https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=tFvrKFD2DnE
Happy first Sunday of Lent everybody. You may have noticed that I am not in my office right now. And yesterday when I turned on my computer and tried to get on the internet, I found out that the Ethernet internet connection was not working. And as it turns out, all of the Ethernet internet connections on the second floor are non-functioning because the switch is fried. My tech assistant assures me that the new switch that’s in the mail is simple enough where you just plug everything in and it should just work without any configuration. And I sure hope he’s correct. But until then, welcome to the basement because there’s a Ethernet port right there that works and that’s what we’re going to be doing. So for my little opening rant tonight, I’m going to be talking about a book by Monsignor Shea. Monsignor Shea is a priest of the Diocese of Bismarck, North Dakota, and he’s the president of the University of Mary in Bismarck, North Dakota. For a time, I think he was the youngest university president in the country. And now he started publishing some books. The first book was called From Christendom to Apostolic Mission. It was a book that I got for Christmas, I think, two years ago. It’s only about that thick. It has just kind of the basic wake up call that Christianity is no longer functioning in a culture that upholds its values. It is based on Christian moral principles. But now we’re more in the time similar to the apostles and what they were dealing with, going against the prevailing culture and the prevailing norms. So a good little book, good little thing to read. And now he has published a sequel to that. It’s called The Religion of the Day. And you notice he doesn’t put his name on it. He’s very humble, but he was the one who wrote this. It’s called The Religion of the Day. It’s a sequel to From Christendom to Apostolic Mission. Once again, he continues really hitting things home well. And like the the religion might be the title of it might imply it’s going over kind of the dominant religious landscape that we are dealing with. Now, this is the tricky thing about religion is that your real religion is for the most part opaque to you. But what you really and truly believe is not something that’s going to be immediately obvious to you. What’s really important? You tend to look through the world at you look through this at the world. Right. So as our little snarky text down below might say, Gnosticism in my church, it’s more likely than you think. It’s more likely than you think that these this subtle religion that everybody’s actually operating on is actually what you’re operating on. So let’s take a look at that. Monsignor Shea calls the kind of dominant religious strain in our in the West, we could say vaguely being appropriately vague. He calls it progressive Gnosticism, modern progressive Gnosticism. So the progressive Gnosticism of today and he points out kind of 12 signs that lets you know that you’re dealing with it. And so we’ve got our classic yellow on black text because I stole this from Pastor Paul. He understands the value of contrast. So we’ve got 12 signs of progressive Gnosticism. He looks at this first slide, the human tragedy of alienation, the fact that we don’t exist comfortably in our own skin, that we don’t feel at home in the world that we live in, that we find we’re struggling more than seems necessary to be. And why is it the case that we are happy? The second sign of progressive Gnosticism is this idea that salvation is possible, that this world that we live in, we are not fatalistically bound to continue suffering, that life isn’t fundamentally meaningless, but it is actually fundamentally full of meaning, and that we somehow are able to enter into a state where we are no longer alienated from the world in its depths. The third sign of progressive Gnosticism is the transformation of our humanity, that somehow the human race, the human persons, all of us can be transformed to a place where we are no longer alienated from the world, but we finally feel at home here. Now you may be thinking with those three things, huh? That sounds awfully familiar. Where have I heard this kind of story before? And as a teacher of Catholic doctrine, I can safely say that those three signs of progressive Gnosticism are 100% compatible with Christianity. That’s what we believe too, that we are alienated from this world through our fall, that through Jesus Christ our salvation is possible, and that our humanity is transformed by participating in his life, death, and resurrection through the church, through the sacraments, through our prayers, through our good deeds, but most especially through God’s grace, transformation of our humanity. So those first three signs of progressive Gnosticism are indistinguishable from Christianity, just on their own. It’s not until you get to the fourth place where we see that the source of our alienation is not within us. That’s where we run into problems. That’s where we start to run into a duality, because it’s like, oh no, I’m actually good. It’s the world out there. It’s the world out there that causes all of my problems. I’m actually a good person. That’s where everything begins to go wrong, because if the world that we live in is fundamentally bad, if this is not a good place for us to be, then we necessarily end up in number five, tragic hostility to God. God created you and then dumped you onto a really, really stinky planet. It’s a place that nobody wants to live. How is it then, how is it that you can be friends with a God who treats you in that way? Christianity is different. God created the universe good. Human beings have turned and fallen away from God. And so our, it’s our fault that we are alienated. It’s our fault that we have fallen away from God. God is good because he calls out to us. He tries to restore the connection and he is working to rebuild the world such that everything that’s still good here can be retained and everything that’s evil will be wiped away, will be restored, will be made right in the end. Now with these signs of progressive Gnosticism, we have a high but ambiguous moral call. It’s not like this progressive Gnosticism is just saying, ah, just sit at home. Just, just be content in yourself. Have a, have an ordinary life. It always promises, no, you can be a part of the change. You can be a part of the restoration of the world. You can do it all on your own. And that’s where we run into number seven, that this salvation comes through human effort alone, that there’s no grace from God. It’s not primarily God who’s restoring the universe, but it’s our human effort, our reaching out and seizing our salvation. That’s how it comes about. And this is where we finally get to the Gnosticism, right? If only, if only we had the right program. We just put the right people in the right place. We just have the right laws passed. We just have the right technology in place. Then finally, we will have our utopia. Then finally, through our work and our will, we will make great things happen. Rather than the Christian way of looking to God, whom we participate with, but ultimately he is the one who calls us and he is the one who leads us. It gets worse from here. The ninth thing he sees is a dualistic view of history. And dualisms very rarely do anybody any good. Maybe they never do anybody any good. We’ll see about that. You inevitably lead to an understanding with this progressive Gnosticism of there being a certain number of people who are the really good guys. They’re the ones who are a part of the change. They’re the ones who are on the program. They’re the ones who have the gnosis that allows you to save the world. But you’re inevitably going to run into people who don’t want to be a part of this new world order, who don’t see what the Gnostics are doing as a good thing. Ultimately, we split history in half between the good guys and the bad guys. Then you end up splitting human beings in half. You’ve got the good guys and the bad guys. Once you’ve got bad guys, for Pete’s sake, maybe you give them a few opportunities to join on with the cause, join on with the revolution. But you run into these strange people who refuse to go along with these new things, who think the old ways are good. And so, well, you just kind of need to get rid of them. We get to number 11. Revolution is the process by which salvation is achieved. So if we’ve got this tragic hostility to God, we’ve got an old order that is corrupting the world and making people evil. Well, the only good thing that you can do under circumstances like that is to turn everything order. Look, the highest is actually evil. Therefore, we need to get rid of it so that the lowest, which is actually good, can rise up and finally set things right. It’s at times like these that I’m called to think about communism for some reason, because I think the Marxism in Russia, the Marxism of China, all that has all of these things in spades. It’s explicitly atheistic. The idea that if we just implement the right program, we will finally, finally achieve salvation on Earth. But we see this final thing, and perhaps the thing that can give us a little bit of hope in somewhat dark times is that the progressive Gnosticism will inevitably fail. It is not founded on God. It is not blessed on God. And human beings, when we reach out and grab something, are quite capable of destroying that thing that we reach out and grab. Now, this progressive Gnosticism can come to us in many forms, and sometimes it can even be Christians who are practicing it. Christians who, let’s say, see the churches that they go to as a means to an end, that we can bring this gnosis, we can bring this technique into the church, and now it will be a part of the solution rather than part of the problem anymore. So those are the 12 signs of progressive Gnosticism. I encourage you all to run out and buy this book. As you can see, it’s just a little book, right? And it’s got nice, big printing and nice spacing within the pages. Some of you voracious book readers, you could get through this in an afternoon. It’s a little bit bracing. It’s a little bit sobering. I think that what Monsignor Shea is pointing at in the religion of the day is something important, something that we should all be attentive to and awake to. And speaking of awake, I don’t want to bore you all to tears, especially those who have been patiently waiting to come on the stream. So hello, Valerie. Hi, how you doing? I remember you telling Mark about that book and I was like, oh, and I couldn’t remember the name of it. I was wanting to put it in my Goodreads. So hold on just a second while I just put it in my Goodreads here. Yeah, I’ll do it on my phone because that way I can talk to you. That’s right. That’s right. We need one of these on every bookshelf in America. So I’m almost there. Sorry. My phone had to start. Yes, this is technology. And the one that came before it, from Christendom to Apostolic Mission, is also quite a good read and I can hardly recommend it. Is it under the artist? Religion of the day. Does it really have an office? No, it’s got to be some somehow University of Mary. Oh, okay. Yeah, it says University of Mary. Okay. University Mary, Prime Matters, Jonathan Ray’s introduction. Okay, I put it in my to read list. I’m always looking for interesting short books to read. And that seems like a worthwhile one. Thank you for your patience with me. Yeah, I just want to say hi and hang out with you guys. That gave everybody an opportunity to get the information on the book down. Great. Cool. Hey Mark. How you doing? Doing alright, plugging along? How about you? Still alive somehow. That’s a good thing. Life finds a way. For now. For now. We’ll see. Got to get down to Florida. That’s the next milestone. Yeah, yeah, the old Symbolic World Summit is coming right up. So I’ll be there. And I know a fair number of listeners of this channel will be there. Let’s see what we got going on in the comments here. Got Andrew tuning in from across the ocean. We went to high school with a bunch of guys who played baseball that you married. Your brother lives nearby. Very nice. Very nice. Very nice. Very cool. Love it when people write anonymously. Instantly adds 30% trust in what they have to say. That depends on a lot of things. What does that depend on a lot of things? Nothing new about it. Just plain old Gnosticism. Yeah. I mean, it’s the same pattern. So yeah, but we don’t have to deal with the mythic framing of it anymore. So that makes it slightly different. Yeah, but expecting to see layers of gods. But the solution hasn’t changed. And because we think it’s new, we think we need a new solution. It’s like, no, we already have a solution to this problem. I don’t know why we need a new one. That’s the one I’m pushing back against. Like everybody thinks we need a new solution. We don’t. Be the change you want to see in the world. Dualism is all binary thinking. Marxism imitates the Catholic subsidiarity hierarchy without subordination to God. Just like you have a priest in every town, you get a commissar in every town. I mean, that’s