A literary culture left to hermits

In a 1981 book review for Harper’s, Hugh Kenner opens with a block-quoted excerpt from a 1978 essay called “Finding” by Guy Davenport. He then writes the following:

So commences a magical account. The day I first read it, on pages copied from a magazine called Antaeus, I resolved that if it ever appeared in a book of Guy Davenport’s nonfictional writings I would lose no time commending that book to the world. So this review was scheduled when The Geography of the Imagination was announced, and it was not to be aborted by the discovery, when the review copy arrived, that the name on the book’s dedication page was my own. If having known a man for twenty-five years is to disqualify one from talking about his work, then our literary culture will have to be left to hermits. (Mazes [1989], 67-68)

This, it seems to me, is the first and last word on reviewing books by people you know—whether onetime teachers, erstwhile students, present colleagues, occasional collaborators, academic acquaintances, outright enemies, or longtime friends. You review the book in front of you. You acknowledge a relationship if necessary. You give honor where it is due. You criticize where necessary, with maximal charity and minimal points-scoring. You grow thick skin when your own work is reviewed. You don’t look for special treatment.

And, without question, you participate in what can only be called a patronage system, a necessarily small network of insiders with varying and ever-changing degrees of authority, status, power, and prestige. Checking your naivete at the door, you do your part to keep the system running but also honest. Because the only checks and balances are internal to it; because the integrity of the particular intellectual culture in question is finally only as good as the individuals who compose it, who send off their little missives, who read and write and review with as little bias as possible—knowing that disinterested does not mean uninterested.

And most of all, you get on with your life when the system fails. Such is life.

Intentionality

My friend and colleague Richard Beck has written up a wonderful series of eight posts on the discourse and phenomenon of “intentionality” in Christian settings. The whole thing is worth reading. Richard is in part responding to me, both things I’ve written and conversations he and I have had offline. The topic came up again in a recent interview he did with another friend and colleague, Greg McKinzie, on his podcast Theology on the Way. They start talking about intentionality at about the 1:48:00 mark, discussing the matter for the final fifteen minutes of the video episode.

Before I add my own two cents, let me set the table. Two years ago, at the conclusion of a review of John Mark Comer’s latest book, I wrote the following:

[I have a question concerning] the idea of “intentionality.” Comer makes much of this, as do many Christian writers and pastors. I’m less convinced. If, for example, the forces that shape our daily habits are so hard to resist that they require a Rule of Life to counteract them—and I agree with this judgment—isn’t calling on individual believers to form a personal plan of spiritual action just moving the problem one step back? If most Christians are not moral heroes, if they are just trying to get by without losing their faith, is it reasonable to expect them to possess the resolve to audit their spiritual habits, fashion a personalized plan of attack, and execute it?

Like Comer, I believe the church has much to learn from Stanley Hauerwas, James K. A. Smith, and Tish Harrison Warren on the role of habits and “liturgies” in forming our hearts. The fly in the ointment, however, is that the kind of liturgical formation presupposed in Christian history was neither self-starting nor optional nor individually directed. It was a matter of communal obligation imposed by ecclesial authority. It was nonnegotiable, on pain of mortal sin.

You didn’t discern meatless Fridays. If you were Christian, if you were obedient, you did the fast like everyone else. You didn’t decide when to feast. The calendar told you when to do so. Fasting and feasting, sacrament and confession—these were just obligatory. For many they still are. As it happens, this is far more faithful to Aristotle and his insights on the formation of virtue through habit than our present attempts to personalize daily liturgies. We run the risk of DIY spirituality, which is the very thing we want to avoid.

Two quotes from the book illustrate this challenge. One has Comer citing “our vision for a new kind of church,” which he implemented while still a pastor. The other records Comer’s experience of finishing Kallistos Ware’s book on Eastern Orthodoxy: “It felt like coming home.”

These two impulses are at odds with each other. One rethinks church from the ground up; the other receives the church as it is from an authoritative past. The tension between them makes Practicing the Way an unusually resonant and useful resource, even as they quietly pull in different directions.

Consider them as ecclesial types. Is the church the corporate sacrament of salvation, whose liturgy is a foretaste of heaven and whose voice speaks with divine authority? Or is the church the company of disciples, a vanguard of urban contemplatives whose daily life together attests the kingdom of God? To my ears, the second sounds like a kind of spiritual Navy SEALs—elite, ultra, for the special few—whereas the first seems tailormade for normies, deplorables, mediocres, and failures. For the Simon Peters and Sauls, the rich young rulers and Kichijiros.

I’m sure Comer would say this is a false dichotomy: We don’t have to choose between them; that’s just the problem that got us into this mess. He may well be right. But I wonder.

That’s more or less still where I find myself. Note that the tone is diffident. That’s not coyness on my part, or mere kindness toward Comer. I think this is a very difficult question. I’ve benefited enormously from writing on the spiritual disciplines, and fashioning my own Rule of Life on an annual basis throughout my twenties was a crucial spiritual lifeline. I’m an insider to this discussion, not an outsider. (Hence the otherwise glowing review!)

The danger, as I see it, runs in one of two directions. Either we respond to individualistic, self-improvement DIY spirituality with only more of the same; or we so ramp up the criteria and expectations for the Christian life that the only folks remaining in the pews are the virtuous and the heroic—or even a certain personality type: the zealot, the passionate, the neurotic. But notice who’s not there: the loser, the mediocre, the motions-going-through-er, the wheels-spinner, the perpetual relapser, the self-loathing, the nominal, the failure.

In other words, my fears is that Intentionality Discourse is a religion for the thoughtful, the educated, the self-reflective; for readers, thinkers, and doubters; for people who listen to Christian podcasts and who grew up going to church camp (or who converted as adults and are all in). It’s the Pareto Principle, or 80/20 Rule, applied to the church. But instead of admitting that twenty percent of a local congregation does eighty percent of the work, we rhetorically kick the eighty percent out so that the church becomes nothing but the twenty percent. Now we can get down to business with all the slackers out of the way! After all, if you’re not going to do your part, if you’re not all in all the time, then you must not be a real Christian!

The truth, though, is that most people, most of the time, just aren’t like this. Most people, including Christians, are worried about bills to pay and kids to raise and doctors appointments and that weird sound the truck keeps making. They’re not “on fire.” They’re not constantly self-conscious in their faith. They’re just there. They’re just people who believe in Jesus, trying to make ends meet and, in my view heroically, still finding time to give their worries to God in prayer and to make it to church on time.

I’m not suggesting that this, whatever this is, is “enough.” I’m not saying Jesus isn’t calling them, too, to follow him, to take up their cross like all disciples. I’m saying that there is a particular kind of discourse, a way of talking about the gospel and the Christian life, that both reflects and reinforces a specific, local, non-universal sub-group or class of people’s way of being in the world. And it’s not obvious why we should generalize this group’s mode of inhabiting faith to everyone else.

By analogy, consider marriage. For most of history, including church history, people were “just married.” Marriage was not a means to happiness or self-fulfillment. Marriage was successful if you formed a household, weathered the storms of life, raised children, and brought honor to your clan or community. The measure of success wasn’t how you felt about it—which doesn’t mean love or emotions weren’t a part of it, just that they weren’t the social index of the institution’s well-being.

Marriage is different today, at least in our time and place. In some ways that’s simply something we have to accept and work with. But there are ways of indulging the pathologies of this cultural shift, precisely within the church, that exacerbate the problem. When Christians talk about marriage in ways that only ramp up, rather than tamp down, the emotional expectations of young people that this is where personal fulfillment happens (and maybe only here), then we have set up a whole generation of believers for massive disappointment. Yes, we have to talk about “intentionality” in marriage today. But that’s not because “intentionality” is some cross-cultural, much less universal, virtue of “good” Christian marriage. Rather, it’s because the kinds of things many people in our culture expect from marriage call for response and engagement, not withdrawal and silence. Marital duties and obligations today really are different, in some respects, than past Christian marriages. That’s fine. But in responding to these changes we can make the problem worse as much as we might make it better.

So with faith and discipleship. What people need, in my view, are grooves to slide into that are not daily-curated individual choices demanding constant self-conscious reflection. That’s just the problem we’re dealing with. Heavier doses of it are little more than gasoline on the fire.

So the question is: If human psychology and habituated unconscious behavior remain facts about us—if that hasn’t changed since premodern times—how can Christians be “background believing” people in a pluralistic age? I’m riffing here on Richard’s helpful distinction between “background” and “foreground.” I think he’s right about the relevant shifts from Christendom to a secular era. But if it remains true, in spite of all that, that by nature we literally cannot function as always-on “intentional” people, what are we supposed to do? Ever more talk about intentionality isn’t going to get the job done. We need some spiritual automaticities humming away beneath the hood when we aren’t thinking—which is most of the time.

