[ I am back working through my pretrial detention journal. It is out of order… Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. You
can find everything from my pretrial detention journal that is
published under the "Pretrial Detention" link under topics on the right
hand of your screen. This was from a letter sent to KH. What you are reading is what you get for your tax
dollars.sch 11/08/2025]
I finished Garp. In 25 minutes, Dad will be here. Not sure I can handle this at all. Between the book and knowing this will be the last time I see him, it feels like death.
I am thinking Irving may be the best thing we have going. Read Garp. The death of Walt was too much for me.
I am getting ideas about the Great America Novel. And about America. I want to get back to writing. Terry always said I had terrible timing.
I also have been thinking about Fitzgerald. Maybe I can live long enough to prove American lives can have a second act - or even a third. I hope you can stick around for the next twelve years.
Working title for the next novel - America Eats Its Young. Only a working title, as I am stealing it from Funkadelic. America hate making America violent. There can be no great American novel because there is no real America - it changes by geography and by times. America always reinvents itself - no history.
sch
[This is 2025 commenting on 2010; this is 65 looking back at 50. I still think John Irving is underrated - not the belle of stylist's ball - that will be Pynchon or DeLillo or McCarty (who would've been in the future from 2010). I think it is the best novel for anyone wanting to be a writer. The novel that had its roots in 2010 is still being worked on in 2025. Yes, it was the last time I saw my father. He hugged me. I do not recall him ever doing that. He died in 2018.
In 2010. I knew the Funkadelic song by its title only - definitely a fecund title - but for you and thanks to YouTube, here is the song:
Friday was Friday. It seems an age ago, this Sunday morning. There was group and I still mean to do a separate post on that. There was a trip to the property management company to get my post office box key that was lost and to Family Dollar for Coke Zero. I got back here around 3:00. I was in for the rest of the night. Did I start putting a “Chasing Ashes” chapter on Google Docs? I did start addressing envelopes while watching something on Tubi. Desperation Road? Not bad, if it leans heavy on having Mel Gibson in the cast when he is a minor character. The back started bothering me then.
I found the lost post office box key when I got up on Saturday. I still have not made it to the box. It has been that kind of week - I can't finish what I've started or start what needs to be done.
CC went into inpatient care. She told me she was going to do that on Thursday. I got a text on Friday that she had done it. She also made me the person to contact in emergencies.
Saturday morning, I overslept. What I did was head out around 10:30 to catch the bus. Off I went to FedEx to make copies, Jersey Mike's for a sandwich, Aldi's for some Coke Zero, and then back home. That took two hours. It also left my back feeling stiff again. Not much accomplished - envelopes stuffed, a little work on the chapter, dinner cooked, and email read.
That included emails about setting up the new computer. I thought it would be yesterday. Nope. These are the emails on the subject:
The software installation appointment with NCPTC is scheduled for Wednesday, December 10, 2025 @ 11:00 a.m. You should receive an email with instruction from the monitoring company to contact them at the specified date and time. I will be out Thursday afternoon to pick up the old computer.
Brent V. Witter
Only that is not how NCPTC scheduled the thing:
This email message is to confirm that you have an appointment scheduled on 11-Dec-2025 at 09:30 AM (America/Indiana/Indianapolis GMT -05:00) Please review the instructions below. For assistance, please dial (855) 855-6278 Option 2.
The back was enough of a problem that I took a muscle relaxer. The first time for that in months.
When the PO was up, I asked why he wouldn't approve a Mac (not that I wanted; I was being curious). Twice he said he couldn't tell me; it felt like I was pressing him for state secrets. However, I noticed something in the monitoring software company's email. They allow for the use of Mac's, but the System Integrity Protection needs to be changed for their access. I guess there is power in making the known obscure.
One thing put off was this post. It will be put off a bit longer. I will be going to church. I need to get ready, and I want to do a bit more work on the chapter. The neck is still a bother. Degenerative disks are not what I expected to put me down. So break here.