just… No, Marxism is a flattening explicitly. Right? Marxism says the manager, the owner, and the worker are of the same quality. And therefore they should be, say, paid the same amount. That’s wrong. It’s anti-hierarchical. It doesn’t have a hierarchy. It’s an explicit flattening of the world. And it’s fundamentally evil because of that. Well, there you have it. False theosis. Ooh. Ooh, yeah. Do you think it’s false theosis right there? No, I think… Williams onto something, right? Like, at the end of the day, there’s no such thing as atheism. There are no atheists. There are people that pretend as though they don’t believe in something. And atheism as stated… No one knows this. Totally fair. No one knows this. Theism comes from this guy, Cudworth. No one knows who Cudworth is, although PVK covered it about a year and a half ago now, I think. Quite a while ago. So Cudworth has no published works. And he changed the vocabulary and philosophy. And one of the words he came up with was this idea of theism. And theism is specifically and explicitly defined as belief of a bearded man in the sky. And the problem is that that means that I personally have met… I’m not saying there aren’t any. I’ve never met any Christians that believe that. I’ve met a few Christians that express it that way, but it’s clearly not what they believe. You ask them, oh, does God bring lightning down upon you? And they’re like, no. So certainly no Catholics couch it that way. So atheists are correct. Their arguments would be correct if they were making them against people who believed in a bearded man in the sky. It’s just that I don’t know too many people… I haven’t met anybody that believes that. And to be fair, some people talk as… How was she supposed to talk about it? Well, you just say, it’s an essay subsistence and then you’re good to go, right? Right. But nobody doesn’t have a worldview. Nobody doesn’t have a belief about how the universe around them operates. And therefore, they all have a false theos. It’s a false religion. They all have something like that, even if they don’t want to call it religion or whatever, because they don’t like the word or something. But yeah, I think… I think William’s on to something. Yeah. Yeah. Yes, yes, yes. Very good. So I kind of want to think about number five. I’ll pull these slides up here ever so briefly so that you can see what number five is. And number five is this tragic hostility to God, right? Your inability to relate to that which is higher, that which is greater, that which is more perfect to you. And it’s really interesting. If you go back to Gnosticism as Saint Irenaeus was dealing with it in the second… So really early on, right? One of the biggest Gnostic distinctives was the inability to play nice with the Catholic and Orthodox hierarchy. That there was always this… There was always… They were always kind of shooting off to the side. They were always kind of going off and doing their own thing. Whereas the… I want to go ahead and say the true church, because we have opinions on this on this stream here. There was a true church. It always existed in hierarchical and sacramental communion with each other. So one of the solutions that we’ve already come up to progressive Gnosticism is the individual submitting themselves to that which is greater than that. Submitting themselves to a higher purpose. One that’s actually higher though, it isn’t just a secret backdoor way of grabbing control onto things. And the way that you’ll know that it’s actually higher than you and not just secret backdoor control that you actually are in control of, is if it does things every once in a while that you don’t like. That’s how you know you’re not in control of it anymore. That you’re, we’ll say, bishop is going to make a decision that you disagree with. Doesn’t necessarily mean he’s a heretic, right? Doesn’t necessarily mean he’s a heretic, as happened in the past. It’s like, well, you know, somebody’s got to be in charge and it’s that guy. And he made this call and I guess I just have to go along with it or go off and do my own thing. Yeah, I think that I think it’s deeper than that though. I mean, the thing that I identify is the creation denial, right? Which is just flat out denial that there were things before you. Not just that there were things before you, but these things have a claim on you. Right, right. But I mean, that’s a deep problem. And you see it with Sam Harris, like the way he talks, nothing existed before he was conscious. And he’ll fret about, well, I was conscious when I was five or when I was ten. What does he pick a number, right? Because you can’t make the case scientifically, it’s impossible. Many have tried, just everyone fails for the same reason. But they are explicitly, I would say, denying the idea that they were born into something that is bigger than them and pre-existed them. And so, yeah, I mean, God’s off the table for sure. There wasn’t even a creator at that point. And I think that’s really the deep gap with the with the Christians in general. Like, no, no, no, you don’t understand how far off these people are. They’re way, I mean, that’s the only way you get to absurd results. Like what we need to do is design the religion that’s not a religion or we need to design a religion that’s pro-natal. You’re you by yourself or with your group of smart friends or whatever are going to design a religion. That’s that’s your plan. You’re going to create one. Yeah, right. But whereas if you’re not a Christian denialist, you’re like the functioning of the thing that we want. Pro-natalism, mystical integration, whatever it is, whatever thing you’re trying to get, meaning whatever thing you’re trying to get is already here. Like we were already born into the world that has these things. Right. So that’s actually good news right there. I would call it good news. No, no, no, no, no. But yeah, it is good news. Sometimes when we’re dealing with somebody with deeply silly and wrong and dangerous and destructive ideas, we’re going to immediately move ourselves into kind of a pugilistic stance. We’re going to try and beat the snot out of that thing. Right. But like literally what we’re doing here is what I’m trying to do here is trying to tell people the good news. The good news is you don’t have to come up with this all on your own. You don’t have to invent it. It’s actually here already. And if you just participate in it in the right way, then you’ll get not only what you’re after, but more than you were asking for. Exactly. Exactly. Right. Right. Well, and the real key is, you know, the people that came before you. And this is where I think Vervecky doesn’t really understand the ideas he’s talking about to some extent. The distributed cognition through time has already figured this out. And once you add the time component to distributed cognition, you realize, all right, well, you know, there is an intelligence that has persisted in some greater or lesser way, probably not perfect because I don’t know about you, but I haven’t seen anything that’s perfect. So I’m going to assume that that’s not real, at least not accessible to us easily. Right. And so that that has already manifested. All right. And of course, Catholics would say, yeah, that’s the one true church. That’s why tradition matters. That’s why symbolism matters. That’s why icons are important. Right. Because you need all of that because all of that is part of the distributed cognition of discovering the stuff in creation that makes you a pro natalist, integrates your mystical experiences or does, you know, whatever thing you’re expecting religion to do. Right. All that stuff has already been sort of provided to you by the church. That’s the reason the church is here. That’s the manifestation of the church is that distributed cognition through time. I guess my question would be kind of then the Protestant Reformation, the change of the world, not to just kind of enter, you know, hello, how are you guys all doing? But yet, you know, the way that that did that it created. Yeah, just how do you how do you how do you how do you wrestle with that? And even this goes to Father kind of his bigger picture, his bigger project with, you know, this this Catholic intellectual heritage. I mean, how do you kind of yeah, how do you wrestle that in your story and your narrative of the Protestant move here? It’s really interesting. Right. And this is something that I noticed a few weeks ago or not a few weeks ago, a few years ago. It was like I was reading history and theology and all that. And I’ve always been a big Thomas Aquinas enjoyer. Right. Like that’s what I was given at seminary. It works. It keeps on working. It gets better with time. Right. It’s just amazing stuff. And it was a shock when I like noticed and realized that, you know, after Thomas Aquinas died, nobody but the Dominicans read him. It’s like, oh, that’s interesting. These guys clearly the best. And yet, oh, you know, the Franciscans had Bonaventure. Bonaventure was real solid, you know, but then the Franciscans went and had Duns Scotus and he started to get kind of weird. And then they had William of Ockham. Oh, my, that’s where we get nominalism coming in. Right. So the Franciscans went off the rails and, you know, like every every there was all this competition to have like the best philosopher when the Dominicans had already won. And you just get like this materialism seeping in like right after Thomas Aquinas writes his great works and they build the great cathedrals. Of Europe there. Part of it might have been the Black Plague. Part of it might have been corruption in the church. I don’t know. You need a real historian to follow these things. But like the seeds of the Protestant Reformation were there in the 14th century. Right. There was this creeping materialism. You could even trace it back further to like the eighth or ninth century and some of the debates that they had over the next century. Which Thomas Aquinas solved, but nobody ever talks about that. Actually talk about it a lot. Just this this materialistic way of thinking about it, which I think manifests itself in the more extreme parts of the Protestant Reformation where they’re smashing stained glass windows, they’re burning icons, they’re destroying statues. They’re no one. They’re not the only ones. They’re no longer practicing the Eucharist weekly. All of these sorts of things where you get the inability to comprehend the spiritual because you’re locked up in the in a what overly if we’re going to use the McGill-Crisp framework over the left brain way of looking at the world. Can you can I guess what I’m getting at is I’ve kind of I mean look I’ll put my cards on the table even Father Eric you know the Italian American and went to this modern this Italian American and went to this modern this modern time of Gnosis and his proposition of Tyrion deconstructed out but I you know I got a philosophical philosopher’s mind and I’m not going to go into that. I’m going to go into that. I’m going to go into that. I’m going to go into that. I’m going to go into that. I’m going to go into that. I’m going to go into that. I’m going to go into that. I’m going to go into that. I’m going to go into that. I’m going to go into that. I’m going to go into that. I’m going to go into that. I’m going to go into that. I’m going to go into that. I’m going to go into that. I’m going to go into that. I’m going to go into that. I’m going to go into that. time of Gnosis and his proposition of Tyrion deconstructed out but I you know I got a philosopher’s heart so I do things you know pretty and an Italian heart so I do things pretty all the way and I landed in a Zen Christian position where I said you know take the deconstruction all the way deconstruct it all you know deconstruct even Paul deconstruct even you can deconstruct Protestants is the one I love to give him you know reading evolved can deconstruct how we even were reading that that paper that paper poke and so. I guess the move is can you can you still man that that that side of it on how is it how is it affected the Catholic intellectual heritage how is it affected you as you as a modern as a man of you know modern times you know something that I have to wrestle with you know is someone who believes and goes in practices like I said in my heritage is this Catholicism and I love that and I understand and like I said strive in the philosophical rigor of the Peugeot symbolism of the Catholicism and and you know the the combinatorial explosivity but at the end of the day I have I’m I’m as proud as any I landed in Zen Christian I you know I landed as I can deconstruct it all I can deconstruct it all the way to this phenomenal logical experience of just participating in the hereness and the nowness. That’s what happens with science right Protestantism is fundamentally a scientific dissection and the assumption that there’s some good in it is a big assumption right because I was like okay where’s that I never get any answer so I have a little suspicious after the you know after the first few hundred people. Not being able to answer a simple question like where’s the good in it and and yeah I mean you can look at