- Introductory: these posts explain how following the calendar is good for your growth as a Christian. The first three of these are free to everyone, and help give a foundation for why you might want to start following the Church Calendar.
- About the Church Calendar: these posts share the history of the church calendar, some things that are helpful to know, and help answer common questions. Why do we celebrate saints? What is Epiphany really about? How did these seasons develop? What is a Triduum?
- Holy Day / Holy Season Reflections: these posts are the real core of the newsletter. As we encounter Holy Days and Holy Seasons throughout the year, you will be given habits to consider adopting that are rooted in who or what is being celebrated by that day or season.
May He, who by His Incarnation gathered into one things earthly and heavenly, fill you with the fulness of inward peace and goodwill, and make you partakers of the Divine Nature; and the blessing of God almighty, + the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, be upon you and remain with you always. Amen.
Moral idiots and a liberal arts education
The paragraph below, from Alan Jacobs, is an important one to comprehend. The rest of his post helps frame some of the wider issues at hand, and points to other helpful works for those seeking to read more widely on these things.
I want to make a stronger argument: that the distinctive “occupational psychosis” of Silicon Valley is sociopathy – the kind of sociopathy embedded in the Oppenheimer Principle. The people in charge at Google and Meta and (outside Silicon Valley) Microsoft, and at the less well-known companies that are being used by the mega-companies, have been deformed by their profession in ways that prevent them from perceiving, acknowledging, and acting responsibly in relation to the consequences of their research. They have a trained incapacity to think morally. They are by virtue of their narrowly technical education and the strong incentives of their profession moral idiots.
While it is not the only point of the paragraph, I cannot help but revisit the final sentence (emphasis mine):
they are by virtue of their narrowly technical education … moral idiots.
Learning to lead, love, and serve our world does not require more technical training, either in K-12 or higher ed. It requires more humane teaching and learning.
Your eight year old can learn to code from an app whenever they need it, whether that is this summer or twenty summers from now. They cannot so easily learn what it means to be a human being who is a member of a human society, while also learning to master the art of letters and numbers.
One of the best things you can do now to prepare young children for the moral idiocracy of our age is to ground them in a rich education in the liberal arts.
Introducing Rhythms of Habit - a newsletter about approaching the church calendar as an apprenticeship in holiness
I am thrilled to introduce Rhythms of Habit, a newsletter about approaching the Church Calendar as an apprenticeship in Holiness.
In addition to (hopefully) being a helpful and informative newsletter, this project is also a means of finalizing the draft of my next book, called Rhythms of Habit: The Church Calendar as an Apprenticeship in Holiness.
If you are already sold, head on over to Substack to join as a free or paid subscriber. If you need to hear more, read on!
A little more about the Rhythms of Habit project:
As we live out the Christian Year together, three types of posts will be published:
If you are new here or new to the Church Calendar, you may want to explore the free introductory posts. Think of these as the introductory foundation of the newsletter.
More of these Introductory posts, along with many About the Church Calendar posts will be sent throughout the year to subscribers.
But here is the real core of the newsletter: Holy Day and Holy Season reflections.
As we progress through the Church Calendar year after year, reflections on major and minor Holy Days will be shared. Yes, you will learn more about the calendar itself. But more importantly you will be given daily or seasonal practices and habits to adopt, in hopes that these habits will help you grow in Christ. You can find a free preview of these sort of reflections here: Feast of St. Joseph.
Why Subscribe?
Free subscribers have access to some of these posts throughout the Church Year. If you like what you are reading, consider becoming a paid subscriber to make sure you receive all new reflections as they are published, and gain access to reading all old reflections, too.
The first Holy Day reflection will be on September 14th, when we celebrate Holy Cross Day. Subscribe by then to make sure you don’t miss a post!
Change your name, and fool the angel of death. Read more from my recent article for the Feast of the Holy Name here.
From a sermon preached in 2007 by Archbishop Rowan Williams.
Taken as a whole, the (Book of Common Prayer) is the ritual celebration of the seasons of our lives from birth to death in the light of the gospel.
Frank Griswold, in the foreword to Go In Peace, a small book on the Art of Hearing Confessions.
If we're the time's lords
If we’re the time’s lords, we don’t determine when to celebrate feasts by looking at the phases of the moon. Paul goes apoplectic when Christians submit to the “elementary things” in the heavens (Gal. 4:8-11; Col. 2:16). As time lords, we have authority to decide when and how to celebrate. We must organize time obediently. We can organize time well only if we have the tunes of creation and redemption running in an endless loop through the ears of our soul.
Peter Leithart, Theopolitan Liturgy