What’s caught my eye…

Helen Alvaré, a Professor of Law at George Mason University writes:

…according to the powers-that-be, supporting killing unborn human beings is “heroic,” supporting natural familial bonds for children is “demeaning,” and forcing religious employers to insure (and really to pay for) services for their employees that they cannot in good conscience support is “respecting religious freedom.”

“Without Words to Describe | Public Discourse” http://feedly.com/k/18REG5Z

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Making a Difference?

We talk a lot about making a difference in people’s lives but do we actually do that? Do we preach to transform or do we preach to survive? Do we stay clear of controversial topics , so we do not upset the apple cart, or do we take them straight on? Are we working to break the cycle, or are we just contributing to it?

Fr. Peter Michael Preble

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HHS Mandate: Where Do Things Stand?

Source: Acton Institute PowerBlog.

According to the Becket Fund, there are currently 44 active cases against the Obama administration’s HHS mandate requiring employers to include abortion, sterilization and abortifacients as “health care”. There have been 14 for-profit companies that have filed suit; 11 of those have received temporary injunctions against implementing the mandate.

Read more on HHS Mandate: Where Do Things Stand?…

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Thinking about America

Some recent posts here have been devoted to my own thoughts about the American Experiment in relationship to the tradition of the Orthodox Church. I thought the following two videos might be of some use.

The first is from Congressman Randy Forbes (R-VA-4th District) talking on the floor of the US House of Representatives about America's Judeo-Christian heritage. The second is country music singer Rodney Atkins' song "It's America."

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

Rep. Forbes, "Our Judeo-Christian Nation":



Rodney Atkins, "It's America":

Faith, Reason and Science

Yesterday's back and forth between NeoChal and I on the morality of artificial contraception raises for me an interesting question. How did the Fathers of the Church regard what today we would see as the findings of empirical science? When, in other words, the Fathers appeal to the scientific understanding of their era, do the see this data as normative or only illustrative? In other words, is a moral positions being advanced based on the best possible science of the day or do the Fathers simply appeal to that science to elucidate an moral argument?

This is important not only for the question of the morality of artificial contraception, but also those areas of the Church's dogmatic tradition that touch on matters explored today by the natural, social and human sciences. Think about what it might me for a central dogma of the Christian faith, the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Holy Trinity in the womb of the Mother of God.

In the ancient world, the best science of the day understood reproduction in a as analogous to agriculture. The male implanted a child in the female much as a farmer would sow seed in a field. The womb was merely the receptacle of the semen and the female was either fertile or not in much the same way that soil was capable of sustaining a crop. In this model of reproduction, the idea of the Virgin conceiving without a human father for the Christ Child isn't much of a stress. But is the dogma isn't dependent on the science, even if the science of the time offered humanity a way of entering more deeply into an appreciative understanding of the mystery.

Returning to the realm of moral theology, those who dismiss the patristic prohibitions against contraception, or the biblical texts cited in against homosexual activity because these positions are based in faulty science are (I think) following into much the same error as I sketched out above. We ought not to confuse, much less reduce, dogmatic or moral truths to our explanation of the truth.

Clearly this is much easier to say then to do in practice. We often don't come to realize that we have conflated dogma and its explanation until science (or philosophy) undergirding our understanding of the truth is challenged. Thinking about this a bit more, it seems to me that we must always be on our guard that we do not put our faith in the fruits of our own reason. Reason is, or at least, should be at the service of faith. Does this mean that faith trumps reason? I don't think so since faith needs reason even as reason needs faith.

Commenting on Wisdom 9.11 ("Wisdom knows all and understands all") the late Pope John Paul II argues in Fides et Ratio that what “is distinctive in the biblical text is the conviction that there is a profound and indissoluble unity between the knowledge (cognitio) of reason and the knowledge of faith.” The Pope continues by reminding his readers that the “world and all that happens within it, including history and the fate of peoples, are realities to be observed, analysed and assessed with all the resources of reason, but without faith ever being foreign to the process.” How is this possible? It is possible because “Faith intervenes not to abolish reason's autonomy nor to reduce its scope for action, but solely to bring the human being to understand that in these events it is the God of Israel who acts.” For this reason, he conclude, “the world and the events of history cannot be understood in depth without professing faith in the God who is at work in them. Faith sharpens the inner eye, opening the mind to discover in the flux of events the workings of Providence” (#16).

What this means is that when the Fathers appealed to the best science of their day they were not confining the Mystery of Faith to the merely empirical, they were not arguing that faith was dependent upon human reason, much less scientific research. What were they doing then? I would argue that they were illuming science, putting it at the service of faith and, in so doing, making clear the necessarily limited character of not only science but human reason itself.

Often when people, in innocence and without a self-seeking motive, dismiss patristic moral teaching because it is based on faulty science, they do so because they fail to reckon with the provision nature of empirical, and especially experimental science. Even the best scientific research is only provisional and this not simply because ALL human knowledge limited, but because scientific research is predicated on the willingness of the scientist to critically re-evaluate and even challenge today what was yesterday's newly discovered truth. Ironically, even if we do so without malice, when we reject patristic moral (or dogmatic for that matter) teaching because it is based on faulty science we inadvertently wed ourselves to what itself will one day be judged as faulty or deficient science.

That said, however, I do not think we can go “backwards.” We can't come to the Fathers as if the intervening centuries and changes in human knowledge and understanding of ourselves and the natural world has not happened. To do this is to dishonor the work of the Fathers and their willingness to struggle with the great issues and thoughts of their day. More than that though, when I “flee” to the Fathers as if the intervening centuries had not happened, I reduce faith to merely history and strip it of its personal quality. How? By imagining that I can divest myself of my own time and culture and imagining—fantasizing really—that I am a Christian not on my own time, but of another.

But I here to tell you, this is the path of delusion, of prelast. I either stand before Christ as a man of my time, faithful not only to what has gone before, but also of what is here and now, or I do not stand before Him at all.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

Freedom and the Church's American Exile

Both on the AOI blog and my own, my post, “Pentecost, Lincoln and the American Experiment,” brought some very interesting and thought provoking comments. Your thoughts have helped me think a bit more deeply about the relationship between the Tradition of the Orthodox Church and the American Experiment. For this I thank you all.