Even here and now in the twenty-first century West, this is actually how many people still operate, including religious people. Many people, maybe most, cannot not live this way. Most of your daily rhythms must be unchosen, unconscious, unintentional—in the strict sense. I don’t know if I could live for five minutes fully and utterly “on” about “everything.” And I’m a neurotic egghead stuck, all too often, inside his own psychodramas! I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy. It can’t be the solution.

And to be clear, this has very little to do with high versus low church or Protestant versus Catholic. Contra Richard, this isn’t an oedipal reflex—i.e., if we only had the divine liturgy forming us, then we’d be fine. Richard’s, Greg’s, and my shared ecclesial upbringing (Churches of Christ) was the cream of the crop at training believers, old and young, in a broad set of “givens” that functioned as theological nonnegotiables for everyone in the community. Talk about an Aristotelian tradition. The CoC habituates you all right. No need for pope, creed, or mass. The local congregation’s got it covered.

So that’s not quite what I’m getting at. Nor is the issue the language of volition or intention. I don’t think popular talk about “intentionality” shares much substantive content with technical theological definitions of the will and intention. “Intentionality,” as actually used in sermons and lessons and popular Christian writing, has much more to do with stepping back from one’s life, assessing it, making plans and goals, and being self-consciously purposeful rather than “mindless” or “automatic” in one’s daily spiritual walk with Christ. In practice, hence, it has much less to do with the kinds of things Richard rightly commends: obeying the teachings of Christ, setting one’s heart on the Lord, directing one’s attention to the Spirit. These are biblical commands and activities that pertain to all believers but remain distinct in important ways from what pastors and writers mean by “intentionality.”

Here are some ways of putting the difference. I can kiss my wife on the way out the door or I can do so as part of a written plan. I can hug my kids before they leave for school or I can think about it as I do so. I can tell my brother I love him or I can stand outside myself, noting clinically whether I feel anything as I say it. I can pray with my student or I can mean to pray with him (whether or not I ever get around to it). Perhaps I only move to pray with him if I muster sufficient sincerity within myself beforehand.

In short, am I commanded to follow Christ? Or am I commanded to maintain a continuous stream of conscious thoughts about following Christ as I follow him? In his book Decreation Paul Griffiths imagines heaven as a perpetual liturgy in which we are freed to worship God without subjective self-awareness. That is, we remain the agents and selves we are, but we are liberated from the prison of the inner theater and its endless dramas of the self on the stage, and in this freedom we are able fully, finally, and utterly to give our selves, to give our hearts and minds, our ears and eyes, to the Lord in his glory as the satisfaction of our souls’ desire. And we do so exactly because we aren’t thinking about ourselves; because we aren’t self-conscious. Self-consciousness, for Griffiths, is an artifact of the Fall. Our healing entails remaining conscious without self-consciousness.

Yet we are not less free in heaven. We are more free. So here on earth, granting our pilgrim state. Even if intentionality, for some of us, is a necessary tool, it is a limited tool meant to get us somewhere else. Saints are not intentional, whether or not they ever were. They climbed the ladder and kicked it over once they got to the top. Intentionality may—again, for some of us—be a means to maturity in a secular age, but it isn’t maturity as such. Maturity is where we’re going, not where we start or where we’re headed. And as both Peter Maurin and Jean Daniélou emphasized in their writing, we want our communities to be places where being good—praying, worshiping, following Christ—is easier, not harder. Why take secularism for granted? Why let it set the terms of what we’re working for in our churches? Perhaps what Stanley Hauerwas once called “peasant Christianity” is actually far more possible, far closer to realization, than we’ve assumed. I don’t like the language of turning back the clock or putting the genie back in the bottle. It’s true that we have to work with what we have, when and where we have it. But all too often we take for granted contingent conditions subject to change. They aren’t immovable. The Overton Window is not set in stone. Let’s name the desired destination, irrespective of our context, and then see what it might take, within our context, to get there.

That might take some intentionality(!) on the part of some of us: leaders, writers, thinkers. But as a general formula for normies, I’m not so sure.

Pluribus

1. Pluribus, as my wife pointed out two or three episodes in, is about large language models and AI chatbots. Trivially omniscient, endlessly affirming, your number-one biggest fan—yet undiscriminating about truth or beauty, and finally empty on the inside.

2. Pluribus is about collectivism, and not only its downsides but also its very real appeal to people who feel isolated, alone, and lonely.

3. Pluribus is about Covid lockdowns.

4. Pluribus is about globalism and the way that the tentacles of capitalism eventually reach everywhere and everyone. No one and nothing is untouched. “Choice” is superficially valued but ultimately weak and powerless. And the result is absolute sameness, no matter where you happen to visit while jet-setting around the world.

5. Pluribus is about asymmetrical multiculturalism: local and particular for thee but not for me. The beautiful village, with its unique language, location, song, dress, and festivity, all of it falls away the moment the young girl “chooses” to join the Others. She smiles, the songs stop at once, and everyone walks away. It was a show. It was a sham. It was a Potemkin village.

6. Pluribus is about popular art—romantasy and erotic fan fiction—versus real art, enduring art, the kind of work produced by a singular artist following her vision rather than her patrons, i.e. “fandom.”

7. Pluribus is about extremes of notional peace. Pacifism and veganism are subtly transformed by taking the unwillingness to kill to its logical conclusion: the willingness to die rather than to make another living being of any kind suffer. (Which makes the absence of birth and babies all the more telling. Will the next season reveal whether the Others are willing to procreate?)

8. Pluribus is about postlapsarian life and whether it is worth preserving if it cannot be reverted to its (actual or merely imagined) prelapsarian form. It is also, therefore, about suicide.

9. Pluribus is about the ethics and epistemology of evangelism. If you possessed the best news in the whole universe, the secret to invincible happiness, what would you be willing to do to give it to others? And if, by contrast, you thought this news was bad, not good, what would you do about it? And how could either group, insulated from the other, know who was right?

10. Pluribus is about what makes life worth living. Which means in the final accounting that Pluribus is about God.

11. Pluribus is a horror movie whose horror is entirely moral, psychological, and emotional. Nobody wants to hurt you. Nobody wants you to be unhappy. On the contrary. And just that is the essence of the horror.

12. Pluribus is a lost X-Files bottle episode, an unfilmed script for the Twilight Zone, an unwritten what-if B-movie idea from the 1970s stretched out into a multi-season prestige series. It’s anti-prestige TV.

13. Pluribus is about the worst person you know being the last person on earth. It’s Matheson’s I Am Legend, only the vampires want your soul, not your flesh. If the future of the human race came down to this woman, this maddening, selfish, ungrateful, unhappy person, could you cheer for her? Would you want her to win? What if you were her? What would it take? Is she capable of change? Are you?

14. Pluribus is about Scarface becoming Mr. Chips. It’s Vince Gilligan’s sci-fi epic about a bad woman breaking good.

Narnia and the seven deadly sins

My brother Mitch East recently floated a theory: that each of the Narnia books is concerned with one of the seven deadly sins. So far he has written up three books:

• The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe —> gluttony

• The Horse and His Boy —> pride

• The Magician’s Nephew —> lust (=curiosity)

That leaves four books, and here is where he and I have landed for now:

• Prince Caspian —> envy

• The Voyage of the Dawn Treader —> greed

• The Silver Chair —> sloth

• The Last Battle —> wrath

Keep reading Mitch’s Substack for further exploration of these four. We’re both open to evidence for and against. It’s mostly just a fun exercise. And it’s his pet theory, I’m just along for the ride.

As an extra bonus, see how the books and sins line up with the seven planets of Michael Ward’s theory (I’ve not read the book, but here’s a helpful post with a great chart I’ve cribbed from):

1. LWW —> gluttony —> Jupiter/Zeus —> geometry, joy, joviality, royalty

2. PC —> envy —> Mars/Ares —> music, war, courage, cruelty, the sword

3. VDT —> greed —> Sol/Apollo —> arithmetic, generosity, liberty, liberality, clarity, light

4. SC —> sloth —> Luna/Selene —> grammar, lunacy, confusion, inconstancy, doubt

5. HHB —> pride —> Mercury/Hermes/Odin —> dialectics, quicksilver, haste, language, union, marriage

6. MN —> lust —> Venus/Aphrodite/Ishtar —> rhetoric, sex, love, beauty, creativity, springtime

7. LB —> wrath —> Saturn/Chronos —> astronomy, time, death, disaster, silence, old age

Some of these, it seems to me, clearly fit: LWW, VDT, SC, and MN. I’m torn on envy and wrath for PC and LB or vice versa. I leave that question to Mitch and to others. Perhaps readers have toyed with this theory before us! Let us know.

