Sith > Jedi

Through five of eight episodes, The Acolyte is a middling failure—and a failure because it is middling. Of everything Star Wars needed, the very last was one more showdown between the Jedi and a mysterious Sith shrouded in darkness, a long drawn-out unveiling and encounter shot without beauty or grandeur or style or grandness of scope. What a bore.

Oh well. Three more thoughts before we finish the series then immediately forget it ever existed.

First: In the lead-up to the show, the buzz was that it would be a story told from the Sith’s perspective, that is, from the vantage point of powerless partisans of the Dark Side at the tail end of a millennium-long unchallenged reign by the Jedi. That’s an interesting idea! Why wasn’t this exact story told in that way? Never in the hallways of Jedi power; never looking at the Sith or his acolyte through Jedi eyes; always, instead, looking at the Jedi aslant, from an angle, burning with furious resentment. In this way the aha-reveal wouldn’t be a Sith under a mask, but the epiphany of actual Jedi in all their boring beige glory—come to steal children, enforce galactic edicts, and kill with impunity. Why did no one think this the better route?

Second: If Disney wants to make quality Star Wars (on either the big or the small screen), they have to commit to top-tier casting. Cast a show the way HBO does. Don’t cast tweens and newbies. Don’t cast on the cheap. Get the best of the best. The only way this works is if the actors on screen have gravitas. Most of the actors on this show, like Kenobi and Boba Fett before it, look like third billing in a spin-off DC comics movie. Follow Andor’s lead and make every actor who has even a single line of dialogue someone who could win an Emmy—someone who could steal the show. (Make them human, too, by the way.) As it is, we get stilted dialogue performed by teens and twentysomethings who look like it’s their big break following a string of guest appearances on the CW. And it’s Disney, I remind you, that’s footing the bill. They’ve got the cash.

Third: Does this show prove once and for all that, canonically, the Dark Side is more powerful than the Light? Ignore Episode IX, since it never happened. Across eight movies, nearly every time a Jedi fights a Sith head-to-head (or a Force-wielding opponent in touch with the Dark Side, since neither Snoke nor Kylo Ren are Sith), the Jedi loses. Darth Maul defeats Qui-Gon Jinn and, at least in terms of lightsaber combat, Obi-Wan too. Dooku defeats Anakin and Obi-Wan both before fighting Yoda to a draw. Palpatine beats Yoda. Anakin may lose to Obi-Wan, but he “wins” in Episode IV and wins again in Episode V against Luke. Luke bests Anakin only by tapping into his anger (i.e., the Dark Side); Palpatine then defeats Luke; and Anakin in turn destroys Palpatine. In other words, this particular Sith loses not to a Jedi but to a fellow Sith—his own apprentice.

It turns out that, with the exception of Obi-Wan in his prime against an Anakin lacking any training in the Sith arts—having turned to the Dark Side mere hours earlier—the Jedi are no match for the Sith. The Sith are simply too powerful. The Dark Side appears to be the stronger side of the Force, and by a wide margin, whatever its moral content. (Note further that the Jedi themselves teach, as doctrine, that the Force as such is amoral; what it seeks, and what the universe wants, is balance, not for the extinction of the Dark by the Light.)

To its credit, The Acolyte confirms and extends this canonical pattern. In doing so, it raises questions it will surely avoid, such as why the viewer should root for the Jedi; why the Light is preferable to the Dark Side; why, post-Rey, anyone should have confidence that the Dark will not return and prevail; and how, pre-Palpatine, the Sith and the Dark Side alike were dormant, or even nonexistent, for a thousand years.

Star Wars has written its canon into a corner. Leslye Headland isn’t going to write it out. That falls to someone else. I have my doubts such a person exists. And even if they did, I wouldn’t hold my breath that Disney would hire or empower them to tell the only story that needs telling.

Update (5 minutes later): I realize, upon pressing “publish,” that this post is, unwittingly but unsurprisingly, one long apologia for Rian Johnson and The Last Jedi. IYKYK.

But seriously: I forgot to mention that Rey and Ren fight to a draw; that Rey is powerless before Snoke; and that only Ren can defeat Snoke. Which only furthers the point. Not to mention that Snoke converts Ren from the Light to the Dark and that Ren rebels against Luke—a Jedi Master!—thereby casting him away into exile and self-incurred defeat, even if also (at the end, through Rey) toward a sort of self-immolating victory. Had Kathleen Kennedy permitted Rian Johnson or some equally brilliant screenwriter to follow the lines he’d drawn where they were pointing (that is, in the climactic ninth film), all this would have already been resolved, since the question at the heart of the above post is the question at the heart of Episode VIII. Asked but, on principle, unanswered by Kennedy, Abrams, et al. Oh well. Maybe that was their signal that it never would be. So it goes.

23 thoughts on The Phantom Menace

Twenty-five years ago I saw Episode I with a childhood best friend in the theater that sits at the entrance to Universal Studios in Orlando, Florida; last night I saw the re-release with my sons at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, Texas. I’ve got thoughts.

1. No matter its potential, no matter the what-might-have-beens, no matter the revisionist reviews or retconning or retrievals, three things were always going to keep TPM from being a great Star Wars film: (a) an eight-year-old Anakin; (b) unnecessary narrative nostalgia; and (c) cutesy cartoon schmaltz. We now have forty years’ worth of evidence that these decisions were not departures from the vision of George Lucas, but part and parcel of it. To change course, he would have had to listen to outside voices suggesting that Anakin be eighteen, not eight; that Anakin not be the original builder of C-3PO; that Jar Jar and Watto and Sebulba and “sleemo” and “doo-doo” and ha-ha neighborhood Tatooine slave children taunting “Ani” are neither funny nor endearing, including to actual children. But Lucas doesn’t believe in listening to others, here in his galaxy above all. So there’s no sliding doors moment where Episode I is truly excellent; it was always going to be hamstrung from the start.

2. A partial addition to this list is Lucas’s obsession with “cutting edge” CGI, which everyone but him knows ceases to be cutting edge the moment the car drives off the lot. On re-watch, though, had the film lacked the above three items of dead weight without cutting the gratuitous CGI, it could have held up. So long as the animated characters weren’t cartoonish or racist(!)—a big “if”—then TPM would have been like Terminator 2 or Jurassic Park or Fellowship of the Ring. The “dated” graphics aren’t dated at all: they’re remarkable testaments to digital artistry. Rather than what they became, which is testaments to Lucas’s softness for silliness.

3. A friend told me years ago that a professor of his ruined The Godfather for him by pointing out Diane Keaton’s acting in it. Allow me to suggest that Natalie Portman is the Kay Adams of The Phantom Menace—indeed, of all three prequel trilogy episodes. She’s not exactly spectacular or awful, the way Hayden Christensen is on screen and going for it and not quite succeeding but still, you know, doing a thing. It’s a void, an absence, a null. She’s a non-presence in every single scene. I’m happy to blame Lucas for this instead of Portman, both for his direction and for his writing of the character. (Portman is, after all, a very accomplished actor outside of Star Wars, which was one reason to be excited about her casting!) Nevertheless one-half of the Skywalker twins’ parentage is a zero in our introduction to her. A lost opportunity.

4. The only time Portman is half-alive is when she “plays” her own double on Tatooine and repeatedly butts heads with Liam Neeson’s Qui-Gon Jinn. But then, the entire handmaiden/queen ruse and its “reveal” is goofy to begin with. I wonder how it played with adults at the time. I vaguely recall being surprised in 1999, yet minus any payoff. The only narrative logic is that it allows Lucas to put Portman in town with Neeson when they meet and befriend Anakin and his mother Shmi. Otherwise it’s a dead end.

5. Given the furor it caused at the time, I have to admit that, on re-watch these many years later, with so many shows and film and canon filled out, I don’t mind the Midi-chlorians one bit. It’s actually rather elegantly done, I must say. Begone, haters! Hier stehe ich und kann nicht anders.

6. There are other clunky bits, not least just about everything related to the Gungans as well as the deep-sea adventure through the planet’s core, plus some of the Trade Federation politics- and alien-speak (again, those accents are shameful). That said … like all the other revisionists, I can’t hate this movie, and there’s a lot to appreciate, even love. Let me count the ways.

7. Neeson’s Qui-Gon is not only a home run: well conceived, well written, and well executed. He may be one of Lucas’s greatest creations. He commands every scene. He’s always in his own skin, comfortable where others are not. His simultaneous uncertainty, confusion, confidence, and resolve are palpable. The hints at his past and his running conflict with the Council are expertly deployed in their ambiguity. He has chemistry with everyone: with Portman, with Ewan McGregor, with Jake Lloyd, with Pernilla August. Neeson somehow single-handedly elevates this movie from forgettable to memorable, at least when he’s on screen (which is a lot). All this is not even to mention the moral gray that Lucas leans into with Qui-Gon. I lost count how many times Neeson lies to someone’s face without a trace of regret. He gambles without promise of gain and doesn’t even stop to inform the queen. What a character! What a performance!

8. Did I mention that Qui-Gon was dead right about the Jedi and the Republic? About its sclerosis, decay, and internal rot? About its detachment from the common good? About its aristocratic self-regard and blindness to the evil in its midst? Neither Yoda nor Mace Windu could see Palpatine standing right in front of them. Palpatine made sure his apprentice killed the only one who might recognize him before it was too late.

9. (This point and the next two relate also, by the way, to The Last Jedi. Rian Johnson understood that Luke had to come to terms, on screen, with the “intra-Jedi” debate between Palpatine, Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan, and Yoda. In a sense, Luke—through Ren—had to mature beyond Yoda and Obi-Wan’s vacillating optimism and despair in favor of something less childish, less binary, less yin and yang, without succumbing to the Dark Side. That maturity goes unspoken in the film, but its name is Qui-Gon. Had Episode IX been made by someone as shrewd as Johnson, Rey’s journey and continuation of the Jedi would have made explicit this callback all the way to Episode I: “a new start” for “a new Jedi,” open to the wisdom and worldly good sense of a Qui-Gon Jinn.)

10. Qui-Gon wasn’t just right about the Jedi; he was also right about Anakin, assuming he was indeed the Chosen One (a contestable proposition, I admit). Even if he was wrong about the prophecy, or rather ensured the truth of the prophecy by tragically ensuring Anakin’s training, he was right to see promise and potential in Anakin and the Council was wrong to treat a third-grade child—to his face—like his sadness and fear, after leaving his home and mother behind, were such a psychological obstacle to his learning the Force that they would rather him suffer humiliating rejection before the highest sages of the land. Hm, I’m sure that would have bode well for the virginally conceived Jesus of Midi-chlorian Force powers. They sealed their fate, and confirmed Qui-Gon’s worst fears about them, in that very room, by that very decision. It’s a miracle that Anakin ever repents at all, given his experiences.

