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How to drive back doubt and dark
Rod Dreher Diary
September 09, 2024
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How To Drive Back Doubt And Darkness

Thoughts For Christians Who Are Struggling With Scandal And Defeat

Sep 8
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Me in Jerusalem, at the Holy Fire ceremony in 2022, one week after learning that my marriage was over. Why am I so joyful? Read on…

Another weekend post from me! I have some things I want to say that I don’t want to get lost in the more news-oriented posts I make during the week. Thanks for your indulgence.

I just returned from church, where I spent some time praying for friends and others who are scandalized by the failure of churches and Christian institutions. The big news in Hungary this weekend is that a 38-year-old Catholic priest who made a name for himself as a right-wing culture warrior, and who had even been invited to bless Prime Minister Orban’s office, was suspended by his bishop. Why? It is reported that he had multiple gay lovers, and even that gay porn videos featuring him performing are available online. This priest had even in the past denounced homosexuality and liberalism. If the charges are true, then it’s hard to imagine a more thorough hypocrite.

Naturally Orban’s political enemies are seizing on this to attack him, but it’s hard to see how the government should have known this about the priest, when his own bishop apparently did not. But that’s not the real issue. The real issue is that at a time when Christianity is fast-shrinking in Hungary, the churches are often their own enemy. The country’s president, a Calvinist, was forced to resign earlier this year because she pardoned a well-connected Calvinist imprisoned for aiding and abetting a pedophile. She pardoned him at the request of the country’s Reformed bishop, who also suffered disgrace from it. And now this big Catholic scandal.

From America magazine:

Hungary is a Catholic country with a strong Protestant presence, but in its latest census, published late last year, a majority of Hungarians, 57 percent, failed to declare an affiliation in any faith tradition: Forty percent did not answer the question about affiliation at all, and 17 percent declared “no religion” after being asked which church they belonged to. The census outcome marks the first time that religious identity has fallen below 50 percent in Hungary.

The Catholic Church in Hungary saw the steepest loss of membership, dropping 30 percent since the last census in 2011. Now 1.1 million fewer Hungarians identify as Catholics than 10 years ago. The contemporary decline reflects a long-term trend. Two decades ago, over half of Hungarians identified as Catholic; today only 28 percent do.

I passed on the gay porn priest news to a devoutly Catholic friend here yesterday. Her response: “Our church is a corpse.” She explained that she meant in Hungary, and in much of Europe.

I prayed for her this morning at liturgy, and for brothers and sisters in Christ like her. And I prayed for a close Orthodox friend who has ceased attending the liturgy out of anger at certain gross and undeniable failures of the Orthodox clergy in his life. When this guy told me that this summer, he found he couldn’t bring himself to go to liturgy anymore, I responded with the usual arguments about how the sins of the priests do not negate the truths proclaimed by the Church. And then I realized that these were exactly the same things that Catholics trying to keep me from leaving the Catholic Church said in my great crisis almost twenty years ago.

I realized in that moment that these logical arguments are as useless to my Orthodox friend in his suffering as they had been to me as a Catholic in crisis. This is a matter of the heart, not the head. The rage and the pain I suffered those many years ago from the corruption in the Catholic institution made it emotionally and psychologically impossible even to deal with those arguments.

Though the failures of the priests in my friend’s case are objectively speaking not nearly as serious as the sins of the Catholic hierarchy and clergy that drove me from Catholicism, that’s not how it feels to him. I know a lot about what he’s been through in recent years, and the idea of saying, “Cheer up! At least our priests aren’t molesting kids!” is insulting. My friend really was failed in a very, very painful way, and tells me that he simply can’t bear standing in church on Sunday with all this weighing on him.

So I pray, and listen, and help as much as he will let me. What else can I do, or any of us do? I did tell him that I came out of the crisis of faith that cost me my Catholicism with the conviction that I should never, ever put the institutional Church and its clergy on a pedestal. What that has meant in practice is that I have learned not to expect anything from the Orthodox clergy, or any clergy. I hate it. It should not be that way. But having been severely burned once by my trust, I can’t let that happen again. So when I hear of corruption in the Orthodox Church — in the news, or in the lives of individual believers — of course I hate it, but it does not shake my faith. I learned that the sins of the priests don’t negate the truths of the faith, just like my Catholic friends back in the day said.

What changed in me? Aside from having thrown down the idolization of the institutional church, that is? Simply this: I had to learn to be enchanted as a Christian. I wouldn’t have put it that way before this morning, but that is the secret to keeping the faith in a time of radical disillusionment with our religious institutions. (I bold printed it)

I don’t bring that angle into my forthcoming book Living In Wonder, because frankly, it hadn’t really occurred to me. But boy, did it make itself clear today in prayer.

I had been thinking this morning, as I stood in church praying, that the Benedict Option is looking better and better as a strategy for coping amid the collapse of church authority. That is, if we Christians, whatever our confession, are going to keep the faith through this long dark winter, we are going to have to take more responsibility in our personal lives, our family lives, and in our local church community. When church leaders fail, we have to disciple ourselves. For that matter, when they succeed, we still have to disciple ourselves, because the pressures from post-Christian, even anti-Christian, culture are immense. If you read The Benedict Option, you will see that it’s about building resilience where you are, not escaping; I say in the opening chapter that there is no escape anymore. We are simply going to have to get through this. We cannot wait to be rescued. We have to build the arks, and start rowing.

Standing in church this morning in prayer, I reflected on how much I had learned over the years of living as an Orthodox Christian, about enchantment. By “enchantment,” I mean becoming aware, not just as a matter of an idea in your head, but in your heart and in your bones, that God is, as we Orthodox pray, “everywhere present, and filling all things.” Here we are all standing around in this hot, humid church this morning in prayer, while all around us, angels have gathered — really and truly gathered. That awareness changes everything.

It’s not just an Orthodox thing. You longtime readers might recall my story about going to Catholic mass in Dallas when my son Lucas was a young toddler. He hadn’t yet learned how to talk. He was being squirmy, so I took him into the church foyer, separated from the nave by large panes of glass. I held Lucas while mass was going on. Suddenly, he sat bolt upright in my arms, pointed his right finger at a space to the side of the altar, and said, “Angel!” His finger tracked whatever he was seeing, and he kept saying, “Angel! Angel!” Then he put his head back on my shoulder, and tried to sleep.

I believe that little boy saw an angel.

