Brothers Judd Blog

If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)

Religion

Religion

WOULDN’T SAY, “NO”:

A century in the Siberian wilderness: the Old Believers who time forgot: In 1978, Soviet scientists stumbled upon a family living in a remote part of Russia. They hadn’t interacted with outsiders for decades. Almost half a century later, one of them is still there (Sophie Pinkham, 1/22/26, The Guardian)

None of the Lykov children had ever seen bread. But when the geologists offered them a loaf and some jam, they refused. “We are not allowed that,” they said, in a refrain that would become familiar to all their visitors. Natalia and Agafia were hard to understand, not only because of their archaic vocabulary but also because of an odd, chanting cadence that one geologist described as “a slow, blurred cooing”.

The Lykovs were Old Believers, members of the Orthodox Christian schismatic sect whose history is deeply bound up with that of the forest and the countryside. The Old Believers emerged in the mid-17th century after Patriarch Nikon, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, amended the liturgy to bring it into harmony with the Greek Orthodox version. The reforms altered the spelling of “Jesus” – at a time when letters were understood as something close to the literal flesh of God – and changed the number of fingers to be raised when making the sign of the cross from two to three.

Those who rejected these innovations became known as Old Believers. To the rebels, who soon broke into many different branches, Nikon’s reforms were a betrayal of the true Christianity. Their anger fed on broader social injustices of the era and was further stoked by the notorious lack of respect for Russian Orthodoxy shown by Peter the Great. A self-consciously westernising tsar, Peter preferred the gods Bacchus and Mars.

In the early days of the schism, Old Believers were burned alive, tortured and imprisoned for their faith. Many were cast into pits in the ground. They believed that they bore a tremendous burden – the preservation of the true words of God – and their extreme ways of living reflected this sense of responsibility. As the whole world fell into sin, they maintained their purity. While they awaited the end of the world, they maintained strict rules about diet (for the Lykovs, no bread or jam), clothing, everyday practices and the adoption of new technology. Some Old Believers and other religious dissidents resorted to self-immolation. Whole communities locked themselves in their village churches and set them aflame.

Others took refuge in the forest, the safest place to hide from the authorities and preserve their way of life without risk of contamination by the outside world. Many branches of Old Believers were “priestless”, meaning that a family could worship without the help of a professional man of God. For the most radical Old Believers, holiness was directly correlated to isolation. The highest holiness was the life of the hermit. In the Bible hermits retreated to the desert; in Russia they retreated to the forest. But they called the forest a desert, deriving the names for hermits and for monasteries from the same word. The forest was the wasteland of holiness, the emptiness of God.

Founding Presidents Religion Uncategorized

IT’S A PURITAN NATION:

Calvin Coolidge’s “Hebraic Mortar”: Henry Ford sought to mainstream anti-Jewish sentiment in the United States. In a 1925 address, Coolidge decisively broke with Ford’s movement. (Devorah Goldman, 12/22/25, Public Discourse)

But he argues that the colonial character was nonetheless marked by a common religious liberalism: “From its beginnings, the new continent had seemed destined to be the home of religious tolerance.” This, he suggests, is because of the Bible, “the work of literature that was common to all of them.” Scripture was everywhere in the colonies. Citing “the historian Lecky”—presumably the nineteenth-century Irishman William Lecky—Coolidge contends that “Hebraic mortar cemented the foundations of American democracy.”

For the “sturdy old divines of those days,” the Bible served as a patriotic rallying cry:

They knew the Book. They were profoundly familiar with it, and eminently capable in the exposition of all its justifications for rebellion. To them, the record of the exodus from Egypt was indeed an inspired precedent. They knew what arguments from holy writ would most powerfully influence their people. It required no great stretch of logical processes to demonstrate that the children of Israel, making bricks without straw in Egypt, had their modern counterpart in the people of the colonies, enduring the imposition of taxation without representation!

