After thoroughly enjoying "Patapsco Spirits: Eleven Ghost Stories", Addison Hart's marvellous collection of short ghost stories (it was my top fiction choice for 2024), I immediately raced to see what other books he had to offer. It turns out, quite a few (click here for his Goodreads list). Since I'm neck-deep in a stack of non-fiction works right now, I wanted another taste of his story-telling, so I used my remaining Christmas cash to pick up his novel, Confessions of the Antichrist.
Full disclosure, if I didn't already follow Hart's treasury of thought on Substack ("The Pragmatic Mystic") and hadn't known he's an elder brother to DBH (perhaps Mycroft to David's Sherlock?), I may have wrongly assumed from the title that Confessions was another fan fiction instalment of the Left Behind literary debacle. I'm glad I knew better! For while this short novel is very readable and moves quickly, it also boasts some wonderfully creative premises that left me pondering (as his ghost stories had in my essay here).
I'm wary of spoilers, and would even recommend avoiding the Amazon summary. So rather than offering an overview of the plot, I can hint at it by suggesting some pre-reading thought experiments to tempt you into Hart's treatment.
The way Addison plays with these questions is well worth enjoying. The book has previously compared the book to a meeting of Through the Looking-Glass and The Divine Comedy. Yes, or I might suggest that it's the lovechild of The Grand Inquisitor and The Screwtape Letters because its relevance is a serious exploration in the nature of temptation and how we in 'the real world' regularly succumb to it in the name of our best ideas, which are precisely what got us into the current mess.
P.S. A few minor asides: I appreciated the very short chapters. It allowed me to snack on the book between tasks or at the end of the day and kept the book moving.
And I would also recommend pausing to look up Hart's incidental references to books, authors, history (historical figures, the Etruscans, etc.), and artworks (Goya)--worthy of pausing for sure.
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Shadia Drury, Chauvinism of the West: The Case of American Exceptionalism (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024)
Each year a few fine and must-read books are published (others not worth more than a passing glance), but there can be little doubt that Shadia Drury’s Chauvinism of the West is a ten-bell book. There is much packed into this historic read of the West and its impact on the notion and ideology of American exceptionalism—the origins, history and contemporary reality of American politics, foreign policy and global politics are parsed and exposed well and wisely.
Chauvinism of the West is divided into 6 compact, probing and arrow hitting bull’s eye well chapters: 1) The Roots of American Exceptionalism, 2) Manifest Destiny Goes Global, 3) What’s Wrong with Spreading Democracy, 4) Neoconservative Realism, 5) Fascist Elements in Neoconservative Realism and 6) The Political Theology of the West. Each of the paced well and tightly argued chapters are divided into smaller sections that hold the reader as Shadia’s argument unfolds and develops. The almost 50 pages of the “Annotated Bibliography” convert the at odds book with the orthodox way of viewing America into a spacious library that highlights further reading for those interested in following the pathway and trail that Shadia organized and constructed.
The cover of Chauvinism of the West speaks its own evocative and convincing message, metaphor of Statue of Liberty falling into the sea, foaming waves soon to bury and drown it, city in the distance soon to suffer the same fate.
Continue reading "Shadia Drury's "Chauvinism of the West" - Review by Ron Dart" »
T.S. Eliot began the 6th of his Advent-Christmas-Epiphany Ariel poems “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees” in an apt and poignant manner.
There are several attitudes towards Christmas,
Some of which we may disregard:
The social, the torpid, the patently commercial,
The rowdy (the pubs being open to midnight),
And the childish—which is not that of the child
The birth of the child, of course, was none of the above, so accurately depicted by Eliot. The actual birth was about the uncertain Joseph-Mary having to leave their home in Nazareth, being ignored in their hour of birthing need in Bethlehem, larger political powers seemingly driving them to places of loneliness---they must have wondered as did the Magi in Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi” that indeed it was a cold coming, a hard coming and was it all folly? And where was God in all this, God actually with them in the form of a vulnerable child (never easy to see when much seems to contradict and oppose such a read of a lived historic moment).