And even more importantly, your words were very much in mind as I read Michael Baxter recent review of American Babylon: Notes of A Christian in Exile, by the late Fr Richard John Neuhaus.

As is no doubt clear from what I wrote, I do not see Orthodoxy and the American Experiment as necessarily in opposition to each other. Or maybe it might be more accurate to say, that the differences between Orthodoxy and America are certainly no wider or deeper than what one would expect between that between God and Caesar, between the City of God which is to come and the City of Man which is here and now.
Be that as it may, however, my interest in political philosophy is motivated by the intuition that—for better and worse—the City of Man conditions the pastoral situation of the Church until the Kingdom which is to come.

I have not yet had the opportunity to read Neuhaus's last book. Having been a faithful reader of First Things and a follower of the work of its parent organization, The Institute for Religion in Public Life, I have good sense of the argument that he is likely to make and so I was interested to read Baxter's review in the National Catholic Reporter (a publication together with others which, as Baxter puts it, has “bore the brunt of [Neuhaus's] sardonic, scathing, at times unfair attacks”). Together with the work of John Courtney Murray, Neuhaus (and again this probably does not come as much of a surprise) has always served as a touchstone for my own thinking about the inter-relationship and inter-dependence of Church and State in the American context. Far from being merely my own idiosyncratic view, I would argue that this inter-dependence of Church and State is part of the teaching of the Orthodox Church. We can see this, for example, in the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom.

In and through the Liturgy we join ourselves to Christ Who offers Himself as a sacrifice to God the Father. And we do so not with but also on behalf of the “forefathers, fathers, patriarchs, prophets, apostles, preachers, evangelists, martyrs, confessors, ascetics, and for every righteous spirit made perfect in faith,” the Most Holy Theotokos, “Saint John the prophet, forerunner, and baptist; . . . the holy glorious and most honorable Apostles . . . ; and for all Your saints, through whose supplications,” we ask God to bless us.

And just as in the Liturgy we intercede on behalf of “all Orthodox bishops who rightly teach the word of Your truth, all presbyters, all deacons in the service of Christ, and every one in holy orders” and acknowledge our dependence on their faith, holy prayers and service, we likewise stand before God and intercede on behalf of “all those in public service.” We ask God to “permit them, . . . to serve and govern in peace” so that “through the faithful conduct of their duties” in the civil realm, “we [the Church] may live peaceful and serene lives in all piety and holiness.”

Owning to her conciliar nature, the different orders in the Church each have their own areas of authority and concomitant competency. Modeled on the Most Holy Trinity, in the Church authority and competency are intrinsically personal and reflect not only the unique role of the different orders of the Church but also the personal vocation of each Christian. As such these differences ought not be opposed to each other; nor can one order advance at the expense of the others anymore than one person can (or should) advance at the unjust expense of another. It is rather the case that each progresses only with and through the other orders of the Church. To borrow from Benjamin Franklin in a not wholly different context, “We all hang together or we all hang separately.”

In like fashion while the authority of Church and State are different, difference need not mean opposition even if (I would argue) the State is not a Christian state but (as in the case of America) a secular one. Back now to Baxter's review.
Nuehaus's American Babylon, writes Baxter, “is about being Christian in the United States. The title is an allusion to the Babylonian exile after the fall of Jerusalem in 587 B.C.” While in exile “God, through the prophet, called upon the Israelites there to build houses and plant gardens, to make families and multiply.” I imagine that to an exiled people who understandable viewed their overlords, as well, their overloads and enemy, God command “to 'seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare' (Jeremiah 29:4-8)” came as something of a surprise. God counsels captives not simply to forgive but to actively cooperation, support and even enrich their captors. According to Neuhaus both the “New Testament and patristic authors” understood this to mean two different, but related things.

First, “Christians, in whatever land they live, await their return from exile, not an exile from the earthly Jerusalem however, but from the heavenly Jerusalem.” As a result (and I must confess, Orthodox Christians have not always been faithful on this point), for those who follow Jesus Christ “every nation is Babylon.” Second, just as every land is Babylon, it is our duty in every land “to go along with the customs and seek the welfare of the city.” We must not simply suffer America, we must enrich her as I said earlier.

But, as Neuhaus reminds us, “there is a limit to . . . going along.” Again in Baxter's summary: “Like the Old Testament heroes, Christians are not to worship false gods or accommodate themselves to the ways of the city when it involves betraying their faith. Thus there is a tension or dialectic for Christians between their ultimate allegiance to God and their political allegiances, which are “penultimate.”

Acknowledging and honoring this tension is often easier in theory than practice but for that it is important not only for Christians but also all men and women of good will that we take on the ascesis of doing so practically and not only theoretically. If we don't then we are prone to two extremes that must be undermine the proper function of the State (and for that matter the Church). We must not succumb to either to “the twin dangers of direct governmental control of religion, as in a theocracy, and of privatizing religion, as in the militant secularism of many European governments since the French Revolution.” And again, as Orthodox Christians we have (I think) inadvertently helped set the stage for the latter by our unwise embrace of (or in America, nostalgia for) the former.

In like manner, much of the tension we see in the American Orthodox Church reflects I think our heretofore unwillingness, or at least inability, to grapple with the interdependence of Church and the American Experiment in a way that avoids on the one hand our nostalgia for a lost theocracy and our dread of oppression under a militantly secular (or Islamic) state on the other. Digging deeper I think part of the lesson we might draw from the Church's new American context is that just as our “allegiance to America is [as Neuhaus argues] provisional, not eschatological, limited yet substantial and real,” so too our allegiance to the other cultural and social settings and forms of government in which the Church found herself must be also “provisional, not eschatological, limited yet substantial and real.”

No matter how much these other cultural and social settings or forms of government might be rooted in Holy Tradition, and indeed even served to structure public life (for example) around the liturgical tradition of the Church they are not as such Christian. Yes, as I said in my earlier post, they have become carriers of the Eternal but they do so in a way that does not undo their character as limited and limiting. And how could they not remain finite? Their ontological and historical contingency is part and parcel of their character as human artifacts and we dishonor the past not only when we make it less than it is, but also more.

