Coming attractions

I have a number of exciting projects that are all about to be published, mostly between now and the end of the year, plus one more thing next spring. I’ve been sitting on most of them, but now I’m in a position to make all of them public. What follows isn’t everything I’m doing in the next few months, but it’s certainly what will be taking up space (rent-free, as they say) in my brain.

First, following the publication last month in The Point of my essay on Wendell Berry and George Scialabba, I have four long essays coming out this fall:

1. In The New Atlantis, a review of Jason Blakeley’s We Built Reality: How Social Science Infiltrated Culture, Politics, and Power.

2. In The Hedgehog Review, a review of Eugene F. Rogers Jr.’s Blood Theology: Seeing Red in Body- and God-Talk.

3. In The Christian Century, an essay on the blackness of the Jewish Christ, reflecting on the theology of James Cone, the Basilica of the Annunciation, and the iconography of George Floyd.

4. In Commonweal, a review of Timothy P. Jackson’s Mordecai Would Not Bow Down: Anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and Christian Supersessionism.

Second, about 15 months ago, right at the outset of the pandemic, Vincent Lloyd contacted me about editing an issue of the academic journal Political Theology dedicated to Karen Kilby’s new book, God, Evil, and the Limits of Theology. I’m happy to say that the issue has gone to press and will be published next month. The forum of responses consists of six major scholars:

1. Andrew Prevot

2. Kathryn Tanner

3. Katherine Sonderegger

4. Rowan Williams

5. Sarah Coakley

6. Miroslav Volf

It’s as though the lineup of theologians unspooled from my dreams.

I have an essay that introduces the series of contributions to the forum, and Kilby has a lengthy response that replies to each of them in one place. Trust me: You will not want to miss this issue. Not one of the pieces falls short of what you would expect (except, well, mine; but then you already knew that). I simply cannot wait to see what people make of the whole conversation.

Oh, and go buy and read the book in advance of it.

Third and finally, my first two books are set to be published this fall and next spring, respectively.

1. The Doctrine of Scripture (Cascade) is set to come out this fall; there’s not a hard publication date yet, but I’d estimate November 1, give or take a few weeks. Though it’s coming out first, I wrote this book after the book that will come out in the spring; I drafted it quickly, in the fall of 2019. It’s just over 80,000 words. It was originally going to be in the Cascade Companions series, but it spilled over the ideal size for those books, and my editor was kind enough to permit me to publish it as a stand-alone work. I am extremely proud of the final product. If you want to know what I think—if you want to see me at my best, whatever “my best” is—this is it. It is a six-chapter spiritual and theological presentation of the church’s theology of Holy Scripture: ecumenical in tone, catholic in substance, evangelical in aim. And I’m humbled and overjoyed to announce that Katherine Sonderegger has written the foreword to it.

2. The Church’s Book: Theology of Scripture in Ecclesial Context (Eerdmans) is set to come out next April. This is a major revision of my doctoral dissertation at Yale, written under my advisor Kathryn Tanner. This one is double the size of my Cascade book; and whereas the latter was written with a view to an audience that might include seminarians and pastors, this book is a work of scholarship (or so, at least, I intend it to be): though I earnestly desire it to build up the church, its audience is fellow scholars in theology, Bible, and hermeneutics. It is an analysis of the role of ecclesiology in bibliology, that is, the role of the doctrine of the church in the doctrine of Scripture. It traces a line from Barth to the present, studying the work of John Webster, Robert Jenson, and John Howard Yoder in order to show how distinct ecclesial logics—magisterial reformation, catholic, and radical reformation—underlie and inform one’s understanding and interpretation of the Bible. Think of this book as the theoretical scaffolding that supports the positive constructive work of the first book. Which makes sense, since this one was written first (though it’s coming out second—confused yet?). I’m also chuffed and humbled to announce that Stephen E. Fowl has written the foreword to it.

All of a sudden these many myriad projects—some involving weeks or months of work, some years upon years in the making—are coming out, one on top of the other. And there’s more to come! (Not least that third book manuscript, due December 2022…) But I’ll leave it at that. I couldn’t be more thrilled to share these with the world. I hope they do a smidgen of good. And I hope you’ll give them a chance, and maybe even read a few.

Sound familiar?

The puzzling thing about [Joseph] McCarthy was that he had no ideology, no program, not even any prejudices. He was not anti-labor, anti-Negro, anti-Semitic, anti-Wall Street, or anti-Catholic, to name the phobias most exploited by previous demagogues. He never went in for patriotic spellbinding, or indeed for oratory at all, his style being low-keyed and legalistic. Although he was often called a fascist and compared to Hitler, the parallel applied only to his methods. Not only was the historical situation hopeless for a radical change like fascism, the country being unprecedentedly prosperous, but McCarthy never showed any interest in reshaping society. Half confidence man, half ward politician, he was simply out for his own power and profit, and he took advantage of the nervousness about communism to gain these modest perquisites. The same opportunism which made him dangerous in a small way prevented him from being a more serious threat, since for such large historical operations as the subversion of a social order there is required—as the examples of Lenin and Hitler showed—a fanaticism which doesn’t shrink from commitment to programs which are often inopportune.

The contrast in demagogic styles between Hitler and McCarthy is related to national traits—and foibles. Hitler exploited the German weakness for theory, for vast perspectives of world history, for extremely large and excessively general ideas; McCarthy flourished on the opposite weakness in Americans, their respect for the Facts. A Hitler speech began: “The revolution of the twentieth century will purge the Jewish taint from the cultural bloodstream of Europe!” A McCarthy speech began: “I hold in my hand a letter dated…” He was a district attorney, not a messiah.

Each of the bold forays which put the Wisconsin condottiere on the front pages between 1949 and 1954 began with factual charges and collapsed when the facts did: the long guerilla campaign against the State Department; the denunciation of General Marshall as a traitor working for the Kremlin (set forth in a 60,000 word speech in the Senate, bursting with Facts, none of them relevant to the charge); the Voice of America circus; the Lattimore fiasco; and the final suicidal Pickett’s charge against the Army and the President. That the letter dated such-and-such almost always turned out to have slight connection with the point he was making (on one occasion it was a blank sheet of paper), that the Facts about the Communist conspiracy he presented with such drama invariably proved to be, at best, irrelevant and, at worst, simple lies—this cramped McCarthy’s style very little. He had working for him our fact-fetishism, which means in practice that a boldly asserted lie or half-truth has the same effect on our minds as if it were true, since few of us have the knowledge, the critical faculties or even the mere time to discriminate between fact and fantasy.