11. Think again about those experiences. He’s conceived without a father’s involvement. He’s a slave from early childhood. He leaves his mother before his tenth birthday. He joins an order that not only keeps him from ever visiting his still-enslaved mother for a full decade but also refuses to use their power, influence, and wealth—not to mention their lightsabers—to liberate her from a slavery that the Republic itself outlaws! Oh, and the Jedi also require lifelong abstinence, forbidding marriage and children. Later, Anakin will return on his own to Tatooine to find his formerly enslaved mother kidnapped, tortured, and raped by Tusken Raiders. He will murder all of them for this. Later still, Anakin’s secret wife, secretly pregnant, will die, in part as a result of his lashing out at her with the Force. Then he will be led to believe that his unborn child died with her. Then he will learn that his son lived, but this knowledge was kept from him both by his current master (Palpatine) and by his old master (Obi-Wan)—all surrogate fathers who failed him. Then he will learn that his son has a twin sister, likewise kept from him. Then he will fight and nearly kill his son. Then he will kill his current master, having “killed” (or defeated) his old master, and ask his son for forgiveness before dying of his wounds. (Note: All three of Anakin’s surrogate fathers died as a result of apprenticing him.) Then he will look on from Force-ghost-world as his grandson turns to the Dark Side and murders his own father and nearly his own mother, even as Luke turns away from the force in despair and self-chosen exile. Then, finally, his grandson will join forces with (former Nabooian Senator) Palpatine’s granddaughter to destroy Palpatine himself—whom Anakin, somehow, failed actually to kill in his one and only good deed in life. Having killed Palpatine once and for all, Anakin’s grandson gives his life to save Palpatine’s granddaughter’s. And so the Skywalker blood line is complete: from Shmi to Anakin (and Padmé) to Luke and Leia (and Han) to Ben. Seven Skywalkers, all special, most Force sensitive, some Jedi, all dead and gone, and for what?

12. No, J. J. Abrams, Rey is not a Skywalker, even if she wants to claim the name. And yes, it occurs to me that one of Freddie deBoer’s best essays is a longer and much funnier version of the previous point. Go read him and weep/laugh.

13. Since I’m mentioning writers on these themes, see also Matt Zoller Seitz and Ross Douthat. And Freddie again, who is correct about The Last Jedi.

14. What else does Lucas get right? The politics, the decadence, the transition from planetary democracy to galactic democracy to galactic republic to galactic emergency to galactic empire. He also understands that the wider cinematic and narrative frame of Star Wars is not itself, his own prior creation, but the larger mythic and movie worlds of both Western and Eastern culture. Granting the moments of eye-rolling nostalgia and point-and-laugh coincidences, Star Wars has not (yet) become solipsistic at this time.

15. The music is flawless. Thank you, John Williams.

16. Lucas also nails multiple scenes and images, to the point that some of them remain iconic. The greatest of these is every single frame of the Darth Maul fight. I dissent from the view that Maul should have lived to fight another day; it was wise to kill him off. What makes the duel with Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon so compelling—somehow I’d never realized this—is that none of them ever speaks a word. In just about every climactic fight sequence in any action movie, the leads are in constant conversation: cajoling, insulting, persuading, begging. Not here. There’s nothing to talk about. It’s pure visual poetry. Few things filmed since then can match it.

17. Maul is a singular visual creation. You can’t help but stare. As for other characters, Obi-Wan is well written by Lucas and well acted by McGregor, as are Palpatine by Ian McDiarmid and Shmi Skywalker by Pernilla August. I was surprised how affecting August’s portrayal of Shmi is. The only pathos in the movie, with the possible exception of Obi-Wan’s grief over Qui-Gon, belongs to Shmi. She is worn down by the world, yet oddly hopeful, given her experience with Anakin’s miraculous conception and her love for him. She wants him to leave, even as she registers a moment’s hurt quickly covered over by a mother’s affection when she sees his forgetfulness, then remembrance, then acceptance at her remaining behind (as, the movie won’t let us forget, a slave).

August and Neeson share multiple moments together: knowing glances, light touches of arms and shoulders. Squint and you might see romantic tension. On this viewing I saw instead a kind of shared religious sensibility. They both relate to the Force the way Mary and Joseph relate to God. Like Joseph, Qui-Gon is a surrogate and adoptive father (also like Joseph, Qui-Gon dies before Anakin becomes an adult; unlike Jesus, Anakin has major daddy issues for the rest of his life, as do his son and grandson, Luke and Ben—apparently the only way for sons in Star Wars to exorcise their paternal demons is by slaying their father or dying themselves, or perhaps through handing on the line from multiples generations of failed father figures to an adopted daughter figure: this is the only reading of Rey I will allow). Note well that Shmi isn’t passive before Qui-Gon; rather, her fiat mihi is, like Mary’s, an active consent in response to a higher benign power. In this way Shmi and Qui-Gon alike are responsive to a kind of cosmic momentum sweeping them along. They see it, acquiesce to it, float along with it, even at great cost; in fact, at the cost of both of their lives.

18. I remain struck by the fact that when Lucas sat down to write Darth Vader’s backstory he made the child Anakin Skywalker a slave on a backwater planet. I must have seen The Phantom Menace at least a dozen times since 1999, but I had never registered the brief conversation at the Skywalker dinner table in which Anakin explains that all slaves on Tatooine have a chip implanted beneath their skin that (a) can’t be detected or removed by the slave himself and (b) marks them as a slave for life, lest they attempt to escape. This, in what is otherwise, in Lucas’s hands, a children’s fable! Anakin can’t run away, much less hop aboard starship, because his brutal slaveowners will track him down through the cybernetic chip implanted in his body!

Is this a kind of dark foreboding of Anakin’s eventual bodily disintegration and reintegration via robotic machinery? “More machine than man”? A man enslaved by his own passions, by his unchosen transhuman body, metal and circuitry rather than flesh and blood? A man overmastered by a Force he supposed he could manipulate to save the wife he eventually killed? All of which turned on his receiving freedom from slavery without his mother—a motherless origin at this, the source of the most famous “orphan’s tale” in American pop culture? Recall that, in the next film, Padmé comforts Anakin following his slaughter of men, women, and children among the Tusken Raiders, after they took and abused his mother (once she had herself been freed and married by a good man!). I lay all this out to show what was going on in Lucas’s mind as he sketched out the origins of Darth Vader. As seemingly light and occasionally cartoonish as Episode I can be, it has moments of such darkness it makes you gasp.

19. This is a movie about overconfidence. More than once different characters say, “You assume too much.” Or, “I promise you…” followed by an outlandish vow they can’t be sure they can keep or whose implications they can’t foresee. Even my beloved Qui-Gon comes under judgment here. No one knows anything—the only exception is the Sith, who see all. No one else has sight. Everyone is blind while presuming the indefinite persistence of the status quo. And it’s all about to come crashing down around their ears. This is the tragedy of the beginning of the story of Darth Vader. This is “the phantom menace” haunting the galaxy, haunting the Jedi, haunting the Republic, haunting Anakin and his many would-be fathers.

20. So no, I don’t mind the name, either. It’s both accurate and appropriately apt to the Saturday morning genre B-movie serials that influenced the original film.

21. Three final thoughts, each a missed opportunity. The first concerns slavery. Why not make that issue more prominent in the next two episodes? Why not make Anakin an abolitionist? Why not insinuate the issue into the Senate’s bureaucratic machinations and Padmé’s own frustrations? Why not send Anakin back to Tatooine to liberate the slaves—only to have his hand slapped by Coruscant, even to have the slaves returned to their masters by the august Republican Senate? And why not have Palpatine rise to the occasion, offering the power of emancipation to Anakin and Padmé in return for emergency wartime powers? After all, doesn’t he need the military might of the Republic to stamp down the Hutts and other slave-mongering forces? How did this not write itself?

22. Why not let Anakin lose the pod race? The race is well shot, but there’s no urgency or angst because we know he’ll win. What if he didn’t? What if a loss then put Qui-Gon in the position of stealing Anakin away, refusing to honor his bet with Watto and the Hutts? Qui-Gon would do it. And it would make him a hero in Anakin’s eyes, even as it made Anakin resentful and ashamed for having lost and furious at the now-villainous Council and Senate, which would politely instruct Qui-Gon to return Anakin to Tatooine. This plot line, too, writes itself.

23. Oh, Jar Jar. By which I mean: Darth Jar Jar. Do I buy the theory? I want to. And man, there really are odd aspects of TPM if Lucas truly had nothing up his sleeve with this character. His banishment, the fear he inspires in fellow Gungans, the suggestion that he will be punished or even killed once Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan depart, his occasional physical prowess and grace, his crucial role at key moments to catalyze the plot (such as hinting in Padmé’s ear that she should return to Naboo—moments after Palpatine whispers diabolical suggestions in her ear in the Senate—not to mention his fateful vote to make Palpatine Emperor in Episode III). Remember, too, that Palpatine is a Senator from Naboo, so it’s absolutely plausible that he and Jar Jar have had prior contact. He just “happens” to run into the Jedi and incur a life debt. Oh, and how does Darth Maul track Padmé’s ship to Tatooine if they never sent a transmission off world, but only received one? One option: Jar Jar himself found a way to send a transmission, alerting the Sith to their whereabouts.

The notion of doubles (“Always two there are”)—co-equal/rival pairs or even a kind of surreptitious self-doubling—is pronounced in TPM: Republic and Trade Federation, Senate and Council, Amidala and Padmé, Palpatine and Sidious, Sidious and Maul, Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan, Obi-Wan and Anakin. Why not Jar Jar and Darth Jar Jar?

As others have detailed, this would also explain Maul’s death and Count Dooku’s random appearance in his place; it was meant to be Count Jar Jar all along. Had the JJB character not been such a fantastic fiasco and embarrassment from day one, he might have been the Gollum of Star Wars: the first true and truly momentous CGI character, and a secret villain to boot. Was he? Was that the plan?

Maybe. Who knows. On this re-watch, aside from some of the narrative holes, it didn’t seem particularly likely. And it sure seems like we would have heard some leak from Lucasfilm in the last three decades spoiling the secret.

Chalk it up as one more might-have-been in this remarkable might-have-been of a movie.

2023: reading

Over the last few years I’ve had the goal of inching my way from 100 books annually up to 150. Last year I hit 122. This year I’ll be lucky to finish with 90. What happened?

A passel of 1,000-page novels, is the first answer. Writing and editing not one but two books of my own, is the second. And third is surely some mix of happenstance, fatigue, and time management. So be it. The books I read this year were good, even if I didn’t hit the number I was aiming for. There’s always next year.

The list below does not include every book I read over the last 12 months, just my favorites across a handful of categories. You’ll see that I read a lot of good fiction and nonfiction. Not so much theology! I leave it to readers to decide whether that’s a reflection on academic theology or on me.

