The Perfect Storm: How the Sea Came Back

Jazz, Shame, and Being With — Essay #10

This essay traces how repeated crises—plague, war, schism, and institutional collapse—reshaped Christian formation over four centuries.

It shows how the grammar the early Church struggled to hold at bay slowly returned, preparing the ground for the faith many of us inherited.

My brother Keith was a Presbyterian pastor in Texas oil country. A few years ago, he preached on Jeremiah — the lack of a balm in Gilead — and wondered aloud why Christians weren’t in full lament over what was happening at the border. Families separated. Children in cages. Asylum seekers treated as pawns.

He described the behavior as cruel. That word hung in the air. Then he mentioned, almost in passing, that Jesus was not an American. And that Jesus was a Jew.

Growls rose from the pews. Literal growls. Two oilmen — husbands of prominent widows, men who’d made piles of money and carried themselves accordingly — shifted in their seats with visible fury.

After the service, one of them found Keith.

“That,” he said, “is the damnedest thing I have ever heard in a Church.”

Not the cruelty at the border. Not children separated from parents. Not the failure of lament. The damnedest thing was that Jesus was Jewish.

I’ve been sitting with that story for years now, turning it over, trying to understand what it reveals. Not about those oilmen — their willful ignorance is easy enough to comprehend. But about the form of the faith that formed them. The form of the faith that formed Keith. The form of the faith that formed me.

How does a faith centered on a Jewish rabbi from Galilee produce people who experience his Jewishness as blasphemy?

The answer isn’t ignorance. Those men might have known, in some technical sense, that Jesus was born in Judea, circumcised on the eighth day, bar mitzvahed, Torah-observant. They might have passed a Bible quiz on it. But as Hauerwas never tires of pointing out, Christians have become very good at knowing about Jesus without being formed by Jesus.¹ We’ve turned a story we’re supposed to inhabit into a set of propositions we merely affirm. The facts get filed away; the life remains untouched.

But knowing a fact and letting it matter are different operations. Something in their formation had taught them to simultaneously suppress Jesus’s Jewishness as historical data and experience it as offensive when spoken aloud in church. The fact was stored in one compartment; their functional Jesus — the one who actually shaped their emotions, their politics, their sense of who belongs — lived in another.

Their reaction wasn’t just theological error. It was imaginative failure. They could not imagine themselves as guests in a Jewish story—as Gentiles grafted into Israel’s olive tree, joining a narrative that preceded them by millennia. They could only imagine that story as theirs: possessed, controlled, available for their purposes. The faith that should have taught them to receive had taught them to own. And owners do not tolerate being told that the house belongs to someone else.

That compartmentalization didn’t happen by accident. It was built, layer by layer, across centuries. And in this essay, I want to trace how the sea came back — how the dikes the Church Fathers had constructed to hold back the sea of Pharaoh’s grammar were breached, one crisis at a time, until the form of faith those oilmen inherited had more Pharaoh in it than manna.

This is the story of a perfect storm: plague and war, institutional collapse and technological revolution, political terror and theological mutation — all converging in ways that would reshape the faith for four centuries.

It’s also my story. Keith and I grew up in the same Louisiana household, shaped by a milieu of German Midlander, Borderlander, and Deep South planter culture, surrounded by the distinctive Catholicism of Louisiana’s New France settlers.² We swam in the same waters. Our father’s theological hero was Reinhold Niebuhr — which meant we inherited, without knowing it, what Hauerwas calls “Stoicism restated in Christian terms.”³ We learned a form of the faith that could pass Bible quizzes while leaving our functional Jesus — the one who shaped our politics, our bodies, our sense of who belongs — untouched by Israel’s story.

Keith saw the supersessionist standard operating in his congregation and named it. I’m trying to understand how it got there — and how much of it I’m still carrying.

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What the Fathers Built — And What Was Always Pressing

If you’ve been following this series, you know the baseline. In Essay 8, I traced two grammars — two logics of worth that have been competing since Egypt. (I use “grammar” as a heuristic—not claiming traditions were sealed containers with incommensurable logics, but pointing to the different consequences that follow when shared concepts get applied. Christians and Stoics both knew what “enemy” meant. The question is what followed from applying the concept.)

Pharaoh’s grammar runs on scarcity: never enough, store against future lack, worth through productivity, hierarchies of who matters. Build store-cities. Hoard. The strong survive.

Manna grammar runs on abundance: enough for today, trust for tomorrow, worth through receiving, everyone fed. Don’t hoard — it rots. Rest on the seventh day. You are beloved before you contribute.

Jesus embodied manna. Fed the multitudes with leftovers to spare. Healed on the Sabbath because people matter more than production. Ate with sinners because belonging precedes achievement. Died vulnerable rather than dominating. The entire arc of his life performed the logic: you are gift before you are useful.

Essay 9 traced something crucial: from the beginning, the Jesus Movement faced competing grammars that used similar vocabulary. Stoic philosophy offered the Sage — the fortress self who achieves worth through rational self-mastery. Gnostic religion offered special knowledge that sorted people into tiers of spiritual belonging. Both were available in the cultural water. Both could be dressed in the Movement’s vocabulary while carrying different freight.

The Church Fathers knew this. And they built dikes.

The creeds weren’t abstract theology. They were anti-Gnostic polemic encoded in liturgy. “Maker of heaven AND earth” — matter isn’t evil; the Creator God of Israel made it. “Born of the Virgin Mary” — Jesus has Jewish lineage; he didn’t parachute in from a spiritual realm. “Suffered under Pontius Pilate” — real flesh, real pain, real political history. “Resurrection of the body” — bodies aren’t escaped; they’re transformed.

The Eucharist was what I called a “liturgical fortress.” Every week, in every congregation, the question was forced: Is this bread Christ’s body? If yes, then matter carries grace — and Gnostic grammar becomes unlivable. You can’t believe bodies don’t matter while eating one.

And the virtue ethics tradition held that transformation actually happens — not through individual technique but through participated life in community. You become a saint by being carried in practices you didn’t design, shaped by rhythms of grace you can’t control.

These practices sustained what I called resignification. The early Movement borrowed Stoic and Gnostic vocabulary — logos, apatheia, gnosis — but attempted to transform it within a different grammar. The transformation was real. But it was never complete. The old meanings persisted, always pressing, always ready to flood back.

I used the image of land reclaimed from the sea. The Dutch built dikes and created farmland where water used to be. The land is real. But the sea never left. It’s always pressing against the walls. The dikes have to be maintained, or the surf comes back.

The practices were the dikes. The creeds, the Eucharist, the slow formation in community — these held the resignification in place. Where the practices were strong, the new meanings held. Where practices weakened, the old meanings reasserted themselves.

The fathers built dikes against Gnosticism while building Christendom—and Christendom would become its own kind of flood. The liturgical fortress that held Gnostic grammar at bay became, over centuries, an institutional fortress that could issue Discovery Bulls. The same practices that formed saints also formed inquisitors. This is the tragedy of Christian formation: you cannot guarantee the harvest.

Three patterns in particular kept pressing against the dikes:

Covenantal severance:⁴ The Gnostic move to abstract Christ from his Jewish, covenantal particularity. Once you sever Jesus from Israel’s story—from that mother, that village, that Torah-observant life—you create a vacuum. And whatever hierarchy your culture provides will rush to fill it.

The Gnostics filled it with spiritual castes. Later centuries filled it with race. Our century fills it with whoever can claim the most authentic belonging—by ancestry, by identity, by whatever sorting mechanism the culture provides. “Heritage American,” “real British,” progressive hierarchies that invert the winners while preserving the grammar. Different containers, same dissolved Christ.

I’ve watched myself reach for these hierarchies. They feel like solid ground when participation feels like falling. But here’s what the reaching reveals: I’m asking ancestry or identity to do what only baptism can do. I’m asking cultural sorting to provide what only dying and rising with Christ provides—a belonging that doesn’t need to exclude to feel real.

The supersessionist standard: A purity test designed to be failed. Create a criterion that sounds universal — who wouldn’t want purity? who wouldn’t want loyalty? — but that ensures the targeted group always fails. The conversos in Spain could never be pure enough. The Jews in Keith’s oilmen’s imagination could never be American enough. And somehow, impossibly, Jesus himself fails the test his own followers invented.

Dominative identity: The self that requires a threatening "them" to know who "we" are. Old Christians existed as a category only through the continuous exclusion of New Christians. The pattern migrates freely: "Heritage American," "real British," progressive hierarchies that name the oppressor class. Left and right, nativist and identitarian—the content inverts, the exclusion remains. The "we" is always constituted by what it excludes. I've felt the pull from multiple directions. The grammar is easier to recognize when it's not my team using it.⁵

These three are connected. Covenantal severance creates the vacuum. The supersessionist standard polices who fills it. Dominative identity is the result — a “we” that knows itself only through excluding “them.”

The dikes were practices—not beliefs, not ideas, but embodied rhythms that made resignification livable. Weekly Eucharist. Creedal confession. The hospital that treats the stranger as Christ in disguise. Where practices held, meanings held. Where practices weakened, the old grammar flooded back.

Now go back to Keith’s oilmen.

Those men growled when Keith said Jesus was a Jew. Not because they didn’t know — they could have passed the Bible quiz. But because their functional Jesus had been so thoroughly severed from Israel’s story that reconnecting him felt like contamination. The supersessionist standard was operating: real faith (in their grammar) is pure, American, untainted by Jewish particularity. Jesus’s Jewishness fails that test.

And their identity — their sense of who they are as “real Christians” — required that failure. If Jesus is Jewish, if the faith is a Jewish movement, if the story we’re in is Israel’s story continued, then the whole apparatus of “us” versus “them” collapses. They weren’t protecting doctrine. They were protecting a self that needs an excluded other to exist.

Covenantal severance isn’t just bad history. It’s bad soteriology. A Christ severed from Israel isn’t the Messiah—because “Messiah” means Israel’s anointed king. Sever the covenant, and you’re left with a generic savior figure who can be filled with whatever content your culture provides.

Hauerwas calls this the God of ultimate vagueness—and vague gods are useful gods. A Christ who isn’t Jewish can be American. A Christ unmoored from Torah can bless your market, your army, your immigration policy. The generic savior is infinitely flexible precisely because he’s infinitely empty. He demands nothing because he is nothing in particular. The oilmen didn’t need Jesus of Nazareth. They needed a mascot. Mascots don’t talk back. Mascots don’t have opinions about the border. And mascots are never, ever Jewish.

The patristic dikes had been built precisely against this. The creeds insisted on Jewish particularity. The Eucharist grounded faith in matter. The practices held covenantal severance at bay.

But the dikes were breached. Not all at once. Not in a single dramatic failure. Layer by layer, crisis by crisis, the sea came back.

This essay traces how.

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Part 1: When a King Was Also a Vassal

The Impossible Position

Here’s an impossible position. See if you can solve it.

You’re the King of England. You answer to no one. Your word is law. Your sovereignty is absolute within your realm.

You’re also the Duke of Normandy — a French territory you inherited. As Duke, you’re a vassal of the French king. You owe him homage. When he summons you, you kneel.

Can you be both? Can a king kneel? Can absolute sovereignty coexist with feudal obligation?

When William the Conqueror took England in 1066, he was already Duke of Normandy. After the conquest, English kings kept acquiring French territory — through marriage, inheritance, conquest. At various points, the “English” king controlled more French land than the French king did.⁶ But every acquisition deepened the contradiction. More French territory meant more obligations to the French crown. More sovereignty in England meant less tolerance for kneeling in France.

For over two centuries, they managed the contradiction through careful ambiguity. Overlapping jurisdictions. Negotiated arrangements. The boundaries stayed fuzzy because everyone benefited from fuzziness.

Then the whole thing started to collapse. And when it did, it took the Church down with it.

The First Breach: When France Captured the Pope

In 1309, the impossible position found a new victim.

The papacy had been anchored in Rome for over a millennium, even when popes were periodically forced elsewhere. Rome was where Peter had been martyred, where the apostolic succession began. The pope was the Roman bishop. That was the whole point.

