Jack Zipes. Once Upon a Time There Was Truth or, Why We Need Fairy Tales. Yale University Press, 2026. $28.00. 200 pp. 

We live in a moment in which the mere act of paying attention is a problem, or perhaps a challenge. We know it’s possible. Simply think about the enchantment you felt with stories in your childhood: Do you remember your own wide eyes and mouth agape as you leaned in to listen to a fantastic tale? Perhaps it was King Arthur and his round table or the pixie dust that Tinkerbell bestowed so the Darling children could fly that took you from your modern world to some place outside of time and place. Maybe it was the tales of the One Thousand and One Nights or Robinson Crusoe’s daring adventures that opened up the possibility of enchantment, change, and perseverance through bleak trials. Fairy tales give us a framework for imaginative possibility. They might also restore our attention.

Jack Zipes, professor emeritus of German and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota, has been writing fairy tales—and writing about fairy tales—for sixty years. Now approaching 90, he still believes the genre is borne from our utopian “hopeful desires.” Once Upon a Time There was Truth or, Why We Need Fairy Tales is a collection of his essays on the development of the fairy tale from oral tales to the genre’s more contemporary “Disneyfication.” The genre has changed along the way. And yet, he writes, “if there is any genre of storytelling that can raise our spirits and make a contribution to humanity…it is the fairy tale.” 

As a collection of separate essays, most of the book’s chapters focus on various tales: “Puss in Boots,” “Hansel and Gretel,” “The Nutcracker,” Disney’s versions of classic tales, and The Wizard of Oz. Throughout, Zipes draws attention to the pedagogical and socializing functions of fairy tales, especially as they begin to be told to children. For Zipes there is a hardening of the genre throughout the 20^th century as Disney’s pervasive influence flattens the genre’s subversive possibilities. Yet, the fairy tale isn’t just about a “happily ever after.” 

Zipes traces the evolution of the form from oral tales to a literary form that flourished from the early 19^th century to the early 20^th century. Different from myth and oral wonder tales, the fairy tale both substantiated civilizing norms while also subverting them. There is a logic to their telling: a protagonist violates a norm and is then faced with banishment or an impossible task. She or he then has various encounters—with a villain, or magical animals or a creature who bestows gifts, thereby enabling the protagonist to tackle the task while a wonder or a miracle also reverses his or her fortune. The result is often marriage and wealth.

Especially in the genre’s golden age, folklorists (like the Brothers Grimm) very much saw their work of gathering and writing down these oral tales to be an integral part of the nation-building project. These “middle-class collectors [gave] voice to the lower classes… and wrote in defense of their native languages and in the interests of national and regional movements.” The nineteenth century literary fairy tale, then, began as a political statement—one that validated the common folk—and while contemporary tales have been more likely to “entertain and soothe a child’s anxieties,” the genre still maintains the power to inspire and subvert. Zipes’ project, then, is not only to recover the history and shifts of the genre but also to name an “impulse for hope for better living conditions.” 

But is the fairy tale simply a social construct, meant to either civilize or comment on social norms? When literary critics evaluate the genre, is it only to class and nation we must look? Must we understand the Disneyfication of fairy tales in terms of perpetuating patriarchal norms? While the fairy tale offers commentary on our present, something much deeper is going on in the genre. This is the nature of truth and reality.

Zipes’ title, Once Upon a Time There Was Truth, links “truth” with the fairy tale, but this truth is located within the fairy tale itself. The implication is that truth cannot be found in the readers’ present circumstances and that the tale motivates the reader to align the truth of the tale with the truth of experience. By presenting the world as it should be—where anyone is capable of social climbing and the villain gets his just due—the fairy tale as Zipes writes in his Epilogue, offers “happily ever after” and “once upon a time” as “a persistent refusal to accept life as it is and a demand that utopian longings be fulfilled.” For Zipes the genre presents possibilities for transformation as we compare our society with the counter world of the fairy tale.

But there is little surprise in Zipes’ readings. There is talk of wonder and magic but there is little magic in the prose. In the book there is not much that gestures to deeper human longings beyond political, national, or gender-based categories. The responsibility is squarely on the reader to recognize “something [is] still missing, deeply missing even, in our lives” and through the world of the fairy tale “to seize on [glimmers of hope] as we tell our tales, and futures, today. Zipes argues that we “insert ourselves cunningly into our daily struggles to turn the course of the world’s events in our favor.” While he has no love for Disneyfication, ultimately Zipes advocates for the same project—to turn our tales into self-made dreams.

Zipes correctly diagnoses how fairy tales name the longing for the world to be different than it is, but he misses the cure. This realization that the world is not how it should be and a resulting longing for a magical intervention aligns with the Christian reality. C. S. Lewis famously wrote in Mere Christianity: “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.” Fairy tales elicit this longing. Lewis places the truth not in the gap between tale and unfulfilled longing, but in the transcendent reality of God’s creative work. Christian hope tells a story—not of writing one’s destiny and future—but of a good created order, a fall into sin, redemption through the work of Christ, and a future restoration of all things. 

Fairy tales—fairy stories, or true myths as Lewis and Tolkien call them—still have an important role to play. They awaken us to imaginative reversal. J.R.R. Tolkien wrote about the moment of recognition, or joyful turn, implicit in the fairy tale. Delivered first as a lecture, he wrote in On Fairy Stories: “It is the mark of a good fairy-story, of the higher or more complete kind, that however wild its events, however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give to child or man that hears it, when the ‘turn’ comes, a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears, as keen as that given by any form of literary art, and having a peculiar quality.” More than just “an agent of socialization,” the fairy tale can hit at something deeper: a moment of surprise, a eucatastrophe. This is the narrative moment where we have, in Tolkien’s words, a “sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth.” 

The truth that fairy stories give is “not only a ‘consolation’ for the sorrow of this world, but a satisfaction, and an answer to that question…In the ‘Eucatastrophe’ we see in a brief vision that the answer may be greater—it may be a far-off gleam or echo of evangelium in the real world.” This moment of realization, where all is restored in a manner that is both good and true, also ushers readers and hearers into what Tolkien calls a “Secondary Belief,” a real enchantment, an experience of good news.

Martin Shaw in his new book, Liturgies of the Wild: The Myths that Make Us, reminds us how our stories point to true myth. Like Zipes, he notes that myths or fairy tales serve a social and pedagogical function. He believes myths make us human, they help us grow up, and they help us locate ourselves. “Far from being untruths, myths have traditionally been forefront in the shaping of human beings. They show us what to defend, what to care about, the need for pluck, sacrifice, and generosity.” Myths are guides. 