The idea of America as a kind of Israel, an “almost chosen nation,” in Abraham Lincoln’s words some generations earlier, was not new. William Bradford, founder of the Plymouth colony in 1620, compared his personal study of Hebrew to Moses seeing the Promised Land, yet not being permitted to enter. John Davenport and Theophilus Eaton, founders of the New Haven colony in 1637, were expert Hebrew scholars; around half of the dozens of statutes in the New Haven code of 1655 contained references to Hebrew scripture. Davenport ensured that the first public school in New Haven included Hebrew in the core curriculum and encouraged broad engagement with, as Coolidge puts it, the “great figures of Hebrew history, with Joshua, Samuel, Moses, Joseph, David, Solomon, Gideon, Elisha.” The United States is peppered with place names sourced from the Bible: Salem, Sharon, Jericho, Bethlehem, Goshen, Shiloh, and Hebron are just a few examples.

George Washington famously sent warm greetings to Jewish congregations, most notably to a synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, where he offered a blessing inspired by Hebrew prophets: “May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants—while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

This biblical rootedness, Coolidge suggests, remains vital to maintaining a cohesive polity. A shared attachment to the Bible bolstered the patriot cause, drawing together scattered sympathies and interests and “divergencies of religious faith.” It is no wonder, he notes, that Jews—who first arrived on America’s shores in the 1650s—formed an integral part of the Revolutionary War effort, giving ample blood and treasure.

Conservative Thought Religion

CIVILIZATION IS ACCEPTANCE OF THE IMAGO DEI:

Western Civilization: Rooted in Dignity & Love (Bradley J. Birzer|, December 17th, 2025, The Imaginative Conservative)

We can trace the desire to understand the universal quality and dignity of the human person as far back as our very origin as a Western people. While someone might justly quibble with me on the exact moment of Western genesis, I happily and confidently turn to the development of philosophy and ethics in the Greek-Persian town of Miletus. There, a number of men gathered and debated the origins of humanity.

They asked two fundamental questions, each trying to get at the nature of our diversity within our universality. First, they asked: Are we and our essence earth, water, wind, or fire? That is, is there an “Urstoff—that is a primary substance that holds us all together? Second, though, and equally important: Are we trapped in the cycles of the world: life, middle age, and death; or spring, summer, fall, winter? And, if a God exists, does he share in the Urstoff with us, and can He help us escape the cycles of the world? While the Greeks didn’t find answers to any of these profound questions, Heraclitus’ definition of our Urstoff—”fire”—became a universal way of understanding the human person. The word Heraclitus employed was LOGOS, a Greek word that meant fire, spirit, Word, reason, and imagination. Throughout the Hellenic and, especially, the Hellenistic periods, many of the Greeks—Zeno, Cleanthnes, and the Stoics especially—adopted the LOGOS as their own. To them, it bridged the world between the God and all men. Each person, it seems, was a singular manifestation of the universal principle. As such, each person was connected to every other person through the God.

Virgil, Cicero, and the Romans took this to its logical conclusion. Virgil, in Eclogue 4, written roughly a half-century before the birth of Christ, predicted that the God would marry a Virgin, and she would conceive a child who would usher in golden age and, through the merits of the father, erase sin from the world. Just as seriously, Cicero, in On the Laws, proclaimed Reason as the link between all men and the God. What is there, he asked, more divine than Reason? As such, all good men and the God live in the cosmopolis, the city of the universal.

Let’s take this argument even farther. We can immerse ourselves in the ancient texts of Western civilization—the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid—and look for proof of racism (that is, judging another person by the color of his skin), and our search will be totally in vain. Judging a person by the color of one’s skin—a grave sin, to be sure—simply did not exist in the ancient West. It is a modern phenomenon, an accident of history, not something rooted in the Western tradition. As horrific as it is, it came with modernity, not with the West.

Religion

THE REFORMATION ROLLS ON:

The Jews’ time of miracles (Samuel Rubinstein, 12/19/25, Englesberg Ideas)

It is not hard to see why non-Protestant Christians thought 1 and 2 Maccabees bore the mark of revelation: the martyrdoms (including the elephant-slayer Eleazar’s) prefigured Christ on the Cross, and the wars gave them succour in their own battles with heathen enemies, whether Saracen, Magyar, or Dane. For Jews, however, the story posed a problem. It was difficult to celebrate the ancient recovery of a homeland when that homeland had since been lost, or the consecration of a temple that the Romans were later to destroy. Hanukkah was a celebration of Jewish cultural and national independence: it did not fit the needs and realities of a scattered people. The festival in diaspora had to be rethought and redefined. The Talmud made popular a story that does not appear in the books of Maccabees: the miracle of the oil, which Jews commemorate by lighting the Hanukkiah. There was a shift in the meaning of Hanukkah, as Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks put it, from a celebration of ‘military power’ to one of ‘spiritual strength’.