There are to be sure weaknesses in the American Experiment. Too easily does liberty become license; freedom of religion become indifference (and even hostility) to religion; and for more and more Americans, the pursuit of happiness become the mere search for pleasure and profit rather than the cultivation of the virtues essential for personal and civic excellence. Yes the media and secular forms of education have their role to play in all this. But first and foremost the cultural excesses that plague us reflect the failure of the Church to take seriously our responsibilities. As Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, (1990) in their book Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony, put the matter, “All Christian ethics are social ethics because all our ethics presuppose a social, communal, political starting point—the church.” And is is through her “teaching, support, sacrifice, worship and commitment of the church, utterly ordinary people are enabled to do some rather extraordinary, even heroic acts, not on the basis of their own gifts and abilities, but rather by having a community capable of sustaining Christian virtue. The church enables us to be better people than we could have been if left to our own devices.” (p. 81)

We have, I fear, too often contented ourselves (as Orthodox Christians and American) to be anything but women and men of extraordinary and heroic virtue. And we have not simply settled for leaders (religious and political) who are themselves be no better than we, we have actively pursued this goal and punished them when they dared to see their service as requiring of them that they “be better people” than they would “have been if left” to themselves.

There is no question in my mind that in planting the Church here in America God has challenged us to a kenosis and martyrdom as real, if less bloody, as any the Church faced under Caesar, Islam or Communism. What we now face is the terrible temptation of our own freedom. Who will I become if I can become anyone I want to be? Who do I want to be?

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

Pentecost, Lincoln and the American Experiment

One of the things that interests me a great deal is the relationship between the Tradition of the Orthodox Church and the founding political philosophy of the American experiment. At the risk of appearing overly critical, or even dismissive, I think the failure of Orthodoxy in America is our not having engaged theologically and critically the American experiment on its own terms. Instead we have been willing to use America without necessarily seeing ourselves as obligated to contribute anything to her.

In this the Church has allowed herself to become merely one interest group among others. The Orthodox Church has not engaged the American experiment as yeast in the dough. We have contented ourselves instead merely to fit within the broad, and decadent, framework of modern identify politics.

This failure is more than simply a matter of our presenting ourselves as an ethnic, albeit religiously themed community. Even when the religious character of the Church is focal, it is often the religion of mere morality.  Not without cause have some complained that some in the Orthodox Church seem to want to put the Church's patrimony at the service of the political and social agenda of the Religious Right.

These criticism I think are rather beside the point however. 

The moral tradition of the Church is, in the main, no different then the classical moral teaching of Western Christianity. I suspect the attraction of some Orthodox Christians to the Religious Right reflects more a love of this shared tradition and a real concern for the moral health of American society than a grab for power as such.  Further I suspect that those Orthodox who criticize their brethren's  involvement in conservative politics do so from a desire to see the Church support (if only passively) their own more left leaning politics. But whether from the moral, cultural or political, right or left these criticism are, to repeat myself, are different then my own concern.

The American experiment is I think best expressed by Abraham Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address. Reflecting on the horror of the war tearing at the fabric of the country, President Lincoln looks back to the historical and philosophical founding of the Nation: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” The challenge facing the United States in Lincoln's time (and ours) was not war per se, but whether the American "nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

Reading over the years the work of the late Catholic theologian and political philosopher John Courtney Murray, I have come more and more to appreciate the wisdom of Lincoln's words at Gettysburg. Unlike other countries that are united by land or blood, a shared culture or language, America and Americans are, or should be anyway, united by an idea, the fundamental equality of all human beings.

While it has not always done so well, or even at all, at its best what the American political experiment asks of us is not to surrender our language or culture. Rather as a nation of immigrants, we ask each other to put the riches of our respective cultural and ethnic heritages at the service of the common social good. Granted in our short history there are times when we have honored this idea more in words than deeds. But even when honored in the breech, if there is a unique American culture or mindset it is that enduring faith in the equality of all human beings and the centrality of committing ourselves to the common good of all.

Contrary to her critics harsh words our failure to be faithful to our own ideals is to be expected. It is to be expected not simply because we are sinners, but and again as Lincoln points out at Gettysburg, because the American experiment is always an unfinished work. Whether in times or war or peace, it remains for each generation to answer in the affirmative Lincoln's challenge to his listeners on that not so long ago battlefield:

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government: of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

So what does this have to do with the Orthodox Church? Two things I think.

First, internally, if the Church is to be a real, indigent Orthodox Church and not simply a pale copy of the Church in Greece or Russia, we need to take seriously the challenge of America that in the neither the City of Man nor the City of God do we have to lay aside language or (to the degree it does not contradict the Gospel anyway) our culture. Let me go further. 

On Pentecost Sunday I reminded my own community that the work of salvation while it is directed at human beings certainly.  Salvation also, however, results in the deification of culture. Just as Greek culture was Christianized and became the carrier of Eternal truth without lossin of its own character as either Greek (or so ontologically and historically contingent) so too American culture can be Christianized, become itself a means of communicating what is Eternal in and through the contingent and limited structures of culture and language.

Part and parcel of the Christianization of American culture is I think demonstrating, and this speaks to my second point, that E pluribus unum is not simply a political motto. It is also at the heart of all human community. More than that, it is also at the heart of Church. 

We sing at Vespers on Pentecost:

The Holy Spirit gives all things: makes prophecies flow, perfects priests, taught the unlettered wisdom, revealed fishermen to be theologians, welds together the whole institution of the Church. Consubstantial and equal in majesty with the Father and the Son, our Advocate, glory to you.

The Church is a pneumatic community of unity and diversity not in opposition but harmony. So too while at it best it falls short of this, this is what America aspires to be. The Church offers America a glimpse not only of  her own biblical foundations but the Eucharist which is both a reminder of that towards which America aspires and the standard against which she must also evaluate her own actions, domestic and foreign.

The American Experiment is for me as an Orthodox Christian a real, if imperfect, icon of the Eucharist. Or to borrow from Hebrews, if the Eucharist is an image of the Kingdom which is to come then American Experiment, seen in light of the Eucharist image, is a shadow of the image. And it is as a shadow, as something which points beyond itself to the image, even as the image points beyond itself to the Reality which is to come (see Hebrews 10.1) that Orthodox Christians can and should not only engage but wholehearted love and support the American Experiment.