But in moments, myths are more than guides. They pierce through the immanent frame, to get at the heart of reality. “Myth is a Sacred Story,” Shaw writes, “And some of the most sacred of those stories circle around the tale of a dying and resurrected king. Who carried a great burden for his people and turned that burden into an extraordinary act of love. And some of us believe that the most sacred story crash-bang-walloped into the kind of time we can all register, ours.” 

Zipes would argue that we ultimately need fairy tales so that we can assert ourselves between the gap of our reality and the world as it should or could be. Shaw (and Tolkien and Lewis) would instead point to the nature of narrative itself: The best fairy tales do not primarily tell us what to do but what must be done on our behalf. They hold out a world where justice rolls down like streams of mighty water, where the lion lays down with the lamb, where the destitute pauper becomes a king. The best fairy tales succeed to the extent that joy catches in our throats and tear ducts so that finally we see: Our King has come, and He will come again to make all things new.

In late June, Donald Trump's Religious Liberty Commission released a 224-page report on the state of religious freedom in America. Ironically, this document, which is supposed to defend religious freedom for all Americans, is exclusive. It also misconstrues the Founders. It reads more like a defense of a religious establishment than an endorsement of liberty. Still, the report is worth taking seriously because it reflects how some American evangelicals now understand the relationship between church and state.

To begin with, the commission that produced the report does not reflect the religious pluralism it claims to defend. Eight of the commissioners are evangelical Protestants aligned with the MAGA movement, including Paula White-Cain, Dr. Phil McGraw, Eric Metaxas, and Franklin Graham. Three are Catholic. One, Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, is Jewish. The commission includes no Muslim, no atheist, no Mormon, no Hindu, no Buddhist, no Sikh, and no representative of the historically Black Protestant tradition.

Yet the Commission insists that it exists "for everyone — to ensure that all Americans of all faiths, from Christians to Jews to Muslims to Sikhs to Hindus can approach God freely to worship him fully and to express their faith without government interference." When commissioner Ryan Anderson, the Catholic president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, writes that "Jewish students should be authentically Jewish, Muslim students could be authentically Muslim," the irony is that no Muslim voice was in the room to say so for themselves. A report that claims to speak for American religious pluralism while mostly excluding non-Christians from the drafting process should raise red flags before a single policy proposal is articulated.

The report calls for repealing the Johnson Amendment, the tax-code provision that bars clergy from endorsing candidates while speaking in their official capacity. Whatever one thinks of its constitutionality, repealing the Johnson Amendment would be bad for the church. Evangelical pastors who chafe against the amendment seem to value free speech over their gospel witness. Many conservative evangelical activists urge Christians to get engaged in political life without acknowledging that partisan politics and the advancement of the Gospel do not mix cleanly.

American evangelicals should thank God that we live in a nation that celebrates religious freedom. The United States is built upon the idea that all citizens have human dignity to practice their faith and to pursue truth without government interference. The idea that humans possess such rights comes, of course, from the great thinkers of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Enlightenment, but these ideas are also rooted in the Christian tradition. (And according to many scholars, including Tom Holland and Nicholas Wolterstorff, the Christian tradition informed the development of these ideas to begin with.) Human dignity, not particular Christian doctrines or beliefs, must order a free and diverse society.

America’s Founding Fathers understood this, but I am not sure that the members of Trump’s commission do. So it may help to briefly review the history of religious freedom in America. In the founding era, three competing visions of church and state emerged.

In Massachusetts, John Adams and the other framers of the 1780 state constitution gave the government the power to tax residents to support the “institution of the public worship of God, and for the support and maintenance of public Protestant teachers of piety, religion, and morality, in all cases where such provision shall not be made voluntarily.” Such a tax was necessary because, as Article 3 of the Constitution states, “the happiness of a people, and the good order and preservation of civil government, essentially depend upon piety, religion and morality….” The Congregational Church remained Massachusetts’s established church until 1833.

Massachusetts also required a religious-test oath for officeholding. Candidates for election to the state legislature needed to be “Protestant.” When Benjamin Franklin heard about this stipulation, he wrote his friend, the Unitarian moral philosopher Richard Price: “I am fully aware of your Opinion respecting Religious Tests; but tho’ the People of Massachusetts have not in their new Constitution kept quite clear of them.” 

Franklin opposed religious tests, but, as he understood it, the place of his birth and the colony established by 17th-century Puritans was at least moving in the right direction: “...if we consider what that People were 100 years ago, we must allow they have gone to great Lengths in Liberality of Sentiment on religious subjects; and we may hope for a greater Degrees of Perfection, when, their Constitution, some years hence, shall be revised.” Franklin would give Massachusetts a pass, at least for now. “When a Religion is good,” he told Price, “I conceive that it will support itself; and when it cannot support itself, and God does not take care to support it, so that its Professors are oblig’d to call for the help of the Civil Power, ‘tis a Sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one.”

Patrick Henry, the two-time governor of Virginia, proposed another model of church-state relations. In “A Bill Establishing a Provision for Teachers of the Christian Religion (1784), he called for a general religious tax in Virginia to fund religious teachers who would offer “the general diffusion of Christian knowledge…to correct the morals of men, restrain their vices, and preserve the peace of society.” Henry suggested that county sheriffs would collect religious taxes in their communities and keep a list of the religious society to which the taxpayer wanted their money distributed.

But for fellow Virginians Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, Henry’s “General Assessment” (as it was called) was still a religious tax. Madison challenged it in his 1785 petition, Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments, which most of the state’s Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians supported. These evangelicals suffered religious persecution for decades under the colonial Anglican establishment in Virginia and thus welcomed a complete separation of church and state. For them, religious freedom was not about building a Christian or moral nation; it was, more importantly, about freeing up the opportunity to build the Kingdom of God.

Madison’s Remonstrance did not pass in the Virginia Assembly. Still, it certainly paved the way for Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom in 1786, considered by many to be the greatest statement of religious freedom ever written. The future president of the United States argued that the government should not be in the business of promoting religion through taxpayer money and wrote that compelling anyone to fund a religion he does not believe in is "sinful and tyrannical." Because of this statute, Jefferson, a man who did not believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ and removed all references to the supernatural in his edited version of the Gospels, became an evangelical hero. In many parts of the United States, he rode evangelical support to two presidential terms.

