Resident Theologian
About the Blog
Hey, I started a newsletter!
A sign-up for my monthly 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!
2025: out of touch
On waking up to the realization that I am out of touch with pop culture.
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.
A rundown of travel, talks, and podcasts in the past year.
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
A round-up of the (meager) offerings this year on the blog.
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.
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Theology
Technology
Reading, Writing, Academia
TV & Film
My latest: Christmas (in CT) and Kingsnorth (in Commonweal)
Links to my final published pieces in 2025.
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
A rundown of what I published in 2025.
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.
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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
A recap of my year in 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.)
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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
Let’s all agree that this needs to stop.
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
Ten thoughts on Rian Johnson’s new Benoit Blanc film for Netflix.
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
Thinking some more about Clare Morell’s book The Tech Exit.
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
Clarifying a distinction.
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”
On critics reassuring us every year how great the previous year was for cinema.
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
Deleting the internet browser from my phone.
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
Thoughts on the traditional solas of the Protestant Reformation.
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.
The C. S. Lewis Test
A little test I like to apply to non-evangelical and non-Christian writers.
I’ve written before about the need for American evangelicals to press the pause button on their love affair with C. S. Lewis, and in particular for American evangelical writers to take a break from quoting Lewis as well as a dozen other big names like Chesterton, Tolkien, Guinness, Chambers, Schaeffer, Henry, Graham, Kuyper, Piper, Keller, Stott, Packer, and Machen. Not because they’re not worth reading, learning from, or excerpting, but because their prominence in Protestant writing is so prominent that it crowds out other voices. More to the point, focusing overmuch on these figures—lionizing them, quoting and re-quoting them, treating them like the only doctors and saints the church has to offer or learn from—fails to learn the first lesson one ought to take from their example, namely, their vast erudition and mastery of fields and authors not themselves. I call this “aping the Inklings.” And we should cut it out, myself included.
Having said that, I’ve realized over the years that, when I’m reading non-evangelicals or non-Christians, I find myself unconsciously applying to them a kind of inverted test. Call it the C. S. Lewis Test. It is what it sounds like: I want to know whether the author in question, if he or she lived and wrote in the last seventy-five years, appreciates Lewis’s work. By “appreciates” I do not mean “is a fan of,” much less “worships at the feet of.” I mean, simply, “appreciates.” Lewis is renowned for a reason. He was a wonderful stylist, a sharp thinker, and a medieval scholar. He wrote poems, allegories, novels, children’s stories, essays, reviews, academic monographs, and apologetics. The man had, and has, much to edify anyone with an open mind, on any number of subjects. He was catholic and ecumenical in his tastes, his friends, his topics. I’m thinking, for example, of his late (recorded and transcribed) conversation with Kingsley Amis on the subject of science fiction. These two writers couldn’t have been more different. But you can sense each of them feeling the other out, poking, jabbing, teasing, querying. And each man comes out unscathed, with, I take it, a measure of respect for the other.
So, as I say, when I read someone—anyone—writing since World War II, if I read much of his or her work, I wait for the choice Lewis quote, the unapologetic citation, the sly allusion. If the writer is worthy of respect, be he pagan or skeptic or anything else, it usually comes. You don’t have to love Narnia to appreciate his criticism, or to like his Space Trilogy to value his writing on education, or to share his faith to take his philosophy seriously. And it also tells me the writer in question isn’t ashamed to quote someone as popular or ostensibly middlebrow as Lewis, as if associating with a writer that evangelicals love might sully one’s reputation with readers who matter. It tells me, in other words, that the writer cares more about truth, style, or both than about superficial appearances. And that’s enough to win over this reader.
DiCaprio
Marveling at the fact that, for thirty years, Leonardo DiCaprio has chosen to work solely with excellent directors.
Since Titanic came out in 1997, when Leonardo DiCaprio gained the clout to make whatever he wanted, with whomever he wanted, he has chosen to work with the following directors:
Martin Scorsese (six times)
Quentin Tarantino (twice)
Paul Thomas Anderson
Steven Spielberg
Christopher Nolan
Woody Allen
Ridley Scott
Alejandro González Iñárritu
Clint Eastwood
Sam Mendes
Danny Boyle
Baz Luhrmann
That’s not counting James Cameron (who directed Titanic) or Sam Raimi (The Quick and the Dead, 1995). All together that’s more than a dozen of the greatest, most influential directors of the last fifty years. Leaving aside de Palma and Coppola, who are past their active years, the only other major names that come to mind that DiCaprio hasn’t worked with are Soderbergh, Malick, Mann, the Coen brothers, Spike Lee, Fincher, del Toro, Linklater, Bigelow, Cuarón, and Paul Schrader. It would have been something to see him work with David Lynch before he passed. Is there anyone else?
