Saint Monica (TLC, 2)

Today is the feast of St. Monica, the mother of St. Augustine of Hippo. St. Monica is (if you will allow it) my self-appointed patron saint. She is an inspiration and a sacred exemplar of Christian fidelity, maternal love, and undying hope. A couple years back Matthew Rothaus Moser, a theologian at Azusa Pacific, wrote this on Twitter:

Theology hot take: *Confessions* is less a narrative of Augustine’s search for God than it is a narrative of the efficacy of Monica’s prayerful tears.

I retweeted that with the following small thread:

Print this out and plaster it on every mirror, wall, and doorframe of your house. God help us parents to pray with one percent of the blood, sweat, and tears of St. Monica.

This supposed hot take should be so cool as to be frozen solid. St. Monica is the human hero of the Confessions: the exemplar, the faithful one, the stubborn widow pestering the judge, Abraham haggling with the Lord: tear-stained incarnation of irresistible grace in fallen form.

I've shared this before, and I always share it whenever I teach the Confessions: Re-reading the book after becoming a parent—sitting in a little YDS second-floor study room—I wept like a newborn baby when I got to the end of Book VIII. God heard her prayers. All grace. Pure joy.

Come by my office, and you'll find icons of St. Monica on my door, on my wall, at my window. (Sitting in my study at home, I'm looking at an icon of her as I write.) When I grow up I want to be like St. Monica.

A few months later, on the feast of St. Monica in 2019, I retweeted that thread with the following appended comment:

A thread from last month for the feast of St. Monica: mother of St. Augustine, soldier of prayer, and my own (alas, self-appointed) patron saint. Jesus spoke of her in Luke 18; she is the persistent widow incarnate.

Remember and celebrate St. Monica this day, and give thanks for her witness and for her tears, which by the Spirit’s grace made her wayward son a son of God. Like Hannah, the one thing she loved most in the world she gave over to the Lord, whom she loved even more; she knew her boy needed the church as a mother, not only herself. And what she gave up, she received back one hundredfold.

Why, after all, did St. Augustine write what may be the most important, influential, and beautiful work of Christian literature in the church’s history? Answer:

My Lord, my God, inspire your servants, my brothers, your sons, my masters, to whose service I dedicate my heart, voice, and writings, that all who read this book may remember at your altar Monica your servant and Patrick her late husband, through whose physical bond you brought me into this life without my knowing how. May they remember with devout affection my parents in this transient light, my kith and kin under you, our Father, in our mother the Catholic Church, and my fellow citizens in the eternal Jerusalem. For this city your pilgrim people yearn, from their leaving it to their return. So as a result of these confessions of mine may my mother’s request receive a richer response through the prayers which many offer and not only those which come from me.

The Confessions exists to elicit the prayers of God’s people in perpetuity, on behalf of St. Monica and as an extension and fulfillment of her own prayers, while she was still on earth. So say a prayer today on her behalf; say a prayer especially for your children, as she did her only son. She’s in heaven now, all her earthly prayers answered, yet still (we may trust) praying without ceasing. For whom? For all God’s children still journeying toward their eternal home.

New essay: “Market Apocalypse” in Mere Orthodoxy

My latest is up at Mere Orthodoxy this morning. Titled “Market Apocalypse,” it’s a review essay of Rodney Clapp’s new book, Naming Neoliberalism: Exposing the Spirit of Our Age. Here’s a taste:

Clapp’s book is titled Naming Neoliberalism: Exposing the Spirit of Our Age. But you might imagine it renamed, à la Patrick Deneen’s bestseller, Why Neoliberalism Failed. Like Deneen, Clapp wants to draw critical attention to what is hiding in plain sight. “What goes unnamed” in such circumstances “is the neoliberal framework that entraps us all.” Entrapment is the proper image for Clapp’s view: we are seduced and deceived by neoliberalism’s lure, but once we fall for the trick, we’re stuck. And the consequences are comprehensive: “Neoliberalism has transformed us — heart, body, and soul.”

Clapp is uninterested, however, in merely naming neoliberalism: many writers and scholars have already done that. He wants to name it as a Christian. That is, he wants to reveal neoliberalism for what it is in theological perspective, and to propose a specifically theological alternative. He thinks this task crucial because neoliberalism can be neither fully understood nor adequately opposed without reference to God, specifically the gospel of the incarnate God, Jesus Christ, and his people, the church.

Go read the rest here.

The adventure of history

This week I’ve been listening to Ernst Gombrich’s A Little History of the World on Audible. I’ve had it on my shelf for a while but I decided it might be good in audio form. I was right: it is wonderful. I’m a little over halfway through, and it’s been sheer pleasure. Since the original German edition of the book is nearly a century old, it’s been translated into dozens of langues, and the English version came out to wide acclaim almost 20 years ago, I take for granted that I have nothing new to say about the glories of this happy wee volume. But listening this week did bring one thought to mind that’s possibly worth sharing: Gombrich has something to teach us about what it means to tell history as a cultural and pedagogical practice.

God help me from wading into the treacherous waters of recent debates over how we do history, in general and in the classroom. But, if I am going to get wet, let me at least avoid wading and just dip a toe or two in from above.

Here’s Gombrich’s lesson, in all its simplicity: For all its many faults and crimes, errors and sufferings, human history is an adventure. And if you don’t tell it as an adventure, you’re doing it wrong. Why? For two reasons.

First, because unadventurous history is boring—one damn thing after another—and no one, not adults and certainly not children, wants to hear about ancient people in faraway lands doing one damn thing after another. Besides, history isn’t boring, so to make it boring is the hard thing, the perpetual own goal of perhaps the most fascinating subject in the world. In this case, the straight route is the best: make the telling as absorbing as the thing itself.

Second, history should be told as an adventure because nearly everyone and everything (and every time and every place) in history is, by comparison to those who are learning or studying history and their immediate surrounding contexts, different—foreign, alien, strange, exotic: all the words you’re supposed to avoid. And what Gombrich succeeds at most, besides making history both accessible and exciting, is rendering the difference of his subjects to such a degree that, no matter what he is talking about, it sounds attractive, appealing, unimaginably magnificent.

