hermits

The idea of the hermit’s life—simplicity, devotion, closeness to nature—lurks somewhere on the periphery of most people’s consciousness, a way glimpsed, oddly familiar, not taken. It is like one of those tracks you sometimes see as you drive along a country road, a path leading up a hill and disappearing into a wood, almost painfully inviting, so that you long to stop the car and follow it, and perhaps you take your foot off the accelerator for a couple of seconds, no more. Most of us wouldn’t like it if we did walk up the hill, we’d become bored, depressed, uncomfortable, take to drink. But the idea is still there: the path we didn’t take.

That’s from Isabel Colegate’s A Pelican in the Wilderness. My friend Luke once played up a phrase I used in the subject line of an email, saying it was a good title for a future blog site, and also a proper summation of our history of conversations: “rambling and inconcise.” Well, if you haven’t already expected it, consider this essay at least potentially … uh, maundering and incompendious.

I have one friend from an old college writing class with whom I exchange written letters. After a heart attack, one of her wishes was to send and receive more hand-written letters. Of course, it was impossible to start writing letters without both of us lamenting the lack, and praising the existence, of that simple and old and neglected medium of pen and paper. I like to think of (personal) emails as being moderately capable of resembling letters, and representing an example of at least a moderately good use of technology. The funny part is that, while I have one friend who writes letters, I have … [checks figures] … zero friends who write emails, at least with any regularity. It’s a lonely world, and for me text messages, while great for quick shares, can often make me feel even lonelier. Kind of like how sleeping on an airplane can have the reverse effect and make you feel more tired, getting a text from a friend who I rarely see makes me feel even less connected. Maybe that’s a bad analogy. But the point is that texting is an inherently lazy and poor form of communication. For some things, that’s perfectly fine. But I think it should always be treated as an inherently lazy and poor form of communication. (I fully admit, if you are not someone I text with regularly, and you randomly send me a text message, there is, without any malice, a very high likelihood I will not reply.) With a COVID epidemic having only compounded a loneliness epidemic, why in shit’s paddleless creek are we not at least writing more email-letters to each other? Of course, I have no idea how many letters or emails anyone actually writes in a given week, nor how anyone regularly communicates with the people they love but don’t see. So, while I have not (yet) had any heart attacks, maybe this is just my own way of asking for more emails.

But the goal here is not to lament the displacement of more thoughtful and thorough forms of communication.

I have a lot of opinions about the church culture in which I grew up, at least half of them quite critical. The problem is that I simply hate being someone who laments the status of “the Church” while not being someone who is even attending the gathering of one. I have been to … [checks figures] … exactly one church service in the last three years. (It was an episcopal church in Idaho Falls. The voice of the woman leading the church was so shrill that it made me ashamed to wonder, but no less actually wonder, how on earth she could have chosen the right profession. I am still ashamed of this, but still admit it.) I was not in regular attendance in Maine even before the pandemic. And while working night shifts and finishing a baccalaureate were certainly factors, they were also excuses I was all too content with.

I read something recently that said some version of a very common refrain, about how the church is a motley crew with all kinds of differences, but we meet because we know that we agree on this ultimate thing: praising God in Christ Jesus. I deeply want to say yes and amen, and I want to say something about how the church has never been perfect but has always been a wayward group needing encouragement and correction just like everybody else. But however true those things are, the first phrasing especially feels too cliché, too dismissive. It does not help with how not-at-home I feel with the Republican Conservative Evangelical church that I have known most of my life. Yes, for over 30 years I’ve heard that we are Christian first and everything else long after, but words are one thing and fruit another. And of course, as a necessary caveat, I am grateful for all the teaching and training and wisdom and love I have received. It is that same Evangelical church that is somehow responsible for forming me and also responsible for my rejection of it. (I think it was Tim Keller who pointed out that the problem with Christians is that they aren’t Christian enough. To me, it is an internal inconsistency that seems always redirected toward an external enemy; or, as I have quoted Garry Wills a thousand times, the church which systematically rejects its own sources of wisdom “cannot contribute what it no longer possesses.”)

Where does all this leave me? I have no idea. Rambling and inconcise, I suppose. But the goal of writing should be openness and honesty leading to discovery, no? I certainly hope that’s what this space is for.