implementation of Vatican II I have no reason to go to authority that the it was never the good in it right it was it was always a reaction to the bad point to the critique of the Catholic Church and so in that in itself it’s the same way it is then you can’t build something good off of a negation. Right right I would say the implementation of Vatican II is highly flawed and that’s and that’s part of the problem so what good what good came out of the Protestant Reformation I don’t know I’m waiting to hear one thing and I haven’t. Yeah well and that’s kind of what I want to offer to Eric I mean I I mean I guess if I was trying to still man like I said it got me to the point to where I was I was able to deconstruct all and and and still find these this this community and this in this intellectual heritage you know I’m the John Brevaki nerd I think I think the cog side vocabulary I’d love to hear your opinion on that. The cog side vocab is is just fundamental to the to this whatever this community is but yeah I would just you know I guess like the individual notion like me and me and Mark had a stream a couple a week ago or so where we kind of he really took a hammer to the notion of individualism and I agree and I went down you know different pseudo religious political ideologies you know when I was wrapped up in politics and stuff and investigating this stuff but the fact is I still I still embody like the I’m a I’m there’s a little individual in me there’s this little Protestant in me you know I just I want to maybe it’s just me maybe I’m just no no no no listen so this lines us up to another chapter in my senior shades book which has it all it’s called catching all the diseases of the world. Okay right so what do we do in the Catholic Church? Well we eat the body and drink the blood of Christ and when we look at the event of the crucifixion every kind of human evil that a person can encounter physical pain and suffering death being abandoned by your friends having the worst sorts of lies told about you having people who are vastly inferior to you be your judges and your masters. And being mocked by people who refuse to understand you right and we can go on and on about that right Jesus took all of the diseases of humanity upon himself. He’s got all of it and it killed him right but then he rose again right and that’s where the story keeps on getting better so it’s like his blood we could use this kind of medical analogy here now has the antibodies for every sort of human evil that you can deal with. But it’s it hasn’t been realized in the here and the now yet and this is part of the reason why I think the Vatican too might have had to have been implemented poorly is that the Catholic Church catches the diseases of the world right because we have the blood of Christ flowing through us we’re capable of producing the antibodies and offering that salvation to the world. Just just to be clear because I can be ignorant you know I can be clueless sometimes Vatican too is the response from the Vatican after the Reformation. No that was the Council of Trent Vatican too was 1962 to 1965. Okay. And it was explicitly in the eyes of most of like we’ve got to modernize some things and there were some things that needed to be modernized right like there were some traditions that have become overgrown and no longer were serving their purpose and kind of quickly moved along. You got to be very careful with that kind of business though because the odds of you doing it right the first time are you doing it correctly all by yourself is approaching zero right. I think I think where I always landed and it’s not some you know unique position is I always landed with the very Peugeotian stance of you know I’m not going to be a very good person but I think that’s the thing that’s really important. I think it’s a perennial problem you know it’s like he got his his stance as he was up he was he agreed with Luther to critique until he made his own a hierarchy until he made his own. It’s like so Mike I guess the print it’s the print question of corruption and you know and of sin I guess you know and this fractal nature you know Christians we have the notion of fractal sin very well with the Reformation. But it’s when do you rebuild and when do you reform when do you revolt and restart and when do you reform I think that’s a perennial question. What if never what if never like what if that’s the problem. Mark I agree I also would say that that is as maybe a deep right I mean if we want to put on the very gross disgusting political lens for a second that’s as deep as the deep right. Mark Mark I agree I also would say that that is as maybe a deep right I mean if we want to put on the very gross disgusting political lens for a second that’s as deep right of a position as you can go right is that is is the faith in the tradition so so so faithful that it says hey no there is no reform that our ancestors got or did what did what did their best and we’re going to continue that that journey into the infinite unknown. Right the problem and the problem isn’t the criticism because a proper criticism is a healthy thing right the problem is in what you do about it and the assumption is and you see Verveki makes this mistake or made it early on right he said the problem with the church’s dogma because the problem with the church is obviously not dogma by the way right because dogma is not in the church. The problem with church is the problem with everything the church is the problem with everything. Right right and so the solution that and I’m like look I don’t want to impugn Luther because I don’t think he was an idiot and he did he not his followers but he repented right on on his bad ideas or he also got in with the politics the political princes. Right whatever that’s not see to me that’s not relevant that’s that’s going to happen you can’t avoid those things so saying like the problem was you got wrapped up into politics is worthless because everything will get wrapped up into politics so. I guess my point is so could he have just focused on himself and been a monk and tried to reform from within and keep it. Right that’s what he should have done so so my my point is the people that came after him at the very least I don’t know that he did this people that came after him their solution was well the church is corrupt therefore we need a new church and it’s like no humans are corrupt and therefore building a new church is not. Well that’s why I go as the philosopher and I say okay so corruption as such what do you do corruption as such and it’s like I agree Mark but I’m saying. Well the problem we have now is no one’s calling out evil so you got to call out evil right even if you do it poorly because you’re not perfect so like you would just have to submit to the fact that you’re going to call out evil imperfectly right and you know then you have discernment. I think you’re right too because any other move even the acknowledgement of like oh we must we must address corruption now you’re in the Protestant predicament where it’s like okay how you address corruption can be. Address I didn’t say address. Yeah it’s like Luther wasn’t the first guy who ever tried to reform the church. I mean we had been in reformation but almost continually for like since the time of Gregory the seventh right so like 600 years at that point there was wave of reform after wave of reform some of it got kind of weird some of it was also really really awesome right. The living tradition. Yeah, so it’s you always have the option of of trying to recall something good to its original its original purpose and its original foundation right. Nobody, nobody disputes the right of the Christian faithful to do that. Yeah. I guess the only other I guess I’m gonna play a little bit of devil’s advocate this evening. Even though I very much appreciated the guy who called the devil and you decided to advocate for him huh. No no no no well it’s mixed for good conversation right. I strive to be a decent conversational partner. So then I guess I would I would then also offer. Is. Hmm. Yeah yeah so I guess I guess that it stays with me then the the the primal the primal issue of how do you how are you ever going to adapt to anomalies how are you ever going to. I guess unless you’re assuming that your tradition is so full proof that is taken into the and I don’t get me wrong I’m a Christian I think Christianity has the best stance for dealing with anomalies dealing with change dealing with with. You know I mean the anomaly is the best word I get but but there has to be some rigidity has to have a way to. Yes yes that’s what human beings are for. Oh that’s us. Well the cap I love that answer by the way I love that answer. Yeah yeah and I think that’s where the confusion is I mean people want some simple sort of well you know. How’s the Latin mass going father Eric I’m pretty sure the pope’s against all that huh. Well we are following the letter of the law here at the Diocese of Fargo. Of course of course I accept that. I’m not sure if you’re following the letter of the law. I’m not sure if you’re following the letter of the law. I’m not sure if you’re following the letter of the law. I’m not sure if you’re following the letter of the law. I’m not sure if you’re following the letter of the law. I’m not sure if you’re following the letter of the law. I’m not sure if you’re following the letter of the law here at the Diocese of Fargo. Of course of course I expect nothing less. Yeah. There’s a lot of masses going on despite his his. They weren’t able to kill it the last time. So maybe they won’t be able to kill it this time. That actually seems like a pretty good track record right there. Yeah yeah. That’s the problem is that what we want is like you know a lot of people try to do this right. Try to redeem Luther. Luther doesn’t need any redemption. Okay and if he did you can’t do it because you’re a human. And so the question the question is why are you defending Luther. He couldn’t defend his own actions at the end of his life. He repented on most of the stuff he did. Oh I really screwed this up. I caused a lot of death. Yeah he did. I’ll just do the phenomenological. Let’s really let’s really get into this vulnerable you know in the moment thing. I’m doing it myself Mark. I’m exemplifying it. It’s the acrasia within me. It’s the inner conflict within me. It’s the modern man of me. It’s the Protestant within me. It’s this I did that I did the logic reasoning and philosophical like you said deconstruction all the way to reading Zen Christian books to where I was at the threshold of Zen Neoplai. You know haha with the JV stuff. At the threshold of you know the Zen Neoplai ism where you can see the nothingness and the one as the inversion. But then I just took one more step and you know found that the symbolism of Christianity and the phenomenological phenomenological stance of my heritage and going to participate as church is very easy. So Matthew hold on hold on. So I just I just want to point something out. This is a very familiar story and let me just recast the story for you right because a lot of people go through this. I don’t think it’s deconstruction. I think that it’s rather explicit right. What happens when you look into the abyss. The abyss looks back at you. Amen brother. Well well let’s think about that for a minute. Okay. Amen. If you are sufficiently we’ll say capable or rational if you want to use that term I’m fine with it here. Fine you’re sufficiently rational and I’m maybe not everybody is. In fact maybe most people can’t be rational at all. Right. But what would you say. Well just say certain people are sufficiently rational to break things down in a way. It doesn’t matter how you break them down because again your story is very familiar. I’ve never heard your path before ever. Just to be clear like you know this is a unique story for sure. And it’s your story and you’re the one that went through it. No one else probably has gone that your path. I’m and I’m fine with like I think that’s true. We all have our own little path right. But fundamentally what happened was you tried to rationalize and break down the world. And what you find is the ineffable staring back at you if you want to put it that way or if you’re a Christian you say God stares back at you. No matter how much you try to deconstruct or rearrange or rationalize or make logical and reasonable the world. At the end of the day no matter what you do how you scientifically divide things you end up with the creator staring back at you. It’s inevitable. And for people who get that far and I would argue that a lot of people never get that far because they’re just not capable of doing it for whatever reason. I don’t even care. There could be lots of reasons you’re not capable of doing it. That’s a problem for them. Right. But the people who never get that far the people get that far. Yeah they have a great experience. But this is like the alcoholics who say well I hit bottom and therefore everybody has to hit bottom or they’re not going to get better. Most people have bottom and die. I don’t think it’s a great solution. And so the question becomes well what