Well, it was not a good Monday, Things just did not go as planned. When the #1 bus finally came around, I got to CVS too late to get my med (the pharmacy closed for lunch). I wasn't taking chances on being stuck on the west end of Muncie for an hour, so I left behind the distilled water needed for my CPAP machine to get the bus downtown. I took the $3 bus to Payless and got the supplies I needed (and a couple I didn't). That took between 1 and 3 PM.
Before that, I cannot recall clearly. Getting old, I guess.
I did some work on a research job. Getting what I required, I started on the email.
Trump formally unveiled the relief plan Monday afternoon at a White House roundtable with top officials, lawmakers, and farmers of corn, soybeans, and other crops. Reuters reported that up to $11 billion of the funds are “meant for a newly designed Farmer Bridge Assistance program for row crop farmers hurt by trade disputes and higher costs.” The other $1 billion is earmarked for commodities not covered by the program.
“Quite an admission that his policies have hurt Americans,” economist Justin Wolfers wrote in response to the plan.
Farm Action, a farmer-led agricultural watchdog group, welcomed the relief package but said it’s not enough to end suffering caused by “tariffs, soaring input costs, and years of volatile markets.”
“The current problems facing our agriculture system have been decades in the making due to failed policy that prioritizes commodity crops for export, which only benefits global grain traders and meatpackers,” said Joe Maxwell, Farm Action’s co-founder and chief strategy officer. “Without addressing the root causes of this issue, farmers will be left to continue relying on government assistance into the future. That is why Congress must take action and fix our failed subsidy system in the next farm bill.”
Rebecca Wolf, senior food policy analyst at Food & Water Watch, said that “bailouts are a denigrating Band-Aid to farmers whom decades of misguided domestic policy have left vulnerable to trade wars.”
But will farmers care enough to regret voting for Trump, or will they take the money and run out on the rest of the country?
A rejection for another of my stories, “Coming Home”:
Thank you for your submission to I Haven't Made It Home Yet. After reviewing your work, we've decided to respectfully decline due to it not being a good fit for our current publication.
We truly appreciate you taking the time to share your work with us, and hope to hear from you in the future for other collaborative projects! To hear about upcoming PWU news & opportunities, we recommend joining our mailing list here.
Sincerely,
✐ Procrastinating Writers United Welcoming all disorganized creatives!
Sen. Aaron Freeman, R-Indianapolis, said Wednesday that he had seen
the maps but hadn’t yet read the details of the bill: “You’re not going
to get me to commit to something that I haven’t read.”
But, he noted, the legislation goes beyond redrawing boundaries.
“I understand there’s, you know, dates in there and all the things
of, you know, people can’t sue. I mean, there’s all kinds of things in
there that are unrelated to a map that I have to review,” said Freeman,
who is also an attorney. “So I’ll do so, and I’ll be ready to go.”
House Bill 1032 would prohibit seeking or granting temporary
injunctions against it, and gives the Indiana Supreme Court “exclusive”
jurisdiction over any appeal of an order promoting an injunction.
“That part, in particular, might be a little flag for them in terms
of how (unsure senators) view this,” said Laura Merrifield Wilson, a
political science professor at the University of Indianapolis.
People can't sue to protect themselves from Republican tyranny? Such hubris has to be born out of the certainty that the Democrats never take control of Indiana's government.
But on the other hand, the curs are ready to impose their own version of a Reign of Terror:
Indiana Gov. Mike Braun, who appeared at the pro-redistricting rally on Friday, was more aggressive. He again threatened to support primary competition for fellow Republicans who oppose redistricting.
The bill’s failure in the Senate, he said, “means you’re gonna have to clean house to get real conservatives in.”
Braun first echoed Trump’s primary ultimatum last month, after the president posted that Braun “perhaps, is not working the way he should to get the necessary Votes” — and later, that he “must produce” on redistricting.
Neither Trump nor Braun want an independent legislature, even one of their nominal political party. What they want are people obedient to the Executive's whims and ambitions.
These four cities exemplify broader Indiana challenges, like
statewide low quality-of-life rankings (#2 worst per CNBC) driven by
crime, child care deserts, and economic stagnation, urging families to
prioritize suburbs like Fishers (A+ Niche grade).
