Ivan Plis

Is it a really good email?

This is great — but my goodness, has the digital typesetter got an f-digraph problem.

2026 STM Liturgical Calendar - Individual We begin taking preorders on October 1. We expect to ship by November 1. The St. Tikhon's Monastery 2026 Lectionary Wall Calendar Complete with exhaustive calendar of daily scripture readings, major f...

Looks like we’re in the clear stmpress.com/products/stm...

Gonna have a keen eye out for this year’s (which comes from a monastery publisher, so maybe we’re in the clear?)

In front. I want them where I can see them

[puts on Orthodox disputation hat] the REAL enemy is Western medieval scholasticism

(when I texted my dad about it I called him Крис Ѳили)

Somebody tell Janeese to start talking about biryani — or at least, like, doro wot

You know the sweetened-unsweetened thing is mostly a miscommunication based on the different varieties of cornmeal available in vs outside the South, yeah?

👀

Well-formed O’Connor sentence

Flannery O'Connor

The new Chris Thile recording of the back half of the Bach Sonatas and Partitas is way funkier and shaggier than expected

They had been during the campaign and now they’ve stopped! It sucks

both my grandmas’ kitchens in the 90s were in Khrushchevki and neither was a particularly motivated cook

This current U.S. policy would have destroyed the lives of many, many people I know and love.

Mentally occupied?? By Satan??

(Not the republic you might think!)

Got my first-ever “Is that baby dressed warmly enough?” from a well-meaning church lady from the former Soviet Union

More to the point, they think mom & dad are parts of themselves

There’s a terrific book series called “English Grammar For Students of [Language]” that exploits this fact nicely

It’s true!

To answer your question, in a period when imperial authority often wavered between popular theological disputes (see also the iconoclastic controversy), it behooved Constantine to support doctrinal unity, even before his own baptism, because that is what Jesus commands of us in John and elsewhere.

“First Council of Nicaea” alludes to “a circle of Christian violence, and of Christian resistance couched in terms of martyrdom,” citing some interesting work by Michael Gaddis, which merits some further investigation.

Giving official sanction to one particular view, however, set the stage for a good deal of bloodshed. Historian Ralph Martin Novak, Jr., notes: By adopting a statement of "orthodox Christian belief," the bishops who prevailed at Nicaea drew a line in the sand with respect to all other forms of Christian belief. Christians who refused to adopt the orthodoxy defined at Nicaea would eventually be required to pay for their "heretical" beliefs in blood: more Christians died at the hands of Christians during the seventy-five years following the council of Nicaea than had died as martyrs under the almost three hundred years of Roman persecution. [4]

[4] Ralph Martin Novak, Jr., Christianity and the Roman Empire: Background Texts (Harrisburg, Penn.: Trinity Press International, 2001), 176.

This was the most rigorous citation on the first few pages of Google (not verifiable on Google Books; no library because holiday). Wikipedia makes no mention of rape, kidnapping, or murder in “Arianism,” “Arian controversy,” or the relevant bit of “Sectarian violence among Christians.”

(This is why, per your post, I only have the intelligence of half a human!)

I’d love to know about that documentation. I know about the administrative crackdowns, but I don’t know about any widespread public anti-Arian violence resulting from the council.

What genocides do you attribute to First Nicaea?

I am whatever on Douthat but his old quip about “wait until you see the post-religious right” comes up a lot

Sumer is icumen in - Wikipedia

It was a word in the mid-13th century (well, “vert,” but yes) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumer_i...