is the solution for the people who either aren’t able to rationalize their way or if they hit bottom they’ll die. Right. Like what is the solution way before they get to that point. And that I think is where the Christians in general the Catholics too right are missing the ball. Like no no these people are way down the well especially the media crisis people but even the crisis of faith people are further down the well than you realize. And your rope is not long enough. This is part of the problem. Put it on my tombstone. This is he always said this one we have to have conversations because actually just in this conversation I’ve. Hearing you and then my inner inner bounce is I’ve really that stance didn’t I wasn’t gripped by that stance near as much as I thought I was. I don’t I don’t find that that split of a crazy near strong as I just literally to 120 seconds 20 seconds ago said you know I have this is because I can because what you can do is and this is this is probably against what you’re trying to say. But it’s my nature is I can actually still apply that that same thought to what I was just describing to you and say look there you go. There’s your issue right there and your phenomenological participation in your heritage is you know what what the world has the Heideggerian thrown this like that’s the best you can do man that’s that’s why pageau is so damn wise it’s like yeah. Where do you stand where do you start mark where do you start and go participate and play and love. Yeah right well it yeah if you’re able to actually break it down properly and you’re probably not but you know you are Matthew clearly some people are right it just they’re rare and that’s why we follow guys like John Breveke myself included like. It’s the beauty of this is the beauty of the scale and we could talk about this because I touched this on this on a stream is the mystery of what the hell is scale what the hell what is scale excuse my language father what is what is scale I think I think it could be a good philosophical discussion on what is scaling because that is the beauty of Christianity right is well that’s the person with very theological interest can can can look can appreciate the love of God and love the world in the proper stance and the greatest theologian such as Aquinas. But that’s the problem right we get attracted to somebody who seems to have it figured out right whether it’s John Breveke or Jordan Peterson or it’s you or whomever doesn’t matter right and then and then they for their part because people are not going to be able to do that. They’re part because people like to do we like to cooperate very cooperative creatures nobody nobody in recent times has any appreciation for how cooperative we are we’re massively cooperative even though that Protestantism and I would call him L. L. I think it’s in the Russian. That Protestantism that rebellion is within us right but we’re very deeply cooperative people right like that’s just humans are cooperative so we want we want to help the other person and so we do things like the following somebody will ask us a question how do we solve the you know that problem for the world like how do we help people who are in trouble. The alcoholic who hit bottom or the drug addicts who hit bottom will say well I had to hit bottom and now a lot of things happen right they go well it worked for me so it should work for you. That’s not true necessarily by the way right but it’s a natural response. It’s also probably the only response you have all of the things you didn’t try or you tried and didn’t work. You’re not going to suggest a solutions most likely because in your phenomenology means they didn’t work. This is where scale comes in right so at scale your solution may work for some percentage of population it may be 1% it may be 30% maybe 80% I have no idea. I’m not going to pretend I have any idea right but but from your perspective, the thing that you did that work worked 100% of the time for 100% of the people. And so right so when you scale up you’re like well everybody has to hit bottom because I had to hit bottom. Now the thing with that is I hit bottom everybody else has to hit bottom. I’m like everybody else that’s deeply cooperative in the other direction. Oh other people’s experience would be validating my experience if they went through the solution and it worked for them. Yeah and so you have this without realizing it or it’s unconscious or subconscious you have this desire for your answer to be correct because then it validates your personal experience too. I don’t think that’s an escapeable bias by the way. Yeah and so you rationalize it that way but the bottom line is at scale what people need is different. Some people need to hit bottom maybe and then you can survive that. But see I think that’s what I’m kind of questioning or what I’m at. I’m not even saying we must do this. I was just offering that it’s something we could meditate on. But I think what you’re saying is to articulate the difficulty and necessity of why things can’t scale or why things have trouble scaling. My point is to meditate on how the hell do some things do scale. That would be the magic. Yeah well I think the easiest way to discern things at scale are look at what’s already there and what’s already working. Judge the tree by the fruits. Are the odds of us coming up with let’s say a new way of gathering people together and having them cooperate successfully. Like I’m not going to say it’s impossible because I haven’t seen all of everything ever but I’m thinking we’ve probably figured out all the ways to actually do it. Unless you take into account what you’re doing right now Father I’m going to call performative contradiction. But if you do take it… I think the only thing that… So in the academy right in like the University of Paris they would have times where they would just do disputed questions right. Where they would get their professors up there and they would just try to hack out a question. It was a little more structured than this. Like this is literally the open mic so you know we’ve got random people and Mark always coming on. It’s a little more open than that. The only thing the technology does is just broadcast it farther. Increase my power but having people watch other people talk things through it’s like that was platonic dialogues right. I agree I mean I could push you on the proximity. I mean I have no idea where you’re at right now so we’re able to do this. But I agree with your larger point. And so you know things like liturgy that’s not going away. It takes all sorts of forms of military has liturgy churches have liturgy public sessions have liturgy like public bodies you know. You go to a baseball game there’s liturgy there. Maybe I could see it this way. I have two things on my mind I would want to steer because I want to I kind of I usually I’m the wild card in the conversations but I kind of do want to stay true to your to your topics here. You say you have a mission of Catholic intellectualism and you know I’m Italian American like exemplifying the Catholic intellectual tradition. Excuse me there you go precisely my language. Thank you. Thank you Father. And as a Italian American you know I mean that’s just and someone who’s a philosophical nerd I mean you strike right at my core and someone who’s going to Catholic Church by the way. Like I said as kind of like a phenomenological just participation. I guess I would ask like I said that that that would be my bone to pick I guess with the Protestant thing is is is can you can you can you paint on how where that where that move fits into that tradition do you find it as completely binary and separate and or I would say as the JV nerd for more personal. Can you just comment on what would John Verbeckis work in his cognitive science stuff his vocabulary is laid out for you just because I find that so. Let’s go one at a time. Yes. What move are you talking about. I mean the the end of me and Mark went out at another laughter but the end of the move the individual move that the Protestant move the to take in the democratization the democratization of authority. And really is the protest. Look you can you can say it this simple you can say this simple they were wrong I have nothing I took nothing it was a you could. Yeah, well rebellion isn’t good right. Okay, that’s that’s what I would just say that the serpent approached the woman and said that the Lord really tell you not to eat of any of the trees in the garden. The woman said no we can eat of any tree in the garden except for the one in the middle that we are eating or even touch otherwise we will die. I love you for it. On that day you will become like gods and have knowledge of good and evil. I love you for it. Maybe it’s my autism. Well let’s go with the JV’s thing. Let’s go with the. Yeah, sure. So I’ll tell you one thing that John Verbeckis really fixed for me right. Cool. There I am sitting in seminary and Dr. And he’s like I don’t believe in reincarnation but if I did Dr. Hitt would have been St. Thomas Aquinas reincarnated right in America. And he’s up there and he’s like you know when you guys are in your parishes you’re very likely to have people there who are holier than you. And they have con natural knowledge of God on account of their long familiarity with them. But they might not be able to to tell you what they know. And it’s just kind of like you know I’m still a recovering materialist. It’s still something that got going on inside of me. Right. It’s always there. Right. The scar tissue and the memory of that by the blood of Christ I’ve got the antibodies now. And then just like Dr. Hibbs said it. It’s probably true. I don’t know what that means. How do you have knowledge that you can’t possibly articulate to anybody. Right. Five years later there I am. It’s the middle of the covid lockdown and I I bored out of my mind. So I’m participating on the bridges of meaning discord server and a lot more actively on Paul Vanderklaas channel and this John Vervee. We talked about participatory knowing they’re all super excited about I got to get to the bottom of this. I have no idea what these people are talking about. Finally watched a job or vacu video where he goes to his four different kinds of knowledge. And it’s like oh that’s what can natural knowledge is. Right. So by using these cognitive science framework he actually explained a bit of Aquinas to me that I had no way of getting into. But you know now I can articulate it better myself. Right. It’s like OK listen now you can describe to me how you brush your teeth. But that isn’t actually knowledge of how you brush your teeth. Right. Knowledge of how you brush your teeth is in your your hand like this. Right. And like the way you you wrap it around you get the live feedback from your gums you know telling you where all of that is. That’s what brushing your teeth knowing how to do that. And that gives you the procedural you know and then Mark will go off in his model and that’s fine. But it was just it was just like a doorway into something that’s rightfully a part of my heritage that I couldn’t I couldn’t grasp that. Beautiful though. That’s beautiful. I think that’s it. That’s an exemplification of exactly what he would he would want out of his work. I’ve heard him say it many times. Yeah. Well that and that’s the that’s the fight against the age of gnosis or the fight against the propositional tyranny that John talks about right there. Father Eric was lost which very similar to my story. I mean not to the same extreme but I was lost in the sauce lost in the culture lost in the so you couldn’t see that. OK. Yeah that’s the age of gnosis and like everybody’s soaking in it. Right. We’re all drowning in it to some extent. I get trapped in it all the time myself. Yeah I have the I have the images for the Jordan instead of TLC the Jordan Peterson sphere. Exactly what you just said is the flood. So if you just think of the flood from the biblical flood just raging water everywhere and you know we’ve already had this technological digital a little where technological society we had we had movie stars and news anchors. And anyways it’s almost like Jordan with his YouTube manifestation just popped up from the water you know after a suffocating drowning culture and just said hey I’m here I’m trying to make sense. And then the flotilla that gris will say or the arc of this you know this this little corner this Peterson sphere everybody who is like hey look he’s trying to make sense in this in this. He’s a lightning rod telling you what. Yes. And so we’ve all oriented our attention and I mean if you know Peugeot aligned attention is a default community. I mean that’s it’s boom you’re a default community. So by definition we were just trying to figure out the Peterson sphere to like we’re just trying to name this thing which naming is weird anyways because you lose the magic and blah blah blah. You might as well just participate and enjoy it. That’s the thing. Naming well naming is important right but it has to be correct and that requires discernment and that’s where that’s where the problem like that every problem every perceived problem