Improving safety, schools, and affordability could reverse trends, but current data signals caution for relocation.
Instead of helping Hoosiers flourish, the Republicans are only concerned with seeing themselves and Donald J. Trump retain power.
I am working on my novel “One Dead Blonde” - mostly translating typewritten pages into a digital format. By the time, this is published, I hope to have moved onto starting “Chasing Ashes”.
One thing I will be doing is using the novelWriter software. So far, I have figured out how to input text; I still need to figure out how to format that text. It always for organizing characters, plot, and themes. How needs to be worked out, too. What I am thinking is it will help me better organize what I am writing. I cannot keep everything in my head. Time and the damage done won't let me do that any longer. I will let you know how it works. From its creator:
The idea to make novelWriter came about because most good software i could find for fiction writing seemed to focus its development on Windows and MacOS. Even those that had once supported Linux, had decided to drop the support.
As a Linux user for many years, this was very disappointing to me, so I started making my own editor, the way I imagined I wanted it. At that time I had mostly fallen back on writing my novel projects in LibreOffice Writer. While it is an excellent word processor that I still use often, it lacked many features I was looking for. I wanted an editor where I could split everything up into chapters or scenes, and move them about as I wanted. I also wanted to have all my notes in the same place, and be able to cross-reference them in my text.
Many writers discover that connecting the plot points of a story is far harder than identifying them. It’s easy enough to name the big turning points on a beat sheet, but when you sit down to write the pages that bridge those landmarks, the story can feel as if it’s stalling in the middle. The real challenge (and the true power of story structure) lies in shaping the in-between sections so they carry momentum. If you want to know how to keep your story moving between the big moments, it helps to look at those stretches as purposeful sequences that grow out of one turning point and drive the story to the next.
***
...We can often lose sight of the fact that the real magic of story structure isn’t in the beats, but in the way the sections around them build, shift, and propel us forward. Part of the reason we might fall into this dilemma is that it can be easy to think of a story’s beats/plot points as distinct from the surrounding scenes. The truth is that the beats must be part of a seamless chain of story events, each one building into the next. The beats are distinct simply in that they represent important nodes of transformation.
I may be doing some of the following, but am I doing them well?
“Who am I?” is the question that echoes beneath every character arc.
At the story’s Midpoint, that central query rises to the surface. This
central beat—this all-important Moment of Truth in story
structure—functions most symbolically as a moment of self-recognition.
It is a mirror held up to the protagonist, often by the antagonist, that
reveals both the Lie the Character Believes and the thematic Truth that
can no longer be ignored.
From the perspective of plot structure, the Midpoint functions as the central turning point.
Everything in the first half leads up to it, and it sets up all the
outcomes that happen in the second half. It is perhaps most potently a
moment of revelation. This is true practically in the external plot, in
which a Plot Revelation opens the protagonist’s eyes to the true nature of the conflict and what will be required to overcome its obstacles.
This is also true within the character arc, as the Midpoint’s Moment of Truth
deepens the character’s understanding of the inner conflict that is
both driving and driven by the character’s attempts at forward momentum
in the external plot. The Midpoint sets up a critical revelation in
which the character clearly sees the value of the story’s thematic Truth—the more effective and/or expanded perspective that will be required in order to finally achieve success.
Why? Because I am neurotic. Because I cannot always differentiate the trees and the forest. Because I worry so much about the content and style of my sentences. Which is why I read Are You Writing Effective Sentences? (Writing Forward). The sentences are trees that make up the forest.
In literature, language is what makes a piece of writing tick. The plot and characters move through time and space on their own accord, but the words you use to tell their story give it rhythm and clarity. That’s why writing effective sentences is paramount for any writer.
Choosing the right words to describe what’s happening in a piece of writing can be challenging. A writer might spend an hour looking for a word that accurately captures the sentiment that he or she is trying to convey. Sentence structure is even more critical. A weak word is like a missed beat, but a weak sentence is discord. It confuses readers, pulls them out of the story, and breaks the flow of the narrative.
