Ross Byrd

New to twitter. Seeking fellow Inklings w/ whom to test ideas & celebrate beauty/goodness. - Episcopal background, mere Xian - Undergrad UVA, Masters RTS - Run a surf camp in OBX, NC - Teach @ VB Fellows - Interests: Lewis, Chesterton, MacDonald, Tolkien (also @PageauJonathan)

@BrantleyVosler Very honored you to have been with you in spirit.

Some of our worship team at church did a local retreat this week. We ate good food, watched A Hidden Life, listened to two @rossbyrd essays and finished it off with some curling. 10/10

A tech-positive vision for our Moses moment. Absolutely fascinating.

@Vocarium_Kara @jgreenhall Thank you, Kara!

Had a great conversation with @jgreenhall on the future of church. Always fun to talk with him. Difficult (and personal) topic, but I think we solved all the problems of the world. youtu.be/XXkM3yRY_Ng?si…

@sympractical @jgreenhall Thanks and thanks for listening!

@rossbyrd @jgreenhall Your use of Saving the Appearances was great in this interview.

@BrantleyVosler @jgreenhall Brantley, well said. Cool your church is wrestling with this stuff too. Let me know what insights you end up getting. And wow, I’m honored to be your guest speaker! Haha. Would love to know how that goes and what comes from it. Maybe let’s chat sometime.

Thanks! That’s helpful. Plato (also pre-NT) seems to zero in on these questions too and it’s fun to think about how Christ solves them in surprising ways. Hope you and Jordan talk again. Our church is wrestling with a lot of similar things and this injected a lot of helpful ideas into the conversation. By the way… my worship team is doing a retreat soon and you are the “guest speaker” via your podcast. We’re gonna listen and talk about your “Why God Hides” series. So good man!

@mattleeanderson Matthieu Pageau's "Language of Creation" would be difficult, but deep.

I think I am going to teach a course this fall that is thematically organized around Memory, Reality and Time. What should we read? I'm interested in classic or classic-adjacent texts, poetry, smart fiction, etc. I have a provisional list, but give me your best ideas.

The Law of Moses, btw, can be seen as an early “school-teacher” of this reintegration, inviting the remarriage of words and deeds. And the Sermon on the Mount (when paired with Christs own life) can be seen as a kind of climactic fulfillment of this reintegration. Who is the man who builds his house on the rock? The one who *does* what I have commanded. Christ is reinstituting original participation by means of simple Christian discipleship. “Let your yes be yes and your no be no” etc.

It’s a great question, and for me (and the Inklings, as far as I understand them) the answer is definitely: the problem starts at the fall. The fall gives rise to a division of heaven and earth, of signified and signifier, of abstract and concrete (see Myth Became Fact, even—you might say—of word and flesh, or more functionally word and deed. Christ is the great unifier of these things, but just as the fall gave rise to long-term decay and increasing alienation with regard to these realities in the kingdoms of earth, Christ gave rise to a long term restoration increasing re-integration of these realities in his inaugurated kingdom. So both increasing decay and increasing re-integration are live options right now.

@kalezelden Ward is indeed a genius. Plenty of unnecessary “Lewis scholarship” out there, but Ward is the real deal.

Bully. This is a masterpiece unto itself. A work of powerful aggregation administration. I recommend it to everyone because Ward is a complimentary genius.

@PageauJonathan Well said. Matthieu’s recent insight about Satan wanting us to uncover the subtle reversal in everything—“nothing is as it seems”—and contrasting that to Jesus’s simple admonition to “judge a tree by its fruit” seems applicable here.

Everyone asking me to say something about the Epstein files. Seriously, I have decided to wait. I see speculation, inflation, confusion, misdirection at every turn and from every side. I don’t trust the shiny thing being dangled, I don’t trust those telling me to look intently at it and I don’t trust those telling me to look away. When I feel I have insight beyond what I have already said about conspiracy and elites with alien agendas, I will let you know.

@chrbaxter_yt @kalezelden Great thread.

@kalezelden Thanks kale… @rossbyrd check this thread

I’m genuinely curious what Neve et al think they are preserving, both in terms of “territorial parishes,” and the moribund parish itself. I get why some in the prelate class want status quo, but the status quo is already ante. It’s cooked as my kids say.

My own little “theory of everything:” on how Jesus preached the gospel and moved the mountain of the human heart. patientkingdom.com/p/the-master-s…

If you're looking to (re-)form healthier spiritual patterns in the new year, this might help. patientkingdom.com/p/new-year-new…

Merry Christmas everyone! Here's what I read, watched, and listened to this year. patientkingdom.com/p/the-best-of-…

Praise God. Merry Christmas, Matthieu.

Please add this entire series from @rossbyrd to your reading list if you’d like to go further up and in on the topic of mountain moving. open.substack.com/pub/rossbyrd/p…

@BrantleyVosler Thanks Brantley. Stoked you read/liked it.

Part 3 of perhaps the most important series of essays I’ve read. If anyone has articulated the paradigm that Ross is articulating, I haven’t come across it. It’s grand, cosmic, symbolic, recapitulatory, natural, supernatural. It makes sense and none at all. Like Tom.

@oblatenate Thanks, Nate!