Furthermore, our press, in its typical American effort to avoid “editorializing”—that is, evaluating the news, or The Facts, in terms of some general criterion—considers any dramatic statement by a prominent person to be important “news” and, by journalistic reflex, puts it on the front page. (If it later turns out that the original Fact was untrue, this new Fact is also duly recorded, but on an inside page, so that the correction never has the force of the original non-Fact. Such are the complications of “just giving the news” without any un-American generalizing or evaluating; in real life, unfortunately, almost nothing is simple, not even The Facts.) A classic instance was the front-paging, several years ago, of a series of charges against Governor Warren of California, who was up before the Senate for confirmation as Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. The charges were serious indeed, but the following day they were exposed as the fabrications of a recent inmate of a mental hospital; despite their prima facie absurdity, they had been automatically treated as major news because the notoriously irresponsible Senator Langer had given them to the press over his name.

In the case of McCarthy, the tragicomic situation prevailed for years that although The New York Times and most of the country’s other influential newspapers were editorially opposed to him, they played his game and, in the sacred name of reporting The Facts, gave him the front-page publicity on which his power fattened. (Thus when he “investigated” the scientists at Fort Monmouth, the Times solemnly printed his charges day after day on page one, and then, some weeks later, printed a series of feature articles of its own, demonstrating that the charges were without substance; a little checking in the first place might have evaluated the Monmouth “investigation” more realistically and relegated it to an inside page; but this, of course, would have been “editorializing.”) When McCarthy’s charisma evaporated after the TV public had had a chance to see him in action during the army hearings and after the Watkins Committee had reported unfavorably on his senatorial conduct, the press began running his exposés on the inside pages and he disappeared like a comic-opera Mephisto dropping through a trap door.

—Dwight Macdonald, “The Triumph of the Fact” (1957)—originally published in Anchor Review, later collected in Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain

Art tonnage

This weekend I watched Steven Soderbergh’s latest film No Sudden Move (available on HBO Max). It’s a modest period heist film, of a piece with Soderbergh’s proclivity to leaven his Major Releases with minor genre exercises. I always enjoy those exercises, and I enjoyed this one, too. It’s restrained, formally inventive, clever, and draws lovely performances out of actors old and new. I especially appreciated seeing Don Cheadle in fine form. I imagine a whole generation of young moviegoers knows Cheadle solely from his role in the Marvel films, which means they think of him as entirely forgettable and therefore dispensable. Not so! (Perhaps his own Disney+ series will rectify that error? Probably not.)

Soderbergh has likened himself, fittingly, to a graffiti artist. He’s a street performer: he does his art quick and dirty, to please his audience and himself—then moves on. His output, as a result, is quite large. Side projects, side hustles, delivery innovation, technical experimentation, multiple films per year: Soderbergh is a jitterbug craftsman, always in motion. He never sits still, just like his camera.

In this Soderbergh belongs to the Stephen King theory of popular art. Even apart from highbrow versus lowbrow (or masscult versus midcult), this theory eschews a vision of creative labors as necessarily painful and painfully long. If you’re a craftsman, then know your craft and do it when called upon, to the best of your abilities, and with celerity. The fact that you’re paid to do it, moreover, is a feature, not a bug; there’s no room here for the pure genius, tortured, alone, and unappreciated. No, you’ve got an audience—readers, viewers—happy and willing to hand over money for what you’ve made. Serve them! Entertain them!

And if not everything you make it a work of world-stopping brilliance, so be it.

This reminds me of John Grisham’s famed writing routine. Every fall, just in time for the airport-heavy travel seasons of Thanksgiving and Christmas, he drops a new novel. After taking some well-earned time off, he outlines in great detail the plan for his next novel. In the first week of January, he begins writing: every weekday for x hours per day. By mid-spring he has a rough draft; by mid-summer, the revisions are complete. Then the manuscript is off the printers, and they publish the book by Halloween. Grisham’s been doing this for more than 20 years. You can set your clock by it.

I certainly don’t think the Soderbergh–King–Grisham model is for everyone. Nor do I think their work is flawless as a result of it. High art is high art for a reason; it takes time, passion, and sometimes pain. But not everyone is meant for such heights. I’m happy to live in a world with graffiti artists and airport novelists. The pleasures they afford are real, and they would be far less and few fewer if their authors weren’t willing to risk some measure of artistic failure and critical dismissal in the speed and style of their creation. May their tribe increase.

An action movie pet peeve

I don’t recall when it first appeared on screen, much less when it became a tired trope, but in the last 5-10 years a certain scene has become a mainstay in action movies (and TV shows). The protagonist realizes he needs the help of A Certain Someone. But either the last time he saw A Certain Someone things didn’t end well, or A Certain Someone is an unsavory character who can’t be trusted. With nowhere else to turn, though, our protagonist goes in search of ACS anyway. And when he finds him, one and only one thing happens. ACS sees him coming a mile away; the two of them fight—often quite brutally—until one submits to the other or, more commonly, the fight results in a draw; then, invariably, they look into each other’s eyes, realize the futility of their conflict, let bygones be bygones, and grab a drink.

Not only has this become an eye-rolling cliché. Most of the time it’s nonsensical. The brutality of the fight suggests unquenchable malice; the violence is bloodthirsty and aspirationally fatal. They’re trying to kill each other. Only, moments later, they’re not; all is well, since (as the plot demands) the protagonist’s needs must be met, and the two must join forces to continue his quest.

I’m the last person to suggest genre conventions are a drag. It’s just that this particular convention is stupid. We know what’s going to happen. The fight is devoid of stakes. And the ferocity of the fighting has no connection to what comes next, often mere seconds later. It’s little more than an annoyance; it’s a box to be checked by the screenwriter or writers’ room; it’s a way to kill time, the plot spinning its wheels; it’s unimaginative, and shows the filmmakers are out of ideas.

I’m looking at you, Mandalorian; and you, John Wick; and you too, Black Widow. To name only a few.