I also believe now that if I had spent more time cultivating my awareness of angels (which I used as a symbol for the general mystical awareness of the presence of God), my faith would have been stronger as a Catholic. But I didn’t: I thought it was sufficient to have mastered the propositional arguments for the faith. I’m not sure why my Orthodox friend is having the crisis that he is, given how much Orthodoxy stresses conversion of the heart, and mystical awareness, but I suspect it’s because his faith is mostly a cerebral thing for him (he is very intellectual, and has more of an engineer’s mindset than an artist’s). As I try to bring him back to liturgical worship, I’m going to need to think and pray hard about how to reach him where he is.

After church, I met a new friend, an American who just moved to Budapest with her family for a temporary job assignment. She is a churchgoing Catholic and a conservative, younger than I am (but aren’t they all these days?), and we got to talking about the situation in our home country, and in the world. As we traded stories about our lives, and shared our deep concerns about the civilizational crisis of the West — it always does me good to meet new people and to be able to say, “You see it too, huh?” — I told her about The Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies. She hadn’t heard about the books or their arguments, but as I laid them out briefly, she nodded along, and added occasions when she had seen the same things I talk about in the books.

She also said that she is only a Catholic now by the grace of God, because her parents had been so demoralized by church scandals that they didn’t raise her in the Church. She had a strong re-conversion in adulthood. We talked about the complacency among American Christians. She said, “I think a lot of us don’t understand how fast everything can change.”

I told her the story of Father Kolakovic, and how he had to battle the same thing among Slovak Catholics in the 1940s. So many of the older ones did not want to see what was coming, and were not prepared for the advent of Communism, and its persecution of the Church.

Walking home a few minutes ago from our conversation, thinking about it and about my experience in church this morning, I felt more convinced than ever that Living In Wonder, though I didn’t intend it as the final part of a trilogy on how to be faithfully Christian in this post-Christian world, that’s exactly what it is. In the end, re-enchanting ourselves as Christians — that is, adopting the mindset and the practices that help us to see and feel the presence of God, his saints, and his angels — is the bottom line of holding on through hard times. Even when the clergy and the institutions fail, and fail badly, if we not only know in our heads, but feel in our bones, the truths of our faith, we can hold on. But if not, well, it’s going to be very hard. In my own life, I have lived this out, and I hope that I can convey that in the book to readers.

Yesterday I listened to an episode of The Exorcist Files, the excellent podcast featuring Father Carlos Martins, an American Catholic exorcist. It’s pretty scary, but what I like about it is that Father Carlos uses these real-life stories from his experiences to educate listeners about the realities of spiritual warfare. One thing he talked about in the episode I listened to is why the demons have special hatred for the Virgin Mary. This is something my own confessor, Father Nectarios, an Orthodox exorcist, has discussed with me as well. There is something about Mary (sorry) that riles the demons up. It seems clear that because she, in her humility and purity, is the absolute opposite of the demons, in their filth and their pride. Plus, she is not a goddess, but was and is one of us: a non-divine human being who epitomizes the pinnacle of what human beings who surrender radically to God can become. Listening to these stories, in both the podcast and in conversations with my confessor, teaches me something about the realities of the world of the spirit. I gained some new insights into why Catholics and Orthodox regard Mary with such honor. Even the demons, who hate God, know that she is special among God’s creatures.

See, this is the kind of everyday knowledge that we Christians, whatever our confession, need to be building into our faith. You might not be able, because of your Protestant convictions, to regard Mary as we from the older traditions do, but it is still valuable to ponder why exorcists report that demons despise her with special hatred. What does that tell us about the role of humility and purity in the Christian life? We have so much to learn, and so many opportunities to learn. But we cannot be deceived by thinking that this is a matter of mastering our catechism. We have to open ourselves up to the power of God in everyday life.

In Living In Wonder, I end by talking about how, the day before Palm Sunday in 2022, on the eve of traveling from Budapest to Jerusalem for Orthodox Holy Week, I learned via an email from my wife that she had filed for divorce, bringing the ten-year painful struggle to keep our marriage together to an end. We had never spoken of divorce before. I got on the plane for Jerusalem the next morning a total wreck. Arriving in the Old City, I dropped my bags in my hotel, made my way to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and up the stairs into the chapel built over Golgotha (really), fell on my face, and begged Jesus for His mercy. That’s how the most extraordinary week of my life began — a week full of signs and wonders.

That photo up above was taken at the ceremony of the miracle of the Holy Fire, in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on Holy Saturday afternoon. I went to it skeptical that the miracle was real. I found out it was! That joy you see on my face is the joy of a man who only one week earlier had learned that life as he knew it had been destroyed — but he had literally just put his hand through the fire, over and over, and had not been burned. Our God is an awesome God! He would take care of me, and see me through this. I returned to Budapest so filled with joy, even though the worst was yet to come.

Here’s where the Living In Wonder narrative picks up from that point:

After that Easter journey, I began to look even more intently for signs of God’s presence and love everywhere. When I would experience hardship—something serious or something trivial—I now framed it as an opportunity to grow closer to him. And I practiced the presence of God by talking to him throughout the day more often than before.

I noticed, too, that the things I had learned about focused attention, particularly the strategies from Orthodox priests about refusing logismoi, any bad or distracting thoughts, helped me avoid being drawn again into the trap of nostalgia for a lost golden past. Whenever I was tempted to feel anger or self-pity, I thought about Saint Galgano in Luca Daum’s drawing and compelled myself to stay focused on Christ. God has not abandoned me, I would tell myself. This is all happening as a test of faith.

There are people who would say, “If God is real, why didn’t he save your marriage? Why does he let children die? Why do the wicked prosper and the just suffer?” This is the wrong approach. My friend Marco Sermarini, whose bereavement of his wife did nothing to dim his bright shining joy, says that the existence of suffering in the world calls us to perform “the spiritual exercise of wonder.”

“If you read the book of Job, there is a question recurring, ‘Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?’ and so forth,” says Marco. “I think this is a program, not just something random.”

This is an important point. It is true that we can’t force the awesome and wonderful to manifest themselves to us; the best we can do is to keep ourselves in a state of watchful waiting. But it is also true that we can practice wonder, in the sense that we can meet our doubts with an exercise of faith in the unfathomable mysteries of God, who is all good. When the tide of the Holy Spirit seems to have gone out, we have a responsibility to trust that it will return in time. Having seen the wonder of God once, we practice it in our prayers, our prostrations, and our liturgies of the everyday. That’s how we make it real and ever present.

How do we begin to live out Christian enchantment? If you are not a believer, or if you are a weak one, start by accepting that the contemporary story about how Christianity is a thing of the past, whose claims cannot be believed by modern people, is just one take among many. If you believe the secular materialist narrative, you are saying that the overwhelming majority of people who have ever lived, and the majority of people alive today, are wrong. It is possible that you are right—but the odds are not in your favor. Shouldn’t you at least consider that you are wrong?

