Revolutions of the Soul
November 12, 2023 Leave a comment
Know this: the issue, whether abortion, gender, sexuality, racism, capitalism, equality, colonialism, Jews or some other oppressor/oppressed power struggle– the issue is never the issue. The revolution is the issue. The key question of any revolution is who holds power, as Lenin wrote.
Many of the revolution’s WOKE reactionaries are blinded by the mythic romance of revolution. Pursuit of revolution itself is seen as something valuable, as taking part in something stylishly ‘Che Guevarean’ and adventurous and something to be passionate about. It may be a religion for some.
The revolution’s WOKE reactionaries are OK with creating suffering and totalitarianism as long as the rhetoric is about total transformation, whatever that entails.
The revolution of the hour: for the destruction of the Western world; we are to be the causalities and they, the martyrs in their romantic myth.
I’ve learned how true revolution takes place. It’s not through mad passions but through everyday empathy and love and the tiny alterations of the heart and mind that move us in that direction . . .
~~~
Literary critic Joseph Epstein, with the title of his book-length essay, asks The Novel, Who Needs It? Turns out, I do, as it offers “truth of an important kind unavailable elsewhere in literature or anywhere else.”
So, I’ve made it a point to read the realist fiction of Russian writers – Solzhenitsyn, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and others along with Chekhov’s short stories.
With a sense of moral urgency, fiction-writing has always been serious business for Russians. The great writers were the truth-tellers, the prophets, the voice of the voiceless, and the conscience of a nation— “a second government,” as Alexander Solzhenitsyn once put it.
Why read great novels and Russian literature today? Gary Saul Morson provides his reasoning:
Like realism in painting, the realism in Russian fiction captures life with an accurate, detailed, unembellished depiction of life. It rejects flowery idealization, fantasy, and supernatural elements, and presents close observation of the human experience which can lead to personal discovery.
Life’s most important questions are explored in Russian fiction. The open-endedness of the writing leaves one to ponder the choices one is making. Literary realism can be grounding.
Ultimately about ideas, superior fiction shows how ideas -ideology and love for two examples – are played out in the lives of the characters. Over time, with tiny alterations, they change their minds –- and you see their conversion. Character development in literary realism is important.
“A single novel can touch on the wildest adventure but also dwell on the most private personal psychology,” writes Epstein. He gives the example of Moby Dick. I went with Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina for the latter.
Anna Karenina (1878), a novel about love and the family, explores the lives of its characters. Some pursue romantic love and others develop mature love. There are heroes and villains in Tolstoy’s most pro-family story.
The consequences of infidelity and the compromises made for forbidden love begin to add up for both Anna and Stiva. In contrast are those well-married and living a rather prosaic life – Kitty and Levin. Over time and with many intimate conversations to understand each other, they have matured from romance to love and found contentment.
Tolstoy at 68 years of age, had just finished Anna Karenina. It has been said by some that as he wrote Anna, Tolstoy was going through a spiritual crisis. He perhaps goes through a very similar spiritual conversion as does Levin.
Tolstoy had been as baptized and raised according to the principles of the Orthodox Christian Church. But later, at eighteen, he said “I no longer believed in anything I had been taught.” I see that as a typical eighteen-year-old response to what feels confining and irrational.
But Tolstoy moves from staunch atheist to a firmly spiritual person. He believed that God was the answer to the type of carnal excess and groundless passions found in the Anna and Vronsky relationship.
Were Levin’s thought processes and his spiritual journey, his tiny alterations of consciousness, also Tolstoy’s spiritual journey? We get a sense of spiritual crisis, of spiritual revolution, and of spiritual maturation in the following four excerpts.
Tolstoy narrates the birth of Levin’s son almost entirely from the new father’s point of view. The birth of his son sparks a spiritual breakthrough in Levin.
Anna Karenina, Part 7, Chapter 13
One night, Kitty awakens Levin with news that her labor has begun. Levin is beside himself, aware only of her suffering and the need to alleviate it. Kitty sends Levin to fetch the midwife and the doctor and to get a prescription from the pharmacist. As he heads for the door, Levin hears a pitiful moan.
“Yes, that’s her,” he told himself, and clutching his head, he ran downstairs.
“Lord have mercy! Forgive us, help us! He repeated the words that suddenly came to his lips out of nowhere, and he, a nonbeliever repeated these words not only with his lips. Now, at this moment, he knew that neither all his doubts nor the impossibility of believing with his reason, which he had known in himself, in any way prevented him from turning to God. Now all that flew from his soul like dust. Who else was he to turn to if not to the One in whose hands he felt himself, his soul, his love?”
