When Is It Time To Schism?

And: A Cheerful Dutch Calvinist Warrior; How To Find Allies; A Shropshire Monk?

View of interior of dome at Church of St. Galgano

Here’s an account by a conservative Methodist power about how progressive United Methodists brought the denomination together by driving the conservatives out. I don’t know enough about the details of what happened to the United Methodists to be able to judge the accuracy of this account, but the story the pastor tells is right in line with how progressives in power behave in all churches. It’s such a familiar story by now that whenever there is even the slightest manifestation of progressive nonsense in the Orthodox churches, usually masking itself as a sincere desire for “dialogue,” or somesuch phony twaddle, I want to yell from the rooftops

In my Louisiana hometown, the local Methodist congregation divorced over this. A slight majority voted to disaffiliate from the progressive United Methodist body, but it wasn’t the two-thirds majority needed under the rules, so that congregation remained United Methodist. But many of the members who had voted to leave the denomination also left and started a new Methodist congregation, unaffiliated with the UMC. One of those who departed is my cousin, who tells me that the congregation of the established congregation is dwindling, while the new, orthodox one is fast-growing. They’re meeting now in a hotel space, but they’ve got land, and will build a new church building.

As you know, I left Methodism many years ago, but I’m still sorry to see this split in the church in which I grew up (the local congregation, I mean). Nevertheless, as someone who has gone through a literal divorce, I agree that as heartbreaking as it can be, there are times when there is nothing of substance left in a marriage, and both parties should go their separate ways.

About the St. Francisville Methodist situation, I only know hearsay, and don’t want to speculate much, because I have friends and family on both sides. My understanding is that the Remainers (those who voted to stay with the national denomination) included people who were genuinely more liberal in their theology (read: pro-LGBT), others who may have had mixed feelings about LGBT but who didn’t want to appear unwelcoming, and those whose conservatism was not moral or theological, but more along the lines of Don’t Rock The Boat.

Normalizing homosexuality is a very, very big deal, no matter which side you are on. Some progressives have a habit of accusing conservatives of making too big a deal of it. But this is hypocritical. If it weren’t a big deal, then progressives wouldn’t wreck whole denominations over it. To be fair, if I believed about homosexuality and the human person what progressives believe, I would probably be doing exactly what they’re doing, as a matter of justice. I would hope, though, that I would have the humility to recognize that what I was asking of my fellow churchmen was to accept and affirm a massive theological and historical change within Christianity, one that overturns the clear and unambiguous testimony of Scripture and Tradition. But they don’t. Those people typically act like it’s no big deal, except to the bigots who resist Progress.

Again, though: if I really believed that homosexuality (and transgenderism) had the moral quality of race (which is to say, was morally neutral), and I also believed that people in any given era have the right to interpret the Bible in ways that they feel better suit the needs of the church in this time and place, then yeah, I would accept the progressive side. I say this to underscore that I don’t think progressives are always villains on this issue. I think some of them, and maybe most of them, are sincere. But I also think they either don’t understand, or refuse to understand, the violence they do to normative Christianity, for the sake of achieving their goal.

After all, if it is permitted to interpret Scripture and Tradition to conform to what a particular community, in a particular time and a particular place, wants, then on what grounds do you stand against the racist Southern Methodists of ages past, who truly convinced themselves that the Bible teaches segregation, and all of it? Granted, all readings of the Bible are inescapably interpretive, and there is no such thing as a fully objective judge who can authoritatively interpret Scripture and Tradition without the possibility of error, and whose judgments everyone can accept as valid.

Catholicism and Orthodoxy have their own internal methods for determining theological truth and falsehood. I don’t know how it works within various Protestant denominations, though. The point is, all ecclesial bodies have to have within them an agreed-upon method of authoritatively determining moral and theological truth. Simply as a sociological claim, if a church body cannot agree on an authoritative means of resolving these questions, what holds it together, except some combination of sentiment and historical inertia?

Standing outside the Methodist drama — a drama that is also being played out in many other churches (Catholic ones too, and soon we Orthodox will face this) — one sees how the final end game for Christianity in modernity is dissolution. Hear me out.

What it means to be modern is to be free of the weight of the past, and of any unchosen obligations. It is to be liberated as a choosing individual. As Patrick Deneen argues in his great book Why Liberalism Failed, it failed because it succeeded! That is, liberalism (meaning classical liberalism, in both its left-wing and right-wing manifestations) has been everywhere triumphant … but it turns out that you cannot run a society based on the idea that everyone starts with a blank slate, and is free to pick and choose whatever “truths” they want.