If we have as Orthodox Christians have been seduced by the identity politics that has come to so mark  contemporary American political discourse on both the left and the right, this doesn't mean that we have to remain bound by our shared failure. Rather we can, if we only decide to do so, return not only to ourselves but return in a way that we can serve the common good of both the City of God and the City of Man.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

Forgiveness and our Civil Life

As I asked in my last post, how do we move beyond a life of civil engagement informed by resentment? The recently Archpastoral Message of His Beatitude, Metropolitan Jonah for Sanctity of Life Sunday offers us the beginning of an answer. His Beatitude writes:

Our life as human beings is not given to us to live autonomously and independently. This, however, is the great temptation: to deny our personhood, by the depersonalization of those around us, seeing them only as objects that are useful and give us pleasure, or are obstacles to be removed or overcome. This is the essence of our fallenness, our brokenness. With this comes the denial of God, and loss of spiritual consciousness. It has resulted in profound alienation and loneliness, a society plummeting into the abyss of nihilism and despair. There can be no sanctity of life when nothing is sacred, nothing is holy. Nor can there be any respect for persons in a society that accepts only autonomous individualism: there can be no love, only selfish gratification. This, of course, is delusion. We are mutually interdependent.

Rooted as it is in pride and self-aggrandizement, is a symptom of my fallenness, of my futile and self-defeating attempts to live a life of radical autonomy and independence (what Robert Bellah somewhat more precisely calls "ontological individualism"). When I reduce my neighbor to the harm he has done me I also reduce myself to the harm that I have suffered. Resentment is a false ontology by which I only disallow my neighbor to be anything other than my enemy and myself to be anything other than a victim.

Resentment, as with "All the sins against humanity, abortion, euthanasia, war, violence, and victimization of all kinds, are the results of depersonalization" Metropolitan Jonah argues. His Beatitude continues,

Whether it is "the unwanted pregnancy", or worse, "the fetus" rather than "my son" or "my daughter;" whether it is "the enemy" rather than Joe or Harry (maybe Ahmed or Mohammed), the same depersonalization allows us to fulfill our own selfishness against the obstacle to my will. How many of our elderly, our parents and grandparents, live forgotten in isolation and loneliness? How many Afghan, Iraqi, Palestinian and American youths will we sacrifice to agonizing injuries and deaths for the sake of our political will? They are called "soldiers," or "enemy combatants" or "civilian casualties" or any variety of other euphemisms to deny their personhood. But ask their parents or children! Pro-war is NOT pro-life! God weeps for our callousness.

Moving from the spiritual life to our life of civic engagement, I think it is important to understand that the absence of resentment, our own personal struggles against the evils of ontological individualism and the depersonalization of self and others are not policy decisions. They are rather a precondition for our virtuous involvement in the civil realm.

Let me go further, whether we are taking political leadership or a leadership role in the home, the work place, or the Church, all demand from me that I first confront my own bitterness and resentment. Only then are we able to find "forgiveness for those who have hurt us," and live "free from the rage that binds us in despair."Whether we are engaging the social world around us as a citizen, a worker, a parent or a minister of the Gospel of Christ, as Christians we know that our work must begin in repentance. "Repentance is not about beating ourselves up for our errors and feeling guilty; that is a sin in and of itself!" as Metropolitan Jonah remind us. Such an approach only engenders guilt and that "keeps us entombed in self-pity. All sin is some form of self-centeredness, selfishness." Real repentance "is the transformation of our minds and hearts as we turn away from our sin, and turn to God, and to one another."

Repentance means to forgive. Forgiveness does not mean to justify someone's sin against us. When we resent and hold a grudge, we objectify the person who hurt us according to their action, and erect a barrier between us and them. And, we continue to beat ourselves up with their sin. To forgive means to overcome that barrier, and see that there is a person who, just like us, is hurt and broken, and to overlook the sin and embrace him or her in love. When we live in a state of repentance and reconciliation, we live in a communion of love, and overcome all the barriers that prevented us from fulfilling our own personhood.

Reflecting on what I've read these last few days about the new presidential administration I worry that whether or not people agree with the policy of the new president, there seems to be a noticeable absence of forgiveness. Both from the political left and right, even when I hear things that agree with the Gospel, I hear an echo of resentment, of old grudges and remembrances of past injustices committed against the speaker or his or her own cause.

While matters of public policy are important, they are secondary. I need to look first to my own heart and only then, in the measure of my own repentance and willingness to forgive those who have harmed me, proceed in the civil realm.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

Resentment and our Civic Life

Needless to say, the inauguration of Barak Obama as the 44^th president of the United States has generated a good amount of interest in both in the US and overseas. Some of what has been said or written about President Obama has been laudatory, other things less so.

Reading through the different viewpoints about our new president, it is difficult for me to escape the sense that—whatever else people think about the new administration—much of what is said is fueled by a sense of resentment.

In the spiritual life, and our civic life as well, resentment is a dangerous emotion to which to give in. This is especially the case when there is some justice, some truth, to our resentment.

The danger of resentment is that it parodies repentance, of the sober self-examination that is at the heart of the spiritual life. When I give in to resentment I see the fault as wholly in you, but not in myself. Resentment is a subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) form of self-aggrandizement. Or, in a word, pride.

St Maximos the Confessor, whose memory the Orthodox Church celebrates today, warns us that whatever we might think, resentment reflects not my neighbor's failure, but my own. My neighbor's fault, he says, is what I use "to justify the evil hatred" that has taken hold of me. The saint continues and tells his monastic readers:

even if you are held by resentment, persist in your praises, and then you will easily return to the same salutary love. Do not, because of your hidden resentment, adulterate your usual praise of your brother in your conversations with the other brethren, surreptitiously intermingling your words with [references to his] shortcomings and condemnation. Instead, make use of unmixed praise and genuinely pray for him, as if you were praying for yourself, and thus you will quickly be delivered from this destructive hatred.

In the context of his own work, Maximos is dealing with gossip and back biting in a monastic community not the life of a citizen in a democracy, much less the increasingly complex world of national and international affairs. Taking his different context into consideration, however, I think that the psychology that underlies St Maximos's teaching is nevertheless applicable not only our spiritual lives, but also the civic realm as well.

Let me explain.