It would have been a matter of months (perhaps under 2 years) that Herod sent his death squads to slaughter many innocent children, Joseph-Mary and Jesus refugees, flight to Egypt and the Jewish community there a temporary home for a few years. Such is, in brief, the tale of the Jewish Jesus born from the Jewish context, the Biblical Jewish tale central to the Western Tradition and ethos, a chosen people, a people offered land, a people near and dear to a significant segment of the Christian Tradition. But, where in this tale are the Muslim and Christian Palestinians?
We have witnessed a barbaric and aggressive Jewish assault on the Palestinians in Gaza since October 2023. The extreme right-of-centre Israeli state has brutally, even though judged as engaging in genocide and violating international law, ignored basic human rights and savaged the Palestinians in Gaza (the West Bank has also felt the impact of this). The right-of-centre Jewish Orthodox Zealots and Christian Zionists have cheered on such a war against a people, and Western leaders have done little to halt the carnage. And, there was the 1st Christmas--yes, the slaughter of the innocents (many more done by the Jewish state than ever done by the Roman military) and Mary-Joseph-Jesus refugees (rather minor when compared to the multitude of Palestinian refugees).
What will be the long-term ripple effect for politics in the Middle East and Palestinian children who have seen families killed, homes destroyed, hospitals, and educational structures obliterated? How will Muslim states (pro-contra West) view the virtual apathy of Israel in this war? And there was the 1st Christmas, many faithfully and religiously remember these days, some as Eliot noted, missing the deeper meaning. But what is the relationship between what the Palestinians are living through (much more gruesome and sustained, Jewish death squads creating hovels, slaughtering many innocents) and the 1st Christmas? To isolate the latter from the reality of the former is to misread the meaning of the contemporary reality in Israel today and its war, genocide, and refugee-making machine on the Muslim and Christian Palestinians on this Christmas season. It might be of some worth to read Eliot’s “The Triumphal March,” the 5th in the Ariel poems, to get a sense of how such a drama plays itself out in the affluent and insulated West to get a sense of the tragedy the West and Israel are facilitating and inflicting on the Palestinians and the unwary implications of it
Fiat Lux
Ron Dart
WARRIOR OF GOD
Syed M Shah
The glint of the sun;
Warms the soul.
From the cold draft;
That seeps thru pores;
From the darkened hills.
A black tide of struggle;
Lingering like a plague;
From crest to crest;
Seen by eyes of this world;
As an undefeatable enemy
"Easy boy", I speak to the heart;
As it purrs with slight fear.
"One last ride I promise";
A known lie that travels like Soothness;
Serenity within a world of disturbance.
Like a fish in deep water;
Smooth below the violent surface.
We ride together Heart, Soul, and Body.
Oh how often we have rode this ride!
1000 and 1 times we led this charge...
That battered armor still holds strong,
That splintered lance still is sharp,
That wounded spirit still is alive,
That dejected heart still holds hope,
This world of unbelief still holds this believer...
The warmth of God's Hand;
Takes the last of doubt.
And you stand - light upon light;
From head to toe facing Darkness.
Syed M Shah
Joonas Sildre’s Between Two Sounds: Arvo Pärt’s Journey to his Musical Language (trans. Adam Cullen (Plough Publishing, 2024).
I confess that I had not recalled previously hearing of Arvo Pärt, the subversive Estonian musician and Soviet exile, nor of ‘tintinnabuli,’ the distinctive musical technique he created. It’s unlikely I would have happened upon him were it not for my friends at Plough Publishing, who graciously sent me a beautiful copy of a graphic novel about his work. That led me to a deep dive of reading the book, listening to hours of Pärt’s compositions, digging into his history as a dissident, and studying his technique. What tied it all together for me was his faith and the remarkable story told so creatively by Sildre and his graphics.
Please purchase your copy >> HERE.
What worked for me so well: first, the 220+ page biography moves quickly because the various sized panels don’t bog down the reader with excessive text. The narrative flows smoothly through the well-written dialogue and clean artwork. The black, white, and greyscale was appropriate to the era and Joonas Sildre is a master of drawing music.