But Philip IV of France had grown powerful enough to bully the papacy. When he maneuvered a French archbishop onto the papal throne, the new pope never made it to Rome. He set up court in Avignon — a city in southern France, in old Roman Provence, conveniently close to French power.⁷

You’ve seen this move before. An institution is designed to be independent — to serve everyone, not just one ruler’s interests. But a powerful leader decides that independence is inconvenient. He wants the institution to serve him. Philip IV wanted the pope to bless French policy, fund French wars, excommunicate French enemies. Just as some modern leaders want central banks to cut rates when elections are near, regardless of what economic stability requires. Once you capture the institution, it loses the authority that made it useful in the first place. Nobody trusts it anymore.

For sixty-eight years, the pope lived in France, not Rome. The Avignon Papacy was widely perceived as placing the Church’s central institution under French shadow. The institution that claimed to mediate God’s grace to all Christendom was now operating out of one king’s backyard. The Vicar of Christ had become a franchise operation.

The tension was building. English kings had French territories. The French king had the pope. And the whole arrangement was about to explode.

The War That Bled Europe

By 1328, the old fuzziness could no longer contain the strain.

French king Charles IV died without a male heir. Edward III of England claimed the French throne through his mother. The French nobles said no — the crown couldn’t pass through a woman. They chose Philip VI instead.

Edward didn’t accept it. In 1337, he pressed his claim.⁸

What followed was 116 years of devastation. The Hundred Years’ War wasn’t one war but a series of campaigns, truces, and resumptions that bled France and England for over a century. Crécy. Poitiers. Agincourt. Names that meant piles of bodies, burned villages, ravaged countryside.

For 116 years, Christian kingdoms bled each other. England against France. Bishops blessing armies on both sides.⁹

What matters for our story: while the creeds were being recited and the Eucharist celebrated, while the dikes were supposedly holding, Christian Europe was demonstrating Pharaoh grammar at civilizational scale.

The Church Splits Along the War’s Fault Lines

In 1377, thirty-seven years into the war, Pope Gregory XI finally returned to Rome. He promptly died.

French cardinals panicked. They’d lose their influence if the pope stayed in Rome. So they elected a rival pope — one who went back to Avignon.

Now there were two popes. And the division was political:¹⁰

• Avignon obedience: France, Scotland, Castile, Aragon — France’s allies

• Roman obedience: England, Holy Roman Empire, parts of Italy — France’s enemies

The Church was literally divided by the war. You couldn’t be loyal to the “wrong” pope without being a traitor to your king.

Sound familiar? When independence gets reframed as disloyalty, the institution is already dead. It just doesn’t know it yet.

By 1409, there were three popes, each excommunicating the others — an art we’ve democratized.

This was the Western Schism. The institution that claimed to speak for God couldn’t agree on who spoke for God. The impossibility that started with kings kneeling had infected the entire system. Categories were supposed to be pure — but nothing was pure anymore. Everything was contaminated by political calculation.

What the War Revealed

While Christian kingdoms fought one another over who got to rule France and who got to speak for God, the Ottomans consolidated power in the Balkans — exploiting a Christendom too fractured to respond coherently.¹¹

When the war finally ended in 1453, Europe had demonstrated something for 116 years straight: how Christian vocabulary operates when Pharaoh grammar is running underneath.

The vocabulary was Christian — crusade language, divine right, sacred monarchy, papal authority. The same liturgy that reconciled enemies to God blessed their efforts to kill each other. The creeds were recited. The Eucharist was celebrated.

But watch what the grammar actually produced: scarcity (there’s only one France, only one legitimate pope, and someone has to control it). Division (split the Church along political fault lines). Competition (the strong take what they can). Extraction (116 years of bleeding populations dry to fund royal ambitions).

That’s Pharaoh’s logic, scaled to civilizational scope. And Christendom had just spent over a century perfecting it.

The Lesson They Drew

The lesson that gradually hardened — whether named or not — was this: overlapping sovereignty doesn’t work. You can’t be both king and vassal. Categories must be pure. Boundaries must be clear. France is France. England is England. Pick a pope and stick with him.

They drew the obvious conclusion: boundaries must be clearer, categories purer, loyalty tests stricter. They drew every conclusion except the right one: that maybe bleeding Christendom dry for 116 years over who gets to rule France wasn’t how the people of a God who fed multitudes were supposed to operate.

Instead, they took the purity obsession and the boundary-policing that the war had normalized — the idea that ambiguity is dangerous, that categories must be clear, that you’re either with us or against us — and prepared to export it.

The same grammar. New applications.

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Part 2: Manna Grammar Resurfaces — And Gets Burned

Into this chaos, some voices tried to remember manna.

While the war bled Europe and popes multiplied — while the institution demonstrated Pharaoh grammar at civilizational scale — a few asked dangerous questions. What if the Church’s corruption meant institutional membership no longer determined salvation? What if belonging flows from God’s commitment to be with us — a commitment no institution can mediate or revoke?

John Wycliffe, in fourteenth-century England, was asking these questions in the 1370s and 1380s — right in the middle of the chaos we just traced.¹² The Avignon papacy was in full operation. The Western Schism was about to begin. And someone had to pay for the war.

Here’s what protected him: war economics.

Remember the Hundred Years’ War? Someone had to fund it. John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster — Edward III’s fourth son and commander of England’s war effort — needed money. War is expensive. The English clergy controlled one-third of England’s landed wealth and were exempt from most taxes.¹³ Gaunt needed that wealth.

Wycliffe was useful. He argued that:

• The Church had “fallen into sin” and should surrender its property

• Secular rulers could legally confiscate Church wealth

• Papal taxation of England was illegitimate

• The Avignon papacy was a French puppet — therefore England’s enemy

You see how this fits? The Church we watched split along the war’s fault lines in Part 1 — the institution that couldn’t agree on who spoke for God — was now being called corrupt by an English theologian who happened to give English kings the perfect excuse to seize Church property and cut off funds to their French enemies.

Gaunt accompanied Wycliffe to ecclesiastical trials with armed men. When papal bulls demanded Wycliffe’s arrest, the English government refused to comply. The Statutes of Provisors and Praemunire had already forbidden papal interference in English affairs.

Wycliffe survived because he was useful to the war. His ideas traveled to Bohemia, where Jan Hus read them and began to preach.¹⁴

Hus’s claim was simple and devastating: “Christ alone is the head of the Church.”¹⁵ You can be IN the visible church without being WITH Christ. The institution doesn’t constitute communion; God’s presence does — and no institution can revoke it.

This was intolerable to a Church operating by Pharaoh grammar. If the institution doesn’t determine belonging, the institution loses its power. If membership is received rather than achieved, the whole apparatus of exclusion collapses.

The threads from Part 1 converge in a single man.

When Christendom’s Fractures Collided

In 1396 — fifty-nine years into the war, eighteen years into the Schism, with three rival popes all claiming Peter’s chair — Sigismund of Hungary led the Crusade of Nicopolis.

Remember the Ottomans consolidating power in the Balkans while Christendom tore itself apart? This was the moment. A major European effort to relieve Constantinople from Ottoman siege and push the Turks back. The crusaders were slaughtered. Sigismund barely escaped by boat down the Danube.¹⁶

The lesson he learned: a divided Church with three rival popes could not organize effective resistance to Islam. To save Christendom from the Turks, the Schism must end. The external threat required internal unity.

Eighteen years later, in 1414, the same Sigismund convened the Council of Constance. His goal: reunify the Church so Christendom could face what really mattered — the Ottoman armies we watched advance unopposed in Part 1.

Sigismund had promised Jan Hus safe conduct—a promise worth precisely as much as every other promise an institution makes when the institution’s authority is at stake. Hus went voluntarily, expecting a theological debate where he could defend his views from Scripture. Instead, he was arrested within weeks, imprisoned in a Dominican dungeon, and presented with propositions extracted from his writings. He was asked to recant — not to debate.

In 1415, at the Council of Constance, they burned Hus.¹⁷

The council succeeded at reunification — but by eliminating internal dissent. The purity obsession we watched take root in Part 1, the boundary-policing that the war normalized, the loyalty test that said you couldn’t support the “wrong” pope without being a traitor — all of it converged on a single man who dared to say the institution doesn’t control access to God.

The institution determines who belongs. Those who question institutional authority are heretics. Heretics burn.

Same year, same Christendom: that war we’ve been tracing continued — English longbows slaughtered French knights at Agincourt. The external threat — Ottoman armies — went unaddressed. The internal dissenters — those who remembered manna — were eliminated.

Pharaoh protects his granaries. The institution’s monopoly on determining who belongs mattered more than Christendom’s survival.

The Pattern Repeats

Sixteen years later, the gatekeeping apparatus found another target.

Joan of Arc claimed God had directly commissioned her to crown the Dauphin Charles. This bypassed the political order (the Treaty of Troyes had given the succession to England) and the ecclesiastical order (the Church claimed sole authority to certify what God had said).

She was tried as a heretic by a French bishop allied with England — the same institutional-political alliance we watched form in Part 1. In 1431, she burned.¹⁸

The parallels to Hus are precise. Both claimed divine authorization that bypassed institutional mediation. Both were tried by Church courts under political pressure—the same fusion of religious and political authority we watched contaminate the Schism. Both were burned. Both received the same message from the institution: You cannot claim unmediated access to God. We control the switchboard. The God who showed up unmediated in a Bethlehem stable was apparently unavailable for comment.

When the Institution Loses

The Bohemian response to Hus’s burning was explosive.

Pope Martin V issued a bull authorizing the execution of all supporters of Hus and Wycliffe. Five consecutive papal crusades were launched against Bohemia between 1420 and 1431.

All five failed.¹⁹

Most Czech lands remained non-Catholic for over a century. When people believe they’re fighting for their own covenant with God — when they refuse the institution’s claim to mediate that covenant — they’re hard to stop.

The institution that couldn’t agree on who spoke for God, that split along war’s fault lines, that burned anyone who challenged its authority — that institution couldn’t enforce its monopoly when people stopped believing the monopoly was real.

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Part 3: When Baptism Wasn’t Enough

The dikes were failing. The mutations were spreading. And the worst was yet to come.

While the institution was losing in Bohemia — while five consecutive crusades collapsed and Czech lands rejected papal authority — something darker was emerging on Europe’s periphery.

Spain, in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, was still finishing its Reconquista. The same decades that brought the Hundred Years’ War, the Western Schism, and the burning of Hus saw Spanish kingdoms completing the centuries-long campaign to push Muslim powers from the Iberian Peninsula. The Catholic Church that split along war’s fault lines, that couldn’t agree on who spoke for God, that burned anyone who challenged its authority — that institution was operating in Spain too. And there, on the margins of Christendom’s chaos, it was about to invent a new technology of exclusion.²⁰

The institution that burned Hus and Joan had demonstrated something: it would eliminate anyone who challenged its authority to determine who belongs. Believe the wrong things, claim the wrong authority, and you burn.

But what if you believed the right things? What if you submitted to the institution completely — converted, were baptized, practiced the faith sincerely? Could you belong then?

In Spain, they were about to answer that question. And the answer would change everything.

The 1391 Massacres

In 1391 — two years after the Council of Pisa created a third pope, thirteen years before the Council of Constance would burn Hus — anti-Jewish violence swept through Castile and Aragon.

Mobs attacked Jewish communities in Seville, Córdoba, Toledo, Barcelona, Valencia, and dozens of other cities. Thousands were killed. Synagogues were burned or converted to churches.

In the wake of the massacres and the proselytizing fervor of the following decades, tens of thousands of Jews converted to Christianity. Some converted under threat of death. Some converted to avoid expulsion. Some converted through social pressure. Some converted voluntarily, seeking advancement in a Christian society. These converts — conversos — and their descendants would number perhaps 200,000-300,000 by the mid-fifteenth century.²¹

Many conversos rose to prominence — in commerce, in the Church, in royal administration, even in nobility through intermarriage. By the Church’s own theology, they were Christians. Many were sincere. Their baptisms were valid. Their faith was genuine.

And that was the problem.

You couldn’t exclude them on religious grounds anymore.