Of the three major models on the relationship between church and state available to Americans in the early republic–Adams, Henry, and Jefferson/Madison–the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom most directly informed the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

The Trump Commission's report does not cite Jefferson’s statute. Its recommendations point the other way, toward direct funding of faith-based institutions and toward public endorsement of religious practice in schools. The report quotes Trump: "We're bringing back religion in our country... because for America to be a great nation, we must always be one nation under God." That is not a defense of religious liberty, but an endorsement of religion by the state.

The same tension appears in the report's call to place the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms. A sacred text that opens with "I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt not have strange gods before Me" is not a neutral document; it is a claim about which god a schoolchild should worship—endorsing it as classroom decor is a form of religious establishment.

A common critique of what I just wrote in the preceding paragraph goes something like this: American law is built on the 10 Commandments, and we should thus display them in public school classrooms for historical, not religious reasons. This argument is correct in its claim that “Judeo-Christian” ideas informed the U.S. legal system. But the 10 Commandments are also (and primarily) part of sacred scripture for two major world religions: Christianity and Judaism. This makes their placement in school classrooms a First Amendment violation. The effort to post them is more about culture war politics than an honest interpretation of the Bill of Rights.

Much of the report's historical argument rests not on published scholarship but on the testimony of commissioners like culture warrior Eric Metaxas and television pop psychologist Dr. Phil McGraw.  For example, the report calls for restoring service members discharged over their religious objections to the COVID-19 vaccine. Still, for all its appeals to American history, the report ignores the fact that George Washington himself mandated smallpox inoculation for the Continental Army in 1777.

Elsewhere, the report attributes Virginia's 1776 constitutional definition of religion to James Madison, but George Mason actually wrote that document. Madison's actual views on religion's relationship to government—he opposed military chaplains and later in his life rejected days of fasting and prayer—run counter to the report's broader argument.

A separate claim, sourced to Dr. Phil, asserts that "In God We Trust" dates to the nation's founding. The phrase did not appear on currency until 1864, and not on paper money until 1957. These kinds of sloppy historical errors further undermine the report's credibility.

The report also invokes religion's "prophetic" role in American life. Like the 17^th-century Puritan clergy who called the Massachusetts Bay Colony back to its spiritual founding, Trump’s commission calls the United States back to its stated ideals. This is the best argument in the document, and I largely agree: a healthy society needs spiritual voices willing to criticize it, not simply bless it. But I am not entirely sure that the Founders shared such a prophetic view of religion. Washington and his contemporaries valued religion chiefly as a support for civic order — a "pillar," in Washington's own words from his Farewell Address (1796), not an independent moral authority that might one day call out the American republic for its sins. Genuine faith, of the kind that produced abolitionists and civil rights activists, is not submissive. This is why the commission report's own celebration of religion's humanitarian record sits so awkwardly beside the administration's cuts to USAID and PEPFAR. As Mr. and Mrs. Beaver reminded Lucy in C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe, Aslan is not a tame lion. True religion never serves the state, despite what some of the founders may have believed.

Much of the report's factual foundation comes from testimony gathered from 100 self-selected witnesses who testified before the committee over 10 months. These accounts likely contain real experiences of genuine mistreatment. Still, a self-selected sample skewed toward people already engaged in high-profile disputes is not a representative picture of how religious liberty functions for most Americans day to day. It is also worth noting that almost all these witnesses describe being persecuted for Christianity rather than other religious faiths.

None of this means the document is without merit. Its section on healthcare conscience protections — shielding medical professionals from being compelled to participate in procedures that violate their beliefs — is reasonable in principle, even if its actual application will call for careful, case-by-case judgment. Its defense of faith-based colleges competing for public funding on an equal footing with secular institutions, rather than as a special exemption, is fair.  And the report’s condemnation of attacks on churches and disruptions of worship should be obvious to all readers, regardless of political conviction.

The report references Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, urging Americans to refuse to participate in lies as the surest defense of a free society. Coming from a commission built on a skewed committee, thin history, and selectively gathered testimony, and serving a presidential administration not known for its truthfulness, the citation reads more as irony than moral exhortation.

The deeper question this report raises is not whether religious Americans deserve protection — they do and always have under the First Amendment. It is whether "religious liberty," in this administration's hands, means freedom for all faiths to practice without government interference, or freedom for one faith tradition to receive government favor. A genuine defense of religious liberty would welcome faith into public life on equal terms for everyone without asking the state to put its thumb on the scale for any of them. This report never quite gets there.

There was a time when Wendell Berry was a passionate and even amusing critic of Christianity. This is seen perhaps most explicitly in one of his earliest published essays, "The Long-Legged House." 

In the essay, Berry describes the experience of repairing an old cabin built by a relative of his. That cabin would become the home that he and his soon-to-be wife would move into it after their wedding. (For long-time readers of Berry’s work, the cabin by the river that Jayber Crow moves to in his dying days is the fictional imagining of this actual cabin where Mr. and Mrs. Berry began their married life together.) Much of the essay is taken up with the meaningfulness of the work of restoring such a place, the ways in which that work tied Berry to his place and his people, and how the preparing of that place for his wife would also set something of a course for their life together.

Then Berry turns to the church, an institution about which he had virtually nothing to say up to that point. But as the wedding grew closer, it became impossible to avoid the church—which is what Berry had been doing quite happily and successfully. When you read his account of things, it is hard to blame the man for wanting to stay well clear of the church:

Our wedding reminds me a little of the Kentucky Derby. The main event, which lasted only a couple of minutes, required days of frantic prologue. During this commotion one must discontinue one’s own life and attempt to emulate everybody. Nobody can be still until convinced that this marriage will be like everybody else’s. The men insinuate. The women gloat. The church is resurrected and permitted to interfere. As at funerals, the principals cannot be decently let alone, but must be overhauled, upgraded, and messed with until they are not recognizable.

During the week up to and including the wedding I am sure I was at the center of more absurdity than I hope ever to be at the center of again. One of my unforgettable moments, as they are called, was a quaint session with the minister who having met me for the first time that moment, and being scarcely better acquainted with Tanya, undertook to instruct us in the marital intimacies. A display of preacherish cant and presumption unusual even for a preacher, and all carried out with a slogging joyless dutifulness. As we were leaving he handed us a book on marriage.

In a country less abject before “expert advice,” the effrontery of it would be incredible. Well, be damned to him and his book, too. We thrive in spite of him, and in defiance of some of his rules. We are, I like to think, his Waterloo—though I know that, like most of his kind, he had come to his Waterloo before that, and survived by his inability to recognize it.

