The Book of Strange New Things, 3

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

What works, if anything? A few things.

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

“So what’s your role?”

“My role?”

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

“None that I can see.”

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

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

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

Second:

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

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

Third and last:

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

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

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

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

Kubrick + Spielberg = ?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Book of Strange New Things, 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Book of Strange New Things, 1

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

The lead character is simply not believable.

Here are things that are true of him:

1. He is a Christian.

2. He is a British evangelical.

3. He is an adult convert.

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

5. He is happily married.

6. He is a pastor.

7. He and his wife are partners in ministry.

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

9. Their church is very “low.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cheering for Monty Williams

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brutalizing academe

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

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

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

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

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

MZS on F9

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

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

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

Late le Carré

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

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

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

A condition of our humanity

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

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

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

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

New essay in The Point

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

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

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

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

The great cataract of nonsense

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

—C. S. Lewis, “Learning in War-Time”

How the Eucharist effects salvation

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

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

Aliens

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

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome to the new blog, same as the old blog

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

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

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

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

Heresy and orthodoxy

"Heresy" and "orthodoxy" (and their variants) are two terms I hear and read with some frequency in low-church Protestant and evangelical circles. Their usage has always nagged at me, though, and lately I've realized why.

Heresy is first of all a term of church discipline, not false belief. It is the application by duly constituted ecclesial authority of a certain status to persons, groups, movements, practices, or ideas. That status is anathema: the curse of excommunication. "Such entities do not belong in the community of Christ" is what heresy announces, publicly and definitively. If the relevant persons or groups do not thereupon repent, they become "heretics" or "heretical," which is a formal status relative to a concrete Christian community or communion. Subsequent to the decisive events that constitute said entities as "heretical," similar ideas and practices might be judged at the popular level to be of a piece with that which was previously anathematized; thus ordinary people might label a notion "heretical" by derivation from prior authoritative pronouncement. But heresy as such remains a matter of church discipline. It isn't something one makes up oneself, much less promulgates on one's own.

Thus understood, heresy is the shadow side of orthodoxy. Orthodoxy is the positive dogmatic teaching of the historic church, that is to say, of the historic episcopal and conciliar church. You do not have to wonder what orthodoxy teaches. Read the canons, creeds, definitions, and anathemas of the seven ecumenical councils, alongside and as an interpretation of Holy Scripture. That is orthodoxy. That, at least, is what the term "orthodoxy" means, if it is to have any substantive or historically coherent meaning at all. It may mean more than that, given the divided state of the church in the last millennium, but it does not and cannot mean less.

I trust that goes some way toward explaining my dissatisfaction and confusion with conventional low-church Protestant and evangelical usage of these terms. For such usage, the terms not only come to be defined wholly relatively—in terms of this or that sub-sub-group new on the ecclesial scene—they also assume meanings contrary to their original historical and dogmatic sense. So that, for example, "heresy" names the veneration of icons, or the mandatory celibacy of bishops, or having bishops in the first place, or the acclamation of Mary as Theotokos. But this is gibberish. One may certainly make arguments that such teaching and practice are wrong, or unwarranted by biblical precedent. But to call them "heresy" is to invert the term's historic sense. Moreover, it is to ignore the word's original and abiding force as an expression of churchly authority, and to deploy it instead as meaning merely "something with which I/we disagree."

"Orthodoxy" fares no better. In popular usage in the last century—popular, that is, among the non-catholic groups I've identified above, but used broadly by their scholars, pastors, and theologians—"orthodoxy" comes to mean "those parts of the historic tradition we continue to affirm, minus those parts we do not." But you can't have your cake and eat it too. Such an operation is surgical. It slices and dices, cutting off elements of the tradition that the majority church (both globally and historically) once thought and still thinks essential. The result is something of a Frankenstein's monster, only without the admission that it is man-made. But the so-called "historic" or "traditional" "orthodoxy" thus proffered and appealed to as "common" and "ancient" is self-evidently an artifice. Perhaps it is true artifice—perhaps it cuts through those other man-made traditions that, like so many weeds, grew up around the gospel, threatening to overwhelm it—but that is a different claim than calling it "orthodox." To do the latter one aspires to participation in and affirmation of the ancient patristic (and perhaps medieval) articulations of the faith. But in lopping off one-third of those articulations while revising or amending another third, one undercuts the perceived benefit of appealing to ancient tradition. If the dogmatic inheritance is revisable, but one's appeal to its antiquity and unanimity is meant to shore up its unrevisability, the internal contradiction should be obvious. You can't have it both ways.

