A church in tatters

In my review of Rodney Clapp’s new book on neoliberalism a few months back, I write the following:

Clapp sometimes partakes of a certain Hauerwasian grammar, whereby the indicative is used to describe what the church ought to be but is not (yet). Call it the eschatological indicative. Such language can function prophetically, calling the church to enact its baptismal and pentecostal identity, whatever its past or present failings. But it can also mystify the facts on the ground. Those facts are plainly put: The American church is in tatters. Our witness is shredded, our integrity a joke, our children bereft of a heritage and leaving the faith in droves. Reading Clapp’s book, at least until I reached the restraint of the epilogue, I simply did not recognize in his rhetoric the church as it currently exists. The rot, neoliberal and otherwise, runs deep. I want to amen the confidence of Clapp’s homiletic. But mostly I just find myself sighing in lament and anguish.

That passage has stuck with me, partly because it surprised me when I wrote it, partly because it gave words to an unexpressed emotion that, the moment it was on the page, I realized articulated exactly how I had been feeling for some time. The church is in tatters: lament and anguish. That’s it, right there. That’s the alternately benumbed and depressed sensibility I find in myself as I survey the church in America today, a sensibility I detect in many others.

Most folks I know who are in their 30s and 40s and who were raised in the church fall into only a few categories. One is ex-Christian: they’ve left the faith. Another is ex-church: they like Jesus but they don’t do the public-worship-and-assembly thing. A third is deconstructing: they’re currently in the midst of a sincere and long-ranging reconsideration of all they’ve been taught, about God, Scripture, Jesus, religion, ethics, politics, family, what have you. A fourth is imploding: their marriage or job or kids or personal life hit some wall or obstacle and a metaphorical IED blew it all to smithereens, and they’re doing their best to pick up the pieces. The fifth and final group comprises those whose faith as well as church membership are living and active and relatively stable, but who are hanging on by a thread. A single modest financial or family crisis, a lost job or a sick parent, a church scandal or a friend’s move away—a real but not life-altering event—would cut the thread and send them spinning into one of the first four categories.

And that’s about it. If I were to select a single word to unite all of these groups, it would be exhausted. And that exhaustion is ecclesial and spiritual as much as it is economic, professional, political, medical, familial, marital, or social. Even the best and most faithful Christians I know in this demographic are spent, tired, struggling with mental health, terribly lonely. They are, in a word, suffering a kind of sustained desolation while clinging to Christ with all they have—which is not much.

Is it always like this? Has it ever been thus? If I went back and polled our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents at this stage in life, would they report the same? Yes, granted, life happens, and life includes pain and suffering, job loss and cancer, divorce and broken friendships and the rest. Life has always happened. But this feels more specific. It is not as though the church has never been well, in this or that time and this or that place. I know enough of church history to tell you about some of those times and places. Some of them were recent. The church and its members sometimes are brimming with confidence, catechesis, and overall health.

This does not seem to be one of those times, whether one looks at the hard data (the sociological research is rather devastating here) or the anecdata (i.e., one’s neighbors and friends and community). The Lord’s promise to the church is that the gates of hell will not prevail against it. But as I’ve written elsewhere, that promise applies to the church, not to yours or mine, not even to a regional or national collection of believers. The Lord will remain faithful to his people even should it be depleted to a remnant of one. Sometimes, though, it feels like that’s precisely what’s happening in America, a winnowing and whittling down, until there’s none of us left, not even one.

Teaching a 4/4: freedom

This is the fourth and final post in a series of reflections on what it means to be a scholar in the academy with a 4/4 teaching load. The first discussed the allotment of one’s hours in a 4/4 load; the second identified the unavoidable tradeoffs that come with either having a family or serving at a particular kind of institution; the third offered a series of tips and strategies for 4/4 profs who want to make, foster, and protect the time necessary for reading and writing. This fourth and last post is a companion to the third, discussing in broader terms some of the gifts and opportunities afforded by serving at a teaching-heavy university as well as having a time-demanding family life outside of work.

Let’s say you accept my terms and agree that it’s possible to find the time to publish while teaching a 4/4. Still, you reply, that doesn’t make the high teaching load good; the load remains a hindrance to research, only a hindrance that can be (partially) overcome.

There are two things to say to this. First, teaching isn’t a hindrance. Nor is it just your job. Teaching is a calling. If it’s not your calling, you might want to get out of the game. As I’ve repeated throughout this series, research is a component of and companion to teaching; the job is twofold, a balance or dance. You don’t teach in order to write. You teach and you write; that’s the scholarly life.

Second, a high teaching load isn’t solely a set of challenges for research by comparison to positions in the scaling heights of the ivory tower: the Ivy League, the R1 state schools, the super-rich private universities whose research operations are a well-oiled machine. A high teaching load, which is usually a function of serving at an institution with less prestige, less money, less power, and so on, also presents unique opportunities for your research.

How so?

First, by taking the pressure off. I cannot put into words the relief I have felt every day on my job not having to publish or perish. Note well: I’m still publishing. But there is no one peering over my shoulder, no one nudging and shoving me toward some invisible finish line extending forward ahead of me, always within sight but never within reach. The sheer benefit to one’s mental health makes it worth a positive mention. When I compare notes with friends who work in The Big Leagues, their jobs sound claustrophobic, stultifying, enervating, depressing. Like a panic attack waiting to happen. Who wants that?

Second, by taking the pressure off what I’m supposed to write. Three months ago my first book was published. I first drafted it two years ago, in the fall of 2019. Would I have written that book, the way that I wrote it, were I at a different, more research-heavy institution? Answer: Not on your life. And it’s the best thing I’ve ever done. I couldn’t be prouder of it. But the spirit that breathes across its pages, a spirit I trust you can sense as a reader, is the spirit of freedom. I wrote exactly what I believed to be true, in the style I thought most apt to the content. The book is what I wanted it to be. Never, not in a million years, would I have done that had an administrator been breathing down my neck, asking me when my Next Big Book would be coming out, and with what university press, and on what topic, and written with what level of dense and unreadable prose. I didn’t write to make a splash. I wrote what was burning up my insides, what was begging to come out. And you know what? If the book ends up making any kind of splash, it’ll be because I wrote from passion and desire, not from administrative pressure or T&P criteria. And praise God for that.

Third, of a piece with an overall reduction of pressure is a broader freedom to pursue interests as they arise. In the last five years I have somehow, by God’s grace (and editors’ largesse), become a person who writes essays and criticism for magazines on wide-ranging topics that include but are not limited to my scholarly expertise in theology. I’m going to say it again: I could not and would not have done that at an Ivy or R1 institution. Why? Because their incentive structures do not care about such writing. But you know what? Alan Jacobs is right: Literary journalism (a term he takes from Frank Kermode) is a lot harder to write than peer-reviewed journal articles. Not only that, doing so makes you a much better writer, doubly so if you have no training as a writer and the only writing you cut your teeth on was inaccessible, jargon-heavy academic “prose.” Working with editors from The Point and The Los Angeles Review of Books and The New Atlantis and The Hedgehog Review and Commonweal and First Things and Comment and elsewhere has made me an immeasurably better writer than I was before I started, indeed than I ever would have been had I never tried my hand at such writing. Thank God, then, too, that I’m here at ACU and not at some soul-destroying publish-or-perish elite place that doesn’t care one whit whether you write well or whether what you write is read widely, only whether the right number of PRJAs is checked on the T&P portfolio. No thanks.

Fourth, my entire “research profile” bears the imprint of this pressure-free vocational freedom afforded by working at a teaching-heavy institution. On one hand, my third book (beginning to draft next month!) is a 25,000-word popular work on the church meant for lay audiences. Would I have signed that contract elsewhere? Probably not. On the other hand, my fourth book (not due for a few years) is a similarly popular work, longer and more detailed, however, on the proper role of digital technology in the life of churches and their ordained leaders. I’m currently reading my way into being able to write about that topic; I’ve also just finished a pilot course teaching on the same. Are you sensing a theme? My writing habits have followed an unplanned and undirected course these last few years; or rather, I have allowed those habits to follow desires that sprang up organically from my reading and teaching, and my institutional location not only permitted but encouraged that process. I can tell you, my conversations with colleagues at other institutions do not report a similar story.

Fifth, I have learned to accept my reading and writing limits in (what I take to be) a healthy way. I’ve always loved a moment that comes early in Wallace Stegner’s novel Crossing to Safety; the narrator is speaking of his early days as a college prof:

I remember little about Madison as a city, have no map of its streets in my mind, am rarely brought up short by remembered smells or colors from that time. I don’t even recall what courses I taught. I really never did live there, I only worked there. I landed working and never let up.

What I was paid to do I did conscientiously with forty percent of my mind and time. A Depression schedule, surely—four large classes, whatever they were, three days a week. Before and between and after my classes, I wrote, for despite my limited one-year appointment I hoped for continuance, and I did not intend to perish for lack of publications. I wrote an unbelievable amount, not only what I wanted to write but anything any editor asked for—stories, articles, book reviews, a novel, parts of a textbook. Logorrhea. A scholarly colleague, one of those who spent two months on a two-paragraph communication to Notes and Queries and had been working for six years on a book that nobody would ever publish, was heard to refer to me as the Man of Letters, spelled h-a-c-k. His sneer so little affected me that I can’t even remember his name.

Nowadays, people might wonder how my marriage lasted. It lasted fine. It throve, partly because I was as industrious as an anteater in a termite mound and wouldn’t have noticed anything short of a walkout, but more because Sally was completely supportive and never thought of herself as a neglected wife—“thesis widows,” we used to call them in graduate school. She was probably lonely for the first two or three weeks. Once we met the Langs she never had time to be, whether I was available or not. It was a toss-up who was neglecting whom.

Early in our time in Madison I stuck a chart on the concrete wall of my furnace room. It reminded me every morning that there are one hundred sixty-eight hours in a week. Seventy of those I dedicated to sleep, breakfasts, and dinners (chances for socializing with Sally in all of those areas). Lunches I made no allowance for because I brown-bagged it at noon in my office, and read papers while I ate. To my job—classes, preparation, office hours, conferences, paper-reading—I conceded fifty hours, though when students didn’t show up for appointments I could use the time for reading papers and so gain a few minutes elsewhere. With one hundred and twenty hours set aside, I had forty-eight for my own. Obviously I couldn’t write forty-eight hours a week, but I did my best, and when holidays at Thanksgiving and Christmas gave me a break, I exceeded my quota.

Hard to recapture. I was your basic overachiever, a workaholic, a pathological beaver of a boy who chewed continually because his teeth kept growing. Nobody could have sustained my schedule for long without a breakdown, and I learned my limitations eventually. Yet when I hear the contemporary disparagement of ambition and the work ethic, I bristle. I can’t help it.

I overdid, I punished us both. But I was anxious about the coming baby and uncertain about my job. I had learned something about deprivation, and I wanted to guarantee the future as much as effort could guarantee it. And I had been given, first by Story and then by the Atlantic, intimations that I had a gift.

Thinking about it now, I am struck by how modest my aims were. I didn’t expect to hit any jackpots. I had no definite goal. I merely wanted to do well what my inclinations and training led me to do, and I suppose I assumed that somehow, far off, some good might flow from it. I had no idea what. I respected literature and its vague addiction to truth at least as much as tycoons are supposed to respect money and power, but I never had time to sit down and consider why I respected it.

Ambition is a path, not a destination, and it is essentially the same path for everybody. No matter what the goal is, the path leads through Pilgrim’s Progress regions of motivation, hard work, persistence, stubbornness, and resilience under disappointment. Unconsidered, merely indulged, ambition becomes a vice; it can turn a man into a machine that knows nothing but how to run. Considered, it can be something else—pathway to the stars, maybe.

I suspect that what makes hedonists so angry when they think about overachievers is that the overachievers, without drugs or orgies, have more fun.

My wife just about spit out her coffee when she read that for the first time. She could relate. But part of the point, aside from the sheer dictatorial vision required to devote all the time one has to what one wants to achieve, is that hour-counting and hour-assigning is not a way of disregarding limits. It’s a way of admitting them and working within them.

For me, those limits bear less on writing than on reading. I’m a fast writer but a turtle-slow reader. I’ve never known someone who reads regularly, for work or for pleasure, who reads as slowly as I do. What that means is that I have to make choices. Here are two choices I’ve had to make that, upon reflection, have made me a better scholar—or at least a practicing scholar, whatever my merits; someone who’s in the game, not on the sidelines.

One choice was to accept that my reading would never be comprehensive. That’s an obvious thing to say, but you might be surprised by how few academics accept it in their heart of hearts. And it’s true, I’ve known one or two polymaths who genuinely seem to have read it all. But that ain’t me. Not even in a single area, not even in a subtopic of subtopic of a subtopic, like the doctrine of Scripture, about which I’ve now written two books. What I’ve not read vastly outweighs what I’ve read. That truth (and it is a truth) can be paralyzing or liberating. I’ve chosen to let it be liberating. Read what I can and write what I’m able, and if people find it of any use, God be praised; if not, then I guess I didn’t meet the magical threshold of “enough, though not everything.” Naturally you don’t want such self-allowance to avoid total comprehensiveness to slide into a permission to be lazy, to avoid covering all one’s bases. Yet the point stands: it’s never enough; let that be enough. Get on with it and do your work, in acceptance that someone someday will read what you’ve written and point out the text you should have cited. It’ll happen. Be grateful they pointed it out to you. You can take the time to read it for the next thing you write!