My latest: on pastors and biomedical ethics, in CT

This morning I have a column in Christianity Today called “So What If the Bible Doesn’t Mention Embryo Screening?” It’s about the kinds of moral and theological questions raised by new technologies that are not directly or explicitly addressed in Scripture, and thus the kinds of intervention and teaching demanded of pastors for the sake of ordinary believers’ guidance in difficult decisions, and the general silence or unpreparedness everywhere in evidence today.

I tried to thread the needle. I’m sure readers will let me know whether or not I succeeded.

More silly scientism

Here are the opening five paragraphs of Robert P. Baird’s review of Ross Douthat’s book Believe for The New York Review of Books (emphases mine):

There’s a view of the human situation that goes something like this: 14 billion years ago, give or take, the universe exploded into being. The Big Bang didn’t create everything, but it did provide everything necessary to create everything else: a collection of immutable physical laws, a hot soup of subatomic particles, an unthinkably vast quantity of energy. After 10 billion or so years of expansion and cooling, the universe contained some trillion trillion stars, and at least as many planets. Around that time, on one of those planets orbiting one of those stars, a random series of chemical reactions produced self-replicating molecules. Chemistry made way for biology as four billion years of further chance developments generated a bewildering diversity of living organisms. Eventually one of those organisms, a bipedal primate with small teeth and a prominent chin, developed the capacity for complex language and abstract thought. This species called itself Homo sapiens, the wise man, but this was only puffery, the illusory boast of an apex predator at the extremely temporary peak of its powers.

Allowing for some rather drastic approximations, the understanding of humanity that I’ve just sketched is the mainstream scientific view. It is not a complete view, in that it cannot tell us why or whence the universe leapt into being. It is, nonetheless, persuasive. Part of what makes it persuasive is that it does so much with so little. It doesn’t need gods or djinni or demonic demiurges to explain why the sun shines, or ice floats, or death comes for everyone. All it requires are some basic principles of biology, chemistry, and physics. Mostly what it needs is math.

The scientific view is not necessarily hostile to morality. Nothing about it prevents you from living as though your decisions mattered and your life had meaning. Ours is not a universe, even in the most flagrantly materialist interpretation, in which you cannot believe in justice, or mercy, or patriotism, or friendship. You are welcome to insist that might shouldn’t make right, or to abhor tyranny and climate change. Nothing in the naturalistic view says you can’t assert, as loudly and as often as you choose, that every person has an inalienable basic dignity.

Yet it is also true that this view of things makes it ridiculous—literally laughable—to speak seriously about human significance. It is ridiculous because, in the universe described by science, there is no such thing as human significance. Not just to a first approximation but to a five hundredth, nothing that any one of us does, not even everything all of us have done since the dawn of the species, matters in the slightest. This is not only a question of scale. The same epistemological parsimony that makes science so persuasive also rules out, in principle, any kind of metaphysics that might give our lives durable meaning.

We might feel as though the experience of love offers access to something eternal. We might insist that a genocide must not count for nothing. We might claim that our faith in democracy, or the class struggle, or the human project writ large needs no transcendental grounding. But science keeps the score. It tells us that all of our philosophy, all of our politics, all of our religion, all of our art is no different—except, perhaps, in its tragicomic pretensions—from the flashes of instinct that attract butterflies to horse manure. To the extent that we want to talk about a purpose for our lives, the most that science will allow is that we exist to satisfy the second law of thermodynamics, which is to say, to hasten the heat death of the universe.

To even the most casual reader, it is obvious that the assertion—it isn’t an argument—found in these paragraphs is a petitio principii: one long exercise in begging the question. For that reason, every conclusion the author draws from his premises is a non sequitur. Not only do his confident pronouncements not follow from his claims; they are not even logically connected to them. He simply presumes what he aims to prove and then walks the compass of the circle until he arrives where he began.

It is true that, if science is the measure of significance, then humans are not significant. But there is no reason to accept that premise, and it is not defended here, and it is certainly not analytic in the concept of science. Science does not “allow” anything, nor does it “keep the score” of meaning. The “view of the human situation” outlined in the opening paragraph is perfectly compatible, for instance, with a classical Christian metaphysics of God and creation. To suppose otherwise is, as David Bentley Hart once remarked of Adam Gopnik, to “enjoy[] an understanding of philosophical tradition that is something less than luxuriant.” It may or may not be true that the world as contemporary science describes it points to or demonstrates the truth of this metaphysics. But to suggest that it “rules out, in principle, any kind of metaphysics that might give our lives durable meaning” is absurd.

What is significance, anyway? Is it literal size? Is it scale? So that the nature of significance is … sheer bigness? On this view, I suppose, a piece of wood measuring two-by-four must be more significant than a piece of wood measuring one-by-two. Or perhaps the measure is age, so that a six-year-old dog is twice as significant as a three-year-old dog. (And perhaps if the first dog is larger than the second, then it is four times as significant.)

Are we done with this nonsense yet? This style of scientism was dispensed with long ago. Why does it return with such brio? The silliness is self-evident, yet august publications lay it out with solemn munificence. Are we to be grateful for the enlightenment? Or is the sermon solely for the choir? Surely we have better things to argue about, or rather, better arguments to be hashing out out—including between believers and nonbelievers.

But to return to Baird: How long would an individual human or the species as a whole have to endure, how expansive would its footprint on the universe have to be, for his measures to count humanity as at least a little significant? Is Bairdian significance counted in numbers at all? One to ten? Or is it by color, green and red, white or black? Or maybe a plain binary, thumbs up or down. (Siskel and Ebert review the human race! Turns out this ticket’s not worth punching, sorry to say.)

Contrary to this whole futile exercise, why shouldn’t it be the case, precisely on scientific premises or on any other, that an absolutely unique eventuality—I mean life on earth, a rational animal, all our philosophy and politics and religion and art—alone in all of cosmic time, across the entire universe, from the Big Bang till the heat death of the universe is, as such, the very definition of significance? So that nothing else is significant, if this is not? So that whatever else might be significant is necessarily measured by this, that is to say, by us, homo sapiens, the human species?

Besides that point—which to me is entirely obvious, but part of the point is that it is arguable, whereas Baird presumes it is settled by something called “science”—consider this: Christians confess that a member of the human species, a Jewish stonemason from Galilee who was executed outside Jerusalem by order of a Roman prefect when Tiberius was Caesar, is one and the same as the God and Creator of the world. The word we give to this (likewise unique) phenomenon is incarnation.

Now “science” has and can have nothing to say about the incarnation. It is not a scientific claim at all. One does not test the DNA of Jesus for divine paternity. The claim is theological, which is to say it is metaphysical. About the incarnation “science” stops its mouth. The scientists have nothing to say either way. Their measurements measure nothing here. The claim may not be true, but “science,” for all its epistemic parsimony, cannot and will not be the means by which we discover its truth or falsehood.

The upshot, moreover, is that if it is true, if it were true, it would, all by itself, apart from anything else that might happen or have happened in earthly or cosmic history, establish once and for all the decisive, undeniable, and unsurpassable significance of the human race. On any reasonable ledger, it’s fair to say, God becoming flesh counts as pretty damn significant.

Hey, I started a newsletter!

A little over a year ago, at the outset of December 2024, I started a newsletter. I’ve kept it on the down low this year because I wanted to get the hang of it—and I wanted to see whether I’d be able to keep it up.

The goal was simple: A monthly update on my work, with news, announcements, and links to publications, podcasts, and blog posts, plus a round-up of what I’ve been reading. Fortunately, I already had a list of email addresses from my old Blogger site (RIP), and I’d been soliciting readers’ emails at the bottom of this website’s home page since it went live in 2022—although to what end, I’d never decided.

So I sent a sample newsletter last December, then began the monthly schedule in January of this year. This morning I sent my eleventh and final newsletter of 2025. Really it was ten newsletters across twelve thirty-ish day periods, but either way, I’ll call year one a success. The practice has become regular and reliable enough that I feel comfortable advertising it to readers.

So in this season of appeals for money, hear this modest one: Sign up for my (FREE) monthly newsletter today!

If you sign up, you’ll get nothing more or less than a monthly update on my work—amounting, most likely, to ten or so total newsletters per year. Your subscription helps me to reach readers directly in the age of Substack and Twitter (and Instagram and BookTok) and thus enables to me to show publishers that I do, in fact, have an audience.

Sign up below: just add your email address, click the button, and you’ll get the next newsletter in about a month. Beneath the sign-up button I have links to each of last year’s newsletters arranged by month, if you’re curious as to what will be showing up in your inbox.

I’ll repeat once more: If you like my work, subscribe today!

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2025: out of touch

A few things came together in 2025 that finally certified something I’d not quite realized: I’m officially out of touch. With pop culture, that is. With pop culture that is popular with teens and twentysomethings, to be precise.

