Theotokos, A Pandemic Observed, and Ideology as Stupidity

Apolytikion of Dormition of the Theotokos - First Tone: In birth, you preserved your virginity; in death, you did not abandon the world, O Theotokos. As mother of life, you departed to the source of life, delivering our souls from death by your intercessions.

Kontakion of Dormition of the Theotokos - Second Tone: Neither the grave nor death could contain the Theotokos, the unshakable hope, ever vigilant in intercession and protection. As Mother of life, He who dwelt in the ever-virginal womb transposed her to life.

This sermon demonstrates that the Holy Virgin Mary is the “Theotokos,” and that the one born from her is neither “solely god” nor “merely man,” but “Emmanuel,” who is both God and man without confusion or alteration.

to ignore the Mother means to misinterpret the Son. On the other hand, the person of the Blessed Virgin can be properly understood and rightly described only in a Christological setting and context. Mariology is to be but a chapter in the treatise on the Incarnation, never to be extended into an independent “treatise.” Not, of course, an optional or occasional chapter, not an appendix. It belongs to the very body of doctrine. The Mystery of the Incarnation includes the Mother of the Incarnate (“The Ever-Virgin Mother of God” in Creation and Redemption, Collected Works Vol. 3, p. 173).

Be not so proud, you rich man;

you too will die someday.

Give up the evil class struggle,

for God’s Son was also not rich on earth.

Ah, how painful our days often are

during our short street-car rides

on which we travel unequal distances

until the day when the train de-rails.

Humility is one of the most beautiful virtues that a person can possess, though contemporary thought sees humility as a form of cowardice. In living this beautiful virtue of humility, Christians surely should not be cowardly, for Christ Himself said: “I am gentle and humble of heart” (Mt. 11:29). Christ was surely not a coward but the greatest of heroes. So. Christians have no reason to be ashamed of themselves when they live this virtue properly.

Three of my children and myself were first exposed to a known COVID-19 case on the five-year anniversary of my husband’s death but did not hear about the exposure for over a week. I looked to my six children and wondered if any or all of them would be the next to lie with their Daddy and brother, or if I would be the one to leave them totally orphaned. Now that the oldest was seventeen and the youngest seven we had finally settled into some kind of regularity, though I still struggled daily with a deep darkness.

As I watched the pandemic and lockdown play out, observing it from a place of intimacy with death and mourning. Very often I wondered if that was the case for our leaders and decision makers. It appeared to me death was being approached officially as an anomaly instead of a certainty, and disease we being treated like a strange exception instead of the rule. We ticked off each COVID-19 death one by one through mass media in a way never done with any other cause of death before.

Of course, this seemed justified at the time because, in a pandemic, each death is another piece of the puzzle, which is helping us to understand the disease, and, to be fair, in the early days we had no idea what it might do. But I began to worry about our nation’s response to the disease about the time our own self-imposed family quarantine was over. The lockdowns were in full swing and no exit strategies were even allowed to be spoken of without the accusation that anyone considering reopening to a more normal sort of life simply did not care about humanity.

It seemed that so many were willing to make a bargain with whoever might be offering that they would do anything to save others from sickness and death. While this was certainly generous and completely understandable (and I am sure I too would have been tempted by it before I had lost my husband and child), it caused me alarm now that I was already in mourning. I could see that these well-meaning, deeply loving people simply could not imagine life without their dear ones and so they were ready to make any sacrifices that were asked of them to keep death at bay.

The pandemic has demanded that we siphon all our lives through the internet. The corporal works of mercy seem to have been made incorporeal, better to be filtered through big tech. Someone is making a lot of money when we funnel all our relationships, commerce, education, recreation and even worship through a third party. This new disembodied way of living is an effort to be “safe,” but it seems Christ’s example suggests we must become more embodied, not less. We already know that however safe living on the internet might make us from some kinds of physical threats, the new cancel culture and persistent internet aggression has opened up whole new ways to devastate and be devastated.

