Montana Nursing Home Closures, the Merchant of Death, and Cameron Bertuzzi

Nursing homes in Montana are closing this year, and I keep hearing about it from Billings Gazette. The latest one in Miles City makes eleven so far in 2022.

Presumably, the elderly, and otherwise incapable of caring for themselves, cannot be taken in by family. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be in nursing homes. Right?

Of course right. Don’t ask such triggering questions. You should know better.

Yet it is concerning, to think of aged men and women with no one to care for them, and family not taking them in. And what if the nursing homes can’t hire enough skilled caregivers, but robotics is still not sufficiently advanced to make up the shortfall?

Here again, we run into the issue of needing the Christian ethic regarding family – including marriage and having children, as well as the responsibility adult children have to their parents, as well as the responsibility adult relatives more generally have to their extended family members in need of help.

Brittney Griner and “The Merchant of Death”

Speaking of knowing better, you simply must celebrate WNBA player Brittney Griner being traded for the Russian “Merchant of Death.” I mean, really. It is all the rage right now.

Besides, if you object, or question, or express disapproval, you run the risk of being called a bigot of any one or more of several varieties. And you don’t want that kind of trouble, do you?

Also, please don’t point out the oddity of this administration wanting more restrictions placed on Americans trying to purchase firearms even as a notorious international arms dealer is set free to resume his work, or as we continue sending both arms and munitions to Ukraine to wage a self-defensive and citizen-led war against Russia.

Krysten Sinema Leaves the Democratic Party

While we’re on the topic of how you should think, feel, and speak, do make sure to mourn that Arizona Senator Krysten Sinema just announced she’s leaving the Democratic party, and registering as an Independent instead.

Shame on her. I’m not sure why, so don’t ask, but this is probably a threat to democracy. I mean, it’s even in the name of the party she just left.

Someone should probably follow Senator Sinema into a bathroom with cameras again and see if they can persuade her to change her mind and come back. It’s worth a shot, anyways.

The Most Internally Quoted Verse in the Bible

Thankfully, the most quoted Bible verse in the Bible, found in Exodus 34, reads as follows:

“The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty.” 

That is to say that God is both merciful to the penitent, and also just toward the stubborn and stiff-necked. And that is a very great comfort.

Yet that brings us to the rather less comfortable question of whether we Americans have become a stiff-necked people. And the short answer is, in my view, ‘Yes.’

Another Several Thousand Words About Christian Nationalism

Enter Thomas F. Booher and Brad Littlejohn, writing for The Tulip Driven Life and Ad Fontes, respectively.

Again and again, it seems, we come back to this issue of what to do about so-called “Christian nationalism,” including the preliminary, and entirely routine, attempts to define both “Christian” and “nationalism,” as well as every other word in the English dictionary, to exclude the unorthodox, and distance one’s self from the heterodox, before delivering the much-anticipated knockout blow to the political philosophy of the godless.

Booher has surprisingly strong words for actual white nationalists, and genuine racists. Yet he is simultaneously adamant that we need to keep the Stephen Wolfes and Doug Wilsons in the conversation because they bring up important questions in need of answers.

Littlejohn, meanwhile, has shortened his first name to ‘Brad,’ which is admittedly more personable and less pretentious than ‘Bradford,’ which has a tendency to come off like he is doing all his public works for the benefit of his mother’s approval.

Prominent Protestants Going Roman Catholic

Before we run entirely out of it, let us do also spend some time on the curious case of Cameron Bertuzzi, of Capturing Christianity notoriety.

Less than a month ago he sat down with Matt Fradd, the Aussie host of Pints With Aquinas, to discuss Bertuzzi’s conversion from de facto Protestantism to Roman Catholicism. For the life of me, the only clear reason I could discern for why he did it is because he’s a photographer, and therefore he is also a sucker for beauty. And Rome has prettier buildings and statues and paintings and music. And also Bayesian analysis, or something.

But really, now. Other than the architecture and art, what is the draw? Perhaps this: that some people do just want to be told what to do, think, feel, and believe, and Rome gives them that.

Indeed, to my outside perspective, that appears to be both the best and worst thing about Rome, how it tells its adherents precisely what to do, say, and believe, as well as when and how, if not always on the right premises why. Yet the trouble comes when Rome is not just wrong, but profoundly wrong, and also stubbornly resistant to five centuries of calls for significant reform regarding false teaching.

But really, now, aesthetics is well and good. Yet Bertuzzi’s reasons, insofar as they seem primarily rather than secondarily concerned with aesthetics, are the very definition of superficial.

Whatever he says about Bayesian analysis, methinks he had a conclusion in search of justification and excuses.

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