Already by the book’s midpoint, for example, Gombrich has discussed China, India, Greece, Rome, Persia, Israel, and the Arabs, as well as Confucius, Lao Tzu, the Buddha, Moses, Jesus, Aristotle, and Muhammad. Guess what? Every single one of them shines like the sun. Gombrich constantly poses rhetorical questions to the reader, ostensibly a child of 10 or 12 years, questions like “Isn’t that wonderful?” or “Don’t you think that’s marvelous?” or “What must it have been like to be there?” or “Beautiful, don’t you agree?” We hear of a sage’s austere simplicity or a general’s peerless courage or a prophet’s irresistible charisma or a governor’s prudent planning, and we nod along with sympathetic understanding. Even when he is recounting what might appear to modern ears as immoral, cruel, or bizarre, Gombrich maintains a light touch, asking the reader, whether explicitly or implicitly, Why might he have done that? Why might others have celebrated it? Can you imagine living at such a time? What unintended benefits redound to us? There isn’t a high horse in sight. Gombrich knows that history is human, and he never lets you forget that the cultures and peoples and individuals and actions recounted in history are wholly of a piece with you and me, today, because we here and now, like they then and there, are human through and through. That means deception and violence and pain, even as it means glory and love and virtue, too. Above all, in the wide sweep of historical perspective, it means realizing the incalculable debt we owe to our forebears, none of whom we can thank, but a few of whom we can come to know, if belatedly. Mathematics from Arab scholars, architecture from Roman builders, theater from Greek dramatists, justice from Jewish prophets, compassion from Christian preachers, manuscripts from cloistered monks: the gifts keep on stacking up, one on top of another. A child, upon closing this book, apart from wanting to learn more more more about all this fascinating material, will feel in her heart nothing so much as bottomless gratitude, rooted in an unquestionable conviction that the ancients are simultaneously entirely different from her and yet the very same.

That is how history should be taught, or it seems to me. Critique follows understanding; deconstruction follows the building of sturdy foundations. In a word, everything turns on affection. Speaking for myself, as I listen to each chapter coming to a close, it is affection more than anything that wells up in me—at times to the point of tears.

Karen Kilby book forum in Political Theology

At long last, the newest issue of the academic journal Political Theology is out, and it features a book forum I organized and edited for the journal. The forum, or roundtable discussion, is devoted to Karen Kilby’s latest book, a collection of mostly previously published essays titled God, Evil, and the Limits of Theology. Here is how the forum is laid out:

• My opening essay, “Theology in the Dark,” introduces the book’s major themes.

• Andrew Prevot, associate professor of theology at Boston College, writes about “Karen Kilby on the Politics of Not Knowing.”

• Kathryn Tanner, professor of theology at Yale Divinity School, writes on “The Limits of Political Theology.”

• Katherine Sonderegger, professor of theology at Virginia Theological Seminary, writes on “Modernity in the Theology of Karen Kilby.”

• Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury and Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, writes about what constitutes “A True Otherness.”

• Sarah Coakley, professor of theology emerita at the University of Cambridge, writes about theology and the Trinity “Beyond Understanding.”

• Miroslav Volf, professor of theology at Yale Divinity School, writes in defense of “Apophatic Social Trinitarianism: Why I Continue to Espouse ‘a Kind of’ Social Trinitarianism.”

• Karen Kilby, professor of Catholic theology at Durham University, writes a “Reply to Critics.”

Though it took a full 16 months to see the idea from conception to print, it was a pleasure to do so. What a feast. Thanks to editor Vincent Lloyd for the invitation. Now go buy Prof. Kilby’s book and read this issue of PT cover to cover

Secular Scruton

After Roger Scruton died last year, I resolved to read back through some of his most important writing on culture, philosophy, and politics. Two things in particular—beyond the usual, and correct, comments on his erudition, intelligence, and lucid prose style—struck me in doing so. The first is his temperament, or rather his temper. At times Scruton is excruciatingly just in both his tone and his treatment of those with whom he disagrees. This restraint approaches a kind of intellectual chastity: one senses this deep disgust with what I can only call a prurience of the mind, a prurience he resents in thinkers he despises and repudiates in the nations and cultures he loves. This reticence is of a piece with the sort of conservatism he represents and recommends to others.

At the same time, Scruton can also give vent to his hatreds and engage in passionate, even bitter, polemic. Polemic is a venerable rhetorical and argumentative mode, so I don’t mean this observation as a critique per se. Often the ideas and writers he aims his words at very much deserve it. But polemic is not a stable vehicle for fine-grained analysis and charitable understanding, and in Scruton’s work one sees where the polemic has worn down the patience and generosity and sheer mental calm that characterizes so much of his other writing.

The second thing that struck me in reading back through Scruton—and this one surprised me—is how profoundly secular a thinker he is. I was surprised not because I thought Scruton an orthodox Christian but because, given his identity as a conservative and as a happy inheritor of Christian civilization, I anticipated an overall positive posture toward religious faith, practice, and thought. And to be sure, when Scruton is meditating on religious questions, he is eager to take seriously the claims of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim revelation as well as their traditions of reflection. But in his ordinary cultural and political writing, Scruton can be rather harsh toward both faith and theology. In fact, “theology” for him functions as an epithet with which to tarnish his enemies: twentieth-century leftist thinkers (like those in the Frankfurt School) embody an inscrutable and irrefutable “theology” by contrast to rational proposals subject to Enlightenment norms of disputation and argument. Elsewhere he heaps scorn on the concept of original sin, whether in its traditional form or in updated political mutations. Like a Rorty or a Scialabba or any other reputable philosopher from the last two centuries, he can refer offhandedly, presuming the reader’s nodding head, to how the great lights of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries rendered faith in the supernatural moribund, or at least problematic, for reasonable and educated people. And he follows Kant et al in both rationalizing religion and reducing it to ethics, thereby explicitly making it a matter of private piety rather than public politics. At times there is—to this believer’s eyes—a vaguely sinister noble lie lingering on the edges of Scruton’s account of politics and religion: a Straussian (or Haidtian!) appreciation of religion for the masses while cordoning off its ostensibly inadjudicable and therefore strictly private implications from the rational public deliberations of the liberal nation-state. This streak of (Platonist? Hobbesian? Burkean? Oakeshottian?) toleration or even encouragement (by the few) of widespread false consciousness (in the many) is unbecoming, in my view, though it is native to a certain slice of secular or post-religious intellectual conservatism. Instead of keeping the kernel and tossing the shell, its adherents reverse the operation: keep the forms, they suggest, preserve the outward forms and traditions; but forget the faith at the center. Surely we have seen by now that that move does not work in actual practice. Form and content belong together. Remove one and the other withers and dies.

In any case, reading Scruton was a reminder of this crucial divide within the theory and among the philosophers of conservatism. Scruton has much to teach us on a range of matters, but for Christians, at least, his instruction comes with a certain proviso attached. Irreligiosity is usually associated with the left, but it is all too present on the right, too, only usually less openly hostile and thus more difficult to discern. Finding friends and forming alliances is harder than it seems.

Charity

What if, when a person you are reading or listening to states a conviction or comes to a conclusion with which you disagree, your first thought were not that such a person must, by necessary consequence, be wicked, stupid, cruel, incurious, unserious, or otherwise worthy of public censure and ridicule?

What if, when disagreement obtains between persons or groups, we understood that disagreement to be neither absolute nor permanent nor exclusive of friendship, neighborliness, mutual respect, and generosity?

What would happen if we all acted on what we already know to be true, namely, that social media—Twitter above all—is inhospitable to reasoned discourse and charitable interpretation? that it is not a sounding board for honest reflection but a storehouse of mental waste, emotional disquiet, and psychic poison? that irony and mockery are not bugs accidental to the system, but features endemic to it? that every second spent on it is invariably a malformation of one’s mind, heart, soul, and habits of attention? that the only worthwhile thing to do with Twitter et al is not “be a better user” but blast it into the sun?