everything we think of as a problem is only an issue of discernment. That’s really all it is everything I get this idea of problem and problematic and problem at a time you have a video coming out about that. Just saying that is all just for lack of as long as we all care for this thing and love it and give our attention to and treat it right then then your name your name will be right. Your name will be right. Yeah you have to care for the right name. Yeah you have to get the same thing and it has to be the right thing in terms of the emanation emanation. Right because the women’s Bible study at Holy Cross doesn’t need to hear any of her vacating. Right. I would disagree. Maybe a few of them would benefit from it but like I worked in. I was teaching an RCIA class about a month ago right that right of Christian initiation for adults is how we bring Catholics in. And this woman got very excited about this guided meditation on the divine mercy of Jesus that she was doing. And I know enough about divine mercy devotions. I don’t think there was anything wrong with it. I could encourage people to participate in it and she was you know telling people how they could do it for themselves. And it’s like you know what. That’s great. I’m not going to do it because I’m not a middle aged woman. I’m a priest and I’m interested in different things. This is we were talking about this earlier like different things work for different people. This divine mercy meditation would really probably nail a certain temperament really well that really just needs to hear how precious they are how loved they are how much mercy God wants to give them. That’s the message somebody really needs to hear the divine mercy is really going to nail them. But you know it’s not relevant. I heard I heard a very beautiful kind of dichotomy the other day of like this this this two kind of templates a persona of that which needs to be that which needs to be encouraged out and that which needs to be and that which needs to be a discipline to appreciate or something like that. Anyways. Well the naming is important and the paying attention is important because let’s suppose you had a number of figures all talking about roughly the same thing from different perspectives. So suppose you had a Catholic priest talking about the meeting crisis in terms of converting people to Catholicism. You know it’s all hypothetical of course and we’re doing this right now. And then suppose you had a Protestant pastor whose goal was explicitly just man we just need to get people closer to Jesus. Right. Right. Or closer to the church or something right. A church any church. Right. And so those are two very different goals. It’s not that they don’t have some directionality or something in common right. Those are two different goals. And then suppose you had a third figure who let’s say was more science oriented right. And they were like no no no the key to all of this problem of meaning we’ll say meaning crisis problem has nothing to do with existing structures. But it’s all wrapped up in the brand new science right. Neuroscience right. And and what we need to do is use that set of tools right. Not an existing set of tools whether it’s a terrible Protestant set of tools or a much more Catholic set of tools right. Instead right. And then what if you had other figures out there who were like listen the real key is symbolism. And let’s suppose that you had to decide right. You could add other figures you could add Peterson and say psychology right. Let’s suppose you had to decide which approaches you needed to pay attention to. OK. So you would do that through the name. That’s how you would do it right. Because again what where where does how does anybody ever know how does Jonathan Pigeot by his own admission start to do the symbolism work that he knew about all along but was was not doing is Jordan Peterson. How does for Vicky get his awakening from the meaning crisis here. That’s all Peterson all of it every bit of it. And again like there’s some backstory that I happen to know because I work with Peterson. I agree I agree I agree with. Right. So the name so the name matters you can’t do the name based on on some random person that came by as a critic of Peterson and only pays attention well because nobody can pay attention to all the work only pays attention well to some of the work some of the time. I see what you’re saying. You’re really looking at the top. I see what you’re saying. The starting point the starting point for the whole meaning crisis thing is Peterson. And so if his name’s not on it or a reference to him isn’t in it I would say it’s missing the proper emanation. That’s still my argument. You know you can disagree that’s fine. But that’s the way I’m reasoning through this. Yeah that makes sense. And we and we have a timeline up on the website. We’re still working on the website but there’s a timeline up right now. It looks pretty good. It’s a good start. It’s a good start. It’s not complete by any means. Well, I mean if you were to put on a complete timeline it would be as big as the universe itself. So probably. Well, there has to be some sorting there. Yeah. Interesting interesting. Okay. So I’ve written my essay for you yet. Oh yeah. You owe me an article. Well, so does Vander Turkey. So get him on it. And I mean I guess I could just throw this random thing is I’ve stumbled onto yet my the best the best priest I’ve had in my life. I stumbled onto here in Midland. Just got lucky. Just hits home runs dropped in Metanoia the other day. Like just yeah just hits home runs after home runs. Really good thing to preach on Ash Wednesday. Ash Wednesday. They’re ready to get you know their butts kicked a little bit. The problem is is they’re doing some weird. He only he does every other Sunday. It’s annoying. Whatever. It’s probably a shortage of priests. My my butt wasn’t kicked on Ash Wednesday but my knees sure were because we don’t have kneelers. Oh my. This was ACNA Anglican but it’s not Catholic but that was the most kneeling I’ve ever done. And I was like shifting around trying to like. Yeah. Yeah. That’s why you become a priest because you deal a lot less. Oh yeah. Yeah. And then you can go and say the you know. Yeah anyways. But I at the risk of derailing too much I don’t think. Yeah we’ll see. This is the open mic. We go everywhere. Yeah. So I was discussing debating arguing with and I father I’m sure you saw some of this but with the in the Orthodoxy channel about the charismatic stuff like specifically speaking in taunts and what I wanted to what I’m trying to figure out is because like there’s there’s a couple of us current and former Charismatics on BOM that are trying to figure out this. We’ve come up with this fire and fireplace analogy so with fire the characters of fireplaces the organized structure church. And so you need a balance of both of those things right. Too much order on one hand too much chaos and the other whatever. So I’m what I’m wondering is because like it doesn’t seem like the Orthodox have even tried or even investigated integrating this charismatic stuff in. But the Catholics have and so I’m wondering like how do you because on the on the worst excesses of the evangelical non-denominational Charismatics it’s just anything goes basically it’s it’s it’s it’s you know it’s the fire and it’s it’s burning a lot of things down and it’s not good. But you know you also don’t want a dead fireplace that doesn’t even have a spark in it either. And so I’m curious to hear how the Catholics have like theologically integrated this if you guys have been able to what would you say how you put the fire in the fireplace. Yeah. So the first thing I want to say is that we’re nice and big. That’s all there are plenty of people who you know at their first sight of kind of charismatic practices they kind of decide I don’t really want to do that. They just go to another parish or even another mass at the same church sometimes and then they just don’t have to do that right. And that’s kind of the Catholic understanding of a charism is that you know if they aren’t distributed equally right. It’s not like everybody gets a certain the exact same. It’s not like you get your Holy Spirit rations right. That the same spirit works differently through different things. Now the time of the Catholic charismatic renewal that was the 1970s. So we were trying lots of things at that time and frankly out of all the things that came from the 1970s a lot of good has come from the Catholic charismatic renewal. So I look at especially a lot of the faculty they have at Sacred Heart Seminary which was where I went but it’s got a lot of very very prominent I would say not just prominent but also holy people in the church you’ve got like Dr. Ralph Martin Dr. Janet Smith Dr. Mary Healy Peter Williamson all kind of connected with this Catholic charismatic movement. Really born great fruit there. So we’ve got the not everybody has to speak in tongues or even be around those who are speaking in tongues. It’s because it’s something that we hadn’t really seen before. And then you know we’ve got a broad enough theological umbrella to be able to have conversations about this. So you go to the same seminary where you’ve got a fairly strong charismatic presence got charismatic priests. You’ve got charismatic prayer groups that are available for everybody to participate in. And then you’ve got Dr. Philip Blosser. He recently published a book which I had recommended to Vigilant Dreamer on Bridges of Meaning Discord server. It was kind of a takedown of the charismatic notion of speaking in tongues. Maybe you saw a bit of that conversation there where he is interpreting the relevant chapters of the New Testament to always mean that the word gloss up means ordinary human speech a language that somebody can actually speak. So when we go to Acts chapter one to when the Holy Spirit comes down the apostles are speaking different languages that uneducated fishermen from Galilee really shouldn’t know. And then when we get to 1 Corinthians chapter 13 it’s not 13 I think it’s 11 or 12. I’m Catholic so I can get kind of close but I usually don’t nail it down to the verse there. And we’ve got Google to fix that for me. It’s what drives me nuts about this book is that it’s going backwards in time. So instead of starting with the New Testament it’s going backwards in time. Because I know you and Sam Adams only care about what’s in the New Testament. Right. Like that’s the main thing. And it should have a certain priority to it. Right. So it’s like I got to wait for volume three to come out before I can argue this. But I think I think if I’ve been able to put the argument together is that some people could actually read the Hebrew and I think that’s the main thing. I don’t know. I haven’t read volume three yet. It’s coming out. So basically we’re trying to keep everybody together. And as long as everybody’s following canon law as long as everybody’s being obedient to their proper pastors within the confines of the law we can let people try stuff. Yeah. Well it’s so interesting to me because it seems like the. Like the Catholic Church is much more of a top down centralized church than the Orthodox Church. And it’s honestly it surprises me that it’s that the charismatic as you know as opposed to the Orthodox where it feels like oh you know they came up with hezikazm however many years ago they’re doing this thing. There’s it’s it’s you know because because you know it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s Exactly. Well it can support more variation and like that’s not like a religious churchy thing right. You can you can actually go to say history right of countries although calling the United States a country is incorrect different problem. You can you can actually go to say history right of countries although calling the United States a country is incorrect different problem. And you can say what makes something like this huge just giant area called the United States so successful relative to these much smaller areas right. And part of it is we have a very large deep hierarchy that’s set up in multiple stages. There’s four stages to the governmental hierarchy of the United States right. So you can see that there’s a very large hierarchy of the United States right. And because of that the United States as a country even though it’s not a country it’s more of a nation or something is able to have a lot of experimentation and take the best of those experiences and then you get the federal government state government and then you get the county governments and then you get the local governments at the very minimum. So this is kind of an impressive hierarchy there right. And because of that the United States as a country even though it’s not a country it’s able to have a lot of experimentation and take the best of those experiments. And you also saw that with something that was also deeply hierarchical in a very similar fashion although not the same maybe parts of it were the Roman Empire right. Why is the Roman Empire successful? Part of it is its size. What about the size of successful because a large thing like say Alexander’s Empire