This point was brought home to me by the Scorsese documentary on Apple TV+. I had no idea how important DiCaprio was to rescuing and preserving Scorsese’s career after the ’90s. I had assumed it was the other way around. The man has taste, and he’s willing to put his money where his mouth is. Just imagine all the paychecks he turned down to work with these guys instead. For DiCaprio, apparently, there’s no “one for them, one for me” dynamic. He only makes the movies he wants to make, and if people want to see them, so be it.
Scorsese
Brief thoughts on gratuitous content in Martin Scorsese’s films.
I was impressed with Mr. Scorsese, the new five-part documentary (or “film portrait”) about Martin Scorsese on Apple TV+, directed by Rebecca Miller. I’ve never been a true devotee of Scorsese, but I’ve always appreciated his work and usually defended him from detractors. Over the years I’ve seen most of his films and all the major ones. (I’ve not seen, e.g., Boxcar Bertha or Cape Fear. I keep trying to get Kundun on DVD via ILL, but no luck so far.) Even those who don’t prefer his work can admit his status as a great American artist with a recognizable moral, political, religious, and stylistic perspective.
That’s a boilerplate paragraph, but I say it to say this: Something in the documentary nagged at me. Miller allowed herself a moderate degree of criticism, but less of Scorsese’s art than of his life. Regarding Scorsese’s actual critics, the lesson we learn from the entire film and from Scorsese himself is that, at the end of the day, they are haters or skeptics or simply confused; they fail to grasp the significance and rationale, in particular, of the gratuitous violence and sex in his films.
There is, regrettably, not a trace of aesthetic self-criticism in Scorsese the man, no Augustinian retractationes. He never says, “I went too far,” or, “You know, they had a point about this one.” Every decision about graphic content is justified because … well, why?
Because, so far as I can tell, “that’s what the world is like” or “that’s what American society is like.” Okay. But that doesn’t tell me whether rubbing our faces in it—while appearing to glorify it in the process—is morally or aesthetically warranted. Such a comment is the beginning of a conversation, not its end.
You don’t have to be a “trash in, trash out” puritanical simpleton (that’s me, to be clear) to draw moral and aesthetic distinctions between, for example, the depictions of sex and violence in Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, on one hand, and those in Casino and Wolf of Wall Street on the other. For me, Goodfellas resides somewhere in the middle. I marvel at the achievement while unable, in my heart, to keep myself from applying Truffaut’s rule about war films to mafia films, with Goodfellas even more than The Godfather the Platonic exemplification of the rule’s almost universal truth.
I just wish that someone would put this question to Scorsese himself, and that he would take it more seriously than he does here.
Simon Leys
A little celebration of the great writer Simon Leys, whom I discovered this year.
2025 was the year I discovered Simon Leys.
The discovery came in the Regent College bookstore in Vancouver. The book was The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays. I’m a sucker for essay collections; this one was a NYRB Classics edition; it was big and hefty and the topics were gloriously wide ranging.
Somehow I’d never heard of Leys’ name. For the fellow uninitiated, “Simon Leys” is the pen name for Pierre Ryckmans (1935–2014), a Belgian essayist, novelist, translator, and scholar of Chinese literature, art, and calligraphy. He read, spoke, and wrote in French, English, and Chinese. His 1971 book about Mao was a bombshell in the playground of the postmodern French intellectuals—it woke everyone up to the unvarnished truth of the Cultural Revolution. He lived and taught for decades in Australia as a professor. He won a raft of awards, had a novel adapted into a film, and wrote gorgeous prose about everything under the sun. He was also Roman Catholic.
Above all, Leys was a man of letters. To read him is to be inducted into another world, the world of literature, a world made of books, words, and the men and women who write them. Yes, history and politics enter in, but it’s the words that matter, the selection of which words in what order to what end. The man knew style because he possessed it himself.
Simon Leys was a man of principle who did not flinch from criticizing living dictators, “China experts,” and academics full of hot air. He was a moralist who refused to moralize and an aesthete who believed in truth. He had no compunction about calling pundits’ and intellectuals’ bluff, as in his extraordinary reviews, respectively, of Christopher Hitchens’ book about Mother Teresa and of Edward Said’s Orientalism. (The final sentence of the latter review: “It is nice to see that Said is now rediscovering such a basic notion; I only deplore that it took him 300 pages of twisted, obscure, incoherent, ill-informed and badly written diatribe to reach at last one sound and fundamental truism.”)