Then you can face seriously the task of changing your mind to become more open to the reality of God and the presence of mystery, meaning, and miracle in this world. True, God cannot be commanded to show himself, but that does not relieve us from the responsibility to open ourselves to him. After all, you will never find if you don’t first seek. You will never experience re-enchantment without metanoia—a radical change of mind. Iain McGilchrist explains how and why the left-brain vision that made the modern world is a distortion of the truth—and why those who seek the truth must not abandon it but rather should balance it with the intuitive way of knowing from the brain’s right hemisphere.

This is not a matter of accepting an illusion because it might make you feel better. This is about learning to see the truth, to access the really real, which has been denied to you by the flawed way of perception the modern world has falsely claimed is the whole truth. The harder we cling to the modern idea that the material world is nothing more than stuff that we are free to manipulate, the more difficult it will be to experience a resonant sense of connection with it.

Because the way we pay attention to the world has a lot to do with what we perceive, you can endeavor to shed distractions in life that get in the way of focus. And you can take on prayer disciplines that help still the mind, cleanse the nous, and repair the fragmented attention that makes it hard to relate to God.

Then lean, and lean hard, into beauty. Beauty—the moral beauty of good and holy people and the aesthetic beauty of art, music, and architecture, as well as the natural world—is a portal through which enchantment passes to us. Stop thinking of it as merely something admirable or decorative. True beauty reveals to us something of God’s nature, and truth. It shows us that the world has meaning and that we are part of that world. Beauty offers us those moments of epiphany in which the fundamental unity and purpose of the world appear to us. It is also a bridge to the world of the transcendent and ultimately to God.

Cultivate a real appreciation for beauty by reading, listening to, and looking at works of art, music, and architecture that have stood the test of time. Go out into nature and see and feel it for meaning. Read the lives of the saints and meditate on the lives of holy people in our world today. The beauty present in all of these people, places, and things is a sign telling us all where we need to go if we want to live.

Take stories of miracles and encounters with the numinous seriously. Don’t be credulous; not every miracle story is true. But many of them are. You might not experience one, and if not, that doesn’t mean you are unworthy. Still, they really do happen to people, even today. This fact should humble us all and remind us that anything is possible. None of us knows if a miracle awaits us, but we have the responsibility to prepare ourselves for that possibility. We don’t want to be the kind of people who, when confronted by a miracle, react with fear or reflexive disbelief because we don’t want to change our lives.

You can also educate yourself about the realities of the dark side—of black magic and the occult. Modern secularists and rationalist Christians laugh, but demonic possession is real. If you’ve seen it, you don’t need convincing. Demons can work apparent miracles, too, for the sake of deceiving us. Remember that occultists want false enchantment—that is, to experience and access the power of the spirit world—but only for the sake of learning to control it, to compel demons to do things for them. This is the way of destruction. More and more people are choosing it. You must learn why it is evil and turn away from it in all its forms—psychedelics, occult practices, all of it.

It is frankly depressing to look at the state of the churches today and to take stock of the overall quality of leadership, both clerical and lay. Don’t despair! God is raising up new voices to show his people the way forward. It will not do to complain about the very real failures of religious leaders and claim that as an excuse to abandon the faith. This is cowardice. How can you be sure that God won’t use you to rally believers to repentance and return to a true and living faith, as he has done so often in ages past with other ordinary men and women?

To summarize: We Christians have a mission to focus our attention on Christ and to create the conditions for the flow of divine energy—of grace—to purify the eyes of our hearts so that we can see the holiness all around us and share in the life of God. To accomplish this, we have to learn how to sacrifice, die to ourselves, and fix our personal swords, as symbols of our will, into the stone of God as an act of faithful obedience.

We have to learn how to direct our attention rightly, pray more effectively, and reestablish resonance with the world beyond our heads. We have to discover how to open our eyes to beauty and allow it to work its magic on us, drawing us into a deeper relationship with reality.

We have to learn about the frightening facts of spiritual warfare and dark enchantment and turn from its enticements. And we have to seek out the community of wise and faithful men and women with whom to share the pilgrim’s journey.

We can’t force enchantment to happen, but we can certainly do all of these things to prepare ourselves for it—even in the face of a world that says they are impossible and that offers us instead the false enchantments of sex, money, fame, technology, and even the occult. The means to do this are part of our past and part of our present. They can be part of our future, if we want them enough to make life-changing sacrifices. There is no other way. The more control you want to have over your life, the less enchantment you will experience. As Jesus said, “Whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it” (Matt. 16:25).

That is a summary of Living In Wonder, but the whole book is full of stories and details and practical advice for how to do this. I needed today — praying for my scandalized friends in church, and that conversation over coffee — to get myself into the headspace of talking about Christian re-enchantment as a survival skill for believers trying to hold on through this civilizational crisis. I’m going to be giving a speech on this topic at the upcoming Touchstone conference in Chicago later this month. But you’d better believe that when the book comes out on October 22, I’m going to be preaching this gospel of joy.

I told my coffee conversation partner this morning the amazing story of how the Lord sent angels to revive the flagging faith of prisoner Alexander Ogorodnikov. God is doing things like this for us all the time, but often we don’t have eyes to see it. I look at that image of my face above, filled with grace and awe at the goodness of the Lord, and I realize that the darkness of the loss of my marriage could not extinguish the holy fire in my hand, and the light that Holy Week had rekindled in my heart. The miserable failures of the clergy cannot touch you if you are enchanted, in a Christian way. Let’s go! Christ has overcome the world!

I’m making this post free to the whole list today. Please share it with anyone you know who is struggling in the faith, and who needs encouragement. I can barely wait for the book to come out, so we can talk more in depth in this space about signs, wonders, miracles, and the light that cannot be comprehended or snuffed out by the darkness visible. In the book, I tell a story about a New York Catholic businessman whose wife was possessed; an ancestor had made a pact with the devil, which brought the evil onto her. She was eventually delivered after much prayer, thanks to the help of an exorcist. The struggle brought both of them much closer to God. The businessman told me that he and his wife had been ordinary mass-going conservative Catholics prior to this horrific experience, but this taught them both that there is another dimension of reality. He said that now when he walks down the streets of Manhattan, he realizes that there are intense spiritual battles going on unseen all around him.

But he also knows how to achieve victory. That’s what I want to share with readers in this new book. We are like the great French general Marshal Foch in World War I. He sent this message back to headquarters: “My center is giving way, my right flank is retreating, situation excellent, I attack!”