***
Build your vocabulary: Nothing makes a sentence sing like words that are precise and vivid. Expand your arsenal by building your vocabulary. Read a lot and look up words you don’t know. Peruse the dictionary. Sign up for a word-of-the-day newsletter. Keep a log of vocabulary words and spend a minute or two each day adding to it and studying your new words. One of the best ways to master language and vocabulary is through poetry exercises.
Avoid repetition: Nothing deflates a piece of writing like the same descriptive word unnecessarily used over and over. She had a pretty smile. She wore a pretty dress. She lived in a pretty house. This kind of repetition robs a story of its imagery, making it flat and two-dimensional.
Use a thesaurus: A thesaurus will help you avoid unnecessary repetition. Many writers avoid thesauri, thinking that reliance on one constitutes some writerly weakness. But your job is not to be a dictionary or a word bank; it’s knowing how to find the perfect words and then use them when writing effective sentences.
Read drafts aloud to check the rhythm and flow: Reading aloud is great for catching mistakes and typos, but it can also help you with flow and rhythm. Take it a step further and record yourself reading an excerpt aloud. Does it flow naturally? If you keep tripping over your own sentences, there may be a problem with rhythm. Try alternating sentence lengths, breaking long sentences into shorter sentences, and joining sentences together to fix the flow.
Pay attention to word choice: Why refer to something as a loud noise when you can call it a roar, a din, or a commotion? The more specific you are in your writing, the more easily the reader will be able to visualize whatever you’re communicating. Choose words that are as precise, accurate, and detailed as possible.
Simplify: Run-on sentences and short sentences strung together with commas and conjunctions create a lot of dust and noise in a piece of writing. In most cases, simple, straightforward language helps bring the action of a story to center stage. Use the simple subject-verb-object sentence structure to keep the text flowing and prevent readers from getting confused.
Avoid filler words: I’ve gone back to this article several times since I first read it and have already passed it along to several writers I work with. In short, don’t tell the reader what the character is thinking, wondering, or feeling unless it’s essential to the narrative. Let the story’s action take its course and move the story forward.
Brush up on grammar: Nothing will clean up your writing more than using good, old-fashioned grammar. Pick up a grammar or style guide (a good starter is The Elements of Style) and spend some time mastering the rules. Yes, rules are made to be broken, but make sure you have a good reason when you break the rules, and make sure doing so doesn’t impede the readability of your work.
I ran across The Writer's Workout blog. I have linked to directly on the blog and have saved its RSS feed. Why? Because I feel this need to keep an eye on the basics.
I get the newsletter from Beyond Craft, Joe Ponepinto's Substack. I quote below from one of his posts. I recommend anyone interested in writing do the same.
Because here’s the truth: if you keep waiting for the perfect first draft—the perfect anything—you’ll wait forever.
There is no perfect first draft. There’s only the one you start.
Every
published novel began as something far messier than its author will
ever admit: tangled plots, flat characters, entire scenes that make zero
sense. But that’s exactly how it’s supposed to be. A first draft isn’t
meant to shine—it’s meant to exist.
Perhaps,
in the shadow of so many stories told about Mansfield, Kimber did not
want to risk any falsehoods. Mansfield herself, by contrast, was
dedicated to a mix of truth and artifice. ‘I think the only way to live
as a writer is to draw upon one’s real familiar life,’ she told one
correspondent in 1922, a year before she died. Mansfield spent her last
few months in Fontainebleau, studying (along with Orage) under the
mystic George Ivanovich Gurdjieff. Long attracted to spiritualism, in
her dying days she was still restlessly seeking meaning – another story –
to give shape to her life.
One of the main pieces of advice Gonzales shared on campus was to step outside of the box.
“Read lots of different types of books, different genres for different ages,” Gonzales advises.
Gonzales's
exploration of genres can be displayed in the vast selection of her
work. Her novels The Red Umbrella, Concealed, and the graphic novel
Invisible are some of her most popular works that tend to resonate with
younger audiences.
“The excitement that they have over
stories is contagious. All of a sudden, you realize that your choice of
words and ideas can stimulate this reaction within people,” Gonzales
said.
