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

Books Conservative Thought Homocentric Universe Religion

FREEDOM IS AN IRKSOME BURDEN:

Mythology and what it means to be human (Thomas M. Doran, 4/22/26, The Dispatch)

The best modern mythology that seeks answers to what it means to be human includes epic mythology that depicts big events and often reduces those events to a page or so of text; heroic mythology by depicting what humans should and should not do; and granular mythology, where one may feel that the myth describes the real world, or an actual era of human history.

At the epic mythology level, we have Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, which describes the creation of the world and all its creatures, high and low; the rebellion of many of the elves and their age-long war with the rebel angel, Morgoth; and the collaboration of many men in the elves’ disordered enterprise. Tolkien’s myths depict in a profound manner the Creator’s gift of freedom and corresponding consequences, a moral momentum that corresponds to physical momentum in the created universe, where objects in the physical world—apart from the object(s) imparting the initial momentum—are also radically displaced.

So too, the moral momentum of the elves’ disordered use of the gift of freedom produces dire consequences for many elves and men who associate with the rebels. Not only that, the moral momentum of the elves’ original rebellion against their angelic benefactors cascades into more abuses of freedom, including “kin-slaying,” when the rebel elves steal their brethren’s ships to travel to Middle-earth. In the Creator’s lexicon, the radical gift of freedom cannot be true freedom unless consequences somehow correspond to the majesty of the gift itself.

The “problem” of Free Will is that opponents abhor the responsibility it imposes:

Crucifixion Film/TV

THE CULTURE WARS ARE A ROUT:

Passion Plays?: Why The Chosen and Stranger Things Captivate Us (Leonie Caldecott, March 30, 2026, Curuch Life Journal)

Then go back to Stranger Things. El is not a Christ-figure. She is not even an angelic figure. She is a superhero, which is an entirely different trope. Superheroes are simply power-endowed human beings. What they do with that power is the hinge on which everything turns. El extracts herself from her compromising situation in a very different way from Judas. She surrenders the power to harm. My gut feeling is that this motive does not actually endorse suicide. It simply endorses sacrifice: of known security, known life. Beyond that, we do not get to follow her.

Back to The Chosen. The point about Jesus is that while both human and divine, he is precisely not a superhero. He will not, as Judas believes, slay his enemies at the last moment: that has never been his MO. Judas’s main flaw is a failure of the imagination, which you could characterize as, simply, bad theology. This is the scandal of Christianity. The author of life, in some way, must die. The Christ will descend, voluntarily, into the valley of bones, through the agony of the Passion. The agony of defeat: of real, absolute, undeniable death. Already in the Garden of Gethsemane, we see him being mentally tortured by what is coming, and by the sleepiness and fearfulness of his followers. Nicodemus caught in his ivory tower trying to belatedly join the dots. Peter and James and John bewildered and afraid. The apostles clutching a few primitive weapons as a ten-ton-truck hurtles down the infested freeway of hell.

No one is on point. No one is going to win. Jesus knows all this. His human body is racked with fear and troubled to the point of collapse. But he goes to meet his betrayer anyway. What follows is the cry of the innocent the world over and through to our time, this time, this terrible moment in history. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

God had to experience the Fall in order to fully comprehend us, and, thereby, forgive us.

End of History Religion

IMAGO DEI:

Sacred Limits and Free Institutions: How Jewish thought helped shape the West — and why it still matters. (Shmuel Klatzkin, March 21, 2026, American Spectator)

The most important of Chabad’s ideas lie in the deep insights of the Jewish mystical tradition into the nature of God’s creation. In the language of the 16th century Tsefat school of Rabbi Yitzchak Luria, before there was a creation, before there was time, before there was a “before,” there was only the Infinite Light of God. No boundaries or delimitations existed, no definitions, as nothing was defined, as there was no finitude, only the infinite.

How could a world of individuation come to exist when there could be no boundaries? Every particular thing would be overwhelmed by infinity.

But limitlessness means as well that there was no boundary to stop God from choosing to limit Himself in order to make a world that could endure and enter into a relation with God blessed by Him with a consciousness and an identity.

