fuller and more comprehensible

From the intro to Tracy K. Smith’s anthology American Journal:

This is why I love poems: they invite me to sit down and listen to a voice speaking thoughtfully and passionately about what it feels like to be alive. Usually the someone doing the talking—the poem’s speaker—is a person I’d never get the chance to meet were it not for the poem. Because the distance between us is too great. Or because we are too unlike one another to ever feel this at ease face-to-face. Or maybe because the person talking to me never actually existed as anything other than a figment of a poet’s imagination, a character invented for reasons I may not ever know. Even when that someone is the real-life poet speaking of things that have actually happened, there is something different—some new strength, vulnerability, or authority—that the poem fosters. This is why I love poems: they require me to sit still, listen deeply, and imagine putting myself in someone else’s unfamiliar shoes. The world I return to when the poem is over seems fuller and more comprehensible as a result. […]

These fifty poems take up stories old and new, and traditions deeply rooted and newly arrived. They bear witness to the daily struggles and promises of community, as well as to the times when community eludes us. They celebrate us and the natural world, and bow in reverence to the mysterious unknown. They do this and, inevitably, a great deal more. I am also hoping that their courage, intimacy of address, and even the journey they collectively map out—a journey that encompasses consideration of place; reflections on family and individual identity; responses to the urgencies affecting our collective culture; and gestures of love, hope, and remembrance—might go some way toward making us, whoever and wherever we are, a little less alien to one another.

Tim Keller

It’s strange how the death of someone you took to be a deeply good man can both sadden and encourage you. I was, I think, a very stereotypical evangelical follower of Tim Keller in my 20s. In the hundreds of hours of commuting in a 2008 Toyota Yaris, I listened to dozens of his sermons downloaded on my iPod, many on repeat. I wanted his insight in my head, so that I could stand as confidently and gently as he did.

I saw him preach once, about a decade ago, at Redeemer’s downtown location, when I was in New York City volunteering with some friends at the Bowery Mission. Unsurprisingly, I remember nothing from that sermon, but I do remember how excited I was to be there. In the age of celebrity pastors and YouTube sermons, it’s rare to sit in the same room with the people who seemingly affect you the most. But actually attending Keller’s church was, for me, very unlike seeing a famous person or musician “live.” It was in this city, on this street, in this church, that he lived and dedicated so much of his life to. It’s a different feeling and one that I still remember.

I was profoundly shaped by two of Keller’s books: The Prodigal God and Generous Justice. Both books turned very central ideas of Christianity around for me—changed the outlook, the responsibility, and the experience of being a Christian in fundamental ways. And both are books I would still highly recommend.

In more recent years, I didn’t follow much of what he said or did, though I heard and read his name mentioned from time to time. Sadly, those mentions often came in a negative light. Culture warriors don’t have time for Tim Kellers. (Though they have the deepest possible need for them, whether they know it or not.) The funny thing is just how telling it was every time, how easily and automatically every criticism of him (that I read) failed its own test the moment I started reading it. In an essentially not-so-strange way, he became something of a litmus test: If your “Christian” politics requires that you take down Tim Keller, it’s a sign, to me at least, that you are basically full of shit flim-flam and doing something very much other than Christian politics.

Though I have no idea what one word is best, if I could pin down one characteristic of Keller’s, it would be his calm and sympathizing largesse. Nothing was too ancient or too backward to be given our modern attention. There was nothing that couldn’t be seen in some better light, a light which he modestly and tirelessly worked to shine everywhere. In approaching the world he lived in—approaching the history of it, life in it, or preaching about it—he was not abrasive or even defensive but essentially optimistic, embracing and celebratory of that world. And he managed to do this with rare skill and dedicated orthodoxy.

As a self-described exvangelical, I may have moved on in many ways from that time in my life, but it is a wonderful thing to look back with fondness at the inspiration and the example of a central figure like Tim Keller. I may no longer fit as comfortably as I once did in Keller’s theological shoes, but one of the greatest gifts in life is to know this sort of difference or separation and to know it, not only without animosity or pride, but with absolute love and respect and humility. And this status-of-peace was infinitely emanated in, through, and around Keller’s life.

The last time I read anything from Keller was, oddly enough, just last December, in a small basement-turned-medical-unit in eastern Ukraine. Though we had no cell phones or individual internet access, every few days we did receive, along with letters from home, a pdf of headlines from The New York Times that we could browse. Just headlines, no articles. But there was one exception that came through early in December: Tim Keller’s article in the Times on forgiveness. I remember reading it with a sort of nostalgia and affection.