I will close out with some videos I have been listening to, lately:
... The commercial publishing industry seems happy with the status quo in which social media marketing provides book sales, regardless of the quality of the writing. As long as a book sells it is a good book. It says something about our culture, however.
What can we as serious writers do about it? I am not particularly optimistic here. I know my opinions about marketing, self-promotion, and how the publishing industry ought to work are considered out of date and out of touch. I hold little hope that writers can organize and achieve a level of influence that publishing companies would have to take seriously.
Which led me to William Deresiewicz's How Art Lost Its Way (Persuasion), and back to where I started.
But the audience needs to cooperate. It needs to want to go beyond itself. And that it did, in the decades after World War II, in the midst of the “culture boom,” with the expanding and aspiring middle class. Sure, there was a lot of bullshit there—a lot of status-mongering, a lot of pretension, a lot of middlebrow “art appreciation.” But there was also a lot that was real: a real desire for expanded consciousness, for spiritual depth, for a world made new by art, especially among the young and especially in New York.
And that is what I don’t see anymore. I have no doubt that there is still strenuous art being made, and that it is being received with attention and written about with intelligence. But almost all of that activity, as far as I can tell, is happening in coteries, in social niches and geographic pockets: poets doing readings for other poets, art that isn’t seen outside of Bushwick, critics writing for specialized websites or personal Substacks. What’s gone missing, in a society that long ago excused itself from seriousness, is a broader sense that art is urgent business, that your life, in some sense, depends on it. With that goes the mass audience. With that goes not only the possibility of meaningful criticism, but also its point. No one needs help understanding White Lotus, or Amanda Gorman, or Sally Rooney. For such creations, we can make do with “cultural criticism”—moralistic agendas, topical talking points, biographical chitchat—which is not arts criticism but a simulacrum thereof, and which any self-respecting gender studies major can produce.
Two further losses should be tallied here. The first is that other mediating institution, college. That is where you were supposed to begin your apprenticeship to the idea that there are traditions of thought and expression that it is your obligation to make yourself worthy of. There used to be a teacher at Columbia, an instructor in the great books program, who was famous for including in his final a question that ran, more or less, “Which of the books that we read this year did you find the least interesting, and what failing in you does that reveal?” Now, of course, a work like Moby-Dick is brought into the classroom not to be learned from but hectored. Or would be, if it were even still taught, which it isn’t, because students won’t read it, becausethey can’t.
What led my thoughts when I was in the deepest throes of my depression was that nothing matter, nothing I did mattered, that the Universe was a grimy place and I went into some of its grimiest corners. What keeps me from going back, to fight against what fed my depression and its attendant nihilism, is the belief that I cannot cure anything, but I can stand against the grimy BS that threatens to swallow us whole. I can do my best to not make things worse.
You may want to take a look at Persuasion, Yascha Mounk's Substack, but that is for reasons beyond writing.
5. Solid over Florid Although many writers try to stand out with clever twists or showy vocabulary, neither can beat a solidly told story of sound structure. As there’s so many entries, there’s some measure of gratitude when coming across an easy-to-read, well-told, tightly written story which relies less on the unexpected (though it may include that as well) and more on solidity. Stories without wasted words, scenes, or characters are impressive for the writer’s skill and craft, and judges take notice.
sch 11/14
Ann Lamott, Writing As A Debt of Honor – a full-length talk by Anne Lamott (yes, another Lamott video because I think her Bird by Bird was one of the books that I found most helpful).
[ I am back working through my pretrial detention journal. It is out of order… Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. You can find everything from my pretrial detention journal that is published under the "Pretrial Detention" link under topics on the right hand of your screen. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars.sch 11/08/2025]
Before going much further, I need to make several apologies.
To my father and mother - for dishonoring them. I hope what I write may make up for some of this.
To my family - sorry for letting down my end and embarrassing all of you.
To my friends - I apologize for not living up to your hopes and for not confiding just how nuts I was.
I am just sorry for having been so much a bother. i write with the hope of saving someone repeating my mistakes. Live well.