The second choice followed from the first. If I wasn’t going to be an independent scholar or research professor who reads 1,000 pages a day (as I’ve heard the encyclopedic Wolfhart Pannenberg did, before writing a book by dinner time), then I might as well broaden my reading to include both academic works far from my area of research and books (old or new) acclaimed for their insights, their impact, or the beauty of their prose. Not only has this practice proved a revolution in my reading habits, and for the better. It has made me a far better academic, scholar, writer, and teacher. Why? Because what I read and know is more than a mile deep and an inch wide. I try to read the dozen or two dozen annual “biggest books,” whether trade or academic, that get press in the NYRB or NYTBR or New Yorker or elsewhere. I read political philosophy and biblical studies and philosophy of science and social science and critical theory and memoirs and novels and collections of essays. Sometimes I review them. I don’t do this reading only at home. I do it in my office. It’s part of my scholarly labor. At this point I’d feel irresponsible if I stopped. It’s helped me resist the siren song of becoming a hedgehog, or a hedgehog alone. In the few areas on which I publish in academic journals, I am a hedgehog: ecclesiology, bibliology, Trinity. But otherwise I’m a fox, reading and writing on as many topics and authors and books as I can lay my hands on.

And I’m telling you: Not only would I not have done that were I not teaching a 4/4. It wouldn’t even have occurred to me. It wouldn’t be possible. The material conditions don’t encourage it, at least for pre-tenure faculty, at least most of the time. Usually they actively block or prohibit it.

That’s why I’m happy where I am. That’s why I don’t resist my high teaching load. That’s part of what makes teaching a 4/4 not just “not as bad as you think,” but (apart from the teaching, which is itself fun and rewarding and good work) a surprisingly conducive environment for research and publication. If you can make and guard time for it, it might actually turn out to be better than it would have been were you elsewhere. Who would have thought?

*

I’m not quite done, though. Consider the following something of a coda.

In the second post in this series I discussed not just institutional but personal and familial tradeoffs. So I want to add a word here about how and why having a rich life beyond work, full of bustling households bursting with children as well as friends, neighbors, churches, sports leagues, and community service, is not only good—being far, far more important than publishing—but, perchance, itself a boon to your academic work.

Here’s the nutshell version. Having something to come home to makes the work you do during the day meaningful, even when it doesn’t always feel like significant work. I never ask myself the question, Why am I even doing this? What’s it all for? That’s not because I think my writing will outlive me. It certainly will not. It’s because having four children who don’t know and don’t care that Dad’s an author (not to mention a wife whose stated marital purpose in life is to be unimpressed with me) puts my work into perspective. The souls for whom I am responsible are not only worth more than the straw that is my writing and teaching. They are a reminder that my job, though a vocation, is also, well, a job. More than a job, perhaps, but not less than one. It pays the bills and puts food on the table. That’s a worthy thing in its own right. And given that I do what I love with a flexible schedule that more than pays the bills, the truth is that I’ve got it made in the shade, professionally speaking. I’m employed, in a time of precarity, anxiety, uncertainty, and fear. What’s not to be grateful for?

Furthermore, as I briefly alluded to in the second post, having a family does important motivational and boundary-setting work, if you’ll let it. I don’t choose not to bring work home with me. That choice is made for me by my children. I can’t be working while driving them to basketball or picking them up from school or attending church or cooking dinner or singing them to sleep. And when they’re finally in bed, should I be a good husband and spend time with my wife, or each and every night march to my office to get a few more hours in? The question answers itself.

Here’s the irony, if it counts as one. Having fewer hours in the office and stronger boundaries between work and home—having, in a word, both more and more fixed limits on one’s time—can have the unexpected effect of supercharging what work time you have. Because I know I have to accomplish X, Y, and Z in only three or 12 or 20 hours, then I don’t have a choice (there’s that freedom in unchosen commitments theme again): I’m just going to have to get it done in the time I have, because once I clock out, the work is finished in any case. What such expectations within limits produce, at any rate in me, is a singularity of vision that crowds out all the usual distractions and detours and time-sucking routes of avoiding work. No Slack, no Twitter, no Facebook, no Instagram, no Gmail, no Messages, no WhatsApp, no nothing. Turn Freedom on or the internet off; kill your inbox or set your phone in another room. Whatever it takes, read the book or write the essay or fix the draft or review the submission or complete the grant or prepare the lesson or grade the papers. Just do it. The only time you have is now. Take advantage of it.

My anecdotal experience in doctoral studies confirms this dynamic. Especially when ABD, my single friends—some of them, I should say, some of the time—had many a day like the following: sleep in (that is, relative to my 6:07am baby-crying human alarm), check email and social media, drag themselves to a coffee shop, work for an hour or two, meet a friend for a late lunch, work a little more, grab drinks at a bar, then work into the wee hours of the night. Their self-report would then describe such an experience as “working all day”—not without some self-awareness, but all the while underwritten by a mixture of disappointment, frustration, and resentment at the lack of some objective structure or set of involuntary strictures organizing their time.

By comparison I often had exactly four total daytime hours in which to get the same amount of work done (sharing, as I did, childcare with my wife; stipends rarely stretch so far as to cover daycare or nannies). And so I did the work in the time I had. I didn’t have another choice. Would I have been as efficient had I been in their shoes? No way. It was the inflexible limits placed on my time that forced my hand. And I’m grateful they did.

The same dynamic obtains beyond the PhD, if you’re fortunate enough to have a tenure-track gig. Limits aren’t the enemy. They’re the secret sauce of happiness. Once accepted, or even befriended, they might just help you publish.

Even while teaching a 4/4.

Teaching a 4/4: publishing

This post is the third in a series on what it’s like to teach a 4/4 load as a university professor and, conditions permitting, how to flourish while doing so. I’ve laid out the allotment of office and home hours devoted to work by a typical 4/4 prof (tl;dr: 50-60 on average, to prep, teach, grade, mentor, sponsor, serve on committees, and reply to emails); I’ve explained why there are inevitable tradeoffs involved, both at the personal and familial and at the institutional level. For many 4/4 teachers, scholarship is next to impossible without transgressing what ought to be a hard and fast division between work life and home life.

Nevertheless. I promised in the opening post that, at least for some of us, at least in certain circumstances, scholarship remains possible even with a 4/4 load. Not that everyone wants that—many college instructors live exclusively to teach; they do the other stuff only when they must—but if you’re someone who does want it, but doesn’t know how to do it, or even whether it’s possible, I’m here to say that it is. In this post and the next one I’ll be sharing what I’ve learned, for whatever it’s worth.

I want to come at the question from two angles. The first is pure logistics: What habits, hacks, and strategies work to protect one’s time and to dedicate what remains of it to scholarship? The second is more philosophical: What does a 4/4 load mean for one’s scholarship—how, counterintuitively, might teaching outside of ultra-elite research-heavy contexts benefit one’s scholarship, providing opportunities and even gifts unavailable in those more superficially “research-friendly” contexts?

I’ll save the introspection for the next post. First comes tactics.

*

By way of beginning, permit me a Cal Newport moment. I owe you some mention of my bona fides, since I’m about to offer some advice. As I write it is Finals Week in the fall 2021 semester, which means it is exactly halfway through my fifth year teaching full-time as a tenure-track Assistant Professor: nine total semesters across four and a half years. Here’s what I’ve produced in that time (beginning summer 2017, when I arrived in Abilene, and counting only what I’ve written during that time, whether already published or currently scheduled for publication—i.e., I’m not counting anything I did before I arrived or that I’m contracted to do but have yet to get around to):

• one edited book;

• two authored books;

• five peer-reviewed journal articles;

• 28 essays (this sort of thing);

• 10 book reviews;

• six conference/paper presentations.

Not counting the presentations, the approximate word count of my writing output (also not counting this blog, I suppose) comes to about 400,000. That in turn comes to 7,500 or so per month, or ~1,800 per week, or (getting granular) just under 400 words per workday (assuming I’m not writing on Saturday or Sunday).

I should add, too, that during the time in question I received five grants (four internal to ACU, one external) and one award (for teaching). The total number of courses I’ve taught is 40: four per semester for nine semesters, plus one overload semester and three summer courses online.

That’s a lot, I know. You might be wondering, reasonably, whether the first two posts in this series were a bit of hot air, since I seemed to suggest that 4/4 profs don’t have time for anything else but being the best teachers they can be. And for many, that’s true. My first year here that was all I could handle, too. If I was in the office, I was prepping for class or grading assignments or meeting with students—full stop. But since then I’ve slowly found ways of creating and guarding the time necessary to do what I love and feel called to do: namely, read and write theology for both academic and popular audiences.

Here are some of the tricks I’ve learned to make sure I could do just that. Maybe they’ll help you as well.

1. Have a good boss.

Yes, granted, this one’s out of your control. But it might still be something of a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for finding time to publish. My chair understands that research is a top priority for me. For that reason he has worked to make my life as conducive as possible to reaching that goal, within the limits that both he and I work under. Five things in particular have been a lifesaver in this area, and my chair is the reason for all of them.

First: Teaching multiple sections of the same course. Instead of teaching four truly different classes in a semester, in other words, I teach two distinct courses, each of which is offered twice in the same semester, in two sections. I’m still in the classroom 12 hours a week, but I’m only preparing lesson plans for half that.

Second: Stacking sections back to back, at the same time every day. I teach every afternoon, Monday through Thursday, either 1:30–4:30 or 12:00-3:00. That kind of regularity is crucial for sectioning off the rest of my time into a single bundle, rather than in scattered bits and pieces throughout the day. Plus, stacking sections of the same course back to back means I’m able simply to press “repeat” on the same material, rather than having to artificially separate (in time and in my mind) what are identical class meetings.

Third: Keeping me off major committees, at least at first. My chair waited until my third year to put me on a committee that demanded real time from me; he waited until my fourth year to put me on a genuinely time-intensive committee. In truth I didn’t even know he was doing this until a year ago. Every faculty member has to do committee work, and rightly so, but that doesn’t mean you need to jump into the deep end your first or second year. Delaying my serious committee involvement until I got my sea legs under me made all the difference; at that point I had learned how to manage my time, and it wasn’t a burden when it came.

Fourth: Class size. Now, this one is more ambiguous by nature. During my first three years part of my load included large, lecture-heavy freshmen survey courses; since then I’ve taught exclusively upper-level electives that center on discussion, with class size capped at 25 or 30 students. I include this as a boon because it’s what I like to teach, and a satisfied me-as-teacher is unquestionably a productive me-as-writer. The through-line there is a straight one. But smaller classes are not necessarily less demanding than larger ones. In fact the latter are often easier and more convenient to grade: quizzes and exams, on top of PowerPoint-heavy firehose-lectures. Whereas the former usually involve loads of writing assignments, which call for extensive feedback and time-intensive grading. For me, though, the tradeoff is worth it, and my chair kindly permitted me to ease out of the bigger courses in order to take on the smaller ones I preferred.

Fifth: Get creative. My spring load entails four courses, but one of them is a week-long intensive the second week of January, before the semester starts. That opens up my daily and weekly time during the semester even more. Last spring I layered my remaining three semester-long classes back-to-back-to-back on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which meant I had zero teaching requirements on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. I felt like a new man. It was a slog the other two days of the week, but it was worth it. I’ve even considered teaching a short course in May as well, following the end of the semester, which would cut down my spring semester-long courses to two. Every college and department has different ways of finagling these things. Look into it. Run it by the boss. Not only might she agree to it; she might think it’s a good idea.

2. Be an excellent teacher.

This bit of advice might sound odd or out of place, but it’s crucial. You will not succeed at publishing at a teaching-heavy institution if you aren’t doing your first job well. Put differently, you cannot allow yourself to think about research until you are satisfied that you are doing a quality job in the classroom. How do to that is a question for another day. But it’s a requirement for 4/4 profs. That’s what they pay you for, and if you’re not succeeding there, you’re in for a world of hurt.

3. Just say no.

This is the first and nonnegotiable rule for writing with a 4/4 load. You have to think of your job as consisting of two and only two things: teaching and research. Everything else—literally, everything else—is either tertiary or an obstacle in your path.

Professors receive requests, whether from students, colleagues, or administrators, every single day on the job. In my experience professors rarely say no to these requests. It is hard to decline an invitation, not least one that is flattering, or that seems to come from real need, or that might benefit one’s students or institution. Yet if your highest priority (after being a good teacher) is securing consistent and reliable time for research, you must be ruthless here. Say no to every ask. Every. Single. One. Just say no. Don’t speak at that event; don’t sponsor that organization; don’t attend that meeting; don’t join that book club; don’t register for that webinar; don’t foster that initiative; don’t explore that opportunity. Don’t do any of it. You can’t, not if you want to do meangingful scholarship. There are only so many hours in the day.

I have a standing agreement with my chair: I will do whatever he needs me to do; his wish is my command. But if it’s a request and not an order (a soft ask, not a hard one), the answer is no. Not because I’m not a team player—I am, or try to be—but because the articles and books won’t write themselves, and after teaching, they’re my priority.

Some departments and institutions welcome this sort of clear boundary-setting, and some don’t. Again, you need good, trustworthy bosses who say what they mean and mean what they say, and who value the scholarship you hope to produce. Doubtless much of the time the “just say no” approach has to be leavened with occasional yeses as well as rhetorical massaging; one can’t be front and center with it all the time. The strategy remains essential in any case. Your time won’t guard itself.