or even the pharaonic empires of Egypt historically they didn’t have that feature like the growth of the Roman Empire. The experimentation wasn’t there. Why? Because they had a very shallow hierarchy right. And a shallow hierarchy cannot support the same level of experimentation. It can’t afford to because it can’t manage it because a flat hierarchy means you’ve got a lot of people at the top but that’s not a lot of people right. Like you have a relatively small percentage of people running things. In the United States there’s actually a percentage of populations huge percentage of population in the government running things. Far too many people in the government not running things of government contractors. You know industrial machine and all that nonsense right. But certainly the idea of the deep hierarchy is the thing that enables the experimentation. And that I think is what you’re witnessing. But that’s a phenomena everywhere. It’s not just a church thing. That was my argument John. That’s interesting. So it’s not even maybe it’s not even more like centralization versus decentralization. It’s just how many levels stack up. Okay. Yeah right. Well that’s what everyone’s missing. They’re all missing the depth and the and the problem of depth. So the problem right now in the Orthodox Church I have an un-good authority from from from my other my other my other father Father Ignatius who Father Eric’s going to meet in Tarpon Springs because he’s going to be there. Father Ignatius was telling me the problem in Ukraine is that the Ukrainian church went and severed from the Russian church as a result of some war or something that’s going on that I hear tell about. And then the government basically or forces within the government or whatever said well the Russian church hasn’t disavowed your church. And they’re kind of like well we don’t have any control over that. You know we’ve we’ve filled out our our end of the paperwork even if the Russians have it and they took over the churches. Right. And why? Well there’s no pope to mediate that. Now you can make this is a valid argument. I’m not falling one side or the other because I’m still not a fan especially the current pope but if pope Jim and Jen the uppity bishop of Rome is a problem for me still a problem for me. Right. The solution that the Catholics have is the pope would decide yes they’re part of the church. No they’re not. And that would be the end of it. Right. Now you could argue there’s a different solution that’s available but the Orthodox don’t have it. And so what happened is the government took over the churches and now they’re empty. And before they weren’t before they were packed. So the minute the government actually takes over the church the oldest church in in Kiev for example it’s now empty which is weird. But like the Orthodox can’t solve that problem because they don’t have a pope and and because you need two things you need a pope and you need the idea of papal infallibility to solve that problem. Now again there may be another better solution. I kind of hope there is because again not a big fan of the uppity bishop of Rome. But we don’t have one and the Orthodox don’t have one. I don’t know about fair but like no one’s using such a thing that I’m aware of. And so the argument is well maybe you need that deep hierarchy to solve that problem because maybe a problem like that where you have a war. Right. Because render under Caesar is still still I’m pretty sure somebody important said that. Right. But it’s still a thing. Well how do you resolve that because it’s not supposed to match up. And I would say on the earlier point about you know this problem of communication we’ll call it right. Well we all speak Latin. We all speak Greek. Do we all speak Hebrew. Like do we all speak English. Of course because English is a way better language for lots of reasons. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that we all have the same liturgy which is roughly that participatory knowledge Matthew. Right. That’s the Matthew. Right. That’s the JV participatory knowledge stuff that that’s what you need to worry about. Not the language that the Bible’s written in or the priest you’re using. Right. It’s the sanctity or we’ll say the sacredness of the liturgy and the modes of participation. And they don’t have to match exactly. I don’t know what that looks like. Well you know what it looks like. Go to an Irish Catholic church. Go to an Italian Catholic church. Go to some South American run Catholic church. You tell me. And I will make the argument that the experience is similar enough that it’s the same experience even though when you’re there it’s like oh this is very different. It’s very different. Well here’s the thing. It’s like when I was you know because the initial impetus for all this was Lord of Spirits basically took a question on their radio show and they give very silly answers anyways. But I was trying to dig in. I’m like who do I listen to here. Who is the like. So I’m an outsider and I want to figure out. OK so the Orthodox are there less. They’re less rational. They’re more mystical. Fine. But is this something you guys have a position on or not. Who do I go to to write or are the five Lord of Spirits good. Should I go to Callisto’s where should I go to Jay Dyer. Should I go to the Patriarchate of Alexandria. Who who who. And look the Catholics whether the Catholics make it easy they’re like look here’s the catechism. We’ll drop it on the table. It’s in there. Here’s here’s what the Pope said. It’s it. There you go. It makes it very it’s you know and I’m like left brained. I’m super Western Christian whatever. So it’s made the puzzle pieces fit together much better there. But like and I was I was you know telling them I’m like. I just I’m I’m not. It makes me more difficult. It makes it more difficult to believe your claims of apostolic authority when this is something that Paul prescribes as you know my bit of a hobby horse. But it’s something that definitely Paul seems to prescribe for Christians to pursue. And you know he’s there’s there’s some there’s like tons of men and tons of angels and they appear to be two different things. Maybe it’s weird but it’s there. And you guys I don’t I don’t know how are you guys implementing this. This how are you implementing baptism on behalf of the dead. Well nobody knows what to do with that verse. Yeah. I’ll just pretend it’s not there. Yeah. The Mormons were there doing it. Yeah. No I don’t know. I mean I guess maybe we all have our blind spots. But I don’t know. I’m just when because I’m not like solo scripture. I’m not I’m not for the clear the perspicuity of scripture. It’s all a bunch of epistemological nonsense. It’s stupid. But I’m also trying to like figure out why. Why does there appear to be a discontinuity in the tradition on this practice. Maybe it’s not a problem. Maybe it’s OK somehow if it seems to disappear and reemerge later. Couldn’t it be as simple. I mean maybe I’m way out of my waters here. Couldn’t it been this simple as the you know it was the technical schism that then just as they as they drift and cultural you know historical confluences the different the different size size of Christianity are just going to they’re just going to manifest manifest and and and move towards towards different instantiations right. They’re just going to have a little bit just just from the cultural and historical confluences of where they’re where they’re occurring where they’re growing where they’re where they’re being taken care of. Yeah. Well that’s that’s like Richard Foster streams of living water. He wrote this book that basically goes you know he’s got the evangelical stream he’s got the charismatic stream he’s got the complete contemplative stream he’s got like six different streams within Christianity that that sort of develops. And you know there’s there’s cross pollination between the nomination and such. So you know I think I think that’s like that’s that’s obviously happened and it’s obviously true. But the vision we’re working towards is to reunite all those streams into one and to integrate it into like you know one body of Christ one church. And you know if the pope is the leader then God have mercy on my soul. If whoever is then right. But I think you know God’s going to bring these things together and he works through people to make that happen. And you know I’m a charismatic so I’m biased so I think I think the revivals that happened in the 20th century among Protestants and also the fact that that that influenced the Catholic Church to. You know have have make space for the charismatic I think that’s a good thing and I think that’s a step towards that. So and I just I see the Orthodox they’re just like we don’t need it it’s not necessary. Well I think I think so this is something it was a topic of stream two or three months ago I talked about how communion functions at different unions and. And the only way that the Orthodox can stay in communion with each other is if they all hold on to the tradition of the apostles which they will tell you is most potently instantiated in their liturgy like this. They got to hold on to that real tight because that’s actually how they have communion with each other right. And so the idea of somebody all of a sudden speaking and glossulalia because that’s a horrible horrible term but it’s very precise in the middle of one of their services. Well it’s like well boy you know I don’t think St. John Chrysostom was doing that in the fourth century so we’re not going to do it. And that’s their that’s their gateway back to the apostles is via the divine liturgy of St. Basil or St. John Chrysostom. So since that’s the basis of their communion it’s a lot more threatening to them to try and change anything. Where is the Catholics it’s like well gosh as long as the pope says we’re okay then and we’re in communion that we’re okay which gives us a really durable communion that I think we’ve abused way too much and I would like to stop abusing that and seeing just how far we can push things. But it’s it’s really it’s like yeah they’re they’re in hierarchical communion with us. And if you don’t like to do it St. Alphonsus is down the road. So yeah at risk of habitually being out of out of my depth here. I would want to just you know and I’m not not an orthodox guy but but I do listen to a lot of Peugeot and I would want I would think the Peugeot move would be you know I was from a Peugeot you know he’s he’s like my comfort zone. He’s like my comfort food he’s so profound but it’s so simple it’s the same thing over to but as he would say properly oriented properly nested right he would say somewhere like somewhere outside of the divine liturgy. There’s a way for that dynamic there’s a way for that aspect that you’re just I would I would guess that that he would say that. Yeah and I’m going to be honest I think all of this charismatic stuff is much better suited to at least liturgically in Eucharistic adoration versus in the mass. The mass is something that everybody needs to be able to participate in and the church has a vision of what the mass is supposed to look like supposed to have the noble simplicity supposed to be sober supposed to be reverent and dignified. Whereas Eucharistic adoration it’s like well that’s for the people who want to attend it it’s not obligatory for anybody. And the church’s documents even say that I’m thinking especially of music here right because for some reason every charismatic that I’ve ever met has been super into guitar. Right now maybe you can show me maybe you can show me an example I would love to meet them but they’re all super into guitars and the church says you know that’s that’s popular piety right there. Right. It’s an art form that’s taken from the culture and we’re trying to bring it in right and it’s like the church is actually pretty clear if you actually read the right documents it’s like you don’t go straight to the mass with that it should pass through other things to see if it can make it more organic journey. Is the objection to the guitar is it strictly on the instruments like we literally can’t or is it that there is a certain style of music that generally comes along with. So the voice is most excellent voice is the most excellent instrument for praising God. I don’t know about my. Okay. No but no that’s the thing like your voice your your your evaluation of your voice is not relevant. But the filter is time and this is the problem with Protestantism per se is it doesn’t understand filtering. Right. Whereas the Catholics will integrate things as they filter right and so you Orthodox do this too right they’ll filter things they filter from below mostly right where the Catholics kind of bring things in from above hope can just kind of grab things and sometimes those things get rejected. Right. And so there’s a filtering going on it at all levels and there’s multiple levels of filtering and multiple things. Right. The tall hierarchy the deep hierarchy that I was talking about enables different types of filtering different ways of filtering right different ways of introduction that aren’t available in its image in a less less