Gary Saul Morson, in Anna Karenina in Our Time: Seeing More Wisely,73:
“His reason suspended out of intense empathy, Levin, an unbeliever on rational grounds, finds himself praying, and not “only with his lips” (738). Why he, an atheist, prays sincerely at this moment becomes for him a riddle touching on life’s essential meaning. Desperate to do something but with nothing to do, Levin simply has to endure, a state that (as we shall see with Karenin) provokes the soul torn from its habitual responses to experience the sublime.”
Anna Karenina, Part 7, Chapter 14
Levin is floored, angry that the pharmacist preparing the opium and the doctor drinking his coffee are so laid back – taking their time – about the approach of the birth. He’s in such a state he can’t think straight. For them, the birth was an ordinary event. But for landowner Levin, who had been primarily concerned with farming and agricultural and was writing a theory book about it, there was no place to catalog the event.
Levin has no way to analyze what is happening. “All the usual conditions of life without which it is impossible to form a conception of anything ceased to exist for Levin. He had lost the sense of time.”
When Levin hears Kitty’s first scream, Levin is nonplussed. He has so bonded to Kitty over time that, in empathy, he suffers intense agony. He had experienced the same intense feelings and helplessness as his brother was dying.
“He knew and felt only that what was transpiring was similar to that which had transpired a year before in the provincial town hotel at his brother Nikolai’s deathbed. But that had been grief – and this was joy. Still, both that grief and this joy were identically outside all of life’s ordinary conditions; they were like an opening in that ordinary life through which something sublime appeared. What was transpiring had come about with identical difficulty and agony; and with identical incomprehensibility, the soul, when it did contemplate this sublime something, rose to a height as it had never risen before, where reason could not keep up.
“Lord, forgive and help us,” he repeated to himself incessantly, feeling, in spite of such a long and seemingly total estrangement, that he was addressing God just as trustingly and simply as during his childhood and first youth.”
Anna Karenina, Part 7, Chapter 15
Watching his brother die, Levin thinks that death is a cruel joke – you live, suffer, struggle and suddenly cease to exist. Now seeing his wife in such a painful state and thinking she is dying, he is beside himself: he “had long since given up wanting the child. He now hated the child. He didn’t even wish for her life now, he only wanted a cessation to these horrible sufferings.” New life brings new suffering.
But with the birth of his son and being anchored to life by his new family, Levin then understands that death is merely part of life. He maturely concludes that if one lives “for one’s soul” rather than for illusory self-gratification, the end of life is no longer a cruel trick, but a further revelation of life’s truths.
“If Levin had been told before that Kitty was dead, and that he had died with her, and that their children were angels, and that God was standing before him, he would have been surprised at nothing. But now, coming back to the world of reality, he had to make great mental efforts to take in that she was alive and well, and that the being howling so desperately was his son. Kitty was alive, her suffering was over. And he was inexpressively happy. This he understood and it made him completely happy. But the child? Where had he come from, and why, and who was he? He simply could not understand, could not get used to the idea. It seemed to him something superfluous, something extra, which he could not get used to for a long time.
Anna Karenina, Part 7, Chapter 16
A changed man.
“At ten o’clock the old prince, Sergey Ivanovitch, and Stepan Arkadyevitch were sitting at Levin’s. Having inquired after Kitty, they had dropped into conversation upon other subjects. Levin listened to them and during these conversations could not keep from recalling what had come to pass, what had happened prior to this morning, recalled himself as he had been yesterday, before all this. It was as if a hundred years had passed since then. He felt as if he were on some in accessible height from which he was making an effort to descend in order not to insult the people he was speaking to. He spoke and thought incessantly about his wife, the details of her present condition, and his son, to the idea of whose existence he was trying to accustom himself. The entire feminine world, which had taken on for him a new, previously unknown significance since he had been married, now in his mind had risen so high that his mind could not grasp it. He listened to the conversation about dinner yesterday at the club and thought, “What is happening with her now? Has she fallen asleep? How is she feeling? What is she thinking? Is my son Dimitri crying? And in the middle of the conversation, in the middle of a sentence, he jumped up and left the room.”
. . .
“Her gaze, bright in any case, shone even more brightly the closer he came. On her face was that same alteration from earthly to unearthly that one sees on the face of the dead; but there it is farewell, here a welcome. Again agitation similar to what he had experienced at the moment of the birth overwhelmed his heart. She took his hand and asked him whether he had slept. He couldn’t answer and turned away, convinced of his own weakness.
~~~
These four excerpts offer an opening into the ordinary life of Levin and Kitty. Other characters, the novel’s headliners Anna and Vronsky, go through significant turmoil over their decisions. Dolly, whose husband Stiva was unfaithful, stands out. But not for bad decisions or for the number of mentions, but for her care and love. She simply does what is needed and shows Christian love.