(Reality check: Do I actually do this? Do I follow my own advice, take my own medicine? To a large degree, yes, I do. But also no: At least twice a week the second half of this semester, for example, I had meetings with students who wanted to discuss their futures, their faith, or theological questions. Even in cases like these, though, I try to be strategic: I either meet first thing, at 8:00am sharp, so I can still guard a chunk of office time for work; or I meet in the late afternoon on a Friday, the better to get work done earlier in my one day with no classes. Besides meeting with and mentoring students, I’ve variously hosted twice-monthly theology discussion groups in my home, had students over for lunch after church, spoken at Honors events, that sort of thing. Sometimes you just have to say yes: whether the compulsion is internal or external, you find yourself nodding in reply. Just this week I was a liturgist in our music department’s annual Vespers service; before Covid hit, I now recall, I gave an invited lecture to a psychology class(!) on sexual minorities(!!) regarding sexual morality(!!!) from both philosophical and Christian perspectives(!!!!). (Those exclamation points should tell you how out of my depth I felt that day.) So no, the honest answer is that I don’t always and in every instance say no. But I try to as a rule, especially when the ask is purely optional and doesn’t seem urgent. And when I say yes, I do so knowing that it means a tradeoff with research; just as there’s no such thing as a free lunch, there’s no such thing in the academy as a yes to X without an accompanying no to Y. That’s life.)

4. Be disciplined with technology, especially email and LMS.

Your laptop is a black hole. When it is open—even when it is in the same room as you—your work time is inexorably sucked down into an abyss. The same goes for your smartphone, especially if it has your email on it. (Right this moment, take your email off your phone. That’s an order.) Our devices do not aid or enable our work as professors. Nine times out of town, they stand in the way.

If you are in the humanities like me, then it is fundamental that you gain the upper hand on your technology. In particular, you need long, long stretches of time in which neither your phone nor your laptop is close to hand, much less open or on. One little trick I do, when I’m in a good zone with research, is begin my day with reading. Specifically, I do not open my laptop, much less check my inbox, until lunch time or later. I arrive at my office; do my morning devotion; change chairs to sit elsewhere than my desk-and-laptop-writing-station; leave my laptop and phone out of reach, over there, on the far side of the office; open a book (or three), and read as long as I’m able to before other work demands necessitate putting it down.

Remember that computers are an innovation in the professor’s office. Not long ago—within living memory!—one’s office contained books, paper, and pens. It’s not weird to read for hours on end. That’s your job. Again: How are you supposed to write about what you’ve read, if you never read in the first place? Do the reading by making time for it, and make time for it by not letting your inbox (or Twitter, or Messages, or Canvas) control what you do, when you do it.

Speaking of Canvas, I’ve written elsewhere about foregoing a Learning Management System. That means, too, that I’m not umbilically connected to a device at all times. If your university or department will let you do it, try going LMS-free one semester as an experiment. For me, it’s meant one less thing to worry about, which in this case means one less digital box to check at all times of the day.

(Here’s a hack on top of a hack: How to preserve all that morning time for reading and/or writing so as to be able to stop just before class starts? Here’s what I do. One or two weeks before the semester begins, I prepare the first month’s worth of classes in toto: I outline the lectures, draft the discussions, print the quizzes, etc. Then I gather them together into their respective folders, so that all I need do on the day of teaching is open the folder and plug and play. I do the same thing, once that first month is behind me, every Friday in advance of the following week. That way, when the afternoon classes of Monday through Thursday arrive, I’m entirely prepared, and don’t have to do a lick of lesson prep or printing or other tasks the morning before I teach. When I’ve got this down to a science (and until this fall, when by voluntary choice I had a new course prep, I’d gotten into a good rhythm), then I can count on two to four or more hours in my office, leading up to teaching, that I can devote to reading or writing as I see fit.)

5. Carve out space and time for reading and writing free from interruption.

Related to the previous point, it is a necessity to have a physical space in which one can work for hours-long stretches with the reasonable expectation that no one will interrupt unless it is very important. For me, that’s my office—my happy place, which is to say, where my books are. For others that’s the library or a coffee shop, or home alone. The point is that you need that rare combination of quiet and sustained runs of sharp focus (what Newport calls “deep work”) for publications to materialize. Wherever and whenever that is—for me, it’s in my office, in the mornings, prior to inbox and lesson prep and printing and teaching—find it, make it the sun around which the rest of your work schedule orbits, and guard it with your life.

In a word: Practice being unavailable. It makes a world of difference.

6. Treat time off from semester teaching as a full-time research job.

I teach 32 weeks a year, including Finals Weeks. That leaves 20 weeks when I’m not teaching. I take off one week for Thanksgiving, two weeks for Christmas, one week for spring break, and two weeks during the summer. Already you, like me, should realize how fortunate a professor’s schedule is. That’s six weeks off out of 52! That’s a full month and a half! That’s European vacation levels! What’s to complain about?

Nothing, is the answer. Absolutely nothing. Remember, this post (this series of posts) is not about how hard the academic life is. It’s about how to make time for research while teaching a 4/4 load. And we already established that family life and personal happiness are more important than academic success; obviously I could choose to work, part- or full-time, during those weeks I take off. But should I? Not unless I have to.

Even taking six weeks off per year, that leaves 14 weeks in which I’m not teaching or spending time with my family. And do you know what I do during each and every one of those 14 weeks? Read and write. That’s it. I don’t lighten my summer schedule, unless childcare or other duties interpose themselves. No one’s checking in on me; no one’s asking me to come to the office. But I do. Every day I arrive at the office around 8:00am and every day I leave around 4:00pm, having read and written, read and written, read and written, until my brain hurt and my fingers ached.

In the first post I stuck up for profs using their summer hours well, though I admitted that we aren’t always the most efficient bunch. Here’s where I’ll speak directly to my fellow academics. You and I both know what a summer week can look like, especially a week when you’re “working.” It’s sort of a throwback to doctoral days. Slow to start, quick to finish, lots and lots of time on social media, or chasing down unimportant leads and tangent lines unrelated to research, or meeting with colleagues for long lunches, or just generally letting the hours slip by without doing much of substance at all. That’s fine, in itself. You’re not on the clock. But if your #1 goal is using what time you have to publish quality work, then it’s not fine. You are on the clock, even if that clock exists only inside your own head.

Treat your weeks not teaching as though your full-time job, for which you will be held accountable, is research, and act accordingly. Then see what happens after a few years.

Postscript: If your finances permit and your chair doesn’t mind, don’t teach summer courses. I taught three summers in a row then decided, in concert with my wife, to forego the extra money henceforth. The extra pay was nice, but it didn’t serve my goals. If I wanted to focus on publishing, even a three-week online class was a distraction; the time and attention it sucks from you is surprising.

7. Accept your limits while setting clear, achievable goals.

In the next post I’ll say more about the limits I have in mind. But for now the thing to acknowledge is that, even if you manufactured four hours per day for your scholarship—and that would be an astonishing amount during a four-class semester—that is a paltry number by comparison to the big leagues. It’s nothing compared to your grad school days. That many hours should get you in sight of reading an okay amount and even actually doing some writing. It is unlikely, however, to get you in sight of what you wish you could accomplish, that is, the kind of scholarly expectations to which you seek to hold yourself. At this point you have a choice to make. Either you can do the work you’re able to achieve in the time you have, or you can wish you had more time and never get anything out the door. It’s your call, but I suggest you opt for the first.

If you do, you need concrete goals. Is it one peer-reviewed article every 12-18 months? Is it two reviews per academic calendar? Is it a book by the time you go up for T&P? Is it a poster presentation (not my wheelhouse, mind you) every year at your guild’s annual conference? Is it a collaborative grant-funded venture that stretches over five years and yields two to four co-written articles? Whatever your goals, you need to identify them, write them down, and hold yourself to them, or at least to what you can control (i.e., writing and submitting the pieces; whether they’re accepted is up to someone else). As time goes by, you can adjust the reasonableness of your goals up or down, depending on your success. Don’t aim for the moon, but don’t let that be an excuse to do little more than keep staring at your own shuffling shoes, either. I’m willing to hazard that you’re capable of accomplishing more than you think, especially if you haven’t been able to publish much at all so far in your 4/4 teaching career.

But before turning in the next post to bigger-picture reflections on research and writing with a high teaching load, here’s one last all-important tip:

8. Type fast.

No joke, I sometimes think being a very fast typist is half the battle. It doesn’t hurt if you suffer from incurable logorrhea, as by now you know I do.

Teaching a 4/4: tradeoffs

In the last post I laid out what a typical work week looks like in terms of one’s allotment of hours while teaching a 4/4 load at a university. In this post I want to compare that to institutional contexts on the other end of the spectrum. Such a comparison shows rather straightforwardly what sort of tradeoffs are involved, from an institutional perspective, when professors are asked to teach more or fewer courses; in this case, tradeoffs concerning quantity and quality of publication.

Before I do that, though, I want to talk about a different set of tradeoffs. These tradeoffs aren’t about what a university asks of you. They’re about what you ask of yourself, or rather, what you want for your life.

I got married midway through my senior year in college, and beginning in my PhD program my wife and I had four children in six years’ time: from the beginning of my second year in doctoral work to the beginning of my second year teaching as a professor. Being a husband and a father in one’s 20s and 30s while earning a doctorate then teaching at the university level is, shall we say, a different experience than doing those things while being a single person without children. The key word there is “different,” which isn’t (yet) a term of judgment. I know single people in doctoral programs who eventually dropped out due to listlessness and lethargy, and I know folks in a position similar to mine (spouse, young kids) who powered through for the simple reason that they were always on the clock and thus were forced to use their time wisely. So in and of itself the difference between the two stations in life doesn’t tell us which is “harder” or “easier” for the academic life.

Having said that, the fact is undeniable that a person who is neither a parent nor partnered has, in general, far fewer limits on her available time than a person who is both. I knew and still know people, both grad students and tenure-track (or tenured) profs, who work 12 hours a day in the office, most weekday evenings, and full days on the weekend. That’s 70-90 hours per week, if you’re counting. The work never stops. There’s always another book to read, another article to review, another draft to revise, another lecture to attend. Such persons are quite literally secular monks. But instead of ora et labora, it’s sola labora (or, I suppose, solus labor): work, work, work, all day, every day, world without end, amen.

Thus the “pure” academic life. No wonder the old Oxford dons were so often bachelors. No wonder the founders of the university were priests and monks!

The upshot is obvious. A scholar who has 70-90 hours available per week to devote to her scholarship, and who does thus devote it, is in an entirely different position than a scholar who does not, owing to the latter’s duties to her family (not to mention to her church, her neighbors, and so on). Whether or not it is wise or live-giving to work 12-15 hours per day every day of the week for months on end, it’s what many do, and are able to do, given their circumstances. And academics like myself who lack that monastic allotment of time can either accept the profound gap between us or kick against the goads. Phrased more sharply, we can pretend that we are equally disposed to produce equally superb scholarship, or we can decide not to deceive ourselves. I suggest we opt against self-deception.

I’m going to write in the fourth post in this series about the flip side of this acceptance: that there are opportunities, gifts, and blessings precisely for scholarly work that come from being a person with a family or from teaching a 4/4 (or both). But the prior condition of realizing those possibilities is the unqualified recognition that the lay life, as it were, pales in comparison to the monastic in terms of sheer hours in the day available for scholarship. Them’s the facts. And that’s before we get to differences between institutions.

But before exploring those differences, there’s an important point buried in these comparisons. That point we may phrase as a question: What do you want? Better put, what should you want? Rare is the happy workaholic academic. I can’t count the number of secular monastic super-scholars I know who are immiserated, depressed, joyless souls from top to toe. That’s not because they’ve resisted the call of the bourgeois life. It often is because they know nothing but The Work, and The Work doesn’t satisfy the heart.

Life is about tradeoffs, in other words, and being the most successful possible academic one can be will almost certainly demand that you give up something not only that you want, but that you should want, if you would be happy. I would like to be happy. That means I’m content with the choices that led me to where I am today. I’m glad I’m a married father of four teaching a 4/4 in a university setting that doesn’t suck my soul right out of my body. But I also refuse to lie to myself. I would likely be a “better” scholar, measured by output and erudition, if I lacked the many limits and duties my family places on my life. Would I trade the latter to gain the former? Never.

Besides, limits and duties are (not paradoxically, but given a certain set of assumptions, unexpectedly) the source and ground of true happiness. The sooner you realize that, the sooner you stop looking to cut them out of your life in order to serve the shapeshifting, exacting, and altogether death-dealing idols of Work.

*

Okay. One set of academic tradeoffs concerns the family, or life beyond work more generally. Another is institutional context. Time to compare like with unlike.

Consider a standard course load for a professor at an Ivy League university. Such a person (pre- and post-tenure) teaches a 2/2, often to small cohorts of graduate students in seminar-style classes that meet once weekly; she further takes a mandatory year-long sabbatical every three or four years, precisely in order to produce the sort of scholarship expected of her, given her status as a tenure-track (or tenured) professor at Harvard or Yale or Princeton. She also regularly receives grants and scholarships from either within or without the university that fund course releases and external sabbaticals and visiting professorships: these in turn alleviate teaching and administrative responsibilities.

Now consider my own situation. I teach four courses a semester, some of which have 20-30 students, some of which have 50-60. (One semester I taught an overload, five courses, and I had about 220 students. We also had a newborn, our fourth child. That semester’s sort of hazy, now that I think of it . . .) These students are mostly gen-ed undergraduates, not tight cohorts of committed Master’s or doctoral students. Moreover, sabbaticals must be applied for and approved; they apply to one semester rather than a full academic year; and one becomes eligible to apply only after having received tenure, in one’s seventh or eighth year at the university.