Religious theism or irreligious atheism

Timothy Jackson teaches Christian ethics at Emory University. I was fortunate enough to take a class with him when I earned my MDiv at Candler School of Theology, the Methodist seminary on campus. I’m currently reading his latest book for a review I’ll write later this month; the book is about the Shoah, anti-Semitism, and Christian supersessionism.

Jackson is a prolific academic, and has written about, and in response to, all manner of thinkers and ideas. In 2014 he wrote a response to Ronald Dworkin’s posthumous book Religion Without God in the pages of the Journal of Law and Religion. It’s a perceptive, accessible introduction to Jackson’s generous mind and capacious approach to positions with which he disagrees. His writing is crystal clear, philosophically speaking, and it’s a pleasure to read such forthright Christian claims in a venue like JLR, in consideration of a figure like Dworkin. Here’s a sample:

For my part, I am far less confident that non-subjectivist aesthetics, ethics, and religion can survive without God. Where Dworkin perceives a third alternative, I suspect an either/or: I see no credible via media between irreligious atheism and religious theism. Biblical faith may be false, but, if so, we are left with some form of emotivism, existentialism, or pragmatism. We are consigned, that is, to constructing or inventing or just asserting our own values. Merely willed or fabricated ideals take us far from most Western normative disciplines, as Nietzsche realized. The notion that the beautiful, the good, and the true are objective was, for him, the last implausible vestige of Jewish and Christian theism. (Sometimes Nietzsche indicted Socratic and Platonic philosophy as well.) If the biblical God is dead, or missing, better to be frankly irreligious and to talk in terms of “power” and “fitness.” On this one point, it is hard to argue with the Antichrist.

I suspect that that Nietzsche is correct: Christ—religious theism—and the Antichrist—irreligious atheism—exhaust our options. To side with the former as the truth of our condition is not to say that all artistic, virtuous, or faithful people must be self-conscious Christian or even professing theists. That is manifestly false. But it is to contend that atheism, whether it calls itself “religious” or “irreligious,” is mistaken because “every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (James 1:17). We may fail to recognize the “Father of lights” and thus may not give Him credit, but without that Father, there would be no lamp even to hide under a bushel. God is omni-relevant, axiologically, even if He is obscure, epistemically.

Go read the rest. There’s a lot more where that came from.

Piranesi and Decreation

Last month I read Piranesi, Susanna Clarke’s belated follow-up to her best-selling Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Piranesi is as wonderful as advertised, a bona fide mystery box of pure prose, genuine wonder, and spiritual imagination. It’s also best to go in without knowing anything, so unspoiled readers who prefer to remain that way ought to stop here.

Much has been made about the theological character of the House, or the World, in which Piranesi finds himself. And rightly so: Clarke invites the comparisons, through interviews, the epigraph from Lewis, and the text itself. Is the House heaven? the divine mind? the realm of the Forms? an in-between place a la the Wood Between the Worlds? something else? (The TVA?)

One clue to the Nature of the Place—Clarke’s liberal capitalizations, like Katherine Sonderegger’s, are contagious—is that Piranesi, like all long-time inhabits of the House, slowly forgets himself. That is, he forgets earth, terrestrial history, his own history, even his name. He lives in a kind of utterly un-self-conscious perfect present of awareness of, and transparency to, the House in all its many-roomed splendor. His innocence and joy are childlike in their unadorned simplicity. Even when he contemplates what one would consider moral harm, he turns over the idea in his mind not so much as a moral quandary as an unthinkable question from which anyone would recoil.

As I read the book, this notion of the loss of self-consciousness in heaven brought to mind Paul Griffiths’ book Decreation: The Last Things of All Creatures. (I wrote about the book a few years ago for Marginalia.) Griffiths argues there, as an admitted item of speculation, that beatified rational creatures—i.e., you and I—will not, in heaven, be self-conscious. We will be conscious, but what we will be conscious of is nothing less or more than the living and perfect and perfectly simple triune God. Saturated in his rapturous glory, we will gladly forget ourselves as we see, finally, face to face, our loving and gracious Creator, who is himself the highest good, ours and all creation’s, he who is beauty itself. But it is important to see that, for Griffiths, we will not choose to forget ourselves, as an intentional act of volition, thus retaining something like a property of self-consciousness. We will no longer be self-aware. And this condition of rapt awareness of nothing but the radiant light of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit will be final, unchanging. We will forever be, as the hymn has it, “lost in wonder, love, and praise.” We will forever be, in a word, happy.

Are these two depictions of heavenly self-forgetfulness the same idea, rendered in different modes? Or are they distinct? And either way, are they right?

I don’t have much to say on the question of their rightness. The matter is wholly speculative; we do not and cannot know, so the best we have to go on is the criterion convenientia, that is, the fittingness of the speculative claim to those matters about which we can claim to some measure of theological knowledge. And here Griffiths, it seems to me, is pushing back, appropriately, on modern trends in both philosophical and theological anthropology and eschatology. In the former, there is far too much emphasis on our cognitive abilities, on our self-transcendence through self-consciousness. In the latter, popular as well as scholarly pictures of the new heavens and new earth often appear as though life as we now find it (at least in the industrialized liberal West) will basically continue on—minus suffering, death, and procreation, plus God. And that is positively silly. The startling strangeness of Griffiths’ speculations does good work in helping us to shed some of those projections and illusions.

As for Clarke’s House, I think there is substantial overlap between Piranesi’s worshipful forgetfulness and Griffiths’ forgetful worship. Both see the human as basically homo adorans; self-consciousness is secondary to a teleology of praise. We are doxological creatures ordered to the Good. When we find it, we revel and glory in it, which elevates rather than denigrates us. Clarke understands this, and accordingly her ideological foe in the book is scientism—not science, properly conceived and practiced—in which the human quest for total mastery and absolute knowledge becomes an idol. “The Other” is incapable of worship, and therefore he is incapable of knowledge. He cannot know because he cannot see; he cannot see because he cannot delight; and he cannot delight because he refuses to be a creature, limited and limiting as that status is. He will not be a supplicant of the House. This makes him an idolater, curved in on the idol of his own self. Consequently the waters of the World rise and drown him in death.

To both Griffiths and Clarke, however, I want to pose a question. Apart from awareness of ourselves as selves, it seems to me a nonnegotiable feature of the life of the saints in heaven that they do not lose their identities there. And if not their identities, then neither do they lose their histories. Mary is and always shall be the Mother of God, because on earth she bore Jesus in her womb. That is an irreducible and inextirpable fact of who Mary was and therefore of who she is and never will not be—precisely in heaven.

