Prayer, Resignations, & a God-Excluding Culture

The Holy Spirit comes when we are receptive. He does not compel. He approaches so meekly that we may not even notice. If we would know the Holy Spirit we need to examine ourselves in the light of the Gospel teaching, to detect any other presence which may prevent the Holy Spirit from entering into our souls. We must not wait for God to force Himself on us without our consent. God respects and does not constrain man. It is amazing how God humbles Himself before us. He loves us with a tender love, not haughtily, not with condescension. And when we open our hearts to Him we are overwhelmed by the conviction that He is indeed our Father. The soul then worships in love.

St Gregory of Sinai goes so far as to say that prayer is God Himself acting in us. “Do Thou Thyself pray in me,” was the constant appeal of Philaret, Metropolitan of Moscow in the last century. We also have the witness of St Paul: “And because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father” (Gal. 4:6).

Fired by the vision of our high calling, we strain to accomplish our purpose—our yearning for Divine Love to dwell in us forever. Without this preliminary rapture of faith, without this fervent reaching towards the loving God Who continually inspires us, we cannot help falling beneath the massive pressure of the contemporary world which does not know prayer.

we are precipitated into a world of realities whose existence we did not suspect before. In the old days when life for the majority flowed in the broad channels of established tradition, the word of Christ was so presented as not to disturb. But now, with the whole earth full fraught with man’s despair, with the protest of consciences outraged, with violence threatening to wipe out all life, we must make our voices heard. In our present peril decorous words which commit us to nothing are not enough. All of us today are in vital need of a firm faith in Christ’s eternal victory, that we, too, may become spiritually invincible. A very great deal depends on ourselves—to remember, for instance, that at the baptismal font we received new birth from on High, in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Those who are baptized “with the Holy Ghost and with fire” (Lk. 3:16) perceive in their prayer that every given moment of our life is enveloped in Divine eternity. At all times and in all places we are held in the invisible Hand of our Heavenly Father.

At some point in time the objection of the demons in our Gospel reading today was raised in our culture: “What have we to do with you, O Son of God?”

Not only influential Jews, who naturally did not believe in Him, but progressive sons of Protestant Christianity—like John Dewey for example—raised the same question: “What have we to do with you, O Son of God?” We will form a culture that excludes you. 

We see the fruits of their success in the schools and on the streets of our country today. Christ having been excluded, many young people today have turned once again to Marxism as their great moral cause and potential savior of our society.

“What have we to do with you, O Son of God?” We don’t need God. We have Marx. His way will bring us social justice. 

You might not care what the Times thinks about anything, but what is published in its pages, and what is not allowed to be published, matters in a way that is hard to overstate. The main direction of any society is set by its elites. The overwhelming majority of Americans will never read a word in the Times. But those who do read it, and take their cues from it, are the people who run this country.

I hope history proves that Bari Weiss’s declaration of independence was the day that the ideological hegemony of the illiberal American media suffered a fatal blow. Watch whatever she does next. Bari Weiss will never win the Pulitzer Prize, but a single one of her is worth a thousand of those raging propagandists who are driving a once-great newspaper, and a profession, into the ground.

What has happened, I think, is relatively simple: A critical mass of the staff and management at New York Magazine and Vox Media no longer want to associate with me, and, in a time of ever tightening budgets, I’m a luxury item they don’t want to afford. And that’s entirely their prerogative. They seem to believe, and this is increasingly the orthodoxy in mainstream media, that any writer not actively committed to critical theory in questions of race, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity is actively, physically harming co-workers merely by existing in the same virtual space. Actually attacking, and even mocking, critical theory’s ideas and methods, as I have done continually in this space, is therefore out of sync with the values of Vox Media. That, to the best of my understanding, is why I’m out of here.

I have passionately opposed Donald J. Trump and pioneered marriage equality, that I support legalized drugs, criminal-justice reform, more redistribution of wealth, aggressive action against climate change, police reform, a realist foreign policy, and laws to protect transgender people from discrimination. I was one of the first journalists in established media to come out. I was a major and early supporter of Barack Obama. I intend to vote for Biden in November.