The Invention of Blood Purity

In 1449 — six years before the Hundred Years’ War would finally end, while the institutional chaos was still raging — the city council of Toledo issued limpieza de sangre: blood purity statutes barring conversos from holding public office.

The purity obsession the war normalized — the boundary-policing that said categories must be clear, ambiguity is dangerous, you’re either with us or against us — was about to take its most devastating form.

The theology justified the apparatus, not the other way around. Limpieza didn’t emerge from conceptual confusion about baptism—it emerged from institutional need for exclusion, which then required theological rationalization.

The logic of limpieza was not about doubting sincerity. It was about ancestry:

• Your baptism is valid

• Your faith may be genuine

• But baptism cannot transform your blood

• Another criterion — genealogical descent — determines real belonging

• The institution decides who really belongs

Think about what this means. A new category of exclusion had been invented — not religious (what you believe), but genealogical (what you are by descent). The sacrament that was supposed to transform identity — baptism, the drowning of the old self and rising of the new — was declared insufficient to transform your essential nature. Apparently the God who raised Jesus from the dead couldn’t manage genealogy.²²

This is proto-racial reasoning. Not “we doubt your sincerity” but “your blood is what it is, regardless of your faith.”²³

Do you recognize the pattern? This is the supersessionist standard from Essay 9 — now explicitly racial.

Create a purity test (blood ancestry). Frame it as protecting the community (preserving Christian Spain from crypto-Jewish contamination). Ensure the targeted group fails (converso ancestry is indelible — baptism cannot wash it away). Use their “failure” to justify exclusion (they cannot hold office, enter religious orders, claim honor).

The Gnostics used purity tests to create spiritual castes. The Schism used loyalty tests to police allegiance. Limpieza used blood. The tests varied. The logic didn’t.

Limpieza wasn’t just proto-racial. It was anti-grace. The Pauline gospel announced that God gives without regard to worth—that baptism incorporates the unworthy into Christ. Limpieza inverted this: worthiness must be established before incorporation can be real. Blood purity was the new merit system, all the more insidious for wearing baptismal clothes.

The Institution’s Response — And Failure

“You were brought inside, but can you really be trusted?” The answer is always no. (That’s not a bug. That’s the feature.) The standard exists to be failed. As generations passed and the memory of Jewish ancestry faded, efforts were redoubled to unearth traces of “impure” forefathers. The category was designed to be inescapable.

Pope Nicholas V — one of the popes attempting to reunify the Church after the Schism — issued condemnations grounded in sacramental theology. Baptized Christians could not be discriminated against on the basis of Jewish ancestry.²⁴

But the condemnations proved unenforceable.

What we just watched in Bohemia was happening here too. The institution that couldn’t enforce its monopoly when people stopped believing it couldn’t enforce sacramental theology when local authorities decided ancestry mattered more than baptism. The statutes spread anyway — to cathedral chapters, religious orders, universities, military orders, municipal governments. By the sixteenth century, proving “purity of blood” was required for most positions of honor in Spanish society.

The Spanish Inquisition (1478) became an enforcement mechanism — investigating conversos, policing hidden Jewish practices, producing records that supported limpieza exclusions.²⁵

1492: The Double Apparatus

In 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella completed two operations that converged in disturbing ways.

They conquered Granada, ending the Reconquista. And they expelled all Jews who refused baptism.

The bitter irony: the expulsion came after limpieza had established that conversion changed nothing essential. Jews who converted in 1492 became conversos — and conversos were already marked by ancestry, already subject to investigation, already barred from positions of honor. Convert, and you’re still tainted by blood. Don’t convert, and you’re expelled. There was no path to genuine belonging.

The system wasn’t broken. It was working exactly as designed—which is the most damning thing you can say about any system.

And the same year — 1492 — Columbus sailed.

That’s not a random coincidence. The same monarchs who perfected religious-genealogical exclusion, who established that baptism couldn’t transform essential nature, who created the Inquisition as enforcement apparatus — those monarchs sponsored the voyages that would carry this grammar to a hemisphere that had never heard of Christ.

The apparatus was ready. The theology was in place. The grammar had been normalized. All that remained was to scale it.

That’s the story of Part 4.

What Limpieza Created

Once you can say “the sacrament is valid but doesn’t transform your essential nature,” you’ve opened a door. The institution now has permission to add criteria—and what starts with blood can extend to whatever serves institutional need. Limpieza didn’t necessitate what followed. It made it thinkable.

Limpieza didn’t just corrupt Christian anthropology. It created a structural position—what I’ve called dominative identity. “Old Christian” was the first form of the unmarked norm: belonging that needs no proof because it’s assumed. The subject who gazes at others as objects of scrutiny while remaining unscrutinized himself. When the oilmen growled at Jesus’s Jewishness, they weren’t defending doctrine. They were defending that position.

The loyalty tests from the war. The political divisions of the Schism. The burnings of Hus and Joan. All operated by this logic. Now it was codified in law. Enforced by the Inquisition. Ready for export.

The content was new. The pattern was ancient.

The dikes the Church Fathers built against covenantal severance, against the supersessionist standard, against dominative identity — those dikes were now thoroughly breached. The sea had come back. And it was about to flood a world that had never seen it before.

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Part 4: The Apparatus Was Ready

The institution that burned Hus for challenging its authority over salvation, that burned Joan for claiming unmediated divine access, that declared converso baptism insufficient to overcome ancestry — that institution wasn’t finished.

Its next claim would extend to the entire globe.

The Chronology

Before tracing what the Discovery Bulls claimed, we need to get the timing right. The standard story has it backwards.

The standard story says Constantinople’s fall blocked spice routes, creating economic pressure that drove exploration, with theological justification following. Necessity first, warrant after.

The chronology is damning.

By the 1440s, Portuguese operations on Madeira and other Atlantic islands were experimenting with sugar cultivation — though not yet the plantation slavery that would later devastate Brazil and the Caribbean. The Portuguese slave trade had begun, but for domestic service and urban labor, not sugar. The full sugar-slavery nexus lay 120 years in the future.²⁶

But the legal and theological infrastructure was already under construction.

• 1449: Toledo issues limpieza de sangre — blood purity statutes establishing that baptism cannot transform ancestry.

• 1452: Pope Nicholas V issues Dum Diversas, authorizing Portuguese kings to “invade, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans… and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.”

• 1453: Constantinople falls to the Ottomans.

• 1455: Romanus Pontifex expands the grant, giving Portugal exclusive rights to territories along the African coast and authorizing perpetual slavery of captured peoples.

• 1478: Ferdinand and Isabella establish the Spanish Inquisition — the enforcement mechanism for limpieza, investigating converso sincerity and producing records that support blood purity exclusions.

• 1492: Spain expels all Jews who refuse baptism. Columbus sails.

• 1493: Pope Alexander VI issues Inter Caetera, drawing a line through the globe. Everything west goes to Spain. Everything east goes to Portugal.

Dum Diversas was issued eleven months before Constantinople fell. The theological warrant for enslavement was prepared before the economic emergency it supposedly addressed.²⁷

And spice prices in the early 1450s were low — recovering from a spike decades earlier. There was no immediate crisis. The warrant preceded the emergency.

The Jurisdictional Move

The Discovery Bulls claimed something unprecedented.

Before: The Pope’s authority extended over Christendom — the community of baptized Christians. Non-Christians were outside papal jurisdiction.

After: The Pope claimed authority to grant dominion over non-Christian lands and peoples to Christian monarchs. The entire world became subject to papal disposition.²⁸

This happened under rhetorical cover of the Ottoman threat — we must find allies, secure alternative routes, keep our gold from infidels. But the actual effect was something else: we can now claim any land, enslave any people, extract any resources — as long as they’re not already Christian.

The grammar is identical. This is supersessionism expanded to civilizational scope. The Church had already claimed to replace Israel as covenant people. Now Christian Europe was replacing all peoples as legitimate holders of sovereignty.

The people who lived in those “discovered” lands had names, families, histories stretching back millennia. They had their own covenants with the divine, their own ways of belonging to place and to each other. In the papal documents, they became line items. They weren’t parties to the negotiation. They were what was being divided. Objects of grant, not subjects with standing.

The pope had given away a hemisphere. One wonders if he consulted the hemisphere first. (He did not.)

The Doctrine of Discovery didn’t just authorize conquest. It constituted legal title — creating ownership by decree. This is why it still matters in American law. Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823) explicitly cited it as the basis for land title — a framework that persists in federal Indian law despite sustained criticism and no formal repudiation.²⁹

The deeper irony: the pope who claimed jurisdiction over non-Christians couldn’t maintain jurisdiction over Christendom itself. The Schism had just demonstrated that papal authority couldn’t keep Europe in communion. The Discovery Bulls are compensatory hubris—the fantasy of universal sovereignty precisely when actual sovereignty was fracturing. The pope couldn’t hold Avignon, but he could give away Peru.

The Economics

The Discovery Bulls created legal infrastructure for extraction at unprecedented scale. But the economics reveal something striking: extraction logic proved self-defeating.

Portuguese “monopoly” over the spice trade operated as state extraction — tribute, taxation, military interception. The result was structural failure. By the 1560s, Mediterranean trade had recovered to pre-1498 levels. When the Dutch tried coercive pepper cultivation in Bantam, production collapsed from 7 million to 300,000 pounds. Meanwhile, market-based cultivation in Penang achieved six times the yield per acre.³⁰

Extraction persisted not because it worked economically but because it served the institution’s authority claims. The warrant mattered more than the results.

Do you recognize this grammar? When ExxonMobil’s CEO told President Trump this month that Venezuela’s oil was “uninvestable” — that the legal and commercial frameworks made the operation economically irrational — Trump responded by threatening to exclude Exxon from the deal. “They’re playing too cute.” Stephen Miller explained the administration’s worldview to Jake Tapper: “We live in a world... that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world.”³¹

The Discovery Bulls didn’t invoke “iron laws.” They invoked papal warrant for royal extraction. But Stephen Miller and Alexander VI would understand each other perfectly. Domination doesn’t require profitability. It requires submission. The quarterly earnings can sort themselves out.

In the fifteenth century, though, the papal-royal partnership went deeper than authorization. Religious institutions didn’t just provide the warrant for extraction — they were the extraction economy’s nervous system. Convents received sugar as dowries and redistributed it through secular networks. Hospital pharmacies created demand by treating sugar as medicine. Liturgical festivals normalized consumption. The Church didn’t merely authorize extraction at one end and consume its products at the other. The Church was the distribution infrastructure that made extraction work.³²

What Was Unleashed

The Discovery Bulls didn’t just authorize conquest. They created a new kind of political actor—the Christian monarch with divine warrant to expand. The pope who couldn’t hold Christendom together outsourced his mission to kings who could. This was the birth of the modern nation-state as theological entity: sacred violence in secular clothes. When American courts cite the Doctrine of Discovery, they’re not invoking vestigial theology. They’re standing on their own founding myth.

When the Hundred Years’ War ended in 1453, the resources that had been destroying France and England for 116 years were suddenly available. Knights. Ships. Capital. Military capacity. Portugal was already exploring West Africa. Spain, completing the Reconquista in 1492, immediately pivoted to Atlantic expansion.

The Discovery Bulls gave Pharaoh a hemisphere—and centuries to demonstrate what his grammar produces.

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Part 5: The Reformation’s Double Edge

Which brings us to 1517 and a German monk who thought he was defending manna.

The Augustinian Paradox

Consider who Luther was: an Augustinian friar, deeply formed in the anti-Donatist theology that Augustine had articulated a millennium earlier.

The core anti-Donatist claim: Sacraments work ex opere operato — their efficacy depends on Christ, not the minister. You cannot be “unbaptized.” Grace received is real grace. Human failure cannot invalidate divine gift.

Yet by Luther’s time, the whole apparatus operated by Pharaoh grammar while speaking manna vocabulary:

The presupposition underneath: The institutional Church mediates grace and can therefore control, withhold, or withdraw mediation.

Luther understood something important: the late medieval Church had become a Pharaoh operation. Indulgences, merits, calculated piety — salvation had become something you achieved through religious performance. The institution controlled access to grace and charged admission.

Against this, Luther thundered: “You cannot save yourself. Grace does everything. You just receive.”