The story itself caught my attention because of my own heritage—a family of faith that knew the communist era persecutions of Czechoslovakia and their musical resistance to the hammer and sickle with bow strings and brass. It was beautiful to hear how Pärt could proclaim the ancient themes of Emmanuel, the Nativity and the Passion in a new musical language.
When I first sampled Arvo Pärt’s tintinnabuli works, it sounded like a brooding form of classical songwriting. But there’s more to it than that. On one hand, it derives in part from early polyphony and Gregorian chant. On the other, tintinnabuli was truly invented by Pärt in 1976 (in a piano piece titled Für Alina. In a fascinating article, “Tintinnabuli – technique, style or ideology? Music In Movement,” it is defined as
… a distinct technique, which in essence unites two monodic lines of structure – melody and triad – into one, inseparable ensemble. It creates an original duality of voices, the course and inner logic of which are defined by strict, even complicated mathematical formulas…
Tintinnabuli music can also be described as a style in which the musical material is extremely concentrated, reduced only to the most important, where the simple rhythm and often gradually progressing melodies and triadic, so-called tintinnabuli voices are integrated into the complicated art of polyphony, expressing the composer’s special relationship to silence.
In addition, tintinnabuli is also an ideology, a very personal and deeply sensed attitude to life for the composer, based on Christian values, religious practice and a quest for truth, beauty and purity.
In Arvo Pärt’s own words,
I could compare my music to white light which contains all colours. Only a prism can divide the colours and make them appear; this prism could be the spirit of the listener.
More technically, he adds,
“Tintinnabuli is the mathematically exact connection from one line to another…. the rule where the melody and the accompaniment is one. One and one, it is one – it is not two. This is the secret of this technique.”
For my own part, the graphic novel taught me how to listen (and ‘see’!) the importance and function of silence—both in the musical compositions and in the spirit/Spirit of faith-based resistance (external and internal). I’ll leave you with
a sampling here of Sildre’s art and then Pärt’s music below:
John W. Martens and Paul V. Niskanen (eds.), The Transcendent Mystery of God’s Word: A Critical Synthesis of Antioch and Alexandria (Saint Paul Seminary Press, 2024).
There has been, in the history of Christian exegesis, at one level, a consistent yet unhelpful tension, simplification and polarization between the literal, grammatical, historic and linguistic approach to exegesis that Antioch (both as a place and metaphor for a type of exegesis) embodies and the more allegorical, tropological, anagogical and mystical exegetical approach of Alexandria (both as a site and icon) of an alternate approach to exegesis. Needless to say, such an either-or attitude should not dominate—in short, there is plenty of Alexandria in Antioch and Antioch in Alexandria.
I should note, before I comment on this fine book, that it was dedicated to Ben D. Meyer (1926-1995). When I was doing my PHD at McMaster University in the mid-1980s, I was Ben’s TA for a semester. I shall never forget the way he assigned, for a lower level class, Bernard Lonergan’s (1904-1984) Insight: A Study in Human Understanding---we who were his TAs had to interpret Lonergan to students who had not the slightest idea of what Lonergan was saying, doing and why, his opposition to “field specialization-subject specialization”, most young students not mature enough to comprehend. But, Ben’s thinking had been deeply impacted by Lonergan and Lonergan-Meyer were grappling, in a significant and nuanced way, with the challenges of the Enlightenment’s historic, empirical and rationalist approach (that was used by many in their approach to the Bible) and a more classical layered method (that was true to modern methods but also acutely alert to how such approaches both revealed and concealed the motherlode and mystery of the text).