These are the preconditions of love. The world was created by God choosing to make love possible by making space to bring the beloved into being.

It is this world that God loves. He sees it as He creates it and calls it good, again and again. He sustains it by choosing again and again to make the space for His beloved creatures to know themselves and then to know Him. God becomes greater in this way than any being trapped in stasis, imprisoned in infinity.

God informs us in His word that we humans are created in His image and that He has put the world within us, enabling us both to work it and preserve it. We can become deputized creators, created in His image, making the world become better and preserving its ancient good, the way it has always been in God’s mind, which sees through to the end from the beginning.

We learn that we become great through making room for others — not by compulsion, for God is uncompelled — but by choice. We become greater through submitting to love, through choosing to limit our fixation with the infinite realm of our private self to willingly love our fellows and make space for them in every meaningful way, even to the last full measure of devotion.

Religion

“FELL LIKE FIRE”:

One Man’s Quest for the End of the World Started on a Ranch in Texas: A Texas businessman believes he was divinely chosen to help usher in the Second Coming of Christ—by finding unblemished red heifers and getting them to Israel. (Andrew Logan, March 2026, Texas Monthly)


It was nearly Christmas, and Jerome Urbanosky was expecting unusual company. The easygoing 72-year-old rancher stood outside his redbrick home, watching as a dozen or so vehicles crunched along the gravel road that winds through the grassy plain of his 1,500-acre ranch northwest of Houston. The delegation that piled out into his driveway included high-ranking rabbis who’d flown straight from Israel, a U.S. documentary crew toting multiple cameras, and a Texas businessman named Byron Stinson.

Urbanosky was taken aback by the size of the crew—but that wasn’t the thing that startled him the most. Four men dressed in black tactical gear and carrying military rifles approached and told him they needed to sweep the property to make sure no “foreign agents” were present. “They were armed to the teeth,” Urbanosky remembered. He wasn’t inclined to stand in their way. His wife, Jane, who was in the kitchen preparing the weekly Sunday meal, stared saucer-eyed as the armed men entered her home.

Once the security team cleared the property, Urbanosky led the rabbis to a red barn, where two calves awaited. Urbanosky Ranch is home to a herd of more than 450 Santa Gertrudis cattle, a hardy breed that’s known to produce good beef and whose origins trace back to the King Ranch, in South Texas. But as Urbanosky knew, this delegation wasn’t here for a steak.

Santa Gertrudis cattle also have striking coats of deep rusty red, which is what had initially attracted Stinson’s attention. A seventy-year-old Glen Rose business owner who’s described himself as a “Jesus zealot,” Stinson had visited Urbanosky at his ranch once before and explained that he was in search of an unblemished, completely red heifer—a scratch or a single white hair, and it wouldn’t do. Such a heifer hadn’t been identified in two thousand years, but it was key to unlocking an ancient Jewish ritual described in the book of Numbers, a necessary precursor to constructing the Third Temple in Jerusalem and, ultimately, bringing about the Second Coming of Christ. It’s a fringe but nonetheless influential belief, and Stinson’s Israeli associate, Yitshak Mamo, had convinced Urbanosky that he, too, was essential to this journey.

Urbanosky, a Catholic who attends weekly Mass, had never heard of the Jewish ceremony. He was wary at first, but Stinson was tireless, and Mamo told Urbanosky that, just maybe, God had indeed chosen him to deliver the sacred heifer. “It has shaken my psyche,” he said. “I don’t have this superiority complex. I know that my wife doesn’t think I’m anything special.”

Baseball Books Religion

ALL GREAT ART DESCRIBES THE FALL OR THE CRUCIFIXION:

Take Me Out to the (Simulated, Hallucinatory) Ballgame (Adam Dalva, March 25, 2026, NY Times)

The abbreviation of Henry’s full name, JHWh, is a conscious echo of YHWH, the Hebrew name for God, and the book teems with religious symbolism: Ball stadiums, Coover writes, are the “real American holy places.” But because Henry has created a clockwork universe, a procedural generator whose rules are fixed, theological intervention is impossible. The dice control everything from off-season sports to a complex system of politics — all of which is highly entertaining to read.

