Sainthood is something often thought of as far in the past, captured only in the confines of books and starting at us through the frames of icons. 

Saint Anthony the Great feels like a superhero at times, Saint George reads like a fairytale, and Saint John the Apostle attained a level of bear-perfection most cannot truly fathom. 

Yet a Saint with no shoes walked the streets of Belgrade, Shanghai, Paris, Brussels, and San Francisco with no shoes, performing miracles of healing and clairvoyance through a life of asceticism that can only be understood as superhuman. 

Saint John Maximovitch came from a novel Russian family, attended military school and law school, abandoned the world after the events of the Bolshevik Revolution, and was tonsured a monk at seminary in Belgrade. 

His duty to Christ would see him leave no student or orphan left behind under the watch of his care making sure every last person in his flock was fed both literally and spiritually as well as educated to the highest standard.

He crossed battlefields in Shanghai to visit the sick, he secured asylum for Orthodox refugees to America, and served as both Archbishop of Western Europe and Western America before his repose in Seattle in 1966. 

To this day, the cathedral he has built in San Francisco feels like a fortress of Heaven, pouring this palpable grade in the Northwest corner of San Francisco, a city that is in desperate need of God’s Grace.

His remains remain in tact, having not decomposed after nearly sixty years since his passing. 

Letters asking for his intercession have seen the quick curing of cancer and other grave diseases, as if he his still caring for all of us, his beloved flock. 

Words could be spoken in praise of him for hours and still would not do his life a justice. 

The Blood & Rain Podcast 

Episode 94

Saint John of San Francisco 

Enjoy.

Return to Vocal Visceral Bleeding

If one is to understand America in the evolution it’s in now, the iteration of which will remain until America is destroyed or evolves once again, you’ll read “The Great Gatsby.” New York is a microcosm for the health and psyche of the nation, and the author of America’s magnum opus is a man who places his soul into its titular character. 

Fitzgerald wrote in a time of the American identity crisis masked with glitz and glam that was known as the Jazz Age. 

Aristocratic families fell out of fashion in the rise of the chaotic nouveau riche Broadway, Hollywood, and niche subsections of the industrialist class. 

Christianity was under attack by the spirit of shellshock  from WW1, questioning Christian monarchy and its moral framework let alone its eternal truth. Bilphism, occultism, and Nietzscheanism all crept into the gaps where Christianity once dwelled including the corners of Fitzgerald’s rare, gorgeous mind. 

American was questioning hierarchy, as European hierarchy was outperformed overseas by raw, American zeal. 

The question of how high America could climb and how hard it could fall was answered in the work of Fitzgerald, a man of the highest highs and lowest lows. 

Fitzgerald first started writing and gaining popularity for and from Ivy League men who fell enamored with the black hole hearts of flapper women in his novels “This Side of Paradise,” a novel that began the movement that was literary Modernism, “The Beautiful & Damned,” and his short stories known as the “Tales of the Jazz Age.”

But he sacrificed his career and popularity to depart from this subject matter to write a or THE Great American novel. He wound up succeeding in this endeavor, but only posthumously. And like his titular character, he fell into a downward spiral by the hand of alcoholism learned form his father and a femme fatale wife who spun into insanity causing his career to become one of financial survival in short stories opposed to fully-realized genius in novels. 

Despite this handicap, he became our great nation’s greatest writer. 

The Blood & Rain Podcast 

Episode 93:

“An Intro to F. Scott Fitzgerald”

The most fantastical period of European history is rooted in the events surrounding one man, one Caesar of his age embodying both Julius and Augustus as a general and political operator respectively. 

He moulded Europe to his will for better or for worse often times for worse fueled by his ambitious and precise tactics, his “living off the land” logistical strategies, his consolidation of legislature in his Napoleonic code, his theatrics in war and in coup, his crowning himself Emperor without any attempt to legitimize his power before God, his countless beatings of Central-European foes, his ambitious continental system to lift the continent from the mercantile yoke of Britain, his ill-fated invasion of Russia, and his return that almost secured his hold of Europe and therefore the world just narrowly bested by Wellington. 

What followed his defeat as the greatest victory of the new order instituted by Hugo Grotius in the Ius Publicum Europeuam: the Congress of Vienna.

Instead of dismantling France, his possessions were reorganized with France retaining its pre-Napoleonic Wars. 

The ramifications of his life echo perpetually into and beyond our lives today. 

The Blood & Rain Podcast 

Episode 92:

Ius Publicum Europeuam Part 3

The return of the Tsar.

The restoration of Constantinople.

Orthodox America. 

The question is always “how?”

There is a notion that is common amongst modern Christians that if the world is not to the perfect standard of Christianity (as judged by themselves), then there is no point in partaking in the discourse of politics and to even go as far as being nihilistic about everything surrounding our world in its form today.

Fifty years ago, Father Seraphim Rose wrote to the few Orthodox Christians in the West who were shellshocked at a world so antithetical to the Orthodox Faith. America still in invincible form amidst the rise of material capitalism as a state religion with enlightenment ideas surrounding, and the Soviet Union waging war on Christianity directly. There was little hope for our world to reflect God then. 

Yet today, 10,000 churches have been rebuilt in Russia, church attendance is climbing there, and the state is funding the Church to rapidly expand and return to its place as the bedrock of the Russian people. 