One response to this comparison might be to suppose I’m comparing quality of situations. But I’m not. I’m deliriously happy in my job. And as I said above, I know a lot of miserable people in Ivy League institutions. Whether it’s the pressure to Be The Best, or the stifling atmosphere of competition and production, or the sword of Not Getting Tenure hanging over the necks of junior faculty, or the Byzantine institutional politics of the Ivies, or what have you, the amenities and affordances of teaching-light, research-heavy professorships are not there to make you happy (in fact, the effect may well be the opposite); they are there to get you to publish. Better: they’re there to make the institution that pays you look good. They’ve a prestigious reputation to uphold, after all.

So we’re not asking which institution is a better work environment. We’re comparing material conditions and incentives for producing high-quality research. And I trust you can see with your own eyes what’s staring us in the face: namely, that to ask professors with a 4/4 load to produce scholarship anywhere close to the level of professors at Ivy League institutions is downright absurd. Looking at the two institutional contexts side by side, we might be inclined to judge them two different jobs.

But the comparison need not be merely between a small Christian liberal arts school in west Texas and a comparatively ancient and ultra-rich Ivy League college in New England. Consider a friend of mine who works at a large R1 school a few hours down the road in Texas. Every fall he teaches one undergraduate course and one Master’s course. In the spring he teaches no classes at all. His primary job, though he is neither tenured nor a research professor nor does he hold an Endowed Chair in Something or Other, is to research and publish. And research and publish he does. All the dang day. You wouldn’t believe his output. Or maybe you would, since you know how little else he has to do with his time.

The point, at the risk of belaboring it, is not to compare apples and oranges as though they were the same fruit. It is to point out that the fruits we invariably compare in academia are apples and oranges. My friend plainly inhabits a different profession than I do. He is something like a patron-supported independent scholar, contingently connected to an institution that happens to be called a university, for which he occasionally teaches a class or two. I, on the other hand, am a workaday teacher of undergraduate college students who, when he can spare a minute, finds the time to read a book and even to scribble a little on the side.

My friend has a good life and a good job. I have a good life and a good job. But our equally good jobs are not the same job. They are both good, but they are different jobs. That’s the point.

And there’s no problem in that difference. The problem comes if and when, and only if and when, someone supposes that my friend’s job should be my job, too, while expecting me to continue doing my original job all the while. In a word, the problem comes if and when I’m expected to work two jobs instead of one—not least when, as I documented in the last post, that first job tends to spill over from the office into the evenings and weekends of life beyond work. After working 50-60 hours per week teaching a 4/4, where is such a person to find the time to add a second full-time job, which is to say, the job of producing first-rate academic scholarship?

I may sound as though I’m speaking in the first person here, but as I will share in the next post, I’m not describing my own situation. I’m fortunate to work in and for an institution that understands that no one teaching a 4/4 can be an Ivy League or research professor at the same time. Those to whom I report evaluate teaching, service, and collegiality first and scholarship second; everyone understands the pressures of teaching and grading and mentoring and sponsoring and the rest. The expectations, accordingly, are reasonable, which is why I’m grateful not only to work here but to be heading into the year of my T&P submission with little to no anxiety.

But so far as I can tell, among 4/4 profs at large I’m one of the fortunate few. I’m the lucky one. Not everyone works in a healthy, mutually supportive, non-dysfunctional—and Christian!—institution. And even in such institutions, the built-in expectations, pressures, and incentives can work against one flourishing and finding promotion rather than buoying and supporting one in that journey. “Punishing” and “brutal” are two words one often hears in conversations about such environments. There’s a reason folks are fleeing academe. Why not just work a boring nine-to-five with benefits and regular hours, without having to bring it home with you?

Most, I take it, are just trying to endure. That’s why I’m writing two more posts in this series. The imagined audience for the first post was graduate students and administrators wondering what it’s like to teach a 4/4; for this second post, administrators and trustees as well as fellow 4/4 teachers. The third and fourth posts, though, are together targeted directly at those friends and colleagues teaching a 4/4 (whether now or in the future), either at the beginning or in the middle of their tenures(!) in such positions, who are wondering how to make the time for research. Having cast a somewhat bleak or at least stark vision of the 4/4 life, I want to make good on the promise that it need not be the academic purgatory—or inferno—it’s so often made out to be. It’s possible to read and to write, to produce quality scholarship. It really is. But just as institutions make tradeoffs in what they offer faculty, given what those institutions want from their faculty, so in your own work and career, you have to be willing to make similar tradeoffs. It all depends on what you want.

Teaching a 4/4: office hours

When I was at Yale and friends were on the job market, every single person I knew considered a 4/4 teaching load—that is, four classes per semester, for a total of eight per academic year—to be a fate worse than death. In fact, most people I knew considered a 3/3 the outer limit of possible professorial sanity, but in itself still an unacceptably punishing load. Since I didn’t even know what a 4/4 was before being informed of its unmitigated misery, I simply assumed they were right. When I accepted a job—a gift from heaven (I do not exaggerate) that delivered what I can describe only as wholesale psychic and existential relief—and that job turned out to be a 4/4, my gratitude was total, but my one question was what the teaching load would mean: for weekly work hours, for work/life balance with young children, for research and publications.

I’m now halfway through my fifth year in that job; next fall I will submit my application for tenure and promotion (“T&P”). I’m here to say four things.

First, I love my job with all my heart; I pinch myself every morning that I get to do what I do. Second, a 4/4 load need not be a personal, professional, or scholarly death knell. Third, a 4/4 load does mean—unequivocally—that you are unable to do things that professors with a smaller load (not to mention other institutional helps) are able to do; there are tradeoffs, and they are unavoidable. Fourth, though, that does not mean your research and publications must be reduced to nil; it means you have to accept other tradeoffs in order to meet your writing goals.

In this post and two three more I’d like to write about what it’s been like for me in this position, what I’ve observed at an institutional and collegial level, and what I’ve learned in terms of achieving my own reading and publishing aims. Across all three posts I’d like to make clear both (a) how and why a 4/4 load can and does suck up so much time that many professors simply and sincerely are unable to do anything beyond teach and (b) how, at least in certain circumstances, it’s possible to make the time for research—or in any case how I’ve done it. In addition, I want to depict just how great the chasm is between teaching-heavy loads with high student-to-teacher ratios, on one hand, and teaching-light loads in institutional contexts that both demand and incentivize high research output, on the other.

In this post I want to offer a snapshot of a week in the life of a 4/4 prof: i.e., what the actual hour-by-hour breakdown is for a typical week in my life, balancing teaching, grading, office hours, committees, meetings, and writing, plus kids, family, church, and friends. Note well, at the outset, that I am presupposing a junior or mid-career faculty member with a young family; I’m not imagining a tenured veteran or empty-nester with retirement on the horizon (though at least some of what I write below would still apply to such a one). I’m writing, too, from and for a humanities perspective; much of what I say will include those in STEM disciplines, but some of it would have to be modified to fit their particular research, teaching, and publication habits (not least the role of lab work and an alternative paradigm of “what counts” for reading and writing—fewer books, in their case, and ten thousand more articles).

*

Let’s start with a 45-hour work week: 8:00am to 5:00pm, Monday through Friday. Now for anyone with young children, that’s already overly optimistic. My wife and I have four children aged three to nine, and we split drop-off and pick-up. So not only am I unable to get to work much before 8am, often I don’t get there until closer to 8:30 and sometimes later. (Timing is dependent on the cooperation of a three-year old, after all.) I also pick up my kids from elementary school at 3:15pm at least twice a week. So now we’re working realistically with about 40 hours—assuming no one is sick that week. (In the fall of 2019, out of 16 weeks of the semester, at least one of our children was sick at least one day in 12 different weeks.) Our home, university, daycare, and elementary school are all within something like a 2.5-mile radius, which means we have next to no commute—but many, many people do.

(When I read super-worker bricklayer’s-son Stanley Hauerwas write about arriving to his office at 5:30am every morning and leaving at 5:30pm every afternoon, I can only ask: Who’s doing pick-up and drop-off? That doesn’t imply injustice. Lots of stay-at-home parents as well as grandparents and nannies aid in such labor, and may do so either out of joy or with compensation. But it does mean, flat out, that a person who can be in his office 12 hours per day without worrying about childcare is in a different professional position than are those who must worry about childcare.)

At any rate, we are working with 40 hours now. Automatically, 12 of those hours are in the classroom. So now we’re down to 28 hours.

Let’s say it takes 90 minutes to prepare for every three hours of class time—which is likely an underestimate—and one hour to grade assignments and provide feedback for every three hours of class time. (We’re also assuming that there’s no G.A. to do menial tasks, though in my experience the estimates I’m using here include help from a G.A.) That’s 10 hours total, which means our available work hours are down to 18.

Now for email. Like all other white-collar work in the U.S., a professor’s inbox is a job unto itself: administrators, colleagues, folks from journals or conferences or other institutions, questions from students, etc. You also, you know, have to eat lunch. So let’s give 30 daily minutes to email and 30 daily minutes to lunch, for a total of five hours per week. Down to 13.

What about committees? Committee work fluctuates—four to seven hours this week, no hours for three weeks straight—but the longer you’re at an institution, the more the committees add up, at least in average terms. So let’s say at least one hour per week, though depending on the department and the person, not least if the person in question has administrative responsibilities (I do not, currently), it may be much more than that. Now we’re to 12.

But everyone has meetings to attend, whether they’re related to committees or not. So we’ll add one or two more meetings per week, each an hour. Down to 10.

(Such meetings might include, for example, mandatory chapel for a religious university such as mine and/or serving as sponsor for a student organization. I once led a voluntary weekly 30-minute “theology chapel” in which anyone could show up for an unguided discussion of twentieth-century theology. Or perhaps your campus, like mine, has a center for teaching and learning that hosts monthly reading groups. These commitments eat up hours, in other words, and the hours add up fast.)

What about students? At my institution we are mandated to have a minimum of seven hours in our office wherein we are available to students, preferably standing office hours rather than by appointment (though that’s been affected by Covid). I know professors who meet with students 5-10 hours per week. But let’s say personal time with students takes just two hours per week. Now we’re at eight.

So here we are. Having intentionally but severely underestimated the time usually allotted to students, emails, meetings, committees, grading, and course prep (for many professors, we’re already down to zero, or rather subzero: students, committees, grading, and prep all add up to another 10-20 hours, easily), we ostensibly have eight hours to work with—that is, assuming it’s not a week when 50 or 100 papers were just submitted, or one of the kids came down with a stomach bug, or a crisis dropped unannounced on the department, or what have you. Eight whole hours, maximum, assuming (also) that you don’t have a new course prep in the semester in question and (like me) you aren’t teaching four discrete courses but only two courses across four sections.

Let me stop and say: This sort of bean-counting isn’t meant to imply that the job is working the professor (me, or him, or her) to death; this isn’t sweatshop labor. The point of laying out the timeline is to make clear what’s left, if anything at all, for serious research and writing. I’m also imagining, for the sake of argument, that one’s time in the office is more or less uninterrupted: sustained, start-to-finish in-office work time. But naturally that’s a figment of this imaginative exercise. Most professors have knocks on the door, calls on the phone, texts on iMessage, and emails in the inbox—many of which are pressing or at least come with the expectation of a swift response—throughout the day in unexpected and inconvenient times. Moreover, class times are usually scattered around: a seminar in the morning, a lecture in the afternoon, that sort of thing. Not to mention that said classes are physically scattered across campus, too: it takes time, after all, to pack up one’s books and notes and trek across the commons to that other building, over there, the one you don’t work in but for some reason teach in.

All of which is to say: Those eight supposedly “free” hours are anything but. They don’t run reliably from 8:00am to 10:00am Monday through Thursday. They consist of random chunks of 20 or 30 minutes, spread throughout the days, adding up (if they do, which is rare) by week’s end.

And here’s the upshot. It takes hundreds upon hundreds (actually, thousands upon thousands) of hours to read the books and articles necessary to write the articles and books that one’s guild, and usually one’s chair and dean, expect out of a professor in order to be a “contributing member” of said guild, not to mention in order to earn tenure and promotion. When, pray tell, is a professor with a 4/4 load with a week’s allotment of hours as I’ve just laid them out supposed to find the time to do all that reading and writing?

In most cases, the time just is not there. In my experience, profs with a 4/4 simply do not do that reading and writing, and thus, quite understandably, do not produce the sort of scholarship expected of them (whether or not they wish they were able to do so). Or rather, if they need to do so in order to keep their job (i.e., to earn tenure by year seven), they do find the time, and you and I both know when they find it.

After hours.

But let me tell you about my week after hours. My kids get out of school at 3:15pm. My wife and I both work. We swap who does pick-up. Every day some child has something: speech path, piano, soccer, basketball, gymnastics. We all have church on Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings and small group on Sunday evenings. (I work for a Christian university, mind you, which means they want me doing such things.) Whatever happens to be going on, those kids need a parent present, and that means, at least ordinarily, that no work is being done until they’re in bed: and the oldest has lights out at 9:00pm. We start every morning around 6:00am (showers, clothes, breakfast, backpacks, car—it takes a lot, as you may know yourself). So if I’m to get a decent amount of sleep, it’s bed by 11:00pm, if not sooner. That leaves about two hours each night between bedtime for kids and bedtime for adults. Even aside from cleaning the dishes, picking up toys and dirty clothes, preparing for the next day, packing lunches for the kids (that’s my job: 20 lunches per week, y’all!), my wife and I would, you know, like to catch up a bit. One of us might even occasionally grab drinks with a friend or go see a movie.

