The Elizabethan courtier John Lyly claimed that the English were God’s chosen and peculiar people. Well, if we are, this was certainly a rather peculiar choice on the Almighty’s part, as we are probably the least religious people on Earth.

So says cultural ethnologist Kate Fox in her book “Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behavior.” I’ve wondered about English religious adherence — or the lack thereof — for years. That’s just more of my troublesome Anglophilia acting up again, but then again maybe not. John Mark Reynolds, for one, is of the opinion that America still mirrors English culture, with a time delay of about 50 years.

So it might be portentious that “… In surveys, up to 88 per cent of English people tick the box saying that they ‘belong’ to one or another of the Christian denominations — usually the Church of England — but in practice only about 15 per cent of these ‘Christians’ actually go to church on a regular basis.”

And she lays a share of the blame on the C of E:

It is hard to find anyone who takes the Church of England seriously — even among its own ranks. In 1991, the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. George Carey, said: ‘I see it as an elderly lady, who mutters away to herself in a corner, ignored most of the time’. And this typically Eeyorish comment was in an interview immediately following his appointment to the most exalted position in this Church. If the Archbishop of Canterbury himself likens his church to an irrelevant, senile old biddy, it is hardly surprising that the rest of us feel free to ignore it. Sure enough, in a sermon almost a decade later, he bemoaned the fact that ‘A tacit atheism prevails’. Well, really — what did he expect?

Interesting comment, I thought. This is the problem I have with people wanting only the “nice” Church, the “non-confrontational” Church that stays on the safe side of every argument and out of the way of the political-correctness police. In less time than it takes to say “be ye not conformed,” the Church that has stayed out of the way has begun to make herself comfortable in that nice rocking chair in the corner.

So the Muslims want to build a mosque at Ground Zero, less than a decade after other Muslims — whose actions they have said don’t represent the norm — murdered over 3,000 of us. And nothing will do but for them to be able to build it at that exact location.

I wonder, do you have to be Orthodox to get the point of Hagia Sophia? One of Christendom’s most beautiful churches (THE most beautiful, to me) … with those obscene spikes sticking up from its four corners like stakes nailing down a corpse. Do we HAVE to be so blind after all these centuries? Mosques may actually be places of prayer, but they are also most certainly the way that Islamists piss on the grave of their enemies.

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The August heat is still bearing down heavily on us here in Missouri. But it’s pleasant enough in small doses, and I’ve succumbed to the temptation a couple times to read or just sit on the porch steps, listening to the cicadas’ rising and falling waves of metallic-sounding chatter. Most of the flowers and plants in the yard are looking fatigued, and some, like the exuberant Shasta daisy that springs up hopefully every year, are burnt beyond recognition. Even the hardy black-eyed Susans whose sunny faces I wait for every year aren’t looking quite as happy as they did last week. Bees and other friends have stopped visiting them now, and all the green things seem to be just doggedly going about the business of getting by until it’s time to close up shop.

Because, of course, for the flora and fauna, that’s what happens next. In our infinite wisdom, we’ve declared December to be the end of the year and January the start of the next. But, more attuned to more ancient rhythms, the Church, in her infinite wisdom, has declared August to be the end of the year and September the start of the new one. And so one fast and various feasts preside over another little Lent, of sorts. And personally, it feels entirely appropriate this summer.
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Have you been watching motion pictures recently and said, “Why can’t we have MORE special effects, MORE dark, apocalyptic imagery, MORE violence and non-stop motion?” Well then! “Inception” is the movie for you. More to the point, if you watched the Matrix series and thought, “Well, it’s an interesting alternate reality, but for goodness sake, can’t they make it MORE complicated and give me LESS information about how it works?” then “Inception” is really the movie for you.

If you haven’t done any of that, you’re like me, which is why I didn’t care much for this movie. All the same, it’s worth seeing, I think. Because the culture-makers of the world’s culture are describing their pain and their crisis. It makes for compelling viewing, even as it breaks your heart.

BTW, here’s a trailer of the movie, in case you haven’t seen it already. (My favorite special effect is at :43-:45.)

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Yesterday’s reading in “Wounded by Love” gave me something to think about, which isn’t unusual. But it made me to do cartoons with tigers in them, which doesn’t happen very often. (Well, not nearly as often as I’d like, anyway.) I wish the subject was a cute one. But it’s actually something that goes to the heart of what being Orthodox is all about.
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s-p has a candidate for the worst music video ever, and he may be right (check it out HERE).

But are you ready for some juicy Bollywood goodness? It’s not in English, but when you see those big-budget production values and that gripping story line, you’re sure to say that some things transcend the boundaries of language.

But it’s hard to decide. Maybe we really need to hand the honors to this melodic interlude from Finland:

So many choices!

In devoting so much of yesterday’s post to the subject of morality, I realized I needed a reminder of what I discovered back HERE: If you make morality an end in itself, rather than a means to an end, you’ll be worse off than if you hadn’t even tried to do the right thing.

Or, to quote C. S. Lewis (**):

Mere morality is not the end of life. You were made for something quite different from that. … The people who go on asking if they can’t lead a decent life without Christ don’t know what life is about; if they did they would know that ‘a decent life’ is mere machinery compared with the thing we men are really made for. Morality is indispensable; but the Divine Life, which gives itself to us and which calls us to be gods, intends for us something in which morality will be swallowed up. We are to be re-made.

If you know that the ‘Divine Life’ is the ultimate goal and act accordingly, you become more moral in the bargain. If you aim only at being moral, you become the caricature of Christianity that secularists rightly despise: self-righteous, legalistic, judgmental and hypocritical.

It seemed worth revisiting, because with all the exploration into the subject I did yesterday, I was more and more uncomfortable that I was treating morality as the goal. In my experience, you’ll know a godly person, because they’ll also be moral. But someone that only wants to be moral is neither moral nor godly. Make sense? Probably not.
Okay, so … on with the countdown.

Since I was just talking t’other day about the dreaded m-word (sh! the m-word is morality. sh!), I was interested to see this quote from John Adams in a Fourth of July newspaper ad:

We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

Yeah! What he said. So then, are we more moral than we used to be? I thought it was a no-brainer. So did an atheist I talked to (well, argued with) recently. The problem is, we both had totally different answers.

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I have some big-thinky stuff that I want to try to get around to, but before then, let’s take a moment for a streetcar ride.

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I considered trying to wear red, white and blue to church yesterday. Would it have been inappropriate? I couldn’t quite decide.
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