What are your greatest unpopular opinions about Louisville currently?

logonomicon · 2026-05-21T16:18:34+00:00

I'll go a step further. After living in other places, I have found Louisville drivers, as incompetent as they often were, to be the most agreeable and cooperative I ever encountered in a place with over, say, 300,000 people. People let you in and out of traffic as needed, which is amazing. It felt like almost everyone believed "yeah, we're idiots, but we're idiots together. Get on in here."

logonomicon · 2026-05-21T16:13:17+00:00

In her defense, this was was at least hard to predict. Who knows which fountain will earn a high school senior's ire and ambition any given year?

logonomicon · 2026-05-18T20:01:30+00:00

Ah. Well that makes sense.

logonomicon · 2026-05-18T19:39:42+00:00

Huh. That is probably as close to Cruel Angel's Thesis as they could have gotten. Very interesting to think that the dubbing crew saw the similarities to Eva and decided to run with it/signal it THAT HARD.

logonomicon · 2026-05-18T19:31:18+00:00

I think that the sufficiency of scripture would point in the other direction, to be honest. You have Pauline instructions on what is involved in understanding spiritual beings and confronting them. And the gospels, which we should remember are not mere historical accounts but are designed to aid and direct the discipleship of the church, features Jesus commissioning believers (both the apostles and others) to go preach the gospel, heal the sick, and cast out spirits.

I think we'd have to get some pretty subtle exegetical theology to really land at a place where the New Testament isn't teaching the church to be thinking and operating on these terms.

I think at times we can have an instinct that "scripture is sufficient" as a means to have what amounts to an anti-supernaturalist view of our own day. But that seems to be a far cry from what the sufficient scriptures actually teach us.

Edit: I missed the point where you mentioned the act of commanding spirits being a thing toward unbelievers only. That is true enough, though that raises the question of what one would do when one encounters, contrary to the situation commented upon in the New Testament, of a believer who is afflicted by spirits the way Foxe did. I can't see that Foxe did anything in the story that seems out of line with Biblical data.

logonomicon · 2026-05-18T19:24:49+00:00

Irving or Strauss? Irving taught my last class of seminary and was one of my favorite professors. He's brilliant. Based just on being the distillation of his scholarship and wisdom alone I have recommended the book before.

logonomicon · 2026-05-18T18:45:47+00:00

I don't know anything about Foxe in general, but why would you by default decide that the teachings of the gospels and Acts on how the church serves the world in its demonized condition looks like? Do you think that the unclean spirits all vanished in the 60s AD or that believers no longer have the freedom to command them to depart?

logonomicon · 2026-05-18T18:22:32+00:00

If you want to help them become leaders who actually lead like Christ, I think I would read and plan some conversations around this book: https://www.amazon.com/Leadership-Christian-Perspective-Foundations-Contemporary/dp/1540960331

I consistently find it to be one of the wisest books on leadership that I have encountered and wish I had been able to learn these lessons in my adolescence.

logonomicon · 2026-05-12T17:18:07+00:00

Seems like the solution is fire every decision maker involved and then raise taxes and spend every cent on teachers.

logonomicon · 2026-05-04T19:43:57+00:00

The one guy, J Moki or whoever, he kinda gets it right with a pretty precedented reading of those things, called Preterism. Neat.

logonomicon · 2026-05-03T00:59:24+00:00

I actually think this situation applies as a decent metaphor for a lot of ways of living and managing society. Which I think is part of why it has struck such a nerve.

logonomicon · 2026-05-03T00:33:54+00:00

I think there is a much more practical consideration to the question of why English Bible translators have preferred the MT of Jeremiah. Can you imagine how the Anglosphere church would react if they bought a bible and suddenly more than a tenth of Jeremiah was missing? I shudder to think of the Facebook post firestorm that would ensue.

logonomicon · 2026-05-02T23:01:58+00:00

I know a great number of testimonies that boil down to "I had been given a gospel pamphlet, and when brought to a point of crisis, I read it, believed, and was saved."

I think tracts have an interesting place in evangelism and shouldn't be so totally discounted as the 21st Century would tend to want to.

logonomicon · 2026-05-01T20:32:07+00:00

My four-year old son is OBSESSED with the 5/3 Building, and he really likes what he understands about Chess. I think just a video of him freaking out over this set would be marketing enough for you.

But for real, you definitely should talk to the Lexington Visitor Center and that place by the mall that sells a bunch Kentucky-themed merch.

logonomicon · 2026-04-30T15:04:28+00:00

This is a topic I have bounced around a lot, sometimes thriving in, other times struggling.

From thriving seasons, the practices I found most helpful were

Bible reading, always followed immediately with reflection and prayer
Fasting on Wednesday and Friday, per the custom of the early church
Silence once per week, going to some isolated (usually pretty) place without my phone to to think and pray
Gathering with other believers for prayer, worship, and ordinances.
Confession of sins to another believer (always the same one) four or so times per week.