In the case of folks like us, then, there just do not exist reliable hours at night to make up work time. And I don’t, mostly. I usually leave work at work, unless that work is also pleasure (reading a book I want to read, writing a blog post [hello], etc.)—though the inbox is always staring me down, especially when a student sends an anxious email at 9:42pm.

The weekends are also largely off limits, except perhaps for an hour or two during nap time on Saturdays. If I want to be a co-parent—and I should, as should you if you have kids—since we’ve got four kids under 10 who need provision and care and love and time and the rest, then the weekend isn’t for work, it’s for family (and church and sports and friends and more: for life, in other words). That means, again, I’m generally not using weekends or nights on weekdays to “make up” for time I lack at work.

But I’m surely in the minority there. Most friends and colleagues I know, whether pre- or post-tenure, speak offhand all the time about “taking work home.” Most work 40-50 hours per week in the office and another 10-20 at home, between nights and weekends. The truth, however, is that most of that makeup work isn’t scholarship. It’s pouring into teaching, grading, and mentorship: the things that make a difference in students’ lives. That’s where all my numbers above really are underestimates, probably by a wide margin. Sometimes teachers are inefficient with their time. But at least as often they just love what they do, which is to say, they love their students and want them to flourish, to get their money’s worth, and then some, from their education.

And recall: I don’t write this to elicit pity for them. Being a professor is a great gig most of the time. It certainly is for me. No, the point is the question lingering over all this hour-mongering: When is the research supposed to happen? Research, let me remind you, that of necessity must be the fruit of hours upon hours of sustained contemplative and meticulous reading, annotation, note-taking, outlining, drafting, revising, submitting, revising again, and publishing.

When’s it supposed to happen then? It is fair to say that, for most 4/4 professors in most circumstances—even under the best conditions, with the best bosses, in the healthiest institutional contexts—the only honest answer is in the negative. That is, there just is no time for quality research for such persons.* And it’s best to recognize and admit that plain fact for what it is than to pretend otherwise.

*You say: Isn’t that what the summer is for? Well, yes and no. Summer is partly for vacation, as for anyone else. It’s also for teaching one or two summer courses, as most professors I know do. It’s also for reassessing and revisiting and regularly revising one’s existing semester classes. It’s also for preparing for that new course you’ve never taught before. It’s also for writing that grant you didn’t have time for during the semester. And also for finishing that committee work that piled up when finals arrived. But, yes, too, summer’s there for jumping into some research. Recall, though, that you’ve barely had time to read a book during the academic calendar, much less to stay on top of the avalanche of publications produced in the last year (or five) in your discipline. The remaining weeks of a summer might provide some time for catching up on the field. It is far from enough—on its own, laughably so—to produce a significant contribution to said field.

Lightspeed politics

I’m just about finished listening to the audiobook version of Charles C. W. Cooke’s 2015 book The Conservatarian Manifesto: Libertarians, Conservatives, and the Fight for the Right’s Future. Cooke is a writer and editor for National Review who leans libertarian. Like all his writing, the book is lucid, witty, substantive, and focused in earnest on what matters most. I’m not a libertarian, and I think Cooke is wrong in significant respects, but I regularly read him both for instruction and for pleasure—and, occasionally, to listen to the most eloquent representative of views I oppose.

But I’m not here to talk about that. Rather, I want to share why listening to the book has caused me a fair bit of political whiplash. It was written around 2013 or so, at the height of Obama’s national unpopularity and the Tea Party’s ascendancy. Cooke adroitly saw a window for the proposal of a new vision for the GOP: fiscally conservative and socially liberal, with an emphasis on limited government and classical liberalism. And listening to him read the book, you can understand why that proposal appeared plausible at the time. And yet, in hindsight, nothing could have been less likely either for the GOP’s rank and file to get behind or for the GOP’s electoral prospects at the national level. Trump comes along just a few months after the book’s publication and torpedoes the whole project. More than that, the proverbial “quadrant” of fiscally conservative and socially liberal is the polar opposite of the most nationally popular but under-served voting bloc in America: socially conservative but fiscally liberal. Bracketing the merits of the proposal, at the level of strategy it is dead on arrival.

Elements of the book also capture, as though in amber, a moment in political time that seemed, then and there, to be perennial, even eternal, but was finished within mere months—or, at most, by the next election. One reference in particular, to Glenn Beck, reminded me of a similar moment in Ross Douthat’s otherwise outstanding book Bad Religion, published in 2012. There Douthat uses Beck to open the book’s eighth and final chapter, framing the argument that follows. Now, neither Douthat nor Cooke is especially enamored of Beck; they aren’t enlisting him in a joint cause. But they permit themselves somewhat spellbound rhetoric to describe the “phenomenon” of Beck and his “extraordinary” popularity “outside” the media “mainstream.”

That’s all fine and good. But does a serious (however popular) work of intellectual history really need central casting to call in a shock jock conspiracy theorist for the concluding discussion of (in this case) American nationalism? Both authors write about Beck the way all journalists did at the time: with a mixture of repulsion, admiration, and envy.

And yet, just as the libertarian moment vanished in a puff of smoke, so Beck’s ubiquity died away without anyone really noticing. He’s still out there—I checked so you don’t have to—but he’s no longer Part Of The Discourse. His time has passed. His presence in these two books, however, written around the same time, testifies to an important feature of our politics as well as how it is observed and chronicled by our journalists in real time.

That feature is this: Politics moves at the speed of light. But while you’re watching it, it seems somehow unchanging, even atemporal. The result of this combination is that nothing is so dated as the verities and common sense of a particular slice of political time, especially when it is caught and put into words immediately, illic et tunc.

For us today, who have lived through this radical, perhaps epochal, set of changes in only half a decade, this is a worthy reminder of two things. First: What seems fixed and permanent in politics in the moment is far more likely to be the opposite: wholly malleable and subject to rapid and profound variation. Second: Politically speaking, what appears impossible is probably anything but.

That said, it takes imagination to cast the truly transformative vision and to find the means of making it a reality. Preferably, though, the right imagination.

Advent

A blessed Advent to y’all. Last year I wrote a reflection for the first Sunday in Advent at Mere Orthodoxy titled “The Face of God.” Here’s a sample:

Advent is the season when the church remembers—which is to say, is reminded by the Spirit—that as the people of the Messiah, we are defined not by possession but by dispossession, not by having but by hoping, not by leisurely resting but by eagerly waiting. We are waiting on the Lord, whose command is simple: “Keep awake” (Mark 13:37). Waiting is wakefulness, and wakefulness is watchfulness: like the disciples in the Garden, we are tired, weighed down by the weakness of the flesh, but still we must keep watch and be alert as we await the Lord’s return, relying on his Spirit, who ever is willing (cf. Mark 14:32-42).

The church must also remember, however, that just as we await the Lord’s second coming, so Israel awaited his first. And came he did. The children of Abraham sought the face of God always: and through Mary’s eyes, at long last, the search was complete. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matt 5:8): so they shall, and so she did. Mary, all-holy virgin and mother of God, beheld his face in her newborn son. “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father” (John 1:14). True, “no one has ever seen God” (1:18), yet “he who has seen [Jesus] has seen the Father” (14:9). And so Mary is the first of all her many sisters and brothers to have seen the face of God incarnate: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life—the life was made manifest, and we saw it, and testify to it” (1 John 1:1-2). With Mary the church gives glory to the God who “has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy” (Luke 1:54); with Mary, who “kept all these things, pondering them in her heart” (2:19), we contemplate with joy and wonder the advent of God in a manger.

The virgin mater Dei has the visio Dei in a candlelit cave in the dark of winter when she beholds the face of her own newborn son. It is a mystery beyond reckoning. Praise be to God! Come, Lord Jesus.

Bezos ad astra (TLC, 4)

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

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

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

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

Sacasas comments:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s what I wrote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I also had the following “aha” moment:

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

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

Now recall that Arendt quote from above:

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

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

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

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

Enneagram anthropology

For years I teased friends and family members—and especially colleagues: pastors love faddish personality tests—about their affinity for the Enneagram. I rolled my eyes and made astrology jokes. I made the requisite asides about pentagrams and its claim to “ancient provenance,” etc. But since you shouldn’t criticize something you don’t understand, I read the book, specifically Ian Morgan Cron and Suzanne Stabile’s The Road Back to You, and lo and behold, I didn’t hate it. I wasn’t converted. I’m not a fanatic. I didn’t read any other books and I don’t listen to daily podcasts. But like all tools, this tool’s value lies in its utility. And it’s useful, not least (in my case) for understanding the motivations and desires of my children. So it’s joined some other helpful instruments in the parental toolkit.

(This also means that I now know what people are talking about when they speak in numbers around me; before it was just gibberish.)

Having said that, there’s a tic common to the Enneagram crowd, indeed common to all folks enamored of personality tests, that bugs me, and (in my view) invariably turns such tests’ relative utility on its head. That tic is explaining one’s behavior as a function of one’s number. As in, “I do [X behavior] because I am a [Y personality].” Call this reflex Enneagram anthropology, where the Enneagram stands in for any and all shorthand psychological measures and theories. The reflex is understandable: people avidly seek for causal explanations for their own behavior, and all the better when those causes are somehow naturally fixed, psychologically immutable, or spiritually bestowed from without.

Such a move is an error, however, in more than one way. It supposes that (e.g.) the nine numbers of the Enneagram are something akin to Platonic forms: eternal paradigms or divine ideas instantiated or individuated in concrete human persons. Being thus incarnate as “a [Y personality],” it follows inexorably that I—the Y-I-am, the Y-embodied-in-me, the Y-that-is-me—do X behavior. Almost as though the person were to cap off the explanation with: “Now you know. (And you better get used to it.)”

But even apart from trading on a sort of Platonizing theory of the Enneagram, the explanatory procedure, if the personality test is going to be meaningfully useful at all, has to run the other direction. Instead of saying, “Because I’m Y-personality, I do X-behavior,” one ought to say instead, “Because I do X-range-of-behaviors, I—or my pastor or my spouse or my therapist—believe the loose, incomplete, and unscientific personality-type ‘Y’ maps that range of behaviors in the most illuminating fashion.” Put more succinctly: “Because X, therefore Y-ish.” Whereupon that Y-identifier functions (usefully) to help oneself or one’s loved ones understand better, albeit in a small and quite limited respect, one’s own unique mix of temperament, motivations, desires, beliefs, and behaviors. Whereas it would function uselessly and counterproductively, because falsely, to explain what one does in terms of who one is, where “who one is” is captured by a predetermined generic description of a broadly universal “type.” For this latter function is not far from explaining away one’s behavior, at which point it is no longer an explanation but merely an excuse—and a bad one at that.

Cats, Catholics, and election

I went to Stonehill’s stock barn. He had a nice barn and behind it a big corral and a good many small feeder pens. The bargain cow ponies, around thirty head, all colors, were in the corral. I thought they would be broken-down scrubs but they were frisky things with clear eyes and their coats looked healthy enough, though dusty and matted. They had probably never known a brush. They had burrs in their tails.

I had hated these ponies for the part they played in my father's death but now I realized the notion was fanciful, that it was wrong to charge blame to these pretty beasts who knew neither good nor evil but only innocence. I say that of these ponies. I have known some horses and a good many more pigs who I believe harbored evil intent in their hearts. I will go further and say all cats are wicked, though often useful. Who has not seen Satan in their sly faces? Some preachers will say, well, that is superstitious “claptrap.” My answer is this: Preacher, go to your Bible and read Luke 8:26–33.

*

Now I will tell you an interesting thing. For a long time there was no appeal from [Judge Isaac Parker’s] court except to the President of the United States. They later changed that and when the Supreme Court started reversing him, Judge Parker was annoyed. He said those people up in Washington city did not understand the bloody conditions in the Territory. He called Solicitor-General Whitney, who was supposed to be on the judge’s side, a “pardon broker” and said he knew no more of criminal law than he did of the hieroglyphics of the Great Pyramid. Well, for their part, those people up there said the judge was too hard and high-handed and too longwinded in his jury charges and they called his court “the Parker slaughterhouse.” I don’t know who was right. I know sixty-five of his marshals got killed. They had some mighty tough folks to deal with.

The judge was a big tall man with blue eyes and brown billy-goat beard, and he seemed to me to be old, though he was only around forty years of age at that time. His manner was grave. On his deathbed he asked for a priest and became a Catholic. That was his wife’s religion. It was his own business and none of mine. If you had sentenced one hundred and sixty men to death and seen around eighty of them swing, then maybe at the last minute you would feel the need of some stronger medicine than the Methodists could make. It is something to think about. Toward the last, he said he didn’t hang all those men, that the law had done it. When he died of dropsy in 1896 all the prisoners down there in that dark jail had a “jubilee” and the jailers had to put it down.

*

The Indian woman spoke good English and I learned to my surprise that she too was a Presbyterian. She had been schooled by a missionary. What preachers we had in those days! Truly they took the word into “the highways and hedges.” Mrs. Bagby was not a Cumberland Presbyterian but a member of the U. S. or Southern Presbyterian Church. I too am now a member of the Southern Church. I say nothing against the Cumberlands. They broke with the Presbyterian Church because they did not believe a preacher needed a lot of formal education. That is all right but they are not sound on Election. They do not fully accept it. I confess it is a hard doctrine, running contrary to our earthly ideas of fair play, but I can see no way around it. Read I Corinthians 6:13 and II Timothy 1:9, 10. Also I Peter 1:2, 19, 20 and Romans 11:7. There you have it. It was good for Paul and Silas and it is good enough for me. It is good enough for you too.