This is all a very long way of saying that division in the church matters. Such division is not only real, it is rooted in and gives rise to opposed doctrines and practices. There is, in other words, a logic to the mutual anathemas of the 16th century. If we teach X and y'all teach not-X, either one of us is right and the other wrong, or both of us are wrong. It can't be the case that both of us are right (at least if we understand what we are saying). So far as I can tell, we want today to be able to affirm a deep commonality across church division: and that is a good desire. But it ought to be grounded in the truth. Some church traditions can affirm what I outlined above as the bare minimum of historic orthodoxy. It seems to me that those traditions have a good deal of common ground on which to talk about their differences. Other traditions, less so. That doesn't mean the ecumenical task is dead on arrival. Nor does it mean per se that the "orthodox" churches are eo ipso right and therefore those that cannot claim orthodoxy are in the wrong. It simply means that we should use these terms with care, so that they have discernible content. It also means that those traditions that have departed from historic orthodoxy ought to admit the fact; ought to stop using the term; and certainly ought to quit the rhetorical habit of laundering the purity of their doctrines through a misplaced appellation of a venerable ancient term.

I'll let Inigo Montoya have the last word: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

The four best essays I’ve read so far this year

We are four months into 2021, and the number of hands-down brilliant, print-them-out-and-mark-them-up, share-them-with-your-friends-and-assign-them-to-all-future-students essays I've read this year is also four. In the order in which they were published:

–L. M. Sacasas, "The Insurrection Will Be Live Streamed: Notes Toward a Theory of Digitization," an entry in his peerless newsletter The Convivial Society. By far the best thing written about and in the wake of the Capitol Riot on January 6. Subscribe to TCS today: it's consistently unique in its sober and brilliant analysis of technology, media, culture, and the production and distribution of knowledge.

–Ian Olson, "Marcion's 'Gift,'" Mere Orthodoxy. Olson threads the needle just right in his treatment of the church's inseparability from the Jewish people and its own history of injustice toward that same people. The exegetical, theological, and rhetorical subtlety on display here is not to be missed.

–Elisa Gonzalez, "No Good Has Come," The Point. Someone finally got Marilynne Robinson right, and that someone is Elisa Gonzalez. This is heads and shoulders above any other interpretation of the Gilead tetralogy, incorporating its two irreducible major themes: on the one hand, a Calvinist perception of the world as the theater for God's glory and of human persons as souls mysteriously bearing the divine image one to another; and on the other hand, the tragedy of our opacity to each other, which manifests as escalating harms cloaked in self-deception: above all, in the United States, the still unresolved collective failure of white Christians toward black Americans. Reading Gonzalez on Robinson only established further for me the extraordinary achievement of the four Gilead books; together they constitute a singular masterpiece in moral, national, and spiritual imagination.

–Phil Christman,"How to Be White,"Breaking Ground. Always be reading Christman, as a rule; now put this at the top of the list. It's the best thing I've read on race and racism how to talk about both in a long time. If you find yourself annoyed by The Discourse, not to mention the inane corporate consultant hucksters who dominate it, but nevertheless agree that there is atherethere, even if our flailing attempts to name it with our shared public grammar (such as it is) routinely fail: this essay is for you.

Humor and despair

Last month a review of Jordan Peterson's latest book made the rounds. It was justly held up as a serious, charitable attempt both to understand Peterson's project on its own terms (along with why it has attracted such a following) and to critique his execution of that project. The substance of the critique is that, in an acute manner and to a painful degree, Peterson lacks a sense of humor. He is earnestness incarnate. He never laughs, he never jokes, he never reveals a wry wit or sheepish grin at the joys or absurdities of modern life. He only grimaces, shifting the burden of finitude from one shoulder to the other, and inviting others to do so, in the same unsmiling manner.

I've not read one word of Peterson's work, and I have no desire to defend his ideas per se from this charge. But the critique, though plausible and even probably true as far as it goes, fails in two respects. And it does so whatever the quality of Peterson's thought in itself.

In summary form: the critique fails, on the one hand, because it presupposes a priori that despair is not a viable or rational option for considered reflection; and, on the other hand, because it assumes a modestly affluent and pleasurable quality of life sufficient to ground the humor that winks or smirks at, or spits in the eye of, the abyss of death.

In other words, Burkeman (the author of the review) recommends a coping strategy at the practical level regardless of its truth at the theoretical or existential level. To which the Petersons of the world are justified in replying: I don't want to cope with the un-copable. I want to live in the truth. And if the truth is the sheer implacable terror of mortality, of the inexorable power of unconquerable death, which will swallow up me and everything and everyone I love, rendering us not only nonexistent but our lives and loves meaningless—if that is the truth, then I would rather suffer that terror humanely, truthfully, and therefore humorlessly, than play-act with jokes and empty grins.