If that is so, then Piranesi’s slow forgetting of himself, including his past and his name, seems somehow unfitting. It is not merely that he is “forgetful” of himself, the way a lover is. He forgets himself, and his history is thereby erased. He must be brought back to himself by “16,” an emissary from his world, which is to say, from his forgotten past. The novel is thus patient of a reading that sees the House in less positive, more sinister terms; one might depict it as a kind of black hole, or parasite, that slowly saps the self of the self. Or, to put it theologically, the House would here stand in for a picture of God as competitive with creatures—for him to increase, we must decrease—by contrast with the classical view, which understands the glory of God and the well-being of creatures to be positively, not negatively, correlated. The more of one, the more of the other: the more I find myself in God and he in me, the more I become truly myself. (Aslan grows as Lucy grows.) God’s presence in me, far from crowding “me” out, expands and deepens my self, for my self is nothing other than his good creation, and it finds its ultimate good in him alone.

That is why the saints are known in heaven by their names and hence by their histories. Dante understands this. St. Thomas and St. Bonaventure can sing praises of each other and of the founder of the other’s order (St. Dominic and St. Francis, respectively) only because each of them remains, in heaven, who he was on Earth, yet now purged of every taint of sin and death and transfigured in Christ by the Spirit to the glory of the Father.

In sum, whether or not I will know myself as an “I” in heaven, you will know me as the “I” I am, at least, the “I” I am in Christ; and vice versa. On its face, then, it seems unfitting for that intersubjective beatified knowledge of each individual as the person she is in Christ, with the unique and irreducible history she had in Christ, to be coextensive with a kind of self-erasure for the person in question: as though you will know I am Brad, but I will not; as though we all will know St. Francis as St. Francis, but he will not—even when we glory him in song, or rather, glory Christ in him through song. Will the words mean nothing to him even, or precisely, when the chorus resounds with his very name?

The paradigm of the saints in heaven, after all, is Christ. Christ reigns in heaven as the enthroned Lord, to be sure, but equally as the One who was crucified. (Just as Mary is Theotokos henceforth and for all eternity, so it Jesus Mary’s son.) Nor does the incarnation cease, as though he sloughs off his skin once “returned” to heaven, for the union of divine and human natures in his person is everlasting. Suffice it to say, then, that Jesus knows who he is in heaven, when we sing of him and when we do not (though that “do not” does not obtain in heaven by definition); the name and history of Jesus are a condition of there being a heaven for beatified rational creatures in the first place: and that name and its history are what are praised, what will be praised, world without end.

That should give us a hint here. Whatever the status of our self-awareness in heaven, not only our selves, but our names and histories will not be struck through, much less forgotten. They will continue to constitute us as us, the great “us” of the bride of Christ. Piranesi, in the true heaven, would be just as dumbstruck in delighted self-forgetfulness as he is in Clarke’s novel. But he would still know his name, not least if addressed by the Voice of the House or by one of its fellow happy inhabitants. The difference is that the occasion of hearing his name would not rouse him to jealousy or confusion or dissatisfaction. It would function more like an echo, a reiteration of the great Rule that guides his life: The beauty of the House is immeasurable; its kindness infinite. It would function, in other words, like a living Amen.

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 queen

Of all the brilliant British women writers who lived to a good old age in the long twentieth century, who is your favorite? The candidates are many; both Mary Midgley and Agatha Christie come immediately to mind. Doubtless Rebecca West is chief among all women and men of English letters during this period. But as for me and my house, we hail P. D. James, or as I affectionately call her, The Queen. Long may she reign, even in death.

Born in 1920, James published her first novel in 1962. From her early 40s to her early 90s she published more than 20 books, one every 2-3 years. Just before her 90th birthday, in 2009, she published Talking About Detective Fiction, a winsome and leisurely stroll through the genre she mastered, having received it from the reigning women before her (Christie, Sayers, Marsh, et al) and made it her own. Born two years after the end of World War I, she lived to see every one of the wonders and horrors of the twentieth century; she then died—to give some perspective on the sheer expanse of her life—some 18 months before the U.K. referendum on leaving the European Union.

The Queen is famous for many things, but most of all, and deservedly, for her series featuring Adam Dalgliesh. The series spans 14 novels written across 46 years. They are, in my humble and mostly uninformed opinion, the finest detective novels in the English language. I’m not a fanatic of the genre, but I’ve read widely across the decades (and across the Atlantic), and I’m not even sure who should come in second.

(I’m reading Gladys Mitchell’s Rising of the Moon right now; perhaps I’ll come to agree that that half-forgotten peer to Christie is a worthy competitor for the throne.)

What makes James’s work so royally perfect? The answer may be boring, but it’s true: she’s a master at the mechanics of what makes a mystery novel work. Put them together, and you’ve got the best of the genre.

First is the prose. It’s readable—she was popular, after all—but crisp, detailed, and stylish, too. More, it’s English: you can tell this is a woman who knows her eighteenth and nineteenth century poetry and novels. The sentences never waste a word, but they take their time. And they always come to a point. In this James was very much a woman of her time; she reads more like Sayers than she does Tana French or Louise Penny. Though she lived into the twenty-first century, she was born closer to the nineteenth, and you feel it in her writing.

Second is the lead. Adam Dalgliesh is the platonic ideal of the English detective. Son of a vicar, widower whose only child and young wife died giving birth, a poet of minor acclaim in his spare time, Dalgliesh is a detective whose reputation precedes him due to his supreme and inarguable competence. Reticent, tactful, passionate, compassionate, and possessed of a rich but private inner life, he lives for the job, and always gets it done.

Third is the plotting. The deaths are rarely outlandish but always complex; they’re also always equally difficult to figure out (though that may just be me, as I’m generally terrible at guessing whodunnit). Again, the mysteries lean more toward the golden age than to contemporary crime novels, so the template is classic rather than realistic: a surprising, even shocking murder; a cast of suspects; three dozen paths criss-crossing the murder scene and the victim’s now-revealed secret lives; a patient narrowing-down of suspects via interviews, alibis, discoveries, and evidence; and the final, climactic confrontation and confession. To watch James weave the web then unravel it is never anything but a joy.

Fourth and finally, and most important in terms of what elevates the Dalgliesh series above its peers, is the social observation and characterization. The plot hooks me; the prose keeps me; the acute eye for human and social detail is what strangely warms my heart. Whatever one’s view of arguments about highbrow versus middlebrow and “art” versus “entertainment,” James’s books bridge the gap inasmuch as they use the occasion of a murder and the form of a mystery to examine the human condition. And the insights invariably illumine.

That social aspect to the Dalgliesh books makes them doubly significant, since the first in the series was written in or around the year JFK was elected; the last, in or around the year Obama was elected. What one feels when reading the books in chronological order is the extraordinary social changes happening in real time in the background of the stories—and James is deeply attuned to them. (As she should be, having spent her girlhood in interwar Britain, raised in a family with so little money she had to quit school as a teenager to go to work.) That aforementioned first entry, Cover Her Face, feels very much a portrait of rural postwar England, itself still bearing traces of the Victorian and the Edwardian. By the sixth Dalgliesh novel, Death of an Expert Witness, published in 1977, the world has turned upside down. The book is littered with casual references to the signs of the times: recession; abolition of the death penalty; women wearing trousers(!); a more or less out lesbian couple living in the Fens (albeit referred to by both the narration and the dialogue solely as “friends”—this is James’s ironic reserve, not prudishness); the rise of the management class; “women’s Lib”; abandoned country churches; even ordinary police use of a helicopter, which ferries Dalgliesh from London to East Anglia the day after the murder.