  

Don’t forget to pre-order the book; the new Living In Wonder website Zondervan has created for the book has lots of links to book dealers. If you would like to pre-order a copy signed by me, you can do so exclusively through Eighth Day Books.

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The dawn of the post-literate society - A VERY LONG READ
And the end of civilisation

The dawn of the post-literate society

And the end of civilisation

 
Sep 19, 2025
 
 
Heated Debates, Burning Books | The New Yorker
 

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book because there would be no one who wanted to read one.

— Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death


The age of print

It was one of the most important revolutions in modern history — and yet no blood was spilled, no bombs were thrown and no monarch was beheaded.

Perhaps no great social transformation has ever been carried out so quietly. This one took place in armchairs, in libraries, in coffee houses and in clubs.

What happened was this: in the middle of the eighteenth century huge numbers of ordinary people began to read.

For the first couple of centuries after the invention of the printing press, reading remained largely an elite pursuit. But by the beginning of the 1700s, the expansion of education and an explosion of cheap books began to diffuse reading rapidly down through the middle classes and even into the lower ranks of society. People alive at the time understood that something momentous was going on. Suddenly it seemed that everyone was reading everywhere: men, women, children, the rich, the poor. Reading began to be described as a “fever”, an “epidemic”, a “craze”, a “madness”. As the historian Tim Blanning writes, “conservatives were appalled and progressives were delighted, that it was a habit that knew no social boundaries.”

This transformation is sometimes known as the “reading revolution”. It was an unprecedented democratisation of information; the greatest transfer of knowledge into the hands of ordinary men and women in history.

In Britain only 6,000 books were published in the first decade of the eighteenth century; in the last decade of the same century the number of new titles was in excess of 56,000. More than half a million new publications appeared in German over the course of the 1700s. The historian Simon Schama has gone so far as to write that “literacy rates in eighteenth century France were much higher than in the late twentieth century United States”.

Where readers had once read “intensively”, spending their lives reading and re-reading two or three books, the reading revolution popularised a new kind of “extensive” reading. People read everything they could get their hands on: newspapers, journals, history, philosophy, science, theology and literature. Books, pamphlets and periodicals poured off the presses.

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It was an age of monumental works of thought and knowledge: the Encyclopédie, Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Radical new ideas about God, about history, about society, about politics, and even the whole purpose and meaning of life flooded through Europe.

Even more importantly print changed how people thought.

The world of print is orderly, logical and rational. In books, knowledge is classified, comprehended, connected and put in its place. Books make arguments, propose theses, develop ideas. “To engage with the written word”, the media theorist Neil Postman wrote, “means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning.”

As Postman pointed out, it is no accident, that the growth of print culture in the eighteenth century was associated with the growing prestige of reason, hostility to superstition, the birth of capitalism, and the rapid development of science. Other historians have linked the eighteenth century explosion of literacy to the Enlightenment, the birth of human rights, the arrival of democracy and even the beginnings of the industrial revolution.

The world as we know it was forged in the reading revolution.

The counter revolution

Now, we are living through the counter-revolution.

More than three hundred years after the reading revolution ushered in a new era of human knowledge, books are dying.

Numerous studies show that reading is in free-fall. Even the most pessimistic twentieth-century critics of the screen-age would have struggled to predict the scale of the present crisis.

In America, reading for pleasure has fallen by forty per cent in the last twenty years. In the UK, more than a third of adults say they have given up reading. The National Literacy Trust reports “shocking and dispiriting” falls in children’s reading, which is now at its lowest level on record. The publishing industry is in crisis: as the author Alexander Larman writes, “books that once would have sold in the tens, even hundreds, of thousands are now lucky to sell in the mid-four figures.”

 

Most remarkably, in late 2024 the OECD published a report which found that literacy levels were “declining or stagnating” in most developed countries. Once upon a time a social scientist confronted with statistics like these might have guessed the cause was a societal crisis like a war or the collapse of the education system.

What happened was the smartphone, which was widely adopted in developed countries in the mid-2010s. Those years will be remembered as a watershed in human history.

Never before has there been a technology like the smartphone. Where previous entertainment technologies like cinema or television were intended to capture their audience’s attention for a period, the smartphone demands your entire life. Phones are designed to be hyper-addictive, hooking users on a diet of pointless notifications, inane short-form videos and social media rage bait.

The average person now spends seven hours a day staring at a screen. For Gen Z the figure is nine hours. A recent article in The Times found that on average modern students are destined to spend 25 years of their waking lives scrolling on screens.

If the reading revolution represented the greatest transfer of knowledge to ordinary men and women in history, the screen revolution represents the greatest theft of knowledge from ordinary people in history.

Our universities are at the front line of this crisis. They are now teaching their first truly “post-literate” cohorts of students, who have grown up almost entirely in the world of short-form video, computer games, addictive algorithms (and, increasingly, AI).

Because ubiquitous mobile internet has destroyed these students’ attention spans and restricted the growth of their vocabularies, the rich and detailed knowledge stored in books is becoming inaccessible to many of them. A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children1.

An article published in The Atlantic, ‘The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books’ cites the characteristic experience of one professor:

Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.

“Most of our students”, according to another despairing assessment, “are functionally illiterate”. This chimes with everything I’ve heard in my own conversations with teachers and academics. One Oxbridge lecturer I spoke to described a “collapse in literacy” among his students.

The transmission of knowledge — the most ancient function of the university — is breaking down in front of our eyes. Writers like Shakespeare, Milton and Jane Austen whose works have been handed on for centuries can no longer reach the next generation of readers. They are losing the ability to understand them.

The tradition of learning is like a precious golden thread of knowledge running through human history linking reader to reader through time. It last snapped during the collapse of the Western Roman Empire as the barbarian tides beat against the frontier, cities shrank and libraries burned or decayed2. As the world of Rome’s educated elite fell apart, many writers and works of literature passed out of human memory — either to be lost forever or to be rediscovered hundreds of years later in the Renaissance.

That golden thread is breaking for the second time.

An intellectual tragedy

The collapse of reading is driving declines in various measures of cognitive ability. Reading is associated with a number of cognitive benefits including improved memory and attention span, better analytical thinking, improved verbal fluency, and lower rates of cognitive decline in later life.

After the introduction of smartphones in the mid-2010s, global PISA scores — the most famous international measure of student ability — began to decline. As John Burn Murdoch writes in the Financial Times, students increasingly tell surveys that they struggle to think, learn and concentrate. You will notice the tell-tale mid-2010s inflection point:

The Monitoring the Future study has been asking 18-year-olds whether they have difficulty thinking, concentrating or learning new things. The share of final year high school students who report difficulties was stable throughout the 1990s and 2000s, but began a rapid upward climb in the mid-2010s.

