tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-73042886598650075.post1649660634165482180..comments2024-03-22T11:37:52.668-05:00Comments on Byzantine, Texas: July 4th: What are we celebrating?Byzantine, TXhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17845681957622343484noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-73042886598650075.post-87813325576741890572016-07-07T08:27:14.265-05:002016-07-07T08:27:14.265-05:00As a first-generation American, the author natural...As a first-generation American, the author naturally focuses on the later period of American Exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny rather than the Anglo-Celt frontier orneriness and Lockean principles which fueled the Revolution and Declaration which is the actual basis of the July 4 (1776) holiday. The immigrant view of America has a much more compressed timeline.<br /><br />This compressed view of America can also be found in the institutional juvenescence of the Church in the US. Converts in particular revel in the comparison of modernist secular America to the pagan Empire of 33 A.D. They experience a frisson in imagining themselves as +Paul speaking truth to Agrippa, and resist any vision of the Church as a mature institution, an organic part of the nation wedded to Her people through a succession of baptisms, weddings and funerals. To modern Orthodox Americans, the US with its multiculturalism and global dominance becomes practically the Divinely successor to Byzantium. As the US dissolves over time (as all multicultural polities do), Orthodox will remain mired in their current quandary: unable to construct an ecclesiology that relates to a world where the Empire has vanished and is not coming back.The Anti-Gnostichttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04386593803225823789noreply@blogger.com