What suffuses every page, adorning the narrative without ever weighing it down, is James’s lightly worn but deeply felt Anglican faith. She doesn’t require her hero to believe—his familiarity with tragedy and evil both walls him off from and draws him ineluctably toward the religious life—but the presence, or rather absence, of God haunts his every endeavor of detection. Whence law? justice? mercy? She forces her readers, as she does her characters, to wonder. It’s something every good mystery novelist aspires to do. For her part, the Queen never fails to execute.

A philosophical introduction

At the close of Jonathan Lear’s introduction to the second edition of his book Freud, he explains what he is and is not aiming to do in the book. Lear is always as sober, clear, and direct as he is here, but it is the confident lucidity of his stated approach to interpreting Freud’s ideas from a particular angle, with particular interests—ignoring any and all matters that would distract from those interests—that is noteworthy here. It should be a model for similar approaches in historical and systematic theology, not least when dealing with events, ideas, and persons as controversial as Freud (both the man and his legacy). Here’s Lear:

It is time to get clear on what I mean by a philosophical introduction. There are already many books that will introduce you to Freud the man, introduce you to the central ideas of psychoanalysis, locate Freud in the history of ideas or offer trenchant criticisms of his views. A philosophical introduction is different. A biographer will want to know what Freud’s life was like and, perhaps, how his ideas arose out of that life. An historian of ideas will want to know the historical context in which these ideas arose, and what influence they had on subsequent thought. A psychoanalytic introduction will aim to explain what the central concepts are, and how they work within psychoanalytic theory and practice. A philosophical introduction, by contrast, will want to show why these ideas matter for addressing philosophical problems that still concern us. Given this aim, there are bound to be aspects of such a book that, from any other perspective, appear strange. The book will pay scant attention to the details of Sigmund Freud’s life. Obviously, one has to be historically sensitive simply to read a book from another time and culture. But the emphasis will always be on why Freud’s ideas continue to have significance, not on how they arose. And Freud may not be the best arbiter of this. Nor is he the final arbiter of what counts as psychoanalysis. There may then be interpretations in this book to which Freud, the man, would have objected. His views are always significant, but psychoanalysis stays alive via a vibrant engagement with them.

That being said, I shall everywhere try to make the best possible case for Freud’s ideas and arguments. This is not because I have a desire to defend Freud, but because if we are going to see how these ideas might continue to matter, we need to see them in their best possible form. Obviously, there are important criticisms to be made of Freud and, more generally, of psychoanalysis. But we have to beware of a certain kind of argument from decadence. So, to give a notorious example, psychoanalysts are sometimes criticized for pulling rank on their patients. If their patients disagree with their interpretation, so the objection goes, then they are ‘resisting.’ No doubt this happens and, humanly speaking, it is awful when it does. But, philosophically speaking, the question is not whether some analysts are bullies. Rather, the question is, ‘When psychoanalysis is practiced well, is there even so a tendency towards bullying?’ Similarly with Freud: there is no doubt that he did not treat the patient he called Dora as well as he should have. Still, one fitting tribute to Dora is to learn from her case as much as we can about the possibilities for human freedom. The aim, then, is not to achieve a balanced historical view of who did what to whom, or who thought what when. Nor is it to make all the criticisms that might legitimately be made. It is to show why these ideas continue to matter insofar as a philosophical understanding of the human soul still matters. And so, when I do offer a criticism, it is because I think that the best possible construal of Freud’s position is still open to criticism and that this criticism is of philosophical significance.

Finally, this is a philosophical introduction. I do not pretend to be able to uncover the hidden philosophical meaning of psychoanalysis; I do mean to engage in a conversation with Freud. My hope is that the book will stimulate others to pursue these thoughts, for I am convinced they are crucial to our self-understanding.

A+ DBH

David Bentley Hart has a new essay in the latest issue of Commonweal, and it’s a corker. It’s Hart in full form, but in his sober (rather than his exuberant or polemical) mode: considerate, charitable, open-handed, wide-angled, just, critical, and constructive. Just what the doctor ordered, in other words.

Ostensibly a review of a translation of a new book by German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, it opens up into a diagnosis of Christendom’s exhaustion in the early third millennium after Christ, a rejection of certain nostalgic paths “forward” (i.e., backward), and an alternative vision for the future of the faith after secular modernity. (It’s surprisingly Hegelian!) I imagine it’s a preview of his forthcoming book, due early next year, titled Tradition and Apocalypse: An Essay on the Future of Christian Belief. Here’s an excerpt from the essay:

So, again, given these realities, what ought Christians to do?

Certainly, what they should not do is indulge in sickly nostalgias and resentments, or soothe their distempers with infantile restorationist fantasies. History’s immanent critique has exposed too many of the old illusions for what they were, and there can be no innocent return to structures of power whose hypocrisies have been so clearly revealed. There are any number of reasons, for instance, for dismissing the current vogue of right-wing Catholic “integralism”: its imbecile flights of fancy regarding an imperial papacy; its essentially early-modern model of ecclesial absolutism; its devotion to a picture of Christian social and political order that could not be any less “integralist” or any more “extrinsicist” and authoritarian in its mechanisms; the disturbingly palpable element of sadomasochistic reverie in its endorsement of various extreme forms of coercion, subjugation, violence, and exclusion; the total absence of the actual ethos of Christ from its aims; its eerie similarity to a convention of Star Trek enthusiasts gravely discussing strategies for really establishing a United Federation of Planets. But the greatest reason for holding the whole movement in contempt is that it is nothing more than a resentful effort to reenact the very history of failure whose consequences it wants to correct. Secularity was not imposed upon the Christian world by some adventitious hostile force. It simply is the old Christendom in its terminal phase.

Well then. There’s no one quite like Hart (as I’ve written before). Go read the rest.

God help me, an MCU viewing order

Regarding the Superhero Industrial Complex I have always felt ambivalent.

On the one hand, I couldn’t agree more with the long exhausted sigh that is the sum total of film critics’ response to the comic book takeover of Hollywood. I wish it were not the case; I wish we still had a diverse array of mid-tier, mid-budget, middlebrow movies made with style and competence for adult consumption; I wish Hollywood did not let the profit motive, and the current fad of capes and tights, determine so much of its offerings—at the very moment that the theater experience is at risk and quality writers (and directors!) are moving to TV.

On the other hand, I don’t hate the MCU. I think few of the Marvel movies stink, most of them are a blast, and some are quite good. My suspicion is that the critical exhaustion with them is due not just to their colonization of cinema, but also to their not being as bad as critics think they ought to be. (By comparison to J.J. Abrams, for example, Kevin Feige comes out smelling like roses.) Moreover, if the Marvel movies existed alongside and within a healthy cinematic ecology of flourishing diverse films made for adults, teenagers, and children alike, I suspect further that most of the ugh and meh tenor of their reception would be muted, or at least marginal.