Just stop it already.

From meaningless content to doomscrolling

One of the truly essential Substack writers is Justin E. H. Smith, who is neither a journalist nor a start-up freelancer but a major academic philosopher and polymath scholar of (what always strikes me as) ten thousand interesting things. His newsletter from two Sundays ago was a typically undefinable reflection on (inter alia) memory, streaming, tense, eternity, and the internet. Here are some sample grafs that bring home one of the essay’s central points:

If this assessment sounds bleak or cynical, consider Amazon’s recent acquisition of MGM for $8.45 billion. Jeff Bezos now holds the rights to numerous treasures of twentieth-century American entertainment, not least Albert R. Broccoli’s almost boutique-style James Bond films with their iconic, mythos-incanting musical opening numbers. Bezos has explicitly stated his intention to “reimagine and redevelop that I.P. [sic] for the 21st century.” On the surface, his idea of what a “good plot” looks like would seem to make twenty-first century content scarcely different from the most archaic and deep-rooted elements of myth and lore. Thus he thinks there needs to be a heroic protagonist, a compelling antagonist, moral choices, civilizational high stakes, humor, betrayal, violence…

“I know what it takes to make a great show,” Bezos has confidently said, “this should not be that hard. All of these iconic shows have these basic things in common.” The problem is that Bezos’s purpose in returning to a quasi-Proppian schema of all possible storytelling is not at all to revive the incantatory power of cliché to move us into the ritual time of storytelling. It is rather to streamline and dynamicize the finished product, exactly as if it were shipping times Bezos were seeking to perfect, rather than the timing of a hero’s escape from a pit of conventional quicksand.

And so the college freshman imagining her life as a show seems doubly sad: she turns to the closest thing we have to new narrative art in order to frame her own life and make it meaningful, but the primary instances our culture yields up to her to help with this framing are in fact only meaningless content being passed off as narrative art. It is no wonder, then, that what she will likely end up doing, after the passing and briefly stimulating thought of life itself as a TV show, is to go back to doomscrolling and vain name-checking until sleep takes over.

Do go read the whole thing; the closing section is eloquent, incisive, and damning in equal parts. Then do your duty and subscribe.

Mary’s gaze

Don’t look up, Christ’s concave golden gaze
unbearable, wholly
beyond, beyond
holy: taste
the gold scent and kiss
the icon laid open, one wing of a book, with
its following eyes and
closed eyelid-like mouth’s
superimposed prints
of lips (as one white rose is
manifested in others, too
infinitely petaled)—this mouth
hiving unnumbered
kisses
of the by now long long dead . . .
I’ve come back to the church
of my mother, of
my own deceased six-year-old
self and his father
as usual absent, and
I look straight ahead and slowly walk
into Mary’s all enfolding
labyrinth-unraveled blue
and white child’s-drawn-
stars-haloed
gaze
made of birds’ sleep
and word-light
and find
without seeking, by
smell and touch only,
HER—
she is home, waiting
visible,
here.

—Franz Wright, third part of “Triptych,” titled “St. Paul’s Greek Orthodox Church: Minneapolis, 1959,” in Wheeling Motel (Knopf, 2009), 26-27

The Book of Strange New Things, 3

So I don’t think Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things works. Its lead is unbelievable; the prose is unmemorable to a fault; the payoffs meant to explain the eerie human and mental atmosphere on the alien planet are unsatisfactory, and call in turn for further explanations that are never forthcoming.

What works, if anything? A few things.

1. The aliens. Or as Peter calls them, the Oasans. Faber succeeds in creating and depicting—with considerable restraint—a plausible and heretofore unimagined style of intelligent life beyond Earth. We get to know them, but at some distance. They are hungry for Jesus, and believably so. They are stubborn, and stubbornly non-human, yet intelligible. They are both like us (bipedal, five-fingered, linguistic) and unlike us (misshapen, hideous faces; radically communitarian; lacking something like an Ego, though individuated nonetheless). Faber is at his best when he’s describing the Oasan community or narrating a conversation between one of them and Peter.

2. The most theologically pregnant feature of the book is the suggestion that the Oasans are mortal, profoundly vulnerable to suffering, illness, and death, but may not be sinful. This is half a virtue for the novel, because Faber is clever enough to imagine this state of affairs (and, by extension, the effects it might have for pastor-missionaries who think of Sin as the one great problem addressed by Christianity), but not committed or interested enough to follow through on its many pastoral and theological implications. C. S. Lewis did so in the first two books of his Space Trilogy, but that is a work of fantasy as much as it is science fiction. Faber here could have offered a more realistic or at least less of a #FullChristian take. But he just leaves it untouched, beyond the crisis it creates for Peter’s faith, since what the Oasans want is healing of their infirmities, and he doesn’t know if he truly believes he can offer that. Then he decides to leave them. The end.

3. That’s a tad glib. The final two pages, the final paragraph, and the final line are all utterly fitting to the book, and quite apt to the biblical verse on which they are a riff. Speaking of which…

4. The relationship between Peter and Beatrice (hello there, Meaningful Names; may I take your baggage?) that is, or is meant to be, the emotional heart of the novel largely works, I think, though I am undecided on what Faber himself thinks of it. Due to the distance between them, Peter’s poor communication skills, and the roiling catastrophes on Earth, Bea more or less lets go of Peter within two or three months of the six-month mission. Seems abrupt, no? She doesn’t stop loving him, but she in effect hands him over to the Oasans, thinking him dispassionate and uncaring, even as she is carrying their first and only child in her womb. It would not be an unjust reading to say that what the novel reveals is that Peter and Bea’s relationship was fragile from the start, built on codependency (she rescued him from addiction and led him to Christ; marrying him brought her out of shame for her upbringing and past sexual experiences) and persisting mutual neediness (they have no friends to speak of; they have no activities other than evangelizing and caring, together, for their little flock). Each of them has nothing but the other, plus Jesus. When all is right with the world, that’s more than enough. When the world—their world—starts to crumble, it proves not nearly enough. What I want to know is: Does Faber want us to see this? Or does he think their relationship a beautiful, healthy, antifragile thing that is only called into question by the stress shocks, so to speak, of unprecedented distance and trial? In any case, it’s emotionally credible, and while I wasn’t devastated by their increasing detachment and loss, I felt it.