The text is obviously Berry, though written when he was only in his early 30s: You can hear the language of his male characters in it—of Jack Beechum and Carter Keith and Nathan Coulter. The phrase "survived by his inability to recognize it" is also vintage Berry and a classic example of his ability to find simple, under-stated ways of making a devastating critique. The disdain for "experts" is there as well, as is the revulsion at ostentatious displays. It is not at all surprising to think that the man who wrote these words would, within only a few years, write The Memory of Old Jack. Indeed, we can find a similarly disdainful attitude toward the church in that book, the first of Berry's truly great novels, alongside Jayber Crow and Hannah Coulter.

In this particular case, the church manifests as villain in the final pages of the novel, as the departed old farmer Jack Beechum is fraudulently reconstructed as a dutiful son of the church by his affluent and spoiled daughter, Clara, who hasn't known her father well for at least 30 years, if she ever did at all. In a particularly pointed passage, Beechum's true heir and closest relative, Mat Feltner, instructs the preacher to simply read a few Psalms at a small graveside service. When the preacher ignores Mat's request and launches into a showy and dishonest prayer after reading the Psalms, Berry describes Mat's reaction to this fictionalized version of "preacherish cant":

And then Mat exercises for the first time his prerogative as the oldest man. He turns his back and gazes upon his fields.

The gesture is subtle, perhaps even polite in its own way, yet its meaning is unmistakable: For Berry, at this time at least, the church is merely one of the institutions of the world, seeking to make better theoretical persons in better theoretical places, without any recognition of the world as it is, of people as they are, and gratitude for all the good things we have. The church, like virtually all other institutions, is perpetually trying to improve its members, exhorting them to make something of themselves. None of them see and love the world as it is, see and love people as they are. They only love imagined, far off places and imagined, far off people who exist only in the false prayers of mendacious preachers. 

There is another passage in Old Jack that names the failure Berry recognizes in the church, but not in the church alone; it is a failure of imagination, a failure of seeing. In the passage I am about to quote, Mat Feltner is reflecting on the bizarre life of a couple renting a home from him on his property. This couple, the Berlews, are travelers, thrill chasers. They avoid hard work as much as they can, seeking only to work enough to make enough to facilitate their thrill chasing. 

For the privilege of such a life they end up working far harder to maintain their old car that facilitates that life than they ever would dream of working in the day for pay.

Then Berry remarks, comparing the Berlews with Beechum's extremely rich and successful daughter and son-in-law the Pettits,

It comes to Mat suddenly—so that he first grimaces and then grunts—that the Berlews and Pettits represent the two halves of the same distraction. What the Pettits are is what the Berlews dream of being. Is not the Berlews' old car the hopeless dream of a Cadillac? Is not their tireless going a persistently frustrated pilgrimage in search of Easy Street? That the Pettits live on Easy Street makes no essential difference between them and the Berlews. If the Pettits are what the Berlews would like to be, they are also what the Pettits would like to be; they have imagined nothing higher than they are.

We could put it this way: There is a way we people, perhaps especially we modern people, have of imagining nothing higher than we are. And once we have started from that point, there is some sense in which Christianity can't help us. It can only be abused and twisted and perverted by us. This is what Berry recognized: The church we find in "The Long-Legged House" and The Memory of Old Jack is a church that simply takes for granted the belief that this world has nothing worthy to offer us. These churches believe without thought or question that the only good thing in this life is to seek to save our own souls out of the world—and if that is the only thing of ultimate importance, than everything else doesn’t much matter, which perhaps explains why such radical spiritualism can often be found closely associated with rampant materialism and spiritual complacency. The ease with which a kind of fundamentalist Baptist or Methodist Christianity of the old south can be melded with a life that imagines nothing higher than we are is actually quite astonishing: Christianity simply becomes one means of serving ourselves (by giving us a sense of superiority), of exalting ourselves (by highlighting our own righteousness in the eyes of others), of protecting ourselves (by acquiring the requisite fire insurance to protect our immortal souls). 

You might say that this is a Christianity that lacks both a doctrine of creation and a doctrine of resurrection; it is bloodless and disembodied and, for precisely those reasons, has very little to offer the world and very little of use to protect its members from violating themselves, their neighbors, and the world.

This is a point worth lingering over. There is a passage in the Gospels where Jesus warns the religious leaders that all their religious teaching serves only to make their followers twice the children of Hell that they themselves are. The Christianity we encounter in Berry's early work is one example of how that can happen. Only leave the great idol of the heart—the supremacy of the self—unchallenged and Christianity, of a kind at least, becomes a tool for spreading and facilitating unimaginable wickedness.

To put it another way, when Berry looked at the goodness of the world he walked about in every day and set that against what he found in the church, he found the church's account of goodness entirely inadequate. Indeed, he found the church routinely taking the side of evil while the world itself shined unnoticed. What Treebeard says to Merry and Pippin in The Lord of the Rings could just as well be said by the land and, perhaps, by Berry himself in Berry's fiction: "Side? I am on nobody's side, for nobody is altogether on my side."

It's important to understand this because this is a different sort of objection to Christianity from those familiar to most Christians. It is not claiming that Christianity’s moral norms are stuffy or antiquated. It is not an objection founded on some sort of moral relativism, or even on some sort of strong moral critique against Christianity. 

The failure, as someone like Jack Beechum would see it, is that he lives "hard up against mystery" every day (to use a phrase from Jayber Crow) and when he sets what he sees in the world, both its beauties and its many evils, he simply finds the Christian account to be small and stuffy, and, as a result, deeply unconvincing. Christianity is too small for the men of Berry's novels—the gratitudes and mercies they receive every day by virtue of their life as human beings (and, particularly, as farmers) seem far more real to them than anything they ever heard in a church.

It's not that there is some negative criticism of Christianity that Berry accepts and this prevents him from believing; that framing presupposes belief as a kind of default mode which will only be deviated from if presented with some sort of sufficient obstacle. But that isn't how the early Berry regards Christianity. It's not that Christianity is necessarily immoral or corrupt or unjust. It's that when Berry encounters the given earth with its pleasures and mercies and difficulties and sets it against Christianity he finds the world far more beautiful.

That, I think, is why Christianity, though seldom treated kindly in Berry's early work is also not something he spends an immense amount of time addressing. Berry is not a misotheist, a god-hater, in the way of a Nietzsche or a Christopher Hitchens. Religion is almost wholly absent from The Memory of Old Jack and from most of Berry's short stories, for example, and most of his early essays. To the degree he considers religion at all, it is simply as one more example of an institution more concerned with its own life than the life of the world and filled with people more concerned with their own lives than the lives of others or of their place.