I claim no control over what is published here. I can say I knocked off maybe 2,000 pages, which could be published here. The subjects run from explanation to atonement, from the personal to the national. I ask only that you understand them as part of this apology, and the apology atonement for a misspent life.
Such measures enjoyed support and even celebration from the American Christian right, leaving many to wonder: What kind of religion endorses such cruelty, the withholding of health care, winking at racism and embracing xenophobia?
There’s little Christian about this, it seems, unless viewed through a theologically Calvinist lens.
The Rev. Robert Johnson, who leads Church of the Resurrection’s new Lee’s Summit location, said the seeming detachment from suffering, tolerance of destructive ideas like “Manifest Destiny” and more likely have Calvinist roots.
“In their minds, God has already chosen,” said Johnson, who earlier led a United Methodist Church in Wichita. “Social justice is viewed as impudence to God’s executed will, and it’s also anti-empathy. In fact, empathy is meaningless.”
I grew up in the American Baptist denomination; a watered down Calvinism is how I viewed it and still view it. That may have more to do with a familial fatalism on my mother's die than a statement of the denomination's actual theology.
“For them, empathy is a cudgel for the left,” the article explained. “It can manipulate caring people into accepting all manner of sins according to a conservative Christian perspective, including abortion access, LGBTQ+ rights, illegal immigration and certain views on social and racial justice.”
Allie Beth Stuckey, author of “Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion,” was quoted as saying: “Empathy becomes toxic when it encourages you to affirm sin, validates lies or supports destructive policies.”
Christian right beliefs have buttressed political conservatism for decades, from the Confederacy’s “Lost Cause,” to Jerry Falwell’s “Moral Majority,” to today’s MAGA movement. Falwell’s Liberty University didn’t originally admit Black students. To be fair, not all evangelicals hold such beliefs, but we should try to understand where the beliefs of so many might come from.
A review of Anthea Butler’s “White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America,” by Bianca Mabute-Louie, identifies evangelicalism as a nationalist political movement to support white, Christian hegemony. Racism is a feature, not a bug, of the movement.
***
Calvin believed that “even before creation,” God had chosen some people for salvation, a belief associated with predestination, according to Christianity.com. Calvin fumed at how Catholicism reduced religion to “salvation by works.”
His refrain? People shouldn’t try to manipulate God nor place Him in their debt. Saved people are saved only Him, not by good works.
“This is the perfect theology for what we see in the evangelical movement,” Johnson said. “This is why they may not consider themselves bigoted or racist. They have found a denominational justification for our racial caste system. It’s why they don’t like social activism. To them, there is no social Gospel, only individual salvation.”
I left the Baptist Church for several reasons, but I left the Church for this kind of thinking - that there was predestination - and for the church's history of violence towards those who disagreed with its interpretations of the religion.
When I joined the Eastern Orthodox Church, it was because it stood for free will and had no institutions like the Inquisition. Empathy is not alien to Orthodox thinking because Christ was empathetic.
The Eastern Orthodox Church, however, has no influence on American politics.
Grace Byron writes in her Doubting Thomas (Granta) (Going to Castleton makes her an Indiana writer):
At twelve I harbored two obsessions: my acoustic guitar and God. I took lessons weekly at a Christian Music Store in Castleton, Indiana, a lovely little suburb that has since crusted over with chain stores. There was a mall that had a Spencer’s, the kind of novelty emo store popular in the early 2000s that sold My Chemical Romance T-shirts and sex toys. All the things a good Christian was not supposed to want.
As kids raised in the church, we were supposed to be content to live in a world of answers, all neatly laid out in hymnals and Vacation Bible School. I wrote ‘To God be the glory, not me’ on all my silly little guitar compositions. It was obsessive, a talisman to ward off uncertainty. It started after hearing that Beethoven had done something similar – he wrote ‘es muss sein!’ on his symphonies. Was there a way out of the frenzied paranoia? Could holiness be discovered in a world less hellbent on shortcuts? Could the question mark be a gateway?