A chart showing the PISA results
 

And, as Burn Murdoch says, these cognitive issues are not restricted to schools and universities. They affect everyone: “[the] decline in measures of reasoning and problem-solving is not confined to teenagers. Adults show a similar pattern, with declines visible across all age groups”.

 

Most intriguing — and alarming — is the case of IQ, which rose consistently throughout the twentieth century (the so-called “Flynn effect”) but which now seems to have begun to fall.

The result is not only the loss of information and intelligence, but a tragic impoverishing of the human experience.

For centuries, almost all educated and intelligent people have believed that literature and learning are among the highest purposes and deepest consolations of human existence.

The classics have been preserved over the centuries because they contain, in Matthew Arnold’s famous phrase, “the best that has been thought and said”.

The greatest novels and poems enrich our sense of the human experience by imaginatively putting us inside other minds and taking us to other times and other places. By reading non-fiction — science, history, philosophy, travel writing — we become deeply acquainted with our place in the extraordinary and complicated world we are privileged to inhabit.

Smartphones are robbing of us of these consolations.

The epidemic of anxiety, depression and purposeless afflicting young people in the twenty-first century is often linked to the isolation and negative social comparison fostered by smartphones.

It is also a direct product of the pointlessness, fragmentation and triviality of the culture of the screen which is wholly unequipped to speak to the deep human needs for curiosity, narrative, deep attention and artistic fulfilment.

World without mind

This draining away of culture, critical thinking and intelligence represents a tragic loss of human potential and human flourishing. It is also one of the major challenges facing modern societies. Our vast, interconnected, tolerant and technologically advanced civilisation is founded on the complex, rational kinds of thinking fostered by literacy.

As Walter Ong writes in his book Orality and Literacycertain kinds of complex and logical thinking simply cannot be achieved without reading and writing. It is virtually impossible to develop a detailed and logical argument in spontaneous speech — you would get lost, lose your thread, contradict yourself, and confuse your audience trying to re-phrase ineptly expressed points.

As an extreme example think of somebody trying to simply speak a famous work of philosophy. Say, Kant’s 900-page The Critique of Pure Reason or Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus or Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. It would be impossible to do. And also impossible to listen to.

To produce his great work Kant had to write down his ideas, scratch them out, think about them, refine them and then rework them over many years so they added up into a persuasive and logical whole.

To properly understand the book you have to be able to have it in front of you so you can re-read bits you don’t understand, check logical connections and meditate on important passages until you really take them in. This kind of advanced thinking is inseparable from reading and writing.

The classicist Eric Havelock argued that the arrival of literacy in ancient Greece was the catalyst for the birth of philosophy. Once people had a means of pinning ideas down on the page to interrogate them, refine them and build on them, a whole new revolutionary way of analytic and abstract thinking was born — one that would go on to shape our entire civilisation3. With the birth of writing received ways of thinking could be challenged and improved. This was our species’ cognitive liberation.

As Neil Postman puts it in Amusing Ourselves to Death:

Philosophy cannot exist without criticism . . . writing makes it possible and convenient to subject thought to a continuous and concentrated scrutiny. Writing freezes speech and in so doing gives birth to the grammarian, the logician, the rhetorician, the historian, the scientist-all those who must hold language before them so that they can see what it means, where it errs, and where it is leading.

Not only philosophy but the entire intellectual infrastructure of modern civilisation depends on the kinds of complex thinking inseparable from reading and writing: serious historical writing, scientific theorems, detailed policy proposals and the kinds of rigorous and dispassionate political debate conducted in books and magazines.

These forms of advanced thought provide the intellectual underpinnings of modernity. If our world feels unstable at the moment — like the ground is shifting beneath us — it is because those underpinnings are falling to pieces underneath our feet.

As you have probably noticed, the world of the screen is going to be much a choppier place than the world of print: more emotional, more angry, more chaotic.

Walter Ong emphasised that writing cools and rationalises thought. If you want to make your case in person or in a TikTok video you have innumerable means for bypassing logical argument. You can shout and weep and charm your audience into submission. You can play emotive music or show harrowing images. Such appeals are not rational but human beings are not perfectly rational animals and are inclined to be persuaded by them.

A book can’t yell at you (thank God!) and it can’t cry. Without the array of logic-defeating appeals available to podcasters and YouTubers, authors are much more reliant on reason alone, condemned to painfully piece their arguments together sentence by sentence (I feel that agony now). Books are far from perfect but they are much more closely bound to the imperatives of logical argument than any other means of human communication ever devised.

This is why Ong observed that pre-literate “oral” societies often strike visitors from literate countries as remarkably mystical, emotional, and antagonistic in their discourse and thinking4.

 

As books die, we seem to be returning to these “oral” habits of thought. Our discourse is collapsing into panic, hatred and tribal warfare. Anti-scientific thought thrives at the highest level of the American government. Promoters of irrationality and conspiracy theories such as Candace Owens and Russell Brand find vast and credulous audiences online.

Laid out on the page their arguments would seem absurd. On the screen, they are persuasive to many people.

The rise of these emotional and irrational styles of thinking poses a profound challenge to our culture and politics.

We may be about to find out that it is not possible to run the most advanced civilisation in the history of the planet with the intellectual apparatus of a pre-literate society.

The end of creativity

The age of print was characterised by unprecedented dynamism and cultural richness. Reading is a foundation stone of the creativity and innovation that is fundamental to modernity.

It is not the case that for a society to benefit from the culture of print that every citizen must be a bookworm. And yet if one habit unites the leaders, inventors, scientists and artists who have forged our civilisation it is reading. Serious readers are over-represented in almost every area of human achievement.

Take great politicians: Teddy Roosevelt claimed to read a book a day, Winston Churchill set himself an ambitious programme of reading in philosophy, economics and history as a young man and continued to read voraciously throughout his life. Clement Attlee recalled that he read four books a week as a schoolboy.

The Books Beloved by David Bowie | Internet Archive Blogs
 

Or consider popular culture (not usually thought of as a particularly literary field of human endeavour). David Bowie read, in his own words, “voraciously”. “Every book I ever bought, I have. I can't throw it away”, he once said. “It's physically impossible to leave my hand!” A list Bowie wrote of his hundred favourite books includes works by William Faulkner, Tom Stoppard, DH Lawrence and TS Eliot.