So, God help me, though I know they aren’t High Art or Great Cinema (yes, I get it, thank you for the reminder, Mr. Scorsese), I enjoy the MCU, and have enjoyed its run since 2008. And now that my oldest two children have gotten to an age where they can be introduced to these movies, I’ve been doing so, slowly, over the last six months, just as I did a couple years prior with Star Wars.

And I’m here to tell you: it’s been fun. Really fun.

And as we draw ever closer to Thanos In Two Acts, as I like to think of Infinity War and Endgame, I’ve drawn up my ideal viewing order for all 24 films of Phases 1-3, at least for elementary-age boys, since they are the sole two-person viewership of my little experiment. Called it the Sacred Order. Here it is, in all its glory:

Part I: Avengers, Made and Unmade

1. Captain America: The First Avenger

2. Iron Man

3. The Incredible Hulk

4. Thor

5. Iron Man 2

6. The Avengers

7. Iron Man 3

8. Captain America: Winter Soldier

9. Thor: The Dark World

10. Avengers: Age of Ultron

11. Ant-Man

12. Captain America: Civil War

Part II: Fallout, Earthly and Cosmic

1. Black Widow (minus post-credits tag)

2. Spider-Man: Homecoming

3. Black Panther

4. Ant-Man and the Wasp (minus mid-credits tag)

5. Captain Marvel (minus mid-credits tag)

6. Guardians of the Galaxy

7. Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2

8. Doctor Strange

9. Thor: Ragnarok

10. Avengers: Infinity War

11. Avengers: Endgame

12. Spider-Man: Far From Home

What’s the logic? What are the benefits? Answers:

• I like sequences organized by character, event, or theme. So, for example, in Part I there are two sets of three films in a row in which Stark (the man or the family name) is central: IM2–AV–IM3 and later AV2–AM–CA3. This keeps the focus on him and his character arc, as well as the consequences that spin out from decisions he makes. (In fact, Tony reappears two films later, in SM1 in Part II, then disappears for seven full movies. That’s good! It clears the path for others to make an impression.)

• I like as well that the division of the 24-film sequence is divided evenly in two; that it focuses on the run-up to the creation of the Avengers and to its rather disastrous dissolution; and that in Part I, apart from two Thor films, it focuses entirely on Earth (and even those two Thor films spend time on Earth, too). It also makes clear that Thanos has basically no narrative role whatsoever in this run of films; Part II, accordingly, is all about (a) the fallout from the Avengers’ dispersal and (b) the slow march to Thanos’s grand entrance on the scene.

• Part II contains, in effect, three mini-sequences: fallout from the events of CA3, while doing double duty as extended introductions to new, important characters; a more expansive look at the cosmic, celestial, and magical side to the universe; and the two-part Thanos epic as climax of all that came before (along with the SM2 epilogue in a minor key).

• The opening of Part I and the closing of Part II form a sort of inclusio for the narrative arcs of both Steve Rogers (who is in five of the 12 films in Part I) and Tony Stark, both of whom are absent (minus Stark in SM1) for nine straight films in Part II. That’s fitting: we don’t see them for a good while, not only because we need to meet some other folks, but also because they’re separated from each other, and suffering the consequences.

• The space sequence of CM–GG–GG2–DS–T3 as a five-film lead-in to AV3–AV4—plus having the latter two as a back-to-back double-header, rather than interrupted (as they were in real life) by AM2 and CM—is ideal. Ideal for world-building, for developing character and narrative momentum, for opening up the larger scope of the story and beginning to point to where it’s headed. It also makes clear that Thor is a part of that world more than he is of Earth’s, and that his story will continue beyond Thanos, unlike Rogers’ and Stark’s.

• Also: Spider-Man stars in the final three-film sequence, and depending on the chronology of Shang-Chi and The Eternals, I could imagine SM3 coming hot on the heels of SM2, in which case you would get a straight shot of four movies in a row featuring everybody’s—especially my boys’—favorite teenage webslinger.

• Finally, this arrangement of the MCU’s first 13 years makes a clean break both for the huge slate of new Disney+ shows (WandaVision, Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Loki, Hawkeye, Ms. Marvel, Moon Knight, Secret Invasion, She-Hulk, Armor Wars, Ironheart) and for the next Big Step into space, magic, aliens, and the multiverse. Knowing what’s ahead, then, it seems clear (to me at least) that there really are three major movements of the MCU, rather than four phases (governed by chronology and artificially timed/named Avengers films), and we are about to see that third major movement played out in the next three to four years. Given that Part II is all about fallout from Part I, it makes sense that Part III will in turn be all about fallout from Part II: Wanda’s grief and possible breaking-bad, Sam’s acceptance of the mantle/shield, Loki’s pruning from the sacred timeline and introduction to the TVA, Kang’s multiversal war, Quill’s search for Gamora, Yelena’s search for Clint, Clint’s training of a successor, Fury’s (and Monica’s) exploration of space, Carol’s encounter with Kamala, Strange’s adoption of Peter, Peter’s continued maturity … and did I mention the multiverse? Put all these characters and events and hours upon hours of plot together, and you’ve got a jam-packed Part III as a worthy sequel to the previous two Parts.

That, in any case, is how I see it. My boys are eating it up. I’m having a good time, too. Feel free to ignore. But if this is your thing, and you’ve got intrigued little ones, follow my lead and heed the Sacred Order.

Coming attractions

I have a number of exciting projects that are all about to be published, mostly between now and the end of the year, plus one more thing next spring. I’ve been sitting on most of them, but now I’m in a position to make all of them public. What follows isn’t everything I’m doing in the next few months, but it’s certainly what will be taking up space (rent-free, as they say) in my brain.

First, following the publication last month in The Point of my essay on Wendell Berry and George Scialabba, I have four long essays coming out this fall:

1. In The New Atlantis, a review of Jason Blakeley’s We Built Reality: How Social Science Infiltrated Culture, Politics, and Power.

2. In The Hedgehog Review, a review of Eugene F. Rogers Jr.’s Blood Theology: Seeing Red in Body- and God-Talk.

3. In The Christian Century, an essay on the blackness of the Jewish Christ, reflecting on the theology of James Cone, the Basilica of the Annunciation, and the iconography of George Floyd.

4. In Commonweal, a review of Timothy P. Jackson’s Mordecai Would Not Bow Down: Anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and Christian Supersessionism.

Second, about 15 months ago, right at the outset of the pandemic, Vincent Lloyd contacted me about editing an issue of the academic journal Political Theology dedicated to Karen Kilby’s new book, God, Evil, and the Limits of Theology. I’m happy to say that the issue has gone to press and will be published next month. The forum of responses consists of six major scholars:

1. Andrew Prevot

2. Kathryn Tanner

3. Katherine Sonderegger

4. Rowan Williams

5. Sarah Coakley

6. Miroslav Volf

It’s as though the lineup of theologians unspooled from my dreams.