And that seems fitting to me. The tensions that existed in that basement are difficult to define, but what better thing to be reading there? In a world defined by difference, fueled by outrage, plagued by war—what more significant quality could be called forth, pleaded and prayed for, than forgiveness? And I can think of few modern pastors who have championed this attitude better than Keller did.

It fits, it all fits. You couldn’t be this confident and accepting of the world if you hadn’t already forgiven everyone and everything in it. Or, more to the point in Keller’s case—it is The Point in Keller’s case—it would mean that you really do trust and love the knowledge that God has done this already.

When you embrace the idea that Jesus’ self-sacrifice was done for you, the Crucifixion becomes an act of surpassing beauty that, when brought into the center of your being, gives you both the profound humility and towering happiness, even joy, needed to forgive others.

Tim Keller really believed and embraced it to the end. So should we.

time to waste

The recent post by L. M. Sacasas in honor of Albert Borgmann is very good. This follow-up post on “the tyranny of tiny tasks” vs. “the fidelity to daily tasks” is also very good. And it reminds me of the very first post I ever made on the commonplace blog.

Here’s Sacasas:

What precisely are we saving time to do?

I think the implicit answer is always something like “to enjoy the goods and services of consumer capitalism” as if this was our highest calling as human beings, that which would bring us true happiness and satisfaction. But it is never quite put this way, nor do we put it this way to ourselves. Instead, the terms of the offer are far more vague and generic. Most of the persuasion, if we may call it that, is done by how our tasks are framed whenever a machine or system is created to do them for us. Suddenly, previously dignified work becomes “drudgery,” labor that some might have found satisfying becomes insufficiently “creative.” The sense is that we might unlock some higher plane of existence if only we adopt a more efficient technique or outsource our involvement in a task to a new technology. Then and only then will we be able to do “what really matters,” and “what really matters” is always sufficiently vague to allow us to imagine that we are choosing these ends for ourselves and simply being empowered by new tools to achieve it. 

In truth, this is just how we are convinced to give up on living. As Lewis Mumford put it in 1964, “Under the pretext of saving labor, the ultimate end of this technics is to displace life, or rather, to transfer the attributes of life to the machine and the mechanical collective, allowing only so much of the organism to remain as may be controlled and manipulated.”

Most importantly perhaps, I think that we should recognize that with all the talk of automated labor and outsourced intelligence we are being distracted from the one element of most profound human consequence—care. Care is what creates the possibility of purposeful action. Care is what issues forth in meaningful knowledge of the world and others. Care is ultimately what transforms the quality of our involvement and engagement with the world so that we pass from “getting things done” to living. 

Implicit in the promise of outsourcing and automation and time-saving devices is a freedom to be something other than what we ought to be. The liberation we are offered is a liberation from the very care-driven involvement in the world and in our communities that would render our lives meaningful and satisfying. In other words, the promise of liberation traps us within the tyranny of tiny tasks by convincing us to see the stuff of everyday life and ordinary relationships as obstacles in search of an elusive higher purpose—Creativity, Diversion, Wellness, Self-actualization, whatever. But in this way it turns out that we are only ever serving the demands of the system that wants nothing more than our ceaseless consumption and production.

If the point [of life] is to care and to love and to keep faith, then what is to be gained by outsourcing or eliminating the very ways we may be called upon to do so?

the humbling staggering stirring painful intricate inevitable resonant mysterious overflowing multitudinous sheer abundance and particularity of it all

Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn:

What is so painful about the thought of death, whether our own or that of others, is not that unending nothingness precedes and follows each life. It is, to the contrary, the sheer abundance of it all, despite—some say because of—our inevitable suffering: the multitudinous moments leading up to the particularities of a single existence, the staggering intricacies filling to overflowing our moments of living, whole new resonances sounding well after the body has given out, stirring others in countless mysterious ways. This is the real infinity. Being humbled by our failures is a necessity . . . . Yet our failures can ultimately be borne only through disciplined remembrance of the plenitude of presence. And the only true failure would be to forget that.

consider your natality

Jennifer Banks:

Just as women have been seen, in Simone de Beauvoir’s phrasing, as “the second sex,” birth has a sense of secondariness about it; it has long hovered in death’s shadow, quietly performing its under-recognized labor. Death has been humanity’s central defining experience, its deepest existential theme, more authoritative somehow than birth, and certainly more final. It is a given that humans are mortal creatures who must wrestle with their mortality, that death is the horizon no one can avoid, despite constant attempts at evasion and postponement and despite the recurring fantasy of immortality. Birth, meanwhile, is what recedes into a hazy background, slipping back past the limits of memory, existing in that forgotten realm where uteruses, blood, sex, pain, pleasure, and infancy constellate.