First, I turned forty. Second, I deleted the web browser from my phone. Third, I’ve not been on Twitter or Facebook in years, and I’ve never been on Instagram or TikTok. Fourth, I don’t have YouTube on my phone—I did not, until a couple years back, realize that YouTube “was” an app to have on one’s phone, akin to email or ESPN or Spotify—and on my laptop I don’t power-use it for videos, news, podcasts, or entertainment. For men my age I’m probably in the bottom ten percent of YouTube users: I go to it for how to fix something in my house or car, or to watch a new movie trailer. Occasionally a friend sends a link. That’s about it. Besides those incidental uses (not even purposeful, just the fact of the matter), YouTube might as well not exist for me.

On top of all that, even though I’m fairly well versed in movies in general, and in TV to an extent, I don’t actually watch that much newly released material. I know more about David Lean or David Lynch than I do the latest prestige HBO or Netflix series. And if it’s an arthouse film, nine times out of ten I’ll see it, if I ever do, months or years after its release date.

Although all this is a wonderfully welcome development—being out of touch is a happy place to inhabit—it’s relatively new for me. Growing up, I was always “in the know.” I subscribed to magazines and read pop culture websites with religious zeal. I hated to feel out of the loop.

Now, because my children are Gen Alpha, my students are Gen Z, and a few of my Millennial friends aren’t out of touch, I find more and more that I have to respond to references, allusions, and topics of conversation with a simple “I don’t know who that is.” And I love it. I’m fading ever more out of any kind of active awareness of “youth” popular culture, somewhat by choice, mostly by circumstance. It’s purging me of silliness by the day.

Just this year, for example:

• I saw the name “SZA” and, in front of in-the-know others, pronounced it phonetically by saying each letter in a row. I was swiftly corrected.

• I was also educated about who Sydney Sweeney is, since I (still) have never seen her in an actual film or TV show. That wasn’t intentional, but maybe I should see how long the streak can last?

• A friend referred to someone called “Theo Vonn.” Never heard of him. Another mentioned someone called “Michael Knowles.” Ditto. Neither friend could believe my ignorance. It’s sincere! They filled me in, but I’ve already forgotten what they said.

• I’ve never listened to Joe Rogan. I do know he’s popular. Good for him!

• Just this week I asked a room full of adults: “Who is ‘Ms. Rachel’?” They looked at me with astonishment. The question was honest! Never heard of her.

• I’m told there are members of the Kardashian clan—I do know who they are—whose last name is not Kardashian. I did not know who they were, or that they existed. I also did not know what was most important, namely, who they were dating.

• What TV shows have I not watched, am I not watching? The Bear, House of the Dragon, Fallout, Industry, Bridgerton, Task, White Lotus, Paradise, The Last of Us, Hacks, The Studio, Shrinking, Landman, Shogun, Adolescence, The Rehearsal, The Chair Company, The Righteous Gemstones, Your Friends and Neighbors, Nobody Wants This, Presumed Innocent—and all the others I don’t know enough to list. I have no plans to give time to these shows, and if I do, it’ll be because I think they’ll repay it, not because doing so will provide a boost in social cachet.

• If my life depended on identifying even one under-thirty female pop star I would almost certainly die on the spot.

• Even in the realm of politics, with which I keep up mostly through reading and somewhat through podcasts, I find myself increasingly adrift. Reading Rolf Dobelli’s Stop Reading the News had a lasting impact on me. Friends are referencing “breaking” news items—names, events, scandals—and I’m discovering the pleasures of a blank face in response.

In sum, the circumference of my world is contracting significantly, and I’ve never felt better. All our knowledge has limits, and I’ve been been one of Tyler Cowen’s so-called “infovores” for far too long. It’s not good for you. It’s not good for me. It’s not what any of us were made for. I have a wife, children, friends, neighbors, parents, brothers, nephews, nieces, godchildren, mentors, students, and colleagues. I read and write books and essays for a living. My chosen field is theology, than which nothing could be further from Zoomer pop culture relevance. Given a choice, I’d rather know more about Saint Irenaeus or Nicholas of Cusa or Homer or Confucius or Fr. Huc or Pascal or P. D. James or Second-Temple Judaism or Hesychasm than about (let me Google real quick) Olivia Rodrigo, Olivia Dean, Billie Eilish, or Chappell Roan.

My life is full, in other words, and its fullness is threatened, not expanded, by taking time I lack to snack on pop culture’s perpetual empty calories.

The danger for the old (for those getting older) is that this loss of organic in-touch-ness is felt as a loss. It’s not. To be sure, the lie of our culture is that “everyone” of a certain age is intimately familiar with pop culture, when that notion is far from the truth. Plenty of home-schooled and religiously conservative Zoomers have no idea who any of these people are: they don’t watch them on TikTok or YouTube, they don’t listen to them in the car, they don’t stream their shows or movies. And others, who do engage in all those media, don’t care. Instead, they like sports, or epic fantasy novels, or restoring old cars, or playing endless hours of MMORPGs. There is no generic default Gen Z twenty-five-year-old. We do not have a monoculture, if we ever did.

Nonetheless it can feel like we did, and we do, and that it is therefore a loss to be out of touch with it. But as I say, it is not a loss, for three simple reasons. First, you can’t know everything, and it isn’t worth trying. Second, you should like what you like, what seems good or desirable or beautiful in itself, not to an imaginary younger digital neighbor. Why outsource your enjoyments to the undeveloped tastes of the immature and foolish? Chasing relevance is an exercise in the worst kind of Zeitgeist swift-widowhood.

Third and finally, youth-obsessed pop culture is intrinsically and necessarily superficial. It’s good to be released from its appeal, even if against your will. It’s good not to know. It’s good to be out of touch. It’s a kind of freedom. The easiest way to achieve it is technological: the more apps, platforms, and devices you delete or remove from your life, the less likely “the latest thing” will find you. You’ll move, ever so slowly, from faux knowledge to happy ignorance.

It happened to me. I woke up and I … just … didn’t know what was going on around me. Like a man startled out of a coma, I was delivered into a sort of ambient cultural apophasis. And from now on my aim is to keep it that way.

2025: pods, talks, travel, etc.

This year I traveled more for work more than I ever have in the past. I gave talks, lectures, classes, and at least one sermon in five different states (Florida, Washington, Illinois, Oklahoma, and Texas), plus another country (Canada). I also got to spend a week in Pittsburgh, my first time, for a mix of a grant meeting at Grove City College and a retreat for CT writers near Carnegie Mellon. And besides the travel, I recorded a total of twenty-one podcasts, thirteen of which were for Mere Fidelity.

The coming year looks to have more of the same: on top of stops in and around the great state of Texas—including Laity Lodge!—I’ll be in North Carolina, New Jersey, Wisconsin, and Colorado, plus a pilgrimage abroad with friends. The pods will continue (although we’re on a bit of a hiatus right now). And in a happy development, we (i.e., the fam) have begun checking off national parks: Big Bend in 2023; Rocky Mountain, Zion, and Grand Canyon in 2024; and Wind Cave, Grand Tetons, and Glacier in 2025—with Carlsbad, Tetons (again), and Yellowstone set for 2026.

I don’t think we’ll ever top this summer’s trip, though. In August, one week before our kids went back to school, we pulled into town on the last of a fourteen-day road trip north-northwest, in which we hit a total of ten states, plus the Canadian side of Glacier. (Having never been to Canada before, I visited three times between October 2024 and August 2025: Toronto, Vancouver, and Alberta.)

In short, what a year! What a few years. And God willing, it’ll be another great one.

Head over to the podcast page for a complete list of episodes, with the most recent ones first. And below, in order, are the talks and lectures I gave by location and date.

• “Spiritual Formation in a Digital Age,” University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, February 12, 2025.

• “From Scripture to Scrolling: How to Be a Christian in a Digital World,” Whitworth University, Spokane, WA, February 19, 2025.

• “Anxious Generations,” Memorial Road Church of Christ, Edmond, OK, March 5, 2025.

• “Why the Church is the Reason God Created the Universe,” The Church of St. John the Divine, Houston, TX, April 9, 2025.

• “Digital Discipleship in an AI-Driven World,” Christian Scholars’ Conference, Abilene, TX, June 4, 2025.

• “The Future of Catechesis of the Bible in Churches of Christ” and “Response to Reviews of The Church,” Christian Scholars’ Conference, Abilene, TX, June 5, 2025.

• “The Sanctuary of the Spirit of God,” Regent College, Vancouver, Canada, June 10, 2025.

• “A Theological Case for Techno-Pessimism,” online webinar, Chesterton House at Cornell University, October 27, 2025.

• “Lessons for Figural Reading from Saint Thomas on Isaiah,” plenary lecture, conference on Saint Thomas’s commentary on Isaiah, Mundelein Seminary, Mundelein, IL, November 7, 2025.