And yet that is not where the story ends. By the time we come to Jayber Crow, published in the early 2000s, Berry has retained many of his criticisms of certain Christian communities and even of certain Christian ideas. But the tone is measured and careful, as if he has learned to do what Frederick Douglass learned a hundred years prior: to distinguish between a sort of Americanized folk Christianity aimed at self-exaltation at the expense of all else and the "pure peaceable" Christianity of Christ. The point is not that the theological questions have evaporated for Berry, or at least for Jayber Crow. They don’t. They linger. But the experience of living in the world and finding love in it caused Jayber to reconsider his relationship to the faith—and in the Gospels, at least, he finds an account of love that anchors and deepens his own experience of it.

And so the rage we find in Berry’s older work has dissipated by the time we arrive at Jayber Crow. What remains is an ordinary man vexed by certain theological questions still, yet convinced that God's mercy can work to overcome any evil and that Christ's law of love is the pinnacle of moral wisdom. How did this change happen?

A neglected volume of essays published in the early 1980s provides an answer—and for my money this particular volume is Berry's greatest accomplishment as an essayist. The collection is called Standing by Words and in it Berry considers poetry, poetic forms, the limits inherent in language, and how all these things relate to the ways we imagine the world. Why is it the volume that is so pivotal in his reconsideration of Christianity? 

I think the answer is here: What Berry knew all along is that he found the life of the world more entrancing and satisfying than the life of the church as he knew it. What becomes apparent in Standing by Words is that he needed an account of why the life of the world is marked by the beauty, abundance, and superfluity that so delighted him. The answer he comes to, through various means, is that the life of the earth is marked by forms that it did not choose for itself, so to speak, but also cannot be overwritten, erased, or remade without causing great and unnecessary harm. The good life and our capacity for good work are both largely bound up with how we are able to relate to the order, place, and people that have been given to us. When we regard these things with indifference, rage, or contempt it turns out that we can violate the fields that Mat Feltner turned toward in Old Jack just as easily as we can violate churches or universities.

What Berry is reckoning with in this collection of essays is the way in which his own callings as both a writer and a farmer have been compromised and set at odds with the givenness of things, coming under the sway of specialization and control and so being drawn out of the world, one might say. In the first essay of the volume, in which Berry laments the "specialization" of poetry he writes, "the poet is isolated and specialized and.. the old union of beauty, goodness, and truth is broken." Later he continues, writing about poets in much the same way he had previously written about bankers and professional religious people:

One of the oldest doctrines of specialist-poets is that of the primacy of language and the primacy of poetry. They have virtually made a religion of their art, a religion based not on what they have in common with other people, but on what they do that sets them apart. For poets who believe this way, a poem is not a point of clarification or connection between themselves and the world on the one hand and between themselves and their readers on the other, nor is it an adventure into any reality or mystery outside themselves. It is a seeking of self in words, the making of a word-world in which the word-self may be at home. The poets go to their poems as other people go to the world or to God—for a sense of their own reality. ...

It may be argued that this emphasis was in some sense forced upon poets by their peculiar isolation in a society dominated by specialists of more practical kinds. But this way of looking at language and at poetry also completes and enforces the isolation of poets, not just within a sort of literary ghetto or subghetto, but within themselves. Mark Strand is evidently not the only poet who would say that, 'the self in a sense is all we have left.'

There are strong echoes here of what Berry wrote of the Berlews and Pettits in The Memory of Old Jack, but whereas in Jack Berry seems to isolate that narrowed spirit, in "The Specialization of Poetry" he is suggesting that it has become ubiquitous. In Old Jack the villains are bankers and drifters and the heroes are farmers. By the time we come to Standing by Words Berry is reckoning constantly with the ways in which farmers and poets–his two vocations–can be just as complicit in the unmaking of places as the bankers and drifters. The problem, in short, can’t be concentrated or distilled down to “corrupt institutions indifferent to the health of the land smothering men like Jack Beechum.” The problem Berry wants to address strikes at the heart of what it means to steward both land and language, the two great preoccupations of Berry’s life.

What this means is that he no longer can focus his ire primarily on bankers, like the Pettits, or lazy dreamers, like the Berlews. Rather, he has had to turn this critique loose on everyone, including the people closest to him and, indeed, on himself. But then that also suggests that the contest we see at the end of Old Jack in which Mat Feltner turns away from the rude and pontificating preacher to turn toward the fields is not quite so clear as that image might suggest. The fields themselves can become a subject of "specialization" and can themselves be cut off. If you are seeking an escape from preacherish cant, it is no sure thing that you will find it in the fields. You might find the same desecration there that one can find in so many other places.

It turns out that one cannot simply pit the life of the world against the life of institutions. Rather, even the world itself can, in the twistedness and lostness of human beings, be set against the life of the world. It is a challenge to see the life of the world truly. And if it is a challenge, that suggests that aids are needed in order to do so. This is where we begin to see a reconsideration of Christianity in Berry's work.

In the essay, "Standing by Words," Berry considers the problem of language and naming in ways quite similar to what Lewis sought to address in The Abolition of Man. And he comes to quite similar answers, though he gets there via a different route. The problem, for Berry, concerns the ways in which language itself becomes divorced from any kind of external control or referent aside from power and will.

He rightly sees that the health of the world and of people and their many communities is dependent on the notion that words stand for something real; language is not simply an expression of tastes or a tool for acquiring power. Language is how we try to name what is real and true and worth living for. The trouble is that when language becomes materialized or politicized, it loses its referent. He illustrates the point with two diagrams, one of which he suggests is a model of healthy communal and natural life while the other is the industrial semblance:

In the first diagram, everything that is part of our life in the world is encompassed in some sense. The second, by contrast, has removed anything that can’t be quantified or financialized. This is how Berry names the change that happens when you move from the economy depicted in the first diagram to the economy of the second diagram:

So long as the smaller systems are enclosed within the larger, and so long as all are connected by complex patterns of interdependency, as we know they are, then whatever affects one system will affect the others. It seems that this system of systems is safe so long as each system is controlled by the next larger one. If at any point the hierarchy is reversed, and the smaller begins to control the larger, then the destruction of the entire system of systems begins. This system of systems is perhaps an updated, ecological version of the Great Chain of Being. That is, it may bring us back to a hierarchical structure not too different from the one that underlies Paradise Lose–a theory of the form of Creation which is at the same time a moral form, and which is violated by the ‘disobedience’ or hubris of attempting to rise and take power above one’s proper place.