I am, have always been, and will probably always be, a skeptical believer. But while I have watched a few people give up on faith entirely, I have never felt that deep faith itself shake. Question? Yes. Despise? Yes. But always there. I had lunch with my friend Marilyn at Fajita Grill shortly before I left Maine. I remember being more than a little offended when she told me that, after our previous meeting, she thought that maybe I had also given up altogether on faith. I’m still a little baffled as to how I could have conveyed that. Exactly what I believe about the Christian faith and how I believe it—how could that not change over the years? But that small Reformed remnant in me does still wake up and say, “Thank you.” (“Oh, the twisted roads I walked! Woe to my outrageous soul,” wrote St. Augustine. “But look, you’re here, freeing us from our unhappy wandering, setting us firmly on your track, comforting us and saying, ‘Run the race! I’ll carry you! I’ll carry you clear to the end, and even at the end, I’ll carry you.’”)

I suppose it’s obvious how all this might be derived from a quote about recluses and hermits. But another quote from one of Colegate’s following chapters might make it more obvious still:

We think we might be [like the contented hermit] ourselves if some things were different . . . forgetting of course that the condition of complete simplicity costs, as Eliot said, not less than everything. Hermits can achieve that state, some of the time or all of the time. There are also restless hermits, ecstatic hermits and madmen. There is hallucination and there is fraud. Too much physical darkness and emptiness result in sensory deprivation in which the brain, finding nothing solid to work on, malfunctions frantically among phantasmagoria.

Colgate goes on to quote Richard Rolle (italics added):

It behoves him then who would sing of his love for God and rejoice fervently in such singing, to pass his days in solitude. Yet the abstinence in which he lives should not be excessive . . . I myself have eaten and drunk things that are considered delicacies . . . in order to sustain my being in the service of God . . . For his sake I conformed quite properly with those with whom I was living lest I should invent a sanctity where none existed, lest men should praise me where I was less worthy of praise.

She closes that chapter with this counsel:

Melancholy and morbid fantasy do assail the hermit. He remembers Ecclesiastes: ‘Woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up.’ A solitary may take leave of his senses, misinterpret messages or invent them, diminish, despair, die. ‘Be not solitary, be not idle,’ remains then the best advice, until such time as the branch grows green again.

While I could spend any number of consecutive days tucked away with a few good books in the corner of the house or in a small coffee shop, I would very much like not to be solitary, not to be idle. For an introvert like me, that can take work. It does take work and, I promise, I’m still working on it.

It may not seem as obvious, but the hermit thing is relevant not only for my individual self, as it relates to the church or elsewise, but also for the church as it relates to the world. I hear over and over again about how “set apart” and “otherworldly” the church must be. And surely this is true in some sense, to some degree. But surely there is a touch (if not a zeitgeist!) of docetism in there. Surely the desire to be set apart undoes something crucial in the message of the incarnating, suffering, reviving God.

I shared a short article from Wesley Hill not long ago, where he points out that the original language in Philippians 2 is a bit ambiguous on a point we often take for granted, since there’s a connector often present in English in vs. 6 that is not present in the Greek. “Though he existed in the form of God” could just as easily be translated as “because he existed in the form of God”: because he is God, therefore he emptied himself. Now, there are a lot of reasons for the first understanding, and I’m not saying that it’s necessarily better translated the second way, and I don’t think Hill is either. But, if God is triune, self-giving love, doesn’t it seem like a textual ambiguity worth appreciating?

Here’s part of a quote from Arthur Michael Ramsey (at short but greater length here):

The self-giving love of Calvary discloses not the abolition of deity but the essence of deity in its eternity and perfection. God is Christlike, and in him is no un-Christlikeness at all, and the glory of God in all eternity is that ceaseless self-giving love of which Calvary is the measure. God’s impassibility means that God is not thwarted or frustrated or ever to be an object of pity, for when he suffers with his suffering creation it is the suffering of a love which through suffering can conquer and reign. Love and omnipotence are one.

Ramsey goes on to quote David Jenkins:

In relation to the practical problem of evil, God is neither indifferent, incompetent nor defeated. He is involved, identified and inevitably triumphant.