All societies have to have a broadly shared concept of How The World Works. It is not enough to rely on the procedural framework of a liberal republic. There has to be a fundamental unchosen basis on which to base a society of choice. That is, there has to be a way to order liberty.

Until the last few decades, the United States was a Christian society. This does not mean it was a country filled with saints. It meant that the Narrative by which Americans understood How The World Works was that provided by the Bible and the traditions emerging from biblical religion. I think of my friend and this newsletter’s reader Giuseppe Scalas, who told me once how fondly he recalls a Marxist professor from his university days. Giuseppe told me that the Marxist celebrated Christmas and all the things, not because he believed in it, but because he loved being Italian, and this is what Italians do. I get that! I don’t find anything hypocritical about that.

Nevertheless, when hard decisions have to be made about how we are to live together, they have to be made by legitimate authorities exercising legitimate authority. A court (say) that issues a ruling that most people regard as illegitimate can only see its order carried out as a manifestation of raw power. Power is not the same thing as authority. Similarly, a court that is itself regarded as an illegitimate body might reach the “correct” rulings, but they have no force (except as an exercise in tyranny) if most people do not accept that court as legitimate.

There are times in the life of a nation, of a church, and of any collective, where the differences in authority become irreconcilable. In a nation, you have civil war, e.g., Americans in 1860 were no longer able to agree to live and let live on the question of slavery. In a church, you have schism. Neither of these fates should be desired, or accepted except as a last resort. But unless you have made an idol of the Nation, or the Church — that is, unless your ultimate end in life, the final authority, is the Country and its institutions, or the Church — then civil war (or a peaceful divorce, as the Czech Republic and Slovakia did after Communism ended) or schism has to be a possibility. A fate to be avoided if at all possible, but something that must be a last resort if Living In Truth is the most important thing.

It was time for the United Methodists to schism. There was no chance that the orthodox Methodists were going to prevail.

I see why schism is such a difficult and painful thing for Catholics and Orthodox, who profess a theology that sees the church not so much as an institution but as an organic entity (the Body of Christ). I thought that church as the Body of Christ was only a metaphor, until I became a Catholic, and entered into the more historically traditional, sacramental way of thinking about church (a way that is also normative in Orthodoxy). Then I began to understand why schism is viewed with horror.

But I still don’t understand why some Protestants are so resistant to schism. Yes, there are the normal things — for example, I can easily imagine that some friendships in the Methodist church in my hometown were damaged by the break-up — but as a concept, Protestantism was born in schism over principle. It’s in the blood.

To be fair to Protestants, as an enthusiastic young Catholic convert, I used to join in the sneering at the fissiparous Protestants, who were adrift without our superior ecclesiology, which includes the Magisterium (teaching authority) of the Church. But you don’t have to be around long to see that this is a coping mechanism. Within Catholicism — at least in the Western countries — there is all manner of dissent, even radical dissent, even among clergy. Unity under authority is an illusion.

Back in 2014, I think it was, I was at a private conference of conservative intellectual Christians, most of whom were Catholics. It was fascinating to listen to the oldest Catholics in the room, all of whom were formed as young Catholic scholars in a period of church life when yes, there were liberals and there were conservatives, but there was general agreement on the validity of Church authority, and the bounds of both liberal and conservative thought were understood and implicitly accepted. The Second Vatican Council blew that all to smithereens.

During one of the breaks, I heard a couple of the younger Catholic scholars in the room — teachers at Catholic universities — observe that the older folks had no real understanding of how totally ignorant of Catholic theology and tradition students today are. They really do show up at college convinced that they are fully and authentically Catholic not because of anything they believe, but because they were baptized and brought up Catholic. Whatever they, as freely choosing individuals, chose to believe was Catholic (“Catholic”) by virtue of the fact that as Catholics, they approved of it. And they had no understanding of why this was problematic.

How can any church — Catholic, Orthodox, whatever — hold together with people in it who have no shared belief, and (more to the point) no shared agreement on authority? If you had walked into the St. Francisville Methodist church in 1973, and risen to speak after the sermon, telling them that you were an emissary from the future, and in fifty years, this congregation will break apart over the question of gay marriage and normalizing homosexuality — well, people would have called Sheriff Percy to come haul the lunatic to the asylum over in Jackson. It would have been completely incomprehensible, because the boundaries of the moral imagination of individual Methodists in that congregation could not have encompassed such an idea. Whatever their own thoughts about homosexuality, the Bible was very clear on the subject, so obviously — obviously — the so-called time traveler was a lunatic.