Comments and links throughout, as well as promissory notes on reviews that I’ve written but have yet to be published.

*

Rereads

5. Kathryn Tanner, Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism. I read this when it was in draft form, as the Gifford lectures, but I’d never read the book version cover to cover. I had, and still nurture, the idea of writing an essay putting Tanner and David Graeber together in a theological reflection on work. We’ll see.

4. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World.

3. John Le Carré, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. Not his very best—that’s A Perfect Spy—but in the top five. Even better on the second time through.

2. Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove. The beauty still shines in the story and dialogue and characters, but the brutality is more apparent. “A dark tale lightly told” indeed.

1. Tad Williams, Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn. As I wrote here, this return to the classic trilogy (a million words in all?) was in preparation for the sequel tetralogy (see below). My love for the series, the author, and the prose is unabated. And the narrator for the audiobook is can’t-miss for lovers of Osten Ard.

Fiction

10. Mickey Spillane, I, the Jury. Not a great book, but popular and influential; part of my attempt to read through the canonical authors of American crime fiction.

9. Adam Roberts, Purgatory Mount. The framing device is gripping, but I didn’t love the middle. Roberts is always worth reading, though.

8. Ian Fleming, Live and Let Die.

7. Denis Johnson, Train Dreams.

6. J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan. Had never read it; am listening to it now. The narrator is Jim Dale. He’s perfect. It’s a treat when you turn to a classic and immediately understand why.

5. Larry McMurtry, Streets of Laredo. Finally read the sequel to Lonesome Dove, where McMurtry lays waste at once to beloved characters, “bad fans,” and any remaining trace of romance we may have had with the West. It’s thrilling. And more affecting than I expected.

4. Mick Herron, Slough House. Having read the first two books in the ongoing “Slow Horses” series, I read the next six in the new year, plus a collection of short stories. In the spring I have an essay in The Hedgehog Review on the series as a whole. It’s great, if confused in its politics; as is the TV show starring Gary Oldman.

3. Tad Williams, The Last King of Osten Ard. No missed opportunity here. Williams keeps breaking my heart, but the books are on a par with what came before. I was preparing for the fourth and final book’s release last month … only for it to be delayed by a year. I’m told it’s written, but the publisher chose to delay it. Oh well. I’ll be ready.

2. Georges Bernanos, Diary of a Country Priest. No words. Just read it.

1. John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces. Ditto. When I finished the last page, I had plans to write a long essay comparing Toole to Melville, with Dunces a kind of madcap multicultural New-Orleans-meets-Chesterton Don Quixote for postwar America. Is Ignatius J. Reilly the white whale, a knight-errant, a holy fool, or just a fool? I forgot the answer, probably because I was laughing so hard. The novel is a one of one. Tolle lege!

Poetry

Another down year for my poetry reading. I always re-read Franz Wright, Mary Karr, Marie Howe, Christian Wiman, and Wendell Berry. This year I read some Les Murray and Allen Tate. More next year, I hope.

Christian (popular)

7. Dane Ortlund, Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers.

6. Tish Harrison Warren, Advent: The Season of Hope & Emily Hunter McGowin, Christmas: The Season of Life and Light. I love this new series. Need to snag Epiphany before we turn to Lent and Easter.

5. Esau McCaulley, How Far to the Promised Land: One Black Family’s Story of Hope and Survival in the American South. Is there anything McCaulley can’t do? New Testament scholarship, theological hermeneutics, liturgical devotions, children’s books, NYT op-eds … and now a bracing, moving memoir. There were more than a few moments that took my breath away. Recommended.

4. Samuel D. James, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age. Immediately added this to the syllabus for my course on discipleship in a digital age. Excellent!

3. Beth Moore, All My Knotted-Up Life: A Memoir. We all know Beth Moore is a treasure. I suggest listening to her read it. I wept.

2. Matthew Lee Anderson, Called into Questions: Cultivating the Love of Learning Within the Life of Faith. Matt is a friend, so I’m biased, but I can’t wait to start giving this book to college students. It’s just what the doctor ordered. And the best thing Matt’s ever written in terms of style. Accessible yet poetic and pious in equal parts. For the brainy or doubting believer in your orbit. (Two-part interview plus podcast discussion over the book.)

1. Andrew Wilson, Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West. Easily a top-5 for 2023 new releases. Here’s my review.

Nonfiction

10. Mark Noll, America’s Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization. Review here.

9. Tara Isabella Burton, Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from da Vinci to the Kardashians. Review here.

8. John Gray, Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life. Good fun. Not just a joke, though. Gray contains multitudes.

7. Mary Harrington, Feminism Against Progress.

6. Edward Feser, Philosophy of Mind: A Beginner’s Guide.

5. Ronald L. Numbers, ed., Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths About Science and Religion. I sort of can’t believe how good this book is. It needed to be written; it needed to be written by the contributors involved; it needed to be published by Harvard; it needed to be readable, consisting of short entries by a range of theists, atheists, and agnostics. And somehow it was.

4. Richard V. Reeves, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It. Wrote about this here.

3. Albert Murray, The Omni-Americans: Black Experience and American Culture. To call Murray unique is an understatement bordering on an insult. He died in 2013. We needed his voice more than ever in the decade since.

2. Yossi Klein Halevi, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor. Alongside Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land, this is the first book I recommend to anyone wanting to learn more about modern Israel.

1. Christian Wiman, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair. There’s no one writing today quite like Christian Wiman. My review of his latest should be out in Comment next month. I’ve got a lot to say!

Theology (newer)

7. Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz, The Home of God: A Brief Story of Everything. Ten months ago I wrote a long review of this for Syndicate. I hope it comes out soon so I can finally share it with people!

6. Joseph Ratzinger, Many Religions—One Covenant: Israel, the Church, and the World.

5. Jim Davis and Michael Graham with Ryan P. Burge, The Great Dechurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back? Every pastor, elder, and church leader needs a copy.

4. Esau McCaulley, Sharing in the Son’s Inheritance: Davidic Messianism and Paul’s Worldwide Interpretation of the Abrahamic Land Promise in Galatians.

3. Jonathan Rowlands, The Metaphysics of Historical Jesus Research: A Prolegomenon to a Future Quest for the Historical Jesus. I wish I’d had this in hand a dozen years ago; it would have helped immensely. As it is, we have it now, and it’s a must-read for all biblical scholars, historical critics, and theologians interested in reading Scripture theologically, responsibly, and/or historically.

2. Matthew Thiessen, A Jewish Paul: The Messiah’s Herald to the Gentiles. See my review in a forthcoming issue of Commonweal.

1. Ross McCullough, Freedom and Sin: Evil in a World Created by God. Another biased pick, since Ross is a good friend, but an honest choice nonetheless. One of the best new works of theology in years. The only remotely satisfying treatment of theodicy, compatibilism, determinism, and human/divine agency I’ve ever read. Extra points for being concise and stylish and witty without losing an ounce of substance.

Theology (older)

4. Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited. What a weird but invigorating book.

3. Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ. Almost unbearably painful, given the way it cuts to the quick. But also full of the deepest consolations. Sometimes it really is Christ addressing you, the reader, by name.

2. Patrick Ahern, trans. and ed., Maurice & Thérèse: The Story of a Love. A window into the heart of Saint Thérèse. Probably the best introduction to her, too. Recommended to me by a friend. A beautiful book. Thanks to the good bishop for putting it together.

1. Blaise Pascal, Pensées. We all have gaps in our reading. I’d never (seriously) read Pascal. For the four-hundredth anniversary of his birth, I read his most celebrated work. It did not disappoint.

2022: reading

On its own terms, it was a solid year for reading. In terms of my goals, however, not so much. What with health, travel, and professional matters hoovering up all my attention from July to December, my reading plummeted in the second half of 2022. Last year I wrote about how, for years, I’d been stuck in the 90-110 zone for books read annually. Last year I climbed to 120. This year I hoped to reach 150. Alas, by the time Sunday rolls around I’ll have read 122 this year. At least I didn’t regress.

The environmental goals I made, I kept: namely, to cut down TV even more; to stick to audiobooks over podcasts; and to leaven scholarly theology with novels, nonfiction, poetry, and audiobooks. I make these goals, not because I value quantity over quality, nor because I want to read faster or just read a bunch of smaller books. It’s because setting these goals pushes me to set aside much less worthy uses of my time in order to focus on what is better for me and what I genuinely prefer. Both the direct effects (more reading) and the knock-on effects (less TV, less phone and laptop, less wasted time on mindless or mind-sucking activities) are what I’m after. And, as I’ve written before, I didn’t grow up reading novels. Which means I’m always playing catch-up.

My aspirational monthly goal is 2-3 novels, 2-3 volumes of poetry, 2-3 audiobooks, 3-4 nonfiction works, 4-8 works of academic theology. That alone should push me to the 140-160 range. I was on pace heading into August this year, then cratered. As 2023 approaches, I won’t make 150 my “realistic” goal; I’ll set it at 135. But one of my brothers as well as another friend both hit 200 this past year, which puts me to shame. So perhaps a little friendly competition will do the job.

In any case, what follows is a list of my favorite books I read this year. Two new books I was disappointed in: Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom and The Ink Black Heart, the sixth entry in J. K. Rowling’s Cormoran Strike series. I won’t write about the latter, but I might find time for the former. I also read J. G. Ballard’s Crash for the first time, a hateful experience. I “get” it. But getting it doesn’t make the reading pleasant, or even justify the quality of the book. I do plan to write about that one.

Here are the ones I did like, with intermittent commentary.

*

Rereads

5. Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time.

4. G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man. Hadn’t picked this one up in 22 years. Magnificent.

3. C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters. I’m willing to call this a perfect book. I should probably read it every year for the rest of my life. Lewis really is a moral anatomist nonpareil.

2. Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451. Hadn’t read this one since middle school. Had completely forgotten about the technologies Bradbury conjured up as substitutes for reading—the very technologies (influencers live-streaming the manipulated melodrama of their own lives into ordinary people’s homes via wall-to-wall screens) we have used to the same end.

1. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. I could not remember when or whether I’d read this years and years ago, but I listened to Forest Whitaker’s rendition on Spotify and it was excellent. Highly recommended. (The audio recording; I know Douglass himself doesn’t need my stamp of approval.)

Poetry

I won’t pretend to have read as much poetry as I have in previous years. I finishing rereading R. S. Thomas’s poems; I got to a couple more collections by Denise Levertov; and I read Malcolm Guite’s The Singing Bowl, my first of his volumes. I’m hoping to get back into more poetry in the new year.

Fiction

10. William Goldman, The Princess Bride. Never knew Goldman wrote it as a book before it became a screenplay and a film. A delight.