What does Berry propose to fix this? As is implied above, he suggests that what we need is a category above 'nature' that controls and names it, and that category, he suggests, is "religion.” The issue he sees is that his “system of systems” is fragile and easily destroyed because its only measure is truth and truth is easily ignored or suppressed. A moral witness is needed from outside Berry’s system, something to help the members of a community recognize why it is good for them to tune their lives to the lives of neighbors and the life of the world. That something, he thinks, is religion:

There is no reliable standard for behavior anywhere within the system of systems except truth. Lesser standards produce destruction–as, for example, the standards of public relations make gibberish of language. The trouble, obviously, is that we do not know much of the truth…. And so yet another term has be introduced. The system of systems has to be controlled from above and outside. There has to be a religious interest of some kind above the ecogenetic. It will be sufficient to my purpose to say simply that the system of systems is enclosed within mystery, in which some truth can be known but never all truth.

In other words, the members of the world can never know the world exhaustively. And so a certain deference to mystery and to our own creaturely ignorance is often necessary to prevent us from committing monstrous acts. You might say that this is Berry’s articulation of the famous Chesterton’s Fence aphorism in which the British writer G. K. Chesterton said that a fence should never be knocked down by someone who doesn’t know why it is there. The only time it is safe to knock a fence down is when you do know its purpose and can explain why it is no longer needed. The recognition of ignorance, in other words, should provoke us toward gentleness, caution, and care–and this provocation, Berry thinks, is what is needed to preserve healthy places, which include the land and the people living from the land.

Interestingly, Berry actually pressed the religious language even further. Earlier in the essay he had teased at this solution when he suggested that the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation would offer a way of grounding our language, such that we can claim that our language is not simply taste or power-grabbing, but can actually be an attempt to speak of reality. Specifically he argues that in the Incarnation true Word and true Flesh are found together, suggesting that not only should we try to speak of reality truly, but that we actually can.

In other words, by the time we arrive at Standing by Words Berry has become aware that the deeper evil he wants to oppose is a kind of human wilfulness that, flowing out of the idea that there is nothing higher than ourselves, reduces everything it finds to consumable goods. The battle is not, necessarily, between “the peace of wild things” and the mechanical. The evils of the machine can come to reign in the wild as easily as they can in churches, farms, and universities. 

What is needed, rather, is some account that offers us a way to name the things that are higher than us, a way to love those things, and a way to tune our lives to them—and that work can happen as much in the fields as it does in the church. The way Berry learns to make this critique is through a return to Christianity, through considering the ways in which theological themes in Christian scripture help us to see and love what is higher than us, to know that Higher Good so well that we can tune ourselves to it wherever we go, whether that be the wild places, a classroom or, even, a church.

Stefan Borg, The Return of the Common Good: The Postliberal Project Left and Right. Routledge, 2026. $200.00, 162 pp.

As someone who has been a self-identified postliberal since around 2010, I have been waiting for a book like this for years. Postliberal political theory has recently become a focal point of intense—and often hostile—attention. Critics routinely accuse postliberals of misrepresenting liberalism, failing to offer constructive alternatives, or advancing proposals that amount to thinly veiled authoritarianism. At the same time, confusion persists about what postliberalism actually is, where it came from, and whether it constitutes anything more than a fleeting reaction to recent political developments.

For several years now, I have frequently been asked whether there exists a single work that could orient readers wholly uninitiated into postliberal political theory. Until now, I have had no monograph-length treatment to recommend—no book that offers a charitable, synoptic account of postliberalism’s intellectual genealogy, internal diversity, and shared concerns. Most existing works either fixate on one recent American faction or engage in sweeping denunciations that obscure the deeper continuities and substantive agreements animating postliberal critiques of the liberal order. In such accounts, opposition to liberalism functions less as an argument worth engaging than as a prelude to warnings about the dangers supposedly lurking beyond it.

This confusion has only been exacerbated by the way postliberalism is frequently narrated through the lens of the Trumpist moment. Too often, postliberal political theory is treated as little more than an opportunistic response to American populism or an attempt to capitalize on the ascent of President Trump. Meanwhile, postliberal discourse in the United States has taken on a more statist, tribalistic, and narrowly particularistic tone, intensifying uncertainty about its relationship to nationalism. Is Christian nationalism properly postliberal? Is postliberalism simply the political theology on display at National Conservatism conferences? In the absence of careful distinctions, critics—especially in academic and media contexts—have been quick to dismiss the entire discourse as intellectually reckless or socially dangerous for daring to challenge liberalism at a fundamental level.

Against this backdrop, Stefan Borg’s The Return of the Common Good: The Postliberal Project Left and Right arrives as a welcome—and much-needed—intervention. Borg’s aim is not to defend every postliberal proposal, but to clarify what postliberalism is, where it comes from, and why it deserves serious consideration. As he puts it in the introduction, the book seeks “to remedy this confusion and present postliberalism as a fully-fledged tradition of thought.” While acknowledging significant internal differences, Borg argues that postliberalism constitutes a coherent—if still underdeveloped and often misunderstood—critique of liberalism, one that has been ignored in part because of liberalism’s own hegemonic status. That critique, he insists, “ought to be taken seriously.”

Borg’s central claim is that postliberalism is unified by what he calls a shared “common project,” a claim signaled in the book’s subtitle. Despite their disagreements, major postliberal thinkers “mobilize a set of similar arguments about the historical trajectory of liberalism and share an understanding of, as well as having similar misgivings about, the liberal order.” They diverge over what should replace liberalism, but they are united in rejecting liberalism’s “one-sided preoccupation with maximizing individual autonomy” at the expense of goods that sustain political and social life. In Borg’s formulation, “the postliberal project may in part be defined as an attempt to resurrect the common good tradition.”

Accordingly, the appeal to the common good functions as postliberalism’s central normative standard. At its most basic level, postliberalism insists that claims of individual autonomy must be ordered toward, and constrained by, the flourishing of the political community as a whole. Politics should not be oriented primarily toward autonomy-maximization, but toward sustaining the conditions of shared life.

In its most ambitious form, Borg argues, postliberalism seeks to retrieve a more ancient and Christian conception of politics—one oriented toward virtue and genuine human flourishing—over against the liberal tendency to construe politics as a mechanism for securing individual freedom alone.