And yet, it happened exactly like that.

I bring it all up simply to say that we are all living in a far more precarious situation than we might think — and not just in church life. Where does authority lie? Most Americans, I’d say, would agree that the US Constitution is our most important authoritative text in national life, and that the Supreme Court is what it says it is: the final interpretive tribunal of what the document means. However, can the Constitution and all that follows from it survive the loss of a shared religious/metaphysical framework?

I quote John Adams’s line all the time, the one about how the Constitution was made for “a moral and religious people,” and couldn’t work for any other. His point was that a liberal document like the US Constitution requires a set of pre-political beliefs — of a religious/metaphysical nature — shared in common. Beliefs that set the boundaries of the political community, and what is possible within it. It ought to be obvious that no church (of all things!) can survive its membership falling into radical individualism. Churches are all about Ultimate Truth, and at some point, there are things on which people within a church cannot simply agree to disagree. Homosexuality is one of those things — both from a progressive and conservative point of view. If the Bible and the Tradition were ambiguous about the matter, that would be one thing. But they aren’t, and besides, more deeply than Scripture’s explicit words about homosexuality, Rieff, that flinty secular Jew, was right to say that Christianity’s concept of sexuality and its relationship to what it means to be human is near to the core of the religion’s social teaching. Rieff said back in the 1960s that Christian pastors who didn’t grasp what the Sexual Revolution was and how profoundly it would affect their churches were whistling past the graveyard.

And so it has proven to be, and is everyday proving to be. There is a temptation among us conservative Christians to shake our heads and even to laugh at the folly of progressive Christians, who think they are at the Vanguard of History, yet who see, everywhere they are triumphant, their victories turn to dust, as not too many people want to get out of bed on Sunday morning to attend a progressive church. Show me a church (denomination) that has liberalized on sexual issues at any time over the past fifty years, and has done anything but decline at a faster rate than conservatives. It is an interesting psychological question as to why the leadership class within churches believes that the future of their church requires liberalizing … even though the evidence that liberalization doesn’t stop decline, but if anything increases it, is overwhelming. I believe it was Schumpeter who said that every institution, over time, will be led by people who mistake what’s good for them personally with what’s good for the institution.

My sense is that churches that liberalize on homosexuality decline because the kind of people who have personally liberalized their views on homosexuality are those who hold a highly individualistic view of how to live in truth. The main fault line between liberal and conservative Christians is how you answer this question: Does church teaching need to evolve to serve the felt needs and honor the experiences of the community — or do members of the community need to evolve to bring their beliefs and behavior in line with church teaching?

This is where I get the clunky term “small-o orthodox” to describe the de facto alliance of more traditional Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants. We may all disagree over specifics of Christian truth and how to live it out, but we all agree that living in truth requires sacrificing our individual liberty to some extent, to serve something higher. The thicker ties we have to tradition are implicit in the way we see Truth, and the proper relationship of a Christian to it.

In the end, it comes down to the role of sacrifice in the Christian life. A couple of years back, the Presbyterian theologian Carl Trueman gave a lecture in which he drew this distinctions sharply. He said that for moderns, to deny the Self is to destroy the Self, because the Self discovers itself through what it desires. This is false. In truth, said Trueman, “The Self is realized by discovering the structure of reality and conforming oneself to it.”

To refresh your memory, I wrote the following in this space a couple of years ago, in a discussion about Mircea Eliade’s great book The Sacred And The Profane:

This is the fundamental metaphysical point from which we religious people diverge from profane modernity. In my view, this is also the metaphysical point on which small-o orthodox Christianity breaks with its various contemporary forms. In general, for the orthodox (theological conservatives), religion is in part a means through which we discover the structure of reality and conform ourselves to it. For the modernists (theological liberals), religion is a means by which we make ourselves at home in this world. It’s not that the orthodox don’t want to make a home in this world, or that the modernists don’t want to live in reality. Rather, it’s that the orthodox believe that all of reality is undergirded, and founded, in a sacred order of which we are a part. We can’t make it up as we go along; we must instead be open to divine revelation, and organize our lives from what has been revealed from God, because it tells us what is really Real. The modernists, by contrast, more or less disbelieve that the material world has a telos (end purpose), and that things have a logos (rational purpose) intrinsic to themselves.