2025: blogging

This year I published a total of forty-two blog posts (at least before I started doing my 2025 recaps), exactly half of which were nothing more than links to pieces published elsewhere. In other words, across twelve months I wrote a whopping number of twenty-one “real” posts for this blog, by far the fewest since re-starting it in the summer of 2017, when I moved to Abilene to start teaching.

By comparison, I published eighty-three blog posts in 2024, seventy in 2023, and just over one hundred in 2022. That’s a continuous, steady, sizable drop!

Moreover, I blogged a respectable eight times between January and March, then—besides a single post on July 3—I did not write up a new “real” blog post (=more than a link to an essay published elsewhere) until the week of Thanksgiving. That post is called: “Why I’ve Not Been Blogging.”

In short, between April and November this blog nearly died, y’all.

Since Thanksgiving, however, I’ve posted more than a dozen times, and I feel like I’ve gotten my groove back. Part of that is because my bottleneck of commitments and deadlines finally opened up, and I gained some more time for unpaid, purposeless, free-form writing. Part of it, too, is that I recommitted myself to blogging, even if not a soul on earth reads it. It’s just good for me to get some of these half-baked ideas out of my head, if not out into other heads, whether they’re about movies or authors or tech or church. As I’ve said many times, the micro blog is for micro blogging (not tweeting) and essays and reviews are for long-form, “official” writing, which leaves this space for mezzo blogging. I just need to give it twenty minutes a day and it’ll take care of itself.

I hope and expect more of the same in 2026. Below you’ll find links to what little I did write here in the past twelve months.

*

Theology

1. Read together or die alone

2. Evangelical gentrification

3. Biblicist churches that don’t read the Bible

4. The solas don’t imply each other

5. A statement of faith is not a creed

Technology

1. On the phone with Google

2. Carr, Sacasas, and eloquent reality

3. Robert Farrar Capon on God, matter, wine, and things

4. Browser-less

5. Tech exit, pro and con

Reading, Writing, Academia

1. Three types of Christian higher ed

2. The ten-plus authors club

3. Simon Leys

4. The C. S. Lewis test

TV & Film

1. Toward a definition of Dad TV

2. Scorsese

3. DiCaprio

4. “Another great year for movies”

5. CGI animals

6. Wake Up Dead Man (—> more thoughts)

My latest: Christmas (in CT) and Kingsnorth (in Commonweal)

Merry Christmas Eve!

I’ve got two final pieces to share for the year 2025. The first is a reflection in Christianity Today on what the birth of Christ reveals to us about God; the second is a review in Commonweal of Paul Kingsnorth’s new book Against the Machine.

The former, in more detail, is a meditation on how the incarnation, especially in Bethlehem, shows us the classical divine attributes, rather than their converse. The latter is an appreciation of Kingsnorth’s thought, work, and writing over the years, proposing his particular combination of essays, poems, and fiction as a worthy successor to Wendell Berry—before concluding with a negative verdict on the book itself. I love Kingsnorth, but in the end the book doesn’t work. I’ll read the next one though. And I’m glad it’s expanded his reach to a new and wider audience. I’m especially excited for a new novel, should it come.

2025: writing

As best I can tell, I published thirty total pieces this year: three in academic journals, twelve essays and reviews in ten different magazines, and fifteen columns for Christianity Today. That comes to about two and a half per month, or a little over one every other week.

That number’s going to come down in 2026. It’s the result of a sixteen-month sabbatical from teaching, and it doesn’t even count the talks and lectures, the travel, the podcasts, and the things I wrote that won’t be published for another month or two. Plus the grant application, and the book proposal, and the …, and the …

In a word, I over-committed heading back into the fall semester, and I’m intentionally trying to cut back as the spring approaches. We’ll see if I’m successful.

For now, here’s what I wrote in 2025.

*

Academic

“Stephen Fowl and Theological Interpretation: Retrospect and Prospect,” Journal of Theological Interpretation 19:1 (2025): 130–36. Link here.

 Frances M. Young, Doctrine and Scripture in Early Christianity, Vol. 1 (Scripture, the Genesis of Doctrine) and Vol. 2 (Scripture in Doctrinal Dispute), in The Heythrop Journal 66:6 (2025): 654–656. Link here.

Philip G. Ziegler, God’s Adversary and Ours: A Brief Theology of the Devil, in Modern Theology (forthcoming). Early access here.

Essays and Reviews

A Future Worthy of Life (Mere Orthodoxy, 7 January 2025). Reflections on Houellebecq, decadence, and dystopian fiction, with an assist from P. D. James.

How to Raise Readers, in Thirty-Five Steps (Front Porch Republic, 31 January 2025). What it sounds like. In my view, my “funnest” piece of the year.

Generation Autodidact (Mockingbird, 12 February 2025). In which I admit how little I’ve read, and try not to be embarrassed about it.

Luddite Pedagogy (Chronicle of Higher Education, 3 April 2025). There are dozens of us!

Goldilocks Protestantism (First Things, 4 April 2025). Probably my most-read piece of the year, at least based on feedback from friends, emails from strangers, and essays written in response to it.

Low Church in High Places (The Public Discourse, 21 May 2025). A follow-up or companion piece to the First Things essay on Protestantism.

Lexicon for the Phenomenon (The Hedgehog Review, 3 July 2025). My aliens essay. This one didn’t seem to get the traction I’d hoped it would. Oh well.

The Stickiness of Religion (The Lamp, 11 July 2025). My attempt to be just to a good book while skeptical of some of the methodological assumptions of the author’s academic discipline.

No Love Lost for Heretics (Los Angeles Review of Books, 30 July 2025). Come for the summaries, stay for the criticisms.

Politics for Losers (First Things, September 2025). If I had to choose, I think this is the best written thing I published this year. I’m happy that, even though Phil disagreed with most of my criticisms, he thought it was fair.

The Connector (Arc, 9 October 2025). This is the one I worked on the hardest. Turns out profiles aren’t easy! With help, I think it turned out all right.

Keeping the Faith (Chronicle of Higher Education, 23 October 2025). This one seemed to vanish into the mist, but I’m really proud of it. A tough book to review.

Christianity Today

A Little Book About a Little Word That Contains the World (4 February 2025). A review of Wesley Hill’s book about Easter.

Ross Douthat Bets on Belief (11 February 2025). A review of Douthat’s book on religion.

Baptism Is Not Optional (18 March 2025). A 3,000-word invitation to evangelicals to have a higher, sacramental view of baptism.

Christians Are Conspiracy Theorists (2 April 2025). An attempted intervention in the conspiracy theory discourse.

How Dude Perfect Won Me Over (28 April 2025). A fun little candy bar of a column.

Finally, a Tech Book That Doesn’t Pull Punches (3 June 2025). A review of Clare Morell’s new book on teens and smartphones.

Just Say No to Online Church (10 June 2025). A critical review of a new book commending hybrid worship. Probably the most negative thing I’ve ever written.

The God Who Must Not Be Named (1 July 2025). A plea for gentile Christians to stop enunciating YHWH aloud in Christian worship and preaching.

Put Down the Shofar (4 August 2025). A plea for gentile Christians to cease and desist from ethno-religious cosplay.

Hating Hitler Is Not Enough (12 August 2025). A review of Alec Ryrie’s new book.

The Bible Is About Jesus—But Not Jesus Without His Bride (26 August 2025). A review of Jonathan Linebaugh’s new book on Scripture.

The Way We Debate Atonement Is a Mess (16 September 2025). An effort at mediating the PSA wars. I think it threads the needle, but I leave that to others.

You Don’t Have to Be Radical (7 October 2025). A letter to my younger self. I’m not a funny writer, but one line in here made my editor laugh out loud.

In Netflix’s ‘Frankenstein,’ Monster Is More Compelling Than Maker (11 November 2025). A review of Guillermo del Toro’s new film.

In Bethlehem, God Chose What Is Weak to Shame the Strong (16 December 2025). A reading of Christmas as a revelation of classical divine attributes.

2025: reading

This is my fifth annual post recapping my year in reading. If you go back and read past year-end posts (see 2024, 2023, 2022, and 2021), you’ll see an annual theme: frustration that I can’t seem to break past a certain limit of books read per year. I’d like to be in the 120-160 range, but I find myself stuck at 80-120. In line with that trend, I read fewer books this year than any in the last fifteen years—and I didn’t teach until September! If I can’t read more in a year like this, I’ll never do it; or so it feels, at any rate.

Maybe if I just stop setting the goal, it’ll happen on its own. Or not. Oh well.

As for what I did read, it was another eclectic year. Fiction was low, but the tech and nonfiction genres held some real highlights. I continue making discoveries of magnificent authors I’d never even heard of before. In that spirit I hope this list might introduce other readers to some of them for the first time as well.

(A reminder: The following is not a list of all that I read this year, just the books I enjoyed the most, organized by category.)