But the more martial themes of the Maccabees story resurfaced in Jewish thought, much as they once had been put to use by Ælfric.

Israel/Palestine Religion

THE IRRITANT:

The Judaism of George Steiner (J. J. Kimche, December 1, 2020, First Things)

Steiner’s portrayal of Judaism is unusual for a modern secularist, in that it defends an essentialist view of Jewishness, arguing that certain immutable qualities define and anchor Jewishness across its historical and cultural permutations. Yet Steiner dismisses the usual hallmarks posited by other essentialist Jewish thinkers: claims of racial, religious, ethical, or national uniqueness. His brilliant and disturbing essay on the subject, “Our Homeland, The Text” (1985), argues that the Jew, like the biblical patriarchs, lives a life of self-exclusion. Spurning society, nature, and passion, the Jew seeks closeness with a transcendent God, which translates practically into a withdrawal from all social and temporal spaces. The Jew has no earthly home; alienation, wandering, self-isolation, and retreat into a vortex of exponentially expanding texts are the essence of Jewishness. The textual canon is the true home of every Jew, and every commentary is a return. This textual Judaism repudiates all attempts to place political, nationalistic, ritualistic, or racial components at its core. The Kingdom of David, the Bar-Kochba Revolt, and Zionism are dismissed as antithetical to true Judaism, whose textual nature underpins its migratory, multilingual, and cosmopolitan attributes.

This view of Judaism lends itself to an ethically based exceptionalism. The Jew, in Steiner’s eyes, is always a stranger, ceaselessly migrating through countries, cultures, and languages, always—and this is the central metaphor—a guest in another’s home. The eternally exiled nation exemplifies Geworfenheit (“thrownness,” a Heideggerian term for the existential disposition of being thrust into an environment of neither one’s fashioning nor one’s choosing), thus teaching the rest of humanity the value of living as “guests of life and truth.” It is this aspect of their existence, this disposition forced on them by the vicissitudes of history, that lends the Jews their ethical ­superiority. The oppressed, bookish, unworldly Jews are superior, contends Steiner, because they have never subjugated another people, never soiled themselves with national realpolitik, never subjected their enemies to the rack or the firing squad. A Jew is one who treads lightly in every circumstance, who treats all with the deference due to a host, whose presence jolts all societies from the pursuit of ethnic or cultural homogeneity. The Jew is the world’s moral irritant, the exemplar of suffering and otherness that gives the human conscience no rest. Through this eternal restlessness, both physical and moral, the Jews actualize their mission unto humanity—a role Steiner terms “an honor beyond honors.”

This paradigm motivates Steiner’s non-Zionism. If the mission of the Jews is bound up with their eternal role as guest, if their moral purity is acquired at the price of rootlessness and displacement, then any attempt to settle is a repudiation of Jewishness. Nationalism is thus an impoverishment of the Jewish spirit, a betrayal of the principles that fueled all prior spiritual and intellectual accomplishments. Zionism can never be forgiven for normalizing the Jew, for introducing political expediency, racial discrimination, and territoriality into Jewish history. Nothing could be more degrading for the people of Isaiah and Spinoza than to sink to the level of Jezebel and Herod, exchanging parchment and pedagogy for ministers and missiles. Despite his grudging admission that Israel has proven necessary for the physical protection of the Jews (a “sad miracle”), disappointment over the Jews’ turn from itinerant scribes to nation-building settlers pervades Steiner’s writings. Like the Hebraic prophets of old, Steiner castigates his fellow Jews for reneging on their historical mission and betraying their raison d’être.

Conservative Thought Religion

BELIEF IN MORALITY IS MONOTHEISM:

Evidence of Objective Morality Is Hidden in Plain Sight: A new book finds this evidence in rational arguments. And in something those arguments can’t capture. (Noah M. Peterson, 9/24/25, Christianity Today)

Moral realism is the philosophical term for the view that objective morality exists. The authors’ definition has four distinct features. First, moral judgments are “truth-apt” (meaning that statements like “Murder is wrong” are capable of being true or false). Second, some moral judgments are true (murder is wrong). Third, the truth of these judgments does not depend on human attitudes (murder is wrong even if people think it’s not). And fourth, at least some clear moral truths are known.