9. John Le Carré, Silverview. A fitting send-off to the master.

8. Ian Fleming, Casino Royale. Brutality with flair. I wasn’t prepared for how good the prose, the plotting, the thematic subtext would all be. I wonder what would happen if, in the next film adaptation, they actually committed to adapting the character rather than a sanitized version of him. I’m not recommending that: Bond is wicked, and the Connery films valorized his wickedness. But the books commit to the bit, and it makes them a startling read some 70 years later.

7. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan. The second entry in the Earthsea saga. I expect to read the rest this year.

6. Walter Mosley, Trouble is What I Do. My second Mosley. Someone adapt this, please! Before picking it up, I had just finished a brand new novel celebrated by the literary establishment, a novel that contains not one interesting idea, much less an interesting sentence. Whereas Mosley is incapable of writing uninteresting sentences. He’s got more style in his pinky finger than most writers have in their whole bodies.

5. Mick Herron, Slow Horses & Dead Lions. I got hooked, before watching the series. Casting Oldman as Jackson Lamb, he who also played Smiley on film, is inspired. I expect to finish the whole series by summer. Herron isn’t as good as Le Carré—who is?—but his ability to write twisty plots in punchy prose that intersects politics without getting preachy: that’s a winning ticket.

4. Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House. My first Jackson. As good as advertised. Read it with some guys in a book club, and one friend had a theory that another friend who’d read the novel a dozen times had never considered. I’m still thinking about it.

3. Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz. Wrote about it here.

2. Brian Moore, The Statement. I’ve never read anything like this novel. It floored me. James and Le Carré are my two genre masters, each of whose corpus I will complete sometime in my life. Moore may now be on the list, not least owing to his genre flexibility. I’ve read Catholics. I just grabbed Black Robe. Thanks to John Wilson for the recommendation.

1. P. D. James, The Children of Men. I’m an evangelist for this one. Don’t get me started. Just marvel, with me, that a lifelong mystery writer—who didn’t publish her first novel till age 40—found it within herself, in her 70s, to write a hyper-prescient work of dystopian fiction on a par with Huxley, Orwell, Ballard, Bradbury, and Chesterton. I would also add Atwood, since this novel is so clearly a Christian response to The Handmaid’s Tale. As ever, all hail the Queen.

Nonfiction

10. A bunch of books about liberalism, neoliberalism, and the right: Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society; Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism; Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal; Francis Fukuyama, Liberalism and Its Discontents; Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture; Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order; Mark Lilla, The Shipwrecked Mind; Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences; Matthew Continetti, The Right.

9. John Pfaff, Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform. Outstanding. Hat tip to Matthew Lee Anderson for the recommendation.

8. Christopher Hitchens, A Hitch in Time. A pleasure to dip back in to some of Hitch’s best work. But also a reminder, with time and distance, of some of his less pleasant vices.

7. James Mumford, Vexed & Yuval Levin, A Time to Build. Imagining life beyond tribalism, neither pessimistic nor optimistic. Just hopeful.

6. Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks & Phil Christman, How to Be Normal. I wrote about Burkeman here. Christman is a mensch. Read both, ideally together.

5. Wilfred M. McClay, Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story & Andrew Delbanco, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War.

4. Freeman Dyson, The Scientist as Rebel.

3. Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution.

2. Wendell Berry, The Art of Loading Brush. He’s still got it. There are a couple essays here that rank among Berry’s best.

1. Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope. The best book of any kind I read in 2022. One of the best books I’ve ever read. A one of one. On a par with After Virtue, A Secular Age, and other magisterial table-setters. Except this one is half the size and happens to focus on Plenty Coups, the Crow, and the moral and philosophical grounds for continuing to live in the face of reasonable despair. Take and read.

Christian (popular)

8. John Piper, Don’t Waste Your Life. Hand on heart, I’d never read a Piper book in my life. I wanted something short and punchy on audio, and this fit the bill. Turns out the man can preach.

7. John Mark Comer, Love-ology & The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry & Live No Lies. Hopped on the JMC train this year, since all of my students and many of my friends love his books. He’s doing good work. Pair him with Sayers, Crouch, Wilson, and Dane Ortlund, plus the younger gents at the intersection of Mere O, Davenent, and Theopolis—Meador, Loftus, Anderson, Roberts, Littlejohn, et al—and if you squint a bit, you can see the emerging writers, leaders, and intellectuals of a sane American evangelicalism, should that strange and unruly beast have a future. And if it doesn’t, they’re the ones who will be there on the other side.

6. Ronald Rolheiser, Domestic Monastery. Simply lovely.

5. Mark Sayers, Disappearing Church. Shrewd, lucid diagnosis. Not so sure about the prescription.

4. Andy Crouch, The Life We’re Looking For. Click on the “Andy Crouch” tag on this blog and you’ll see tens of thousands of words spilled over this book as well as Andy’s larger project. A wonderful man, a great writer, a gift to Christian attempts to think and live wisely today.

3. Kate Bowler, Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I’ve Loved. I listened to this one on audio. I wept.

2. Andrew Wilson, Spirit and Sacrament. Just what the doctor ordered for my students.

1. Abigail Favale, The Genesis of Gender. The unrivaled summer beach read of 2022. No joke, I was at the beach in July and looked to my right and then to my left and saw more than one person reading it. You heard it here first.

Theology (newer)

15. Some books on Christian ethics: A Guide for the Perplexed (by Victor Lee Austin), A Brief History (by Michael Banner), A Very Short Introduction (by D. Stephen Long).

14. Myles Werntz, A Field Guide to Christian Nonviolence & From Isolation to Community. Two accessible entries from a friend on Christian pacifism and Christian community. Nab copies of both today!

13. Charlie Trimm, The Destruction of the Canaanites. See my review in Christianity Today.

12. David Bentley Hart, Tradition and Apocalypse & You Are Gods.

11. Victor Lee Austin, Friendship: The Heart of Being Human. Victor makes a case that friendship is not just the heart of being human, but the heart of the gospel; or rather, the latter because the former; or vice versa.

10. Fred Sanders, Fountain of Salvation. See my forthcoming review in Pro Ecclesia.

9. Edwin Chr. van Driel, Rethinking Paul. See my review in Modern Theology.

8. Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt, The Love That is God. This one will be on a syllabus very soon.

7. R. B. Jamieson and Tyler Wittman, Biblical Reasoning. See my forthcoming review in International Journal of Systematic Theology.

6. William G. Witt, Icons of Christ: A Biblical and Systematic Theology for Women’s Ordination. So far as I can see, immediately the standard work on the question. I’d love to see some good-faith engagements from the other side, both Protestant and Catholic.

5. John M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift & Paul and the Power of Grace.

4. Christopher Bryan, The Resurrection of the Messiah. Historical, textual, linguistic, literary, and theological scholarship at its finest.

3. Mark Kinzer, Searching Her Own Mystery. I learned a lot from this book. I try to read everything Kinzer writes on the topic of Israel, church, and messianic Judaism. Even better something focused on a particular text, in this case Nostra Aetate.

2. Adam Neder, Theology as a Way of Life. Pellucid and compelling. A beautiful vision that captures heart and mind both. Here’s a taste.

1. Jonathan Bernier, Rethinking the Dates of the New Testament. What can I say? I have a thing for contrarian dating of the NT. I’m not at all persuaded by the consensus dating of most first-century Christian writings. Bernier updates John A. T. Robinson’s classic Redating the New Testament, with a clearly enunciated methodology deployed in calm, measured arguments that avoid even a hint of polemic. For that very reason, an invigorating read.

Theology (older)

6. A Reformation Debate: The Letters of Bishop Sadoleto and John Calvin. (Whispers: Calvin doesn’t win this round.)

5. Papal social encyclicals: Veritatis Splendor, Evangelium Vitae, Humanae Vitae, & Lumen Gentium. Always worth a re-read.

4. St. Bernard of Clairvaux, On Loving God & Homilies in Praise of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Beautiful, devotional, exemplary models of spiritual theology.

3. St. Cyprian of Carthage, On the Church: Select Treatises & On the Church: Select Letters.

2. St. Basil the Great, On Social Justice. Blows your hair back then lights it on fire.

1. Michael Ramsey, The Gospel and the Catholic Church. Is Ramsey the most underrated Anglophone theologian of the twentieth century? The man had exquisite theological sense; he wrote with style and passion; he cared about the unity of the church; he was a bona fide scholar; he wrote about everything; he became Archbishop of Canterbury; what’s not to love? Both this work and his little volume on the resurrection are classics.

Out of touch

Before they premiered, I assumed that both House of the Dragon and The Rings of Power would flop. The assumption was pure projection. I couldn’t gin up an ounce of interest in either. Why? Because they were both inessential prequels produced entirely for reasons having to do with the bottom line, i.e., competing corporations spending hundreds of millions of dollars in the service of diminishing returns from previously profitable IP. Did anyone ask for them? Are they answering some urgent question about the fantasy worlds or original stories told about them? No. HBO wanted more of that sweet sweet GRRM cash, and Bezos wanted his own GRRM, so he opted to buy the next best thing: the rights to JRRT.

Clearly I was wrong. Both shows were enormous “hits,” in the sense that millions of people watched them and, apparently, cared about what happened on them. I confess it felt a little like going through the motions, watching from the outside; the precaps and recaps, podcasts and explainers, reviews and “arguments.” Do people actually enjoy these shows, or are they playing the old hits, reliving the glory days of Peter Jackson’s films and the initial shock and awe of Benioff and Weiss’s show?

But I may be wrong, since I was wrong the first time. What the popularity of these series showed me is just how out of touch I am. It was a pleasant surprise. Once upon a time, the mere existence of these shows and their accompanying buzz would have made them irresistible to me. No more. And thank God.

*

My rule with TV, as I’ve written about before, is that it either needs to be weightless fun (Top Chef, Great British, Brooklyn 99) or an A/A+ (Better Call Saul, Succession, Mare of Easttown). My students have time for C+ and B– shows. I once did too—or I thought I did: the truth is, there’s always something better to do with your time—but no longer. An episode or two of TV per week works for me. I can certainly do with less. More, and I should reconsider my priorities.

So regarding the other big franchise premiere this fall, Andor, I stayed away. I’ll eventually consider checking out HOTD or TROP if people are saying either show is genuinely A-level headed into season 4. Until then, it’s just a waste of time. But friends have been telling me that Andor is worth the time, so I finally gave it a watch this week. Some habits never die, and this childhood Star Wars fan is a sucker for more time in the galaxy.

And it’s not bad! It’s actually quite good, and getting better with each episode. A far cry from the useless, boring redundancy that was Kenobi. Some thoughts on the first eight episodes:

• True to his word, Tony Gilroy has made what appear to be four mini-movies, each made up of three episodes. I wish this had led to greater formal experimentation. What if the season actually were four movies, and edited accordingly, rather than randomly sliced and diced episodes? The opening three in particular feel random in when and how they begin and end. One more example of a filmmaker not quite understanding the television medium.