*

Poetry

Next to nothing, except for Virgil’s Eclogues and Wendell Berry’s This Day: Collected and New Sabbath Poems (2013).

Fiction

8. Mick Herron, Clown Town (2025). A good back half, and an unexpected ending, but I’m starting to sour on (reading) this series. More thoughts here.

7. Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (1992). I did not “like” this book—no more than I “liked” Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984)—but I’m glad I read it, and no one can deny Stephenson’s prescience.

6. P. D. James, The Taste for Death (1986). It’s not a complete year without one more Adam Dalgleish mystery crossed through. At this rate I won’t have any more James to read once I hit my fifties. I guess I’ll have to re-read them all!

5. Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun (2021). This one crushed me.

4. Robin Sloan, Moonbound (2024). A continuous pleasant surprise from start to finish.

3. Michael Ende, The Neverending Story (1979). My final read of the year, but a pure delight so far.

2. Ted Chiang, Story of Your Life and Others (2002) + Exhalation: Stories (2019).

1. George Saunders, The Tenth of December: Stories (2013). My first. Not my last.

Christian (popular)

8. Myles Werntz, Contesting the Body of Christ: Ecclesiology’s Revolutionary Century (2025).

7. Wesley Hill, Easter: The Season of the Resurrection of Jesus (2025). Review here. I read not only Wes’s book but also the rest of the published series so far, all of which are wonderful.

6. Ross Douthat, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious (2025). Review here.

5. Jonathan Linebaugh, The Well That Washes What It Shows: An Invitation to Holy Scripture (2025). Review here.

4. David I. Smith, Everyday Christian Teaching: A Guide to Practicing Faith in the Classroom (2025). Smith’s sterling reputation had me suspicious, but he overcame my doubts. A lovely read.

3. John W. Kleinig, The Lord’s Supper: A Guide to the Heavenly Feast (2025).

2. Leah Libresco Sargeant, The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto (2025). Review and profile here.

1. Bobby Jamieson, Everything Is Never Enough: Ecclesiastes' Surprising Path to Resilient Happiness (2025). I read this in galley form before 2025, but I couldn’t count it last year, since it hadn’t come out yet. So I’ve revised this post on Christmas Eve to update my rankings accordingly. Read my blurb here.

Theology (academic)

8. John F. Boyle, Aquinas on Scripture: A Primer (2023). A model of lucid explanatory prose; it helped immensely as I read through Saint Thomas’s Commentary on Isaiah for the first time this fall.

7. Jonathan Rowlands, Befriending Scripture: Sideways Glances at a Theology of Reading (2025). Blurb here.

6. Ryan Darr, The Best Effect: Theology and the Origins of Consequentialism (2023).

5. Philip Ziegler, God’s Adversary and Ours: A Brief Theology of the Devil (2025). Review here.

4. Frances Young, Doctrine and Scripture in Early Christianity, Volumes 1-2 (2023–24). Review here.

3. David Bentley Hart, The Light of Tabor: Toward a Monistic Christology (2025) + Lewis Ayres, Christological Hellenism: A Melancholy Proposal (2024).

2. Judith Wolfe, The Theological Imagination: Perception and Interpretation in Life, Art, and Faith (2024). Theological scholarship at the top of its class. Wolfe is among the best “younger” theologians writing today.

1. Paul T. Sloan, Jesus and the Law of Moses: The Gospels and the Restoration of Israel within First-Century Judaism (2025) + Jason A. Staples, Paul and the Resurrection of Israel: Jews, Former Gentiles, Israelites (2024). I love good biblical scholarship, and these two volumes are outstanding; read them as a pair and they’re even better.

Technology

9. Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Thread of Big Tech (2017).

8. John Dyer, People of the Screen: How Evangelicals Created the Digital Bible and How It Shapes Their Reading of Scripture (2022).

7. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance (2025). I’m anti-anti-Klein and anti-anti-abundance. I don’t get the vitriol or the mockery.

6. Clare Morell, The Tech Exit: A Practical Guide to Freeing Kids and Teens from Smartphones (2025). Review here.

5. Byung-Chul Han, The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present (2020).

4. Matthew Ball, The Metaverse: Building the Spatial Internet (2025). Ball is way too credulous, even a hype man, but he’s also an expert surveyor, synthesizer, and hand-holder.

3. Tom Bissell, Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter (2010). I secretly love to read video game criticism, and no one’s better than Bissell. But so far neither he nor anyone else has persuaded me to take it seriously as an art form except theoretically. Maybe one day I’ll be won over. Either way, these essays were worth the time.

2. Hartmut Rosa, The Uncontrollability of the World (2018).

1. David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 (2019). I can’t recommend this book highly enough. Just read it. No account of digital or any other contemporary technology is complete without the story or the framework he offers here.

Nonfiction

10. Ryan P. Burge, The American Religious Landscape: Facts, Trends, and the Future (2025). Review here.

9. Alec Ryrie, The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It (2025). Review here.

8. Christopher Hitchens, Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Square (2000). A lesser Hitch collection, but I continue to plod slowly through his back catalog.

7. Wolfgang Streeck, Critical Encounters: Capitalism, Democracy, Ideas (2020). A powerful and challenging read. I’ve got more Streeck on the docket.

6. Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless (1979).

5. Wendell Berry, What Are People For? (1990). None of Berry’s essay collections is a dud, but this one is particularly special.

4. C. S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature (1966). Ditto.

3. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books (c. 1800).

2. P. D. James, A Time to Be in Earnest: A Fragment of Autobiography (1999). A beautiful book from my favorite stylist. She is the very best.

1. Simon Leys, The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (2013) + The Burning Forest: Essays on Chinese Culture and Politics (1983). A revelation. More here.

CGI animals

It needs to stop.

Once upon a time, animals in movies were real creatures captured on film. They were in the room or on the set with the actors, interacting with them, responding to them, being led or ridden or spoken to, and (in their own way) directed in accordance with the script—albeit, like human actors, subject to their own whims and fancies, and occasionally doing unexpected things, as in the final scene of the Coen Brothers’ Barton Fink.

Beyond their verisimilitude or personal presence to the actors, part of the power of animals on film is their unique haecceity, or thisness. The wonder of an animal in person, even at the zoo, translates to the medium of film because any animal, however tame, is its own thing, separate and apart from its ostensible human masters. This wonder extends to stunts and set pieces, because any time Indiana Jones hops on a horse or Lawrence of Arabia rides a camel, you know the actor had to take the time to learn—to be taught—how to do such a complex activity as if he’d been doing it all his life. Even something as lowbrow as Sofia’s fight-on-command dog in John Wick 3 is a remarkable testament to the trainers, choreography, and direction, not to mention the (two) dogs themselves. You can’t help but marvel even as you’re laughing.

For the most part, though, real animals in movies have been replaced by computer graphics, and nine times out of ten it’s slop. To add insult to injury, often as not the slop-CGI animals are meant to be objects of wonder. For some reason directors are especially enamored of slop Cervidae—i.e., deer, elk, moose, and other forest folk. They love their fake eyes on their fake heads, staring intently at the camera. We are meant to marvel in awe. Instead we yawn in boredom. “Really? This is it?” we ask.

The teaser trailer for Spielberg’s next movie is only the latest instance, or victim, or culprit of this cinematic crime. And the contrast came to me in stark terms as I watched Martin Scorsese’s film Kundun for the first time this week. Released in 1997 and now unavailable apart from old DVDs—I got mine via university inter-library loan—the film is the story of the fourteenth Dalai Lama, from age four to his exile at twenty-five years old. It marks Scorsese’s first collaboration with famed cinematographer Roger Deakins.

And you know what? In the first hour it features a regular appearance by a rat. A physical, real-life rat that finds its way around the monastery, sipping the monks’ water and tea when they aren’t looking, or when their eyes grow heavy from meditation and prayer. For the child lead, the rat is an object at once of humor, of delight, of terror, and finally of benign respect.

Yet all I could think about as I watched the little rat scurry around was: If Scorsese made this film for Netflix in 2025, that rat would be CGI.

Wake Up Dead Man

1. I liked it, as did my boys.

2. I know it’s got some cheesy moments; I enjoyed rather than resented the visual and oratorical hamming.

3. I’m pro–Rian Johnson, both generally and regarding his greatest film, which came out eight years ago this month. If you know you know, caveat lector, etc.

4. That said, I downright hated The Glass Onion. Too clever by half, an empty mystery, and the politics and satire both fell flat.

5. Wake Up Dead Man is thus a return to form. A fantastic mystery, jokes that land, characters that entice, new riffs on old themes, capped and united by a turn to religion. I’m here for it!

6. I have a soft spot for any popular entertainment that doesn’t make a mockery of Christian faith, or reduce it to woo, or project infinite doubt onto all believers, or unmask every pastor as a cynical abuser. Johnson succeeds on all counts.