There is perhaps nothing that makes me more deeply joyful than what Ramsey and Jenkins describe. Those words “involved,” “identified”—they are the heart of existence for me.

Though I have quoted it before, perhaps just as importantly and well stated is Karl Barth, from his Church Dogmatics IV/3:

The solidarity of the community with the world consists quite simply in the active recognition that it, too, since Jesus Christ is the Saviour of the world, can exist in worldly fashion, not unwillingly nor with bad conscience, but willingly and with good conscience. It consists in the recognition that its members also bear in themselves and in some way actualize all human possibilities. Hence it does not consist in a cunning masquerade, but rather in an unmasking in which it makes itself known to others as akin to them, rejoicing with them that do rejoice and weeping with them that weep (Rom. 12:15), not confirming and strengthening them in evil nor betraying and surrendering them for its own good, but confessing for its own good, and thereby contending against the evil of others, by accepting the fact that it must be honestly and unreservedly among them and with them, on the same level and footing, in the same boat and within the same limits as any or all of them. How can it boast of and rejoice in the Saviour of the world and men, or how can it win them—to use another Pauline expression—to know Him and to believe in Him, if it is not prepared first to be human and worldly like them and with them?

What Barth says next I first read quoted from George Hunsinger, and it’s something that has stuck with me ever since I read it six years ago:

[The church] manifests a remarkable conformity to the world if concern for its purity and reputation forbid it to compromise itself with it. The world only too easily sees itself as a community which has no care but for its own life and rights and manner and which thus tries to separate itself from those around. The world itself constantly divides into individual cliques, interested groups, cultural movements, nations, religions, parties and sects of all kinds, each of which is sure of the goodness of its own cause and each anxious within the limits to maintain and assert itself in face of all the rest. . . . As distinct from all other circles and groups, the community of Jesus Christ cannot possibly allow itself to exist in this pharisaical conformity to the world. Coming from the table of the Lord, it cannot fail to follow His example and to sit down at table with the rest, with all sinners.

Which brings me back to Colgate and hermits and life outside of church attendance. “For his sake I conformed quite properly with those with whom I was living lest I should invent a sanctity where none existed.” 

I wrote to a traveling nurse friend a few years ago who encouraged me to read Eugene Peterson’s A Long Obedience in the Same Direction. Here’s what I wrote:

I told you in Liberia that I’ve never been a big fan of The Message [translation], or at least that it’s never done anything for me. That’s still true, really, but every once in a while I find something in it that is very helpful. In this case, I really liked his translation of Philippians 4:5. NKJV says, “Let your gentleness be known to all men.” NASB uses gentle spirit. ESV, for some unknown purpose, uses reasonableness. Peterson paraphrases it like this: “Make it clear to all you meet that you’re on their side, working with them and not against them.” Naturally, since I’m often reading an ESV, I wondered how he got from “reasonableness” to all that. Turns out, most of the verse spins on one word: epieikés. Here’s the definition I found: “properly, equitable, gentle in the sense of truly fair by relaxing overly strict standards in order to keep the spirit of the law.” Long story short, I like Peterson’s translation better.

I think the NKJV comes closest with “gentleness,” but it seems like that one little Greek word needs a lot of English words to do it justice. We exist apart from the world only insofar as we exist for it. To quote Barth again: the church does not/can not seek to exist “in a cunning masquerade, but rather in an unmasking in which it makes itself known to others as akin to them.” If that is not epieikés, I don’t know what is. It’s a taking down of walls and refusing to build them up. More than that, it’s walking unarmed away from the city with nothing more than what God has given you.

As difficult as things have been in recent years, as much as I often feel like a hermit in exile, I do think that I have felt more for the world than ever before.