This is manna grammar. You can’t earn it. You can’t hoard it. It comes fresh each morning as gift.

What Luther Recovered

This is manna grammar recovered: Worth through receiving, not achieving. Identity as participated, not constructed. Grace that cannot be controlled, hoarded, or revoked.³³

The Same Apparatus

When Pope Leo X issued Exsurge Domine (1520), threatening Luther with excommunication, he was operating from the same supersessionist ecclesiology that had burned Hus.

The bull explicitly referenced Constance: “Witness to this is the condemnation and punishment in the Council of Constance of the infidelity of the Hussites and Wyclifites as well as Jerome of Prague.”

Leo X was saying: We burned Hus for this. We’ll burn you too unless you recant.

I hadn’t seen this until recently: the structural parallel between limpieza de sangre and Exsurge Domine.

The same supersessionist standard. In both cases, sacramental status is formally acknowledged but functionally overridden by an institutional criterion that the institution itself controls.

Limpieza: Your baptism is valid, but blood purity determines real belonging. Exsurge Domine: Your baptism is valid, but submission to Rome determines real belonging.

Different purity tests. Identical grammar. The method creates the category that dismisses the questioner.

Several of Luther’s condemned propositions directly challenged this apparatus:³⁴

“In the sacrament of penance and the remission of sin the pope or the bishop does no more than the lowest priest; indeed, where there is no priest, any Christian, even if a woman or child, may equally do as much.”

This is anti-institutional: Grace is not mediated through hierarchical gatekeeping.

“Excommunications are only external penalties and they do not deprive man of the common spiritual prayers of the Church.”

This directly challenges papal power to exclude from covenant. If excommunication is merely “external,” then the institution cannot control access to God.

“That heretics be burned is against the will of the Spirit.”

This challenges the entire apparatus of coerced conformity that limpieza and Inquisition represented.

Why Luther Survived

The difference between Luther and Hus was not that Luther’s ideas were better. The difference was technological and political.

When Hus challenged institutional authority in 1415, the printing press didn’t exist. The Council could burn him and expect his ideas to fade.

When Luther challenged institutional authority in 1517, his 95 Theses were translated, printed, and distributed throughout Germany within weeks. By the time Exsurge Domine threatened him with excommunication (1520), Luther’s ideas were everywhere. You couldn’t burn all the books.

Luther also had Frederick the Wise’s protection — political cover from a powerful elector who refused to hand him over.

And Luther had something else: a German population that had watched five papal crusades fail against the Hussites. The apparatus that worked in 1415 could not work in 1520.

Luther initially knew little of Hus. But during his debates with Johann Eck in 1519, Eck forced Luther to acknowledge that some of his positions aligned with Hus’s condemned teachings. Luther later studied Hus’s writings and declared: “We are all Hussites now.”

The connection was not accidental. Both were challenging the same structure: the institutional Church’s claim to determine authentic covenant membership.

The Double Edge

But Luther’s revolution had unintended consequences.³⁵

Luther rightly rejected the late medieval system where salvation felt like achievement — counting indulgences, calculating merit, constructing your own worth through religious performance. Against this, Luther thundered: “You have no capacity to save yourself. Grace does everything. You just receive.”

But here’s the problem: in rejecting self-construction, Luther’s formulation could be heard as rejecting all human agency. If we’re “totally depraved,” can we participate at all? If works are “filthy rags,” does transformation happen? If justification is purely forensic — a legal declaration that leaves us unchanged — where is sanctification?

Luther himself sometimes held these tensions together. But his systematizers often couldn’t. And what they developed was a framework where:

• Human agency disappears entirely

• Practices become irrelevant (since you can’t contribute anything anyway)

• Transformation isn’t expected

• “Just a sinner saved by grace” becomes an endpoint, not a beginning

Do you recognize this? I grew up marinating in it.

Now I wonder whether Luther escaped the grammar—or just transposed it into a different key.

Think about the late medieval system Luther rejected. It ran on contract logic: you owe a debt (sin), you make payments (penance, indulgences, merit), and eventually — if you’ve paid enough — you’re square with God. It’s a transaction. A deal. An exchange.

Luther said no — you can’t pay. The debt is too great. Only Christ can pay it. Grace is free.

But notice what Luther didn’t change: the whole framework is still about debt and payment. The question is still “who pays?” — Luther just changed the answer from “you” to “Christ.” The New Testament scholar Douglas Campbell calls this “justification theory” and argues it retains the contractual logic it claims to reject.³⁶ The alternative — what Campbell finds in Paul and what Wells develops as “being with” — isn’t about payment at all. It’s about participation. Union. Being drawn into a life that transforms you from the inside.

Luther glimpsed this. His language of union with Christ, of being “in Christ,” points toward participation rather than transaction. But the systematizers who followed him often flattened it back into contract: Christ paid your debt, you accept the payment, transaction complete.

Protestants celebrated their escape from Rome’s transaction. They didn’t notice they’d landed in another one. The currency changed; the cash register didn’t.

The grammar shifted while the vocabulary stayed the same.

The alternative Paul offers isn’t a better transaction. It’s the announcement that the transaction framework was always wrong—that God wasn’t setting conditions but breaking chains.

And here’s the deeper issue: “receiving” can become its own achievement—the right posture, the proper openness, faith as the one thing you contribute. Paul’s alternative is more radical. It’s not that we receive rather than achieve. It’s that we’ve been called by name, claimed as beloved, drawn into a life already underway. The self that would achieve or receive has been buried with Christ. What rises is someone who no longer needs to secure their own belonging.

This is why blood-and-soil nationalism is works-righteousness with better genealogy. The “Heritage American” or “real British” thinks he’s escaped the achievement trap—he didn’t earn his belonging; he received it through birth. But he’s turned reception into merit. His ancestors’ crossing is his achievement. The accident of his birth is proof of his worth. He’s billing his grandparents for righteousness he never earned.

Paul would not be impressed. You cannot ground yourself in blood any more than in works. Both are the self securing itself against the grace that would undo it. The self that has been named beloved doesn’t respond to “Papers, please.” The self that had papers died in the water. The new creation has no birth certificate from the old world—which is precisely why those who build kingdoms on documentation find the gospel so threatening. A God who names the undocumented beloved is no use to Pharaoh at all.

Luther’s own formulations were shakier than Protestant hagiography admits. He diagnosed the disease correctly—salvation by works—then smuggled the infection into his cure. His forensic model kept Rome’s transaction; he just changed who paid the bill. His language of union with Christ was genuine—real glimpses of participation that later systematizers would lose entirely—but that language was at war with his own framework. And the framework won. The systematizers weren’t betraying Luther. They were completing him.³⁷

The Reformation recovered something essential. But the recovery was incomplete. The resignification project — Christian vocabulary operating within Christian grammar — was already in trouble.

The Immediate Fragmentation

The printing press that saved Luther from Hus’s fate did something else: it made theological fragmentation instantaneous.

Within months, Luther’s ideas were everywhere. But so were the critiques, the revisions, the alternatives. Some said he hadn’t gone far enough — the Radical Reformers who would become Anabaptists pushed for immediate church purification, rejecting infant baptism and state authority. Others said he’d articulated key doctrines incorrectly — Reformed theologians in Bern, Frankfurt, Geneva (under John Calvin), and Zurich (under Huldrych Zwingli) developed their own formulations, often disagreeing with Luther on crucial points.

This wasn’t a later development. The Reformation fragmented from the beginning. The same technology that spread Luther’s 95 Theses throughout Germany in weeks also spread competing visions of what “reformed” meant. This is what Charles Taylor would later call the “nova effect”: once the medieval synthesis fractured, it didn’t produce two options but an explosion of possibilities, each claiming to recover primitive Christianity.³⁸

Marburg would make this fragmentation undeniable.

The Marburg Fracture

In October 1529, in a castle in Marburg, two men sat across a table and decided the future of the Western church. They didn’t know that’s what they were doing. They thought they were arguing about bread.

Martin Luther slammed his hand on the wood: “Hoc est corpus meum — This IS my body.”

Ulrich Zwingli shook his head: “This SIGNIFIES my body.”

They agreed on almost everything else. Justification by faith. The authority of Scripture. The rejection of papal corruption. But on this one point — whether bread could carry the presence of Christ — they couldn’t budge. The Reformation that began by insisting Scripture was clear enough for anyone to read had just discovered that two of its best readers couldn’t agree on four words.³⁹

What Luther understood, instinctively if not always clearly, was that Zwingli’s position reopened the door to Gnosticism. If the bread is “just a symbol,” then matter and spirit have been separated again. The physical world becomes a collection of teaching aids, not the medium of grace. Bodies point to spiritual truths but don’t participate in them.⁴⁰

And more than that — though I don’t know if Luther saw this part — Zwingli’s position weakened the practices that had kept Christ’s particularity in focus. When the Eucharist becomes “just a memorial,” it loses its power as a liturgical fortress. The weekly encounter that made Gnostic grammar unlivable becomes a quarterly reminder of something that happened long ago and far away.

Luther wasn’t wrong to worry. But he had vulnerabilities of his own.

The Reformation recovered something essential — manna grammar against institutional Pharaoh. But the recovery was incomplete. And what came next would make it worse.

The Chaos That Required a New Human

You already know this chaos. You’re living in it.

Your social media feed floods you with contradictory claims. Experts disagree. Institutions that once seemed stable — governments, churches, universities, newspapers — are fragmenting or fighting each other. You can find “evidence” for almost any position. Algorithms feed you what you already believe. Your uncle shares conspiracy theories with the same confidence your professor shares peer-reviewed studies. And nobody knows what’s true anymore.

How do you survive it? You have options. Build an inner fortress — curate your feed, protect your peace, master your reactions, don’t let the chaos get to you. Or find a method — the right podcast, the right teacher, the right system that cuts through the noise and tells you what’s really going on.

The sixteenth century invented both solutions. For the same reasons.

By the 1580s, Europe was drowning in print.⁴¹ Religious pamphlets multiplied. Multiple Bible translations competed. Lutheran texts fought Geneva Reformed texts fought Zurich Reformed texts fought Frankfurt Reformed texts fought London Reformed texts fought Catholic polemics and Radically Reformed sectarianism. News sheets. Commercial records. Legal documents. Scientific treatises. And nobody knew what was true anymore.

Before print, you trusted your priest, your guild master, your local authorities. Information came through stable institutional channels with clear authority structures.

After print? Information flooded from everywhere. Contradictory claims. Competing authorities. No clear way to adjudicate truth.

But our chaos differs from theirs in one crucial respect. They faced cacophony through proliferation—too many voices claiming authority. We face cacophony through saturation—so many voices that authority itself becomes suspect. The Neo-Stoic solution was designed for their crisis: build an inner fortress against the noise. Whether it can work for ours, when we’ve watched a dozen “right methods” fail, remains to be seen.

In England, the chaos was compounded by political whiplash: Henry’s break with Rome, Edward’s Protestant reforms, Mary’s Catholic restoration that sent Protestant leaders fleeing to Geneva and Frankfurt and Zurich, Elizabeth’s attempted Settlement that satisfied no one completely.⁴²⁴³ The exiles returned with competing visions of what “Reformed” meant — and those competitions would cross the Atlantic.⁴⁴ ⁴⁵

And in the Borderlands between Scotland and England — and soon in Ireland — the chaos was not merely theological. It was existential.

For centuries, the Anglo-Scottish border had been a region of endemic raiding, feuding, and lawlessness.⁴⁶ When James VI of Scotland became James I of England in 1603, he pacified the borders by force — executing some, imprisoning others, and “planting” many in Ulster as a convenient way to remove them.