I’ll end with a quote from Gary Saul Morson’s Anna Karenina in Our Time: Seeing More Wisely:, 190:
“In this novel, Christian love produces monstrosity, and real saintliness, if the term can be so used, is inconspicuous. It does not sound a trumpet.
Any doctrine that defies human nature and everyday practices will, if backed by sufficient force, create much greater suffering than it sets out to alleviate. A movement that is truly “revolutionary” – that, like Bolshevism, sets out to change human nature entirely – will create evil on a scale not seen before the twentieth century. Tolstoy saw Christian love, revolutionism, and all other utopian ways of thinking as related errors. If so, they are errors of our time, and perhaps prosaic goodness offers the best hope of correction.”
I would correct the above with “Tolstoy saw insincere Christian love . . .”
~~~~~
The Abiding Truths of Russian Literature – A Conversation with Gary Saul Morson
The Abiding Truths of Russian Literature: A Conversation with Gary Saul Morson – AlbertMohler.com
~~~~~
2017 marks the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution, an event that tragically reshaped Russian and Western history. How such an extraordinary event, and the ghastly regime it produced, could ever have happened depended not only on a great war, and the theoretical arcana of Karl Marx but, perhaps even more, on the outlook of the Russian intelligentsia and its assumptions about its social role. These same psychological and ideological predispositions continue to be found among intellectuals today. Hence, understanding the cultural setting of the Russian Revolution also helps us understand some of the more dangerous currents in contemporary intellectual life.
“Russian Lessons from 1917” – Gary Saul Morson – YouTube
~~~~~
Cindy Wity 
You and Euaggélion
November 26, 2023 Leave a comment
We are entering a season of celebrating Good News. But hold on. There are some, the same some since before 2016, who are now heralding a disastrous 2024.
Today, at the top of media’s Richter scale of catastrophic “Oh Nos!” and bumping “climate crisis” to number TWO is word of a disastrous new year as speculated in The Economist magazine article Donald Trump poses the biggest danger to the world in 2024 !!!!
To add to the hysteria known as Trump Derangement Syndrome, unhinged Joe Scarborough of MSNBC’s Morning Joe said that Trump “will end democracy as we know it.” Wow!!! What a power calculus!!
Joe, hyperbolizing on a New York Times Op-Ed [“Trump’s Dire Words Raise New Fears About His Authoritarian Bent”] went beyond calling Trump an authoritarian. He implied that Trump’s a murderous fascist: “he will imprison” “he will execute” enemies if reelected. Scarborough knows this because of “his past”. (I’d like to see those press clippings. Anyone?)
N.B.: MSNBC is where people go to completely lose all touch with reality because Orange Man Bad.
Here’s Mika man:
Trump Acquitted of Inciting Insurrection, Even as Bipartisan Majority Votes ‘Guilty’ – The New York Times (nytimes.com)
And there’s more from the ‘sound and fury, signifying nothing’ MSNBC:
“Former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson said Tuesday on MSNBC’s “Inside” that “everybody should vote for” President Joe Biden if they wanted democracy to survive.” Wow!!! Again!!!
Before we exit the land of the unhinged, there’s another unbalanced MSNBC political contributor who weighs in on Trump: former Democrat U.S. Senator of Missouri, the very rich Claire McCaskill.
McCaskill claims that Donald Trump is “even more dangerous” than dictators Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler!!! In the process of loathing Trump, McCaskill also has to mock MAGA supporters. You should know that the schtick of MSNBC contributors – our hoity-toity betters – is making their viewers feel superior to the deplorable hoi polloi.
The above insanity should tell you that the Left – Wokes, LGBTQ+ mafia, Antifa, the climate overwrought, BLM, race hustlers and all – are terrified of Trump. And they want you to be terrified of him, too. They see their world, supported by the vast administrative State that sustains their power and control over America, as threatened by Trump. For, in Trump’s next term, he will begin to pull apart the leviathan deep state apparatus that destroys Democracy and America itself.
That and the Left’s constant lawfare against Trump is an indicator to me that Trump is the right man for the job. He’s about saving what’s left of our Republic – namely, the Constitution, free speech, the right to bear arms, religious freedom, and due process which prohibits the states from depriving “any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” (14th Amendment).
The Left, on the other hand, want to abandon all that. The Left wants to seize life, liberty, and property and create a system of producing and distributing collectively owned goods via a centralized government that plans and controls the economy. The left’s economic reforms increase centralized state control to the extent that private ownership becomes virtually impossible.