—Charles Portis, True Grit (1968), 32, 41-42, 114-115. I’m currently listening to the incomparable Donna Tartt read this novel for an audiobook. Her slow drawl and comic timing plus Portis’s prose and dialogue are a perfect match. They make for nothing but a constant cackling grin on my face wherever I’m walking on campus or in the neighborhood.

Abraham our contemporary

The Bible is not a human record from the distant past, full of a mixture of inspiring and not-so-inspiring stories or thoughts; nor is it a sort of magical oracle, dictated by God. It is rather the utterances and records of human beings who have been employed by God to witness to his action in the world, now given to us by God so that we may learn who he is and what he does; and the “giving” by God is by means of the resurrection of Jesus. The risen Jesus takes hold of the history of God’s people from its remotest beginnings, lifts it out of death by bringing it to completeness, and presents it to us as his word, his communication to us here and now. Because we live in the power of the risen Christ, we can hear and understand this history, since it is made contemporary with us; in the risen Christ, David and Solomon, Abraham and Moses, stand in the middle of our assembly, our present community, speaking to us about the God who spoke with them in their lifetimes in such a way that we can see how their encounter with God leads towards and is com­pleted in Jesus. In the Fourth Gospel, Jesus speaks of Abraham being glad to see his coming (John 8.56); this is the thought that the icon represents. Just as Jesus reintroduces Adam and Eve as he takes each of them by the hand, so he takes Abraham and ourselves by the hand and introduces us to each other. And from Abraham we learn something decisive about faith, about looking to an unseen future and about trusting that the unseen future has the face of Christ. Thus a proper Christian reading of the Bible is always a reading that looks and listens for that wholeness given by Christ’s resurrection; if we try to read any passage without being aware of the light of the resur­rection, we shall read inadequately.

—Rowan Williams, The Dwelling of the Light: Praying with Icons of Christ (Eerdmans, 2003), 33-34. This paragraph is part of a larger reflection on an Eastern icon of the anastasis. The comment about the fullness of Scripture, even Scripture itself, being given in, by, and through the resurrection of Jesus is a theme developed further, in recent years, by John Webster and especially John Behr, to great effect.

Be the teacher

It’s an old line: When asked about the experience of teaching, a teacher replies that he learned more from the students than they learned from him. One can understand the impulse, and why the answer endures as a kind of proverb or cliché: it’s an expression of humility; it resists the impression of the master dispensing Knowledge from on high; it conjures a classroom in which student and teacher collaborate together in the search for knowledge; it appeals to our democratic sensibilities; it might even tickle our know-nothing instincts, dormant though they may be. In truth, the answer might be little more than a deflection. What teacher wants to say outright, “Yes, I’m a fantastic and knowledgeable teachers and my students are lucky to have me”?

Nevertheless. I want to call bunk on this nonsensical and finally destructive reflex.

To begin, it is usually (not always) a false modesty and thus a false humility on display. No teacher worth her salt really believes her students have more to teach her than vice versa. If that were true she wouldn’t be a teacher in the first place. It would amount to vocational malpractice. You are a teacher because you have something to teach. If you don’t, then you should probably consider another profession.

Moreover, such a view misunderstands the nature of the student. The student is not already equipped, albeit awaiting something like activation. The student is a learner, and a learner needs to learn. The teacher is both the facilitator and the source of that learning. The teacher possesses something the student lacks, and it is her special privilege to help the student to come into possession of it, too. In that way there is an egalitarian element to teaching: what one communicates is not thereby lost; when you teach me and I learn, we both have knowledge that, before, you had and I did not. That is one of the beauties of teaching and learning, namely that there is no competition intrinsic to it. You and I can both know X equally and fully, and neither suffers as a result. It’s zero sum.

But precisely because knowledge is a shared or common good in this sense, when one lacks it he really lacks it. The relationship between a teacher and a student, then, is not equal from the start. It is unequal. That is what makes the teacher a teacher and the student a student. “Inequality” here has nothing to do with worth or value; nor does it have to do with everything that might count for knowledge, only with the particular type or range of knowledge in question. I have a friend who builds energy-efficient homes from scratch. In the realm of building energy-efficient homes, he is the master and I am the apprentice. (Better: I’m a flat zero.) The roles are reversed in the realm of theology. If we were to suppose otherwise, it would be sheer pretense.

Imagine a chemistry class in which the teacher claimed to learn more from the students than she taught them. Is such a claim even intelligible? Perhaps, at a stretch, there is an equivocation here: she means to say that she has learned about some other matter—life, or the resilience of this generation of students, or the lovely array of diverse backgrounds and cultures represented in the classroom. That’s as may be, but it’s not germane to the point. For she is a chemistry teacher. She teaches chemistry to students who need to learn it. That there are other or additional exchanges of various forms of knowledge happening alongside the chemistry-teaching is at once a happy fact and irrelevant to the question of whether she, the teacher, is teaching them, the students, the subject of which she is an expert. If she isn’t, we’ve got a problem.

I detect at least two anxieties here. One is a fear of authority, wedded to or underwritten by doubt about expertise. We wonder whether expertise really exists (does that imply some people are smarter than others? that some are better educated than others? than some simply know more than others, and always will?), but even if it does exist, we doubt whether it can be wielded with authority in a way that avoids abuse. For if abuse is endemic to the exercise of authority, better to deny or abolish the latter than to provide unwitting cover for the former.

The second anxiety belongs to the humanities. That is to say, most of us would admit that a chemist or a geologist or an epidemiologist(!) knows his stuff, and the stuff he knows is stuff we don’t. But for academics outside the STEM fields, there is a widespread suspicion—a simmering low-grade feeling—that what we trade in is not so much knowledge as it is, well, opinions and ideas clothed in jargon. So that, in a strong sense, we don’t have anything to teach our students. In which case they have as much to teach us as we them. After all, if it’s contested readings all the way down, who’s to say they won’t propose a reading as good as, or better than, ours?

I’m not an English professor, so I won’t comment on why language and literature should see itself as a true disciplina or Wissenschaft akin to biology or mathematics. My minimal point is that, even in those disciplines that most explicitly and critically practice and foster the arts of interpretation (and, spoiler, no human inquiry, however empirical, is exempt from these arts), the teacher has something to hand on to her students, and she should do so with gusto. If she had nothing, she could not and would not be a teacher. As it stands, she does and she is, and so her posture should be one of confident authority, not false modesty. Students learn when we know what we are doing and do it without apology. They do not learn when we pretend to lack what they so desperately need.

I sometimes wonder whether the abdication of pedagogical authority is rooted in a false diagnosis of “students these days.” As though they already know what they need to know; or, if they do not, then their exquisitely sensitive egos can’t stand the suggestion that they need to learn what they don’t know. Neither is true, at least in my experience. My students don’t think they know everything already. Almost to a person, they are eager to admit how little they know, and how much they want to learn. That doesn’t mean they simply take my word for it (nor should they). But no one’s egos are being bruised when I teach them as one whose training has prepared him to teach theology with some measure of authority (an authority that is relative in more than one respect: relative to their other courses in theological subjects; relative to their courses in other disciplines; relative to the teachings of the church; relative to the testimony of Holy Scripture; relative, ultimately, to God, the source of all knowledge and the supreme authority). On the contrary, my students lean forward in their seats. They see from my own passion for the material, first, that this thing matters; second, that it is substantial, hefty, neither thin gruel nor small beer; and third, that it is therefore worth desiring for its own sake. It stands apart both from them and from me: it’s the thing I keep pointing toward, gesturing at, like the finger of the Baptist. It’s real, it’s good, and it’s worth knowing—precisely because they only barely glimpse it, at least at first.

That’s the magic. That’s what can happen when you’re in the classroom and you’ve got something to teach folks who are ready to learn. Be the teacher, and the rest falls into place.

Dreams and prayers

More than occasionally I dream of people whom I have neither seen nor thought of in years, sometimes near on two decades. I was in high school from 2000 to 2004, and at least once every couple months nowadays a random person from high school—a stranger, not a close friend, someone I might have been “friends” with on Facebook, before I deleted my account—just walks into a dream. Not a weird dream. Not a nightmare. Just populated by people I know as well as the name and face of an almost complete stranger I last saw more than 17 years ago.

Actually, I’ve also dreamed of people I haven’t met before, and not just actors or famous people whose faces and personalities I’ve seen on TV. I’ve dreamed of writers I’ve never met plenty of times. As though they were a regular fixture of my daily life.

It’s always made me wonder: Whose dreams am I rambling around in? What almost or actual stranger woke up this morning wondering why “what’s-his-name, that Brad guy” appeared in his or her mind while sleeping last night?

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It occurred to me this week that prayers are the same. I’ve been praying the last few weeks for someone I don’t really know. We’ve met once or twice, but we might as well be strangers, and he definitely does not know I’m praying for him. In fact, looking at the little hand-scribbled list of people to pray for on my office desk, I imagine almost none of them, even those I’m close to, know—or at least would assume—that I’m praying for them. Some of them the family members of friends, some of them students, some of them close or distant friends who are expecting a child. (I have a rule: If I know you and you’re pregnant, you will be prayed for.) But like strangers strolling through dreams, the names and faces and sufferings of the prayed-for are “present” in my life and to my mind in a way they wouldn’t guess and I wouldn’t have known to expect in advance of finding myself compelled to “add them to the list.”

Which, naturally, raises the question: Who’s praying for me? What distant relation, what tenuous acquaintance, what absolute stranger is praying for me, not just on a lark or when tragedy strikes, but every single day of the week?

I learned, after becoming a parent, the secret of someone winning my affection in the blink of an eye. The secret: letting me know you are praying for my children. You could be my mortal enemy, worthy of contempt and derision—or, less intensely, just an unlikable or unpleasant person—but if I learn that you pray for my children, my heart swells up like a balloon. All I feel for you henceforth is love and gratitude. Prayer covers a multitude of sins. I have no higher esteem than for the people in my life who, if I told them my children were in peril or need, would stop what they were doing, fall to their knees, and beg God for mercy.

Anonymous prayers are themselves a special mercy. Someone today will say a prayer for one or all of my children; even, perhaps, for me. I won’t know it. But God will hear it. Just as he hears my prayers for the unknowing prayed-for on my list.

This is a great mystery. But I am talking about the communion of the saints.

Euphemism

Most Eugenists are Euphemists. I mean merely that short words startle them, while long words soothe them. And they are utterly incapable of translating the one into the other, however obviously they mean the same thing. Say to them "The persuasive and even coercive powers of the citizen should enable him to make sure that the burden of longevity in the previous generation does not become disproportionate and intolerable, especially to the females"; say this to them and they will sway slightly to and fro like babies sent to sleep in cradles. Say to them "Murder your mother," and they sit up quite suddenly. Yet the two sentences, in cold logic, are exactly the same. Say to them "It is not improbable that a period may arrive when the narrow if once useful distinction between the anthropoid homo and the other animals, which has been modified on so many moral points, may be modified also even in regard to the important question of the extension of human diet"; say this to them, and beauty born of murmuring sound will pass into their face. But say to them, in a simple, manly, hearty way "Let's eat a man!" and their surprise is quite surprising. Yet the sentences say just the same thing. Now, if anyone thinks these two instances extravagant, I will refer to two actual cases from the Eugenic discussions. When Sir Oliver Lodge spoke of the methods "of the stud-farm" many Eugenists exclaimed against the crudity of the suggestion. Yet long before that one of the ablest champions in the other interest had written "What nonsense this education is! Who could educate a racehorse or a greyhound?" Which most certainly either means nothing, or the human stud-farm. Or again, when I spoke of people "being married forcibly by the police," another distinguished Eugenist almost achieved high spirits in his hearty assurance that no such thing had ever come into their heads. Yet a few days after I saw a Eugenist pronouncement, to the effect that the State ought to extend its powers in this area. The State can only be that corporation which men permit to employ compulsion; and this area can only be the area of sexual selection. I mean somewhat more than an idle jest when I say that the policeman will generally be found in that area. But I willingly admit that the policeman who looks after weddings will be like the policeman who looks after wedding-presents. He will be in plain clothes. I do not mean that a man in blue with a helmet will drag the bride and bridegroom to the altar. I do mean that nobody that man in blue is told to arrest will even dare to come near the church. Sir Oliver did not mean that men would be tied up in stables and scrubbed down by grooms. He meant that they would undergo a loss of liberty which to men is even more infamous. He meant that the only formula important to Eugenists would be "by Smith out of Jones." Such a formula is one of the shortest in the world; and is certainly the shortest way with the Euphemists.

—G. K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils (1922), chapter 2. This is an important, witty, and morally serious work; I’d not read it until this fall. There are passages of uncommon common sense and deep Christian wisdom (as in this passage), against one of the perennial evils of the modern age. And yet, occasionally, Chesterton’s own prejudices stand in the way of his overall point. The more-than-stray asides about Jews (and once or twice about black Africans) reveal either his own incomplete internalization of the very point he is seeking to make about eugenics’ evil (namely, that it segregates humanity into breeds and races, some of whom are supposedly superior to others) or, what is in a sense worse, his willingness to play to the crowd with a cheap joke about Exotic Others, the falsity of which he understands all too well but chooses to ignore just to get a laugh. In any case, the book is well worth a read, but Chesterton’s own failures are intermittently on display. Probably the best way to interpret that fact is to use it as an occasion for recognition: namely, that one’s own burning moral passions, especially those one is unquestionably right about, are likely, as with Chesterton, not yet entirely or consistently comprehended, much less enacted, either in word or deed. We are none of us wholly converted in this life.