But the dice can also cause tragedy. In one indelible scene, a freak sequence of rolls brings out the Extraordinary Occurrences Chart, which details the unlikeliest (and unluckiest) scenarios. Henry can’t accept what he sees, and what he’s done to his favorite player. But to cheat the rules of the game would be to render the whole thing meaningless. His hands tremble. Disaster has struck.

Religion

PATH TO OBLIVION:

Worrying Picture for Buddhism Worldwide (Tsering Namgyal Khortsa, 3/21/26, Asia Sentinel)

According to the latest analysis by the Pew Research Center, covering 201 countries and territories, Buddhists are the world’s only major religious group whose population declined between 2010 and 2020 despite the powerful charisma of the Dalai Lama, the highest spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism and global recognition as a figure of peace, and Buddhism’s rational self-help approach emphasizing inner peace, compassion, and mental discipline over dogmatic belief or divine authority. […]

Demographic trends are not favorable to Buddhism. Nearly all Buddhists—98 percent—live in the Asia-Pacific region, with around 40 percent concentrated in five East Asian societies: China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. These regions tend to have older populations and lower birth rates. The median age of Buddhists globally is about 40, significantly higher than the global median of 31. Fertility rates among Buddhists are also low, averaging 1.6 children per woman—well below the replacement level of 2.1 needed to maintain population size.

As a result, between 2010 and 2020, the number of Buddhists in these five East Asian societies fell by approximately 32 million, or 22 percent.

Religion

THE CULTURE WARS ARE A ROUT:

King Kong Died for Our Sins: Why Unexpected Christ Figures Matter (Mike Schramm, 3/11/26, Christ & Culture)

No, Kong was not the heroic Christ figure one expected, but that is what made him a thought-provoking one.

Fiction—whether in novel, TV, or movie form—is filled with similarly unexpected, almost scandalous, Christ figures. Fans of Breaking Bad may have noticed Walter White’s cruciform pose that followed the death that saved his downtrodden former partner. While the bear-man Beorn from The Hobbit fights for good in the end, his chaotic unpredictability coupled with his hypostatic union of bear and human natures point to Christ’s unpredictable actions throughout the Gospels.

One final example from fiction I remember: Having to write a paper on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in high school, I was struck by one prompt proposing Randall McMurphy as a Christ figure. He is an outsider to the mental health facility who operates beyond the level of the inhabitants. He continually upends the status quo and frustrates the established authorities. He seeks to emotionally free the imprisoned and it is his death that contextualizes Chief Bromden’s escape (being the narrator, he is also a stand-in for us, so it is our freedom that is instantiated too).

One would like to think we were the prompt.

Religion

EMPATHY IS A HOAX:

The Cartesian Ghost and Gilbert Ryle’s Critique (Robert Kmita, 3/07/26, Voegelin View)

In the same ironic style, Ryle continues by maintaining that, according to the dualist perspective, each of us lives “the ghostly life of a Robinson Crusoe,” exiled on the island of his own soul, lost somewhere within the body. As a logical consequence, no person has access to the “intimacy,” to the events of another person’s inner life. Therefore, we could do no more than speculate by using “problematic inferences” based on certain behaviors that uncertainly signal what the agent is thinking.

Heck, you don’t even comprehend your own inner being.

Anglospherics Puritan Nation Religion

KNOW NOHINGS:

Smashing Plato’s Egg: Hidden in plain sight (Arron Reza Merat, Fall 2025, Hedgehog Review)

Michael Beresford Foster (1903–1959), Oxford tutor of A.J. Ayer, is among the most known for this view. The reason Greeks had no science, Foster argued, is because their philosophical traditions assumed an uncreated world. Unlike the Christian and Jewish God, who created nature ex nihilo, Plato’s Demiurge assembled the world out of a preexisting and eternal cosmos. God is analogous to a worker who makes things for a purpose—a chair for sitting, a pen for writing—and it is this purpose, or telos, that makes the object intelligible to the human mind. For the Greeks, natural objects were defined through reason alone, which can apprehend the true essence of things simply by contemplating the form given to them by their artificer. Matter, on the other hand, was irrelevant to knowing for the Greeks. It contributes nothing positive to an object’s being, obviating the need for science, based as it is on knowing through the empirical investigation of matter. The pagan theory of God presupposed here meant that God was not independent of the world and therefore has no omnipotent power over it. Nature in Greek thought, which tends toward panentheism, depends on God for its activity but never for its existence.

