Join me for the Advent prayer challenge: Pray only with digital versions of attractive celebrities on your favorite app. No need to ever associate with regular Christians or darken the door of an actual church building again. Best of all we’ll call it “spiritual renewal”!

For Chicagoland locals, I worked up this fancy graphic (AI free!) for my talk entitled Miracles on Roosevelt Road... Hope to see you next Monday Dec. 8 at 7pm at the @WheatonPL (online or in person, but please do register at this link) www.wheatonlibrary.org/event/miracl...

I spent 4 days at the Orthodox Academy of Crete where the Russians famously backed out of the Holy and Great Council of 2016 (presaging the war). Among the participants was a former young Russian monk (an Augustine scholar) who was defrocked for opposing the same war. He can’t go home.

Subscribe to The Critic. That is all.

Love letter to Canada with a crooked bow tie, being my Larkin-Stuart lecture last week at the University of Toronto's Trinity College www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrhH...

Someone at a conference today began a question by saying, “We are academics, we don’t believe in God.” It was so cute! We snickered politely and carried on.

Report from Toronto: growing majors at the U of T include religion, philosophy, and art history (told to me by a prof). Anglican vicar says students are showing up at church out of the blue saying, “I need meaning in my life.”

You wanna know who is a real scholar-pastor of faithful integrity in a great North American city? Jason Byassee.

You wanna know who is a real scholar-pastor of faithful integrity in a great North American city? Jason Byassee.

“I don’t need to “deconstruct” my faith because I have read Dionysius the Areopagite, who does such a better job of that than modern Christians, all the while pointing me to the un-deconstructible mystery of Christ.”

“'Would you feel better if I’d shown up wearing a Proton Pack?' I asked." via the ever delightful Mockingcast mbird.com/everyday/exp...

Like I said, enjoying the resurgence of classical theism.

I’m very much enjoying living through the inevitable resurgence of “classical theism” (or whatever one chooses to call it).

George MacDonald to John Ruskin, improving on Julian of Norwich (which is no easy task): “I am more and more convinced that all is on the way to being well, with a wellness to which there is no other way than this, where you and I are walking.” www.youtube.com/watch?time_c...

“It speaks volumes that leaders in this church supported Perpetua’s writing to the point of saving this document, which would have been easy to destroy. Instead, they edited it after her martyrdom, published it, and made sure it received a reading.” -NadyaWilliams t.co/R8UPbfWLQv

"That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings." -John Ruskin, Unto This Last (Ruskin's Collected Works, vol. 17, p. 105)

G.K. Chesterton's first reaction to neon advertising on Broadway: "What a magnificent spectacle for a man who cannot read."

John of Apamea (a.k.a. John the Solitary, 5th c. Syriac mystic) on 💰& 🙌

Well, at least the crises in the church today have precedent.

I love that these are next to each other in our library (so that future minds can be rescued from amusingly reductive approaches to mind).

"In other words, Indigenous people did not need to wait for Columbus to have something to resist." t.co/o7Il3DwKfa

Very concerning development here:

The October Material Mysticism at @commentmagazine.bsky.social is a descent through the maw of despair into a hell of mercy. comment.org/salvation-by...

“Behold now, praise the Lord… You that stand by night in the house of the Lord.” Psalm 134

"The truth is I'm going to be on my deathbed and the five years I spent as a youth minister are going to be the most important things I ever did." -David Zahl themockingcast.fireside.fm/284

What a thrill to host Father Maximos Constas in our Virgin Mary class today to discuss his translation of the Life of the Virgin! If you don’t know his work, I’d start with his book The Art of Seeing. www.uaustin.org/people/nicho...

“The Virgin’s brilliance, moreover, is never obscured by the arrival of [Jesus] the son, as is as the constellation Virgo [which is obscured by the sun], but to the contrary is rendered brighter by the presence of what is superior.” -John Geometres

A genuine delight to tag team with iconographer Nick Papas at Villanova (who created this Augustine icon in a matter of hours), to learn of the art of the equally Augustinian Vernon Adams, to meet author Catherine Ricketts, and to finally meet the inestimable Martin Laird!

Aidan Hart is the real deal. Shame on me for not realizing this sooner (though I did know of his work), thanks to Matthew Dallman for getting me to his talk. And in addition to his YouTube talks, he has written it all down. www.aidanharticons.com/product-cate...

🤯

New piece on some recent happenings at Asbury and Wheaton College: millinerd.substack.com/p/the-art-of...

Ashley Lande and I are uniting a divided America at Comment with the modest claim that at least we don't need a bunch of new people dropping acid right now. Things are weird enough already. t.co/mfw3p8AHS4

Raising children as a cheat code.

“I hesitate to use the term “psychedelic” in any kind of a positive way, yet I’ve had the thought that birth is psychedelic in a way that the “best” trip can only ever mimic, and very poorly.”

Intro to this month’s Material Mysticism at @commentmagazine.bsky.social : millinerd.substack.com/p/just-say-no

“I think people are perhaps slowly realizing that psychedelics simply cannot deliver on the promises their proponents aver, and a gradual disillusionment is taking place.” @millinerd.bsky.social interviews Ashley Lande on psychedelics and Christianity.

The September issue of Material Mysticism at Comment Magazine covering psychedelics and Christianity with the ever insightful Ashley Lande: comment.org/decoy-enligh...

Those stale takes on Luther may need an upgrade. This is the upgrade. 👇🏻

Once more, Christians have known this for 2000 years, but we’re delighted psychology is catching up: “I’m going to crush her like a worm, and then I’m going to crush you.” He cites Christian mystics like Dionysius the Areopagite, Maggie Ross and William Johnston as one response.

That time the all-religions-same crowd lost a big fish.

“Perhaps Julian of Norwich does not “belong” to any of the churches. Instead, she was ahead of and above us all, pulling each of us together into a theology that is bigger than our divided communions.” @millinerd.bsky.social on Norwich and the gospel of grace.

Count me in @millinerd.bsky.social: "I invite what’s left of the evangelical elite to join me in full scale disillusionment not with the church (how easy that would be), but with the entire enterprise of scholarship & publishing that some deploy to expose it." millinerd.substack.com/p/i-kissed-e...

It’s been called the Marian event of 2024… by me. The latest of my continuing Comment Magazine ADVENTures begins at the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham #MaterialMysticism comment.org/the-secret-o...