Whenever you hear a Christian defending heterodox sexual morality, say something like, “I find it hard to believe that the all-powerful and eternal God really cares what we do with our body parts” — you are dealing with a modernist, and not simply because such a claim violates Scriptural teaching. In this case, metaphysics are a guide to morals. We who believe in the God of the Bible know that sex has sacred meaning because all things are saturated with the sacred. If I’m reading Eliade correctly, then all traditional and archaic religions, whatever their particular teachings about sex, share that basic understanding. A pure materialist, by contrast, can rightly say that there is no ultimate meaning behind a sexual act, other than the meaning we assign to it.

Eliade, who was raised Orthodox, writes that the traditionally religious man doesn’t want to know about ultimate reality; he wants to participate in it. As the Anglican scholar Hans Boersma so beautifully explains in his book Heavenly Participation: The Weaving Of A Sacramental Tapestry, all Christians, up until the end of the Middle Ages, believed that ultimate reality was something one participates in via ritual, practices, and other sacramental ways. It is my view, and I think Boersma’s, that Christianity will not survive unless it returns to strong sacramentalism — that is, the belief that God is everywhere present, and is filling all things, and the rituals and practices that help us live within that reality by making it manifest to us.

See, this is why I believe, with Karl Rahner, that the Christianity of our time will be mystical, or it will cease to be at all. That is, it must be re-enchanted, meaning that we Christians have to learn to recognize the reality of the sacred, and desire to participate in it. Of course many non-Christian people also believe in the reality of the sacred. To be Christian is to believe that the Bible (and Tradition) tell us something true about the way the cosmos is constructed, and how we should live if we wish to participate rightly in it. See, this is why, when I see Orthodox Jews on the streets of Budapest, I do not share their religion or their dietary habits, but I greatly respect the fact that they sacrifice the way they consume food as a way to participate in Ultimate Reality. They understand that at the heart of authentic religious experience is the willingness to sacrifice. It is only through sacrifice — through giving up something precious to yourself for the sake of obeying God — that we learn how to be real, which is to say, with Carl Trueman, to discover the structure of reality, to conform to it, and (perhaps my Orthodox spin on it), participate in it.

Gosh, I did go on, didn’t I? It just seemed that I should (once again) elaborate on why these schisms are a very big deal, because they cut right to the heart of what it means to be a follower of Christ. If you are a progressive Christian, you probably aren’t reading this newsletter. But lots of conservative Christians do, and I would warn you, brothers and sisters, not to be satisfied with the apparent fact that the progressives who think of us as backwards bigots are evaporating into thin air. It could happen to us, and will happen to us, unless we endeavor to re-sacralize our lives in every way possible: through studying the Word, through faithful worship, through diligent prayer, and through sacrifice.

And through clear teaching of all these things to our communities, especially to our young! I cannot tell you how often, as a Catholic convert in my twenties and thirties, I would get into arguments with cradle Catholics who would insist that the Church doesn’t teach X, Y, or Z, because they had never heard of it. You can destroy the faith in someone by not teaching them truth as easily as you can by teaching them falsehood. I know why so many otherwise conservative pastors choose to soft-pedal or ignore these controversial things in their sermons and in parish life. But it’s slow poison.

How To Find Allies In The Coming Persecution

Here’s a fantastic Twitter thread from Lyman Stone, a demographer and faithful Lutheran. He’s a great follow on Twitter, @lymanstoneky . He writes:

Many Christians like me think the next 80 years will see a great diminishment in the degree of tolerance that secular people show for Christianity, and a resulting worsening in our relative conditions of life. This leads to adoption of different strategies for life.

For an example of what this great diminishment could look like, in my own community stuff like the Rasanen case in Finland looms extremely large. A pastor and parliamentarian brought up on criminal charges merely for quoting scripture!

Regardless, if you hold any version of this view that "Things will get worse for Christians who hold to historic orthodoxy," then you have a problem. You have to find a way to protect your family, and in particular to try to assure successful transmission of values across time.

This is basically the debate being had with books like The Benedict Option (or the new angry one, The Boniface Option). What is the best strategy for the coming deluge? We all see the wave coming; what do we do?

I've been chewing on this because somebody recently asked me why otherwise decent and upstanding people seem so tolerant of extremely bad stuff in their midst. And my answer was that there's actually a strategy of "appreciating things you hate."

Take the example of a very racist "dissident right" Christian conservative.

Why would otherwise decent people who know the racist stuff is opposed to scripture go along for the ride with a public figure making those arguments?