• Having said that, “movement two” (i.e., the arc spanning episodes 4-6) is magnificent, and if episode 9 delivers, then the third movement will be too. You can feel the Gilroy-ness of it all (brother Dan is writing as well). They’re in their element with the plotting, characters, and intrigue. It may well be the first successful live-action depiction of these things. Even Rogue One was beset by the dual shadow, on one hand, of Vader and the Force, and on the other, of our knowledge of the Death Star, its plans, and its eventual destruction. The mini-dramas of “BBY 5” and these heretofore unknown characters (minus Mon Mothma and Andor, only one of whose fate we know—we’ll think of her as Kim and him as Jimmy for now) have no canonical future for viewers. Their simultaneously small and large stakes create wonderful narrative tension.

• By contrast to the other Star Wars shows so far, the acting has been uniformly excellent. No comedic guest stars, no amateurs doing their damndest to make gibberish sound profound. Gilroy hiring top-notch old British guys and letting them chew scenery is just what the doctor ordered. Even smaller parts like Fiona Shaw’s adoptive mother lend gravitas that, in their absence, would make the show feel small and forced.

• The show is at its best, surprisingly, on Coruscant and inside the walls of the infinitely byzantine corridors of the immaculately white Imperial Security Bureau. (Cue Melville on the whiteness of the whale.) Kyle Soller, Alex Ferns, Denise Gough, Anton Lesser, and Genevieve O'Reilly are brilliant in their roles, and Gilroy et al give them both the words and the direction to make it all feel far more than glorified galactic dress-up. Whereas whole stretches of Kenobi felt like low-rent TV—“where’s the money???”—most of Andor makes clear exactly where the money went. Who knew Star Wars minus wizards and laser swords could be fun?

• The weakest link so far is the titular lead. Diego Luna plays Andor as a twitchy, world-weary, unsmiling Han Solo. All exposed nerve and bitter anger. That’s fine. But it drains him of any charisma. He’s supposed to be a womanizer. But who would want to go near this guy? He seems brittle and sketchy, not alluring or mysterious. Clearly he’s playing the role “correctly”—in the seventh episode, we understand why the stormtrooper stops him (however unjustly): Cassian Andor always wears a guilty look on his face, as if he’s only one step ahead of the law (which he is). His tell is his nervous constant surveillance of his own person. In that sense, Luna is doing his job. But why should we, the audience, care? We’ve got to have a reason at some point. When he vanished for a full 15-20 minutes in a later episode, I didn’t miss him at all. I wanted to stay on Coruscant with Mothma and Luthen and the rest. Make him matter, Gilroys!

• Having said that, Luna was quite impressive in episode 8, in which, from memory, Andor basically lacks a single line of dialogue, except to repeat, over and over, his own false name to judges, stormtroopers, pilots, and prison guards. The dawning realization of his situation in prison is almost feral in its raw bodily expression. The addition of Andy Serkis was a grace note in an otherwise brutal episode. If what we’ve got waiting for us in episode 9 is one long masterfully executed prison break, I’m here for it.

• The real weakness of the series so far is its opening three episodes. I understand why something like the story they sketch was necessary, but again, I think something more formally interesting could have served the show’s purposes much better. What if, for example, the show began with season 4, in media res, with the viewer as clueless about who Andor is and why he’s there as any of the other rebels? Then you fill in the back story at the necessary moments, when other characters are also learning these things for the first time, surprised when they are surprised (as when he reveals he’s a mercenary, for example), all while stretching out the suspense of the planning and undertaking of the robbery and escape. You scrape away the fat of those first 105 minutes while filling in the gaps in a much more engaging way. You also do away with some of the pro forma “yes, this is the backstory for the guy whose backstory we’re telling in this prequel” paint-by-numbers feel of the opening episodes, which surely turned many viewers away from what quickly becomes a richly suspenseful story of empire, law, bureaucracy, sedition, criminality, justice, morality, politics, and spycraft.

• I do hope Gilroy is able to make season 2. It would be a bust if the low viewership of season 1 led to premature cancellation. If season 2 really does stretch from BBY 4 to, more or less, the opening scene of Rogue One, that could be an absolute blast in the right hands—and so far, these are the right hands. Here’s hoping Kathleen Kennedy agrees.

The bishop of Rome in Alpha Centauri

I finally read Walter M. Miller Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, a novel with my name written on it if ever there was one. It’s more than six decades old—having been written in the wake of World War II; its origins there, as well as the fate of its author, are shadowed with tragedy—so I’m not worried about spoiling it for you, but be it known that the following quote comes from the final 50 pages of the book.

After humanity refuses to learn from its errors in the first nuclear holocaust of the late twentieth century, some two thousand years later they do it again, only this time with few survivors likely to see life beyond it. So the Church makes plans for human, and thus Christian, life beyond this planet. Here is the scene when an Abbot gives final instructions and blessings to a few dozen priests before they set sail for an interstellar voyage to a colony in another solar system:

It had not been easy to charter a plane for the flight to New Rome. Even harder was the task of winning clearance for the flight after the plane had been chartered. All civil aircraft had come under the jurisdiction of the military for the duration of the emergency, and a military clearance was required. It had been refused by the local ZDI. If Abbot Zerchi not been aware of the fact that a certain air marshal and a certain cardinal archbishop happened to be friends, the ostensible pilgrimage to New Rome by twenty-seven bookleggers with bindlestiffs might well have proceeded on shank's mare, for lack of permission to use rapid transport jet. By midafternoon, however, clearance had been granted. Abbot Zerchi boarded the plane briefly before takeoff-for last farewells.

“You are the continuity of the Order,” he told them. “With you goes the Memorabilia. With you also goes the apostolic succession, and, perhaps—the Chair of Peter.

“No, no,” he added in response to the murmur of surprise from the monks. “Not His Holiness. I had not told you this before, but if the worst comes on Earth, the College of Cardinals—or what's left of it—will convene. The Centaurus Colony may then be declared a separate patriarchate, with full patriarchal jurisdiction going to the cardinal who will accompany you. If the scourge falls on us here, to him, then, will go the Patrimony of Peter. For though life on Earth may be destroyed—God forbid—as long as Man lives elsewhere, the office of Peter cannot be destroyed. There are many who think that if the curse falls on Earth, the papacy would pass to him by the principle of Epikeia if there were no survivors here. But that is not your direct concern, brothers, sons, although you will be subject to your patriarch under special vows as those which bind the Jesuits to the Pope.

“You will be years in space. The ship will be your monastery. After the patriarchal see is established at the Centaurus Colony, you will establish there a mother house of the Visitationist Friars of the Order of Saint Leibowitz of Tycho. But the ship will remain in your hands, and the Memorabilia. If civilization, or a vestige of it, can maintain itself on Centaurus, you will send missions to the other colony worlds, and perhaps eventually to the colonies of their colonies. Wherever Man goes, you and your successors will go. And with you, the records and remembrances of four thousand years and more. Some of you, or those to come after you, will be mendicants and wanderers, teaching the chronicles of Earth and the canticles of the Crucified to the peoples and the cultures that may grow out of the colony groups. For some may forget. Some may be lost for a time from the Faith. Teach them, and receive into the Order those among them who are called. Pass on to them the continuity. Be for Man the memory of Earth and Origin. Remember this Earth. Never forget her, but—never come back.” Zerchi's voice went hoarse and low. “If you ever come back, you might meet the Archangel at the east end of Earth, guarding her passes with a sword of flame. I feel it. Space is your home hereafter. It's a lonelier desert than ours. God bless you, and pray for us.”

He moved slowly down the aisle, pausing at each seat to bless and embrace before he left the plane. The plane taxied onto the runway and roared aloft. He watched until it disappeared from view in the evening sky. Afterward, he drove back to the abbey and to the remainder of his flock. While aboard the plane, he had spoken as if the destiny of Brother Joshua's group were as clear-cut as the prayers prescribed for tomorrow's Office; but both he and they knew that he had only been reading the palm of a plan, had been describing a hope and not a certainty. For Brother Joshua's group had only begun the first short lap of a long and doubtful journey, a new Exodus from Egypt under the auspices of a God who must surely be very weary of the race of Man.

Those who stayed behind had the easier part. Theirs was but to wait for the end and pray that it would not come.

This excerpt provides a lovely sample of Miller’s fine grasp of both Christian theology and ecclesiastical language, without losing the heart of it all. The whole book is quite beautiful. I can’t believe it took me this long to read it.

As I got to this part—what is in effect a short story or novella contained in a larger set of stories spanning 1,500 years or so—it reminded me of Robert Jenson’s discussion of the papacy in the second volume of his systematic theology, published in 1999. I seemed to recall Jenson coming to the very question of whether the pope might continue the office of the bishop of Rome elsewhere than Rome, including elsewhere than earth. Here’s the passage:

Two matters remain . . . . The first is a question so far skirted: Granted that there must be a universal pastorate, why should it be located in Rome? Why not, for example, Jerusalem? The question is odd, since Roman primacy developed first and the theology thereof afterward. But it nevertheless must be faced.

Pragmatic reasons are not hard to find, and the dialogues have gone far with them. So international Catholic-Anglican dialogue: it occurred “early in the history of the church” that to serve communion between local diocesan churches “a function of oversight . . . was assigned to bishops of prominent sees.” And within this system of metropolitan and patriarchal sees, “the see of Rome . . . became the principal center in matters concerning the church universal.” And so finally: “The only see which makes any claim to universal primacy and which has exercised and still exercises episcope is the see of Rome, the city were Peter and Paul died. It seems appropriate [emphasis added] that in any future union a universal primacy . . . should be held by that see.”

It is clear that the unity of the church cannot in fact now be restored except with a universal pastor located at Rome. And this is already sufficient reason to say that churches now not in communion with the church of Rome are very severely “wounded.” Just so it is sufficient reason to say also that the restoration of those churches’ communion with Rome is the peremptory will of God. Yet such considerations do not provide quite the sort of legitimation we look for in systematic theology and that we found for the episcopate and for the universal pastorate simply as such.

The historically initiating understanding of Roman primacy is perhaps itself the closest available approach to what is wanted. For in the earlier centuries of the undivided church, it was precisely the local church of Rome, and not the Roman bishop personally, that enjoyed unique prestige. The bishop of Rome enjoyed special authority among the bishops because their communion with him was the necessary sign of their churches’ communion with the church of that place. If the pope's universal pastorate is based on a unique prestige of the Roman congregation, then obviously in Rome is where it must be exercised.