Since I closed down the Dish, my bloggy website, five years ago, after 15 years of daily blogging, I have not missed the insane work hours that all but broke my health. But here’s what I do truly and deeply miss: writing freely without being in a defensive crouch; airing tough, smart dissent and engaging with readers in a substantive way that avoids Twitter madness; a truly free intellectual space where anything, yes anything, can be debated without personal abuse or questioning of motives; and where readers can force me to change my mind (or not) by sheer logic or personal testimony.

I miss a readership that truly was eclectic—left, liberal, centrist, right, reactionary—and that loved to be challenged by me and by each other. I miss just the sheer fun that used to be a part of being a hack before all these dreadfully earnest, humor-free puritans took over the press: jokes, window views, silly videos, contests, puns, rickrolls, and so on. The most popular feature we ever ran was completely apolitical—The View From Your Window contest. It was as simple and humanizing as the current web is so fraught and dehumanizing. And in this era of COVID-19 isolation and despair, the need for a humane, tolerant, yet provocative and interesting, community is more urgent than ever.

So, yeah, after being prodded for years by Dishheads, I’m going to bring back the Dish.

Quiet friend who has come so far,

feel how your breathing makes more space around you.

Let this darkness be a bell tower

and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength. 

Move back and forth into the change….

O Lord Eternal and Creator of all things, 

Who of Thine inscrutable goodness didst call me to this life;

Who didst bestow on me the grace of Baptism and the Seal of the Holy Spirit;

Who hast imbued me with the desire to seek Thee, the one true God: hear my prayer.

I have no life, no light, no joy or wisdom; no strength except in Thee, O God.

Because of my unrighteousness I dare not raise my eyes to Thee.

But Thou didst say to Thy disciples, “Whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer believing, ye shall receive” and “Whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do.”  

Wherefore I dare to invoke Thee. Purify me from all taint of flesh and spirit.

Teach me to pray aright.  

Bless this day which Thou dost give unto me, Thine unworthy servant.

By the power of Thy blessing enable me at all times to speak and act to Thy glory with a pure spirit, with humility, patience, love, gentleness, peace, courage and wisdom: aware always of Thy presence.

The league’s new policy suggests a newfound commitment to enhanced employee expression. But that free expression appears to stop at the edge of your corporate sponsors’ sensibilities. And for woke capital today, profits from the Chinese market are more popular than patriotism.

1. Is the NBA prepared to allow its players to wear phrases in support of the United States, the American military, and U.S. law enforcement personnel, such as “God Bless America,” “Support Our Troops,” or “Back the Blue”? Will it censor players wearing such messages on their jerseys?

2. Are public reports correct that the list of phrases approved for display on NBA players’ jerseys does not include messages in support of victims of the Chinese Communist Party?

If you think it’s merely a matter of being more sensitive to the way race is spoken of in classrooms, oh my sweet summer child, do I have news for you. This is totalitarian madness. I’m not exaggerating: “antiracist pedagogy” is about turning the entire process of education into a paralyzing, endless process of analyzing racial and power relations, and inculcating this kind of radical racial suspicion within students.

Your fate, reader, and the fate of your children, is being determined right now by intricate and abstruse works of social criticism and theory. You cannot afford to be indifferent to what is happening

Whether you read [Live Not By Lies] or not, please, please wake up to the ideological takeover of our institutions, and by the way the seemingly innocent term “antiracist” carries with it a malignancy that will poison anything it touches. Everybody should want to be against racism—but that’s not what this is! This is about colonizing and transforming academia with ideology.

We are either going to have real universities, or we are going to have ideology factories. The time of choosing is now.

claims of systemic racism in particular institutions are now accepted and repeated as fact, and that it is practically impossible to criticize or reject those claims in any way. “Systemic racism” is as fundamental to the construal of reality in the fast-emerging social order as “class conflict” was in Marxist social orders. It is the uncontestable axiom on which the entire ideological structure is built. Deny that, and you’re part of the racist system.

It would actually be useful to learn ways in which racism is built into systems and structures, so we could work to dismantle and overcome them. But that is not what this is about. If you can’t prove that particular claims of systemic racism are wrong, you have no reliable way of proving that they are correct either. Again, though, what is true and what is false is a sideshow. The real deal is about power. And once more, this is how we think in America today:

(1) I am my desires

(2) Justice is the fulfilling of my desires, injustice is the impeding of my desires

(3) You are either the ally or the enemy of my desires

(4) If you are the ally, I will tolerate you; if you are the enemy, I will seek to destroy you.