“to dazzle with possibility”

Douglas Yacek:

We are in thrall to the language of transformation. It instantly rallies the human spirit. It promises radical personal growth. It hints at transcendent forces that we’ve all but buried in our pragmatic, I-am-the-prime-mover-of-my-life sort of age. And it taps into one of the most powerful ideologies of consumer life—the endless project of self-invention and reinvention. […]

The goal of transformation is left open-ended, unstated, and uncertain, as if we have done our jobs as educators when we increase the sheer number of possible choices available to young people without helping them figure out which ones are actually worth pursuing. Ironically, in leaving these questions unanswered, we do not actually avoid advancing a conception of what the good life entails. On the contrary, we suggest to young people that change for its own sake is itself a worthy modus vivendi. We are setting students on a path of perpetual transformation, making them into people who are always searching for experiences that stretch and strain their prior commitments and who, in the last analysis, lack existential purpose. Such continual up-endings can have an addictive quality, luring us toward nowhere in particular, so long as it is shocking and surprising. In the end, transformation becomes valued precisely because it does not fulfill the timeless human longing for greater wisdom, purpose, and character. Rather it “frees” us from the hard work and moral integrity that are required to achieve these fundamental goods. […]

Not all transformations are created equal. Although transformative education is often cached out with the logic of option expansion just described, this is not the only kind of transformation we might experience. In fact, if we reflect on experiences that have actually exerted a transformative effect on our lives, we generally focus on the very opposite of increased options or choices. . . . When we talk about such experiences, we concentrate on the greater sense of purpose, understanding, and meaning that the experience has brought to our lives, not the naked plus sign between it and our prior perspective. In other words, we value our transformations less for the Big Change it effects and more for the New Good that has begun to reshape our lives.

. . . Transformative education in its most compelling form points students toward real human goods that inspire them to become better people than they are right now. It increases the richness, depth, and perspicacity of students’ views of themselves and the world around them. It awakens a desire to fill their lives with ever-expanding value and meaning. And it encourages them to pour their hearts into vocations, practices, and ways of life that have proved to be both intrinsically valuable and conducive to human flourishing, in the best cases over millennia. Transformative education is not merely about increasing life options; it should help students wholeheartedly commit to those that are deeply worthwhile.

“to enrich and to complicate”

Walter Russel Mead:

“Others look to religion to provide a clear and all-encompassing explanation of world events, and an easily understood method for dividing out the good guys and the bad. This approach also falls short. As a Christian, admittedly a rather imperfect one, I believe that we all benefit from God’s providence and live under his judgment, and that when properly seen and understood the tangled threads of human history will ultimately reveal the work of a divine hand. But my faith also teaches me that, as C.S. Lewis put it in the Narnia books, Aslan is not a tame lion. Faith in God can help you find the inner strength to face the storms of history with courage and resolve, but the Christian revelation is intended to lead people toward a deeper engagement with the mystery and the wonder of the universe. Those who look for point-by-point guides to a coming apocalypse in the Christian scriptures, or those who think that a simplistic reading of the ethical teachings of Christ eliminates the need for hard political thinking are missing the point. Christianity—and in this it resembles all the great religious traditions—exists to enrich and to complicate rather than to simplify our understanding of the contemporary world.”

Mark Noll:

The Bible’s story may indeed be considered a metanarrative subsuming all other narratives, or a truth that relativizes all other forms of knowledge. But as metanarrative and final truth, the Bible does not speak directly about everything per se. It rather speaks of everything indirectly, because it speaks of the origin, redemption, and final purpose of all things. Believing what the Bible says about the Bible, in other words, makes it possible to affirm both that the Bible provides a comprehensively true perspective on all things and that the Bible does not explain everything in the world directly. With the Scriptures’ own statements about themselves in view, attitudes toward studying the world – eagerness to exploit secondary ways of knowing – should be opened up rather than shut down. This openness to experiencing the world, in turn, is exactly what a biblical vision of divine creation, with Christ as the active agent, encourages. […]

In [J. I.] Packer’s phrase, “sola scriptura was never meant to imply that what is not mentioned in the Bible is not real, or is unimportant and not worth our attention, or that the history of biblical exegesis and exposition, and of theological construction and confession, over two millennia, need not concern us today, or that we should restrict our interest in God’s world and in the arts, sciences, products, and dreams of our fellow-human beings.” Rather, “The Bible has been given us, not to define for us the realities of the created order, nor to restrain our interests in them, but to enable us to diagnose, understand, appreciate, and handle them as we meet them, so that we may use and enjoy them to the Creator’s praise.”

For a truly biblical view of the Bible, it is important not to treat the Bible as a storehouse of information sufficient in itself for all things but to embrace, rather, the Bible’s own perspective that leads its readers to a God-ordained openness to all things.

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 …