In the fathers’ understanding of the apostolic foundation of the church, the founding history of each apostolic local church was a different act of the Spirit. This act was thought to live on in a special character of that church, in what one might perhaps call a continuing communal charism: the continuing life of each apostolically founded church was experienced as an enduring representation of her role within the Spirit-led course of the apostolic mission. The specific authority of the church of Rome derived from her honor as the place to which the Spirit led Peter and Paul, in the book of Acts the Spirit's two primary missionary instruments, for their final work and for their own perfecting in martyrdom; the Spirit was therefore expected to maintain the Roman church as a “touchstone” of fidelity to the apostolic work and faith.

But one need not enter the realm of science fiction* now to imagine a time in which Rome, with its congregation and pastors, no longer existed. Yet the role that initially developed around that church, once developed and theologically validated, would still be necessary. Surely an ecumenical council or other magisterial organ of the one church could and should then choose a universal pastor, elsewhere located. The new ecumenical pastor might of course still be styled “bishop of Rome,” but this is neither here nor there to our problem. Probably we must judge: identification of the universal pastorate with the Roman episcopacy is not strictly irreversible. On the other hand, hard cases make bad law.

Indeed I did remember correctly, though almost too correctly. For where you see the asterisk in the final paragraph, there is a footnote where Jenson writes the following:

In A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller, it having become nearly certain, after millenia [sic] of repeated nuclear catastrophes and repeated slow rebirths, that this time nuclear warfare will render the earth permanently uninhabitable, three cardinal bishops are sent to the small human colony of Mars.

Face palm! I was right to think of Jenson’s discussion, since Jenson literally tells the reader he’s thinking of Miller’s novel. Well then! I’ve come full circle. Though having just finished the book, I’m at least in a position to note that Jenson was quoting from memory, since he refers to a colony on Mars rather than a planet in the Alpha Centauri system.

Oh well. Read both books, is the moral of this story.

Bezos ad astra (TLC, 4)

In his latest newsletter—is it the best going? It’s up there—L. M. Sacasas writes about what he calls “earth alienation.” He uses Arendt and McLuhan’s distinct reflections on the significance of Sputnik as a frame for considering Jeff Bezos’s recent comments about space exploration and colonization. Here’s where he quotes and unpacks Bezos:

During his portion of the proceedings . . . Bezos articulated a vision for the creation of space colonies that would eventually be home to millions of people, many of who would be born in space and would visit earth, Bezos explained, “the way you would visit Yellowstone National Park.”

That’s a striking line, of course. It crystalizes the earth-alienation Arendt was describing in Prologue of The Human Condition. It is, in fact, a double alienation. It is not only that these imagined future humans will no longer count the earth their home, it is also that they will perceive it, if at all, as a tourist trap, a place with which we have no natural relation and know only as the setting for yet another artificial consumer experience. And, put that way, I hope the seemingly outlandish nature of Bezos’s claims will not veil the more disturbing reality, which is that we don’t need to be born in space to experience the earth in precisely this mode.

To be sure, Bezos makes a number of statements about how special and unique the earth is and about how we must preserve it at all costs. Indeed, this is central to Bezos’s pitch. In his view, humanity must colonize space, in part, so that resource extraction, heavy industry, and a sizable percentage of future humans can be moved off the planet. It is sustainability turned on its head: a plan to sustain the present trajectories of production and consumption.

Sacasas comments:

Arendt believed, however, that the modern the desire to escape the earth, understood as a prison of humanity, was strikingly novel in human history. “Should the emancipation and secularization of the modern age,” Arendt wondered, “which began with a turning-away, not necessarily from God, but from a god who was the Father of men in heaven, end with an even more fateful repudiation of an Earth who was the Mother of all living creatures under the sky?”

We’ll return to that Arendt quote. After meditating on the set of issues it raises, Sacasas concludes:

What alternative do we have to this stance toward the world that is characterized by a relation of mastery and whose inevitable consequence is a generalized degree of alienation, anxiety, and apprehension?

We have a hint of it in Arendt’s warning against a “future man,” who is “possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself.”  We hear it, too, in Wendell Berry’s poetic reminder that “We live the given life, not the planned.” It is, I would say, a capacity to receive the world as gift, as something given with an integrity of its own that we do best to honor. It is, in other words, to refuse a relation of “regardless power, ” in Albert Borgmann’s apt phrase, and to entertain the possibility of inhabiting a relation of gratitude and wonder.

Go read the whole thing. I can’t do it justice in a few quotes, not to mention the way in which every one of Sacasas’s newsletters is part of a larger, coherent whole. It brought something to mind, though, a recent film that seems to me a perfect example of the phenomenon he is describing, precisely in existential and aesthetic terms. Whether or not it is an illustration or a critique of that phenomenon is an open question.

The film is Ad Astra, which somehow was released only two years ago. (Every pre-pandemic cultural artifact feels much older than it is.) Written and directed by the great James Gray, Ad Astra (“to the stars”) tells of an astronaut, played by Brad Pitt, who goes on a mission to find his father near the planet Neptune, who may or may not have finally discovered extraterrestrial life. Pitt plays his character, Roy, with a perfectly controlled flat affect: his stoic courage is actually the surface of a dying, or dead, inner life. He lacks what he most desires, namely presence: to himself, his ex-wife, his estranged father. Haunted by his mental monologue, Roy’s voyage to the stars to find his father and/or life beyond the human is at once a metaphorical and literal, allegorical and spiritual journey into the heart of darkness.

When the film came out I didn’t write about it in a formal venue, but I did tweet about it. So let me take the opportunity to unfold one of my “Twitter loci communes.” First read Alissa Wilkinson’s excellent review for Vox, then Nick Olson’s lovely thread. (Also a bit from the indispensable Tim Markotos: “Penal Substitutionary Atonement: The Movie flirts with Freud and Nietzsche before finally settling on Beauty will save the world.” LOL.) Now here’s what I said:

Grateful to @alissamarie for this beautiful review of Ad Astra. Couldn't agree more. I'll have to keep pondering whether there's something potentially transcendent there, or if it's as deeply immanent-humanist as Gray's oeuvre suggests.

She's also right that this is the sort of a-theological spiritual art that religious people should celebrate, contemplate, and (quite possibly) read against itself. I mean, what a beautiful film.

It's also something of an anti-Interstellar. What finally doomed that film was its navel-gazing: when we look at the stars, we see ourselves blinking back. Here, Gray's vision is subtly different: the stars are “empty,” but beautiful in their sheer existence for all that.

And that very beauty and wonder of the ostensible nothingness—that the cosmos exists at all rather than nothing—generates not only awe at the mystery of life but love for those closest to us. That's what Nolan sought to accomplish, I think, but failed where Gray succeeds.

The next day I read Nick’s thread and riffed on this tweet of his in particular:

The TOL [Tree of Life] parallels come easily. One way of putting it is that this is TOL without Mother. Maybe in spite of itself, it winds up being a film that’s in search of Mother in lieu of distant Father. AD ASTRA’s “we’re all we’ve got” is also that TOL cut from the universe to the infant.

Here’s what I wrote:

This is good too. If you can accept the father/mother // nature/grace symbology of Tree of Life then apply them to Ad Astra, what you have in the latter is nature without grace, because a creation without a creator.

Then you can read it one of two ways: 1. The father's despair is a proper response to the realization that the universe is bereft of Logos (much less a Logos incarnate), and the son in effect embraces a false consciousness in the face of a potential nihilism.

2. The son's affective embrace of an "empty" cosmos is the proper response because "Man" has been searching for meaning (or ratio) apart from "Woman" (here, a figure for concrete love, rather than abstract wanderlust).

Again, you've got to accept that gendered symbology on the front end, but if you do, and you import it from Malick (and other sources!), then Gray is doing a lot here with his choice of characters. (Also makes me think of what role Ruth Negga serves in the story . . .)

Having said all that, though what I most want is to read the film in the vein of #2, inflected theologically, I have to admit that if I'm going to read the film against itself, #1 is the more penetrating as well as the more provocative route.

The next day I expanded on this line of thought, using an interview of Gray on one of The Ringer’s podcasts, The Big Picture:

In that James Gray podcast interview, he says he wanted it to star someone like Brad Pitt, who brings with him a “myth” or “mythology” that he, Gray, could then deconstruct in the film—referring to Ad Astra as “a deconstruction of masculinity.” Pairs well with the thread below.

Not only is Brad Pitt a global icon of “manhood” or “masculinity.” In Tree of Life he literally plays “Father/masculine” (=nature), as opposed to “Mother/feminine” (=grace) (Jessica Chastain). Gray then makes him a Son who spurns Woman while searching for the absent Father.

And in the process (again, literally) cutting the umbilical cord (in the heavens!) connecting him to the Father, thence to return to Mother Earth—now no Fall but a reditus of the aboriginal pilgrim-exitus—to reunite masculine (nature) with feminine (grace) via the bond of love.

I also had the following “aha” moment:

Somehow it only just occurred to me that Ad Astra opens with ha-adam, the royal Man (Brad Pitt)—husband of Eve (Liv Tyler), whose name (Roy) means "king" (le roi)—literally falling from heaven to earth.

Now I realize Brad Pitt's character's name, Roy, has not only royal connotations (Leroy, le roi, the king) but also a biblical-theological connection (el-roi, Hagar's naming of the Lord as God-who-sees). Roy wants truly to be seen by his father/God—a hope left unfulfilled.

Now recall that Arendt quote from above:

Should the emancipation and secularization of the modern age, which began with a turning-away, not necessarily from God, but from a god who was the Father of men in heaven, end with an even more fateful repudiation of an Earth who was the Mother of all living creatures under the sky?

It seems to me that Ad Astra is, from start to finish, one long cinematic meditation on this question. And whereas my initial reading of the film leaned immanent-cum-nihilistic, I feel prompted to revise that reading in a more hopeful, if still humanist, direction.

Sacasas writes of “Arendt’s warning against a ‘future man,’ who is ‘possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself.’” In this respect Pitt’s Roy might be construed as that “future man” who goes beyond himself by his own means but, ultimately, reaches the end of his tether—again, this happens quite literally in the film—before returning to earth to accept the limits of finite human life for what it is: a gift. As given, it is not subject to the manipulations or technologies of man, but as what it is it is good in itself, howsoever concrete, delimited, and therefore subject to loss. The gift is a mystery from without and can only be accepted with gratitude or spurned with ingratitude. Though Gray insists on an immanent frame—indeed, we are given to understand that going beyond that frame is itself a rejection of the gift of finite existence—the film’s closing scene is less a period than a question mark. Roy accepts the gift in love, and as love. But if a gift, then a Giver? If love, then a Lover?

The question is apt for Bezos and his ilk. To escape the immanent as immanent is a rejection of transcendence, not its embrace; the technological sublime is a substitute for the beatific vision, not a means of reaching it. Accept earth as the gift that it is, and you will gain heaven with it. Renounce earth for the stars, and you will lose it all.