4. Speaking of which, Faber also succeeds in his depiction of Peter’s relationship with Grainger, his main “handler” and only real friend on Oasis. Their budding no-yes-maybe-no relationship—little more than seeking some kind of basic human connection in an emotional wasteland—is worn and lived-in and all too recognizable.

* * *

I cannot conclude these reflections, however, without instancing a few quotations to show how off, finally, Peter is as a character, that is, as a Christian convert, pastor, and missionary (recall: not because his theology is wrong, but because it doesn’t hold together; the parts don’t add up to a whole that makes sense of his character, or that echoes anything one would find in the world of Christian faith and ministry). First:

“So what’s your role?”

“My role?”

“Yeah. A minister is there to connect people to God, right? Or to Christ, Jesus, whatever. Because people commit sins and they need to be forgiven, right? So . . . what sins are these guys committing?”

“None that I can see.”

“So . . . don’t get me wrong, Peter, but . . . what exactly is the deal here?”

Peter wiped his brow again. “Christianity isn’t just about being forgiven. It’s about living a fulfilled and joyous life. The thing is, being a Christian is an enormous buzz; that’s what a lot of people don’t understand. It’s deep satisfaction. It’s waking up in the morning filled with excitement about every minute that’s ahead of you.”

Mmm. Okay. An enormous buzz. Filled with excitement. Did I mention that this guy left behind his wife and all he knew to share the gospel with aliens? That he and his wife, back on Earth, would hand-stitch tracts of Bible stories to be mailed and delivered to foreign, “unreached” people groups? For what? Buzz and excitement? (NB: He’s not a charismatic, and his faith is rocked to the core when an Oasan asks him to pray for her to be healed from a physical injury.)

Second:

He only wished he’d had the chance to explain more fully how prayer worked. That it wasn’t a matter of asking for things and being accepted or rejected, it was a matter of adding one’s energy—insignificant in itself—to the vastly greater energy that was God’s love. In fact, it was an affirmation of being part of God, an aspect of His spirit temporarily housed inside a body. A miracle similar, in principle, to the one that had given human form to Jesus.

Ah. Gotcha. So this dude’s a “we’re all incarnations of God/Jesus is just the highest version” sort of Christian. Excellent. No further comment necessary, none whatsoever.

Third and last:

“You one of those decaffeinated Christians, padre? The diabetic wafer? Doctrine-free, guilt-reduced, low in Last Judgment, 100 percent less Second Coming, no added Armageddon? Might contain small traces of crucified Jew?” Tartaglione’s voice dripped with contempt. “Marty Kurtzburg—now he was a man of faith. Grace before meals, ‘A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,’ none of this Krishna-has-wisdom-too crapola, always wore a jacket and pressed pants and polished shoes. And if you scratched him deep enough, he’d tell you: These are the last days.”

Peter swallowed hard on what tasted like bile. Even if he was dying himself, he didn’t think these were the world’s last days. God wouldn’t let go of the planet he loved so easily. He’d given His only son to save it, after all. “I’m just trying . . . just trying to treat people the way Jesus might have treated them. That’s Christianity for me.”

Faber almost grasps the nettle here. Almost. The problem is that he supposes there are only two options: either fundamentalist (the Lutheran Kurtzburg) or non-fundamentalist (the (Abelardian?) evangelical Peter). Faber’s imagination can conceive a traditionalist Christian believer exclusively as a fundamentalist who travels to an alien world in “jacket and pressed pants and polished shoes.” Equation: true believer = traditionalist = confesses an actual bodily resurrection = fundamentalist = culturally parochial and anthropologically naive stereotypical Western missionary. And since Peter is not that, that is to say the last item, he cannot be any of the others. But Faber also wants—or rather, his narrative requires—Peter to be a Bible-believing, hyper-evangelistic, tract-mailing, low-church Pietist type. One who thinks Christianity is a matter of life and death … and yet who also describes Christianity as an exciting emotional buzz, moralized without remainder into treating other people the way Jesus would treat them.

The novel remains powerful and evocative, and I don’t regret reading it. But the unrealized potential makes the whole thing all the more disappointing. Oh well.

Kubrick + Spielberg = ?

I had my cinephile card revoked on or around the birth of my first child (there’s only so much time in the day, you know?), but for the first dozen years or so of this century, I was something of a budding film fanatic. I watched American films, foreign films, old films, new films, art films, popular films. I had lists upon lists of directors whose whole oeuvres I devoured one by one.

I always knew I was supposed to like Stanley Kubrick but not Steven Spielberg; something about internet movie culture, or perhaps film-loving dudebro influence, or some such thing. (Maybe I missed the memo to dislike both of them.) But in any case, I couldn’t help myself: while I certainly found a lot to appreciate in Kubrick—I still remember that first 2001 viewing—I loved Spielberg. Adored him, in fact. And not just because his films are popular or entertaining or tailor-made for my tastes. Spielberg may be king of the high middlebrow, but the royalty is earned: his art, to my young eyes, was evident in all that he made. Ever since, I’ve thought that there’s nothing for a director like him to apologize for, and nothing for those who love his work to apologize for, either.

I still remember twenty years ago, the summer before I turned sixteen, dragging my parents, younger siblings, and extended family visiting Austin for the week of the Fourth to see “the latest Spielberg sci-fi blockbuster.” That sci-fi blockbuster was A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. Needless to say, no one liked it but me. Better to say, no one knew what they had just watched. I had an inkling, though I knew I needed to read up and re-watch what I had just seen if I wanted to form a complete opinion.