Without this foundation, moral arguments for God’s existence can’t get off the ground. But how do we know whether moral realism is true? We can’t run lab tests on justice. Nor can we dissect the human brain and find “goodness” inside. We need a different set of tools.

Secular philosophers Terence Cuneo, Russ Shafer-Landau, and John Bengson have approached the question by identifying moral “data” in need of explanation and suggesting we let the best theory win. For example, one’s moral theory should be able to explain why there is both widespread agreement about some moral issues and widespread disagreement about others. It should be able to explain why moral judgments are thought to motivate or direct our actions. And it should be able to explain why moral demands apply regardless of what we think or feel.

Baggett and Walls agree with these criteria. They argue that moral realism, unlike its competitors, makes the best sense of what we actually experience. But as they remind us, “Moral theory is hard … and no single volume will clear everything up.” Though progress is possible, don’t expect knockout blows.

This intellectual humility is consonant with their previous books. They don’t overpromise. They don’t feign certainty. Their conclusions are modest, and their tone is winsome. They respect other thinkers and take their arguments seriously. It’s clear their goal is not to win but to woo.

The term “objective morality” is redundant. Were it subjective it would not be morality just personal preference.

Identitarianism Religion

THE AEESOMENESS OF ANTI-IDENTITY:

Days of Awe (Robert Zaretsky,| September 25, 2025, The American Scholar)

Yet perhaps we do not need alpine guides, but instead moral guides to experience this emotion. As a historian of France under the Nazi occupation, I cannot help but return, time and again, to the case of André Trocmé. He was a Protestant pastor and an ardent pacifist in the village of Chambon-sur-Lignon, a dot on the map of the rocky and austere Massif Central region in south-central France. Eighty-five years ago, that dot soon became a haven of safety for men, women, and children who were in fear for their lives.

In 1940, Trocmé and his equally remarkable wife, Magda, launched their effort to rescue as many Jewish refugees as possible who were fleeing Vichy police and SS officials. From his pulpit, Trocmé used his pulpit to spur les Chambonais to action. “Tremendous pressure will be put on us to submit passively to a totalitarian ideology,” he warned his parishioners. Yet, Trocmé continued, the “duty of Christians is to use the weapons of the Spirit to oppose the violence that they will try to put on our consciences. … We shall resist whenever our adversaries demand of us obedience contrary to the orders of the gospel. We shall do so without fear, but also without pride and without hate.”

Over the next four years, while Vichy collaborated with the Nazi implementation of the Final Solution, Trocmé and his congregation were, in every sense of the phrase, as good as their word. They made, in fact, their word flesh. As a growing stream of Jewish refugees, as well as French Jews whom Vichy had denaturalized, fled to Chambon, the townspeople opened wide their doors. They created safe houses, forged identity cards, sheltered, fed, and educated thousands of desperate Jewish men, women, and children.

The moral imperative of caring for children was the driving force in the young life of Trocmé’s nephew, Daniel Trocmé. He had come to Chambon to be a teacher, but he eventually found himself in the role of their protector. When the police captured his group of students, the young Trocmé refused to abandon the children. Instead, he kept them close, calming them as best he could. And he died with them at the extermination camp of Maidenek. Daniel Trocmé freely chose to follow the same ethical teaching expressed by his uncle. (In fact, Trocmé and his fellow pastors were also arrested and sent to a concentration camp, but they were mysteriously released a few months later.)

In his landmark account of Chambon, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, the late American philosopher Philip Hallie was obsessed by a single question: Why did goodness happen not only in Chambon, but also the surrounding towns and villages? Historians, psychologists, and philosophers have since widened and deepened the search for an answer to this question. It turns out that the nature of goodness is perhaps even more difficult to isolate than is the nature of evil. But if one had to boil it down, it might come down to the words spoken by André Trocmé to a French officer who had demanded the whereabout of the Jews the pastor had hidden. “We do not know what a Jew is,” Trocmé replied. “We know only men.”

Anglospherics Conservative Thought Religion

HOW THE ANGLOSPHERE WAS SAVED FROM THE CONTINENT’S DISASTROUS PLUNGE INTO REASON:

Can We Truly Know Anything? Hume’s Problem of Induction (Viktoriya Sus, 8/29/25, The Collector)

Induction is a technique of reasoning in which we derive general principles from specific observations. For example, if every swan we have ever seen is white, we might conclude that all swans are white. This kind of reasoning is deeply embedded in human thought and underpins a lot of science as well as our everyday decision-making.