Foundation

Later this month the television adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation will premiere on Apple+. I had been planning on writing something about it, then doubled down on that plan when I read a piece resorting to that laziest but most common of critical terms of approval these days: the R-word. You know what it is. “Relevant.” As in, and I quote, Asimov’s story is “deeply relevant” and represents “something that feels more relevant than ever these days.” Foundation may be relevant, but if it is, it’s not because Asimov has something useful to say about our lives. Nor is it because Asimov offers us a critique of the late decadent phase of the American imperium. It’s because Asimov’s text begs to be read against itself, as an unconscious window on the late modern technocratic mind that believes itself to be the solution to decadence, when it is actually its principal symptom.

I have, or rather had, a lot more to say about that. But then Alan Jacobs beat me to the punch. He notes how, in both Asimov’s trilogy and Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, which were all written between 1942 and 1952, each author is “deeply invested in thinking about the ways old political orders give way to self-proclaimed Utopias; and both, also, see that the technocratic Utopia—as distinguished, I think, from the more traditional Utopias of authoritarian and totalitarian states—is a new thing in the world.”

Let me add one thing, which concerns the protagonist, Hari Seldon, and his Foundation scheme that sets the plot going. Not only is Seldon a pure projection of Asimov, or Asimov as he imagines himself and his ilk to be. The so-called science that Seldon has cracked is the science of predicting the future based on the past with perfect exactitude. And it’s the cranks who run the Empire who are fools not to believe his probabilistic calculations. I remember, when I first read the initial novel in the trilogy, thinking that Asimov was setting Seldon up to be a fool himself. I mean, imagine thinking “psychohistory” to be a legitimate empirical-mathematical enterprise in which the custodians of trillions of living souls should place their trust! But I was the foolish one. Naturally, that is exactly what Seldon-Asimov thinks world leaders should do: believe the science—in this case, the pseudo-science of technocrats tinkering with their algorithmic prediction machines. Knowing the unlikelihood of being believed, Seldon-Asimov sets in motion a series of events leading to the hoped-for future founding of a new intergalactic civilization with far less bloodshed and destruction than otherwise would have occurred (in the absence, that is, of his genius). His well-timed appearances and messages in the centuries to come are a running deus ex machina, only the god in the machine is Hermes, bringing one more message, just in the nick of time, from the omniscient Seldon-Asimov (speaking from the past). Not to put too fine a point on it, whereas the Foundation he establishes is meant to contain all the knowledge humans have amassed across the millennia, the cornerstone of the Foundation is—you guessed it—psychohistory. (It doesn’t help that every time just what the Foundation is preserving is mentioned it’s always, or almost always, the deliverances of the technical and empirical sciences, and never, or rarely, the treasures of the humanistic arts. You can be sure the gadgets of Steve Jobs reside safely in some Foundation vault; less so the works of Bach or Rembrandt.)

All that said, the book is worth a read, not least for its influence on Frank Herbert and George Lucas. And it’s still a fun, if not especially well written, yarn. And I might check out the show; it would be nice if the showrunners signaled their having grasped the unintended subtext of the story instead of buying into its ostensible prescience and relevance to the year of our Lord 2021. But I’m not holding my breath.

An alternative Episode IX crawl

Yesterday I wrote about Episode VIII. Unfortunately, we never saw the promise of that great film fulfilled in a sequel that continued its themes and narrative arc. Instead, we got Episode IX, which was dead on arrival.

When I wrote about IX two years ago—a lot of words, by the way—I mentioned an idea for an alternative crawl that would have opened a much different, far better capstone to the Star Wars trilogy of trilogies. I did have an idea, and a good one, if I’m to be trusted; but I’ve since forgotten it. Thinking about VIII yesterday got thinking about IX again, though, so I thought I’d try my hand at that crawl (which, on Earth-2 and/or in the divine mind, not only exists but is followed by an actual Episode IX film written and directed by none other than Rian Johnson). Here it is:

Princess Leia has died.
Her body lies in state on Naboo
during an armistice granted by Kylo Ren,
Supreme Leader of the FIRST ORDER.

As a grateful galaxy gathers to mourn,
Rey, first of a new order of Jedi Knights,
calls together leaders of the RESISTANCE
to prepare a daring attack on Ren’s faltering rule.

But Rey has just received a shocking message.
Kylo Ren wants to meet her—alone—on
the mysterious planet of Myrkr. Is it a trap?
Old friends and new allies assemble to offer
counsel that will decide the fate of the galaxy . . .

The most important thing about an alternative Episode IX—call it alt-IX—is that it avoid Palpatine, Rey’s lineage, and digitally reconstructed Leia. Instead, the way to honor Carrie Fisher’s legacy and abrupt passing would be to explicitly mourn her in the film’s opening. Create a visually and aesthetically impressive funeral for a royal figure. Moreover, let that opening funeral be a hinge for the plot. First, in that it throws our heroes (Rey and Poe especially) off kilter. Second, though, in that it throws our Big Bad, Kylo Ren, even more off balance. Third and finally, in that it only adds to the poignant open-ended question at the close of The Last Jedi: Will ordinary peoples and systems across the galaxy rally to the side of the rebels against the First Order? Here, not only does the story of Luke’s heroism light a fire across the worlds; Leia’s passing calls them to their senses, and they show up en masse to mourn and remember and celebrate her. That presents both opportunities (now the Resistance has numbers on its side) and challenges (who can be trusted among all these new allies and would-be friends?).

As for Ren, he is shaken to the core by the death of his mother—remember, he couldn’t bring himself to kill her in VIII—and this only exacerbates his ill fit as Supreme Leader. Who wants Millennial Darth for a dictator? Besides, wasn’t Vader second to the Emperor? Dissension in the ranks, doubts about Ren’s true intentions, even rumors of spycraft and sabotage begin to unravel the First Order from within.

So Ren flees to Myrkr, a semi-canonical planet from the original Thrawn trilogy that is home to a species of animal that repels the Force. Think of them like Force vacuums; put enough of them in one place, and Force-users can neither feel nor use the Force. To meet Rey on such a planet offers a kind of neutral playing-field, where they can talk rather than fight.

I don’t have the whole film mapped out. In my mind, Rey goes in spite of her advisors’ wishes, in good faith; nor is Ren meaning to spring a trap. But her friends sabotage the meeting, to her surprise, even as Ren’s enemies, in his absence, enact a coup d’état. From there, battle lines as well as alliances are redrawn, and the fight to the finish is begun . . .

UPDATE: I’d forgotten one other idea (taken from my brother Mitch): If VII is about Finn learning not to run away (i.e., the vice of cowardice) and VIII is about Finn learning not to seek a glorious but meaningless death out of blind hatred (i.e., the vice of recklessness), IX needed to conclude his arc through his learning the virtue of courage through daring but prudent military leadership. And so what he does in alt-IX is sow the seeds of doubt and rebellion within and among the First Order’s storm troopers, who (as we know) are not clones but kidnapped and brainwashed orphan children. It is Finn, not Rey, who assumes command of the Resistance following the death of Han, Ackbar, Hondo, and Leia; and in the final battle, it is General Finn who directs the pincer movement of Poe’s squadrons and revolting storm troopers to seize control of the First Order’s home base of operations on some heavily fortified but centrally located planet. That planet in turn becomes New Coruscant, the staging ground for reconstructing oversight and governance by and for the New Republic, which did not and could not die with the destruction of a few planets (in VII), but survives in and beyond the pitiful reign of the First Order, now destroyed once for all.

Or so I imagine. Indulge me my fan-fic imaginings.

Interpreting The Last Jedi

I’m on record, and have been from the beginning, as a lover of Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi. When I was on Twitter, I enjoyed having friendly—key word, that—debates with others about it. In fact, just last month I introduced myself to a senior academic at another institution, a person I’ve read but have never met before, and as he shook my hand he said, “Oh, I know who you are. You’re the one who thinks The Last Jedi is a good movie.”

Touché!

What I don’t enjoy, however, is the reception of the movie as filtered through the culture war. When that happens, the terms of the debate are prefabricated, overdetermined, and (worst of all) boring. All heat, no light.

But perhaps what’s most annoying is how shoddy so much conventional interpretation, pro and con, of the film is. It’s not just that people have good or bad opinions, more or less well reasoned. It’s that it’s not always clear they’ve seen the movie, or at least paid attention when they did (in the theater, once, four years ago).

So, granted that talking about talking about Star Wars is potentially insufferable and inescapably meta, here goes. Here is what The Last Jedi is and is not about; here is how (not) to talk about it.

1. “Let the past die. Kill it if you have to” is not the theme of the film. It is Kylo Ren’s view, which is not that of either Rey or Rian Johnson.

2. The theme, or one of the major themes, of the film is what one’s relationship to the past, and to venerable tradition, ought to be. Note that that theme is a question. Johnson is asking the audience, as he asks his characters (esp. Luke, Rey, Ren, Finn, and Leia), to decide what that relationship should be. He gives his answer, though you don’t have to agree with it. In a sense, the visceral reaction of a certain segment of fans to the film is itself their answer to the question. As Matt Zoller Seitz has observed, that means the question was one worth asking.

3. Neither Rey nor Luke ultimately answer the question the way Ren does. Luke is tempted to, but the trio of Rey, Leia, and Yoda change his mind.

4. Luke’s answer is not, however, to receive the past as it is; it is not a bare affirmation of the status quo ante; it is not to be silent about the errors and crimes of his forebears. To do that would only perpetuate the cycle he rightly perceives in the decadence of the Jedi: tradition for tradition’s sake; immunity to reform on principle. That way led to disaster.

5. Rey speaks from want and need, desire and innocence; she doesn’t have an argument to make, only an honest appeal for help. But Yoda does have an argument. Yoda understands that failure need not be absolute. Life follows death, good comes from loss, the young learn from the mistakes of the old. Sometimes a fire is cleansing—though purgation is far from pleasant. The same act (burning a tree, say) can come from opposed intentions: one to purify, the other to destroy. Luke’s impetuous urge to annihilate is a form of the latter; Yoda’s lightning from above, the former.

6. Note well: Yoda does not obliterate the sacred Jedi texts. He knows Rey took them when she left. Nor is he impugning them. He’s telling Luke that they have become for him nothing but “a pile of old books,” unread totems of a lost age worthy of little more than repudiation. Thus fossilized, they are useless for Luke, who has reached the end of his path. But not for Rey. She is a new start for the Jedi—one both continuous and discontinuous with the old order.