My answer is that they actually aren't just "tolerating" it, but they also aren't "endorsing" it. Rather, you have to think about the social function of taboo beliefs.

A person standing up and making statements that are very socially costly, esp. among secular people, may be perceived as sending an extremely strong signal that they will never compromise with the secular world.

By sending such a signal, they may be perceived as signaling that they are "credible allies" for people worried about the deluge. So the racist beliefs do not operate as either "a downside to tolerate" or "an upside to endorse" but merely "a signal of hostility to the world."

Basically, the theory goes like this:

1) A deluge is coming
2) To survive it you need allies
3) It's hard to know prospectively who will be good allies
4) Criteria #1 for good allies is they need to stick with their current views in the future
5) Signaling strong hatred of the world today may predict that

Or, 5b) Being so offensive that the wider world would never forgive you and let you back in the club is a credible signal you'll stick with your allies even if you don't personally believe it

Though that's a more cynical read

Now, I actually believe a version of this theory. But I think that racism is actually a very bad signal, since in actual historic practice ethnonationalism is as often rivalrous with religious community as it is cooperative. If you want a religious community to endure...

... I think that regardless of the truth or falsity of racist beliefs (IMHO mostly falsity), racists are also capricious and unreliable allies. They will turn on you when your child marries a faithful nonwhite convert.

Moreover, I think the most useful "high cost rhetorical social signaling" is not actually racism, but is to signal directly on the underlying unobserved, that is, religious faith.

Example: I believe demons are real and have a role in shaping the social world.

That statement right there is more than enough to alienate a lot of people. "Fetuses are human lives and intentionally killing them is murder" also does a lot of work. "Human sexuality is highly socially malleable and sensitive to suggestion and life-course formation" works too.

That last one may seem to oblique but we can rephrase it as, "You were not born that way, your sexuality and gender identity can be modified or changed by the application of different social pressures, especially very early in life."

These statements have advantages over racist ones IMHO because 1) they are more closely tied to the actual faith stakes, 2) they are more true, 3) they do not preclude any within-faith alliances (whereas racist beliefs do)

However, at a higher level, I think the whole rhetorical signaling strategy is a bad one.

The truth is that speech signals really aren't that costly. Nobody is going to arrest me for those statements. I probably won't even get that many replies, even with 30k followers.

The absolute worst thing that will happen is I'll just have to make my account private for a day to eliminate notification spam.

It's extremely cheap signaling. And this is the issue with online spaces: some people are getting "costly signal" credit for cheap signal work.

So what are actual costly signals?

Behavioral things. Taking your kids out of public school. Being at church as often as possible. Assuming roles at church that require more of you. Encouraging the expansion of church activity into more facets of life. Selective investment in church friends over work friends. etc

Another costly signal is evangelism. Our society dislikes evangelism very much, it has costs, and moreover you only do it if community survival matters to you. There is little intrinsic reward and certainly no individual extrinsic reward for evangelistic activity.

Rather, evangelistic behavior has mostly externalized benefits. People who do it absorb considerable personal costs in order to generate group benefits by adding new network nodes and increasing total network value.

As such, one of the single most credible markers of somebody who might actually be a useful ally in the deluge, somebody who might actually sacrifice for you, is evangelistic behavior. It is hard to hide, entails individual costs, almost purely group returns. Costly signal.

So my view is people worried about the deluge should quite simply be sorting towards people who are forthrightly seeking to win converts, and that people worried about the deluge should send strong signals of their own commitment by also forthrightly seeking to win converts.

And here I'll mention, just in passing, that you should all be baptized in the Triune name of God, because there is no sure path to heaven apart from the grace you will receive therein. Repent of your sins and receive Christ!

What great advice. Here is where I remind you that Kamila Bendova and other Christians who stayed behind to resist Communism said much the same thing: that if you want to know who your true allies are, don’t assume they can be found in your church. Look to those who are willing to suffer for the truth. Who are willing to sacrifice for principle.

How do you know who those people are today, before the persecution really gets going? Well, Lyman Stone tells you. Look to those who are willing to put skin in the game, and cost themselves something for the stands they’ve taken. Caveat: just because you’re hated doesn’t mean you’re holy. Stone explains that.

Look around you: who are the Christians you know who are decent people, but who are more or less open about what they believe — even though it likely costs them among their social and professional milieu? Who are the Christians you know who believe the right things, but keep it carefully hidden, not out of prudence, but out of fear?