But David Hume famously questioned this process, arguing that there is no logical justification for assuming that the future will resemble the past. Just because the sun has risen every morning up until now does not mean it will do so again tomorrow – yet this is what induction leads us to believe.

Hume’s critique is deeper than it first appears. It asks whether we can assume that the laws of nature will remain the same. For instance, how do we know gravity will work tomorrow exactly as it does today?

According to Hume, our belief in this consistency doesn’t come from logic itself. Instead, it is based on habit and custom. If something has always happened a certain way before, we expect it to happen like that again.

This raises an important question: if induction (our process of reasoning) lacks a logical foundation but our understanding of the world relies on induction, can we ever truly say we “know” anything for sure?

We ultimately choose among faiths and the best of us choose the most beautiful ones.

Religion

I AND THOU:

sex! swing dancing! sixtine!: come for the Renaissance erotics; stay for my problems with Brideshead Revisited (Tara Isabella Burton, Aug 07, 2025, The Lost Word)

This idea, like so much of the magical tradition, comes out of Plato, via hs late antique Alexandrian followers. We have an inherent attraction – and it is attraction – towards the good, and the true, and the beautiful, and God; erotic love, rightly understood, pulls us not just towards physical beauty but towards what that beauty represents: which you can find in higher forms of symmetry, or knowledge of prime numbers. Matthew Crawford helpfully touches on this in another context: in his recent First Things/Substack essays “Is Math Erotic?”/”Math is Erotic”. We’re attracted not just to the beautiful but the beautifully true. (I admit I want to read an even nerdier second postscript from him that goes into more detail about how eros differs from mere contemplative appreciation).

That attraction is, basically, hackable, by magicians capable of hacking it – but ultimately our attraction is to God, or the Good, or the One, or whatever Platonic words you want to use. Everything else is cosmological flotsam.

So far, so fair.

Oh, but, God, what do you do about other people?

This is the part where, I think, the magical worldview, and maybe the Platonic worldview, and whatever version of Christianity isn’t magical (or you might say, is magical differently) diverge. Maybe I’m too much of a Protestant, or a Kierkegaardian, or too much a nineteenth-century scholar, or a twenty-first century post-Kantian in my moral horror of treating people as means, but what always galls me about these ideas of ascent and descent, of loves that really mean the love of God, is that they seem to have so little to do with loving a person. The other night at a Cracks in Postmodernity event, a friend was explaining their reading of Brideshead Revisited to me: that we move from the aesthetic realm of Charles Ryder’s love for Sebastian, to the more explicitly romantic nature of Charles’s love for Julia, to the final completion: Charles’s conversion, his love for God. But does that mean Sebastian and Julia are just waystations? Is Charles’s love for them just a metaphor for divine love, the way, say, dancing is a metaphor for sex?

This idea may be the right one. It may – I’m not sure – also be deeply Christian; of course Christians have our own version of it; the batter my heart, three person’d God, the Bernini angel that pierces St. Teresa’s breast – He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart,…when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God…[that] made me moan. There’s precedent, too, of thinking of all the things of this world, love included, as merely conveyances for the knowledge and love of God. Augustine himself (as the always-insightful Sam Kimbriel reminded me, when I was driving myself nuts over this exact topic back in May) distinguishes between right objects of enjoyment (basically: God), and right objects of use (basically, everything else).

But is that all we are to each other? Objects?

Here’s what I can’t get past: the idea that whatever’s going on, with someone, at whatever communication is happening at the level of dance, or whatever dance is a metaphor for, is only real insofar as it points to this other, better, higher thing. Are we really supposed to conclude that desire for someone obviates all the particularities that make them them, in favor of a passion for unmoved movers and parallel lines? If I could be convinced that this were the right way to be I could, I think, accept it with resignation; but I don’t understand how you can love somebody, or want somebody, if what you actually want from or through them is something that has nothing to do their their them-ness, if they’re just an occasion for the real relationship between you and math, or even you and God. How is that fair to Sebastian? How to Julia? Is God that kind of jealous God?

When Christ commanded that we love one another as He loved us, He means as subjects, not objects.

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