See Mao’s Great Leap Forward for one example of the effects of collectivization. A Progressive’s collective communist State means that all labor, money, and production go to the State and the State determines who benefits and who must go without based on political loyalty.
And see North Korea for the Left’s brand of “Democracy!” which the braying MSNBC crew says is under threat and not because of their dictatorial ways but because of the guy who wants to keep them from their dictatorial ways.
Trump has also shown that he wants to ensure our country’s sovereignty. And that means a closed border with legal immigration. He also wants to safeguard America from another war. The Left, under the Biden regime, has shown us that open borders with constant war and anarchy are its will.
Another indicator that Trump is right for the WH job is that there are those, not just domestically but internationally, who want Trump and those around them out of the picture, e.g., Iran-linked hitmen. Trump is bothering all the right (evil) people.
Going forward, I sure don’t want someone representing me in the WH who folds or capitulates under pressure. I sure don’t want appeasers and accommodationists like members of Congress. I sure don’t want someone who, at one time in Indiana, looked the part of a respectable Christian leader but turned out to be a squish: Don’t Ever Forget That Mike Pence Threw Religious Liberty Under the Bus | National Review
Results, not presentation, earn my respect.
And though New Yorker Trump could always pick out better words and phrasing to explain his thoughts and his frustrations with the stolen 2020 election, he wasn’t chosen to be president in 2016 and 2020 and once again in 2024 because he’s a poet laureate or a pastor or a prefab politician. Trump’s a producer for the American people.
The firing-on-all cylinders low-inflation economy (before the subterfuge of COVID) and the strong dollar Trump delivered – both are being destroyed by the Biden administration’s willful neglect of the American people as are the times of peace Trump fostered.
But MSNBC stands by their man Biden . . .
Since President Biden took office in January 2021, Americans have faced increasingly higher prices for food, gasoline, and other common household items. And while prices have been going up, wages have been going down, placing additional stress on family finances. This, per The Biden Inflation Tracker. This per Full-Time Nurse and Mother Breaks Down as She Discusses Tough Financial Struggles Under Bidenomics — Family Living ‘Paycheck-to-Paycheck’ Despite Decent Income (VIDEO) | The Gateway Pundit | by Jim Hᴏft
Since Biden took office Home sales fell to a 13-year low in October as prices rose (cnbc.com),
Since the illegitimate President took office in January 2021, our southern border has been invaded. Biden-Mayorkas have allowed in (6 million +) all kinds of illegal immigrants including narco-terrorists, gangs, CCP migrants, Hamas terrorists, and more unsavory types along with fentanyl and disease. 2024 will be disastrous as the effects of the open border hit home.
Under the corrupt, compromised, incompetent, and incorrigible Joe Biden, Americans now risk getting pulled into wars on three major fronts: Europe, the Asia Pacific and the Middle East. That didn’t happen under Trump.
But MSNBC stands by their man Biden . . .
Unlike those who are “ashamed” or “embarrassed” by Trump and want to condemn his unrefined ways as being beneath them, my working life was spent in the real world outside the cloisters of academia, religious organizations, and armchair punditry. I learned which people get things done and what needs to get done.
As a business partner in a multi-million-dollar manufacturing enterprise for many years, I found out who was needed and what was needed to bring success to both employees and the bottom line. The things that Trump got done during his first term allowed me to get things done in the Kingdom of God.
N.B.: There are imperfect people like Trump and tax-collector Matthew in the kingdom of heaven. (Mk. 2:15-17). So, it is best for the offended and the ‘high-minded’ to stick with the gospels and to stay away from tea leaves.
Consider a Trump economy. With a thriving economy, I am able to support myself and give to help others in need in a closely tied relationship. But under a Leftist Joe Biden economy, disposable personal income shrinks. Financial survival kicks in. And worse.
You should be aware that Leftists are intent on neutralizing Christianity and its charity. As mentioned above, the Left wants everything to be funneled through the State and the State to be the only effect on society. This is what Progressives do. They make everyone and everything dependent on ruling class ‘good will’. And that is the substance of State media’s MSNBC and their ilk.
So, while the prophets of Baal, enflamed with Trump Derangement Syndrome, shout louder and slash themselves with swords and spears in the hope that viewers will pay attention to their frantic prophesying and let their fire rain down on Trump, let’s turn to the Good News that has already come down from the heavens with its fire poured out through the Holy Spirit.
The beginning of Mark’s Gospel (εὐαγγέλιον or euaggélion – literally, “God’s good news.”):
This is where the good news starts – the good news of Jesus the Anointed King, God’s son.