I have an essay that introduces the series of contributions to the forum, and Kilby has a lengthy response that replies to each of them in one place. Trust me: You will not want to miss this issue. Not one of the pieces falls short of what you would expect (except, well, mine; but then you already knew that). I simply cannot wait to see what people make of the whole conversation.

Oh, and go buy and read the book in advance of it.

Third and finally, my first two books are set to be published this fall and next spring, respectively.

1. The Doctrine of Scripture (Cascade) is set to come out this fall; there’s not a hard publication date yet, but I’d estimate November 1, give or take a few weeks. Though it’s coming out first, I wrote this book after the book that will come out in the spring; I drafted it quickly, in the fall of 2019. It’s just over 80,000 words. It was originally going to be in the Cascade Companions series, but it spilled over the ideal size for those books, and my editor was kind enough to permit me to publish it as a stand-alone work. I am extremely proud of the final product. If you want to know what I think—if you want to see me at my best, whatever “my best” is—this is it. It is a six-chapter spiritual and theological presentation of the church’s theology of Holy Scripture: ecumenical in tone, catholic in substance, evangelical in aim. And I’m humbled and overjoyed to announce that Katherine Sonderegger has written the foreword to it.

2. The Church’s Book: Theology of Scripture in Ecclesial Context (Eerdmans) is set to come out next April. This is a major revision of my doctoral dissertation at Yale, written under my advisor Kathryn Tanner. This one is double the size of my Cascade book; and whereas the latter was written with a view to an audience that might include seminarians and pastors, this book is a work of scholarship (or so, at least, I intend it to be): though I earnestly desire it to build up the church, its audience is fellow scholars in theology, Bible, and hermeneutics. It is an analysis of the role of ecclesiology in bibliology, that is, the role of the doctrine of the church in the doctrine of Scripture. It traces a line from Barth to the present, studying the work of John Webster, Robert Jenson, and John Howard Yoder in order to show how distinct ecclesial logics—magisterial reformation, catholic, and radical reformation—underlie and inform one’s understanding and interpretation of the Bible. Think of this book as the theoretical scaffolding that supports the positive constructive work of the first book. Which makes sense, since this one was written first (though it’s coming out second—confused yet?). I’m also chuffed and humbled to announce that Stephen E. Fowl has written the foreword to it.

All of a sudden these many myriad projects—some involving weeks or months of work, some years upon years in the making—are coming out, one on top of the other. And there’s more to come! (Not least that third book manuscript, due December 2022…) But I’ll leave it at that. I couldn’t be more thrilled to share these with the world. I hope they do a smidgen of good. And I hope you’ll give them a chance, and maybe even read a few.

Sound familiar?

The puzzling thing about [Joseph] McCarthy was that he had no ideology, no program, not even any prejudices. He was not anti-labor, anti-Negro, anti-Semitic, anti-Wall Street, or anti-Catholic, to name the phobias most exploited by previous demagogues. He never went in for patriotic spellbinding, or indeed for oratory at all, his style being low-keyed and legalistic. Although he was often called a fascist and compared to Hitler, the parallel applied only to his methods. Not only was the historical situation hopeless for a radical change like fascism, the country being unprecedentedly prosperous, but McCarthy never showed any interest in reshaping society. Half confidence man, half ward politician, he was simply out for his own power and profit, and he took advantage of the nervousness about communism to gain these modest perquisites. The same opportunism which made him dangerous in a small way prevented him from being a more serious threat, since for such large historical operations as the subversion of a social order there is required—as the examples of Lenin and Hitler showed—a fanaticism which doesn’t shrink from commitment to programs which are often inopportune.

The contrast in demagogic styles between Hitler and McCarthy is related to national traits—and foibles. Hitler exploited the German weakness for theory, for vast perspectives of world history, for extremely large and excessively general ideas; McCarthy flourished on the opposite weakness in Americans, their respect for the Facts. A Hitler speech began: “The revolution of the twentieth century will purge the Jewish taint from the cultural bloodstream of Europe!” A McCarthy speech began: “I hold in my hand a letter dated…” He was a district attorney, not a messiah.

Each of the bold forays which put the Wisconsin condottiere on the front pages between 1949 and 1954 began with factual charges and collapsed when the facts did: the long guerilla campaign against the State Department; the denunciation of General Marshall as a traitor working for the Kremlin (set forth in a 60,000 word speech in the Senate, bursting with Facts, none of them relevant to the charge); the Voice of America circus; the Lattimore fiasco; and the final suicidal Pickett’s charge against the Army and the President. That the letter dated such-and-such almost always turned out to have slight connection with the point he was making (on one occasion it was a blank sheet of paper), that the Facts about the Communist conspiracy he presented with such drama invariably proved to be, at best, irrelevant and, at worst, simple lies—this cramped McCarthy’s style very little. He had working for him our fact-fetishism, which means in practice that a boldly asserted lie or half-truth has the same effect on our minds as if it were true, since few of us have the knowledge, the critical faculties or even the mere time to discriminate between fact and fantasy.

Furthermore, our press, in its typical American effort to avoid “editorializing”—that is, evaluating the news, or The Facts, in terms of some general criterion—considers any dramatic statement by a prominent person to be important “news” and, by journalistic reflex, puts it on the front page. (If it later turns out that the original Fact was untrue, this new Fact is also duly recorded, but on an inside page, so that the correction never has the force of the original non-Fact. Such are the complications of “just giving the news” without any un-American generalizing or evaluating; in real life, unfortunately, almost nothing is simple, not even The Facts.) A classic instance was the front-paging, several years ago, of a series of charges against Governor Warren of California, who was up before the Senate for confirmation as Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. The charges were serious indeed, but the following day they were exposed as the fabrications of a recent inmate of a mental hospital; despite their prima facie absurdity, they had been automatically treated as major news because the notoriously irresponsible Senator Langer had given them to the press over his name.

In the case of McCarthy, the tragicomic situation prevailed for years that although The New York Times and most of the country’s other influential newspapers were editorially opposed to him, they played his game and, in the sacred name of reporting The Facts, gave him the front-page publicity on which his power fattened. (Thus when he “investigated” the scientists at Fort Monmouth, the Times solemnly printed his charges day after day on page one, and then, some weeks later, printed a series of feature articles of its own, demonstrating that the charges were without substance; a little checking in the first place might have evaluated the Monmouth “investigation” more realistically and relegated it to an inside page; but this, of course, would have been “editorializing.”) When McCarthy’s charisma evaporated after the TV public had had a chance to see him in action during the army hearings and after the Watkins Committee had reported unfavorably on his senatorial conduct, the press began running his exposés on the inside pages and he disappeared like a comic-opera Mephisto dropping through a trap door.