In avoiding the pain of my own life, I find the lure of being dis-incarnated very seductive. The internet—that glittering indulgence of the eyes—is an infinite stream of the finite, wherein you can pretend to lose your loss, and your body with its limitations. There, I can temporarily avoid some of the pain of my present life.

But, God Himself, pure spirit, became a real man with a real body. It is a continuing argument I have with Him that He took the bodies of my dear love and child from me at the same time that He insists on the Incarnation of Himself. My argument with God goes something like this: You say it is so important to be incarnated, to become a human with a body and yet you expect me to be satisfied with this husband and son of mine whose living bodies are gone from me? You expect me to commune with them as far away spirits while you lived as a man. Which is it, God? Is it good to be incarnated or not? To which I wonder if God’s response to my objections might be something like: your dissatisfaction, my dear, is exactly My point. This is not the end. We await the Resurrection of the body.

St. Paul says that Christ died and rose again to set us free from our fear of death which is a kind of slavery that has held us in bondage from the beginning (Hebrews 2:15). How do we understand the lives of the martyrs in a pandemic? “They endured mocking and flogging, chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, sawn in two, put to death by sword. They went around…destitute, oppressed and mistreated,” says St Paul. But he concludes, “The world was not worthy of them” (Hebrews 11:37).

Pandemic was actually very common throughout history and, through those times, the saints went right on fulfilling Christ’s commands to feed and clothe, care for, and love others. It’s very possible some disease was actually spread through the charitable acts of the saints, if it was God’s will. It’s not that those saints were too uneducated to know that this could happen, it’s that they made a conscious choice to care for others in a physical way in spite of the risks to themselves and even the risks to those they cared for. Why did they do this? Because the people around them who asked for their embodied love needed that embodied love more than they needed long lives free of suffering.

Even though humans make choices that are real, no sickness or death happens without God’s permission or involvement. Or at least Christians used to believe this. Forcible, physical segregation and perpetual isolation is usually used as punishment. Are we so sure that the negative outcomes of these safety measures won’t outweigh the positive?

• “The Pandemic and Practical Wisdom” by Andrew M. Yuengert 

• “Common Objects of Trust” by Peter J. Leithart 

Ocasio-Cortez, naturally, complained about a culture “of a lack of impunity” [sic], portraying herself as a victim of violence, as other women are. “Patriarchy” came in for automatic blame. The congresswoman seems unaware that every one of the 1,500 cultures we know of has been patriarchal, and that the most violent areas of America are those from which the married father has disappeared.

I was raised never to raise a hand against a woman, and never to aim obscenities her way. That was the protective arm of Christian patriarchy at work. No such consideration need be given to men. As a matter of fact, with the obvious exception of rape, men are far more likely to be the victims of violent crime in America than are women: to be beaten, mugged, knifed, shot, and so forth. Even criminal men generally target other men for their violence, not women.

What staggers me is how an editor, even an editor of the National Catholic Reporter, could say something so silly. I think I have the answer. It comes to me by way of Mikhail Sholokhov’s novel, And Quiet Flows the Don (1928-1940): Political ideology makes man stupid. Political ideology is an index card onto which you aim to sum up the whole experience of mankind. Political ideology is to wisdom as a paint-by-numbers portrait of Stalin (or Mussolini, or Mao, or any ideologue) is to the Mona Lisa.

So, this fall, virtual class discussions will have many potential spectators—parents, siblings, etc.—in the same room. We’ll never be quite sure who is overhearing the discourse. What does this do for our equity/inclusion work? How much have students depended on the (somewhat) secure barriers of our physical classrooms to encourage vulnerability? How many of us have installed some version of “what happens here stays here” to help this? While conversations about race are in my wheelhouse, and remain a concern in this no-walls environment—I am most intrigued by the damage that “helicopter/snowplow” parents can do in honest conversations about gender/sexuality. And while “conservative” parents are my chief concern—I know that the damage can come from the left too. If we are engaged in the messy work of destabilizing a kids racism or homophobia or transphobia—how much do we want their classmates’ parents piling on?