Everything in Scripture (and specifically Isaiah 40-55) up to this time pointed to the Kingdom of God on earth. Mark writes (vs.14-15):
After John’s arrest, Jesus came into Galilee, announcing God’s good news.
“The time is fulfilled!” he said; “God Kingdom is arriving! Turn back and believe the good news!”
“Turn back”? When Jesus launched the long-promised kingdom of God on earth, allegiances and lifestyles began to change direction, as he began to talk about and show what that meant.
Jesus spoke of kingdom of God in parables and directly, as in Matthew 5-7. He showed what the kingdom of God meant – unclean spirits are cast out (Mk. 1:39), people are healed (Mt. 4:23), there is restoration (Lk. 15) and resurrection (Jn. 11:38-44). And, that the kingdom of God on earth was a fulfillment of the Law and Prophets (Mt. 5:17-18).
When he taught his disciples how to pray, he prayed
May your kingdom come,
May your will be done
As in heaven, so on earth
I wonder. Is that prayer being realized? Instead of allegiance to King Jesus the ultimate restorer and to the kingdom of God on earth, have the followers of Jesus become accommodationists of the world to fit in and find ease?
Have the followers of Jesus understood what the good news is? Have they reduced the gospel (euaggélion) to the formulaic four spiritual laws and an escape from the world into heaven?
Below are two podcasts that offer an understanding of the Good News and the kingdom of God on earth. Download and listen as you enter the season of celebrating the birth of a King who brought us good news and a kingdom.
But the holy ones of the Most High shall receive the kingdom and possess the kingdom forever—forever and ever. Daniel 7:18
We, the King’s holy ones, are to herald the good news of God’s Kingdom with a new way of life to a world that sees answers in profoundly short-sighted ways rather than in the Way of King Jesus. And then . . .
Then the seventh angel blew his trumpet, and there were loud voices in heaven, saying,
“The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord
and of his Messiah,
and he will reign forever and ever.” Rev 11:15
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On Earth as it is in Heaven
Anglican Bishop, and New Testament scholar, N.T. Wright makes clear, Jesus’ good news wasn’t about giving advice, or founding a new religion, or even where a soul goes when the body dies. Jesus was inviting his hearers into a new way of understanding Israel’s ancient story and the cosmic significance of its sudden fulfillment.
Reading Scripture with N.T. Wright
Trinity Forum Conversations | Reading Scripture with N.T. Wright (transistor.fm)
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Jesus and the Kingdom of God
Jesus bringing the Kingdom of God to the world looks much different than what his friends, family members, and Jewish community thought.
Jesus & the Kingdom of God (bibleproject.com)
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Informed Dissent:
A year of determination, the help of world-renowned doctors, and this mother’s research exposed the world to the known toxins in the Covid-19 vaccines that nearly killed her son.
“In 2021, after my then 21-year-old son went from running miles a day to walking with a cane, diagnosed with a rare, catastrophic blood disorder, this mom knows it is time for vaccine injury victims & families to ignite an intelligent, rational conversation about what the mRNA vaccines put into our bodies. We don’t buy food or health products without reading the labels and knowing the ingredients, and it’s time we do the same with the vaccines for our children.”
The Shot Heard Around The World – A Mother’s Anthem (substack.com)
Livestock raised in confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) are routinely given a range of veterinary drugs to prevent disease, and some of those drugs could potentially impact the health of those who eat their meat.
Common Drug Used by Pork Industry Has Human Cancer Risk (mercola.com)
Thousands of vials of biological substances — including some labeled “HIV” — and a freezer marked “Ebola” were found inside a secret Chinese-owned biolab in California which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and FBI initially refused to investigate, according to a House committee report released Wednesday.
Pathogens labeled ‘HIV’ and ‘Ebola’ found inside illegal Chinese-owned biolab in California (nypost.com)
“This is really a massive cover-up. And I suspect it’s because there’s many more links to the funding, and there was probably discussion of the funding,” says Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky).
HHS and NIH More Secretive Than CIA on COVID Origin Documents: Sen. Rand Paul | EpochTV (theepochtimes.com)
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Brace Yourself For What’s Coming in 2024 – Victor Davis Hanson – YouTube
Victor Davis Hanson Warns America: ‘Brace Yourself for What’s Coming in 2024’ (VIDEO) | The Gateway Pundit | by Mike LaChance
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Filed under 2023 current events, 2024 Election, Christianity, cultural Marxism, Gospel of Mark, Gospels, Kingdom of God, media, Political Commentary, Politics, Progressivism, social commentary Tagged with democrats, Jesus, Joe Biden, media, MSNBC, politics, progressives, the Gospel, The Kingdom of God, Trump