robust hierarchy. And so time is a factor for filtering and you know look I mean you know maybe guitars are evil. I don’t know man. It could be like you know I mean I love guitars. I like I can’t play them. That’d be maybe girl but you know I love them. I listen to them. But like hey maybe maybe that’s the path path of Satan. I have no idea. You know the church will filter that out over a couple hundred years or maybe a thousand or so. Who knows. I don’t know. I don’t know either. But I know this is that you can listen to Gregorian chance and get pumped up. That’s that’s been my I’ve been on like a workout kick with those. And there’s so there’s something about you don’t need anything else but a line human human. But it’s like you know you create an architecture and you create a discipline and a community and you Gregorian chant and who it’ll get you ready for that three mile truck. OK. Let me let me try to leverage two challenges to the voices focal only idea. So the church also does allow pipe organs to the degree that they voice. That’s that’s that’s really something. But you know you have songs that I mean this is more obvious. The songs that say you know are from the liar and oh this is a song for strains or whatever. So there’s multiple instruments. So that would be like the first simpler effect. The second one which hopefully doesn’t sound too well but I don’t think it is. If we’re looking at the eschatological vision of all of the nations coming into the heavenly city and praising God in their own ways for bringing all of their their particular ways of worship. You’re talking about all sorts of different singing styles. You’re talking about all sorts of different instruments. You’re talking about all these different things and to restrict it to like well I guess I do agree that the voice is probably the best instrument. I do agree with that but the other instruments are there to support the human voice. Yeah. And occasionally do an instrumental like why restrict it to just the organ or something because it seems kind of arbitrary because the organ was an instrument that arose in a certain cultural context. You’re doing the Protestant thing. You can do arbitrary all the way down. Sure. So I think I think there’s you can make a distinction between folk culture and high culture. Yeah. And there are certain things that can actually when they you know like folk culture is very distinctive and very particular to different people. And sometimes they begin to like folk cultures or people just doing people stuff will start to shoot towards something higher which is a little more universal there. Right. So you know you can go to we’ll just say you can go to Detroit Michigan and you can find some lovely Gothic church there. You got this beautiful early 20th century Gothic revival architecture and you looked at that next to some of the brick buildings and some of the it’s like huh. Goths who are the Goths that was a bunch of Frenchies right a bunch of French barbarians you know but we’ve got this architecture that’s named after them where they got the pointed spires and the flying buttresses and the big stained glass windows and that seems portable. Like people can look at that and they just understand it. They know how to as long as they’re not complete animals they know how to behave towards that with a certain reverence and awe. I don’t just start blabbing in there unless they’re awful Chinese tourists. But never mind that. I think one of these things when they get to a certain level I are shooting up pointing towards the highest they actually become portable where you know why do people go to Europe. Do they they go there for the food because they got some pretty good chefs there in Italy right and I’ve heard French cuisine is also good but what do I know I haven’t been to France. Man and like everybody goes there to see the churches right right even though they’re not part of the culture but again John I want to I want to point out something very important that people are steeped in. You the assumption of your statement is that all instruments and all ways of worship are equal and that can’t be true right and so that’s the point and this is a very common problem. Everybody falls into this equality first doctor where they go well it’s arbitrary and therefore everything’s equal to very postmodern way of thinking. But the fact that things are arbitrary first of all we don’t know if they’re arbitrary right like like it could be that they seem arbitrary to us because we’re all stupid because we are we’re all we’re all Muppets. You know my dream we’re all Muppets right but but maybe they’re not arbitrary they just seem arbitrary because we don’t understand how the decision was made. That happens all the time by the way right but more importantly. What when you’re saying that you’re not recognizing something like the way Americans build cars the way the Japanese build cars the way the Germans build cars and the way the Yugoslavians build cars are not the same. Some of those cars work really well some of those cars do not right and so it matters and maybe a Yugoslavian car is not a practical car for the world in the same way maybe a form of worship is not appropriate. Maybe guitars are no good and maybe it’s because they’re too accessible too easy to play and therefore they don’t have the sacredness component in them as a very scientific way of thinking about it. They haven’t just taken the organic journey through through the temporal aspect. And it’s been developed. I mean there’s different ways to play the guitar still there’s really only one way to play the pipe organ that works in a church. And that’s loud. Another thing I do want to give you a little bit of a point John and something that the church is not entirely unaware of is the possibility of an enculturation into the liturgy which is something that has to be done very slowly and done very carefully. But you can find a Roman missile that is for the Zaire use of the Roman Rite where they have taken symbols from their own kind of religious vocabulary and put them. I’ve never seen one right but apparently the priest will cross his arms like this and bow down. And that means like repenting of your sins. If that’s what repenting of your sins looks like in the Congo, then I very slowly and gently will say okay if that’s how you guys want to say that you’re sorry. As long as it’s what that actually means. We can do that. I think if the churches in East Asia, where it’s so small and persecuted, they would probably be some of that kind of in culturation there. One of the seminarians in Detroit was Vietnamese. I think his family had fled because of the government persecution. But he had lived in Vietnam, and he told me he’s like, the Vietnamese want to have their own kind of right of the mass and, and I’m kind of trust the Vietnamese, they’ve got like a certain level of, I’m going to say a certain level of civilization, and all I mean by that is living in cities. Where you’ve got these symbolic language kind of built in to how you interact with each other. So anyway, there is something to that. We don’t need to have everything become St. Peter’s in Rome, but St. Peter’s of Rome is still the exemplar and the pattern of how things are. And we don’t. I mean, I mentioned this earlier, right? You go to an Italian Catholic Church and a French Catholic Church, and you’re going to see something very different, right? And American church, forget about it, man. Like you’re not even in like, you’d be like, what is this? Is this are these Catholics? Really? But they are. And the experience is similar enough that you know it’s correct. That’s very mysterious, but you try it out, you know? I mean, like I, okay, so this is interesting because my main motivation is to be faithful to that vision that we have in Revelation, the vision that pervades the scriptures and the whole point of Christ, you know, coming down from heaven, God becoming man, is that all humanity, all the nations of the earth, you know, and everything. And so, I mean, maybe it’s a matter of different rates of uptake. Maybe that’s where the difference is because, okay, you’re shaking your head. Let me try this. So my, like, being, you know, growing up charismatic, very much influenced by the third wave revivals in the 80s and stuff. But the roots of that go back to Azusa Street in the early 1900s, where you have this, you know, segregation in society, you know, blacks, whites, men, women, all these things. And all of those barriers are broken down over this very rapid process because the spirit is just coming on anybody he pleases. The spirit does not segregate or discriminate. And to me, that represents such a beautiful vision of what the, you know, in the age to come of what that sort of worship will look like. We’re going to have all nations. There’s not going to be this, you know, it’s not trying to be like a woke or a postmodern kind of ideal. I think it’s, it’s not worried about you being woke because you put the right thing at the center. Right. And if the right thing’s actually at the center, then diversity is actually possible. Right. Yeah. So that that that’s like, that’s that’s basically it. And then when I see the charismatic stuff going into the global south and how it’s the fastest growing by far, all these African countries, China, Southeast Asia. And they’re all like developing and working within your different, you know, cultural upbringings. Now there’s got to be boundaries. There’s got to be boundaries because, you know, to go back to the musical styles point or instruments or whatever. You know, we probably shouldn’t imitate the same music that was used to worship some tribal God or something. Yeah, we should get rid of that. That should go. But Christ is not just about, you know, throwing things out. He’s about repurposing things, plundering the Egyptians, bringing stuff into the body of Christ and redeeming it. Right. What is beautiful and what is truthful there. And so maybe maybe it’s like and I guess I can see the point. I can see the point for the conservatives. Let’s say, OK, let’s let this thing percolate over and maybe 500 years from now. We’ll see masses with guitars. I don’t know. Maybe that’s unthinkable. It probably is unthinkable now. But I guess I do have respect for that position. But at the same time, I’m like, I don’t know. It’s kind of this a bit of a bit of a little post-molodial twinge that I have. But I would argue that’s based on a universalist attitude. Right. Like so. So let’s suppose we all want to participate in in building building something like a cell phone. OK, we all want to participate. Our end goal is the same cell phone. That’s our highest goal. OK, just say that the way you participate is not the way I’m participating. Right. Because maybe you know how to like build a cell phone case, which I do not know how to do. But I know how to build the software. Right. And so that’s the integration. The integration in how to build a cell phone is called a corporation. Or maybe many corporations ultimately. Right. With one at the top like Apple, because that happens. Right. And so the church is operating exactly the same way. Or to say it in the correct chronological order, corporations operate the exact same way churches operate. Because the distributed cognition starts with the religion and then it gets adopted by these other by the separation, I would argue, the render and the Caesar. The body of Christ that made these other bodies, because that’s all corporation means possible. Exactly. So so what if, right? What if there’s lots of different ways to participate in the project of bringing about the Shining City on the Hill or Revelation or however you want to frame it doesn’t doesn’t matter. What if there’s multiple ways to do that requires multiple skill sets from multiple places and multiple people and they’re all in different starting points? Then it’s not a matter of what you were saying. Like, well, how far along you are will say along the timeline. Right. What if it’s a matter of it just takes like 10 different skills, whether they’re starting at the same place or not is not relevant. Now you get two variables. Right. Because the thing you have in common is an abstraction. It’s right. It’s us. It’s abstract. Heaven’s abstract to us, obviously. Right. We’re not we’re not there yet. Right. Or maybe the way that we’re there is not the way that we say in our house. I hope that’s true for everybody. I think that’s true for everybody. And therefore, your starting point is different. The skills you bring to bear are different. Your ability to implement those skills is different. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Because universalism isn’t required. Right. And once you drop the universalism requirement, all of a sudden all this stuff becomes easier. It’s like, well, yeah, you can do what you can do. And see, this is the problem that the Protestants all run it all. Protestants and nominations run into. Maybe not the reforms. I want to make a distinction just because my buddy Bruce will get upset if I don’t. All the process denominations run into this problem, right, because they have to put everything in a box. They have no choice. The solas require that. All of them separately. Weird that you have five alone things. Doesn’t make any sense. Whatever. Right. But they require you to say things like, well, only these people can be baptized and therefore only these people can get heaven. And then it’s like, but now you’re not including everybody. So they talk about universalism, but they’re the least universal in that. Right. Because the Catholics, for example, they can canonize somebody who’s never been to church. That’s not a problem for Catholic. But Protestants can’t do anything like that for lots of aside from they don’t have saints. They can’t even afford that somebody’s a Christian if they’re not going to that particular denominations church. It’s no good. And so they’re less universal, even though they’re more, we’ll say, forgiving and it’s easier to get in. Right. You can say a few words and bang, you’re in the church. I have an un-good authority. Somebody tried to play that trick on me, Father Eric. But, you know, that’s ridiculous. Like you get a bit on the other hand, the Catholics actually have a lower bar because they’re like, yeah, you know, maybe St. Christopher never went to church and didn’t even know Jesus, but he helped them across the river. So he’s in. Well, couldn’t you leverage the exact same points against the Catholic Church because they have, excuse me, they have the they have certain they still have certain standards, right? Like I think Bonhoeffer should be a saint, but because he was never officially joined to the Catholic Church, he should. I might have brought that up a long time ago, but or like I’m rough on finer points of. But it’s not because he wasn’t brought into the church. It can’t be that because a lot of people or saints weren’t ever in a church. I know that. So you got St. Christopher. You’re not like importing Dante into this, are you? No, because Dante put some pagans in heaven and you know, it was he was the one who wrote the Divine Comedy. But I don’t know who else you would be talking about besides, you know, the giant St. Christopher. Well, but they can, but they can. The point is, I guess we could. There’s no hard to it. Right, right. You see, the Protestants actually have bars to all of these things like they have gates around everything. And so they’re more universal in who they who and what they accept. Right. Right. But they’re not more universal in in what can be included. And that’s a big difference. And so the universalism actually lies with the universal church, the one true church and not with these others splinter rebellious groups, even though it seems the other way around. It’s actually not that way. That to me is the irony. Like in Protestants, are you amongst themselves? Who’s killed more Protestants, Catholics or other Protestants? Other Protestants by far, by the way. And so they bitch about the Catholics and think, yeah, but mostly you guys just killed yourselves. Sorry. Just historical like numbers thing. Right. Just that’s the way it unfolded. Very unhappy about it. I’m sure everyone’s unhappy about it. Death is no good. But also that’s what happened. And so you kind of have to account for that. So who’s more universalist? I, you know, look at the end of the day, it’s not the Protestants because they don’t agree with each other. So like the Baptist don’t think the non-Baptists are getting in. The Catholics don’t have that attitude at all. By the way, the Catholics are like, you know, we don’t we don’t know. We just hope our Protestant brothers make it to the one true church. In the meantime, we pray for their for their souls. That’s it. That’s the whole statement. Like this is nothing else going on. And that’s not to say all Catholics. Right. Because again, the sin is in the human, not in the not in the greater church. But that’s actually really important. OK, I think I see it because I wasn’t following for most of that. But I think what you’re saying at the end there makes sense that like the Protestants are very dogmatic as to, you know, that you know, you could caricature the independent fundamentalist Baptist types. And that’s, you know, I think the weakness of that’s the weakness of putting everything in confessional, even participatory boxes, whereas I guess, you know, I do like that approach. The Catholics are like, OK, we’re going to be humble about this. God can do whatever God wants to do. God can save. Visibly incorporate whoever he wants into the church. I hope I’m a repentant Jew. Yeah, not from a Catholic perspective. I would like to be a repentant Jew, but not according to being Jewish. I definitely do not repent of being Jewish. That is definitely true. Oh, goodness. Yeah. Father Eric, since you didn’t read that marvelous article I sent you, I’m going to have to do it myself because I just enjoyed that article way too much. I read the article. No, no, no. You didn’t read it. You didn’t read it. You didn’t read it. You didn’t read it. You didn’t read it. You didn’t read it. You didn’t read it. You didn’t read it. I read the article. No, no, no. You didn’t read it on your channel. Oh, well, I think that’d be a little impolitic for me too. It would. Yeah, I didn’t think you would, but I can read it. Okay. Not on your channel. I’ll do it on my own channel. If you’re curious about what Jacob’s talking about, you’ll have to go back four days on his Discord server and find that link. So, yeah, it was just a little bit of news. Sometimes we get good news in the more conservative religious sphere. And sometimes that news is written in a way that induces this. I have to repent of my Schadenfreude because I sometimes do, in fact, indulge in the sin of Schadenfreude. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, there’s lots to pray for. We’re being a little bit mysterious here. There was a church in Rhode Island that got a new pastor, and the new pastor wasn’t into as much lay participation and social justice stuff. And they were very unhappy about it, and the newspaper wrote an article about it. If you watched my livestream on the Untold Catholic Story about the reform of American seminaries in the 90s and the 2000s, that story is very unsurprising because they’re all a lot more like me than they are, you know, Father Hippie. And the church is now filled with people and all the people who weren’t happy about the stuff are like, ah, why is this no longer my temple to my social justice? Social justice came up a lot in that article. This is all really good because I don’t know how much you guys follow Aaron Renet all, but he always talks about how terrible conservatives are of maintaining and taking over institutions. They just leave and they do their own thing. They’re Protestants. They leave and they do their own damn thing, right? And like, they don’t. So that’s an example of like, the conservatives are, we’re holding the line. We’re keeping this institution. Thank God the Catholics are not Protestants. Right. Conservative Protestants have a problem. It’s not true conservatism at some point. So the nice thing about a seminary is that it’s a monarchy. There’s one man at the top that’s the rector. He answers to the Archbishop and to the Pope. And if he just goes in there and starts like dropping the hammer down, like many good men did in the 90s and the early 2000s, then a lot of things can really just kind of happen. So there is a benefit to the monarchical structures that if you need quick reform, it can actually pull it off. Not necessarily going to be pretty or easy. You want to have the right people doing that. You don’t want to give it to somebody who’s going to go a little bit mad with their power. But yeah, yeah. So we do have that. And even parishes, I mean, they’re kind of anarchical because you have a pastor and he’s the one who’s in charge and responsible. So anyway, monarchy is good. Well, the problem, but the problem with saying monarchy is everybody assumes a universal single monarchy. And I’ve had to correct people. A universal single monarchy with no limitations or restrictions put on them. Exactly. Well, and they believe in postmodern top-down power from above, which is garbage and nonsense. It’s never happened in the history of the world. Because that’s the Peterson’s tyrannical chimp problem. It’s too expensive to maintain tyranny. There’s a cost to it and it’s just too high and two people can take you out. And so it’s not that it never happens. It’s that it doesn’t last very long when it does. And it’s people worrying about short-term problems like, oh, this boss in this particular job is like oppressing me. Yeah, probably. But, you know, either he’s going to get promoted or fired eventually or you can leave. Right. And then that’s what people don’t like. Well, I don’t want to have to make a change. I want them to make a change. Yeah, well, you know, and I want a purple talking unicorn. But it gets a disappointment all around. It’s not going to happen. So yeah, if you could come in on Saturday, that’d be great. The other problem with the monarchy is that most of us are all Americans. So like, you can’t do that. You know, it’s funny. It’s funny. I’m a part of the SCA, which is the Society of Creative Anachronisms. And that’s basically hierarchy, monarchy stuff going on all around. And it was born in Berkeley, California, back in the 60s. The Americans long for a monarch. They do. It’s funny. We have all these traditions and all these customs and stuff, which a lot of us newbies are like still figuring out. Like, oh, yeah, I’m supposed to bow and say, you excellency, this person who’s a Baroness. I’m like, whoops, I just messed up. That one’s lying. A real thing. The fascination that so many Americans have with the British royalty. Yeah. Right. They’re just like, it’s like they just eat that stuff up. Guess what? I said a couple of prayers for King Charles when he was crowned. I said a few prayers for Queen Elizabeth when she passed away. That was the extent of my participation because they’re not my monarchs. Right. It’s cool that the British have it. It certainly provides utility for British society to have somebody that can gather around that doesn’t have the authority of administration. But I’ve got Christ as Lord and the Pope is his vicar on Earth and I’ve got the bishop as my boss. So it’s like I’ve got all the monarchy I can handle. Thank you very much. That was the problem we solved. You got to remember that the people in the colonies, in the half of the colonies that revolted because there are 26 colonies, 13 of them revolted. They didn’t revolt, though. They actually just rebel. And they didn’t rebel against the king so much as they were rebelling against Parliament. And like I get that this history is kind of esoteric to people who aren’t familiar with it. I have videos on Navigating Patterns with Adam about all this. Right. So they had already destroyed the monarchy in England. And the reason why the colonies were passed is because appeals to the king were failing because the king established the colonies and he is responsible. Parliament was new. Parliament wasn’t established when the colonies were established. It came along much later and it was effectively a corporate takeover. You worry about corporate takeovers of government today? You should read some history. You’d be very grateful once you read about the East India Company. You’d be like, whoa, man, we’ve got it good. The East India Company effectively propped up Parliament. Parliament wouldn’t exist. The king would have been restored. The proper king would have been restored in England if it not for the corporate interference of the East India Company. And so the solution that they came up with, because everybody in the colonies was a loyalist. They were all loyalists. They were all loyal to the king. All of them. Not everybody in England was loyal to the king. That was the problem. But they came up with a solution to the problem of the loss of the monarch. We have to get rid of the monarch. Right. But we can’t get rid of monarchy. What do we do? And they came up with this very sophisticated, very new, maybe it won’t work, although pretty good record so far, government that replaced the monarch. Right. In a very unique way that’s never been tried before. It is a step in a certain direction from the European continental philosophy to the English tradition around the Magna Carta. The improvement is the Constitution. Right. So there’s a direct sort of lineage there. And then that replaced the monarchy. But yeah, we still long for monarchy here in the United States. It’s just we have a unique solution to the problem. And who knows if it’ll last. But like so far so good. Yeah. Well, thanks for the history lesson, Mark. And you know, if I don’t end this stream soon, I’m going to be history. So this one was a real banger. I was happy to have Matthew on. That was a good participation. John, great to have you on. Wish you were here a little more often. You’ve always got good questions and sparked a conversation. Josh, you were quiet tonight. Valerie and Jacob. And as always, Mark does have the talking and that’s just fine. So good night and God bless you all. God bless.