Reading writers like Leys is more than a breath of fresh air. It’s a gust of wind at your back. It shows you your own moral and intellectual cowardice, not to mention the absolute void that is your learning compared to such a man. But far from enervating, the epiphany empowers. It’s a call and therefore a calling: This life, the writing life, the life of the mind in the life of letters, is possible. Don’t give up, not yet.
“There is no sublunary topic,” Leys wrote, “on which Samuel Johnson did not, at some time, issue a pithy and definitive statement.” You could say the same about Simon Leys. He was that good. I’m grateful to have discovered his voice, and through his so many others.
Why I’ve not been blogging
A minor update on the paucity of posts around here.
I’ve just been too busy. That’s the reason.
There are other reasons, or reasons behind the reasons. For instance, my sabbatical from teaching lasted from May 2024 to August 2025—a full sixteen months away from the classroom. During that time, I published two books, drafted a third, and kept up a publishing schedule of two to four essays/reviews per month. On top of that I did dozens of podcasts, mostly publicity for the books, but also more regular fare for Mere Fidelity. And I began traveling more than I ever have before, giving talks and lectures at colleges, conferences, and churches.
And then I returned to the classroom, without slowing any of that down. You can imagine how that went. September and October formed an airtight bottleneck of deadlines I barely met and in some cases did not. I’m out of that now, and mostly I’m recovering.
The obvious point is that I can’t keep up a sabbatical schedule of commitments while teaching a full course load of undergraduate classes. I was foolish to try to combine them without giving something up.
More than that, I’ve simply realized that in the 40-45 hours I give to work each week, besides teaching, grading, meetings with colleagues, and meetings with students, I have time for the following (in order):
Email
Reading
Writing
Podcasts
“Blogging” is distinct, because writing means either paid work or academic work that will pay for itself later, in other currency. If I have a spare moment to write—for that matter, if I have even the germ of an idea for anything that could be written of interest to others—then I’m going to give it to an essay, a review, an article, or a book manuscript. I can micro blog because it takes mere seconds, and I never develop anything essay-like over there. Here at the mezzo blog, by contrast, it’s difficult to justify the time, even 15-20 minutes’ worth. I don’t read nearly as much as I should, which means that I’d always (without exception!) be better off reading than blogging. But in that case, as I’ve discovered in practice, the blogging will go by the wayside entirely.
What does that mean, then? For one, it means that I remain secure in my decision to stay off social media; for another, it means that I won’t be joining the Substack cinematic universe anytime soon. From the bottom of my heart I do not understand how anyone—by which I mean writers and academics—even owns an account on these platforms, much less gives them the time of day. If that were me, I would accomplish literally nothing: I would write nothing, read nothing, and do nothing but scroll, half-reading “notes” and tweets and suchlike, intermittently, in every nook and cranny of my days.
Since I would like to read and write, when I’m not doing other things, it stands to reason that I should stay off. So I will. Having said that, I’m going to give mezzo blogging one more try between Thanksgiving week and the New Year. If there’s just no way to squeeze it in, then this space may be reduced semi-permanently to a ghost town of occasional announcements and little more. If so, so be it. But I do love blogging, and I especially love reading others’ blogging, so I’d be remiss if I didn’t make it work again.
In the coming weeks, then, expect more posts. And if they don’t appear, then you’ll know what I’ll have already learned: in this season of life, there’s just no time for it.
My latest: del Toro’s Frankenstein, in CT
A link to my latest piece, a review for CT of Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation of Frankenstein for Netflix.
This past Tuesday Christianity Today published my review of Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. The title is “In Netflix’s ‘Frankenstein,’ Monster Is More Compelling Than Maker,” with the following subheading: “The Guillermo del Toro adaptation brings unique perspective—but fails to match the depth of its source material.” That’s a fair representation of the review, which is critical of the film but appreciative of some of its virtues, not least Jacob Elordi’s performance and some of del Toro’s marvelous compositions. The last lines of the review sums up my theological take, too.
I must say I love the opportunity to moonlight as a film critic for CT. The original review I submitted was basically a cinematic recap of del Toro’s entire filmography, some of which remains in the final version. Turns out I got multiple degrees in theology and a job as a tenured professor just so I could finally fulfill my heart’s desire as a teenage cinephiliac: to get paid to write about the movies. What a life.