At its core, resentment is not the pain of caused by injustice. Rather, resentment is the unwillingness on my part to see you EXCEPT in terms of how you've hurt me. Not only that, whether the harm is great or small, real or imagined, resentment is also the unwillingness on my part to see myself in any terms other than in the lose I've suffered. The defining characteristic of resent then is the reduction of self and other to the harm done by a moral failure.

None of this is to say that the harm done me is (necessarily) insignificant or unreal. Nor do I mean to imply that the harm should simply be ignored or minimized. But to my resentful heart, the harm becomes if not the whole of the story, the one, indisputable and undeniable fact of my relation with my neighbor, with God and my self.

So what then shall we do? I will attempt an answer in my next post.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

Orthodox Christian Faith in the Public Square

Fr Richard John Neuhaus has an interesting—and as usual, insightful—essay on the relationship (or lack thereof) between Christ and culture in the American context. Fr Neuhaus's reflect center on those

Christians who, knowingly or unknowingly, embrace the model of "Christ without culture"—meaning Christianity in indifference to culture—are captive to the culture as defined by those who control its commanding heights. They are not only captive to it but are complicit in it. Their entrepreneurial success in building religious empires by exploiting the niche markets of the Christian subculture leaves the commanding heights untouched, unchallenged, unengaged.

What I find interesting here is how well this model of the relationship between Christ and culture expresses how most Orthodox Christians here in America understand the Church's relationship to the larger culture. Whether "cradle" or "convert" in my experience at least, there are a surprisingly large number of Orthodox Christians are content to live in an Orthodox ghetto—at least on Sunday morning.

Whether the content of the ghetto is Greek or Russian or a crude imitation by lay converts of monastic life, I suspect that the vast majority of Orthodox parishes—like their broadly evangelical Christian neighbors—what cultural products they produce is one that "typically cater to the Christian market." The fact that a local Protestant congregation does this with Evangelical praise music and witness wear and the Orthodox do it with ethnic food festivals, by making sure we keep the parish for "our" people, or by dressing in the latest 19^th Orthodox Christian peasant chic is a matter of little consequence. In all these case the Orthodox parish is contentment "with being a subculture."

But, as Neuhaus writes,

Christianity that is indifferent to its cultural context is captive to its cultural context. Indeed, it reinforces the cultural definitions to which it is captive. Nowhere is this so evident as in the ready Christian acceptance of the cultural dogma that religion is essentially a private matter of spiritual experience, that religion is a matter of consumption rather than obligation. Against that assumption, we must insist that Christian faith is intensely personal but never private. The Christian gospel is an emphatically public proposal about the nature of the world and our place in it. It is a public way of life obliged to the truth.

Having spent more than a little time with the recent sociological studies that examine the attitudes of Orthodox Christians, I can confirm that for a significant percentage—and in some cases, a majority—of Orthodox Christians draw their understanding of morality not from Holy Tradition but popular American culture.

As with our brothers and sisters in western Christian traditions, many, even most, Orthodox Christians too "have uncritically accepted the dichotomy between public and private, between fact and value, between knowledge and meaning." For all that we might imagine that we are preserving Hellenism or the "other worldliness" of monastic life, we live lives structured on the same "dichotomies [that] are deeply entrenched in American religion and culture and are closely associated with what is often described, and frequently decried, as American individualism."

In other words, our rhetoric notwithstanding, having withdrawn from the work of engaging the culture has not preserved Orthodoxy but surrendered it to American culture.

And so whether I understand my faith as an Orthodox Christian is "conservative or liberal, orthodox or squishy," the important point "is that it is my religion, certified and secured by the fact that it is mine. By the privilege of privacy, it cannot be publicly questioned, and it is forbidden to publicly question the preferred beliefs of others."

Bring our faith as Orthodox Christians into the public square not only in debating the great issue of our day but also in active philanthropy, can only happen if we are willing to shed the notion that our faith is private, merely a preference. This doesn't mean that people will agree with us. Far from it.

But what will happen is that the more I enter with my faith into the public square, the more I will be challenged by others and by events to repent of my own faith will be purified and (hopefully) strengthened. But this purification will not happen without my having to surrender my own fantasies, my own ideas about how the Gospel "ought" to be lived. But taking on this challenge cannot but strengthen not only my personal faith, but our faith as a Church.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

p.s., Sigh! I'm still in Charlotte—my flight is now leaving a hour late giving me 30 minutes from airport to presentation. Your prayers please for a successful retreat according to Christ's will not my own.

+FrG

FIRST THINGS: On the Square » Blog Archive » Desert Like a Rose

A special concern for Orthodox Christians in America is the intersection of Christ, culture and missions. On this point, Peter Leithart, a professor of theology and literature at New Saint Andrews College and pastor of Trinity Reformed Church in Moscow, Idaho, has some interesting observations. He writes in First Things' blog "On the Square," That,

Time was when Christian missions occurred "over there." Every now and then, the missionary would show up at church dressed like a time traveler, to show slides of exotic places and to enchant the stay-at-homes with tales about the strange diet and customs of the natives. Foreign missions still happen, but that model seems like ancient history. With the new immigration and the increased ease of travel and communication, the mission field has moved into the neighborhood, and every church that has its eyes open is asking every day how to do "foreign missions."

After some very well thought out biblical reflections on the missionary character of both Adam and Israel he concludes his essay by observing that:

In its first centuries, the Church was mainly preoccupied with evangelizing Greco-Roman culture, a process that Robert Jenson has identified as the “evangelization of metaphysics.” Despite liberal accusations that the Church fell prey to “acute Hellanization,” the reality was almost the opposite. Cultural and intellectual life was transformed from within as Christians fit a gospel of a crucified and risen Redeemer into Greco-Roman clothes. The clothes were never the same again.


Greek conceptions of “being” and “substance” remained, and even found their way into Christian creeds, but they were now used of a Tri-Personal God. Greeks believed in an absolute, but Christians confessed that the absolute entered the temporal world as a man. After Constantine’s conversion, the impressively efficient Roman institutions and legal instruments remained but were, sometimes imperceptibly and over centuries, turned toward compassion.


