Sometime back in 2003 I started this site on blogspot.com. It’s purpose then was to chronicle the large number of amazing things I was learning about history, philosophy, literature, and theology in those heady days (!) of my undergraduate education.

The site title, Societas Christiana, came straight out of intensive studies I was doing on Medieval Christendom, in which fathers and brothers from our distant past used that very term to speak of the dual-end society they inhabited: Christ was King over all of life, and His rule manifested itself in two modes, ecclesiastical and civil, covering all lawful domains of human thought and action.

I will spare the reader a detailed account of how the site developed over the next ten years or so (to 2013), as such a chronicle would be of interest to very few.  But I should say at least that due to a combination of life circumstances and shifting research interests now reflected on other blogs I started – Res Cogitandae, Resident Pilgrim, Politeuma – this site, my original venture, has been inert for almost a decade.

Although much of my focus for the life of the old site was, as noted, on Medieval matters, there always was a strong undercurrent of conviction that those things mattered for today.  As I studied about patristics and monastics and reformists and papalists and conciliarists, I kept thinking that all of that happened for a reason, that there had been a great “Christendom” not so much to provide us with a blueprint for our own day, but at least to teach us important lessons about God’s inscrutable providential guidance of the world and also about our own duties, potentials, and pitfalls.

History as teacher is, as many know, not an idea that means little to me. Indeed, I think one of the most glaring failures of we Western Christians for the last four or five generations has been a widespread loss of serious interest in, and so of serious understanding of, the history of our part of God’s kingdom project on Earth. We moderns are like men stumbling around in the dark, trying this, that, or the other thing solely by our own unaided notions, unaware of vast sources of light literally right at our fingertips, just waiting for us to kindle them and use them.

In this context, for we in the West, the days seem particularly evil. Especially since the Supreme Court’s Obergefell ruling in 2015, the public cause and progress of Christianity has seemed  quite bleak.  Indeed, the very notion of a “Christian society” seems to be foundering in rough seas, a barque with so many holes only God Himself could patch them – and if we listen to history rather than our own unmoored aspirations, we can’t really sure He will.

And so more than a decade after I let this blog lapse, I have come back to it because all the questions that originally motivated it not only still remain, but now seem more pressing than they did back then.

• In terms of the definition given above, is there such a thing as a Societas Christiana?
• Did anyone, such as those who coined the term and used it constantly to describe their world, ever actually live in one?
• Perhaps more importantly for us living in the exceedingly culturally decadent late stages of the Enlightenment, do we live in one now?
• If not, are there any prospects for “repairing the ruins” and “rebuilding Christendom”?
• And even if there are prospects, should that sort of external dominionism be our goal as Christians?

And more yet along those lines.

I still love the Middle Ages and still enjoy reading and talking about works from that time. But though my primary research interests and also the specific orientation of my Protestantism have shifted significantly, the questions that animated this blog’s original iteration remain quite live for me. As I’ve thought about these questions more intensively over the last 7 years or so, I have found that Societas Christiana is still the best description for all of my intellectual and spiritual interests and aspirations.

To that end, I have – to be self-consciously Medieval for a moment! – treated this old site of mine as a palimpsest: I have kept the site itself and its old “shape” and “color” while scrubbing off its surface contents in order to write anew on the same material. If you ever followed me “way back then” and are still interested in the same topics, I hope you’ll find sufficient time and interest to re-follow now.