The Transcendent Mystery of God’s Word brings together essays from a conference in June 2022, highlighting eight packed and challenging chapters that engage, in an updated way, layered ways of defining both Antioch and Alexandria and a lively and healthy dialogue between them. Specific texts are chosen from limited passages in the Bible that reflect both Antioch and Alexandria and massage the nature of both “letter” and “Spirit”. The varied approaches of Patristic exegesis and how Psalms can be interpreted and applied are wisely covered just as New Testament texts that reflect on the baptism of Jesus and “the Johannine Farewell Discourse”. Each of these chapters, when read slowly and thoughtfully, reread and sat with for days, walks the attentive reader into a way of reading the Bible in a way that asks of the reader a thoughtful and receptive mind and imagination. A rather dated and, perhaps, irrelevant notion of Antioch versus Alexandria or Alexandria versus Antioch vanishes in such a judicious approach and multiple probes. I have no doubt that Ben Meyer would be amply pleased with those who have been given the torch he once carried and carried it yet further.
The front cover of the book has splendid painting of St. Jerome as a portal of sorts into the sanctuary of insights. It might have been valuable, given the Antioch-Alexandria dialogue to have Origen gracing the cover also.
Ben Meyer was at McMaster at the same time as the much respected Canadian political philosopher George Grant. Both Grant and Meyer would have agreed with Lonergan’s questioning of “field specialization-subject specialization”--all three would have been committed to multiple methods to approach the more comprehensive whole and mystery of the journey. The underlying vision of The Transcendent Mystery of God’s Word very much reflects such a notion of the deeper concerns and reasons for uniting, in an updated way, Antioch and Alexandria.
The Bibliography in The Transcendent Mystery of God’s Word is an inviting library in itself and many of the books listed point in directions for those interested that bring to the fore the fuller landscape of the Antioch-Alexandria merging. If understood aright, these approaches can be friends on the journey rather than opponents. John Martens and Paul Niskanen should be offered many a kudo for this 10 bell book that one and all should read and inwardly digest for a mature understanding of Antioch-Alexandria and the transcendent mystery of God’s Word.
Amor Vincit Omnia
Ron Dart
"The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord." Romans 6:2
It's amazing how a pre-conceived "framework" constrains how you understand a piece of text. For example, 2x4 is either 8 or a piece of lumber depending on whether you are a mathematician or a carpenter. We always come to texts with a framework which is sometimes not found in the text itself.
So, the "juridical/accounting/transactional" framework that I was taught always told me that St. Paul meant "If we sinned we owed God big-time, so much that we could never re-pay so Jesus paid it for us, suffering the wrathful penalty of God's justice, paid the debt we owed to God for our sins, and the zero balance of the ledger was our free gift from Christ".
Over the years the "substitutionary" framework (as it is usually preached) made less and less sense as "the gospel" in light of what I read about God in the Gospels. One day I read the text exactly as it is written: It says "SIN pays the wage of death." Not God. God doesn't kill us because we sin. WE embrace death when we serve sin, and sin gives us the paycheck it promises and we cash it: Alienation and separation from God who is Life. Apart from Life, we die.
And yet God still offers a free gift: Himself, Life, not "wages". He doesn't offer Life as a paycheck for "not sinning", He offers forgiveness carte blanche. He always has from the beginning. There is no death in God. There cannot be, because He is Life eternal. Death is only in us.
St. Gregory said, "What is not assumed is not healed." That is The Gospel in seven words. When Jesus died in His human flesh He assumed ALL that is within us, our nature, our limitations, our will, our mortal flesh and ultimately even our death and united it ALL to God. He accepted sin's "wage" even though He didn't earn it by sinning. He took the paycheck and ripped it up instead of cashing it in.
So, God didn't kill Jesus instead of us (John MacArthur's take on Good Friday). Christ accepted the wages from sin (not from God the Father) on our behalf and nailed the W-2 to the cross (Colossians 2:14). Death is zero'd out. In Christ we have no fear of an audit, no taxes due, no penalties for non-payment of our back taxes. It has ALL been assumed into Christ.
In all the Parables, the Master, Lord, King, Landowner forgave the debts of his crappy householders, borrowers, scammers, and negligent subjects with "a Word". He NEVER extracted the due debt from an innocent third party and then offer the zero-sum, paid off balance sheet to the debtors as a "gift" the innocent paid for. On the Cross God in Christ absorbs death, the wages of sin, into Himself because God is Life and not even our "last enemy" (I Cor. 15:26), invincible death can prevail before and within God. As Solomon said, "Love is stronger than death..."