Which one are you?

Henk Jan van Schothorst, Cheerful Warrior

Henk Jan van Schothorst, with Paivi Rasanen

I’ll tell you who’s a great ally: the Dutch Reformed layman Henk Jan van Schothorst. I first met him a couple of years ago. I had this idea that the Netherlands, which I love, is, alas, a godless wasteland. And then I met Henk Jan (pron. “Hank Yon”), who is as admirable as he is likable. I honestly didn’t think many people like him existed in the Netherlands, but he showed me photos of full Reformed churches in Holland’s Bible Belt — the kind of people and places who never turn up in the media. Jonathon van Maren profiles him in The European Conservative. Excerpt:

After a half-hour audience with Henk Jan van Schothorst, President Chan Santokhi of Surinam was vexed. Abortion is illegal and opposition to the LGBT movement is strong in the small South American country. But the Surinamese ambassador to Brussels had recently signed a binding trade agreement with the European Union that included mandatory provisions on sexuality and “reproductive rights.”—without any public debate. Quietly inserting a radical social agenda into ostensibly economic negotiations is a key neo-colonial strategy of Western powers, and it is very effective.

Van Schothorst advised the president to withdraw the signature and send the treaty text to the Surinam parliamentary assembly, giving them six months to compare it with the country’s laws, and return the Surinam position to the EU. If the EU rejected it, Surinam could simply find other trade partners. “I thanked the president for his time and his attention,” he recounted. “‘No,’ he and his spiritual advisor said, ‘We must thank you. God has sent you. Would you please pray for us?’” The Dutch activist and the South American president bowed their heads together in prayer.

Surinam was the last stop on Van Schothorst’s whirlwind December tour of four South Caribbean countries. Henk Jan van Schothorst is the founder and executive director of Christian Council International (CCI), and his mission is to create “a transatlantic and international network of Christians and conservatives involved in public policy and influence policy from a Christian perspective,” working at the UN, EU, AU, and OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) “to stand up for a Christian voice worldwide with a focus on life, family, and freedom of religion and education.”

I can’t say enough good things about that stouthearted Dutch man of God. As difficult as it can be to stand up as a devout conservative/orthodox Christian in the US, it is far, far more difficult in the Netherlands. Yet Henk Jan does it, and does it cheerfully. After we met a couple of years ago, I had thought that I need to travel to these Reformed churches and meet these believers, who are taking a real and costly stand in their country. It slipped my mind. Must put that back on the agenda.

A Shropshire Monk?

I’ll leave y’all this weekend with an appeal by my pal Martin Shaw, who is trying to raise investors to buy a rural Shropshire hermitage and turn it into an Orthodox monastery and retreat center. Read his story here. It’s a farmhouse and buildings on twenty acres of country land. Martin writes:

My seeing would be this: the small monastery would become a Christian centre with an Orthodox core. We would run courses, enable vigils and retreats in the woods (there are several cells), have the joyful labour of stewarding of the land, maybe a wee bit of a small holding. We’d have volunteers coming through in the summer and winter seasons, and likely a rotation of permanent staff.

Groups would probably be smaller than I’ve worked with for some time, and I would bring in all sorts of friends to teach – many of whom you’d know already. Summer would have monthly courses and space to camp, winter would naturally be more contemplative, with likely longer retreats with relatively modest-sized groups. It’s wild up there: to process through the snow by candlelight to attend a midnight service in the chapel, well there’s no words really.

I have a feeling that there’s a great deal in the lives of the early saints that are talking to us right now – in a time of tremendous spiritual peril. This would be a place where we are not just thinking about their lives but actually get to walk in their footsteps a little. Holy Spirit goes where he wills, with not so much attention to which century he’s in. This would be no kind of re-enactment fair but a jump into the big and rare adventure bequeathed to us. I am very interested in the liturgical year and how we could creatively dwell within it.

Go to the site, see the photos, and read more about it. They need about $540,000, Martin figures, and they need it in the next few months. Can you help? Martin adds that maybe God has other plans, and he’s barking at the moon here. “But I can’t keep talking about Camelot then ignore it when it actually turns up.”

Again: read Martin’s appeal to find out more. And with that, I bid you a good weekend. Will check in with you on Monday from the Greek islands, where no doubt I will meet a faithfully Greek Orthodox, age-appropriate widow of a shipping magnate, who has been longing for a husband who can cook jambalaya and who knows how to second-line, and make a great mint julep. Hey, miracles happen!