The 23rd Psalm: Framing the Moral Life
An Audacious Attempt at Describing the Framework of the Moral Life, All In One Place
This summer, I began to write a series of posts for Chris Green’s Substack, taking the 23rd Psalm as the framework for what the Christian moral life looks like. The whole series is comprised of ten posts, breaking down the Psalm into phrases, and asking one basic question:
“What does the moral vision look like if we take the 23rd Psalm as our guide?” What came out was a vision of the moral life as a journey through time, as we walk with the LORD through provision and death, accompanied by the gifts we need for the journey, which is beset by enemies, scarcity, and the need for deliberation.
The 8th of 10 installments came out today, and the remaining two will post the next two Fridays. I’m pretty proud of what it does, and sometime in the future, I’ll expand these out into a short volume, as I think Christians are largely in need of three things:
A comprehensive vision of the Christian moral life.
A comprehensive vision which assumes that Scripture has something to do with it.
A comprehensive vision, which assumes that Scripture has something to do with it, but doesn’t devolve into cherry picking verses on particular topics. We need a vision before we need a concordance.
You can begin the series here. The remaining contributions can be found below:
Writing: Now that this series on the 23rd Psalm is wrapped up, I’ll continue some more on the nature of obligation: there’s so much more to explore about what we are called to morally be and do! Making headway on a long-languishing project on the doctrine of the church (Baker Academic, 202x), and just heard that my next project after that—a book on the moral vision of Dorothy Day—has been approved with Baylor University Press! Won’t be out for a long while, but it’ll be a chance to pull together lots of pieces that I’ve been writing on her for several years now.
Paying Attention:
I am not on any bandwagon of DIY medicine, but it’s worth asking how FDA regulation occurs. It’s probably the money.
Matthew Lee Anderson wrote a good piece here on the connection between ecological collapse and anti-natalism. I’ll probably riff on this in the future.
Michael Sacasas is one you should subscribe to, post-haste. He’s one of the only Substack writers we’ll be reading in fifty years. This piece on technological liturgies is particularly good.
Normally, one piece a week is for everyone, and one for paid subscribers. But this is still coming off a wild couple of weeks. If you’re interested in group subscriptions (which wind up being about 3$/month/person), click below.