Those who philosophize properly, Plato asserted centuries before Seneca, are those who practice death and dying. In the Christianity that matured alongside such Greek and Roman influences, the crucifix would overshadow the manger as the central symbol of liturgical worship, with Christ’s death and resurrection accruing more theological significance in most communities than Mary’s miraculous birthing.

Birth often felt so huge and untamed, so morally dense and so imaginatively rich, that it continually overwhelmed all human attempts at describing or controlling it. But I’ve wondered what human life would look like if the poets, sages, intellectuals, and political leaders had made statements more like these: “From the time we are born, we are being shaped by birth.” “Study birth always; it takes an entire lifetime to come to terms with our having been born.” “Keep birth daily before your eyes.” “Birth is evidence of our freedom.” “The fundamental purpose of art is to process the strange, painful, and miraculous experience of childbirth.” Imagine what the world would look like if we humans understood ourselves as natal creatures who throughout our lives, whether we like it or not, need to wrestle with our own natality.

These phenomena [growing inequality and loneliness, rising suicide rates, fewer social services, greater political polarization, the spread of false narratives and propaganda campaigns, political setbacks for women, the stalled campaigns for racial justice, and the erosion of democratic norms] all point to a profound isolation at the heart of modern life, a pulling back from a shared, embodied, and committed life with other people. Birth, like democratic politics, challenges us with otherness, with the putting aside of oneself to make room for another person, and with the challenges of difference and plurality.

dimly, always dimly

Samuel D. James:

There is always an intrinsic danger to telling one’s story. We are all fallible narrators. Even the purest intentions cannot cure a mistaken memory or a misunderstood moment. These things do not make our self-histories worthless; they simply make them human.

Yet telling our stories of theological, political, or intellectual transformation carries a distinct risk: that our gratitude for where we are now lures us into ignoring or distorting the grace that met us at a much different place. This isn’t just a factual problem. It’s a spiritual one as well.

Many of us raised in evangelical subcultures must admit that we are very different people today than we were while living with our parents, attending this Sunday school class, or sitting under that youth pastor. Many of us will look back at the things we were taught and see problems—some minor, others serious.

Yet this transformation shouldn’t leave us with contempt for the people and places of our past. When we’re honest with ourselves, we should acknowledge that even the ways we change are deeply rooted in the things that were poured into us when we were too young to refuse them. […]

… Indeed, this is the peril of all our testimonies[:] We see even our own lives only as through a mirror dimly.

I have not read Jon Ward’s new book, Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Failed a Generation, which James is reviewing. And I’m not sure I will or need to read it. The title resonates, but my experience so far with these kinds of narratives has remained a bit standoffish. When it comes to evangelicals and deconstruction and all that, there are levels both of offensiveness and defensiveness that I have not been able to get on board with.

In Ward’s defense, there’s plenty, plenty more that should be fleshed out regarding generations of evangelical failure. I also take Ward at his word (in this interview) when he says he acribes no malice to the evangelicals his book is directed at. And James’s defensiveness (and anger?) toward the book is much more evident in this follow-up post to the CT article. However, the above excerpt/warning from James is spot-on.

(Also, just to get this off my chest, this interview with Jon Ward on MSNBC’s Morning Joe is unwatchable. I could not finish it. It’s like Ward was brought on to the show to watch Joe Scarborough interview himself on his own high-flying opinion of the topic of Ward’s book. After all the Morning Joe SNL skits, you would think they would have caught on at least a little.)

“zombie parrots”

Baldur Bjarnason:

You know what Generative AI is in terms of how it presents to you as software: clever chatbots that do or say things in response to what you say: your prompt. Some of those responses are useful, and they give you an impression of sophisticated comprehension. The models that generate text are fluent and often quite engaging.

This fluency is misleading. What Bender and Gebru meant when they coined the term stochastic parrot wasn’t to imply that these are, indeed, the new bird brains of Silicon Valley, but that they are unthinking text synthesis engines that just repeat phrases. They are the proverbial parrot who echoes without thinking, not the actual parrot who is capable of complex reasoning and problem-solving.

A zombie parrot, if you will, that screams for brains because it has none.

The fluency of the zombie parrot—the unerring confidence and a style of writing that some find endearing—creates a strong illusion of intelligence.

Every other time we read text, we are engaging with the product of another mind. We are so used to the idea of text as a representation of another person’s thoughts that we have come to mistake their writing for their thoughts. But they aren’t. Text and media are tools that authors and artists create to let people change their own state of mind—hopefully in specific ways to form the image or effect the author was after. […]

These language models are interactive but static snapshots of the probability distributions of a written language. […]

That’s what distinguishes biological minds from these algorithmic hindsight factories …

“staying human together”

Mary Harrington:

I was raised to believe in progress – the more-or-less religious framework that governs much of modern culture in the West. This framework says there’s a right side of history, and things can go on getting better forever.