The Plantation of Ulster (1609) became England’s rehearsal for American colonization: confiscate land from Gaelic Irish lords, displace the native Catholic population, settle Scottish and English Protestants, extract resources.⁴⁷ The “Undertakers” who received large grants were required to bring Protestant tenants. The sectarian geography this created — Protestant planters, displaced Catholics, endemic violence — persists to this day.⁴⁸

My Lyles ancestors were part of the plantation. They came from Kilmacolm and Linlithgow in Scotland — associated with the Stuarts — to Ballynure in County Antrim. They were elites, planters. When they later migrated from Charleston to Louisiana, they carried the grammar they had learned: confiscate, displace, plant, extract. Ulster prepared them for Bayou Boeuf.⁴⁹

The Borderers who would later cross the Atlantic to Appalachia carried a different version of the same formation: centuries of violence, suspicion of all authority, fierce clan loyalty, honor culture that demanded blood for insult.⁵⁰ They had learned that institutions couldn’t be trusted. Survival meant self-reliance.⁵¹

Add religious warfare — the Wars of Religion devastating Europe from 1562 to 1598. The institutions that used to provide stability were fracturing, fighting, killing each other.

The existential question then was the existential question now: How do I know what’s true when every institution I trusted is either fragmenting or trying to kill the others?

Into this chaos stepped two solutions that would shape the faith for the next four centuries — and that you’re still choosing between every time you open your phone.

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Part 6: The Solution That Arrived

Into this chaos stepped the first of two solutions that would shape the faith for the next four centuries. And I’m only now recognizing that the formation I received — “Be the Gift,” master yourself, keep it together — was its direct descendant.

The Philosophy of Survival

Justus Lipsius was, above all else, a survivor. This is not incidental to his philosophy. This is his philosophy.⁵²

Born in 1547 in the Spanish Netherlands, he lived through some of the most brutal religious violence in European history. The Dutch Revolt. The sack of Antwerp. Protestants killing Catholics. Catholics killing Protestants. Entire cities destroyed over theological disputes that seemed, to someone watching the bodies pile up, increasingly absurd.

Lipsius survived by changing his confession. He was raised Catholic, became Lutheran, then Calvinist, then returned to Catholicism. His critics called him a chameleon. He called it staying alive.

What he produced from this experience was a philosophy of survival: Neo-Stoicism. His book De Constantia (On Constancy, 1584) became an instant bestseller — running through eighty editions across Europe — because it answered a question everyone was asking: How do I maintain my sanity when everything around me is collapsing?⁵³

Lipsius’s answer: Build an inner fortress.

The ancient Stoics had taught that the wise person achieves apatheia — not apathy in our sense, but freedom from being controlled by external circumstances. Your city can burn. Your family can die. Fortune can strip away everything you thought you possessed. But if you’ve cultivated the inner citadel of rational self-mastery, nothing can touch what really matters: your capacity to govern yourself through reason.

Lipsius called this constantia: firmness of mind that remains steady regardless of external fortune. The self-controlled agent who doesn’t get rattled by circumstances. Who governs emotions through reason. Who, in modern terms, “keeps it together.”

For people living through religious warfare, this was water in the desert.

Why Reformed Christians Found It Useful

What I didn’t understand until recently: Neo-Stoicism didn’t attack Reformed Christianity. It offered itself as ally.

Think about what Reformed communities already emphasized: discipline, sobriety, self-examination, the mastery of passions. Think about the suspicion of excessive emotion, the emphasis on rational piety, the preference for order over enthusiasm.

Lipsius seemed to provide philosophical foundations for virtues Reformed Christians already valued. You’re not earning salvation — Luther settled that. You’re just living well after receiving grace. And Neo-Stoicism tells you how: cultivate inner discipline. Master your passions through reason. Build the self-controlled character that demonstrates you’ve received what you claim.

This looked compatible with Reformed piety. It provided moral seriousness without works-righteousness. It offered technique for the transformation that Protestant theology still expected but had stopped explaining how to achieve.

As Christopher Brooke documents in his study of Stoicism’s political influence, Reformed theologians found in Lipsius “a philosophical companion who seemed to validate what they believed Scripture demanded.”⁵⁴ Neo-Stoicism effectively supplied the anthropology the Reformers had never intended to canonize but had already begun to assume.

The Objection That Should Have Stopped It

But there was a problem. And the problem had a name: Augustine.

Eleven hundred years before Lipsius, Augustine had already diagnosed Stoicism with devastating precision. His critique was simple: Stoicism is “a philosophy for the proud.”⁵⁵

The Stoics, Augustine argued, “drastically overestimated the abilities of fallen men and women to act in accordance with reason and virtue in the absence of divine grace.” The whole project — achieving invulnerability through rational self-mastery — was the self curved in on itself, refusing to receive from God what only God can give.

Augustine forged what Brooke calls “the ideologically powerful link between Stoicism and the notion of original sin.” The serpent’s temptation in Eden — “you shall be like God” — was precisely the Stoic promise: achieve self-sufficiency through your own rational capacity. “From Cicero’s point of view,” Brooke observes, “to declare oneself a Stoic was to make a number of significant philosophical mistakes; from Augustine’s, it was also in a way to declare war on God.”

This should have stopped Neo-Stoicism cold. Augustine was the most authoritative voice in Western Christianity. His critique was devastating. And it was aimed directly at what Lipsius was selling.

The Clever Relabeling

Lipsius knew the objection. His response was clever.

He made a distinction: Constancy is not the same as obstinacy.⁵⁶

Obstinacy, Lipsius admitted, is “a certain hardness of a stubborn mind, proceeding from pride or vainglory.” That’s the Stoic vice Augustine criticized. But constancy? Constancy is different. The mother of constancy is “patience, and lowliness of mind.” True constancy is humble, rooted in “judgement and sound Reason.” Pride produces obstinacy. Patience produces constancy.

See the move? Augustine diagnosed Stoic self-sufficiency as pride. Lipsius agreed — and then explained why his version was different. The humble version. The Christian version.

It’s a brilliant defense. It’s also the defense every addict makes: I can handle it. I’m not like those other people.

Lipsius acknowledged the Augustinian critique and claimed he wasn’t doing that. His Neo-Stoicism was the good kind — the humble, patient kind that doesn’t overestimate human capacity. The Stoic pride Augustine attacked was the stubborn, arrogant version. Lipsius was offering something gentler.

This distinction created a permission structure. Reformed Christians could adopt Neo-Stoic practices — the inner fortress, the self-mastery, the rational governance of passion — while believing they weren’t falling into the pride trap Augustine warned about. They had the humble version. The Christian version.

The distinction spread. It became the standard defense. And for four centuries, Western Christians have been practicing NeoStoicism while believing they’re doing something else.

Why the Distinction Doesn’t Hold

The distinction is a sleight of hand.

The problem isn’t the motivation for self-mastery (humble vs. arrogant). The problem is the stance of self-mastery itself: the assumption that through proper technique, I can achieve a kind of invulnerability. That’s the declaration of war on God. And calling it “humble” doesn’t change what it is.

Jennifer Herdt traces how Augustine’s critique, intended to protect the gratuity of grace, created an unexpected trajectory. Augustine’s accusation that pagan virtue was “splendid vices” — performed for glory rather than love of God — was meant to establish divine grace as the only source of genuine virtue. But by so thoroughly delegitimizing human moral capacity, it created conditions where virtue could eventually be understood only naturalistically — as sentiment, instinct, or disguised self-interest.⁵⁷

The irony cuts deep: Augustine’s critique was deployed by Lipsius precisely to defend a program of self-mastery that Augustine would have recognized as the very pride he opposed.

Charles Taylor identifies what actually happened. He calls it “excarnation” — the migration of meaning from embodied practice to abstract mental representation. What had been formed through participation became achieved through technique. What had been received in community became mastered by individuals. The body that had been the site of transformation became the object of control.⁵⁸

The Stoic stance — disengaged rational self-mastery, relating to the world through control rather than participation, governing the body through will — that stance is the pride Augustine diagnosed. You can’t escape the critique by relabeling. Lipsius didn’t Christianize Stoicism; he gave Stoic pride a Christian vocabulary.

Humble constancy versus proud obstinacy. I know which one I have. Ask me. (Actually, don’t. I’ll explain at length why my version is the humble one.)

That’s the tell, isn’t it? The person who’s sure they have the humble version is the person who’s stopped asking. The distinction doesn’t invite self-examination — it provides permission to stop examining. You’ve already sorted yourself into the good category. Anyone who questions you goes in the other one.

Augustine’s critique didn’t land because it couldn’t land. The distinction was designed to deflect it. “You’re describing the proud kind. We have the humble kind.” Next objection?

I know this move because I use it. When someone challenges my need to keep it together, I don’t hear the challenge. I hear someone who doesn’t understand mature faith. Someone who wants me to be weak. Someone who — if I’m honest — fails my private test for people worth listening to.

The test looks fair. Anyone could have humble constancy. But somehow the people who question the project never qualify. A test designed to be failed isn’t a test. It’s a sorting mechanism wearing a test’s clothes.

This is the supersessionist standard applied to selfhood. Create a purity test that sounds universal. Ensure your critics always fail it. Use their “failure” to dismiss the critique.

Four centuries of Christians practiced Stoic self-sufficiency while believing they’d escaped the trap Augustine identified. The permission structure held. The grammar shifted while the vocabulary stayed the same.

This is how you get “Be the Gift.” This is how you get Christians who can articulate grace theology on Sunday and live by Stoic self-sufficiency on Monday without noticing the contradiction. The Neo-Stoic package was absorbed so thoroughly that it became invisible — just “what mature faith looks like.”

The Sage, wearing Christian clothes. And producing what the Sage always produces: dominative identity. The autonomous Subject who has achieved proper self-mastery. Who needs nothing from outside. Whose worth is constructed through achievement rather than received through communion.

But Neo-Stoicism was only half the package. The inner fortress addressed the emotional chaos of religious warfare. There was still the epistemic chaos — the flood of competing truth claims that print had unleashed. For that, another solution emerged. And it would cross the Atlantic with the Puritans.

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Part 7: The Pattern That Would Repeat

Something clicks into place—something I missed for years—why Neo-Stoicism and its epistemic twin emerged together, and why they fit so perfectly.

Richard Hooker helped me see something I'd missed for years: Ramism and Neo-Stoicism weren't separate developments. They were parallel responses to the same crisis—the crisis the Reformers created when they broke the medieval synthesis that had held theological knowledge and moral formation together. They thought they could do better. Ramism and Neo-Stoicism were the repair attempts. And both arrived at the same solution: technique over formation, method over participation, individual mastery over communal transformation.⁵⁹

Neo-Stoicism did it to virtue. I was trained to believe I didn't need the slow work of liturgical formation—the gradual shaping of desire through practices I didn't choose, the transformation that happens to you in community. I needed the right technique for self-mastery. Method replaces apprenticeship. The individual applying correct procedure replaces the community carrying you in rhythms of grace. You don't need sacramental practices when faith mutates into a private thing. Indeed, you don't need communities at all.

And around the same time — not coincidentally — another mutation was spreading through Protestant universities that did to knowledge what Lipsius did to virtue.

The Decay of Dialogue

Peter Ramus was a French Protestant professor martyred in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572.⁶⁰ Before his death, he launched what his followers called a revolution in method.

Walter Ong gave this revolution a haunting title: Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue.⁶¹

That phrase — “the decay of dialogue” — captures what happened. Before Ramus, knowledge was transmitted through dialogue. You learned by engaging with a teacher, a tradition, a community of formation. Truth emerged through conversation, through the give-and-take of minds in relationship.

Ramism replaced this with something else: visual-spatial diagrams that contained knowledge in neat, binary divisions. Define, then divide. Divide again. Keep dividing until you have a complete map. Once you have the diagram, you have the knowledge. Anyone can master it through correct procedure.

Where medieval education had been formation — years of slow cultivation within a community of practice — Ramism offered technique. Where wisdom had required a master’s guidance, method could be taught from a textbook. Knowledge became something you could extract from a chart rather than receive through relationship.

Donald McKim documents how this method spread through English Puritanism. The Ramist principle was to divide knowledge areas into opposing binaries or dichotomies. “As Perkins approached a passage or text he applied Ramist method: defining, dividing, classifying from general to specific.” The assumption was that by doing so, “the ‘interior logic’ or thought pattern of the author could be plainly shown.⁶²

And since the author of Scripture is the Holy Spirit, Ramist exegetes believed their method “could lay bare the very mind of God Himself.”⁶³

Do you hear the grammar? This is mining, not gardening. Extraction, not cultivation. Pharaoh, not manna.