7. There are two specifically spiritual grace notes that show both Johnson’s commitment to fidelity and his willingness to interrogate his beloved lead. (Spoilers hereon.)

The first is the call to Louise, which begins as a frantic plot point, then becomes a rat-a-tat dialogue played for laughs, then brings the scene to a screeching halt when Louise bears her soul to Fr. Judd—who then transforms from suspect into priest, closing the door, and praying for her and her mother. Blanc is left holding the bag, unable to do anything but wait for this pastor to conclude his work.

The second is the climactic confession of the killer, a scene that immediately brought to mind Brideshead Revisited. The film’s Catholicism is truest here, when even a proud, vain, duplicitous murderer can receive the grace of absolution mere seconds before dying. Every word of the priest is sincere; there’s no irony, no winking, no playacting on Johnson’s part. The guilty can be forgiven, no matter the crimes they’ve committed, should they repent and confess. That the scene happens before the altar, where the original crime was committed, is all the more poignant.

8. Johnson cites Christie, Carr, Poe, and Sayers, among others, but the author and stories that came to me were Chesterton’s Father Brown mysteries. Johnson does not let his rationalist atheist detective off easy. Fr. Judd is his equal and in more than scene shows himself Blanc’s superior. It’s a mere game for Blanc, but Fr. Judd would rather let justice be done, and he suffer the consequences, than “solve the mystery.” And it’s Blanc who relents by the end, not Fr. Judd. Both of them change, but the priest never once calls Christ into question; if anything, his faith is confirmed and deepened by the end.

9. Who, then, is the dead man in the title? Sure, it’s a play on words, not to mention a reference both to Christ’s resurrection and to the central event of the film. But more than these, the dead man is Benoit Blanc, and the cry is Christ’s, speaking through Fr. Judd—not to mention Saint Paul. As Ephesians 5:14 puts it: “Wake up, you sleeper! Rise up from the dead! Christ will shine on you!” The whole film’s constant refractions of light and darkness, red and green, and the tempting pink of a secret jewel (=Eve’s apple) all function as visual glosses on this one verse.

10. Yes, it seems all too obvious that the victim, Msgr. Wicks, is a stand-in for Trump, and his flock the ever-winnowing devotees of his cult of personality. Trump the man is famously immune from satire. I’ll just say that Josh Brolin’s portrayal of the character Johnson wrote—not so much a full-blooded character we understand objectively as vignettes of a fractured personality, depending moment by moment on perspective, occasion, and relationship—clicked in a way that surprised me. Your mileage may vary.

Tech exit, pro and con

I have a running friendly debate with Samuel James about Clare Morell’s recent book The Tech Exit. I gave it a glowing review back in June. In October James wrote about his concerns on his Substack. This semester I assigned forty-seven students across two sections to read both Tech Exit and Samuel’s Digital Liturgies, as well as Andy Crouch’s Tech-Wise Family, Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism, and Tish Harrison Warren’s Liturgy of the Ordinary.

More another day about their reactions to the other books. As for Morell, they mostly shared Samuel’s reaction. (I know him and not her, so I’m alternating between last and first names here.) One student described it as “aggressive”: both in style and in advice. They just weren’t persuaded by her maximalism: no television, no video games, no tablets, smartphones, or social media. They were persuaded, by all the books and by the course in general, that social media is a major issue and that smartphone addiction is all too real—and that they (like everyone else) need help. But they felt like Morell threw out the baby with the bathwater.

That’s not to say they didn’t appreciate the book. It opened their eyes to both systemic issues (schools, laws) and children (fentanyl, not sugar). Most students finished the semester convinced that they got personal digital devices at a younger age than they should have, and therefore most of them are not planing to replicate that early-adoption for their own potential future children.

The funny thing is, I’m not myself much of a Tech Exiteer. My household would maybe count as a two-third Tech Exit family at most. We have wireless, two televisions, and two laptops (mine and my wife’s). We even have video games. No child pre–middle school had or has a tablet, and when we first bought a Nintendo Switch our rule was that it wasn’t for handheld use; only for shared play in the living room, on the TV.

Nevertheless, that’s already a lot of Tech Exit rules broken. We do screen time, which is Morell’s number-one enemy. As a general rule we practice screen-free Sunday (or Crouch’s digital sabbath) and up to one hour of daily screen time otherwise, albeit with more leeway on Friday after school and Saturday morning. Some weekdays we’re so busy with piano and dance and tennis and church that the TV never gets turned on; on Saturday mornings we’re not setting timers to make sure they’re off before they hit sixty-one minutes.

We’re a pretty typical family, in other words, with perhaps stricter limits on time and content than the average household. So why, if my house looks more like Samuel’s than Morell’s, did I like her book so much? Let me count the reasons.

First, because I think her diagnosis is correct. I don’t know anyone (literally, not a soul) who takes the problems or challenges of digital devices too seriously. Almost everyone I know underrates the threat they pose to prayer, attention, literacy, free play, and healthy childhood development and socialization. So “directionally” she’s got the better side of the argument.

Second, because most Christian books on technology pull their punches, leaving people the same as when they started. Whatever else her book does, it doesn’t do that.

Third, because nothing would be lost and much would be gained if families took her up on her proposals. This is key. A house without screens is a gift to children—even if it’s not the choice my wife and I made. A house without wireless would be glorious! Why not say that out loud, even if most of us are unlikely to match that ideal?

Fourth, because she’s dead to rights on smartphones and social media. This is where we have drawn the line. My seventh grader doesn’t have a smartphone, and I don’t plan to buy him one anytime soon. And even if (whenever) he does end up getting one, social media will be a hard No.

Fifth, there’s a sense in which a book like The Tech Exit extends the Overton Window for Christian families in such a way that a TV-less, device-less household becomes an imaginable possibility in a way that it might not have been before. So that, even if a family doesn’t go all the way, if they still go forty or sixty or eighty percent of the way, they will have made harder (but better) decisions about technology than they would have otherwise. Put differently, the gravity that a book like Morell’s exerts pulls us all in the right direction, even if there’s still a belle curve of digital practices with a swollen, mushy middle.

Sixth and finally, because although the first half of the book, supported by the rhetoric throughout, suggests an implacable standard, as a matter of fact Morell offers examples throughout her chapters of actual families making local, personal decisions that do not amount to cookie-cutter Tech Exit implementation. These examples reveal that the buck stops with parents, who must work together to put beliefs into practice. It turns out that parents themselves don’t always agree about these things! My wife and I are different people. We’re not both Luddites. Some of our decisions have been compromises. That’s called marriage.

For this reason, among others, Morell rightly refuses to make the perfect the enemy of the good—yet without lowering expectations. That last point makes all the difference. In my experience, the fact that most Christians basically end up looking just like their neighbors in terms of digital habits functions as a prevenient deflator in conversations and thereby a defeater in arguments. Since we’ll all just fail anyway, maybe we shouldn’t set the bar too high, or even talk about it at all? Well, I may be mistaken, but I could have sworn Paul comes to a different conclusion in Romans 6:1.

In short, Morell allows Christians to argue from the shared premise that digital technology is a problem—for all of us, but especially for our children—rather than to argue (once more, ever more, ad infinitum) toward it as a contestable conclusion. Moreover, her vision is resolutely not pie in the sky. I know a father of young children who, based on Morell’s advice, just this summer took the household television off the wall. He and his wife bring it out from the closet for family movie night, but otherwise it’s no longer a digital babysitting option. I assume there are hundreds of anecdotes just like that from Morell’s readers (and others influenced by her ideas). Surely such responses and changes are all to the good?

And if there are other readers who find her suggestions too aggressive, no harm done. At best, it’ll prick their conscience about this or that, leaving them to ruminate about how they might make small changes. At worst, they’ll get annoyed or outraged, then immediately forget about it the moment their unlock their phone.

A statement of faith is not a creed

When Christians refer to “the creed,” they mean one of two things: the Nicene Creed or the Apostles’ Creed. Both are expansions of the Rule of Faith formulated in various ways by various writers and documents in various times and places across the first three centuries of the church’s life.

The Nicene Creed is the primary referent, across time and traditions, because it was and remains the explicit, canonical, and juridical confession of orthodox trinitarian faith for all Christians since the early fifth century. It possessed and possesses authority, in other words, statutory authority both within particular ecclesial traditions and across them. Once issued and received, the Nicene Creed is no longer debated or negotiated; it is submitted to; it is a given, a nonnegotiable. It is recited weekly in the liturgy. It is, to repeat, authoritative.

