the iconoclast's descending

Trump's Lawlessness by Personalizing the State in Him Rev. Douglas Olds January 27, 2025 The new administration, in this minister’s view, is pushing the envelope on governance by Diktat—dictatorship-- at the federal level as constitutional checks and balances are being vitiated, moving federal operations and policy warrant into the person of the executive order. Trump has now fired inspectors general, those whose purpose is to ensure executive department agendas are done legally in statutory compliance—i.e. in accordance with the legislature’s authority to set moral policy. So it is hard to deny that Trump will continue to implement his agenda by Executive Order, as they may have become presumptively allowable by the Supreme Court’s deference to the Executive Branch. These EOs face reduced likelihood of injunction given expanded immunity, yet remain justiciable under statutory constraints. To wit: In July 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a significant ruling in Trump v. United S...

    Blinded by the Flight:  Wars and Rumors of War  [A Thimble Sermon] Douglas B. Olds, June 22, 2025 Matthew 24:6-13  And you will hear of  wars and rumors of wars;  see that you are not alarmed, for this must take place, but the end is not yet. 7  For nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom , and there will be famines  [ a nd pestilences] and earthquakes in various places: 8 all this is but the beginning of the birth pangs. 9 “Then they will hand you over to be tortured and will put you to death, and you will be hated by all nations because of my name. 10 Then many will fall away,[ b ] and they will betray one another and hate one another. 11 And  many false prophets will arise and lead many astray . 12 And because of t he increase of lawlessness , the love of many will grow cold. 13 But the one who endures to the end will be saved./   Matt...

Paradox as Gift to Open the Prophetic Heart Douglas Blake Olds Paradox involves holding several truth claims in tension. Is it heresy that relieves the tension, or orthodoxy? This essay redefines paradox as a liminal and mobile crux--a tabernacle of accountable discernment rather than a crucible of destabilizing, mystical suspension. A summons not a puzzle. A manger rather than an emptied trough. In doing so, it advances a conative, deontological model of prophetic witness—charting a Biblically transformed epistemic-ethical trajectory rooted in Hebrews 5:13-14: ethical discernment, virtue, and aesthetic attunement to neighbor and world. “Attachment [to form],” Weil wrote, “is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained/obtained only by someone who is detached”[5]. This paradox is not a simple contradiction but often becomes the victim of a faulty hermeneutical spiral, where detachment leads to moral indifference. Such distortion reflects a genealogical fallacy: privile...

  The Restoration of Reason from the Eyes of a Neighbor: A Shema -Christological Metaphysic of Conative Healing Douglas Blake Olds Being  an annotated, sermonic prolegomenon to millenarian iconoclasm preceding judgment-- a theological prolepsis, the intervention into modern philosophy of mind, evolutionary theory, AI discourse, metaphysical epistemology in the age of  Daniel 2:43, and in the footnotes, the necessary and overdue rehabilitation of Johann Gottfried Herder . This essays proposes a  peripat(h)etic, perichoretic  grammar for theological and pedagogical reconstruction after ideological collapse—anchored not in institutions, formal aesthetics, or instrumental binary logic, but in re- covenanted conation as intent. This essay emerges at the intersection of post-secular crisis (AI, collapsing rationalism, technocratic reduction) and theological covenanted renewal (Shema-conation, poietic Bildung, Pentecostal immanence, earth trustee ethics)....

  AI’s Necromantic Narcissism: Hallucinated Hegemonics and Its Condemning Collapse of Covenant Perception Douglas Blake Olds Arena eos qui in ea cacant reflectit   (cf. James 1:8). Generative AI is  necromantic architecture of narcissistic simulation , condemned eschatologically and incompatible with covenantal perception.  AI as both fraud and sin , its makers as blasphemers , and the system as eschatologically condemned. Not simply a critique of AI—this essay is a hammer in the   biblical mode of idol exposure--not just of cultural danger but of divine prosecution and prophecy of impending system collapse and designer doom.  It    declares metaphysical war against dark triad systems that collapse covenantal perception of reality by  disorientation, derealization, loss of proximal sense and disrupted embodied memory .  It argues that generative AI commercializes necromantic sorceries (as modern witchcraft of Endor [1 Samuel 27-31]) to e...