The other side of such a reply is that one can only imagine coping with finitude through humor no matter the truth of the matter if one's material conditions rise above a certain level. That is, if my day-to-day activities include modest pleasures and even delights—fulfilling work, faithful marriage, beloved children, delectable food, enjoyable leisure—then these can provide respite from the existential torment of endlessly meditating on suffering, death, and loss. And in such respite one is permitted the therapy of humor, even gallows humor.

But again, here a Peterson is able to mount a reply: Our affluence may be nothing more than a conspiracy to hide the truth from ourselves, indeed society itself may be just that: a systematic attempt to make us forget, for sustained stretches of time, the absurdity of our lives and the single common fate awaiting us all. And, again, if the highest aim of the human creature is to live in the truth, then better to resist this massive operation at collective deception; better to live, miserably and humorlessly, in the truth that quotidian pleasures try to mask, than to live a falsehood that includes laughter.

Put differently, if humor is nothing but a way to cope with suffering, then it is perfectly reasonable to decline the invitation, given a different hierarchy of values. But if it is meant to be more than merely a coping mechanism, then more is required to ground it in the soil of the real. It must arise from and share in the truth. If it does not, then despair may be a legitimate response to the realities of bare human life (and nothing is less funny than despair). At the very least, it cannot be ruled out in advance.

Biographies of theologians

Alan Jacobs suggests that we need more biographies of theologians. By which he means, on the one hand, quality biographies (not chronicles) written with style and insight; and, on the other hand, biographies about contemporary theologians, such as Robert Jenson or John Webster.

I would love nothing more than a biographer on a par with Ray Monk to tell the story of, e.g., Jenson's life and work. And in general I heartily second his recommendation. But it prompted a thought.

What makes a life worthy of a biography? Or put differently, what makes a biography worth reading?

It seems to me the answer is threefold. Either the person is herself interesting (something about her charisma or temperament or virtue or genius); or her life was interesting (she fought back the English after having a supernatural vision, say, or traveled through the Balkans in between the world wars); or her thought, beyond being interesting in itself (that justifies secondary literature), produced interesting and notable effects in the world, whether within institutions like the academy or outside of them, say in politics or art (think the Frankfurt School, or Darwin or Einstein).

The question is: Do theologians today meet any of these criteria? Note well: a memoir is distinct from a biography, in that the former invites us into the inner life of the theologian; hence it is easy to imagine theologians writing memoirs worth reading. But what of biographies about them?

It seems to me that the stature of contemporary theologians has fallen so dramatically in the last three generations that, in general, it would never occur to a Ray Monk to profile a theologian for the simple reason that he would see nothing to profile in the first place. What a biography needs, in one variety or another, is drama. And once the leading lights of public intellectual life stopped reading or even caring about theologians—indeed, from the other side, once theologians stopped having social and political cachet, stopped being invited (like Maritain, like Niebuhr) into the halls of power to shape and inform the decisions and policies enacted therein—the potential for drama in theology vanished. Every actual drama was and is thereby reduced to interpersonal squabbles, institutional gossip, and tempests in teapots.

When I try to imagine how a theologian's biography would read, I simply can't get past the sheer tedium of it. "He read and wrote all day—sometimes teaching small seminars of doctoral students—before returning home to his family; his books, while celebrated among his peers, were ignored by everyone outside the field. Occasionally churches would invite him to deliver a lecture; sparsely attended, the gatherings would pay him a modest honorarium and politely applaud what they otherwise only half understood."

I don't mean to make fun: such a life is my own, or at least my own as I hope it stretches into the future. It's a good life, and a life well worth living. But it isn't the stuff of biography. Which is fine, since almost no life is.

In sum, something extra has to make a theologian's life worth telling: wide, impassioned reception of her work; impact on extra-ecclesial institutions; sheer popularity; intersection with major historical events or figures; or perhaps appointment to a major position in church leadership, such as the papacy or see of Canterbury.*

Or, I should add, sainthood. If and when a theologian is possessed of unvarnished, unimpeachable holiness, we ought to write and read biographies about her. I will not hazard to speculate about the prevalence or paucity of saints in modern theology; no doubt there have been and are some, invisible as saints often are. But I do wonder whether holiness is aimed at in the formation of academic theologians today, or whether holiness is actively opposed and routed in such formation, and therefore whether we would be wise to look elsewhere than the ranks of theologians for the discovery of modern-day saints.