7. In short, The Last Jedi is about the sublimation of the past—of history, heritage, inheritance, and tradition—neither its rejection as wholly unworthy nor its pristine persistence into the future. Luke was the last Jedi; Rey now is the last Jedi: the eschatological Jedi, the last of the old and the first of the new. The Jedi will continue, though not without change. The blinkered self-regard and decadent haughtiness shall be no more. Padawans in the line of Rey will be Jedi, to be sure; but what it means to be a Jedi will not be the same as it was in the days before Palpatine.

8. Ren’s solution is wrong, therefore, because he believes that his past—his lineage—determines, must determine, who he is. And yet that lineage includes not only Anakin (himself redeemed before the end) but Han and Leia. That is why patricide and matricide are major themes of VII and VIII (following VI). His parents’ living goodness threatens his simultaneous act of self-creation and self-binding to Anakin’s turn to the Dark Side: he will make himself (in spite of his parents) through forced imitation (of his grandfather—not, note, his maternal grandmother!). Killing Snoke is his second act of patricide; the final duel with Luke seems, at first, to permit him the third and final stroke. But he’s robbed of the occasion, just as Vader was with Obi-Wan. He can’t kill the past: even when it dies, it lives on (“See you around kid”).

9. Whatever one thinks of Johnson’s handling of this theme (and I’ve not said anything about Finn or Leia, both of whom come to terms with their own past and its bearing on the future), the important thing to see is that it is an honest grappling with the story of the seven preceding films. It’s an honest reckoning with the through-line that runs across the prequel trilogy, original trilogy, and Abrams’ semi-remake sequel. The story of cyclical decadence and Jedi failure is the subtext of those seven Episodes, considered as a single narrative, and what Johnson does is make that subtext text. Luke comes to terms with one more Jedi Padawan rebelling and murdering his fellow students, having once more been seduced by the Dark Side, and like Obi-Wan and Yoda before him, he runs away into exile and the consolations of self-pity. And then he realizes this very dynamic, in self-conscious reflection, and decides to throw a spoke into the wheel: no more Jedi; no more cycles of Light versus Dark; no more high hopes dashed by devastating failure, and lives lost in the balance. This is where Luke is when the film opens, and it’s the only honest emotional and spiritual place for Luke to be in, given how The Force Awakens ended.

10. In that sense The Last Jedi is indeed a meta-reckoning, as a film, with Star Wars as such. The failure of interpretation is to see it as Johnson disliking Star Wars, either its story or its fans. Instead, it is Johnson putting Star Wars to the test, and seeing whether it will bend or break. The stress test is substantial, but after bending to the breaking point, it snaps back into place: Rey and Luke, together a sort of Jedi apocalypse, save the day; they fight back the First Order, deliver the Resistance from defeat, and light a spark that will burn through the galaxy, inspiring the apathetic and unbelieving to join the fight that will crush the remnants of the Empire once for all. Johnson, like everyone else, loves this franchise; like everyone else, he wanted his heroes to be heroes. But given the cards he was dealt, given the story he’d inherited, he couldn’t cheat. They had to earn it. And so they do.

At any rate, that’s what Episode VIII is about. It’s about other things too. It’s not perfect. And you don’t have to like it, whether or not you think Johnson succeeded in pulling off this particular set of themes. (I certainly don’t like Episode IX, which I prefer to pretend never happened.)

But there’s no question about what Johnson was trying to do; there’s no ambiguity about what the film is up to in this regard. So far as I can tell, there’s nothing to debate there. It can certainly be fun to argue over Star Wars. But only if we know what it is we’re talking about in the first place.

The Book of Strange New Things, 3

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

What works, if anything? A few things.

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

“So what’s your role?”

“My role?”

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

“None that I can see.”

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

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

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

Second:

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

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

Third and last:

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

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

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

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

Kubrick + Spielberg = ?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Book of Strange New Things, 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Book of Strange New Things, 1

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

The lead character is simply not believable.

Here are things that are true of him:

1. He is a Christian.

2. He is a British evangelical.

3. He is an adult convert.

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

5. He is happily married.

6. He is a pastor.

7. He and his wife are partners in ministry.

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

9. Their church is very “low.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aliens

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

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

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

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

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

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

The virtues of Lewis's Space Trilogy

I've been re-reading Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra this last month (I read That Hideous Strength for the first time last year), and the former especially brought to mind why I love Lewis so much. His novelistic shortcomings are more than apparent in these early works, so in the midst of noticing those, I asked myself: What is it about these books that makes them lovable? What are the virtues that Lewis the novelist brings to bear in them that raise them to more than pleasant diversions?

Here's a short list.

1. Lewis has a knack for making the metaphysical reality that Christians confess to be true inhabitable. He makes it seem like common sense—more, he makes it seem roomy. "This is the real world, refracted through fiction" is the refrain of all his writing, not least Ransom's adventures in space. Or: "It's probably not precisely this, but it's almost certainly very like this—only better and more wondrous."

2. Apart from the beautiful economy of his prose, perhaps Lewis's greatest strength across all the genres in which he wrote is the depth of his moral-spiritual psychology. He knows what makes us tick. Both at our most virtuous and our most vicious (more on the latter in a moment), his description of the motivations, intentions, pressures (petty and glorious), goals, indecisive failures, and temptations of the will is nonpareil. Better, it is utterly recognizable. And all too often it is deeply, shamefully convicting.

3. Lewis holds up a mirror to us—in this case, through the earnest observations of sinless alien species and their angelic rulers—and reveals our undeniable fallenness, both at the individual and at the civilizational level. (In this case, the theme of his fiction is "sin is real, it's inside of all of us, and you know it's true.") His extraterrestrial creatures are constantly dumbfounded by the everyday goings-on of earthlings, and that dumbfoundedness is a cue to the reader: why aren't you similarly bothered or surprised? Our fear of death, our denial of God, our fears of one another, our indefensible mistreatment of our neighbors, the quantity of time and energy we spend on worthless matters ... it is difficult to listen to Ransom's interlocutors without turning on yourself in the somber realization that you're implicated, indicted even, by their speech.

4. Continuing that theme, Lewis has no time for the insipid platitudes of technocratic modernity. The evil men whom Ransom battles are, in the end, hollowed out by the nihilism of cultural-scientific self-preservation, while lacking any guiding principles—not even the well-being of humanity as such—that might garner qualified praise as splendid vices. Knowledge for the sake of power for the sake of perpetuation of knowledge for the sake of power for the sake of ... until kingdom come. Lewis may be guilty of nostalgia at times, but he knows the problems of his day, not at the surface, but at the root; or rather, in the sickness of soul that drives soul-denying men to seek immortality at all costs. The narrative function of beauty in "the heavens" of "space" in the Trilogy drives this home: knowledge without wonder is finally the libido dominandi, now naked yet "clothed" in society's approbation. This is the enemy to be resisted to the end.

5. Lewis's Space Trilogy works also—as so many interplanetary stories do—as an allegory or metaphor for imperialism, and although Lewis was guilty of many of the biases and prejudices of his day, he knew that colonization and domination of other peoples and cultures was an offense against God and the fruit of original sin. Moreover, closer to his literary expertise, he knew the extent to which such domination is often an expression of ignorance and impotence, the exercise of force masking the insecurity of a fearful people. Culturally this expresses itself in a parochialism both of space and of time; Lewis termed the latter "chronological snobbery." Just as the European peoples thought themselves superior to peoples from other continents, so they (and others) thought (and think) themselves superior to people from the past. The two are related and inseparable: when Ransom listens to Oyarsa, part of his instruction consists of unlearning the modern prejudice against "difference," whether found across the sea or across the ages.

6. Finally, Lewis the theologian always emerges in dialogue between (say) his former self, Ransom, and his would-be present self, the unbent creatures of Malacandra or their eldila or Oyarsa himself. I long to read these stories with my children because those dialogues will themselves be occasions for them to hear ancient spiritual truths articulated in the clearest, freshest of ways. How odd: to hear the gospel lucidly spoken by being made strange on the lips of alien beings in a fictional novel. But when we find ourselves loving C. S. Lewis's novels, that's just one of the many reasons why we love them.

Genre lists: the best science fiction authors and series

All right. I've written about my crime fiction list and my fantasy list; here, rounding out the genres (at least those in which I'm interested), is my chronological list of the authors and series in science fiction that I have read or aim to read. Far from exhaustive, and not aiming to be "completist." I want to read the best. What should I add to it? [NB: The list has now been expanded with suggestions.]

1. H. G. Wells, Time Machine + Invisible Man + War of the Worlds (1895–98)
2. Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess of Mars (1917)
3. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932)
4. C. S. Lewis, Space Trilogy (1938–45)
5. George Orwell, 1984 (1949)
6. Ray Bradbury, Martian Chronicles (1950) + Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
7. Isaac Asimov, The Foundation Trilogy (1951–53)
8. Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End (1953) + 2001 (1968)
9. Richard Matheson, I Am Legend (1954)
10. Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination (1957)
11. Walter M. Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)
12. Stanislaw Lem, Solaris (1961)
13. Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) + The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966)
14. Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle (1962)
15. Frank Herbert, Dune (1965)
16. J. G. Ballard, The Crystal World (1966)
17. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) + The Dispossessed (1974)
18. Joe Haldeman, The Forever War (1974)
19. Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, The Mote in God's Eye (1974)
20. Alice Sheldon (as James Tiptree Jr.), The Girl Who Was Plugged In (1974)
21. Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
22. Gene Wolfe, The Book of the New Sun (1980–83)
23. William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)
24. Connie Willis, Fire Watch (1984) + Doomsday Book (1992)
25. Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game (1985) + Speaker for the Dead (1986) + Ender’s Shadow (1999)
26. Michael Crichton, Sphere (1987) + Jurassic Park (1990) + Timeline (1999)
27. Iain M. Banks, The Culture Series (1987–2012)
28. Dan Simmons, Hyperion (1989) 
29. Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (1992) + Anantham (2008)
30. Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower (1993) + Parable of the Talents (1998)
31. Kim Stanley Robinson, Mars Trilogy (1993–96)
32. Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow (1996) + Children of God (1998)
33. Ted Chiang, Story of Your Life (1998/2002)
34. Margaret Atwood, MaddAddam Trilogy (2003–13)
35. Theodore Judson, Fitzpatrick's War (2004)
36. Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (2005)
37. John Scalzi, Old Man's War Series (2005–2015) 
38. Liu Cixin, Remembrance of Earth's Past Trilogy (2008–10) 
39. Max Brooks, World War Z (2006)
40. Haruki Murakami, 1Q84 (2010)
41. Tom Perrotta, The Leftovers (2011)
42. China Miéville, Embassytown (2011)
43. Ann Leckie, Imperial Radch Trilogy (2013–15)
44. Pierce Brown, Red Rising (2014–)
45. Jeff Vandermeer, The Southern Reach Trilogy (2014)
46. Adam Roberts, The Thing Itself (2015)