Importantly, Borg is careful to stress that this “common project” does not imply uniformity. He distinguishes between two broad branches of postliberalism: a British strand and an American one. While there is sufficient overlap to justify speaking of a single project, the differences between these branches—particularly their historical origins—are analytically illuminating. One of Borg’s most valuable contributions is to demonstrate that British postliberalism long predates both Donald Trump’s election and Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed. On Borg’s account, postliberalism emerges in the 1990s and develops across theology, political theory, jurisprudence, international relations, and cultural criticism.

The term “postliberalism” itself (with reference to politics) was first deployed in the early 1990s by the British political theorist John Gray to name his growing disillusionment with liberal assumptions and liberal social orders. Yet Borg traces the deeper roots of British postliberalism to Radical Orthodoxy, the theological movement associated above all with John Milbank. Radical Orthodoxy mounted a far-reaching critique of secular modernity and “what is perceived as its chief ideological expression, namely liberalism.” Its foundational text is Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory (1990), which argued that liberalism rests on a secular ontology that displaces theology as the interpretive framework for social life.

Postliberalism assumed a more overtly political form in the aftermath of Labour’s defeat in the 2010 British election. Maurice Glasman founded Blue Labour, while Philip Blond—a student of Milbank’s and a contributor to Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology—advanced related ideas under the banner of Red Toryism through the think tank ResPublica. Around the same time, the term “postliberalism” entered wider public discourse through figures such as David Goodhart, who popularized postliberal critiques of market society and social fragmentation. Across these expressions, British postliberalism combined a rejection of radical individualism and market atomization with an equally strong resistance to collectivism, emphasizing virtue, intermediary institutions, and local forms of belonging.

At the intellectual core of this tradition stands Radical Orthodoxy. Beginning with Theology and Social Theory and culminating, in Borg’s telling, with Milbank and Adrian Pabst’s The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future (2016)—which Borg describes as “the most theoretically elaborate articulation of postliberalism” and “the most comprehensive statement of postliberalism currently on offer”—Radical Orthodoxy advances a comprehensive critique of liberalism as the ideology of the secular. Liberalism, on this account, insists on carving out a supposedly neutral public sphere free from theological commitments, reducing politics to procedural coordination among competing conceptions of the good. Radical Orthodoxy rejects this neutrality as illusory. Liberalism, Milbank argues, advances its own substantive moral vision, grounded in what he famously calls an “ontology of violence”—a vision of social reality that presupposes primordial conflict and self-interest rather than participation in the divine good. As Borg summarizes, Milbank’s project seeks to reinstate theology as a governing meta-discourse by which secular modernity itself may be judged, and to recover a Christian social vision as a genuine alternative to the liberal order.

Much of Borg’s account resonated deeply with my own intellectual trajectory. My engagement with postliberalism predates the Trump moment and developed independently of the American cohort associated with The Postliberal Order. Like many others, I was first prepared for postliberal arguments through engagement with communitarian thinkers such as Alasdair MacIntyre and Michael Sandel, as well as figures who bridge communitarianism and postliberal theology, notably Stanley Hauerwas.

Borg is especially helpful in making explicit the overlap between communitarianism and postliberalism. Postliberals share with communitarians a relational anthropology, a rejection of autonomous individualism, skepticism toward claims of neutrality, and a critique of negative liberty as liberalism’s core value. Yet Borg rightly resists collapsing the two traditions. Communitarianism emerged in a different historical moment and often exhibited a greater reluctance toward state action, and tended toward preservation of inherited social forms—which can drift in a more relativistic direction. Postliberalism—especially in its Radical Orthodox variant—is more overtly political and more explicitly theological, advancing a thicker normative account of political order and the common good.

The American branch of postliberalism, Borg argues, coalesces later, beginning with Trump’s election in 2016 and crystallizing with Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed (2018), which Borg calls “the first defining work of U.S. postliberalism.” Deneen’s critique bears a clear communitarian imprint, hardly surprising given his exposure to the communitarian political theorist Wilson Carey McWilliams during his undergraduate years at Rutgers. Liberalism, Deneen argues, rests on an anthropology of voluntaristic individualism, a conception of liberty as autonomy-expansion, and a severing of the human person from nature. Far from limiting state power, this individualism generates statism: as social bonds erode, the state expands to manage the resulting disorder. Market capitalism intensifies this dynamic by commodifying desire while relying on regulatory expansion. Why Liberalism Failed is primarily diagnostic; Deneen’s later Regime Change (2023) advances more constructive proposals centered on the recovery of the common good. Borg situates these developments within the consolidation of American postliberalism around Deneen, Adrian Vermeule, Gladden Pappin, and Chad Pecknold in the early 2020s.

Despite these differences, Borg identifies three elements that unify postliberalism as a common project: a genealogical critique of liberalism’s internal contradictions, a social analysis of the orders liberalism produces, and a normative commitment to the common good.

First, postliberals broadly agree that liberalism is internally self-undermining. Its commitment to atomistic individualism proves corrosive not only to social life but also to the natural world. Liberalism systematically privileges the political and economic spheres over the civic and social, and this imbalance ultimately erodes the latter. Moreover, while liberalism presents itself as neutral with respect to substantive visions of the good, postliberals argue that it in fact enforces this purported neutrality as a comprehensive moral framework, often acting illiberally toward those whose substantive commitments conflict with it.

Postliberals identify liberalism as a decisive break with classical and Christian accounts of political order, and this is why Thomas Hobbes figures so centrally in their genealogy. Leviathan is commonly understood as “the most forceful articulation of the break with the ancients,” radically undercutting the foundations of common-good political theory. As Borg explains, “modernity is often understood as the process by which Hobbesian assumptions of the world slowly but steadily won out.” Hobbes’s conception of order as an artificial imposition of power designed to manage primordial hostility generates a pervasive suspicion toward social authority and inherited forms of life—one that, over time, functions as an acid on the social fabric. Contractarian models weaken the intermediary institutions that once mediated between the individual and the state, while liberalism’s commitment to negative liberty fosters mistrust toward the traditions, habits, and norms that sustain common life. In a market society these dynamics are further exacerbated, as social relations themselves are increasingly commodified. The result is a mutually reinforcing logic in which the abstract individual, the expanding state, and the market together erode the very sources of social cohesion and shared flourishing on which liberal order ultimately depends.

Second, postliberals analyze the social orders liberalism produces, with particular attention to the rise of a managerial elite. Drawing on James Burnham, Christopher Lasch, and Michael Lind, postliberals narrate the emergence of a professional class that governs institutions while remaining detached from the communities they administer. This elite combines technocratic power with cultural liberalism, advancing norms that corrode social solidarity while entrenching its own privileges.