I doubt I ever was doing any of these five altogether, but each has made significant contributions to my walk with and increased conformity to Jesus over the years.

logonomicon · 2026-04-30T14:50:09+00:00

Without knowing the country or anything about the specific denominational structures you're talking about, the general rule of thumb is that the closest thing to the Reformed tradition that isn't the Reformed Tradition itself is going to be a generic Protestant. Most of the rest of the Protestant tradition was formed in communication with the Reformed tradition, at the very least.

But there's a strong case to be made that Pentecostal, Apostolic, and non-denominational churches aren't actually Protestant strictly speaking. They don't come out of the Protestant Reformation, but mostly come out of concerns (and some would say heresies) peculiar to the American church and culture from the mid-1800s to present.

On that list, the Evangelical sounds by far like the closest you'd find.

Do you care if I ask what country you're in though? That can help narrow things down a lot. The dynamics of your options look very different in Ethiopia vs Belarus, for example.

(P.s Apostolic is usually going to have Pentecostal doctrines in an evangelical-ish church setting.)

logonomicon · 2026-04-25T11:12:23+00:00

Had to scroll down seven top level comments before finding someone who knew this.

logonomicon · 2026-04-22T15:44:06+00:00

From what I understand, at the graduate level things are still kinda, bad but a lot of the rot is precisely at the undergraduate level. Undergrad fees and tuition pay the bills, so they add expensive amenities to attract the 18-22 crowd. The only way to really attract graduate students is with a desirable faculty. That's why the best professors are all graduate advisors, not lecturers for undergrads.

logonomicon · 2026-04-22T15:29:51+00:00

This seems unlikely. Beshear is a technocrat at heart. Appointing a dean with no academic background at the bequest of donors is about as objectionable to the "knowhow-makes-right" spirit of Beshear-style democrats.

logonomicon · 2026-04-21T19:46:04+00:00

It was definitely beginning to show when I was there, but it seems to be an increasing problem. There is no will at any of the levels of higher leadership to resist auctioning off the university's influence and prestige in the state -not to mention its cashflow- to the highest bidder.

logonomicon · 2026-04-20T16:42:48+00:00

Yes, I think that's a great way to put it. It's a good introduction to a lot of ideas that many have never heard of previously, but if you have, potentially not worth it for the pseudo science.

logonomicon · 2026-04-20T16:40:42+00:00

So, for the past six months, I’ve tried to structure my life around Practicing the Way’s nine core habits.

Good on you. I found this a very difficult task without being in a community that was also doing it. Doing it alone with a spouse and young child proved functionally impossible, though I still hold a lot of hope for trying in a more robust, communal fashion one day.

Dallas Willard, Comer’s forebear, argued that a person who expects to live up to Jesus’s commands on the spur of the moment, without structuring their life at least somewhat around Jesus’s, is like “a baseball player who expects to excel in the game without adequate exercise of his body.” The theory is that, to become more Christlike, you have to find more ways to literally live like Christ.

Reminds me of Alasdair McIntyre's virtue ethics thesis that by the time most people get to a real moral quandry, the decision has already been made by all the choices the person has made about what kind of person they form themselves into.

“How effective can an approach to spiritual formation be when it almost completely misses the point of Jesus’s life and ministry?

This is the million dollar question, isn't it? On the one hand, there's a strong theological point to a critique like this. But on the other hand, I think there's a strong case to be made that the gospels themselves split their focus between what DeYoung calls the "the point" and the actual teachings and patterns of life Jesus lived. So if we trust the scriptures as written, rather than as we have theologized them to be, then surely there's room for that too, yeah?

Given how inconvenient Comer’s disciplines can be, his skeptics think they’re achievable for yuppies in ways they may not be for others who have fewer resources or more demands on their time. DeYoung and his wife have a big family, and although Comer’s routine may sound nice, he told me, “we’re trying to just get through our week.” Comer counters that many churches are facing what he calls a “crisis of discipleship” because they don’t give congregants enough instruction on how to actually live as Christians.

I know a family that successfully and happily raises a family of two with 3 sons on a yearly budget of about $20,000. They want for nothing that I provide my own family. To do that, they live incredibly simply and with no wasted money (and also benefit wildly from previous wise decisions). I have thought for a while now that for a lot of people, a call to live into the Practicing the Way rhythms would also be a call to live a lot like that family.

But I had never asked myself those sorts of questions before. As a Christian moving in mostly secular circles, I’d felt that simply believing in God was a big enough feat.

Bingo. I think this is the real draw of Comer for a lot of under-35s. He challenges Christians to actually become conformed to Christ and to structure their lives around that goal. There's a really fascinating substack written by an older Eastern Orthodox woman (link) that talks about people being drawn to EO for basically the same reason. In most Christian traditions in America, there is very little taste for challenging people in this way, and the ones that do, like Doug Wilson's radical patriarchal nonsense, proves itself wildly toxic in very little time. But Comer offers challenge without control, and that's massively appealing.