*This is why biographies have been written about, e.g., Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI and Rowan Williams. And Jenson, mentioned by Jacobs in his original post, is himself something of a throwback; his life (1930–2017) bridged the rapid transformation between the age of Niebuhr, Maritain, Lewis, and Barth (on the one hand) and the age of what I've elsewhere called the public theologian in retreat (on the other). Stanley Hauerwas is here the exception that proves the rule, both because there is no one quite like him on the American academic theological scene in the last four decades and because his memoir, while a lovely read and wonderfully illuminating, would have been a bore had it been written by a biographer.

Two new essays on the long Lent of Covidtide

Last week in Mere Orthodoxy I wrote about Tish Harrison Warren's terrific new book, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep.

Today I’m in First Things reflecting on what it means to celebrate the Triduum in Covidtide.

The essays are, in a way, companion pieces. Both are about persisting in Lent as we approach Easter Sunday; both reflect on the long Lent of the last year (the emergency liturgical season of "Covidtide"); both insist that resurrection is coming; both remind us that the passage to Sunday runs through the passion of Jesus. Some of us need to know in our bones that Jesus is risen; some of need to recall that Holy Saturday comes first.

Yesterday I read St. Luke's account of Jesus's final hours with his disciples. The passage in 22:31-34 is almost too much to bear:

“Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail; and when you have turned again, strengthen your brethren.” And he said to him, “Lord, I am ready to go with you to prison and to death.” He said, “I tell you, Peter, the cock will not crow this day, until you three times deny that you know me.”

The Lord calls us and prays for each of us by name. Like St. Peter, we will fail (vv. 56-60), and beneath the gaze of the Lord (v. 61), we will weep bitterly (v. 62). But borne up by his prayers and the power of his cross, we will turn again, strengthened and ready to strengthen (John 21:15-17). Only then will we be truly ready to take up our own cross and follow him (vv. 18-19).

A blessed Triduum to all of you.

Dame, ACU, sports, glory (TLC, 1)

Two years ago I wrote the following in a short tweet thread, in response to Damian Lillard's walk-off buzzer-beater to win Portland's playoff series against Oklahoma City:

What's revealed by Dame's buzzer-beater walk-off series-winner, and the hoopla surrounding it since, is something simple but often forgotten in today's analytics-driven journalism: People do not watch or play sports for the sake of technical proficiency. They do so for glory.

What Damian Lillard did was all-caps GLORIOUS. The stakes, the moment, the narrative, the beef with Russ, the degree of difficulty: People watch what is often sheer monotony in sports for a single, once-in-a-lifetime moment just like that.

Paul George's comments after the game that "it was a bad shot, though nobody's going to say it," was true but seriously beside the point. Of course it was a bad shot! If by "bad" we mean "having a low probability of going in," it was definitionally bad. And yet it went in!

Watch the video, and look at the reactions: OKC's, the crowd's, Dame's teammates, and Dame's own. Sheer, stupefying, lightning-struck glory. Athletes devote the entirety of their lives, soul and body, to be ready for a moment like that—and not, say, to finish 4th in MVP voting.

Sports journalism's in a weird place, drawn in a few directions: hyper-analytics; First Take stupidity; Twitter cleverness; athletes-as-celebrities gossip. What I'd love more than anything is a recognition of what makes sports great, and matching prose to the glory of the thing.

I stand by all of that. Every day that analytics makes further inroads not just on backroom GM decision-making but on the whole public culture of professional (and amateur!) sports is a step in the wrong direction. Sports do not exist for "wins," Ringz, or championships. They certainly do not exist for statistical supremacy. They do not even exist first of all for the display of physical excellence and bodily self-mastery and the combat of competition. They exist for people to behold unpredictable epiphanies of human glory. All the other goods of sports are contained therein.

Which brings me to ACU, where I teach. My colleague Richard Beck wrote up a nice appreciation of our "little ol'" basketball team's dethroning—decapitating? horns-sawing?—of the University of Texas in the NCAA tournament. Watching our team upset UT in the opening round, by icing two free throws to go up by one point before stealing the inbound pass as time expired, put me in mind of Dame's walk-off buzzer-beater. Sheer pandemonium, wild release, pure glory: the reason why we do this in the first place. That glory spread like wildfire across sports media and social media alike, and rightly so. How often in your life will you see something like that?

It would have been wonderful for our guys to have won the next game (and the next, and the next...). But that loss doesn't remotely diminish the glory of the initial upset. It happened, it always will have happened, and those players will be the toast of west Texas for a long time to come. Good for them.