In a recent book about his song-writing career Paul McCartney cited “Dylan Thomas, Oscar Wilde and Allen Ginsberg, of French symbolist writer Alfred Jarry, Eugene O’Neill and Henrik Ibsen” among the authors who had inspired him.

Thomas Edison read deeply throughout his life. So did Charles Darwin. So did Albert Einstein. Ironically, even Elon Musk claims that he was “raised by books”.

Reading enriches creative work by giving men and women of genius access to the vast and priceless trove of knowledge preserved in books — “the best that has been thought and said”. The discipline of reading equips them with the analytical tools to interrogate, refine and revolutionise that tradition.

As Elizabeth Eisenstein argues in The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, the invention of the printing press helped to catalyse a series of cultural revolutions which forged the modern world: the Renaissance, the Reformation and the scientific revolution. Other historians would add the Enlightenment, the birth of human rights and the industrial revolution.

Eisenstein explains how the tendency of reading to foster innovation played out in Renaissance universities. With the invention of printing students had increased access to books allowing “bright undergraduates to reach beyond their teachers’ grasp. Gifted students no longer needed to sit at the feet of a given master in order to learn a language or academic skill.” And so,

Students who took advantage of technical texts which served as silent instructors were less likely to defer to traditional authority and more receptive to innovating trends. Young minds provided with updated editions, especially of mathematical texts, began to surpass not only their own elders but the wisdom of ancients as well.

Modern students who are unable to read are once more reliant on the authority of their teachers and are less capable of racing ahead, innovating and questioning orthodoxies.

These students are just one symptom of the stagnant culture of the screen age which is characterised by simplicity, repetitiveness and shallowness. Its symptoms are observable all around us.

Pop songs in every genre are becoming shorter, simpler and more repetitive and films are being reduced to endlessly-repeated franchise formulas. Studies suggest that the number of “disruptive” and “transformative” inventions is declining. More money is spent on scientific research than ever in history but the rate of progress “is barely keeping pace with the past”.

Doubtless many factors are at work, but this is also precisely what you would expect of a generation of researchers who spent their childhoods glued to screens rather than reading or thinking.

Even books themselves are becoming less complex.

 

If the literate world was characterised by complexity and innovation, the post literate world is characterised by simplicity, ignorance and stagnation. It is probably not an accident that the decline of literacy has ushered in an obsession with cultural “nostalgia”; a desire to endlessly recycle the cultural forms of the past: the television shows and styles of the nineties, for instance, or the fashions of the early 2000s.

Our culture is being transformed into a smartphone wasteland.

Cut off from the cultural riches of the past we are condemned to live in a narcissistic eternal present. Deprived of the critical tools to question and develop the insights of those who went before us, we are condemned to endlessly repeat and pastiche ourselves, superhero film by superhero film, repetitive pop song by repetitive pop song.

Most of all, this increasingly trivial and mindless culture is a calamity for our politics.

The death of democracy

Amusingly from the perspective of the present the reading revolution of the eighteenth century was accompanied not only by excitement but by a moral panic.

“No lover of tobacco or coffee, no wine drinker or lover of games, can be as addicted to their pipe, bottle, games or coffee-table as those many hungry readers are to their reading habit”, thundered one German clergyman.

Richard Steele feared that “novels raise expectations which the ordinary course of life can never realise”. Others fretted that reading “excites the imagination too much, and fatigues the heart”.

It is easy to laugh at these anxieties. We have spent our whole lives hearing how virtuous and sensible it is to read books. How could reading be dangerous?

But in hindsight, these conservative moralists were right to worry. The rapid expansion of literacy helped to destroy the orderly, hierarchical, and profoundly socially unequal world they cherished.

The reading revolution was a catastrophe for the ultra-privileged and exploitative aristocrats of the European aristocratic ancien regime — the old autocratic system of government with almighty kings at the top, lords and clergy underneath and peasants squirming at the very bottom.

Ignorance was a foundation stone of feudal Europe. The vast inequalities of the aristocratic order were partly able to be sustained because the population had no way to find out about the scale of the corruption, abuses and inefficiencies of their governments.

And the old feudal hierarchy was justified not so much by logical argument as by what Walter Ong might have recognised as very pre-literate appeals to mystical and emotional thinking.

This was what historians of the seventeenth century know as the “representational” culture of power, the highly visual system of monarchical propaganda which forced the fearsome and awe-inspiring image of the king onto his subjects. The regime displayed its power in parades, paintings, fire-work displays, statues and grandiose buildings.

Equestrian Portrait of Louis XIV by MIGNARD, Pierre
 

The system worked in an age before mass literacy. But as knowledge spread through society and the analytic, critical modes of thinking fostered by print took hold, the whole mental and cultural atmosphere which sustained the old order was burned away. People began to know too much. And to think too much.

The feudal order seems to be fundamentally incompatible with literacy. The historian Orlando Figes has noted that the English, French and Russian revolutions all occurred in societies in which literacy was approaching fifty per cent.

Robert Darnton’s book The Revolutionary Temper chronicles the chaos unleashed on the old regime in France by the age of print. Knowledge spread through French society with disastrous effect: political prisoners wrote bestselling memoirs publicising their unjust incarceration by the state; ordinary people consumed pamphlets about the exorbitant and unjust wealth enjoyed by aristocrats; the government’s disastrous finances were suddenly debated by an incredulous and furious public rather than behind closed doors in the back rooms of Versailles.

Meanwhile the analytic, critical modes of thinking began to eat away at the mystical and emotional underpinnings of the old order. The philosophes and radical thinkers of the Enlightenment, supported by a growing middle class readership, began to ask the kinds of critical questions that are pre-eminently print-based in their tone. Where does power come from? Why should some men have so much more than others? Why aren’t all men equal?

***It’s worth noting that this highly simplified account clearly excludes many of the factors the shape the unfolding of history: economics, climate, individual men and women, blind chance. Print alone cannot usher in peace and democracy (witness the consequences of the Russian revolution). And print cannot abolish the innate human tendencies towards partisanship and violence (witness the aftermath of the French revolution). Print is certainly not immune to fake news and conspiracy theories (witness the lead-up to the French revolution). ***

But you do not have to believe print is a perfect and incorruptible system of communication to accept it is also almost certainly a necessary pre-condition of democracy.

In Amusing Ourselves to Death Neil Postman argues that democracy and print are virtually inseparable. An effective democracy pre-supposes a reasonably informed and somewhat critical citizenry capable of understanding and debating the issues of the day in detail and at length.