The God of Christianity is of another order. He is radically separated from Creation, which He creates out of whole cloth by establishing the conditions of possibility for all things. But through this arbitrary act of divine will, known in Christian theology as voluntarism, the purpose of the things He creates ex nihilo (and therefore the means by which humans can know them) is known only to God and remains forever obscure to His creatures. The Christian God who created the world from nothing is like an artist who paints on a whim. We do not know the purpose of the things in the world and—unlike with an artist who might, if she chose to, tell us her reasons—we cannot interview the Creator.

The Greek mode of thought is therefore incompatible with Christian cosmology in that it assumes one can know the mind of God through the things He made. For Christians, as for scientists, knowing is the humble endeavor of forever grasping at our mysterious reality. Only God really knows, and the best we can do is rise a little from our fallen state to know slightly more than nothing. Ecclesiastes 1:13 captures the idea: “I set my mind to study and to explore by wisdom all that is done under the heavens. What a heavy burden God has laid on mankind!”

Islam

ADHERENTS:

Growing Up Alawite in Assad’s Syria: Loubna Mrie Explores the Intersections of Family, Faith and National History Under Authoritarianism (Loubna Mrie, March 4, 2026, LitHub)

The Alawi faith is a branch of Shi’a Islam that traces its origins to the early Islamic period and the teachings of Ibn Nusayr, a Shi’a scholar who lived and worked in what is now northern Iraq during the late eighth and early ninth centuries. The term “Alawi” means “those who adhere to the teachings of Ali.”

Alawite theology is syncretic, incorporating elements from Islamic, Christian, and Jewish traditions, as well as influences from Persian, Indian, and Greek (Neoplatonic) philosophies. Alawism emphasizes the importance of esoteric or hidden knowledge, which the faith holds was revealed by God to the imams, the Prophet Muhammad’s successors.

This manifests in the form of rituals that are often more private and secretive than those of mainstream Shi’a Islam, scriptures in addition to the Quran, and the belief in tajyeel—reincarnation. Our deeds in one life determine how we are reborn in the next, allowing us to rise upward until we reach the highest levels of heaven. We can be reborn as holy figures, our dead bodies enshrined, our mausoleums sites of pilgrimage and worship, where we come for prayer and spiritual blessings. Local cultural practices and historical contexts also influence dress, another sign of the sect’s broader divergence from mainstream Islamic practices: Unlike many Shi’a and Sunni Muslim women, Alawite women do not cover themselves with the hijab.

A religious minority in Syria, Alawites faced persecution for centuries under various ruling powers. Growing up, I felt proud listening to my grandmother as she explained how Zaman Awal, our ancestors, survived under the Ottomans—Osmanli—who ruled Syria from 1516 to 1918. Every time she cooked rice, she would tell me and my older sister, Alia, that we should be grateful; most of Zaman Awal lived and died without ever tasting it. “Why, Grandma?” I would ask, though I knew the answer.

She would pause over the steaming pot. “Burghul—bulgur—was all they had. Rice, in Ottoman Syria, was for city dwellers only: Christians and Sunnis. You and I, we were not allowed in cities. The Ottomans hated us.”

The Ottoman Empire was the seat of the Sunni caliphate, and viewed Alawites as mysterious and suspicious because of their distinct religious beliefs and practices. Unlike Sunni Muslims, Alawites do not pray in mosques but instead have their own places of worship; in addition to not requiring women to wear the hijab, the Alawite sect also does not have any dietary restrictions and does not prohibit alcohol. These differences contributed to the distrust and disdain the Ottomans held toward the Alawite community, highlighting broader sectarian tensions between Sunni and Shi’a groups within the Ottoman Empire.

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