The Convergence

Hooker saw this in the 1590s, and I read him for years without grasping it: these weren't two separate mutations. They were one mutation with two expressions.⁶⁴

Ramism and Neo-Stoicism shared a single deep pattern: confidence that human reason can directly access divine requirements without mediation, that truth can be systematized into specifiable conditions, that the individual applying correct method can secure certain outcomes.

Both separated knowledge from formation. Both separated method from virtue. Both separated individual technique from communal practice. Both separated mastery from transformation.

And the Puritans found both mutations enormously attractive.

William Perkins — the most influential English theologian of his generation, whose books outsold Calvin, Beza, and Bullinger combined — was simultaneously the leader of Ramist Puritanism at Cambridge and one of the earliest systematizers of Federal Theology in England.⁶⁵ As McKim documents, Perkins’s “earliest published works were polemical defense of the Ramist art of memory,” and his theological works were “constructed nearly all along the lines of the Ramist method.”⁶⁶

In Perkins, the epistemological mutation and the soteriological mutation converged in a single figure.

This wasn’t coincidence. They fit together. Ramist confidence that human reason could directly access divine patterns enabled Federal confidence that natural law could specify salvation’s conditions. Ramist method’s binary divisions found their theological expression in the works/grace dichotomy. Ramist technē — the reduction of wisdom to technique — found its soteriological expression in the reduction of salvation to meeting contractual conditions.⁶⁷

As Simon Burton has argued, “the attraction of Ramism to Puritans was especially in its nature as a Platonic logic with its assumption of a direct map or isomorphism between the created world, the human mind, and the mind of God.” This epistemological confidence underwrote the Federal conviction that salvation’s conditions could be rationally specified.⁶⁸

Formation became technique. Wisdom became method. Relationship became procedure.

“The Bible Clearly Says”

“The Bible clearly says.” I’ve heard that phrase shut down more conversations than any other. It sounds humble — I’m not giving you my opinion, I’m just telling you what the text says.

But listen to what’s underneath: I have extracted the meaning. If you disagree with me, you’re disagreeing with God.

That’s not submission to Scripture. That’s using Scripture as a weapon while claiming to be unarmed.

This is Ramism’s long tail. Define, divide, diagram. Break Scripture into pieces small enough to fit on a chart. Organize the pieces into binary categories. And now you have it — the mind of God, laid out in propositions anyone can master.

The supersessionist standard found a new domain: how we read.

Create a purity test: Do you take the Bible “plainly”? Frame it as universal: Anyone can read! The meaning is right there on the surface! Ensure the wrong people fail: Those who bring historical context, who insist on dialogue with tradition, who suggest that formation might matter for interpretation — they’re adding “human wisdom” to God’s word. Use their “failure” to dismiss them: They’re not really Bible believers. Not like us.

I know this one from the inside too. The person with more verses wins. The person who can proof-text fastest has the truth. And the person who says “it’s more complicated than that” has already lost — not because they’re wrong, but because they’ve failed the purity test. They’re the ones who can’t just accept what Scripture clearly says.

Richard Hooker saw this coming four centuries ago. Against the Ramist Puritans of his day, he insisted that Scripture doesn’t work like a diagram. You can’t extract its meaning through method and apply it through logic. Reading requires formation. Interpretation requires community. Wisdom requires apprenticeship to a tradition that shapes what you’re capable of seeing.⁶⁹

The Puritans dismissed him. He was adding “human tradition” to God’s word.

Four hundred years later, Stanley Hauerwas made the same argument against the same mutation. In Unleashing the Scripture, he called the bluff: there is no “plain reading.” Every reading is a formed reading. The question isn’t whether you bring interpretive assumptions to the text — you do. The question is whether your community’s practices have formed you to read well. The claim to read Scripture “plainly” isn’t humble. It’s a power play that hides its own formation.⁷⁰

Today’s Ramist biblicists dismissed Hauerwas too. Same reason. Same supersessionist standard.

Hooker in the 1590s. Hauerwas in the 1990s. Four centuries apart, same argument, same dismissal. The method that claims to read Scripture “plainly” can’t see itself reading. The blindness is load-bearing.

Lipsius addressed virtue; Ramus addressed knowledge. The underlying grammar was identical. The method creates the category that dismisses the questioner.

Crossing the Atlantic

And nearly one hundred Cambridge men who grew up in Perkins’s shadow led early migrations to New England.⁷¹

They carried with them the complete package: the Neo-Stoic anthropology (master yourself through technique), the Ramist hermeneutics (extract meaning through method), the Federal soteriology (salvation as contractual conditions). They carried the supersessionist standard that had developed for selfhood and for reading. They carried the grammar that separated knowledge from formation, method from virtue, individual technique from communal practice.

They didn’t know they were carrying mutations. They thought they were carrying purified Christianity — Scripture alone, read plainly, applied rationally. They thought they had finally escaped the Catholic corruption that had obscured the gospel.

They carried it to Massachusetts Bay. They carried it to Harvard. They built institutions to transmit it.

And over the next four centuries, it would become the air Americans breathe — including Americans who have never heard of Lipsius or Ramus, who have never opened a Puritan devotional, who might not even call themselves Christian.

That’s the next question: How did ideas held by a few thousand Puritans become the default grammar for millions of Americans who don’t know where it came from?

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Part 8: How Ideas Become Air

I can already hear the objection: “Why should I care what some philosophy professor wrote 445 years ago? Lipsius wasn’t the Pope. He wasn’t the King. He just wrote books.”

Fair question. And if I can’t answer it, everything I’ve said is just intellectual history.

So let me tell you how ideas become air.

The Transmission Belt

Philosophers don’t change the world by commanding armies. They change the world by shaping the people who train the people who run the institutions that form everyone else.

Lipsius was a professor at Leiden, one of the most influential universities in Protestant Europe. His students became professors. Those professors trained pastors. Those pastors preached sermons that assumed the goal of Christian life is autonomous moral self-governance — without ever mentioning Lipsius. The assumptions seeped into hymns, catechisms, devotional literature. By the time it reaches you, nobody’s reading philosophy. But the philosophy has become the water you swim in.

The transmission wasn’t through propositions but through practices. Devotional manuals taught self-examination as a daily habit. Preaching styles modeled rational self-governance. The format of private prayer—solitary, methodical, focused on interior states—enacted the disengaged stance before anyone could name it. The architecture of the examined conscience, borrowed from monastic practice but democratized for every believer, trained Christians to relate to themselves as objects of scrutiny and control. By the time the assumptions reached the pew, they weren’t ideas anyone had to accept. They were habits no one thought to question.

Charles Taylor calls this a social imaginary: the largely unstructured, inarticulate understanding of our situation that we inherit, not choose. It’s pre-theoretical. It makes certain things “thinkable” and others “unthinkable” before you consciously reason about them. You don’t decide that “maturity means self-sufficiency.” You just know it. It feels obvious. Natural. Just how things are.⁷²

That’s why social imaginaries are so powerful. They make historical contingency feel like created order.

Taylor calls this proliferation the “nova effect.” Once the medieval synthesis fractured, it didn’t produce two or three alternatives. It produced an explosion — an endless proliferation of options, each one a variation on the themes now loosed from their institutional containers. The Reformation didn’t create one Protestant church; it created thousands, each convinced it had recovered the primitive gospel, each carrying mutations it couldn’t see.⁷³

This is why Dominative Christianism has so many faces. Calvinist and Arminian, high church and low, premillennial and postmillennial, nationalist and globalist — they look like opposites, but they share the same grammar. The nova effect means that once Pharaoh’s logic re-entered the bloodstream, it could express itself in infinite variations while remaining structurally identical. The surface diversity masks the deep unity.

The Freud Parallel

If this still feels like intellectual history with no practical consequence, try an experiment: go a week without using the words “projection,” “defense mechanism,” “repression,” or “trauma.”

You can’t. Because you think in Freudian — not because you read Freud, but because Freud became the water. The Freudian social imaginary spread through medical schools, psychology programs, therapy practices, self-help books, TV shows — until Freudian assumptions became invisible common sense. You don’t need to read Freud to be Freudian. You swim in it from birth.⁷⁴

Lipsius is the same. His articulation of the Neo-Stoic autonomous Subject transmitted through universities, seminaries, churches, families — then nova’d across four centuries into Protestant individualism, Enlightenment rationalism, American self-reliance, therapy culture, wellness optimization. All sharing the same underlying grammar: self-possession as maturity, autonomy as freedom, self-sufficiency as virtue, dependence as failure.

By the time I got the message “Be the Gift,” nobody in my family had read Lipsius for four hundred years. But I was swimming in water he helped mix.

The Personal Landing

When my therapist asks about Data mode — that part of me that must master everything, control everything, govern everything through reason — I thought I was describing personal adaptation. A quirk of my psychology.

What I’m actually describing: a 445-year-old social imaginary transmitted through channels I can now name.

I told you at the beginning: Keith and I swam in the same waters—Louisiana folkways, German Midlander and Borderlander and Deep South, our father's Niebuhrian Stoicism dressed in Christian vocabulary, God as “ultimate vagueness” rather than the particular God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But I haven't told you about our mother.

My mother’s side tells a different story. She was Methodist. Where Dad theologized, she gardened. Her faith was Franciscan before I knew that word—creation-attentive, practically embodied, never announced.

The Lyles ancestors who came through the Ulster Plantation to Charleston and eventually to Bayou Boeuf carried what David Hackett Fischer calls “hegemonic liberty”: the freedom of gentlemen to rule their own domains without interference.⁷⁵ These were the plantation owners, the landed elites who migrated with Calhoun and Houston, carrying a formation where autonomy meant everything and dependence meant shame — or worse, meant being the one who was dependent, who was property.

Two streams, one grammar: self-possession as maturity, autonomy as freedom, rational control as virtue. Data mode isn’t personal neurosis. It’s inheritance. I thought I was describing my adaptation. What I was describing was a 445-year-old social imaginary that just happens to fit my nervous system like a glove.

And what I inherited was dominative identity — the self that must be defended because it was constructed rather than received. The supersessionist standard internalized: I sort myself into “disciplined” or “undisciplined,” “mature” or “needy,” “together” or “falling apart.” The purity test runs continuously. The targeted part of me — the part that needs, that depends, that can’t keep it together — always fails.

The pattern doesn’t just sort communities. It sorts selves.

Why Naming Matters

And when Samuel Wells says God’s being-with requires receiving rather than achieving, participating rather than self-possessing, dependence as maturity rather than autonomy—It sounds literally unthinkable.⁷⁶

Here’s the test: when I use words like “maturity” or “freedom,” what do I actually mean by them? What follows from applying them? For me, maturity has always meant self-governance. Freedom has meant independence and non-interference. And dependence has meant failure. I can find all these words in Scripture. But the logic governing what they mean — the consequences of applying them — matches Lipsius more than Luke.

Not because Wells is unclear. Because 445 years of Neo-Stoic social imaginary made receiving feel like weakness, dependence feel like failure, being-with feel like threat to the autonomous Subject I must protect.

The dikes weren’t maintained; the sea rushed back in.

Naming the mutation as Stoic rather than generic “individualism” matters because it identifies the specific problem: self-mastery as the goal of formation, rather than participatory dependence on grace. Different diagnoses require different cures. If the problem is just “individualism,” the cure might be more community. If the problem is Stoic grammar — the stance of self-sufficient rational mastery — the cure requires something more radical: learning to receive, to participate in being.

Naming doesn’t let you escape the inheritance. But it breaks the possession’s power to operate invisibly.

That’s why this genealogy matters. Not intellectual exercise. Exorcism.

Answering the Opening Question

Now I can answer the question that started this essay.

How do Christians who pass Bible quizzes experience Jesus’s Jewishness as blasphemy?

Because the grammar they inherited isn’t biblical. It’s Stoic, Ramist, supersessionist — a formation that can speak Christian vocabulary while operating by Pharaoh logic. The oilmen in Keith’s Sunday school knew the words. But the grammar governing what those words meant came from Lipsius and Ramus and the Federal theologians, not from the Jewish peasant who ate with tax collectors and touched lepers.