The cornfields of Iowa aren’t my idea of paradise either, but America would be a much better place for all of us if those farm families were still the American mainstream. In Weimar America, those prairie Calvinists are the freaks, and Cardi B. is the mainstream. God help us.

I don’t really understand what Péguy is getting at here. If it’s a mysticism ultimately grounded in sacrificial love, how do you discern the good kind of mysticism from the bad kind? After all, to the Nazis, Horst Wessel was a martyr. The totalitarian Left has its martyrs too, those who gave it all up for the Sacred Cause. I suppose I’ll need to buy the book if I want to know—or maybe we have Péguy readers in this blog’s audience, and they can enlighten me.

Let’s stipulate that nobody Joe Biden could have picked for his running mate would have pleased conservatives in any way. Of all the people he could have picked, I think Kamala Harris is the most dangerous, from a social conservative point of view. I’ll get to that in a second. But first, let me explain why I think she was probably the best pick for Biden.

The 2024 Harris/Hawley race is going to be lit. 

Many of us who went to college in the Before Time treasure our classroom experiences with professors who challenged us and helped us to grow intellectually and morally. I pity the professors who now have to regard each student as a potential threat to their livelihood. I pity the students who really do want to be challenged, and to learn, but whose opportunity to learn has been crippled by the woke heckler’s veto that these puritanical woke rats exercise on many campuses.

“We want to really be careful for those students who will be most harmed in the room,” said Leoung. “I think we think about the equality of the voices—like everyone being heard, versus the equity in the room, who’s really being heard.”

The equality-equity question. In wokespeak, “equality” is giving everyone an equal chance; “equity” is doing the things necessary to make sure there has been an equal outcome. I’m not sure what that means in terms of managing a classroom discussion. Choosing those from officially non-privileged demographics to speak first?

I guess it’s not possible for Baylor to develop an authentically Christian approach to cultural humility, and instead to rely on importing categories from culturally Marxist Critical Race Theory into the university, and dressing them up in terms that won’t frighten people. 

Baylor is failing as a Christian university, although it is doing an excellent job of imitating their secular counterparts (and most of what I found in the Baylor lesson plans is borrowed from critical theory type professors at secular universities). Overall, these kinds of examples increasingly convince me that Baylor is becoming a “sound and fury” Christian university. There is plenty of administrative rhetoric about the Christian mission but with administrative initiatives at the faculty and staff level it seems to mean nothing.

Now you’ll have to report any possible violation to the bias cops to save your own skin. It’s like living in East Germany. Who on earth would want to go to college in such a place? Think about having to prove that even though someone saw you near the scene of a “bias incident,” that you didn’t hear it—this, to keep you from being punished.

Would you want to risk that on your record, for the sake of a Syracuse diploma? Could the Syracuse administration possibly make studying there more fraught with anxiety and neurosis?

a world of snitches, informants, rats. Go to any space concerned with social justice and what will you find? Endless surveillance. Everybody is to be judged. Everyone is under suspicion. Everything you say is to be scoured, picked over, analyzed for any possible offense. Everyone’s a detective in the Division of Problematics, and they walk the beat 24/7. You search and search for someone Bad doing Bad Things, finding ways to indict writers and artists and ordinary people for something, anything. That movie that got popular? Give me a few hours and 800 words. I’ll get you your indictments. That’s what liberalism is, now—the search for baddies doing bad things, like little offense archaeologists, digging deeper and deeper to find out who’s Good and who’s Bad. I wonder why people run away from establishment progressivism in droves.

Here’s why we have to pay close attention to colleges: What happens on campus will eventually reach through all of society, or at least to institutions (e.g., corporations) whose ethos is determined by college graduates [Dreher's emphasis]. You will sooner or later come to the realization that your fate can be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse theories of power and identity.