The Apostles’ Creed is the secondary referent, for a number of reasons. First, it is not recited in the liturgy. Second, it was not promulgated by an ecumenical council. Third, the East has never (to my knowledge) formally adopted it; it was always the Latin West, both before and after the Reformation, that liked to comment on it as a sort of shorthand for the faith outside of liturgical recitation. It’s still what some believers mean when they say “the creed,” but not to the exclusion of Nicaea; more as a simpler, easier-to-memorize substitute, especially for those preparing to be baptized or confirmed.

In sum, when Christians refer to “the creed,” whether they have the primary or secondary referent in mind, they are in either case speaking of the ancient symbol of ecclesial, ecumenical, and trinitarian faith. The creed is received, it is authoritative, it defines (though it does not exhaust) orthodoxy. That’s what it is and what it does.

If, therefore, you draw up a statement of faith—whether “you” names an individual, a pastor, a writer, a congregation, or an institution—you have not thereby composed a creed. Christians already have a creed. In point of fact, you can be anti-creedal (on ecclesial or biblicist grounds) and pro–statement of faith (on legal organizational grounds). You don’t depart from creedalism by composing a statement of faith, and you don’t preserve anti-creedalism by avoiding statements of faith. In a sense, any sermon or theological statement or articulated doctrine is necessarily and automatically a statement of faith of some kind. Putting it in writing doesn’t transform it into a creed. Nor does making it a condition of employment or institutional membership. One doesn’t just (et voilà!) conjure up a creed on Tuesday.

If a person, pastor, writer, congregation, or institution did want to leave behind anti-creedalism for creedal faith, there would be one and only one thing to do: to submit to the already existing creed on the books. How? By confessing it in faith, reciting it in worship, and making it definitive of one’s (personal, pastoral, writerly, congregational, liturgical, and/or institutional) life. Anything else is confused, not grasping what the creed is or entails, or merely stuck with half measures and weak tea.

“Another great year for movies”

I’ve written this before, but it bears repeating: It is a very silly trope for film critics to remind us, every December, of just how great the movies are doing; how it was another great year at the movies; how reports of cinema’s death have been greatly exaggerated.

The trope is born of insecurity: Cinema isn’t well, so its health must be reasserted in a manner that cannot be gainsaid, by sheer authority. “People say” movies are in decline, but I, the critic, say otherwise. And since I’ve seen them all and am about to list a bunch I claim are great, therefore, thou shalt trust me.

Part of the silliness here lies in the odd commitment to any given year being a measure of the health of any art form, underwritten by the notion that year to year an art form (such as film) will show itself to be consistently “good.” Even if there were no decline in film—nothing to worry about, nothing to see here—surely there are good years and bad years, high stretches and low, waxing and waning. There can be no truly excellent years or periods of cinematic creativity if there are not also lower quality years to match. Otherwise it would be meaningless to call some years great. If 1999 was a high point, 2025 might be a low point. Does anyone really want to defend the view that movies have been a single straight line of high quality going back decades? A plateau of eminence? Does any art form display such a thing, whether over decades or centuries?

Nor, finally, can the sheer quantity of films released each year tell us anything about their quality. Given Netflix et al, the overwhelming amount of slop and soulless prefab “content” is staring us all in the face, each and every day. Perhaps the more movies we make, the worse they get. Who knows?

Here’s what I do know: While there could have been some great films released this year, that’s a falsifiable claim. The proof of the pudding’s in the viewing. I can’t know the previous twelve months produced good movies just by arriving at December. I’ve got to actually see them—and to be willing, hard as it may be, to admit the possibility that “this year’s movies just weren’t that great.” An unwilling critic in this regard isn’t worth reading.

Browser-less

I like to give periodic updates on my tech use here on the blog, especially when I make a big change. Here’s the latest one.

I deleted the browser on my phone.

I’d tried this once before, two or three years back, and I lasted only a few days. I just didn’t know how to operate as an adult without the ability to do a quick Google search—whether for a need, a want, or a request from someone else. Nor, it turns out, did I like being without a browser, because that meant I couldn’t read articles on my phone, including links shared by friends.

But I decided to give it another try about two months ago, and this time, for some reason, it wasn’t even hard to go without. I deleted Firefox, disabled Safari, and haven’t looked back once.

For a few years there I had settled into a pretty stable equilibrium. My phone had calling and texting plus Spotify, Libby, Firefox, and Marco Polo. Maybe a year ago I deleted Polo. My brothers and I had enjoyed using it since the pandemic, but we finally agreed it was better just to talk by phone rather than to talk “to” our phones in video-recorded form. That brought my average daily screen time down from 90+ minutes per day closer to 60-75, depending.

Since deleting my browser, though, it’s down to 30-40 minutes per day. Basically I now open my phone to text someone, to call someone, or to select the song or podcast I want to listen to. That’s it.

I haven’t had access to email on my phone in years, I’m not on social media, I’m not on Substack, I have zero news or website apps, no ESPN or New York Times or puzzles or games or anything else. I live in a small town in west Texas, so I don’t need Google Maps, but I keep it somewhere on the phone just in case I need to find an unknown destination, or for when I travel. And I’ll re-download Uber or Venmo or what have you as needed, when traveling, and maybe a few others.

But for all intents and purposes, on a day-to-day basis I’m down to calls, messages, and music. That’s my simple little home screen: a black-and-white rectangle with a few squares I touch when needed. This old iPhone might as well be a Spotify-enabled dumb phone.

And I love it.

The solas don’t imply each other

Protestant defenses of the traditional solas of the magisterial Reformation tend, in my experience, to prove too much. The chief example of this overreach is the claim that the solas mutually and/or logically imply one another. Sola gratia entails sola fide entails sola scriptura, and so on.

But none of these follows from the others. Any of them might be true—all of them might be true—but irrespective of that question, each principle requires independent demonstration; the solas are not necessarily a package deal. Protestant apologetics would therefore be much stronger, not to mention more honest, if it did not suggest or assert that each sola implies or requires the others.

Take grace and faith. It is perfectly coherent to imagine a world, whether or not it is our own, in which God wills to save by grace alone but not by faith alone. I don’t mean not-by-faith; I mean that, in such a world, God wills to save sinful human beings (just like us) using the instrumentality of faith but not solely the instrumentality of faith. (It’s also possible to imagine a world in which God saves by grace but not by faith, but that’s too far afield from the present point.) In this case, then, God might save by faith through baptism, and both would be necessary for salvation, and both would remain utterly gratuitous means of grace, because neither would constitute a human work. Each would instead be a gift passively received, and on this schema, both would function together as God’s ordained means of saving grace.

Note that I’m not arguing that this is the case; I’m arguing that it could be, because there is nothing intrinsic to divine grace that logically entails the status of faith as sole instrumental means of receiving that grace. Perhaps in fact faith is the sole instrumental cause of sinners’ salvation by grace alone—but that need not be the case, just in order to be grace.

Now consider either sola fide or sola gratia (or, for that matter, solus Christus) in connection to sola scriptura. Imagine a world, exactly like ours, in which God wills to save by grace alone (possibly even by faith alone, though not necessarily) but simultaneously wills for his church to be led by successors to the apostles who, as a collective over time, are deputized by the Spirit of Christ to rule definitively (i.e., infallibly) on crucial questions of faith and morals, as and when conflicts arise over the interpretation of Scripture. In a word, in such a world God wills that his church be authorized to issue dogma.

Plainly, there is no contradiction here. God could do this. God is God, after all; it is within his omnipotent power. God thus might have done it—in this world or any other.

The question, then, is not whether it is possible: It is possible, and it is absurd to doubt it. The question, rather, is a matter of fact: Has God, in this world, just as it is, vested the church with dogmatic authority? And with respect to the answer to this question, on what basis (a) would we know it and (b) should we decide it?

Note well that the hypothetical world I have proposed is one in which God saves sinners through Christ alone, by grace alone, (even possibly) by faith alone. Each of these things might be true together with an infallible magisterium deputed by Christ’s Spirit to guard the deposit of faith entrusted to the apostle’s successors as they lead the church over time in the faithful interpretation of the authoritative word of God in Scripture. Were God to will this arrangement, Scripture would be the one word of God, which gives the church the gospel; the magisterium would interpret that word with definitiveness for the lay faithful; the latter would be bound to submit to the former; and in so doing the gospel of multiple solas (Christ, grace, faith) would not in any way entail a fourth (scriptura).

Hence, the dispute between Protestants and Catholics (as well as the Orthodox) is not an abstract one; it is not about logical possibility. Nobody is proposing a contradiction. The dispute is about actuality. Each of the solas must stand on its own two feet. Perhaps, if it were the case that all of the solas were true, then believers would be right to see organic connections or relations of fittingness between them. But such a discovery would be aesthetic rather than logical, and certainly not necessary. Moreover, it would be a retrospective judgment, nor a priori. The fact that all of them turned out to be true would be a function entirely of God’s good pleasure. It would not be analytic to the very notion of each sola, properly understood.