All the Horrible Ideas of 2025

Because it's a tradition

Old school cow hide covered medicine chest via wikipedia.

If you don’t count its 24-year-old millinerd prequel, this Substack began by delineating all the horrible ideas of 2024 (which I handily refuted with long form essays that I’m quite certain absolutely everyone has read). Following said custom, all the horrible ideas of 2025 have now been likewise refuted below in my year end review (now with handy highlight paragraphs). This genre of writing, by the by, is an ancient Christian literary form known as the “Panarion,” Greek for “medicine cabinet,” which afforded literary antidotes to various intellectual toxins. If any of the below ideas have infected you, your remedy awaits.

1. Only celebrity artists matter. Antidote: Broken Beauty Revisited (a conversation with Bruce Herman). As Bruce puts it (with advice that applies just as much to writing as to painting):

   All of us desire to be seen. To be known. The question that haunts the artist is, Who cares? We often find that our work does indeed make us “strangers in a strange land” because painting is no longer seen as a vital thing in our culture. It is relegated to antique or luxury status as image making—because TV and film and CGI are the current lingua franca of image making. As a result, artists can feel very alone unless they happen to get recognition from some influential gallerist or critic or curator. But my advice to younger artists is simple on this score: make your art for the One who entrusted this gift to you in the first place. Don’t worry about making a name for yourself—rather, concern yourself with making the work. Period. Let the chips fall where they may. The beautiful and meaningful form that then is revealed under your chisel and mallet will emerge in the melee of flying chips. If it is the authentic article—real and costly art—it will compel other eyes to look. But it is always a gift. There are no guarantees. We work, we make, and we wait. It is all in the waiting.

2. The Christian Gurdjieffian esotericist Cynthia Bourgeault is entirely unorthodox. Antidote: The Wildest Christianity of All.

   Because she was in the room where it happened [that is, she was at Thomas Keating’s death bed], Bourgeault is able to report that “despite his earlier proclamation that ‘religious rituals and symbols . . . are meaningless to me now,’ Thomas returned faithfully to his old monastic breviary, reading and digesting the psalms as he had from his earlier year of monastic formation.” The passing Keating clung to Charles de Foucauld’s classic Abandonment Prayer “like a long-lost friend.” “Father,” Keating asked his monastic brothers to pray over him, “I abandon myself into your hands; do with me what you will.” Faced with the assumption from her followers that Keating’s appeal to a heavenly Father amounted to an offensively trinitarian “regression,” Bourgeault stands her ground: “This was not a regression, only the return of a mode of relationship that had carried him all his life.”

3. Christian spirituality should be as tediously illuminating as florescent light. Antidote: The Mary Underground.

   A descent into the Tomb of the Virgin in Jerusalem, where this journey began, illustrates the cryptic utterings of the church’s myriad mystics. This chamber, along with its countless global siblings, tells us that that depth outpaces height. The Mary underground is an atlas of architectural humility, an international template of contemplative prayer. Where the once-proud above-ground churches have vanished, sometimes only the depths remain. I expect that in the eschaton, the same thing might be said of Christianity itself, not to mention our own biographies. Only the depths remain.

4. Contemporary art is hopelessly “secular.” Antidote: The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art (an interview with Jonathan Anderson). As Jonathan puts it:

   [S]ometimes what appears to be hostility [to religion among artists] is only a surface presentation, or a surface reading, of dynamics that in fact involve serious theological struggle and real theological insight. I’m quite interested in the ways irony, misdirection, paradox, self-deception, and negative dialectics surround the topic of religion in contemporary art. We are often talking about more than we think we are. Furthermore, overt hostility is often only one stage within a longer, more interesting development of a person’s life, thought, or art-making. The vast majority of artists who populate the histories of modern and contemporary art, for example, were raised in religious homes, and their work often involved a (sometimes hostile) distancing from this upbringing and a critical engagement with it. But it is also surprising how theologically important these processes often are and how many of these artists returned to some sort of faith later in life.

5. Evangelical elitism is helping. Antidote: I Kissed Evangelical Elitism Good Bye.

   [I]f I may boast just a little, I consider my own disillusionment to be more radical than that of the evangelical “elites” who may be compromising and selling out, catering to a need for esteem. I know there is something to be said for calling out the errors of one’s home community. Indeed, that is exactly what Noll was doing, which is why he described his famous book as an “epistle of a wounded lover.” But for some of the “evangelical elites” today it is all wound and no love, and that’s just boring. Maybe that’s why God played a trick on them by having the best of these critical historians of evangelicalism, Molly Worthen, show all of them up by herself converting to evangelicalism, and that’s not boring.

6. True mystics have no need for routine liturgy or actual congregations. Antidote: The Puffins and Evelyn Underhill.

   Evelyn Underhill, the first woman chosen to be an outside lecturer at Oxford, slowly concluded that mysticism flourished best within, not outside, classical Christianity. She insisted on calling a more mature publication not Mysticism but Mystics of the Church. “There is always, in the church as in the family,” Underhill intones in the book, “a perpetual opportunity of humility, self-effacement, genteel acceptance; of exerting that love which must be joined to power and sound mind if the full life of the Spirit is to be lived.” Though she appreciated Meister Eckhart’s vertiginous rhetoric, she came to prefer the clarity and dependability of Jan van Ruusbroek instead.