Democracy draws immeasurable strength from print — the old dying world of books, newspapers and magazines — with its tendency to foster deep knowledge, logical argument, critical thought, objectivity and dispassionate engagement. In this environment, ordinary people have the tools to understand their rulers, to criticise them and, perhaps, to change them.

Postman cites the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 in which both presidential candidates spoke at incredible length and in remarkable detail as one of the summits of print culture:

Their arrangement provided that Douglas would speak first, for one hour; Lincoln would take an hour and a half to reply; Douglas, a half hour to rebut Lincoln’s reply. This debate was considerably shorter than those to which the two men were accustomed . . . on October 16, 1854, in Peoria, Illinois, Douglas delivered a three-hour address to which Lincoln, by agreement, was to respond.

When Postman was writing in the late 1980s, such debates were already impossible to imagine. Ironically the televised debates that he criticised as degraded, uninformative and over-emotional strike twenty-first century viewers as almost comically civilised and high minded.

 

Politics in the age of short form video favours heightened emotion, ignorance and unevidenced assertions. Such circumstances are highly propitious for charismatic charlatans. Inevitably, parties and politicians hostile to democracy are flourishing in the post-literate world. TikTok usage correlates with increased vote share for populist parties and the far right.

TikTok, as the writer, Ian Leslie puts it is “rocket fuel for populists”.

Why does [TikTok] benefit populists disproportionately? Because, almost by definition, populism thrives on emotions, not thoughts; on feelings not sentences. Populists specialise in providing that rush of certainty you get when you know you’re right. They don’t want you to think. Thinking is where certainty goes to die.

The rational, dispassionate print-based liberal democratic order may not survive this revolution.

The Course of Empire (paintings) - Wikipedia
 

Into the moronic inferno

The big tech companies like to see themselves as invested in spreading knowledge and curiosity. In fact in order to survive they must promote stupidity. The tech oligarchs have just as much of a stake in the ignorance of the population as the most reactionary feudal autocrat. Dumb rage and partisan thinking keep us glued to our phones.

And where the old European monarchies had to (often ineptly) try to censor dangerously critical material, the big tech companies ensure our ignorance much more effectively by flooding our culture with rage, distraction and irrelevance.

These companies are actively working to destroy human enlightenment and usher in a new dark age.

The screen revolution will shape our politics as profoundly as the reading revolution of the eighteenth century.

Without the knowledge and without the critical thinking skills instilled by print, many of the citizens of modern democracies find themselves as helpless and as credulous as medieval peasants — moved by irrational appeals and prone to mob thinking. The world after print increasingly resembles the world before print.

Superstitions and anti-democratic thinking flourish. Scholarship in our universities is shaped by rigid partisanship not by tolerance and curiosity. Our art and literature is cruder and more simplistic.

Many people are now as suspicious of vaccines as the uneducated yokels of the eighteenth century satirised by the cartoonist James Gillray more than two hundred years ago.

File:The cow pock.jpg - Wikipedia
 

As power, wealth and knowledge concentrate at the top of society, an angry, divided and uninformed public lacks a way understand or analyse or criticise or change what is going on. Instead more and more people are impressed by the kinds of highly emotional charismatic and mystical appeals that were the foundation of power in the age before widespread literacy.

Just as the advent of print dealt the final death blow to the decaying world of feudalism, so the screen is destroying the world of liberal democracy.

As tech companies wipe out literacy and middle class jobs, we may find ourselves a second feudal age. Or it may be that we are entering a political era beyond our imagining.

Whatever happens, we are already seeing the world we once knew melt away. Nothing will ever be the same again.

Welcome to the post-literate society.

1

When George Orwell reported on a newly-published study of children’s reading habits in 1940, he found that children were “voluntarily” reading works by Charles Dickens, Daniel Defoe, Robert Louis Stevenson, GK Chesterton and Shakespeare. These children, he noted, were “aged between 12-15 and belonged to the poorest class in the community”.

2

I protest that I read my Peter Brown and accept this is a simplistic (though I hope rhetorically forceful) characterisation of late antiquity. But I also think recent fashionable attempts to rebrand the “dark ages” as the “light ages” can be a bit overdone. Literacy rates did decline in late antiquity.

3

People sometimes object that Socrates bemoaned the death of writing. Havelock’s detailed argument as set out in his book Preface to Plato is worth reading in full. One point he makes is that Socrates himself was the product of an intellectual climate already being profoundly influenced by writing. Plato, according to Havelock, was an active campaigner against pre-literate modes of thinking.

4

This is not to say literate societies are “better” or more intelligent than oral societies. As Ong writes, oral societies are capable of feats of memory that are staggering to outsiders. But it is true that literate habits of thought seem to be essential to the kind of advanced and complex civilisation we live in.

 

 

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October 04, 2025
Why They Will Never Be Honest About Islamist Violence
From Konstantin Kisin's Sub Stack

Why They Will Never Be Honest About Islamist Violence

 
Oct 04, 2025
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Have you ever wondered why in the wake of every Islamist terrorist attack, our media and politicians bend over backwards to make the extraordinary claim that Islamism has nothing to do with Islam? The answer is a mixture of things, but the central reason is easy to understand if you think about it logically.

To avoid offending morons, let’s not talk about people and talk about apples instead. As you know, there are red apples, green apples and yellow apples. Let’s imagine for a second that a small percentage of green apples are poisonous and can injure and kill people. It is difficult to distinguish the toxic green apples from the other green apples which are perfectly “peaceful”, “law-abiding” and so forth.

Now imagine that you are the public health authority whose job it is to protect the public. If your concern is solving the problem of the small minority of toxic green apples, you would immediately do a number of things.

You might devote significant resources to identifying the toxic green apples and removing them from the supermarket shelves. You might commission thorough research into how and where the toxic green apples are grown. You might crack down very, very hard on anyone who knowingly participates in growing or distributing such apples. You might even say that while you are dealing with the problem of deaths caused by toxic green apples, bringing more green apples into the country is liable to worsen the public health crisis until suitable measures are identified which allow you to separate the bad green apples from the good ones.

This is how you would act if your primary concern was the safety of the public. But what if you, as the public health authority, had spent the preceding decades claiming that all apples are the same? That to suggest that a small minority of green apples are potentially toxic is fear-mongering and green-o-phobic? What if you had been openly encouraging unfiltered importation of green apples and actively resisted calls to thoroughly check whether such apples are in fact, digestible for your citizens? What if your mantra for the last 20 years has been that anyone who believes there may be significant variations between the toxicity of different types of apples is a bigot who must be suppressed for fear of emboldening the “far right”?

