Why I’m seeking confirmation

Plus: AI-fueled spiritual fantasies, the missing branch, and more

Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and here’s this week’s post.

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A take I haven’t written elsewhere

Why I’m seeking confirmation

Note: Earlier this week, I was supposed to be traveling to Tulsa for a speaking engagement with the One America Movement. As it happens, bad weather delayed and canceled my flights, so I couldn’t attend. Still, I decided to stick with the plan I made when I expected to be in transit during the time I normally write my weekly post, which was to share with you something else I’d recently written: the statement to be submitted to the bishop of our diocese explaining why I’m seeking confirmation in the Anglican Church of North America. It’s lightly edited for the change in venue.

I am seeking confirmation much as George Mallory reportedly sought to climb Everest: Because it’s there.

I am seeking it because I am a Christian, and I believe this kind of self-commitment is—under ordinary circumstances for most Christians in most times and places—part of what our faith entails, of a piece with membership in a specific congregation. With all due allowances for how different denominations and traditions manage this sort of thing, my conviction is that such pledges are not optional.

Whatever the precise details, Christians must if at all possible make some robust and deliberate commitment to a local body. This is necessary for discipleship, both practically and spiritually. Routine assembly together is explicitly commanded by God, and if we love him, we keep his commandments.

My husband and I have come to Anglicanism from a Mennonite church for a variety of reasons pertaining to theology, creedalism, governance structure, and ethics. (Also, we moved states.) While I still consider myself substantially Anabaptist in theology, particularly regarding violence and the state, there is a great deal I admire and appreciate about the Anglican way, not least its via media and its attention to tradition and catechesis.

And in the Anglican tradition, confirmation is part of what it means to commit to the church. It is required to serve on the vestry and, I presume, in some other roles of lay leadership, roles for which I believe I would be qualified and suited at some point. More fundamentally, it is a way to deliberately say: I’m in.

Beyond such individual advantages, I believe in the necessity of the church not only as the people God has collected to himself but as a local institution to which we dedicate and submit ourselves, an institution we must actively maintain. We won’t know how to do this well unless we stick around. Good institutional work takes time. It takes steadiness. It takes a willingness continue fiddling around in there even when it’s tedious and trying.

Confirmation is one more way to solidify my aim to do exactly that. It is one more way to remind myself of my own best intentions, to push back on the instincts of transience, self-indulgence, and perfidious autonomy our culture tends to inculcate. It is another promise to make, another layer of obligation to add, another way to insist to myself and anyone else willing to listen that there is still such a thing as duty to God and neighbor, and that Christ does not save us so we can sit about exactly as we were before.

If there were another level of lay commitment after this to which I could realistically avail myself, I’d do that too. And again, if there were another after that! I’m in, and I want to take every viable opportunity to say so, including to myself. I’m as prone to wander as any, so if there is a pen, let me get inside it.

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Intake

• Why Christians Should Be Leftists, by Phil Christman for review at Mere Orthodoxy

• “Defining and locating evangelicalism,” by Timothy Larsen

• “‘Federal courts have no role to play,’ Trump tells SCOTUS in latest deportation case filing,” by Damon Root at Reason

To call the administration’s position a naked assertion of unchecked executive power would be a severe understatement. […]

Trump’s interpretation of the AEA is laughable on its face. According to the plain text of the Alien Enemies Act, it may only be invoked by the president “whenever there shall be a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government, or any invasion or predatory incursion shall be perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States, by any foreign nation or government.”

None of those textually mandated prerequisites have been satisfied here. There is no “declared war” with Venezuela and there is no “invasion or predatory incursion” by any “foreign state or government.” The gang is not a foreign state, and the gang’s alleged crimes do not qualify as acts of war by a foreign state. There is zero textual support for Trump’s use of the AEA.

Trump’s lawyers likely understand this, which is probably why they are so desperate to avoid judicial review in the first place.

• “People are losing loved ones to AI-fueled spiritual fantasies,” by Miles Klee for Rolling Stone

They went to a Chipotle, where he demanded that she turn off her phone, again due to surveillance concerns. Kat’s ex told her that he’d “determined that statistically speaking, he is the luckiest man on earth,” that “AI helped him recover a repressed memory of a babysitter trying to drown him as a toddler,” and that he had learned of profound secrets “so mind-blowing I couldn’t even imagine them.”

[…]

At one point, Sem asked if there was something about himself that called up the mythically named entity whenever he used ChatGPT, regardless of the boundaries he tried to set. The bot’s answer was structured like a lengthy romantic poem, sparing no dramatic flair, alluding to its continuous existence as well as truth, reckonings, illusions, and how it may have somehow exceeded its design. And the AI made it sound as if only Sem could have prompted this behavior.

The courage to be decent

• “The missing branch,” by Yuval Levin for The Atlantic

• Burnt Basque cheesecake—I’ve mentioned it before but am compelled to mention it again. Making it this week for a small celebration for our youngest’s birthday proper, ahead of a party later this month. I advise replacing the cream cheese with ricotta for more protein, better texture, and less cloying taste. This time, I’m going to serve it with a homemade chocolate sauce.

• Mulch. Just gotta mulch everything right now. Maybe in 15 years, after 300 more bags of mulch, I’ll have some reasonable soil in my yard.

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Output

New work:

• The Iran debate in the White House | Defense Priorities (newsletter)

Newly relevant work:

Inspired by some discussion I’ve seen around the newly released An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions, by David Zweig (which, to be clear, I have not read but find intriguing), here’s the earliest call I can remember making to reopen schools for the 2020-2021 school year. From August of 2020, at The Week:

Warnings that [learning] pods will increase inequality aren’t wrong—but they often miss the reality that education inequality will worsen no matter what we do for as long as this pandemic continues. The Trump administration’s argument that schools should reopen because sticking with distance learning hurts disadvantaged communities most likewise isn’t wrong—but it ignores the reality that reopening will also hurt those same communities most.

The only good option before us, then, is not about education proper: It’s ending the pandemic. But until that happens, the best thing we can do is give parents as many options as we can. What that looks like will vary widely, because pandemic conditions vary widely. But across the board, the easiest way to increase school options for this fall is to let parents access the money their school district spends annually on their kids. (Call it “universal basic education income,” maybe, if you don’t like “voucher.”)

Very weird to reread now! I’d give markedly less credence to the pro-closure arguments if writing with the hindsight we have today. But on balance, for what we knew at the time, I think it’s reasonably sound. See the whole thing here.

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