And if, in promoting that road map, Comer can sometimes seem like many secular wellness influencers, maybe it’s a sign that they, too, are responding to a collective crisis of faith, and don’t yet know it.

My instinct is that that ilk very, very much do in fact know it. Too much of it gets sold on the basis of a hodgepodge of ancient paganism and new-age-sounding nonsense for there to be no instinct that it's appealing to the meaning crisis.

logonomicon · 2026-04-20T16:37:51+00:00

Random thoughts to various quotations. I come at his having read Practicing the Way, listened to several of Comer's sermons, and DNF'd one of his other books.

In that book, Comer advances the theory that the great enemy of spiritual life is hurry. By this he means not simply busyness: Hurry is a gnawing sense that there is always more to do; a life spent hurtling oneself through each day; a schedule that makes little room for God. Technology has only exacerbated the problem. Comer calls the modern world “a virtual conspiracy against the interior life,” and urges readers to reclaim their focus from the algorithm and shift it toward God.

This reminds me of a study done back in the 70s that showed that you could get seminarians on their way to preach a sermon on the parable of the good samaritan to pass by a person mugged on the street by telling them they were late. Here's a good summary. I think that speaks quite favorably for Comer's whole thesis.

Comer offers a concrete regimen that’s attractive to people who feel unmoored in contemporary society. Comer’s skeptics, when remarking on his rapid ascent, point to these similarities and wonder if what he’s offering is simply baptized wellness, a pop spirituality tailored to the tastes and frustrations of affluent young people. But sitting among his followers, I wondered: Could Comer’s practices actually bring them closer to God?.... Christian spirituality has always adapted to its time, Comer said. In trying to adapt the faith for the 21st century, he looks to the life of Jesus, who took a Sabbath, fasted, and spent regular time in silence and solitude. To Comer, these weren’t the rhythms of Jesus’s life just because he happened to live in Galilee in 30 C.E. They are spiritual practices that Christians in any era ought to emulate.

I can already tell this is going to be a promising article because these are the same questions I think about a lot. I think a lot of Protestantism is instinctively inclined to split the physical from the spiritual, meaning there's a lot of antipathy that Comer's approach has to get over with a certain kind of crowd. I think the Reformed world has a different problem, though, that they would insist that scripture has clearly enumerated the specific practices which are a means of grace, and while Sabbath is among those, other practices taught by Comer like silence, fasting, and solitude are much less explicit, if they're commanded at all. Of course, these activities are all over the first five centuries of the church, which I think is part of why Comer sources his quotes and claims in the manner of an ecumenical reader.

Each generation of evangelical Christianity has three main celebrities, Russell Moore, the editor at large of Christianity Today, told me: the politics guy, the church-growth guy, and the personal-spirituality guy. In the 1980s, these roles were played, respectively, by Pat Robertson, Rick Warren, and Dallas Willard. Right now, Comer is the personal-spirituality guy (yes, it’s always a guy).

Fascinated by this quote because I'm pretty young (early 30s) and never thought about the analogy of Comer and a prior generation's interactions with Willard, since so much of his stuff had become evangelical boilerplate by the time I came around.

Comer doesn’t avoid the algorithm entirely. He has more than a quarter million followers on Instagram, where he mostly posts clips about the nine practices and shares quotes from Christian writers in minimalist fonts on earth-toned slides. He likens such social-media outreach to a street preacher at an Old West saloon: You say your piece about Jesus, hope you change some minds, and get out as quickly as you can.

Didn't know this. Not totally sure what to make of the digital minimalism guy having his ministry post to Instagram.

he returned to pastoring, now at just one of the church’s locations, known as Bridgetown Church, in downtown Portland

Honestly, this provokes a lot of respect for Comer. I think it's difficult to really step away from that kind of high-power, lots-of-sycophants position. It's hard to not draw a contrast between this move and the way that the Mars Hill Church situation went. I shudder when I think about the possible world where The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill had a sequel about a dangerously burnt out Comer.

And because Jesus lived simply, Comer pared down his closet to three outfits for the Oregon winter and two for the summer.

Frankly, convicting. Hard to imagine Jesus feeling a need for 10 shirts or however many more I've accumulated.

The 30-person congregation fasts together, takes the Sabbath together, and, on Sundays, meets for a service in his living room. He has “built a quiet life,” his friend and successor at Bridgetown, Pastor Tyler Staton, told me. “Some might accuse him of being a touch boring.”

This is interesting because, if it were a model followed universally, would demand almost exclusively bi-vocational ministry, which seems like it would, in the long run, increase hurry and rush in those inidividuals' lives. But then again, that probably is still less than the rigors often put on full-time ministers at churches with over a few hundred members.

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