It’s not self-evident, though, that humans have steadily progressed. That doesn’t mean everything was perfect once and we’re all going to hell in a handbasket. But pick a subject, and you’ll find some things are better, while other things have become worse. If you’re going to believe in progress, you have to define what you mean by progress. More stuff? More freedom? Less disease? Whatever your measure, you’ll find that what looks from one vantage point like progress mostly seems that way because you’re ignoring the costs. We’ve grown immeasurably richer and more comfortable in the last three hundred years, for example. But we did so on the backs of plundered, colonized, and enslaved peoples, and at the cost of incalculable environmental degradation. Meanwhile, torture in warfare hasn’t gone away. Warfare hasn’t gone away. Nor has hunger, misery, or human degradation. […]

Resisting this means pursuing not untrammelled freedom, but a broader project of staying human together.

I’m admittedly hijacking Harrington’s point (which is a great point about how a “radical reordering of women’s politics, women’s priorities, and even our bodies to the interests of the market, in the name of liberty, has racked up a growing mountain of uncounted costs,” and the need to “re-evaluate how men and women can be human together”), in order to make a note that this broad, and very central, project of “staying human together” is an excellent way to frame a thus far mostly intuited explanation for why I am so deeply—or at least viscerally—opposed to libertarianism.

“to build a great library”

Zito Madu:

It was important to my parents that we also have a library at home. After years of moving around, including across continents, when we finally settled in the house where my parents still live today, an entire room was set aside to be the library. It was tremendously impractical with our family of eight, with everyone doubling up to fit in the limited space. Arguments, fights, friendships, alliances, and temporary allegiances were all part of the pressure of that closeness and lack of privacy. The use of another bedroom would have alleviated this pressure, but my parents refused that possibility. The room was the library and that was that. […]

I never defined myself by reading – to be honest, I still spent most of my time playing soccer or causing trouble – nor did I need it to be a way for me to see myself and my experiences reflected. That was fine when it did so, but more important to me is the way it expanded my world. My real world and its ideas, and then the imagined worlds and their ideas as well.

I can’t ever recall my parents demanding that we read, or spend any amount of time in the library to compete with other kids or to better ourselves. The library just had to exist and be available so that we could use it whenever we wanted. The rest was up to our imaginations and personal desires. The library door was always open – we only had to walk in. […]

I needed to be surrounded, everywhere that I stayed, with these books that were doors to endless worlds. I needed the ones that I hadn’t read, and the ones that I might not ever get to read, much more than I did the ones that I had. Those books were the unknown, the unexplored dark forests – they both comfort and thrill me with the possibility that one day I might open them up and find myself among new monsters, friends, adventures, and tragedies. Even if that opening never happens, that it might happen is enough. […]

Sometimes when I’m going through a phase of exhaustion or alienation, I imagine an escape the same way that some people imagine running away to a farm or to a small town where they can live modestly with their friends or family. This is my runaway fantasy: not to move towards the margins of the world, but to build a great library. A great library in the village that I’m from, in a small town by the water, in Marseille, in New York, anywhere. A library that doesn’t demand anything, as the best libraries usually don’t. One that is simply present as part of life, where I and anyone else can go sleep, play, read, or do nothing but let the hours pass. A library like the one that nurtured me at home.

aim small, miss small

Freddie deBoer:

Homo sapiens is about 300,000 years old, give or take 50,000. Here are the available options.

  1. Despite the incredibly long odds against this happy coincidence, the period of your lifespan – which will likely be around 75 years, and thus cover about .025% of the human story to date – does in fact happen to overlap with the most important era in human history, the age of kings, the great conjunction, the time of heroes. Congratulations.
  2. You do not, in fact, live in the most important era of human history. You have not been lucky enough to occupy some sort of liminal period for our species. But you have a consciousness system that compels you to think of yourself as uniquely special and thus begs you to believe that you live in special times. The idea that you are somehow not important, the notion that the universe had no special responsibility to produce you, is in a very deep sense unthinkable to you. Now a new technology has emerged, and those who stand to make billions off of it are telling you: you will never be lonely again; the meaning you’ve always pined for will be provided for you by superintelligent beings; you will not die, but have eternal life. Or, alternatively, you are soon to witness the end of the world, which will free you from everything you don’t like about your life and yourself. Either way – people are telling you that something very, very important is happening, and right now is important, and you live now, so you’reimportant, and you want to believe, have to believe, are desperate to believe. And so you do believe, even though it isn’t true.

So. Do absolutely everything you can to extricate yourself, momentarily, from what the maladaptive evolutionary byproduct we call consciousness is screaming in your ear, and ask yourself: which of these two stories is more likely?