Jesus’s particularity — his Jewishness, his embodiment, his being-with — violated the grammar they had absorbed. It felt like blasphemy because it was blasphemy against their actual god: the autonomous, self-sufficient Subject that Neo-Stoicism built and American culture canonized.

The supersessionist standard that began with limpieza de sangre — creating a purity test that ensures the targeted group fails — reached its logical conclusion: the Jewish Jesus fails the purity test for Christianity.

This is what happens when Pharaoh grammar wears Christian vocabulary. The god it produces can’t recognize the God who showed up.

Standing at the Atlantic

I’ve told this as a sequence—one crisis leading to another. But the historical reality is messier: multiple streams converging, reinforcing each other, producing what meteorologists would recognize as a perfect storm. Neo-Stoicism influenced Catholic spiritual writers too. Ramism had Catholic adherents. The Federal theology developed in complex dialogue with scholastic traditions. Fischer’s folkways are cultural as much as theological—the Borderlanders often had weak theological formation of any kind. What I’m tracing is not a single current but a confluence. The surface diversity masks the deep unity.

Nearly one hundred Cambridge men who grew up in Perkins’s shadow led early migrations to New England. They carried Ramist method and Neo-Stoic self-mastery across the Atlantic, institutionalized it in Harvard’s curriculum, and transmitted it to generations who never knew the names of the professors whose assumptions they breathed.

The Borderers who crossed to Appalachia via Charleston and Philadelphia carried a different version of the same formation: centuries of violence, suspicion of all authority, fierce clan loyalty. The planters who came through Charleston to Louisiana carried yet another: hegemonic liberty, the right to rule without interference, autonomy sustained by the labor of the enslaved.

Different folkways. Same grammar. The surface diversity masks the deep unity.

To understand how the mutations I’ve traced became the form of faith that could pass Bible quizzes while experiencing Jesus’s Jewishness as blasphemy, I need to trace the specific folkways that carried Pharaoh grammar to American shores.

That’s the story of the next essay.

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CODA

Before returning to the main arc this week, I paused briefly for a few short riffs. They weren’t detours so much as ways of staying regulated while working through the material that led to this essay.

If you need them, they’re there:

• Riff: The Data We Create by Looking — on how systems of evidence can remain rigorously blind to the suffering they exclude, and why that blindness matters for everything that follows.

• Riff: Make the Coffee Slowly — a pastoral pause on regulation, kindness, and staying human when fury feels justified but corrosive.

• Riff: The Art of Fugue and the Art of Staying Human — on music, presence, and the practices that help us remain capable of faithful action amid moral overload.

None of these are prerequisites for this essay. They’re simply companions, offered for those moments when the work asks more than you have capacity to carry all at once.

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The Series

This essay belongs to Jazz, Shame, and Being With—a twenty-essay arc tracing shame and pride from neurobiology through theology to political formation. If you’ve been reading along, you know where we’ve been. If you’re new, or if you’d like to see the architecture of where this is heading, the Reader’s Guide maps the full journey. Every essay is a real door. Start anywhere that calls to you.

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ENDNOTES

1. Stanley Hauerwas’s Gifford Lectures, With the Grain of the Universe (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2001), contains a devastating chapter on Reinhold Niebuhr. Hauerwas draws on John Milbank’s observation that “Niebuhr’s ethics is Stoicism restated in Christian terms.” Hauerwas argues that Christians have become very good at knowing about Jesus without being formed by Jesus — affirming doctrines without being shaped by practices.

2. Colin Woodard’s American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America (New York: Viking, 2011) maps eleven distinct regional cultures in North America, each with its own founding values and political instincts. Louisiana sits at the intersection of several: the Deep South planter culture, Borderlander folkways that came through Appalachia, German Midlander settlements around the Mississippi, and the Cajun Catholic inheritance from New France.

3. See note 1.

4. J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Carter’s central thesis is that modernity’s racial imagination has theological roots in Christianity’s supersessionist posture toward Judaism. By severing Christ from his Jewish particularity, Christian theology created what Carter calls a “racial optics”—a way of seeing bodies as carriers of essential, transmissible identity that determines belonging. The move from “Jewish blood taints” to “African blood taints” required no new logic, only new targets. See especially his introduction and chapters 1-2 on the theological architecture of race.

5. J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) and The Anarchy of Black Religion: A Mystic Song (Durham: Duke University Press, 2023). Carter’s genealogy traces how Christianity’s supersessionist severance from Judaism created the template for racial exclusion—identity secured through constitutive othering. His term for this structural position is “whiteness.” I’ve adopted “dominative identity” instead, not to correct Carter’s diagnosis (which is devastating) but to name the phenomenon more precisely: the sin isn’t inscribed on bodies; it’s a story embraced. Anyone can adopt the false narrative in which a righteous “we,” defined by purity and possession, is threatened by a contaminating “them.” That’s what makes it so dangerous—and why limpieza’s logic could migrate from blood to doctrine to race to “heritage” without changing its grammar. As Carter shows, the dissolved Christ eventually got poured into racial categories, and dominative identity became, in his phrase, a “replacement doctrine of creation.” See Essay 9 for extended discussion of this terminological distinction

6. I had to look this up because the feudal complications made my head hurt. How can you be a king and someone’s vassal at the same time? Anne Curry’s The Hundred Years War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) is short and won’t make your eyes glaze over — she covers the impossible position in chapter 1. If you want the whole story in exhaustive (and I mean exhausting) detail, Jonathan Sumption’s The Hundred Years War, Volume 1: Trial by Battle (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990) is the standard reference.

7. When I first learned the pope lived in France for 68 years, I thought someone was messing with me. Rome is the whole point! Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (New York: Viking, 2009), chapter 17, covers the Avignon papacy clearly. For full scholarly treatment, see Joëlle Rollo-Koster, Avignon and Its Papacy, 1309–1417: Popes, Institutions, and Society (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), especially chapter 1 on how Philip IV of France basically kidnapped the papacy. Gregory XI’s return to Rome in 1377 — and his immediate death — is covered in pages 285–289.

8. The war’s origins and Edward III’s 1337 claim are covered in both Curry and Sumption (cited above). The key date is 1328 — Charles IV dies without a male heir, Edward claims the throne through his mother, French nobles say no.

9. When I say “bishops blessing armies on both sides,” I’m not exaggerating for effect. Christopher Allmand’s The Hundred Years War: England and France at War, c. 1300–c. 1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pages 132–145, documents it. English bishops preached crusade sermons against France. French bishops declared English claims heretical. Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978) has vivid examples in chapter 9.

10. The Western Schism (1378–1417): Rollo-Koster’s Avignon and Its Papacy covers the entire period in chapters 8–12. R.N. Swanson’s Universities, Academies and the Great Schism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) shows how institutional loyalty became a political loyalty test. The Council of Pisa in 1409, which tried to solve the two-pope problem by deposing both and electing a third, is covered in Rollo-Koster, pages 322–331.

11. While Christian kingdoms were bleeding each other for 116 years, the Ottomans were consolidating power in the Balkans. Donald M. Nicol’s The Last Centuries of Byzantium, 1261–1453, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) documents the repeated Byzantine appeals for help that went nowhere. Colin Imber’s The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1650: The Structure of Power, 2nd ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) traces the expansion.

12. Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Christianity covers Wycliffe in chapter 17. Alister McGrath’s Christianity’s Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution (New York: HarperOne, 2007) also covers Wycliffe as a proto-Reformation figure. The standard scholarly biography is Anne Hudson’s The Premature Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).

13. W.A. Pantin’s The English Church in the Fourteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955) documents clerical landholdings and tax exemptions in chapter 1. For John of Gaunt’s protection of Wycliffe — including accompanying him to ecclesiastical trials with armed men — see Anthony Goodman, John of Gaunt: The Exercise of Princely Power in Fourteenth-Century Europe (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), pages 67-71.

14. The Wycliffe-Hus connection happened through the marriage of Richard II to Anne of Bohemia in 1382, which created diplomatic and scholarly exchanges. Czech students came to Oxford, read Wycliffe’s works, and brought copies back. Thomas A. Fudge, Jan Hus: Religious Reform and Social Revolution in Bohemia (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), pages 42-47.

15. Hus’s core claim — “Christ alone is the head of the Church” — comes from his treatise De Ecclesia (On the Church), written 1412-1413. See Fudge, Jan Hus, chapters 3-5.

16. The Crusade of Nicopolis in 1396 was a disaster. Aziz S. Atiya, The Crusade of Nicopolis(London: Methuen, 1934) provides the classic account; Norman Housley, The Later Crusades, 1274-1580: From Lyons to Alcazar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pages 74-82, offers a more recent treatment. The connection between Nicopolis and Constance is made explicit in Louise Ropes Loomis, The Council of Constance: The Unification of the Church (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961).

17. For the Council of Constance drama — Sigismund’s safe conduct promise, Hus’s arrest and imprisonment, the rigged trial, his burning in 1415 — see Thomas A. Fudge, Jan Hus: Religious Reform and Social Revolution in Bohemia (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), chapters 8-9. Matthew Spinka’s John Hus at the Council of Constance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965) was the standard treatment for decades.

18. Joan of Arc’s trial by Pierre Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais (allied with England), and her burning in 1431 are covered in Marina Warner’s Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism (New York: Knopf, 1981). For the trial itself, see Régine Pernoud and Marie-Véronique Clin, Joan of Arc: Her Story, trans. Jeremy duQuesnay Adams (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), Part III.

19. Pope Martin V issued the bull Inter Cunctas (1418) and later bulls authorizing crusades against the Hussites. Five crusades were launched between 1420 and 1431; all five failed. Thomas A. Fudge, The Crusade against Heretics in Bohemia, 1418-1437: Sources and Documents for the Hussite Crusades (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002) provides comprehensive documentation. See also Fudge, The Magnificent Ride: The First Reformation in Hussite Bohemia (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), chapters 6-9.

20. My reading of the Iberian theological developments is informed by J. Kameron Carter’s concept of the colonial archē in The Anarchy of Black Religion (Durham: Duke University Press, 2023), Introduction, 6–8. Carter uses archē in its full Greek range: origin, foundation, first principle, sovereignty, rule.

21. The 1391 violence and converso history: Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 1–65; David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), Part III; Yitzhak Baer, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1961–1966).

22. David Bentley Hart, “Notes Toward a Polyphonic Politics — Part the First,” Leaves in the Wind (Substack), December 6, 2025. Hart observes that in the formation of the Spanish state, “for the first time, nationality in both the ethnic and political sense took preeminence over the notion that baptism was an entry into a corporate reality that effaced all ‘natural’ divisions.”

23. On limpieza de sangre as proto-racial reasoning: Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination, 79, 276; George Fredrickson, Racism: A Short History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 31–47.

24. Pope Nicholas V’s condemnations of the limpieza de sangre statutes on sacramental grounds are documented in Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition, pages 35-41; Nirenberg, Communities of Violence, Part III; Baer, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain, vol. 2, pages 276-283; Jennings, The Christian Imagination, pages 58-62.

25. The 1391 violence and converso history: Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 1–65; David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), Part III; Yitzhak Baer, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1961–1966).

26. Herbert S. Klein, “The Atlantic Slave Trade to 1650,” in Schwartz, ed., Tropical Babylons, Chapter 7. Klein demolishes the assumption that the Atlantic slave trade and sugar plantations evolved together from the beginning.

27. Herbert S. Klein, “The Atlantic Slave Trade to 1650,” in Stuart B. Schwartz, ed., Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450–1680 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 201-236. Klein’s evidence that Dum Diversas (1452) preceded Constantinople’s fall (1453) by eleven months inverts the standard causation story.

28. Willie Jennings, The Christian Imagination, 15-64. Jennings traces how colonial Christianity displaced Israel from salvation history — abstracting Christ from his Jewish particularity and creating a vacuum that racial hierarchy would fill.

29. The persistence of the Doctrine of Discovery in American law is documented in Chu et al., The Crisis of Christian Nationalism: Report from the House of Bishops Theology Committee, ed. Allen K. Shin and Larry R. Benfield (New York: Church Publishing, 2024), 44-48. The Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823) decision explicitly invoked the Discovery Doctrine to justify how the United States acquired title to Native lands.