***
In the Evangelical church we were supposed to accept the answers we were given as final. Questions and doubts were met hesitantly, like youthful rebellion. Early Christian writing developed as a form of self-surveillance. The diary was a technology of admitting fault and sin and finding answers to why one falls into temptation. The Christians I knew were less interested in contemplative dialogue – unless it was confirming their already deep-held beliefs about the world and their place in it. This wasn’t a synagogue or a sangha. It was a church. Besides, the mystics and seekers – even among the Christian faith – had never gotten very far. God’s will was supposed to be clear and easily definable. Even when we got confused, we could find counseling and clarity in a fifty-minute sermon. Don’t you want the promise of easy answers? I do. It’s alluring to know the way.
There is a very fine writer by the name of Marilynne Robinson who writes about the good side of Calvinism; I can see her point without agreeing with it. I have never agreed with predestination, and I cannot see how I will. There is a firm point in Orthodox thinking that God could not make something evil, that he is not angry with us, while the West sees God as doing the opposite. Empathy is not anti-God in the East. It is much easier to burn heretics when you think you are serving an Angry God - which seems also easy to translate into the French Reign of Terror and genocide, etc. In the East, we are to persuade heretics of their errors, not harm them. Bottom line, since I am holding myself together with chewing gum and baling wire, it goes back to the difference between Greek and Roman. The Romans were great ones for the law, were very good at destroying their enemies, and the Greek church never had the temptation for worldly power that Rome had. Oh, yeah, I read Hawthorne's The Marble Faunwhile in prison, and it was not bad - New England Puritan in the dying days of The Papal States - and never before got the real sense of the Pope as temporal prince (Yea, I've seen Rex Harrison in the Michelangelo move, but that was Harrison hamming up it up.) Good lord, I am in a gloomy and loquacious mood this morning. Shoulders throbbing and neck stiff, you'd think I'd just shut up.
All this might be moot except here we are with White Christian Nationalism rising, the Evangelical heirs of Falwell and Robinson letting Israel commit genocide so long as it brings about the end times. There is something seriously wrong with this kind of thinking that might just get a lot of us killed. Oh, yeah, been listening to some videos about Heinlein - was he a fascist or not. None have mentioned the dictatorship he predicted in his Future History was a religious one. So, I never bought the fascist argument, but do have to wonder if anyone gave proper attention to the dictatorship predicted. (They all want to jump on Starship Troopers - which actually asks a very old question, who should be citizens. There was a time I could not have voted because I had too little property; Americans, not knowing their history, assume everyone can vote and always have.)
And I should say that not all Western Churches agree with the Evangelicals (who seem to be really Pentecostals), but they're not in the middle of politics now, are they? I am also not sure that they condemn Christian nationalism in the way that the Eastern Church does.
At first glance, Robinson is a surprisingly traditional Calvinist. She defends the hallmarks of traditional Calvinism: the majesty of God (though not in those terms), original sin, the providence of God, and predestination. She also has a high view of scripture. Moreover, in addition to defending Calvin against all comers, she also defends the Puritans and occasionally cites Jonathan Edwards with approval. In each case, however, she gives a special Robinsonian spin to their doctrines.
***
In another essay Robinson alludes to the same “offensive” doctrine and puts it in a historical context, thereby absolving Calvin from responsibility for it. “Terms and concepts associated with Calvinism also shock and horrify, for example the idea of an elect, of sin and fallenness, of judgment and condemnation, as if these were the products of one Frenchman’s fevered brain rather than basic issues in Christianity from its beginnings.”2 Her main line of defense that predestination is not determinism; that it is both scriptural and has a long doctrinal history preceding Calvin. “The elect” and “election,” she points out, “are terms used twenty-three times in the New Testament, seven times by Jesus, and are therefore significant in all classical theology, though folklore attributes the notion to Calvin and blames him for it.”3 She repeats the latter point in various contexts, and is quick to point out that “Predestination was accepted by every significant theologian (Chrysostom seems to have been the exception) before Calvin or contemporary with him, including Augustine and Aquinas.” After making this claim (which I believe is too sweeping), she adds this interesting observation, “Whether predestination is ‘double’ or ‘single’ is a quibble with which Calvin was too honest to have patience.”4 Only a “quibble”? I doubt it.