Armond White (a longtime Spielberg lover) calls A.I. the best film of the twenty-first century. Whether or not that’s true, it’s certainly worth remembering, and reconsidering from a critical perspective. Over at The Ringer, Tim Greiving has a long essay exploring the winding route the film took to make it onto the big screen. He focuses in particular on the nature of Kubrick’s demanding, idiosyncratic development process and the shape of his collaboration with Spielberg, who (after Kubrick’s sudden death in 1999) completed the script himself and directed the film in the spirit and style of Kubrick. The result is a cinematic chimera, in every sense of the word. As Greiving writes,

It’s the end of the movie when this cinematic marriage is consummated, and when there’s both harmony and friction. The 2,000-year epilogue and Monica’s temporary return were what Kubrick wanted, not (as some critics supposed) Spielberg’s feel-good addition. Spielberg is not known for ambiguous endings, and this one is ambiguous: Does David die? Was it all for naught? Is it beautiful that a Monica clone gave him the affirmation he needed and then disappeared—or is it macabre? “For me, A.I. can be tragic, but also not soul-crushing,” says Osment, “because there’s a sense of possibility, and you don’t give a definitive answer to something like that. I really like that. That’s what 2001 did so well. That’s something that Kubrick and Spielberg share.” Robards agrees: “It was different, and chewy, and dense. It did have that Kubrick feel to it, right? Dispassionate. At the end, it was great they got together, but also it wasn’t wholly emotional. I think Steven nailed that.”

That feeling my family (and I) felt when the credits rolled was honest: emotional confusion was the point, or rather, it was the inevitable result of Spielberg channeling Kubrick. In my view, the film is unspeakably sad, and the sheen of Spielbergian family love and redemption—the light, the music, the mother and son’s one happy day in a post-human wasteland in which intelligent machines “survive” without knowledge of their own creators—is what lends it its pathos. Far from masking the tragedy, it highlights it. It gives us what we, like David, think we want. But we, who are human, know better than David, who is not. It isn’t real. Nor is he. That perfect day is artifice. It’s fiction. It’s a false “happily ever after” to a would-be fairy tale that is nothing but one long story of rejection and loss. Which only makes it the more unbearable.

That’s my reading, anyway. The depths of the film, the many interpretations it is patient of, are a testament to its unique creation, indeed to its unique duo of creators. In honor of them, give it a second watch this weekend. You could even make it a family viewing.

The Book of Strange New Things, 2

In my last post I wrote about how Peter, the protagonist of Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things, is unbelievable. I want now to say a bit more about why the novel doesn’t quite work.

One is the prose. It is bloodless and boring. Perfectly adequate, never “bad,” it is so unmemorable that at times I wondered if that was Faber’s intention: perhaps to signal the inner purity of Peter’s converted heart and mind. Based on a quick perusal of Faber’s other work (esp. Under the Skin and The Crimson Petal and the White), the man can write interesting and stylish prose. So what went wrong here? Or, if the plain style is a choice, why does it fail in its purpose? The only possible narrative effect is to make of Peter an utterly vanilla protagonist.

A second issue is the tone. For much of the novel the atmosphere on Oasis, the alien planet, is somehow askew: haunting, haunted, moody, oppressive, mysterious. The reader gets major Solaris vibes (or even, for me, echoes of Sphere). Something is wrong here. What could it be?

Nothing at all, as it turns out. The “reveals,” such as they are, are fourfold:

1. Light years away, Earth—politically and ecologically—is falling apart at the seams.

2. The corporation that sponsors both the intergalactic travel to Oasis and the scientific outpost on it has as its goal to make Oasis a kind of ark or haven for the elite few on Earth who are (a) rich enough and (b) sane enough to qualify to come.

3. The corporate employees (scientists, engineers, doctors, mechanics) who work at/for the Oasan outpost are such flat personalities—resorting to neither sex nor drugs nor violence to let off steam or give vent to their vices and repressed desires—by design: they were selected by a sophisticated psychological process created to exclude all persons who might fall back on such “anti-social” habits.

4. The intelligent alien species, the Oasans, have extremely vulnerable bodies supported by nonexistent immune systems. The slightest injury or illness is terminal, therefore, and they believe “the technique of Jesus” to provide deliverance from, and possibly miraculous healing for, this condition.

I’m going to save comment on number 4 for the next post, because (along with the depiction of Peter’s epistolary estrangement with his wife, Beatrice) it the depiction of the Oasans is the best thing about the book. What I want to focus on now is simple: none of these reveals is satisfying, because none of them explains the brooding, discombobulated atmosphere so effectively manufactured by Faber. The closest any of them comes is number 3, and this one is the least credible. Why?

Answer: Faber wants us to believe that, so long as you put the right controls in place, you could transplant 50-100 adult human beings from Earth to a colony on another planet, and without actually lobotomizing, sterilizing, or otherwise chemically sedating them, they would go about their daily jobs more or less contentedly and consistently, without psychic or emotional needs or problems, absent children, elders, religion, recreation, marriage, family, sex, alcohol, drugs, gambling, art, literature, theft, envy, deceit, or violence.

To me, that reads like a joke. Or a thought experiment by someone who’s never met a human being, or read human history. Or, at best, a “what if?” exercise or narrative puzzle that calls for further explanation—rather than itself an attempt at an explanation of some other mysterious phenomenon, which is how it functions in the novel. How can this fanciful assertion of neutered, compliant, prelapsarian humans (who are, mind you, nothing but a random assortment of corporate employees who live on an alien planet with nothing to do but work) serve to answer the reader’s befuddlement at the unyielding, inhuman, overbearing environment in which Peter finds himself? The answer to one inexplicable mystery cannot be the assertion merely of another inexplicable mystery, not least one so implausible as this. But there it is. And it does not work.

The Book of Strange New Things, 1

I just finished Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things, and I’ve got Thoughts. I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t love it either. I think I might expand on a couple reasons in future posts. But the first thing I have to say about the book is this.

The lead character is simply not believable.

Here are things that are true of him:

1. He is a Christian.

2. He is a British evangelical.

3. He is an adult convert.

4. He is an ex-addict, sober alcoholic, and onetime homeless person.

5. He is happily married.

6. He is a pastor.

7. He and his wife are partners in ministry.

8. Their ministry is extremely evangelistic; the sort that moves heaven and earth to reach a single soul.

9. Their church is very “low.”

10. Their church and ministry are Bible- and sermon-centric (liturgy and sacrament are, if I recall correctly, never mentioned).

11. Their evangelistic efforts include, for example, hand-crafted tracts and pamphlets for far-away “unreached” people groups.

12. They both agree, upon discovery of intelligent life on a distant planet, that it is God’s will for him, the husband-pastor, to journey light-years away to bring the gospel to this alien species.