30. Stuart B. Schwartz, ed., Tropical Babylons, Introduction (1-26), and M.N. Pearson, ed., Spices in the Indian Ocean World (Aldershot: Variorum, 1996). The statistics are striking: Bantam pepper production collapsing from 7 million to 300,000 pounds under Dutch coercion, while market-based Penang achieved six times the yield per acre.

31. Darren Woods, remarks at White House meeting with oil executives, January 9, 2026. Woods called Venezuela "uninvestable" in its current state, citing the need for legal reforms and durable investment protections. Trump's response ("They're playing too cute") came January 12, 2026. Stephen Miller's remarks to Jake Tapper aired January 5, 2026. See Washington Post, "Exxon CEO calls Venezuela 'uninvestable' without 'significant changes,'" January 9, 2026, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/01/09/trump-oil-executives-venezuela-exxon/; Axios, "Stephen Miller asserts US right to Greenland as allies push back," January 6, 2026, https://www.axios.com/2026/01/06/stephen-miller-greenland-europe-nato.

32. Stuart B. Schwartz, ed., Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450–1680 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), Introduction (1-26), documents how religious institutions served as both theological warrant and distribution infrastructure for sugar. Convents receiving sugar as dowries, hospital pharmacies treating it as medicine, liturgical festivals normalizing consumption — the Church wasn’t merely complicit in extraction. The Church was the extraction economy’s nervous system.

33. Luther’s recovery of grace as gift rather than commodity: Alister E. McGrath, Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 188–240; Berndt Hamm, The Early Luther, trans. Martin J. Lohrmann (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014). For biography, Roland Bainton’s Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (Nashville: Abingdon, 1950) remains readable; Lyndal Roper’s Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet (New York: Random House, 2017) is the best recent biography.

34. The bull Exsurge Domine (June 15, 1520) condemned 41 propositions from Luther’s writings and gave him 60 days to recant. The explicit reference to the Council of Constance and the burning of Hus was not incidental — it invoked the institutional precedent for executing those who challenged papal authority over covenant membership. The Latin text and English translation appear in Heinrich Denzinger, Compendium of Creeds, Definitions, and Declarations on Matters of Faith and Morals, 43rd edition, ed. Peter Hünermann (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2012), nos. 1451-1492.

35. Jennifer A. Herdt, Putting On Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Herdt traces how Luther’s rejection of works-righteousness, while addressing real problems in late medieval piety, created new difficulties for Christian ethics by severing the connection between grace and virtue formation.

36. Douglas A. Campbell, The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), especially chapters 1-4 and 13-14. Campbell’s argument is controversial but important: the standard Protestant reading of Paul — what he calls “Justification Theory” — retains the contractual/forensic logic it claims to reject. The question is still “who pays the debt?” — Luther just changed the answer from “you” to “Christ.”

37. The technical issue is Luther’s simul justus et peccator—”simultaneously justified and sinner.” If this means what it sounds like, it preserves exactly the dualism that participation dissolves. Being in Christ means being transformed—not two things at once but one thing becoming what you’re not yet. The Orthodox tradition’s theosis captures what forensic categories cannot: salvation as ontological transformation, not legal reclassification. Luther’s union language was always fighting his dominant forensic framework—and the framework won. Douglas Campbell’s Deliverance of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), especially chapters 1-4 and 13-14, argues that “justification theory” retains the contractual logic it claims to escape.

38. Charles Taylor’s concept of the “nova effect” appears in A Secular Age, 299-313. Once the medieval synthesis fractured, it didn’t produce two options but an explosion of possibilities — each claiming to recover authentic Christianity, each fragmenting into further alternatives.

39. The Marburg Colloquy (October 1–4, 1529): W.P. Stephens, The Theology of Huldrych Zwingli(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 218–259; Hermann Sasse, This Is My Body: Luther’s Contention for the Real Presence in the Sacrament of the Altar (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1959); Lee Palmer Wandel, The Eucharist in the Reformation: Incarnation and Liturgy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

40. Bernd Wannenwetsch, Political Worship: Ethics for Christian Citizens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), chapters 1-3, argues that worship is the arche of politics — which means flattening eucharistic presence has consequences far beyond liturgy. Ephraim Radner’s The End of the Church: A Pneumatology of Christian Division in the West (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998) develops this further.

41. Andrew Pettegree’s Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe — and Started the Protestant Reformation (New York: Penguin, 2015) transformed how I understand the Reformation. By the 1580s, everyone was trying to replicate Luther’s publishing success, and the result was cacophony.

42. Christopher Haigh’s English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) insists on the plural. There wasn’t one English Reformation but several, often contradictory, imposed from above on populations that mostly wanted to be left alone.

43. Diarmaid MacCulloch’s magisterial Thomas Cranmer: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998) gives human texture to the institutional chaos of the English Reformations.

44. Peter Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988). Lake traces the theological divisions within English Protestantism that would become central to colonial American religious identity.

45. Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559-1625 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). Collinson’s work on “the religion of Protestants” shows how parish-level religion actually worked in post-Reformation England.

46. David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), Part 4, “Borderlands to Backcountry” (605-782). Fischer’s account of the Anglo-Scottish border culture — centuries of raiding, feuding, endemic violence, distrust of authority, fierce family loyalty — and its transplantation to American Appalachia remains influential.

47. Jonathan Bardon, A History of Ulster (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1992). The Ulster Plantation (beginning 1609) was England’s rehearsal for American colonization: confiscate land from Gaelic Irish lords, displace the native Catholic population, settle Scottish and English Protestants, extract resources. The “Undertakers” who received large grants were required to bring Protestant tenants. The sectarian geography this created — Protestant planters, displaced Catholics, endemic violence — persists to this day.

48. Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). Jennings traces how colonial Christianity produced “race” as a way of organizing human difference.

49. The Lyles family genealogy is from my own research, tracing ancestors from Kilmacolm and Linlithgow in Scotland — associated with the Stuarts — to Ballynure in County Antrim during the Ulster Plantation, then to Charleston and eventually to Louisiana.

50. Fischer, Albion’s Seed, 605–782. Fischer documents the Borderlander migration patterns and the distinctive concept of “hegemonic liberty.”

51. On regional folkways as formative: Fischer’s Albion’s Seed(1989) established the framework; Colin Woodard’s American Nations (2011) extended it to eleven regional cultures; Wilbur Zelinsky’s The Enigma of Ethnicity (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001) explores how these patterns persist and transform.

52. Justus Lipsius (1547-1606): Mark Morford, Stoics and Neostoics: Rubens and the Circle of Lipsius(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Gerhard Oestreich, Neostoicism and the Early Modern State(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

53. Justus Lipsius, De Constantia (On Constancy, 1584). The claim of “eighty editions” comes from bibliographic studies of Neo-Stoic literature. For English translation, see On Constancy, trans. John Stradling (1594), available in modern edition from Bristol Classical Press (1939).

54. Christopher Brooke, Philosophic Pride, 28–35. Brooke traces how Neo-Stoicism provided Reformed communities with “a ready-made moral vocabulary” that seemed compatible with their existing emphases on discipline, self-examination, and moral seriousness. The phrase “a philosophical companion who seemed to validate what they believed Scripture demanded” captures how Neo-Stoicism entered Reformed piety — not as foreign import but as apparent ally.

55. Christopher Brooke, Philosophic Pride: Stoicism and Political Thought from Lipsius to Rousseau (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 9. The title of Brooke’s book captures Augustine’s critique precisely: Stoic self-sufficiency is a form of pride — the creature’s refusal to acknowledge dependence on the Creator. Augustine argued that the Stoics “drastically overestimated the abilities of fallen men and women to act in accordance with reason and virtue in the absence of divine grace.” Brooke observes that Augustine forged “the ideologically powerful link between Stoicism and the notion of original sin.” For Augustine’s critique directly, see City of God Books 9, 14, and 19.

56. Lipsius, De Constantia, I.4. Lipsius knew the Augustinian objection and tried to address it by distinguishing constantia (true constancy, arising from humility and patience) from obstinatio and pertinacia(mere stubbornness, arising from pride or vainglory).

57. Herdt, Putting On Virtue, chapters 2–4. Herdt traces what she calls “the theatrical critique” of virtue from Augustine through the Reformation to the French moralists.

58. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 613–615, 771–772. Taylor defines “excarnation” as “the transfer of our religious life out of bodily forms of ritual, worship, practice, so that it comes more and more to reside ‘in the head.’”

59. Craig David Uffman, "'Special Equity' and the Particular," chapter 3 of How the Mind of Christ is Formed in Community: The Ecclesial Ethics of Richard Hooker (PhD diss., Durham University, 2015), http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/10971/.

60. Peter Ramus (Pierre de la Ramée, 1515-1572) was killed during the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. See James Veazie Skalnik, Ramus and Reform: University and Church at the End of the Renaissance(Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2002).

61. Walter J. Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958).

62. Donald K. McKim, “Ramism in William Perkins,” 507. “As Perkins approached a passage or text he applied Ramist method: defining, dividing, classifying from general to specific.”

63. Donald K. McKim, “Ramism in William Perkins,” 507. Ramist exegetes believed their method “could lay bare the very mind of God Himself.”

64. Uffman, “’Special Equity’ and the Particular.” The shared pattern I identify — confidence that human reason can directly access divine requirements without mediation, that truth can be systematized into specifiable conditions — is what connects Ramist hermeneutics to Federal soteriology.

65. The claim that Perkins’s books “outsold Calvin, Beza, and Bullinger combined” reflects his enormous influence. See Ian Breward’s introduction to The Work of William Perkins (Appleford: Sutton Courtenay Press, 1970); W.B. Patterson, William Perkins and the Making of a Protestant England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

66. Donald K. McKim, “The Functions of Ramism in William Perkins’ Theology,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 16, No. 4 (Winter 1985): 503–517, at iv–v, 286–288. Perkins’s “earliest published works were polemical defense of the Ramist art of memory,” and his theological works were “constructed nearly all along the lines of the Ramist method.”

67. The connection between Ramism and Federal (Covenant) Theology is not merely chronological but structural. Both assume that divine-human relations can be specified in clear, binary conditions. David A. Weir, The Origins of the Federal Theology in Sixteenth-Century Reformation Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).

68. Simon Burton, The Hallowing of Logic: The Trinitarian Method of Richard Baxter’s Methodus Theologiae (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 47–48. Burton argues that “the attraction of Ramism to Puritans was especially in its nature as a Platonic logic with its assumption of a direct map or isomorphism between the created world, the human mind, and the mind of God.”

69. Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1593–1662). I develop Hooker’s critique of Ramist realism extensively in Craig David Uffman, How the Mind of Christ is Formed in Community: The Ecclesial Ethics of Richard Hooker (PhD diss., Durham University, 2015), http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/10971/.

70. Stanley Hauerwas, Unleashing the Scripture: Freeing the Bible from Captivity to America (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1993). There is no “plain reading.” Every reading is a formed reading. The claim to read Scripture “plainly” isn’t humble. It’s a power play that hides its own formation.

71. Donald K. McKim, “The Functions of Ramism in William Perkins’ Theology,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 16, No. 4 (Winter 1985): 503–517, at 297. “Nearly one hundred Cambridge men who grew up in Perkins’s shadow led early migrations to New England.”

72. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, 171–176. Taylor defines social imaginary as “the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows.”

73. Charles Taylor’s concept of the “nova effect” appears in A Secular Age, 299-313. Once the medieval synthesis fractured, it didn’t produce two options but an explosion of possibilities — each claiming to recover authentic Christianity, each fragmenting into further alternatives.

74. On the diffusion of Freudian concepts into popular culture without direct transmission, see Eli Zaretsky, Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis (New York: Knopf, 2004), chapters 7–9.

75. Fischer, Albion’s Seed, 605–782. Fischer documents the Borderlander migration patterns and the distinctive concept of “hegemonic liberty.”

76. My primary engagement with Samuel Wells is through Constructing an Incarnational Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2025), where he develops the most comprehensive contemporary account of “being with” as the heart of incarnational theology.