In America, Orthodox Christianity has 10xd in four years going from 600,000 to 6 million members across all jurisdictions. 

Yet there is still this utter pessimism that is the result of a lingering liberalism and nihilism after the conversions still within the minds of many here in the West. 

Twenty years ago, the thought of an America increasingly Orthodox with a potential President to be listening to ideas that are increasingly classical this shifting the discourse to values increasingly close to those of our own would never have entered our minds. Yet this pessimism remains. 

God has dominion over all, and when one thinks with this mindset, one can detach from his prideful perfectionist projection on the Faith of leaders, and begin to see how God is using them to enact his will. 

The Blood & Rain Podcast

Episode 91

“Orthodoxy & Modern Politics” 

Featuring: Principality of Spirit

Enjoy. 

The bid for an American Napoleon originating from the American South in a Louisiana that stopped looking after its people. 

A boy born in one of the poorest counties in America to an upper middle class family by that county’s standards and a low class by America’s standards. 

High school kingpin and political operator inspired by Napoleon, the Count of Monte Cristo, and the downtrodden men of his state. 

Former seminarian turned traveling salesman turned lawyer. 

Innovator of campaigning by both automobile and radio. 

The Caesar of Louisiana becoming governor and destroying its bureaucratic state building infrastructure never thought possible. 

Challenger of FDR for the fate of America only to be unceremoniously assassinated before the election he was picked to win. 

The man who famously declared that every man should be a king but there should be no crowns. 

The Kingfish. 

The Blood & Rain Podcast 

Episode 90

“Huey Long” 

Featuring: John Slaughter 

Enjoy.

What is often defined as the golden age of television is centered around one common thread: the antihero. 

America’s obsession with the flawed protagonist not always operating in the interest of upholding the highest morality standard is a reflection on its idleness as a nation in the post-Cold War Era. No clear enemy and Godlessness lead to fascinations in behaviors that point downward. 

We grew bored with heroes as they should be. We grew bored with flawed heroes who eventually conquer their one fatal flaw. We only wanted the ones who plunge into indulgence of spiritual and sometimes indirect physical suicide. 

All that glitters is unfortunately not always gold. 

I’m joined by @bloodsatellite in a discussion that was originally supposed to be regarding the benefits of studying leftist thinkers like Derrida and Foucault, but it spontaneously shifted into a discussion about the great anti-heroes of television’s golden age. 

Despite this subject matter, it was a comedic, jovial, and dare I say, fun conversation. 

We discussed Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Mr. Robot, Boardwalk Empire, The Wire, and the Sopranos among others. 

Give it a listen. 

The Blood & Rain Podcast Episode 90: 

“Anti-Heroes of Television” 

Enjoy.

In part two of the Ius Publicum Europeaum Series, I am once again joined by our new political theory cohost, Merctores to discuss the fruits of Hugo Grotius’s labors that gave life to European public law and the rise of the nation state: the Peace of Westphalia. 

It is in this peace that the European consensus was cemented for 300 years, with empires being outsourced to possessions overseas, and the German people never truly recovering from the war that begged for this peace in the first place: the Thirty Years War. 

With the exception of somewhat grander conflicts like the Nine Years War and Seven Years War, the consensus of Ius Publicum Europeaum was maintained amidst the many punitive wars that it permitted from its inception. 

This status quo however would receive its first major threat and test in the form of the French Revolution and its consequences. 

The Blood & Rain Podcast

Episode 88 

“Ius Publicum Europeaum Part 2” 

Featuring: Mercatores 

Enjoy.

The Son of God and Son of man has not only given humanity the opportunity for salvation of the soul, but He has called upon us in the material to act in accordance with our prayers on the road to Salvation. 

God saw it necessary to make material our Salvation by becoming flesh, and it is in a material world where the fruits of our Faith are visible through our demeanor reflecting theosis or through our deeds.

I’m joined by Prismatic Orthodox to discuss prayer and it’s lack of fruits when not coupled with action in his beautifully spoken understanding of synergy in the Orthodox Faith.

The Blood & Rain Podcast

Episode 87 

“No Prayer Without Action”

Featuring: Prismatic Orthodox

Enjoy. 

For the first time on Blood & Rain, we have a co-host, a member of the Anti-Fragile Athletes and aspiring professor from the Netherlands, Adam who will go by the moniker, “Mercatores.” 

After two years of fascination with political theory, Mercatores will be my bi-weekly partner in crime on Blood & Rain when discussing various topics of political theory we both find a fascination in studying. 

The first of these episodes is regarding the work of Hugo Grotius, who was called by King Henry IV, “the miracle of Holland.” Grotius was a lawyer, jurist, professor, and political theorist whose key texts laid the groundwork for the Peace of Westphalia, European Public Law or “Ius Publicum Europeaum,” and the dawn of true mercantilism. 

In this part one episode, we chronicle the early life of Grotius, his influences from Spain in Francisco Vittoria and Francisco Suarez, his magnum opus, and the peace of Westphalia. 

In part two, we will discuss the impact of Westphalia upon the next 300 years and its influences on Nuremberg which dictates the order of the world today. 

The Blood & Rain Podcast 

Episode 86:

“Ius Publicum Europeaum Pt 1”

Featuring: Mercatores 

Enjoy.