The ache and the Austinite

Richard Beck, my friend and colleague here at ACU, enjoyed my post yesterday on “Needing Jesus” but pushed back on some elements of it. In particular he thought what I took with one hand I gave back with the other. That is, I denied that our hypothetical 26-year old happy Austinite was “secretly unhappy” before waxing eloquent about . . . just how secretly unhappy he must be, sinsick and lacking Jesus as he is. Moreover, he wasn’t sure just how I am (we are) supposed to get Mr. Contentment into church if we aren’t filling him in, through conversation or other means, just how secretly unhappy he is. Why is he supposed to care enough to go to church? And how is church supposed to “work” on him if it speaks about things he’s already convinced, in his natural happiness, don’t matter and aren’t true of him?

Good questions. A few thoughts.

1. There’s definitely a sense in which I’m wanting to have my cake and eat it too. Our Austinite—I’ll go ahead and call him Kendall for the sake of convenience—is somehow both satisfied with life and, at bottom, absolutely starved for transcendence, fulfillment, and forgiveness. Richard finds this psychologically implausible. If I’m not just wanting to have my cake and eat it, then here’s my defense. I think it’s wholly plausible. Why? Because human beings are walking contradictions who hold together, every day, internal dissonances that would many anyone else dizzy after ten seconds. Moreover, I’m not speaking of Kendall across his life: I’m describing him at a particular moment in his life. And that moment more or less satisfies all the needs he’s been taught he has. Life’s gone well and continues to go well for him, and his various hedonistic and personal-meaning boxes are, at this point in time, checked. It might make sense to help him see that there’s more than those boxes, if he’s open to hearing it. But it still seems unwise to me to tell him that deep down he himself knows that “all this” isn’t enough. I’m not sure he does.

2. Put more simply: It is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Expand the definition of “rich” to include more than mere extravagant wealth, and that’s the perennial problem we’re dealing with when we think about all the many Kendalls of the world.

3. Having said that, Richard rightly pointed to a concept he deploys in his own writing, most prominently in his latest book, Hunting Magic Eels: Recovering an Enchanted Faith in a Skeptical Age. That concept is “the Ache.” The Ache is the existential neediness in the basement of our souls that cries out, day and night, for satisfaction. It’s the spookiness that secularism can never quite seem wholly to exorcise. It’s the tug-of-war between our desire for self-creation and autonomy, on one hand, and for life and deliverance from outside us, on the other. It’s the pull we feel beyond ourselves to surrender, to worship, to praise, to thank, to love. It’s the capital-W Whence and Whither that encompass our existence, which in turn balances perpetually on the edge of a void of nothingess. It’s all that and more. Richard sees it in his students as I see it in mine, including the most unchurched, post-Christian, and non-religious. He thinks the Ache is at the heart of my post yesterday, but instead of foregoing alerting Kendall to it, as I seemed to suggest, we ought to move heaven and earth to fill him in. Apart from that being the only real motive he might have for going to church (and then finding Jesus), Richard suspects that Kendall is playing a nice game on the surface, but if you press on that nerve, he’ll spill his spiritual guts. He knows about the Ache. He just hasn’t found anyone to help him understand or resolve it.

All granted. I don’t have a rebuttal here. When and where this is true, then self-evidently Kendall is in a position to hear, from a trusted friend, just why he feels that cosmic emptiness-cum-desire on the inside, and where he might find rest for his restless soul. To everyone able to do such a thing wisely and with gentleness, I say: Go for it.

My point is more a matter of emphasis. I’m not actually sure that there are that many Kendalls ready, today, in their 26-years-old-and-happy-with-material-and-social-life-selves, either to hear of the Ache or to admit their own. Think again of the rich man. It’s hard to see one’s need when all of one’s needs are met, and then some. I don’t doubt the Ache is coming big time for Kendall: it’s hard to sustain the illusion of earthly contentment through one’s thirties, forties, and fifties. Suffering and failure and disappointment and illness and pain and death await, for him as for all of us. Finitude is never deniable indefinitely. But can you sincerely disbelieve in death and pain in Kendall’s position, as genuine realities for oneself, as more than abstractions, at least for a while? Yes, I think you can.

4. Which is all a way of saying that I wasn’t meaning to propose a comprehensive evangelistic strategy in my post. Only to clarify one misbegotten presumptive posture on the part of the church toward the Kendalls that increasingly fill our major cities. Don’t assume it’s all a front. Don’t assume he knows there’s a problem but doesn’t want to admit it. Take for granted that he might well mean what he says: so far as he knows, he’s a happy camper. And there’s nothing much that a church, not least a church that prioritizes earthly happiness in the form of affluence and consumption, can add to that sort of happiness.

5. But that also reveals my main target yesterday: not Kendall, but the churches. If the churches don’t offer anything but an affirming echo of Kendall’s life and values, then he’s right to ignore them, even if he doesn’t resent them. What the churches need to do is so fashion a common life defined by what Kendall cannot find outside them that, when he does perchance darken their doorstep, he finds something inside that he’s neither heard nor seen elsewhere. That means sacraments, scriptures, sermons, prayers, confessions, creeds, candles, icons, tears, love, faith, courage, truth-talk, hell-talk, heaven-talk, sin-talk, Spirit-talk, Satan-talk, sacrifice, suffering, service to the least of these—to list only a few. Let it be different, exotic, weird, even (at first) alien and off-putting. Let it be, in Jenson’s words, a world unto itself. Let the liturgy be all-consuming: confident, spooky, global, cosmic. Kendall doesn’t know the language before coming, but continuing to come is how he learns to speak Christian. And learning to speak Christian, he will learn to say Christ. Learning to say Christ, he will learn how to live Christ. Learning to live Christ, he will learn how to love him.

I don’t know whether Kendall is coming while still in his 20s. I’m not sure we can convince him, or many of his peers, of the Ache at this point (though perhaps I’m overly pessimistic about this). My instinct is that, eventually, aging or suffering will open him up to the Ache and, thence, to the One who has made us for himself, in whom alone our hearts find peace. The main thing to do right now is to live faithfully as his neighbor and friend. It is our lives that will draw him, now or decades hence, to Christ’s body. And if our churches are faithful in the meantime, when he journeys to the body he will find more than just you and me. He will find Jesus.

Needing Jesus

Start with a man.

A young man, to be more specific. He lives in a small but well-furnished apartment in a gentrified neighborhood of Austin (or Chicago, or Brooklyn, or Portland). He’s 26. He’s single, he’s got friends, and he works a reasonably well-paying job with a tech start-up, a consulting firm, or perhaps a non-profit. He eats good food, reads good books, listens to good music. In general he’s a nice guy. He’s not a jerk. He recycles. He has reliably soft-progressive opinions. He voted for Bernie then for Biden. You’d enjoy his presence if you spent an evening with him.

This young man is not opposed to religion. He’s open to spirituality, even mysticism. One or two friends have dabbled in witchcraft. Though he rolls his eyes at evangelicals, he doesn’t hate Christians. He’s known a few believers who checked the “rational” and “decent” and “not constantly proselytizing” boxes. That said, he’s not particularly drawn to Christian faith, though he doesn’t blame anyone for being so. His life is already in satisfactory order. He’s a nice person, a good person, who treats people well enough. He’s living his one life the best he can. Besides, it’s the churches that are off-putting. Who would volunteer to join one of those?

My impression is that there is a long-standing Christian response to our hypothetical young man. It’s that he’s not “really” happy. Or perhaps he’s not “really” nice/good. Because the only true happiness comes through knowing God, and no one—“not one”—is genuinely good in this life, at least apart from Christ.

Now there’s truth in that, certainly in its desire to change the terms of the discussion: e.g., what makes for happiness? what makes for virtue?

But I think, at least today, perhaps always, that this response is inadequate. Because the young man in question doesn’t live in accordance with Christian (much less Platonic or Buddhist or Marxist or . . .) teaching on the good life. He lives in accordance with a vision of the good to which he is, in fact, approximating quite closely. That vision has its source in late modern capitalist society, and it says that what makes for happiness is health, affluence, autonomy, entertainment, fun, friends, and city life with a decent job and correct opinions. Guess what? He’s got that. In spades. To boot, no one hates him, because he’s not a jerk. So he’s nice on top of having run the gamut—really, the gamble—of the happiness benchmarks. To say in reply, “nuh uh; meet Jesus,” is surely wrong as a strategy. It might be wrong on the merits.

Chesterton writes somewhere that it’s nonsense when Christians say a man can’t be happy in this life without faith. Of course he can. Natural happiness is available to all, at least in principle. What Christianity offers is supernatural and eternal happiness. There’s no doubting that the latter bears on the former. But the former is not obviated by the latter, that is to say, its possibility is not utterly erased either by grace or even by sin.

It seems to me that churches ought to imbibe this truth as deeply as they can. Why? And what would that mean? A few preliminary answers:

First, it would awaken churches from their non-dogmatic slumbers. In other words, churches would stop being scared to talk about—to clarify that so much of the faith comes down to—heaven, eternity, life after death, etc. In my experience many pastors see these and related ideas as very like the enemy, because they turn the eyes of believers to the great hereafter instead of to the here and now. I haven’t yet figured out what’s going on here, apart from a partial misreading of N. T. Wright.

Second, though, there’s a flip side. Because churches are antsy about emphasizing heaven, they focus almost entirely on earth. Sometimes that has some good consequences: social justice, serving the poor, partnering with other institutions to help ameliorate various social ills. But one unintended consequence is implying, at times quite strongly, that the main thing Christians are concerned with is this life, in particular making this life good. At that point you’re not far away from presumptively affirming middle- and upper-middle-class folks’ affluent lives of entertainment and consumption as just about the apex of what one can expect from this world. The marks of that apex include Netflix, exotic food, travel, funny podcasts, household amenities, and lightly held correct political opinions. A church doing its job would hold up a mirror to such persons—of whom this writer is the worst, to be clear, being the chief of sinners—and say, This is not the good life. The good life is the passion of Jesus Christ. Take up your cross and follow him. In following him, you will find death but, afterward, life eternal with God. If a church isn’t doing that, I hesitate to say whether it’s a church at all.

Third, part and parcel with affirming affluent Christians in their lives of leisure and pleasure is affirming as well that they are good people, just like everyone else they know. Bad people, if such there are, include murderers, thieves, rapists, and those neighbors with the wrong political sign in their yard. But that’s not you; how could it be? To which churches ought instead to respond with one great Barthian yelp: Nein! Not only are Christians not “good people” by Christian lights. Church is not about “being good people.” Church is AA for sinners. I go, stand up, and introduce myself by saying, “Hi, I’m Brad. I’m a sinner.” I keep on saying that till the day I die, hoping and trusting in God alone for the grace that might not only heal me, if in fits and starts in this life, but completely, body and soul, in the life of the world to come. That’s it. That’s the whole ballgame, y’all.

Which means, fourth, that we owe the proverbial young man a much better explanation of why he ought to go to church—of why, in short, he needs Jesus. He needs Jesus for the same reason you and I do. Not because we can’t find provisional contentment in daily life; not because can’t be nice people without the Bible. No, he and you and I need Jesus because we suffer from an unchosen, perhaps unconscious, but nonetheless unavoidable and universal condition. We are sinners. We are in bondage. We don’t need to learn how to be nice and we don’t need a dollop of affluence to nudge us toward earthly fulfillment. We are sinsick and we need the cure. The whole world does. For this world is sodden and weighed down with the burden of sin, sickness, suffering, injustice, idolatry, and death. An upper-middle-class life of money, entertainment, and pleasure has no power to relieve us of those things. They are masks and bandages hiding wounds and scars that are open and bleeding, even if—especially if—we don’t know it. And if what we need is Jesus, the church is the place to find him. He’s what you get there, whatever else you get. And he’s enough. The people around you? Every one is unimpressive. A bunch of boring normies. In the words of Nicholas Healy, the church is nothing if not full of unsatisfactory Christians. That’s the point. The church is a house of healing, and it’s full of the sick (even if some of them have convinced themselves they’re well). The thing to realize is that you’re one of them, whether you like it or not. Nor do you have to gin up the energy or emotion or feeling to receive Jesus, who alone is the fix, the chemo, the medicine of immortality for your mortal soul. The church gives him to you, whole and entire, in the blessed sacrament and in the public reading and proclamation of God’s word. Christ visible and audible is both sufficient and objective: he’s enough and he’s real. He’s the only thing worth going to church for; but then, he’s the one thing needful, as Mary knew and Martha learned.

We might not be able to persuade our 26-year old sociable Austinite of his sinsickness of soul; we might not be able, through mere conversation, to convince him of his need, of the dark spiritual cancer within that, if he’s honest, he sometimes feels and worries and wonders about. But at the very least, the church can stop pretending in two ways. It can stop pretending that his life is so very bad, humanly speaking, without Jesus: it’s actually pretty sweet, on the surface. But it can also stop reinforcing that surface, that superficial shallowness, in its own life. The church won’t make him happy; it might make him less happy, at least in one sense. It certainly can’t promise to make him any nicer. That’s not what it exists to do.

But in its sacramental and liturgical common life, the church can offer him Jesus, and through Jesus, hope for a happiness in comparison with which his present modest and unstable contentment is a trifle. That hope transfigures this life, shedding light on our lives as well as on those of our neighbors, uniting us in the knowledge of the singular condition of need and dependence in which we all share.

What Jesus offers, in a word, is truth, and the truth will set you free.

