Carbon Mike and Professor Rachel Fulton Brown discuss Christian life in the Middle Ages; the origins of Marian devotion; secularism, religion, and modern society

Mike tells me that the lady is a fencer as well! It has long been my belief, having rejected secularized Catholicism as a boy, as well prosperity-based charismatic Christianity as a youth and a man, that the more ancient forms of Christianity, Gnosticism, Catholicism and Orthodox would find a resurgence once the cult of the God of Things wore thin. Unless a protestant church is young it will secularize under the prefect moral storm of modernity. Having explored this to some extent in fiction with Malediction Song, I have often wondered when the defiling of the church by the recent homosexual communist takeover and the surrender of mainstream Protestantism to the atheist hive mind would bear dissident fruit among anachronistic thinkers retreating to these more ancient Christian forms. And then to find out that this lady has joined the budding reverse reformation, was quite a moment of interest. Thanks, Mike.

Professor Brown’s description of imaginative prayer strikes me as a shamanic survival imbedded in agrarian paganism, essentially a heathen thread which was not extinguished in the syncretic manner in which Christendom took form and will provide a gravitational point of repose for dissidents from the various secularized Christian expressions which have devolved into grossly ethical systems.