoot for the stars and never lie about what you do or don’t know, in my experience thus far, the younger generations respect and even desire the adventure (most of them do, anyway).

4. Theological work ahead must be historical and humanist as much as anything else.

By “historical” I mean attentive to the actual history—the whole, messy, complicated life—of the Body and its thought (theology), not just to the bare idea of such a history. As Rahner knew—that much maligned but little approximated giant of twentieth-century Catholic theology—such an approach appeals to the very dynamics of the human spirit (as both finite in circumstance and infinite in desire/intention) and to the necessary import of Christology itself. It’s not just a philosophical account of “tradition,” in other words, or even a good knowledge of philosophical hermeneutics that leads to this conviction (though both are necessary). It is rather that the rise of historical consciousness in the modern era is itself a subtle if unintentional affirmation of the Incarnate Word. There is no real Logos who is not embodied and historical. Those who decry “modernism” for fear of “relativism” or the like are themselves relativists when it comes to the universal import of God’s Incarnation for our ongoing apprehension and appropriation of the Truth himself. So much internet clatter these days leaps over all of this. Alas, even many clergy indulge this sort of relativism. But since it is inherently unsustainable and opposed to the Incarnation, it must needs vanish at long last. And, with due patience and painstaking work, it will.

5. Everyone is “woke.”

I wouldn’t typically comment on faddish phenomenon like this were it not for the fact that this word, “woke,” has invaded not only the social media feeds I should have long abandoned, but also the familiar pleasantries of holiday conversation. Originally used in the obvious sense of “having awakened” to otherwise invisible or overlooked yet ubiquitous and determinative realities, its derogatory sense now apparently means something like, “Overly concerned about this or that social injustice (regarding race, class, sexuality, etc.).” Certain acquaintances inform me that “wokeism” is generally pernicious and fanatical. It’s an ideology that claims we are all to a person subject to unseen or hard-to-discern structures and forces; that such forces warp our desires and beliefs and behavior even unbeknownst to us; and that such forces need to be unveiled by some sort of insight or revelation to be combatted. This ideology carves the world up into the good and the bad, the light and the dark, the awakened and the distracted. And that we are born into this dismal situation—who would ever indulge such a pessimistic and downright gloomy worldview? Well, who else indeed but practically the whole of Christian tradition(s)? Original sin? Ancestral sin? The ruler of this age? The darkness that doesn’t overcome yet incessantly attacks the light? The archons and rulers and principalities? The human will inveterately incurvatus se? Look, I know well there are serious debates to be had about the content of these claims, their concrete applications to the here and now. Hell, some of the first critiques I ever heard of wokeism came from Black Marxists from the American South (e.g. the Reeds). But when I hear certain people bemoan the formal features that bedeck this “ism,” I do balk a little. The Black Marxists critique wokeism, after all, exactly for being yet another permutation of the doctrinal matrix they learned in their private Catholic grade schools. And then too when some of the same people who excoriate the woke worldview earnestly warn in the next breath of the “deep state” or of the plausibility that, having denied human-affected climate change for decades, the government can now apparently drive an actual hurricane to a specific county as political retribution—at this point, I must say, I simply have to conclude that everyone, deep down, is a little woke in their own way, you know?

AIMS

1. Maximus’s letters: I tell you here and now that I will, I must, submit the final draft of the whole volume this coming June. Samples from this now years-long endeavor will appear here quite soon.

2. Schelling’s lectures: Still ongoing, still several leagues from our destination. But I hope to sample some of these too in the coming year.

3. Three book projects begin: As the translation projects subside, I have three book projects next in line. First, a colleague and I will begin in earnest on a book tentatively titled, A Catholic Universalism. It will make a comprehensive case for such a thing. All its chapters are planned. We will not cut corners, so we will work as long as it takes and vet as many presses as possible to ensure its quality through and through. Second, another coauthored book with a different colleague on challenges to Christian faith in the modern era. This book will be reworked lectures from a course we once taught. Third, a book on Maximus’s vision of the Christian life. These will combine material I’ve taught in various online courses as well as talks I’ll give at a Trappist monastery on related themes. In a sense, it will condense and simplify the vision I treated more “academically” in my first book and integrate this with practices familiar in Christian life.

4. Response to DBH: I’ve planned a conciliatory yet critical response to David’s critique of my Christology in his Stanton Lectures. The essay’s title is (for now): “Indifference, Indistinction? A Response to David Hart’s Christology.”

5. Podcast(s). This past Fall, Charles Hughes-Huff and I resumed our podcast, History & Dogma. There’s more in the queue. I also heard a tantalizing rumor that another podcast I once participated in might well see a reboot this year. On verra!

*If you’ve suggestions for things or themes you’d like to see on here in the coming year, you’re very welcome to drop them in the comments below. Anyhow, welcome to 2025!