The meta mafia

Here’s something Mark Zuckerberg said during his indescribably weird announcement video hawking Facebook’s shift into the so-called metaverse:

There are going to be new ways of interacting with devices that are much more natural. Instead of typing or tapping, you’re going to be able to gesture with your hands, say a few words, or even just make things happen by thinking about them. Your devices won’t be the focal point of your attention anymore. Instead of getting in the way, they’re going to give you a sense of presence in the new experiences that you’re having and the people who you’re with. And these are some of the basic concepts for the metaverse.

There are many things to say about this little snippet—not to mention the rest of his address. (I’m eagerly awaiting the 10,000-word blog-disquisition on the Zuck’s repeated reference to “presence” by contradistinction to real presence.) But here’s the main thing I want to home in on.

In our present practice, per the CEO of Facebook-cum-Meta, devices have become the “focal point” of our “attention.” Whereas in the future being fashioned by Meta, our devices will no longer “get in the way” of our “presence” to one another. Instead, those pesky devices now out of the way, the obstacles will thereby be cleared for the metaverse to facilitate, mediate, and enhance the “sense of presence” we’ve lost in the device-and-platform obsessions of yesteryear.

Now suppose, as a thought experiment, that an anti–Silicon Valley Luddite wanted to craft a statement and put it into the mouthpiece of someone who stands for all that’s wrong with the digital age and our new digital overlords—a statement rife with subtle meanings legible only to the initiated, crying out for subtextual Straussian interpretation. Would one word be different in Zuckerberg’s script?

To wit: a dialogue.

*

Question: Who introduced those ubiquitous devices, studded with social media apps, that now suck up all our attention, robbing us of our sense of presence?

Answer: Steve Jobs, in cahoots with Mark Zuckerberg, circa 15 years ago.

Question: And what is the solution to the problem posed by those devices—a problem ranging from partisan polarization to teen addiction to screens to social anomie to body image issues to political unrest to reduced attention spans to diffuse persistent low-grade anxiety to massive efforts at both disinformation and censorship—a problem, recall, introduced by (among others) Mr. Zuckerberg, which absorbs and deprives us all, especially young people, of the presence and focus necessary to inhabit and navigate the real world?

Answer: The metaverse.

Question: And what is that?

Answer: An all-encompassing digital “world” available via virtual reality headsets, in which people, including young people, may “hang out” and “socialize” (and “teleport” and, what is the Zuck’s go-to weasel word, “connect”) for hours on end with “avatars” of strangers that look like nothing so much as gooey Minecraft simulacra of human beings.

Question: And who, pray tell, is the creator of the metaverse?

Answer: Why, the creator of Facebook: Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta.

Question: So the problem with our devices is not that they absorb our attention, but that they fall short of absolute absorption?

Answer: Exactly!

Question: So the way the metaverse resolves the problem of our devices’ being the focal point of our attention is by pulling us into the devices in order to live inside them? So that they are no longer “between” or “before” us but around us?

Answer: Yes! You’re getting closer.

Question: Which means the only solution to the problem of our devices is more and better devices?

Answer: Yes! Yes! You’re almost there!

Question: Which means the author of the problem is the author of the solution?

Answer: You’ve got it. You’re there.

Question: In sum, although the short-sighted and foolish-minded among us might suppose that the “obvious solution” to the problem of Facebook “is to get rid of Facebook,” the wise masters of the Valley propose the opposite: “Get rid of the world”?

Answer: This is the way. You’ve arrived. Now you love Big Zuckerberg.

*

Lest there be any doubt, there is a name for this hustle. It’s a racket. When a tough guy smashes the windows of your shop, after which one of his friends comes by proposing to protect you from local rowdy types, only (it goes without saying) he requires a weekly payment under the table, you know what’s happening. You’re not grateful; you don’t welcome the proposal. It’s the mafia. And mob protection is fake protection. It’s not the real thing. The threat and the fix wear the same face. Maybe you aren’t in a position to decline, but either way you’re made to be a fool. Because the humiliation is the point.

Mark Zuckerberg is looking us in the eyes and offering to sell us heroin to wean us off the cocaine he sold us last year.

It’s a sham; it’s a racket; it’s the mob; it’s a dealer.

Just say no, y’all.

Just. Say. No.

Enns and eggs and common sense

. . . not only the practical politics, but the abstract philosophies of the modern world have had this queer twist [of being contrary to common sense]. Since the modern world began in the sixteenth century, nobody's system of philosophy has really corresponded to everybody's sense of reality: to what, if left to themselves, common men would call common sense. Each started with a paradox: a peculiar point of view demanding the sacrifice of what they would call a sane point of view. That is the one thing common to Hobbes and Hegel, to Kant and Bergson, to Berkeley and William James. A man had to believe something that no normal man would believe, if it were suddenly propounded to his simplicity; as that law is above right, or right is outside reason, or things are only as we think them, or everything is relative to a reality that is not there. The modern philosopher claims, like a sort of confidence man, that if once we will grant him this, the rest will be easy; he will straighten out the world, if once he is allowed to give this one twist to the mind.

It will be understood that in these matters I speak as a fool; or, as our democratic cousins would say, a moron; anyhow as a man in the street; and the only object of this chapter is to show that the Thomist philosophy is nearer than most philosophies to the mind of the man in the street. I am not, like Father D'Arcy, whose admirable book on St. Thomas has illuminated many problems for me, a trained philosopher, acquainted with the technique of the trade. But I hope Father D'Arcy will forgive me if I take one example from his book, which exactly illustrates what I mean. He, being a trained philosopher, is naturally trained to put up with philosophers. Also, being a trained priest, he is naturally accustomed, not only to suffer fools gladly, but (what is sometimes even harder) to suffer clever people gladly. Above all, his wide reading in metaphysics has made him patient with clever people when they indulge in folly. The consequence is that he can write calmly and even blandly sentences like these. "A certain likeness can be detected between the aim and method of St. Thomas and those of Hegel. There are, however, also remarkable differences. For St. Thomas it is impossible that contradictories should exist together, and again reality and intelligibility correspond, but a thing must first be, to be intelligible."

Let the man in the street be forgiven, if he adds that the "remarkable difference" seems to him to be that St. Thomas was sane and Hegel was mad. The moron refuses to admit that Hegel can both exist and not exist; or that it can be possible to understand Hegel, if there is no Hegel to understand. Yet Father D'Arcy mentions this Hegelian paradox as if it were all in the day's work; and of course it is, if the work is reading all the modern philosophers as searchingly and sympathetically as he has done. And this is what I mean saying that all modern philosophy starts with a stumbling-block. It is surely not too much to say that there seems to be a twist, in saying that contraries are not incompatible; or that a thing can "be" intelligible and not as yet "be" at all.

Against all this the philosophy of St. Thomas stands founded on the universal common conviction that eggs are eggs. The Hegelian may say that an egg is really a hen, because it is a part of an endless process of Becoming; the Berkeleian may hold that poached eggs only exist as a dream exists; since it is quite as easy to call the dream the cause of the eggs as the eggs the cause of the dream; the Pragmatist may believe that we get the best out of scrambled eggs by forgetting that they ever were eggs, and only remembering the scramble. But no pupil of St. Thomas needs to addle his brains in order adequately to addle his eggs; to put his head at any peculiar angle in looking at eggs, or squinting at eggs, or winking the other eye in order to see a new simplification of eggs. The Thomist stands in the broad daylight of the brotherhood of men, in their common consciousness that eggs are not hens or dreams or mere practical assumptions; but things attested by the Authority of the Senses, which is from God.

Thus, even those who appreciate the metaphysical depth of Thomism in other matters have expressed surprise that he does not deal at all with what many now think the main metaphysical question; whether we can prove that the primary act of recognition of any reality is real. The answer is that St. Thomas recognised instantly, what so many modern sceptics have begun to suspect rather laboriously; that a man must either answer that question in the affirmative, or else never answer any question, never ask any question, never even exist intellectually, to answer or to ask. I suppose it is true in a sense that a man can be a fundamental sceptic, but he cannot be anything else: certainly not even a defender of fundamental scepticism. If a man feels that all the movements of his own mind are meaningless, then his mind is meaningless, and he is meaningless; and it does not mean anything to attempt to discover his meaning. Most fundamental sceptics appear to survive, because they are not consistently sceptical and not at all fundamental. They will first deny everything and then admit something, if for the sake of argument—or often rather of attack without argument. I saw an almost startling example of this essential frivolity in a professor of final scepticism, in a paper the other day. A man wrote to say that he accepted nothing but Solipsism, and added that he had often wondered it was not a more common philosophy. Now Solipsism simply means that a man believes in his own existence, but not in anybody or anything else. And it never struck this simple sophist, that if his philosophy was true, there obviously were no other philosophers to profess it.

To this question "Is there anything?" St. Thomas begins by answering "Yes"; if he began by answering "No", it would not be the beginning, but the end. That is what some of us call common sense. Either there is no philosophy, no philosophers, no thinkers, no thought, no anything; or else there is a real bridge between the mind and reality. But he is actually less exacting than many thinkers, much less so than most rationalist and materialist thinkers, as to what that first step involves; he is content, as we shall see, to say that it involves the recognition of Ens or Being as something definitely beyond ourselves. Ens is Ens: Eggs are eggs, and it is not tenable that all eggs were found in a mare's nest.

Needless to say, I am not so silly as to suggest that all the writings of St. Thomas are simple and straightforward; in the sense of being easy to understand. There are passages I do not in the least understand myself; there are passages that puzzle much more learned and logical philosophers than I am; there are passages about which the greatest Thomists still differ and dispute. But that is a question of a thing being hard to read or understand: not hard to accept when understood. That is a mere matter of "The Cat sat on the Mat" being written in Chinese characters: or "Mary had a Little Lamb" in Egyptian hieroglyphics. The only point I am stressing here is that Aquinas is almost always on the side of simplicity, and supports the ordinary man's acceptance of ordinary truisms. For instance, one of the most obscure passages, in my very inadequate judgment, is that in which he explains how the mind is certain of an external object and not merely of an impression of that object; and yet apparently reaches it through a concept, though not merely through an impression. But the only point here is that he does explain that the mind is certain of an external object. It is enough for this purpose that his conclusion is what is called the conclusion of common sense; that it is his purpose to justify common sense; even though he justifies it in a passage which happens to be one of rather uncommon subtlety. The problem of later philosophers is that their conclusion is as dark as their demonstration; or that they bring out a result of which the result is chaos.

—G. K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas (1933), 119–123. Last week I was walking home from work, listening to this book on audio, and when the narrator read the bolded portion above about Hegel, I yelped aloud, then had to stop in the middle of the street because I was laughing so hard.

Three new essays published: on chronic illness, supersessionism, and blood

I’ve had three new pieces published this week (with two more coming in the next six weeks: when it rains, it pours). Each is a longish review essay of a recently published book by a major author:

The first reviews of Ross Douthat’s The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery. Titled “Dragons in the Deep Places,” the essay reflects on theodicy, nature, prosperity, and the fragility of medical epistemology, rooted in Douthat’s experience of chronic Lyme disease.

The second reviews Timothy P. Jackson’s Mordecai Would Not Bow Down: Anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and Christian Supersessionism. Titled “Still Supersessionist?,” the essay follows closely Jackson’s argument that the Shoah was a unique crime directed as the Jews because they were Jews, and therefore calls for theological analysis of anti-Semitism as a sin. I affirm that argument while taking issue with some of the premises and conclusions he deploys in the book.

The third reviews Eugene F. Rogers Jr.’s Blood Theology: Seeing Red in Body- and God-Talk. Titled “Power in the Blood,” the essay explores and extends Rogers’ probing observations about blood’s role in society, culture, religion, sacrifice, and Christian faith.

It’s a pleasure to see these three pieces come out in a three-day span. Sometimes you read and write and revise and revise and revise, for months on end, only to wonder when anyone will see your work. Well: here it is, folks! Enjoy.

A sheep among wolves

If, after reading [this book], you now turn to study the historical evidence for yourself, begin with the New Testament and not with the books about it. If you do not know Greek get it in a modern translation. Moffat’s is probably the best: Monsignor Knox is also good. I do not advise the Basic English version. And when you turn from the New Testament to modern scholars, remember that you go among them as a sheep among wolves. Naturalistic assumptions, beggings of the question such as that which I noted on the first page of this book, will meet you on every side—even from the pens of clergymen. This does not mean (as I was once tempted to suspect) that these clergymen are disguised apostates who deliberately exploit the position and the livelihood given them by the Christian Church to undermine Christianity. It comes partly from what we may call a ‘hangover’. We all have Naturalism in our bones and even conversion does not at once work the infection out of our system. Its assumptions rush back upon the mind the moment vigilance is relaxed. And in part the procedure of these scholars arises from the feeling which is greatly to their credit—which indeed is honourable to the point of being Quixotic. They are anxious to allow to the enemy every advantage he can with any show of fairness claim. They thus make it part of their method to eliminate the supernatural wherever it is even remotely possible to do so, to strain natural explanation even to the breaking point before they admit the least suggestion of miracle. Just in the same spirit some examiners tend to overmark any candidate whose opinions and character, as revealed by his work, are revolting to them. We are so afraid of being led into unfairness by our instant dislike of the man that we are liable to overshoot the mark and treat him too kindly. Many modern Christian scholars overshoot the mark for a similar reason.

In using the books of such people you must therefore be continually on guard. You must develop a nose like a bloodhound for those steps in the argument which depend not on historical and linguistic knowledge but on the concealed assumption that miracles are impossible, improbable, or improper. And this means that you must really re-educate yourself: must work hard and consistently to eradicate from your mind the whole type of thought in which we have all been brought up. It is the type of thought which, under various disguises, has been our adversary throughout this book.

—C. S. Lewis, Miracles (1947), 267–269