St. Paul says, "God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself" at the Cross. (2 Cor. 5:19) He was not vicariously punishing Christ, exacting a penalty, or substituting Him for us in some cosmic juridical execution of a guilty evil-doer. THIS is why we celebrate "The Feast of The Precious and Life-giving Cross" because death is slain through the power of love. Therefore it is not called "The Celebration of the Horror of the Penalty God Demanded in His Righteousness".
The Gospel is not about wages, ledger books to be balanced, cosmic justice and penalties to be paid to a God who must pay Himself off via His Son to satisfy His need for a balanced ledger or the guilty punished. The Gospel is about a benevolent King who just forgives because that is who He is: an unconstrained, free God who is Love. And because of that He takes all the crap and debt and even death that we can deal out into Himself for our sake's just because He loves us, because that is His nature.
I once held the former thing as "Gospel", and it made sense to me until it didn't. Then I found the latter thing in the Parables. The longer I live the latter thing makes more and more sense to me. God says to us, "Forgive your enemies..." and either He expects us to be better gods than Him as a "juridical God" or He does what He expects of us (though we fall short, He does not.)
All that said, we look upon the Cross today as our salvation, regardless of what theological framework we bring to it.
As if we can make sense of the horror of the Cross.
As if we can make sense of human, much less, divine Love.
(For the Feast of the Cross, Sept. 14).
Painting by Salvador Dali
Compassion Not Criminalization: The Chronic Misunderstanding of Drug Addiction
by Madeleine T. Canlis
The opioid crisis is at an all-time high, killing around 250 people each day in the US alone (USA Facts, 2024). While controversy ensues over the most effective strategy to address this national health crisis, most everyone can at least agree that the billions of dollars spent up to this point has not worked. With the infamously unsuccessful War on Drugs anchoring our collective understanding of addiction, we must ask ourselves, is there a better way to address this issue? Drawing from scholarly research, expert opinions, and global examples, I will be contending that we are gravely misunderstanding addiction, and that the solution to this crisis lies not in increased punishment but in compassion and trauma-informed care.
A quick note on language: I will be mostly using the term “PWUD” (people who use drugs) instead of “addicts”. As I discuss the importance of empowering PWUD, I find it appropriate to emphasize the person over the problem. That being said, I know many PWUD who self-select the term “addict”, finding it more accessible and less performative. For that reason, there are a few cases where the term “addict” is used.
If I were to ask someone what they think causes drug addiction, chances are they would answer that when someone tries a drug, especially the stronger ones, they are likely to become addicted to it due to the strong chemical hooks of the drug. Makes sense, right? Well, many case studies throughout history seem to suggest an alternate explanation, leaving us to take a look at the numbers and see that something isn’t adding up. Take, for example, American soldiers during the Vietnam War. A few years into the conflict, a startling statistic was reported to the American public that 20 percent of active soldiers had become heroin addicts in their time deployed. For a country rallying around Nixon’s promise to eradicate drug abuse once and for all, this news was unsettling.
As these soldiers arrived back home, however, something peculiar happened: 95 percent of them quit cold turkey, returning smoothly to the comfort of the lives they had left before the war (Hari, 2015). If addiction was caused principally by the development of a chemical dependency, these men should’ve been addicts for life. What piece are we missing? Well, according to author Johann Hari (2015), we are attributing addiction to all the wrong sources. He teaches that the opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety, but connection. These soldiers were using heroin to survive the hellish conditions of war; when they returned home to their families and places of belonging, there was no need for it anymore. Perhaps even stronger than chemical hooks are social and environmental factors. This realization changes everything.
CLICK HERE to download the full article and continue reading
Madeleine Canlis is a Grad Student in School of Social Work, University of Washington
New Release: Philemon of Gaza Meditates Luke's Gospel
"Turning the the other cheek is not enough: Luke 6:27-38"
The People's Seminary is delighted to announce the publication of the first English translation of 6th Century Philemon of Gaza's mediation on Luke's Gospel. Check out his inspiring reflection on Luke 6:27-38 below.