—Dwight Macdonald, “The Triumph of the Fact” (1957)—originally published in Anchor Review, later collected in Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain

Art tonnage

This weekend I watched Steven Soderbergh’s latest film No Sudden Move (available on HBO Max). It’s a modest period heist film, of a piece with Soderbergh’s proclivity to leaven his Major Releases with minor genre exercises. I always enjoy those exercises, and I enjoyed this one, too. It’s restrained, formally inventive, clever, and draws lovely performances out of actors old and new. I especially appreciated seeing Don Cheadle in fine form. I imagine a whole generation of young moviegoers knows Cheadle solely from his role in the Marvel films, which means they think of him as entirely forgettable and therefore dispensable. Not so! (Perhaps his own Disney+ series will rectify that error? Probably not.)

Soderbergh has likened himself, fittingly, to a graffiti artist. He’s a street performer: he does his art quick and dirty, to please his audience and himself—then moves on. His output, as a result, is quite large. Side projects, side hustles, delivery innovation, technical experimentation, multiple films per year: Soderbergh is a jitterbug craftsman, always in motion. He never sits still, just like his camera.

In this Soderbergh belongs to the Stephen King theory of popular art. Even apart from highbrow versus lowbrow (or masscult versus midcult), this theory eschews a vision of creative labors as necessarily painful and painfully long. If you’re a craftsman, then know your craft and do it when called upon, to the best of your abilities, and with celerity. The fact that you’re paid to do it, moreover, is a feature, not a bug; there’s no room here for the pure genius, tortured, alone, and unappreciated. No, you’ve got an audience—readers, viewers—happy and willing to hand over money for what you’ve made. Serve them! Entertain them!

And if not everything you make it a work of world-stopping brilliance, so be it.

This reminds me of John Grisham’s famed writing routine. Every fall, just in time for the airport-heavy travel seasons of Thanksgiving and Christmas, he drops a new novel. After taking some well-earned time off, he outlines in great detail the plan for his next novel. In the first week of January, he begins writing: every weekday for x hours per day. By mid-spring he has a rough draft; by mid-summer, the revisions are complete. Then the manuscript is off the printers, and they publish the book by Halloween. Grisham’s been doing this for more than 20 years. You can set your clock by it.

I certainly don’t think the Soderbergh–King–Grisham model is for everyone. Nor do I think their work is flawless as a result of it. High art is high art for a reason; it takes time, passion, and sometimes pain. But not everyone is meant for such heights. I’m happy to live in a world with graffiti artists and airport novelists. The pleasures they afford are real, and they would be far less and few fewer if their authors weren’t willing to risk some measure of artistic failure and critical dismissal in the speed and style of their creation. May their tribe increase.

An action movie pet peeve

I don’t recall when it first appeared on screen, much less when it became a tired trope, but in the last 5-10 years a certain scene has become a mainstay in action movies (and TV shows). The protagonist realizes he needs the help of A Certain Someone. But either the last time he saw A Certain Someone things didn’t end well, or A Certain Someone is an unsavory character who can’t be trusted. With nowhere else to turn, though, our protagonist goes in search of ACS anyway. And when he finds him, one and only one thing happens. ACS sees him coming a mile away; the two of them fight—often quite brutally—until one submits to the other or, more commonly, the fight results in a draw; then, invariably, they look into each other’s eyes, realize the futility of their conflict, let bygones be bygones, and grab a drink.

Not only has this become an eye-rolling cliché. Most of the time it’s nonsensical. The brutality of the fight suggests unquenchable malice; the violence is bloodthirsty and aspirationally fatal. They’re trying to kill each other. Only, moments later, they’re not; all is well, since (as the plot demands) the protagonist’s needs must be met, and the two must join forces to continue his quest.

I’m the last person to suggest genre conventions are a drag. It’s just that this particular convention is stupid. We know what’s going to happen. The fight is devoid of stakes. And the ferocity of the fighting has no connection to what comes next, often mere seconds later. It’s little more than an annoyance; it’s a box to be checked by the screenwriter or writers’ room; it’s a way to kill time, the plot spinning its wheels; it’s unimaginative, and shows the filmmakers are out of ideas.

I’m looking at you, Mandalorian; and you, John Wick; and you too, Black Widow. To name only a few.

Just stop it already.

From meaningless content to doomscrolling

One of the truly essential Substack writers is Justin E. H. Smith, who is neither a journalist nor a start-up freelancer but a major academic philosopher and polymath scholar of (what always strikes me as) ten thousand interesting things. His newsletter from two Sundays ago was a typically undefinable reflection on (inter alia) memory, streaming, tense, eternity, and the internet. Here are some sample grafs that bring home one of the essay’s central points:

If this assessment sounds bleak or cynical, consider Amazon’s recent acquisition of MGM for $8.45 billion. Jeff Bezos now holds the rights to numerous treasures of twentieth-century American entertainment, not least Albert R. Broccoli’s almost boutique-style James Bond films with their iconic, mythos-incanting musical opening numbers. Bezos has explicitly stated his intention to “reimagine and redevelop that I.P. [sic] for the 21st century.” On the surface, his idea of what a “good plot” looks like would seem to make twenty-first century content scarcely different from the most archaic and deep-rooted elements of myth and lore. Thus he thinks there needs to be a heroic protagonist, a compelling antagonist, moral choices, civilizational high stakes, humor, betrayal, violence…

“I know what it takes to make a great show,” Bezos has confidently said, “this should not be that hard. All of these iconic shows have these basic things in common.” The problem is that Bezos’s purpose in returning to a quasi-Proppian schema of all possible storytelling is not at all to revive the incantatory power of cliché to move us into the ritual time of storytelling. It is rather to streamline and dynamicize the finished product, exactly as if it were shipping times Bezos were seeking to perfect, rather than the timing of a hero’s escape from a pit of conventional quicksand.

And so the college freshman imagining her life as a show seems doubly sad: she turns to the closest thing we have to new narrative art in order to frame her own life and make it meaningful, but the primary instances our culture yields up to her to help with this framing are in fact only meaningless content being passed off as narrative art. It is no wonder, then, that what she will likely end up doing, after the passing and briefly stimulating thought of life itself as a TV show, is to go back to doomscrolling and vain name-checking until sleep takes over.

Do go read the whole thing; the closing section is eloquent, incisive, and damning in equal parts. Then do your duty and subscribe.

Mary’s gaze

Don’t look up, Christ’s concave golden gaze
unbearable, wholly
beyond, beyond
holy: taste
the gold scent and kiss
the icon laid open, one wing of a book, with
its following eyes and
closed eyelid-like mouth’s
superimposed prints
of lips (as one white rose is
manifested in others, too
infinitely petaled)—this mouth
hiving unnumbered
kisses
of the by now long long dead . . .
I’ve come back to the church
of my mother, of
my own deceased six-year-old
self and his father
as usual absent, and
I look straight ahead and slowly walk
into Mary’s all enfolding
labyrinth-unraveled blue
and white child’s-drawn-
stars-haloed
gaze
made of birds’ sleep
and word-light
and find
without seeking, by
smell and touch only,
HER—
she is home, waiting
visible,
here.

—Franz Wright, third part of “Triptych,” titled “St. Paul’s Greek Orthodox Church: Minneapolis, 1959,” in Wheeling Motel (Knopf, 2009), 26-27