P.S.: I know the plural is taoisigh but few people abroad know that word!

The vote on Saturday Bible studies has concluded that you would like thematic studies, with regular discussion of grammar and idiom in the original languages, with a quarter of an hour at the end for Q&A. I will open an audio-only chat for the Bible study and I’ll run the Q&A by concurrent text posting.

Some have asked for coverage of “Day of rest: Saturday or Sunday?”, “The Trinity: is it Biblical?”, or “Deuterocanonical books: why aren’t they in the Bible and what do we learn from them about world power structures?”. These are issues better addressed by wide reading and ongoing one-to-one correspondence, and are points on which a believer can use a good deal of adaptability to get along with the fellowship and culture where he finds himself. If I broached them, the whole hour would be absorbed in addressing controversy.

I’d rather do studies on topics that will lend themselves optimally to this format. Your germane suggestions below, please.

One of the few GCHQ colleagues I've kept in touch with wrote me this in a New Year e-mail:


The C of E and New Frontiers, among other denominations, had their terminal nervous breakdown 2016-18.

NHS collapse 2017.

The RC Church I dropped out of 2014.

Some unwary people have been trapped by sentimentality and lack of mental sharpness, having had belief stolen from us by nearly all the churches.

A discussion has started in the chat about modern pastors manipulating families through wives. The strongest form of this, in my opinion, is found in Northern Ireland. It’s a pan-Anglo problem and is spreading to the Dutch Reformed.
I have been advising Dutch pastors and elders to read two authors on the issue:
- the scholarly Leon J. Podles (two expensive books)
- the Alaska man’s man David Murrow (several affordable books and audiobooks)

Principle 11 of 286. Universal suffrage, but in terms set by the states, not the top-level government.

I can't think of anything more depressing than the prospect of the E Michael Jones vs Vaush debate. How does the man who believes in a transcendental good convince a complete nihilist he's wrong about everything?

My prediction is EMJ will say:
''You're living in filth, son, and it's destroying the world''

And Vaush will say:
''I like the filth, we all love the filth, and there's nothing you can do about it!''

I didn't realise I could despise Vaush any more intensely. His disrespect towards EMJ was quite incredible. Some of the things he said to him, an old man, were simply shocking. Within the living memory of most people, it would have been unthinkable for a young man to speak that way to an old man, and any young man who did would have to expect universal contempt from society for doing so.

Of course, Vaush himself is an agent of the very moral decline which makes such behaviour "acceptable". He is truly a creature beyond any redemption, and his conduct towards EMJ proved that definitively.

Goodness is an affront to Vaush, as are honesty and integrity. He is a man without any moral core, without any culture, without any soul, just a grotesque consumer. A sack of atoms who belongs on Supermarket World, languishing alone in the stench of his own unholy appetites.

“In October 2020, an Orthodox convert friend who still goes to Bible study with his Evangelical pals took them a copy of my just-published Live Not By Lies, and told them that it’s an interesting take on present and coming persecution. He told me that his Bible study partners told them they didn’t need to read it, because President Trump would be re-elected, and all would be well. Even if Trump had been re-elected, very little would be well for faithful Christians. For these older men, it’s always 1994.”

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/evangelicals-post-christianity-aaron-renn-david-french-ross-douthat-benedict-option/

It would be a bit over-optimistic to call it the first week of a Dutch Revolution, but don’t underestimate how much is afoot here in the Netherlands at the moment. Folk are so heartily sick of having their “non-essential” businesses closed that they’ve started mass defiance.
It’s been a penetratingly cold, foggy day in most of the country, but there’s been brisk business at shops in participating towns (of which there’s been a good spread, from godless Amsterdam and the Catholic German border area to Calvinist Alblasserdam, the nearest town to the Kinderdijk windmills).
My wife was touched this morning by news from Valkenburg, a tourist town in the bobble that protrudes at the bottom of the Netherlands (Limburg), where a couple insisted on paying the waiter €30 for their two coffees today to express their appreciation of the café’s lawful defiance. The sun even came out for them down there.
The new coalition cabinet was sworn in on Monday and is thick with totalitarians. The new Health Minister was previously an inhumane hospital boss, and has not “won friends and influenced people” in his first week in office by defending the opening of a gym at the teaching hospital in Rotterdam on the basis that “only healthcare workers attend it”. This inspired a number of gyms-for-plebs to reopen after quickly sticking a note on the door that “all who enter here shall be assumed to be healthcare workers”.

Someone has just asked what the Eastern Approaches Chat group is for. A very reasonable question.

If you want to set up a Telegram channel (mine is entitled “Eastern Approaches—Alex Thomson” and has a logo beside the wording), the only way to enable people to comment under posts is to set up a group and to link it to the channel.

What Telegram then does is to cross-post to that chat group everything that the channel owner posts to his channel, and it’s in that chat group that people can add comments. In my case, that chat group has been named “Eastern Approaches Chat”. It might appear to be a channel because all my posts are visible there, but you can tell that it’s not the channel by the lack of logo at the top.

However, you don’t need to join “Eastern Approaches Chat” to see what I write, nor to write comments beneath my posts. It suffices to tap the “Comments” option below the post in question in the main channel (or to open it up if no-one has yet commented on the post in question). “Eastern Approaches Chat” will then handle people’s comments as a back end, but the comments are visible under my posts in the main channel.

There’s no harm in joining “Eastern Approaches Chat” (fifty out of 3,000 have done so thus far), but there’s nothing gained by doing so, either. It’s just an artefact of Telegram, where group chat was an afterthought in the architecture.

https://t.me/EastApp?livestream

A slight majority of the poll respondents wanted thematic Bible studies, so this will not exclusively be a Romans 13 Bible study. Questions will be by text chat and I’ll address them in the final quarter-hour.
In its format, this will be an audio-only stream with me speaking and the audience automatically muted.
I regret that Telegram, unlike applications such as Zoom and YouTube, does not auto-caption live speakers for the hard of hearing or those with less good English.