13. Also, they both share misgivings about, bordering on dislike for, St. Paul.

14. Also, he, the husband-pastor, takes for granted that the Pastoral Epistles were written by St. Paul to St. Timothy in the year AD 68.

15. Also, he rejects with vehemence the doctrine of the resurrection of the body.

The story is set in the near future; though the year is never specified, it is probably meant to be sometime in the next 50-150 years.

Numbers 1 through 12 are perfectly believable. Number 14 would be consonant with them. Number 13 would be an odd fit; the reader would be right to expect more than a passing explanation (which she would not receive). But number 15 brings the whole edifice crumbling down.

Let me instance very nearly the only reference to bodily resurrection in all 500 pages of the novel:

Jesus Lover Five [an alien believer] had fallen silent. Peter couldn’t tell if she was persuaded, reassured, sulking or what. What had she meant, anyway? Was Kurtzberg [the alien congregation’s former missionary-pastor from Earth] one of those Lutheran-flavored fundamentalists who believed that dead Christians would one day be resurrected into their old bodies—magically freshened up and incorruptible, with no capacity to feel pain, hunger or pleasure—and go on to use those bodies for the rest of eternity? Peter had no time for that doctrine himself. Death was decay, decay was decay, only the spirit endured.

The author, Faber, is unfailingly unpatronizing in his own (alien) inhabitation of an evangelical missionary’s mind and thoughts, even his piety. But this false note is telling. Like a fart in a fugue, it afflicts the whole. And the fact that it comes halfway through the novel, with neither preparation nor elaboration, tells us that the author cannot hear the dissonance, does not smell the stench.

Bible-centric low-church hyper-evangelistic born-again missionary-pastors are, without exception, Pauline in flavor and faith, and above all they are adamant believers in the resurrection of the body: first Jesus’s, then believers’. There are no exceptions to this rule. They do not pick and choose books of the New Testament with which they disagree or in which they casually disbelieve. To begin to do such a thing, to begin to make exceptions, is to cease to be a Bible-centric low-church hyper-evangelistic born-again missionary-pastor, one willing to move heaven and earth to win a single soul, to place a New Testament in the hands of a single unbeliever.

Perhaps I exaggerate. Perhaps Faber is himself such a person (though, from what I can tell, he most certainly is not), or perhaps he knows such a person. But such a person in unique on this planet. To make such a unique person the protagonist of a novel, one must know, and show that one knows, that he is indeed so unique; and, thereupon, to sketch what led to his being thus unique. That Faber does not offer that sketch suggests to me, his reader, that he lacks this knowledge. Lacking it, the novel’s central character does not hold together. Which means the novel does not hold together.

Cheering for Monty Williams

While you, like me, are enjoying this year’s NBA playoffs, and while you, like me, are cheering for a Suns–Hawks Finals, remember what kind of man is coaching Phoenix. Just under seven years ago Sports Illustrated wrote an extensive piece about Ryan Anderson, who at the time played for the New Orleans Pelicans. The story was about the circumstances surrounding the suicide of Anderson’s girlfriend, and the personal and emotional fallout afterward. Monty Williams, now coach of the Phoenix Suns, was the New Orleans coach that year. Here is how Williams, a devout Christian, responded to Anderson’s crushing shock and grief:

Pelicans coach Monty Williams hurrying in with a team security guard and finding Ryan slumped on the carpet, his back to the door, unable to rise. Williams dropping to his knees and hugging his player, the two men rocking back and forth. . . .

As a crowd milled outside the apartment complex, Williams and the security guard hoisted up Ryan, who was limp and drenched with tears and sweat, too hysterical even to walk. They dragged Ryan to the elevator and then into a waiting car, the tops of his feet, still wedged into flip-flops, scraping the asphalt so hard that his toes still bear thick white calluses more than a year later.

As they drove in silence, Williams kept thinking that it was fine if he blew a game, but he couldn't mess up now. Once home, he huddled with his wife, Ingrid, and Ryan in the family room, praying. Ingrid's brother had committed suicide recently. She knew not to say it was going to be O.K., because it wasn't. "This is going to be hard for a long time," she told Ryan.

That night, as the family pastor came and went, Ryan cried so much that it felt as if he were dry heaving or bleeding internally. Each convulsion ripped his insides apart.

Around 1 a.m., at Ingrid's urging, Monty brought one of his sons' mattresses down to the living room. There the two men lay through the night, Ryan curled on the sofa and his coach on the floor next to him. When Ryan wanted to talk, they talked. Otherwise there was only his muted sobbing. Finally, just after the sun came up, Ryan fell into a fitful sleep.

At the time, I learned of the SI piece via Deadspin, which similarly quotes this excerpt. Go read the rest here. (And read this, too, if you can stand it.) And as you’re following the conference finals, and when you notice that poised, intelligent, humane man on the Suns sidelines, send him a cheer or a prayer or good vibes or what have you. This Spurs fan is hoping he reaches the finish line.

Brutalizing academe

Timothy Burke, who teaches history as Swarthmore College, is a brilliant mind and thoughtful writer. For years he’s maintained one of the best academia-adjacent blogs on the internet, called Easily Distracted. Recently he switched over to Substack, where (by/through/from which?—the terminology here seems opaque, platform- and mediation-wise) he’s been sending daily emails to all subscribers (until such time as it switches over to paying subscribers only). The Substack is called Eight by Seven, and a week ago the post for the day was titled “Academia: Falling Away.” It starts this way:

I have had three strikingly similar conversations in the last few weeks with colleagues (two at other institutions, one at Swarthmore) about their perception that younger tenure-track faculty at their institutions are wary, disaffected and disconnected not just from the institution they’re working for but from departments, disciplines, and the more abstract professional activities and obligations that compose “academia”. My conversational partners weren’t thinking about a mood limited to the pandemic, but instead about a deeper sense of alienation and malaise that preceded and seemingly survived it.

In each case, while I was wary about the generalization overall, my main response was, “If so, can you blame them”? On the whole, that structure of feeling rests on something real—and the people who might be able to shift it towards a more connected, enthusiastic and trusting posture seem unaware of the problem or are unwilling to make the changes that would encourage an attitudinal shift.