7. Thomas Merton was basically a Buddhist, never came to his senses after his reckless affair, and it was great for poetry that William Everson swapped his Dominican habit for buckskins. Antidote: Merton’s Nurse.

   Against the baseless rumours that he had become Buddhist, the very same day [Dec. 8, 1968, two days before his death] he wrote to a friend, “I have not found what I came here to find. I have not found any place of hermitage that is any better than the hermitage I have, or had, at Gethsemani, which is after all places, a great place.” Griffin wisely concludes that “had Merton returned from the East alive, he would have become more and more silent. . . . He would have gone on writing . . . but he would have published less and less.” Merton once prayed to Our Lady of Mount Carmel, “Teach me to go to the country beyond words and beyond names.” And she answered.

8. Everything is God (without any qualification on what we mean by “is”). Antidote: Boundary Waters.

   This Christian paradox of divine presence is to lazy pantheism what freshly ground pour-over coffee is to the Folgers crystals we have to satisfy ourselves with at our campsite. “My only ‘me’ is God. In my soul I see no one but God,” says Catherine of Genoa. “God is who we are more than we are,” writes Thomas Keating. Henri Nouwen testifies that true prayer of the heart is where “there are no divisions or distinctions and where we are totally one.” But in the richness of Christian tradition, these claims exist alongside Gregory of Nyssa’s insistence that “God dwells in you, penetrates you, yet is not confined in you.” R.S. Thomas’s declaration in “Emerging” that “[prayer] is the annihilation of difference” runs parallel to Karl Rahner’s claim that “God establishes and is the difference of the world from himself, and for this reason he establishes the closest possible unity precisely in the differentiation.”

9. Generative AI is great for education, especially freshman. Antidote: Welcome to Chartres.

10. Julian of Norwich is the property of one Christian confession. Antidote: Julian for Everyone (with some more info here).

    Ironically, the very same passages that cause some to conclude that Julian “reproduces insights of the great theologians of the Eastern Church” (and hence everyone should become Orthodox), might cause others to conclude that the deifying impulses retroactively labeled “Orthodox” are in no way limited to the East, enabling us to contentedly remain in Western traditions. That having been said, God’s call on others is (of course) not my call to make. When glaciers melt, hitherto concealed pathways emerge; may our mutual Lord guide the footsteps of each of us as we make sense of this softening terrain.

11. Psychedelics are essential building blocks for a well-integrated life, and modern psychologists don’t believe in demons. Antidote: Decoy Enlightenment (being my interview with Ashley Lande), with considerably more on the subject here. Here is Ashley:

    The irony of psychedelic ego death is that it often has the opposite effect—the ego becomes inflated, delusional, convinced of its immortality and superior grasp on some kind of esoteric meaning beyond meaning that the inexperienced do not possess.

12. The void gets the last metaphysical word. Antidote: Salvation By Dread Alone.

    The drugs did not generate the void any more than a dog whistle generates an attacking rottweiler. I know this because I had summoned the very same void as a child all on my own. I had what are now classified as “night terrors” when I was around twelve years old. I called forth these terrors honestly, which is to say, I thought my way into them rationally. It started when, on my bed in the dark, I began to entertain the idea of eternity as duration. As I went down that rational pathway, my soul and heart recoiled at the idea that such a duration might not necessarily be good. Instead, I sensed my posthumous existence might not end even if I wanted it to, even if I desperately wanted it to. My mind may have opened the doorway to this horrifying prospect, but what I encountered behind that doorway—I knew with certainty—was real. I knew it to be a discovery, not my invention, precisely because I so much wished it were my invention.

13. Evangelicalism is so over. Antidote: Evangelicalism: A Love Story.

    I have several times been among groups of Protestants invited to attend symposia at Mundelein Seminary, the flagship Catholic Seminary in the Chicago area. On one such occasion, we investigated medieval Catholic understandings of the doctrine of grace that were more in line with the Reformation (understandings that, arguably, were proscribed by the Council of Trent). On this occasion, I witnessed a remarkable moment. Just before the case could be made that the Catholic Church had always promulgated a robust Pauline sense of grace, the great scholar of mysticism Bernard McGinn interrupted the discussion and announced (and I quote from memory), “But by the sixteenth century, this understanding of grace had been buried!” Forgive me if I imagine the author of the biography of the Summa theologiae might know what he is talking about. And the Catholic defenders of John Henry Newman who concede “he most probably never read Luther firsthand” might know what they’re talking about as well.

14. Toronto and Chicago are entirely “secular” cities. Antidote: Toronto the Holy and (now with original photography), Our Lady of Chicago and Miracles on Roosevelt Road.

15. You have to choose between theistic evolution or young earth creationism. Antidote: On Christ and Coral. Which, some will have noticed, is a further antidote to horrible idea #8 above.

16. John Ruskin hated Mary and debates about complex theological issues are best advanced on social media. Antidote: Reefer Madness.

More next year, Deo volente, though not at such a steady rate. Material Mysticism will be toned down to six per year so I can finish Mere Iconography, which is coming along nicely. My sincere gratitude to readers of this stack. Happy Fourth Day of Christmas to all!