Similarly, even the Christians most hostile to modernity don’t want to abandon the gains of the modern age. Mission to the modern world would humble, but preserve, science. It would retain the modern emphasis on the dignity of the person, and give it a surer foundation than secularism could. To the mission field next door, it comes not as a destroying flood but as an irrigating river, preserving a difference as robust as anything in multiculturalism, without letting difference collapse into the sameness of indifference.


For the modern world as for the ancient, mission is like water. What grows when the gospel comes is native to the landscape, but what grows would never grow but for the river. When the water flows from the stricken Rock, the land comes to life; and the fish, floating lifeless on the surface the Sea, live again.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

In Memory of the Trampled Wal-Mart Worker: A Contemplative Rant

From Anamachara:The Website of Unknowning:

Here’s some unhappy post-Thanksgiving news: Wal-Mart Store Employee Trampled to Death by Black Friday Shoppers. It’s a grim story. Not only did frenzied shoppers trample an employee, but they just kept on stepping over his body once he fell. They pushed fellow employees who were trying to help him out of the way. And then they got angry when the store closed, in the wake of the poor man’s death.

Do we need any more proof that the American Dream has collapsed into a commercial nightmare?

My friends, we who believe that life ought to be organized around contemplation rather then consumption have a large and difficult task ahead of us. First of all, I think we must be clear that traditional forms of religion, or even currently popular forms of spirituality, appear to be powerless to fight against the forces of mammon. I’m afraid that we can expect little or no help from the various institutional churches, since the liberal churches appear to be stuck in a quagmire of declining membership while the conservative churches come across as ignoring pretty much all issues except those involving the regulation of middle-class sexuality. And we most assuredly cannot expect any help from the panoply of new age or post-religious spiritualities, since they are so mesmerized by the ‘law of attraction’ and so forth that they are more part of the problem than part of the needed cure.

If you’re a conservative Christian and you’re worried about sex, then do something about human trafficking. If you’re a liberal Christian and you’re worried about the ongoing relevance of your faith, then take a stand against excessive consumerism. If you’re a non-Christian but interested in Christian contemplation, then at least recognize that contemplative spirituality demands that people come before either things or money or ideology. Regardless of your political or theological persuasion, we all need to address the question of how our faith should inform our relationship to the earth, to natural resources, and to sustainable living. And in any case, I believe this kind of activism will only make a difference if it begins with a life of deep, sustained, daily prayer.

The Rolling Stones once sang, “I shouted out, ‘Who killed the Kennedys?’ When after all, it was you and me.” LIkewise, my friends, it was you and me who trampled to death that Wal-Mart employee in the midst of a Black Friday rush. We must avoid the temptation of seeing our culture as divided into consumerist goats and non-consumerist sheep. That just introduces another dualism into our lives, and solves nothing. We are all mad shoppers, we are all air and water polluters, we are all eagerly hypnotized by our baubles and trinkets while the world around us gasps in a fever.

The question is, what are we going to do about it? And I think the answer must begin in silence, sustained silence. From there, we must remove the beams in our own eyes. And I’m not sure what comes next, because I’m still working on those first two steps for myself. But I believe the Spirit will lead us. We just have to snap out of the reverie long about to be lead-able.

What I do believe is that the Spirit’s leading must involve a combination of contemplation and action. We who hear the call to silence do not have the luxury to recite our Jesus Prayer ad nauseum while everyone else goes to hell. At that point, our contemplation becomes infernal. No, we bask in the silence in order to be empowered to live Christlike lives. We must be prepared to cast the money-changers out of the temple. And we must begin by dealing with the money-changers who are our own selves.

Let us never forget the Ottoman genecide against the Armenians, Greeks, Kurds and Assyrians.

Attention Everyone, PLEASE CIRCULATE TO ALL YOUR FAMILY, FRIENDS, ETC. AND URGE THEM TO VOTE YES NOW!!!

MSNBC is doing a survey whether the Armenian Genocide should be recognized or not. As of a few minutes ago the numbers showed Yes 20%, No 80% !

The Turks have mobilized a global campaign to shift results towards "No" but we can let them. The Armenian Genocide is a historical fact, along with other many other crimes against humanity of behalf of the Turks, and it should be recognized.

Please vote ' YES ' at the below link and send it to everyone you know.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21253084

Despina Axiotakis
General Secretary
Cyprus Federation of America
Phone: 201-444-8237
Fax: 201-444-0445
e-mail: cyprusfederation@aol.com
Cell: 201-981-5764

Thoughts on Praying for the President

Gael, left a comment on my brief post asking God's blessing on President-elect Obama. You can read the comment here.

I'm assuming his comments above are meant to be humorous. Though given the heat of the recently finished presidential election campaign, it is understandable that they are not.

If they are not, I should point out that praying for the President as the servant of God is taken from the Orthodox Christian invocation asking God to bless someone that is used at the end of the Divine Liturgy.

Whether one agrees with his policies or not, whether his policies are compatible with the Gospel or not, Orthodox Christians--indeed Christians of any tradition--are required by God to pray for civil authorities.

And yes, President-elect Obama is God's servant. He may or may not understand himself as such and if he does he may or may not understand rightly, much less act rightly upon, what is required of him--but he is still God's servant as our we all.

That said, some of his policies (I'm thinking particularly about his support of abortion and stem cell research) are evil and within the realm of what I can do I will oppose them. Let me go further, I would hope that all Orthodox Christians--indeed all Christians--would oppose Mr Obama's policies on abortion and stem cell research.

Are there other policies with which I disagree? As a priest, I feel myself obligated by my office to limit my public political comments to only those things about which the Orthodox Church has spoken clearly. This means that in the realm of what is often called prudential matters--economics, or the general range of domestic or foreign policy matters--though I have my own view, but I remain silent about them.

Senator Obama has been elected the 44th President of the United States. Insofar as I or any of us can do so in good conscience and without violating the teaching of the Church, we should support the new administration at the very least with our prayers. Are there policy areas in which Orthodox Christians are bound to oppose the new administration? Yes certainly (particularly in matters of abortion and stem cell research) and again at a minimum with our prayers.

Finally, as for some of the rhetoric used by Mr Obama and his support--yes it often sounds messianic, but then American political rhetoric often does. And why are we suprised? Americans are, fundamentally, a religious people. Our nation was founded on an ideal drawn as much or more from Christianity as from any Enlightenment philosophical speculations.