What justifies it? For one, the simple fact that if you’ve been hired into a tenure-track position in an American university or college, unless you are supremely arrogant or unobservant, you know you’ve mostly been lucky. There were likely twenty, thirty, fifty or more people just as well-qualified and capable as you hoping for that position, in a profession whose leaders and governing authorities are steadily eliminating such jobs in favor of poorly-paid, poorly-treated temporary teachers (who are nevertheless expected to have full professional qualifications). In your first three or four years as a tenure-track professor, you may receive even further verification of how seemingly random your employment is by participating in a job search on the other side. You can’t easily embrace a professional future that seems built on discarding and exploiting so many other people as qualified and capable as yourself.

He goes on at length, both to describe and to indict what life is like for far too many junior faculty in the academy right now. I’m fortunate in having few, perhaps no, experiences on a par with his account here. But it resonates nonetheless, since it brings to mind names and faces of friends and colleagues who have had similar, and similarly awful, experiences. It’s harrowing and alarmist, in other words, but it’s true.

MZS on F9

Matt Zoller Seitz was put on this earth to write about film, but most of all about big-budget would-be brain-dead Hollywood blockbusters. The combination of highbrow (his eye, his prose) and lowbrow (in this case, the ninth entry in the Fast & Furious franchise) is always gangbusters. E.g.:

Diesel holds the thing together through sheer mopey majesty. His rumbling baritone and sad eyes have become intensely moving. He's a depressive he-man, a sad sack doom-racer, and Lin photographs him as if he's a posthumous statue of himself. It's startling to realize just how long Diesel has been playing Dom and how much the character has changed. Dom is Diesel's Rocky Balboa, his Indiana Jones. In the first movie, he was an antihero, a badass who was good when circumstances required it (like his other great recurring character, Riddick). At some point, though, maybe after the last film that he did with the late, lamented Paul Walker, Diesel started to seem both bigger and much older and more tragic, weighed down by Dom's responsibilities to his family and perhaps by Diesel's investment in a franchise that he has a financial stake in.

“Sheer dopey majesty” is imperishable, as is Lin photographing Diesel “as if he’s a posthumous statue of himself.” Read the rest here. See also Matt’s reviews of Godzilla vs. Kong, Zack Snyder’s Justice League, and Chaos Walking, among many others.

Late le Carré

The truth is that politics began to intrude itself into le Carré’s work more flagrantly. It certainly preoccupied him. The Brexit vote outraged him, and at the end of his life he petitioned for Irish citizenship, so that he might remain a European. “I think my own ties to England were hugely loosened over the last few years,” he told The Guardian in 2019. “And it’s a kind of liberation, if a sad kind.” This growing disenchantment could not help but leave its mark on his work. In his classic novels, politics is the background against which his figures act; in the later ones, politics itself is the subject matter, and his figures become the surrogates who act it out.

One of the reasons that the later books tend to blur together is in the sameness of their plots: an essentially decent but rather dim fellow is complicit in some sort of international conspiracy about which he is ignorant until he is enlightened through his encounter with a clear-eyed idealist, after which he tries to redeem himself with a selfless but typically futile act of heroism. Le Carré’s idealists were sadly generic: all-purpose human-rights lawyers or international doctors—types rather than individuals. This is the tragic irony of his career: having made his mark by introducing moral complexity and ambiguity into the spy novel, he ended by making cardboard cut-outs against whom James Bond seems like Hamlet.

—Michael J. Lewis, “The Cooling of John le Carré,” The New Criterion (June 2021). That seems a harsh assessment, but what comes before and after the essay is measured, fair, and deeply appreciative of le Carré’s art. I wrote about his second-to-last novel, A Legacy of Spies, when it came out in fall 2017. I enjoyed it, though my reaction was similar to Lewis’s, and only confirmed by what turned out to be le Carré’s last novel, Agent Running in the Field, which Lewis calls his “Brexit novel.” Le Carré was one of a kind, and his prose was always top notch, but his career was bifurcated by two 30-year periods: 1961–1989, and 1990–2019. A Perfect Spy (1986) is his masterpiece, or rather his crowning masterpiece, alongside The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and the subsequent Smiley/Karla Trilogy. But there are other jewels in the crown, both before and after the end of the Cold War, because the man did not know how to write boring sentences or boring stories. I think of him the way I do P. D. James: a master of his craft whose second-tier work runs circles around would-be competitors. And as with her prolific output, I look forward to finishing every single book that came from his pen in my lifetime.

A condition of our humanity

But is there not ultimately something dehumanizing about Deudney’s deterministic vision of the future, which paints human action and choice as entirely constrained by the material conditions described by his geopolitics? He might have argued that there are perennial problems of the organization of national and international politics, that space expansionists have not sufficiently considered those problems because of their utopian assumptions, and that unless they take them seriously their enterprise is not likely to go well. But instead he argues that his theory allows him to predict outcomes in a more or less distant future that are sufficiently fated as to motivate us today to start down a path of renunciation, as if there is no possibility for human beings to meet the novel challenges of law and order that he suggests will arise in alien environments. This outlook is all the more problematic given that, absent any breakthroughs in space propulsion systems, we will have a long time to think about, and adjust to, most of Deudney’s most troublesome scenarios. And here it is also worth noting that the most immediate threats, which are and have long been based in our space-transported nuclear arsenals, suggest (so far) a record of how prudence and ingenuity can navigate highly dangerous waters.

Lest the picture I am painting seem too rosy, I must add that we should have the right expectations for what it would mean to “meet” those challenges. Certainly expansion into space may be accomplished in ways that are more or less dangerous, but in any case “safe” is not on the table. Nor should we want it to be. “Spam in a can” or not, the early astronauts were heroes. We should want heroes, but heroism requires danger. That many professed shock when the idea was floated that early Mars explorers might have to accept that they would die on Mars is a sign of how far we miss the real value of our space enterprise as falling within the realm of the “noble and beautiful.” It would be better to return in triumph, to age and pass away gracefully surrounded by loved ones, and admired by a respectful public! But to die on Mars — to say on Mars what Titus Oates said in the wastes of Antarctica, “I am just going outside and may be some time” — would be in its own way a noble end, a death worth commemorating beyond the private griefs that all of us will experience and cause.