“To whoever slaps you on one cheek offer him the other.”
When we have received a slap, the first reaction that comes to us is most often to respond, slap for slap, we might say. The action of anger is rapid, so rapid in fact that it is, so to speak, instinctive. Also, what the Lord commands us regarding the slap becomes very difficult because we are to turn the other cheek before even responding to our aggressor.
There are commandments that we can obey after careful consideration, but this is not the case with this one. We are to turn our cheek spontaneously, without even taking time to think. We barely have time to pray before turning the other cheek, and if we pray, then our prayer must be very brief, spontaneous, instinctive and precede any reflection.
Such rapid and instinctive obedience is not possible without long prior work on our part, without long practice of prayer, without long practice of obedience to the Lord, without such practice that our obedience has become our new nature. Then we can turn the other cheek without anger, without responding slap for slap. Anger is a fire that lights up very quickly; it is like a beast with rapid reflexes. Not responding to a slap requires having tamed anger and being its master. What is then necessary for us is self-control; it is also to have replaced anger with gentleness.
O my soul, you know that meekness and self-control are fruits of the Spirit (Gal 5:23). The long preliminary work that we must do in order not to retaliate against a slap is therefore only possible with the help of the Lord and the precious gift of the fruits of the Holy Spirit. You also know that this help is granted to us in response to a long practice of prayer and unfailing obedience to the commandments of the Lord; thus, our obedience to the command on slapping will be spontaneous.
Only the humble know how to obey in this way, those whose humility has been granted by the Lord along with meekness and self-control. I now understand the apophthegm where we are told that a hermit turned the other cheek and thus chased away an evil spirit, he lived so much in this perfect humility received from the Lord.
However, after turning the other cheek, we may still not at peace, nor in love towards our aggressor, nor ready to forgive him. Why is that?
Turning your cheek is not enough! O my soul, I give thanks for the enlightenment given by the Lord to Abba Joseph who explains to us that this absence of peace comes from the fact that our pride has also been slapped. Indeed, not only has our cheek received a slap, but our pride has received one too. So if the fire of our anger was extinguished when we turned our cheek, another fire remains in us, the fire of resentment, a fire maintained by our pride which refuses to forgive and love our aggressor. While anger reacts and retaliates quickly, without even thinking, resentment takes time to reflect and nurture revenge before responding to the aggression.
This is why, Abba Joseph tells us, we must truly obey the Lord and turn the other cheek, not the left cheek when the right has been struck, but the other right cheek, the inner cheek of our pride.
This in truth is the deep meaning of the commandment given to us by the Lord. How marvelous! The long work that it is good for us before being attacked is the work of humility which alone chases away pride and resentment and then allows us to forgive our aggressor and to truly love. This humility that is victorious over pride is that which only the Lord can give us, the divine humility which he grants to those who have already walked a long way down the path of human humility. It is this humility received from the Lord which allows us to obey spontaneously, this famous humility which allowed Mark, the disciple of Abba Silvanus, to interrupt the writing of his omega. It is the very humility of Jesus who was slapped several times without ever responding with a slap (Mt 26:7; Mk 14:65; Jn 18:22; 19:3).
We are never told that he turned the other cheek, because in truth, it was the invisible inner cheek that he turned; this reaction escaped the eyes of men, but not the eyes of the Evil One who was immediately repelled and chased away. The Lord, meek and humble of heart (Mt 11:29), is the only one who can enable us to respond with meekness and humility to an aggressor. He only grants this gift to those who open themselves to it through long interior work in synergy with him. Then we are given to turn our inner cheek with true love to our enemy.
Order your copy of Philemon of Gaza Meditates Luke's Gospel here.
Philemon of Gaza Meditates Mark's Gospel, is now available as an Audiobook here, as is Daniel Bourguet's The Humble Divinity of Jesus in Mark's Gospel, Volume 1 and Volume 2 paperback, e-book and Audiobook versions.