If you were, in fact, responsible for the fact that people were now being killed on the streets of your country by the small minority of toxic green apples, would you not do everything in your power to explain that the diversity of apples is our greatest strength? That the toxicity of green apples is nothing to do with them being green? That any doctor who suggests that the government should carefully regulate the importation of green apples specifically is a racist?

The central premise of our elite consensus is that we must continue to pretend that all apples are the same. No matter how many people pay for this lie with their lives.

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September 27, 2025
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More thoughts on Forgiveness
Thoughts from 2022 with a new addendum for 2025

Thoughts on Forgiveness from April of 2022 with a 2025 Addendum

In Cath-O-Land we are celebrating Divine Mercy Sunday. Be you a believer or not, do you think that people are defined by their worst traits or decisions and thereafter imprisoned by them? Once a murderer, always a murderer? Is there a path of redemption, rehabilitation or restitution for that person, or are those dark choices and acts irrevocable? For the victims of vile crimes, they are unforgettable, they can be experiences that are life changing or life ending.

I guess it depends on the circumstances. I am not a fan of letting criminals skate free. If you commit the crime, do the time. I know it sounds simple, and we live in a world of decaying justice and manipulations of the courts that can prompt all of us to be cynics about justice. Dial back the clocks just a century and domestic violence and abuse was often ignored unless it erupted into murder. If you saw your neighbors beating their children or a husband beating a spouse, it was often ignored unless dealt with specifically within the family. I am not even sure that was the case, but that certainly is the impression I got from listening to my parents and grandparents talk about abusive neighbors by today's standard.

 

Justice - Mercy - Forgiveness – Contrition - Reconciliation - Healing

Justice - everyone has to face their choices, good & bad. If you believe in a Divine Judge who knows all, no one skates free. Everyone must face their story and how they wrote it by their actions.

Mercy - One can find forgiveness of sins, make restitution for their crimes. In this life, or the next. No one is a prisoner to their past, but no one gets to ignore it either. Mercy is meant to lift us above our past, pull us back on the path, reset the world we live in even if our acts have shrunk that world by our choices. Some may only fine mercy by a life in prison because their acts make them unworthy of living among us. While not a fan of the death penalty, finality of life often opens the door to reflection. The mask comes off when you are going to die, are you a harden & hateful soul, or can you in your final moments have contrition for your acts? In my world, mercy is only going to be received when I am willing to provide it. Mercy flows through me, or it bypasses me. My choice.

Forgiveness - It does not ever mean that the wrong someone has committed against us is acceptable. Forgiveness is not asking us to close our eyes and pretend everything is ok. Forgiveness is the ability to see beyond the wound, to emancipate oneself from the memory that has become our mental prison, to let justice be in the hands of another when we cannot obtain it for ourselves. Forgiveness is a choice - we can decide to offer it or withhold it. few things are worse than letting someone who injured us live rent-free in our heads for a life, imprisoning us in an inescapable memory when we have the keys of our freedom in our own possession.

Contrition – You are sorry for your offense and take accountability for it and are willing to live with the consequences of it and the possible need to make amends for it. Contrition belongs to the perpetrator of the act, and the victim may freely tell them to the go to Hell if they please.  Your sorrow for your acts does not depend upon their recognition or reception of your repentance.  

Reconciliation - It takes two, and it is not always achievable. When forgiveness and contrition are experienced, there is the possibility of reconciliation. You can't be reconciled with someone with someone who fails to take account of their own actions. In a more perfect world, reconciliation is always the goal. You can't be reconciled with a person who is a slave to addiction, especially if that addiction is behavioral altering. The addiction will always come first until they leave it behind. If someone says they are sorry and they alter their acts, reconciliation is possible. But contrition without change is empty. Few things can heal our hearts more than real reconciliation, but it is something not entirely in our control, as all the best things in life are, others have to meet us on the path of their reconciliation and work through the mess and injury however great or small it might be.

Healing - Be it victim or perpetrator - there is healing. If you have a healthy mind & heart, you choose the acts that define you. You choose the emotional weight to give to those acts and how they roam about in your thoughts and feelings. No victim need be a prisoner to the worst crime committed against them. *Victimhood is the surest path to an unhappy life.* Perhaps for some it is inescapable because they have developed a mental illness that will ever prevent they from rising above the pain. But if you are not mentally ill, defining your life as a victim may be one of your worst choices. Healing for the perpetrator can only come when they face their acts and do what they can to make amends.

Well, that is a lot. If you read it all, you probably need another cup of coffee. As always comments are welcome, even if you disagree with me on some of the points. It is after all just my ramblings about it. I hope you have a great day my friend, fellow pilgrim and one willing to lead me some minutes to read this. Peace.

*2025 Addendum for the Coffee Talk Crew 

I couldn’t agree with Fred more than recklessly inviting evil into your life is stupid. Nothing could be more stupid than knowing beforehand that someone is going to do evil and you welcome it pretending that it somehow won’t take place.   I can agree that that type of naive wishful thinking is profoundly stupid.  Europe is doing that with Islamists and the Center & Right of American culture & politics does that too often with the LEFT. There is no such thing as pre-forgiveness. If you come to commit evil, I pray you are stopped.  If it takes you leaving life to protect those I love, I vote you go home to God first rather than my loved ones. I am not happy about not having a choice but violence, but violent men/women have to be stopped with violence, not nice words or hopeful prayers.  Pray for their souls, stop their actions. Contain their evil. Predatory evil needs to be identified and ended. 

I don’t think Charlie Kirk’s wife is stupid for forgiving the murderer of her husband.  She still wants him to face justice and punishment for his crimes, but she is not going to live in the wound created in her life by his vile act. She did not have to forgive; she could have chosen to wait on it or never offer it to the murderer. She made a choice, and one that happened early on because she is serious (not perfect) about her faith.  I admire hr for her seriouness, I don't think I could arrive at forgiveness that quickly. 

At the core of Christian Discipleship is the dynamic of forgiveness – contrition and reconciliation.  Disciples are aware of how much they have been forgiven by God. Disciples know that if they want to seek God’s mercy, they must offer it to others.  I don’t think it has to be an immediate thing, massive wounds of hatred, violence and evil take equally massive amounts of time, grace and healing to mend.  The wounded will know their scars forever, how they chose to think about them is a choice.

Most Christians, and all Disciples should know that forgiveness is essential if they pay any attention to the Our Father.  “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” I can’t imagine praying those words and not trying to live by them. Again, I don’t think it means forgiveness has to be immediate, thoughtless and a given, but it should be something or somewhere I hope to arrive in life.  I should want to forgive eventually even if the pain of the offense at the moment is too fresh, deep and crushing.

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