Where I think the fault line lies in American politics is not between those who use and those who do not use religious rhetoric--but between those whose use of it I agree with and those whose use of it I find objectionable.

Let me go further, I do not object to the use of religious rhetoric by Mr Obama and his supporters--I welcome it as I did when it was used to such good effect by President Reagan. For all that it has become unfashionable, even among Christians, to do so it is important to remember that we are all of us called by God to fulfill certain roles in life. No the objection I have is not to the use of religious rhetoric by either the left or the right. It is rather to our unwillingness as a nation to take seriously the implications of that rhetoric--and again this is a problem I see on both the left and the right.

So God grant His servant President-elect Obama many years and may He also grant him, the wisdom need to govern and through his administration peace and prosperty to the people of the United States so that we may excel in every good work.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

What's Next?

By John Baden, Chairman of the Foundation for Research on Economics & the Environment (FREE), based in Bozeman, MT.

In response to my recent column, "What Went Wrong," several people emailed me this question: What's next? The answer is easy; America will attempt to emulate Europe's welfare state. Our perceived crisis is inimical to sound policy and provides a good seedbed for political opportunism.

First, though, a positive note. America can congratulate itself on successfully overcoming racial prejudice. Consider Obama's enthusiastic reception at the University of Mississippi, a school where, in 1962, federal marshals were required to protect James Meredith when he was admitted to the Law School. Riots followed, and it took several regiments of U.S. Army troops to restore order and protect Meredith from harm. This election is a benchmark, genuine progress to celebrate. It's as though we cured or, at the least, arrested a debilitating if not quite lethal cancer.

However significant this progress, and progress it surely is, 2008 may also mark the end of the great American experiment in individual liberty and responsibility. Attempts to activate the European welfare state in America will dominate politics for the foreseeable future. Here's why.

Those who created the American experiment recognized the problem of constraining two kinds of bandits: the stationary and the mobile. Mobile bandits include highwaymen, pirates, common thieves, and muggers. These are conceptually easy to constrain; enlist honest police.

Stationary bandits are more difficult, and were a focus of America's founders. Their challenge was to create a constitution to generate and maintain laws that foster progress-while constraining those making the laws.

How might those in power be kept from rigging the game to the advantage of themselves and their most politically powerful constituents?

Over the long run this may be impossible in a large democracy comprised of numerous factions, interest groups, and ethnic and racial identities. No such nation has successfully dealt with this challenge. It is easier in a small, relatively homogenous country, not one like ours.

The current worldwide financial crisis gives license to our stationary bandits to advantage themselves and powerful constituents. Franklin Raines, White House Budget Director under Clinton, became CEO of Fannie Mae and received $90 million in salary and bonuses. Of course Fannie Mae had made large and strategic concessions and donations to politicians. That's how politics works.

America's automakers, protected for years by tariffs from foreign competitors, are but one of numerous corporate examples of powerful firms, and unions, shaping the rules and seeking to loot taxpayers. Such pleading is bound to increase; the political tide is with those who see and seize opportunities for advantage, always, of course, in the "public interest." The results are ominous and the causes clear.

First, there is diminishing support for institutions that generate wealth rather than redistribute it. Who still advocates small government, low taxes, private property, and the market process? It's not a null, but surely a small, set of citizens-and few are among America's opinion leaders and political decision makers. We elect those who promise us our share. This does not augur well for the survival of a wholesome America.

A second factor is the huge increase in the disparity in income between the top one-tenth of one percent of the population and the remainder. While Americans have been more tolerant of substantial wage and salary differences than Europeans, there is a cultural threshold that we've long since passed.

Who thinks a CEO is really worth $25 or $50 million or more per year? Few voters do and resentment builds. And consider our reactions to $10 million dollar vacation homes.

Third, both positive and negative values increasingly converge and agglutinate. This promotes substantial class differences. If one is blessed with responsible parents, intelligence, favorable genetics, health, presentable appearance, and the ability to defer gratification, she is exceeding likely to prosper-and to marry one with similar characteristics.

However, everyone has one vote. The political calculus is obvious and on bold display; promising voters public largess brings victory and dependency.

What's next? A new and different America, one that will increasingly resemble the European welfare state. Some friends celebrate this anticipated change. Few however heed ecologists' admonition and ask: "And then what?

What are predictable consequences of the proposed changes?" That's a future column.

What Went Wrong?

As I have thought about the current economic world situation as well as some of the struggles facing the Orthodox Church in the United States, I have begun to wonder if there are not certain parallels.  Specifically, a shared lack of awareness of, or maybe indifference to, the human vocation to be wise stewards of the gifts we have been given by a loving and merciful God.

One thing that has helped me understand somewhat the struggles I see in the Church are the findings of a relatively new branch of the social sciences, the economic study of religion.  Applying economic theory, scholars in this discipline work to understand the different choices made in the area religion.

Now one of the different groups I am associated with is Foundation for Research on Economics & the Environment (FREE), based in Bozeman, MT and chaired by the author of the essay I have posted here today, John Baden. 

In some John's earlier scholarship, he looked at how different religious political groups manage the stewardship of shared goods (the "tragedy of the commons").  I thought I word re-post some of Dr Baden's columns here to stimulate some conversation especially on the life of the Church.

As always, your comments, thoughts, questions and criticisms are not only welcome, they are actively sought.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

This column was prompted by the question: "Doesn¹t today's economic distress demolish the case for capitalism and free markets?"

Some, who inquired gleefully, anticipated my discomfort; others were genuinely curious and concerned. All were confused about the complex causes of our economic chaos.

I hope this helps clarify their thinking, but first a disclaimer: I'm not a general economist who knows macroeconomics, money and banking, and international trade. Rather, I'm a retired professor and farmer who has studied and written academic articles and books on political economy for 40 years. I focus on the ways in which institutions, that is culture, ethical norms, and law, influence wealth, opportunities, and strategic behavior.

Let's dismiss the claim that the greed of Wall Street and investment bankers caused our distress. Greed is ubiquitous, perhaps for evolutionary reasons. Jewish theologians have wrestled with this character flaw for three thousand years. Yet, Israeli politics remain plagued with pathological greed.

