Bulletin 9.28.25

I'm goin' up the country baby, don't you wanna go?

I'm goin' up the country baby, don't you wanna go?

I'm goin' to someplace where I've never been before

I'm goin', I'm goin' where the water tastes like wine

I'm goin' where the water tastes like wine

We can jump in the water, stay drunk all the time

—Alan Wilson, "Goin' Up the Country", Track 4 from the 1968 album, Living the Blues by Canned Heat

I have said that Asia and the ancient world had an air of being too old to die. Christendom has had the very opposite fate. Christendom has had a series of revolutions and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.

At least five times, therefore, with the Arian and the Albigensian, with the Humanist sceptic, after Voltaire and after Darwin, the Faith has to all appearance gone to the dogs. In each of these five cases it was the dog that died.

—G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (1925; p.244,249)

To be clear: I'm not predicting the end of the world or the arrival of the millennium here, and indeed my arguments for the sustainability or decadence would cut against any crude attempt to read the book of Revelation, with all its wars and plagues and disasters, into the warp divine intervention happened, whether long prophesied or completely unforeseen, there would be, in hindsight, a case that we should have seen it coming. And it shouldn't surprise anyone if decadence ends with people looking heavenward: toward God, toward the stars, or both. So down on your knees--and start working on that warp drive.

—Ross Gregory Douthat, The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success (2020; p. 240)