The story changes for species-level risks, but perhaps not so radically as some might think. We should certainly seek to avoid destroying ourselves spectacularly by a profligate lack of concern with maintaining a human future, but we should also seek to avoid constantly eroding and degrading our humanity by always taking the “safe” course, by the effort to recreate for ourselves a world without risks or tradeoffs. Deudney exposes how this kind of techno-utopianism is at the heart of his space expansionists, but in the end seems a little unclear himself on the extent to which the fragility of human life is not a problem to be solved but a condition of our humanity.

—Charles T. Rubin, “The Case Against the Case Against Space,” in The New Atlantis 64 (Spring 2021): 90–98

New essay in The Point

This morning I’ve got an essay in The Point, one of my favorite magazines (to which I subscribe, and to which you should also subscribe). The essay is titled “When Losing Is Likely,” and it is a lengthy response to George Scialabba’s review of Wendell Berry’s collected essays last year in The Baffler. Here’s a taste:

The industrial economy is thus the paradigm, for Berry, of technocracy understood as the generic application of Thinking Big from nowhere to anywhere and everywhere. Such “thinking” is nothing of the kind: it is the abdication of thought, which properly takes shape in particular interactions between actual persons and the concrete objects and environments that make their lives possible—“our only world,” as he calls it. Technocracy is “machine thought.” Some presume the solution to the problems of technocracy must be more of the same, only the good variety rather than the bad. Berry demurs: technocracy as such is the errant mode of thinking and acting for which we need an alternative. It cannot save itself. It is what got us into this mess.

That objection, however, is not the heart of Berry’s view as expressed in “Think Little.” Its heart is this: Justice is not bifurcated between public and private, global and local, them and me; justice, like all the virtues, is a form of life and thus an end in itself. Every attempt to divorce these elements one from another, to address one as though it were not of a piece with the others, to reduce ends to mere means—in sum, to achieve a just society without just people—is both wrong on the merits and doomed to failure.

I touch on religion, pragmatism, Rorty, Chiaromonte, Macdonald, Marxism, ecology, justice, and more. Go check it out.

The great cataract of nonsense

Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered. The cool intellect must work not only against cool intellect on the other side, but against the muddy heathen mysticisms which deny intellect altogether. Most of all, perhaps we need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion. A man who has lived in many place is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village: the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune form the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.

—C. S. Lewis, “Learning in War-Time”

How the Eucharist effects salvation

Since [the Eucharist] is the sacrament of the Lord’s passion, it contains in itself the Christ who suffered. Thus whatever is an effect of our Lord’s passion is an effect of this sacrament. For this sacrament is nothing other than the application of our Lord’s passion to us. . . . Hence it is clear that the destruction of death, which Christ accomplished by his death, and the restoration of life, which he effected by his resurrection, are effects of this sacrament.

—St. Thomas Aquinas, In Ioannem 6:56, para. 963 (cited in Eugene Rogers Jr., Blood Theology [Cambridge UP, 2021], 192–93)

Aliens

Last month Ezra Klein wrote a refreshing column on the UFO revelations of the last few months (and years).* It was refreshing because it not only carefully distinguished between alien and supernatural but also avoided the silly trope that the existence of alien life would undermine, transform, or even substantially affect the doctrines or practices of major world religions like Christianity. Here’s the money graf:

There is a thick literature on how evidence of alien life would shake the world’s religions, but I think Brother Guy Consolmagno, director of the Vatican Observatory, is quite likely right when he suggests that many people would simply say, “of course.” The materialist worldview that positions humanity as an island of intelligence in a potentially empty cosmos — my worldview, in other words — is the aberration. Most people believe, and have always believed, that we share both the Earth and the cosmos with other beings — gods, spirits, angels, ghosts, ancestors. The norm throughout human history has been a crowded universe where other intelligences are interested in our comings and goings, and even shape them. The whole of human civilization is testament to the fact that we can believe we are not alone and still obsess over earthly concerns.

This is exactly right. At least for Christians, while the discovery of alien life would be momentous as a discovery, and while it would certainly raise theological questions, it would not in the least threaten or even disturb faith in the gospel. Whatever exists in the cosmos—indeed, whatever exists outside of time and space that is not God—is a fellow creature, just like us, created by the God of Abraham from nothing, just like us. Read C. S. Lewis or Mary Doria Russell or Michel Faber or any other science fiction author from the last century who has imagined intergalactic missions to meet or learn from or evangelize non-terrestrial rational species. Lewis in particular loved to speculate that Jesus’s comments about “other sheep, not of this fold” in John 10:16 applied not only to gentiles but, potentially, to intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. Who knows?

Whatever the answer, the collective response from Christians to the demonstrable existence of alien life will and should comprise four options: doxology; wonder at the mysteries of creation; desire, with appropriate caution and within limits, to learn more about and form some relationship with these fellow creatures; and, for the most part, getting on with the business of life.

Kudos to Klein for seeing that, and cutting through the nonsense.

*In my own mind, there are five possible interpretations of the seemingly physics-defying happenings recorded and witnessed by the pilots (and their flight cameras): (1) human technology; (2) alien technology; (3) natural occurrences; (4) supernatural phenomena; (5) nothing—a trick of the light, a fault of the eyes, a mistake of the video, or some other similar explanation. It seems to me the only frightening option is the first, though perhaps I should be more fearful of the second.

Welcome to the new blog, same as the old blog

Welcome, all! This is the new and permanent home of my blog, Resident Theologian, which used to be hosted at Blogspot. All the old posts have been imported here, and while I don’t anticipate deleting the old blog anytime soon, I may well do so at some point.

There’s not much to offer by way of orientation: here’s the blog, same as the old, only housed on my personal site. If you want to know more about me, click the About tab above; if you want to know more about this blog, click the About the Blog link just below the blog title on the blog home page (how many times can I say “blog” in one sentence?).

What with the move, I’m hoping to ramp up my so-called mezzo-blogging this summer, perhaps as soon as next week. So stay tuned for that, and in any case, thanks for reading.

Addendum: If you are receiving this post via email, then you either signed up to do so on the Home page, or were already signed up to receive posts via email from the old blog. If there has been an error, or you no longer want to receive these posts in your inbox, just click “Unsubscribe” below, and you’ll be taken off the email list automatically (and permanently). Thanks for your patience as I navigate moving the blog from its old environs to these lovely new digs.