Blaming greed is like condemning gravity; both endure. Responsible people recognize and utilize these forces rather than deny them. It's most constructive to design institutions that contain and direct greed into productive channels, just as engineers put gravity to use in building arches. Obviously, our institutions are flawed, greed has run amuck, and innocent as well as complicit folks are hurt.

Let's first consider the basic function of capitalism. Its success lies in efficiently allocating capital toward profit, the difference between costs and returns. When the system works, market prices provide the information and the incentives to invest where legal returns are greatest.

But this is perhaps not capitalism's greatest asset. In addition to being an engine of prosperity, only free markets spontaneously and peacefully organize the daily, voluntary interactions of millions of primarily self-interested individuals.

Socialism works poorly because it is unable to efficiently coordinate and allocate resources. Hence, it never generates wealth for the masses but socialist elites enjoy privilege and plenty. Their greed rigs the game to their advantage. Likewise, America's investment bankers have rented and bribed politicians to rig the game to socialize risks and privatize profits. Fannie and Freddie's failures and rich rewards to former managers, $100 million to one, are prime examples.

Our current problems flow largely from Wall Street bankers' financial innovations. They discovered ways to profit by misallocating capital, and in the process they decoupled risk from their returns. Under legislation for which they lobbied, they were rewarded for pumping evermore capital into overvalued housing. Viewing their houses as ATMs, people bought consumer goods far beyond their means. (Expect massive credit card default next.)

Investment bankers arranged highly arcane financial instruments covering their loans with understated risks. Loans were bundled, sold internationally, and insured by American International Group (just bailed out with nearly $125 billion from the federal government) among others. This process endured as poor risk management was fostered by profits from capital misallocation.

Further, Wall Street adults who should have been in charge and responsible, didn't understand the complex, mathematical models directing investment decisions. Senior management ignored the admonition to loan money only to those likely to pay it back.

While some bankers knew better, the net result of bad loans is the erosion of capital. Assuming recovery, we need institutional reforms that inhibit capital misallocation. For example, removing legal requirements to make loans when risks are not reflected in interest rates. This generates loss while stressing people, especially the poor.

When politicians allocate capital, we can't expect efficiency, but corruption by special interests is certain. Investment banks benefited from this political arrangement. With the Bush Administration encouraging sub-prime lending (the "Ownership Society"), these home loans grew from 2 percent in 2002 to 30 percent in 2006. In October of 2004, President Bush said, "We're creating...an ownership society in this country, where more Americans than ever will be able to open up their door where they live and say, welcome to my house, welcome to my piece of property."

Sub-prime loans were bundled into Collateralized Debt Obligations and rated AAA. With this high rating, investment-banking firms neglected due diligence and sold the bundles worldwide. Defaults and massive write-offs naturally followed, banks collapsed, and we suffer.

That's what went wrong.

John Baden is Chairman of the Foundation for Research on Economics & the Environment (FREE), based in Bozeman, MT.

Archbishop Chaput's response to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi about the Church's historic stand on abortion

As I've mentioned here, the number of Orthodox Christians who favor few or no restrictions on abortion is terribly high (just over 60%). Given that number, I found the following from Denver's Roman Catholic Archbishop Charles J Chaput, O.F.M. Cap on abortion worthy repeating here.

You can download the rest of Archbishop Chaput's statement as a PDF, "ON THE SEPARATION OF SENSE AND STATE: A CLARIFICATION FOR THE PEOPLE OF THE CHURCH IN NORTHERN COLORADO" by clicking on the title.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

Pelosi: "I would say that as an ardent, practicing Catholic, this is an issue that I have studied for a long time. And what I know is over the centuries, the doctors of the church have not been able to make that def-inition . . . St. Augustine said at three months. We don't know. The point is, is that it shouldn't have an impact on the woman's right to choose."

Chaput's response:

"Since Speaker Pelosi has, in her words, studied the issue "for a long time," she must know very well one of the premier works on the subject, Jesuit John Connery's Abortion: The Development of the Roman Catholic Perspective (Loyola, 1977). Here's how Connery concludes his study:

"The Christian tradition from the earliest days reveals a firm antiabortion attitude . . . The condemnation of abortion did not depend on and was not limited in any way by theories regarding the time of fetal animation. Even during the many centuries when Church penal and penitential practice was based on the theory of delayed animation, the condemnation of abortion was never affected by it. Whatever one would want to hold about the time of animation, or when the fetus became a human being in the strict sense of the term, abortion from the time of conception was considered wrong, and the time of animation was never looked on as a moral dividing line between permissible and impermissible abortion."

Or to put it in the blunter words of the great Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

"Destruction of the embryo in the mother's womb is a violation of the right to live which God has bestowed on this nascent life. To raise the question whether we are here concerned already with a human being or not is merely to confuse the issue. The simple fact is that God certainly intended to create a human being and that this nascent human being has been deliberately deprived of his life. And that is nothing but murder."

Ardent, practicing Catholics will quickly learn from the historical record that from apostolic times, the Christian tradition overwhelmingly held that abortion was grievously evil. In the absence of modern medical knowledge, some of the Early Fathers held that abortion was homicide; others that it was tantamount to homicide; and various scholars theorized about when and how the unborn child might be animated or "ensouled." But nonediminished the unique evil of abortion as an attack on life itself, and the early Church closely associated abortion with infanticide. In short, from the beginning, the believing Christian
community held that abortion was always, gravely wrong.

Of course, we now know with biological certainty exactly when human life begins. Thus, today's religious alibis for abortion and a so-called "right to choose" are nothing more than that - alibis that break radically with historic Christian and Catholic belief.

Abortion kills an unborn, developing human life. It is always gravely evil, and so are the evasions employed to justify it. Catholics who make excuses for it - whether they're famous or not - fool only themselves and abuse the fidelity of those Catholics who do sincerely seek to follow the Gospel and live their Catholic faith.

The duty of the Church and other religious communities is moral witness. The duty of the state and its officials is to serve the common good, which is always rooted in moral truth. A proper understanding of the "separation of Church and state" does not imply a separation of faith from political life. But of course, it's always important to know what our faith actually teaches."

Wow. Praise God and pass the ammunition . . . There will no lack of clarity in Chaput's town this week - at least about what the Church Church teaches on the subject of abortion. Pelosi walked right into that one.

H/T Sherry W on Intention Disciples:

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