Before turning to the third element, Borg clarifies a frequent misunderstanding. Critics object that postliberals offer an overly narrow, one-sided account of liberalism. Borg concedes that postliberal critiques are not primarily exercises in textual reconstruction. But this, he argues, is precisely the point. Postliberals treat liberalism not merely as a theory but as a sociopolitical project whose consequences matter more than its internal nuances. The question is whether liberal societies can sustain the goods they require to function.

This leads to the third element: the recovery of the common good. Drawing on Helen Rosenblatt’s authoritative history of liberalism, Borg acknowledges that earlier liberals often affirmed the common good, but he argues that contemporary liberalism—exemplified by John Rawls—treats it as politically inaccessible. Under conditions of pluralism, Rawls contends, the state must remain neutral and secure fair procedures which allow individuals to pursue their disparate ends rather than promote substantive goods. Postliberalism rejects this premise, seeking to recover a politics ordered toward virtue rather than autonomy.

Borg identifies three postliberal approaches to the common good: pluralist, common good conservatism, and integralism. The pluralist approach, associated with British postliberalism and Michael Lind, emphasizes an open-ended pursuit of the common good through dispersed power, corporatist institutions, relational economies, and strong civil society. Deneen’s common good conservatism places greater emphasis on tradition, social stability, and popular wisdom, articulated through his concept of “aristopopulism.” Integralism, associated with Vermeule, offers the most programmatic and state-centered approach, insisting that political authority should actively promote substantive goods.

Borg’s typology usefully dispels the claim that postliberalism lacks constructive proposals. Yet the book’s greatest strength lies in re-centering the common good itself—an emphasis increasingly eclipsed by the association of postliberalism with nationalism. 

Echoing his earlier point about communitarianism, Borg argues that postliberals are opposed to radical conservatism in that they are not primarily motivated by the preservation of a given social order—a posture that can easily slide into relativism. And, as Oliver O’Donovan demonstrates in Ways of Judgment, nationalism often functions as a species of identity politics, which postliberals recognize as an expression of liberalism. Postliberals can concede that nationalist critiques of liberal universalism have real force, particularly insofar as liberalism tends to universalize late-modern Western norms. Yet nationalism, Borg suggests, frequently replicates liberalism’s own pathologies. It retreats to a Hobbesian state of nature at the international level and reduces political judgment to collective self-interest—merely scaling liberal individualism and liberalism’s “ontology of violence” up to the level of nations.

By contrast, Borg shows that postliberals insist on the irreducible universality of the Christian faith, even while affirming the necessity of historical and cultural particularity. As he puts it, “[U]niversals must always find expression in historically instantiated particulars …. Universals are never fully disclosed outside of their (always imperfect) instantiations in particulars.” Where strands of the dissident right radicalize particularity and lapse into an ontology of violence—now transposed to relations between nations—postliberals such as Pabst and Milbank advance a form of Christian internationalism. We should understand nations as neighbors—each seeking in its own way to instantiate the good, with the common good itself requiring forms of international cooperation. On this view, postliberalism decisively rejects frameworks such as Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis.

The book also draws attention to the “sex-realist feminists”—figures such as Louise Perry, Christine Emba, Erika Bachiochi, and Mary Harrington—showing how their work advances distinctly postliberal arguments. In particular, they critique contractarian accounts of sexual relations, the commodification of intimacy, the equation of libertinism with empowerment, and what Harrington terms “bio-libertarianism.” This strand of thought is rarely included in standard mappings of postliberalism, yet Borg persuasively demonstrates its family resemblance to the broader postliberal project. On this point, I am entirely in agreement: these thinkers deserve to be recognized as an integral part of the postliberal conversation.

There are, however, areas where Borg could go further. He rightly notes that not all postliberal positions are wholly or uniformly antiliberal, and he gestures toward the ways liberalism emerged by abstracting and radicalizing certain Christian principles. I would press this insight further: liberalism is best understood as a Christian heresy—or, in Oliver O’Donovan’s formulation, the “prodigal child” of Christendom. Liberalism represents, to borrow G. K. Chesterton’s phrase, a set of Christian “virtues gone mad.” Insofar as liberal orders continue to draw on moral capital they cannot themselves reproduce (à la the Böckenforde dilemma), that capital must be re-tethered to the Christian whole from which it was severed. On this view, the task is not simply to oppose liberalism but to call it home—to re-anchor its moral claims within the ecclesial and theological framework that once gave them coherence and limits.

Indeed, this points toward a deeper omission. Borg would benefit from drawing the theological thread more consistently throughout the book. Postliberalism—especially in its Radical Orthodox forms—is not merely a sociological critique but a theological one. Postliberals do not merely criticize liberalism for its deracinating social effects—for eroding the resources that sustain common life, producing increasingly atomized individuals alongside an ever-expanding state—but also for its desacralizing logic. This dimension is central to John Milbank’s argument in Theology and Social Theory, where the very category of the “secular” is exposed as a historical and conceptual invention—one that, though emerging from within the Christian tradition itself, was progressively hardened in modernity into a domain conceived as wholly autonomous from and impermeable to theological judgment. At the heart of Radical Orthodoxy, and thus of postliberalism more broadly, is the insistence that theology be recovered as a governing meta-discourse—the regina scientiarum by which other forms of knowledge are ordered and judged. 

This theological critique carries an implication that Borg only partially develops: political order is never religiously neutral. Borg notes that postliberals expose liberalism’s claim to neutrality as illusory and highlight its substantive moral commitments. Yet he stops short of drawing the full implication—namely, that such commitments are always and inevitably theological. He comes close when he observes that deviations from liberal orthodoxies are often treated as a form of “secular sinning,” but he does not carry the point far enough. Every political order, liberal ones included, necessarily renders judgments about God, religion, and their relevance to social life and human flourishing. Borg rightly shows that postliberals understand the human person as socially constituted and embedded in thick networks of relationships. But the most fully Christian expressions of postliberalism press further still, insisting that human beings are situated within a theological horizon, ordered toward God. Without foregrounding this claim, postliberalism risks being reduced to institutional reform rather than a challenge to liberalism’s spiritual architecture. 

Finally, Borg largely omits a crucial postliberal strand: ecclesiocentric postliberalism, represented by the Communio school and figures such as David L. and D. C. Schindler, as well as Peter Leithart and the Civitas network. Though largely North American, these thinkers stand closer to the theological and ecclesiological concerns of Milbank and Radical Orthodoxy than to the more overtly political forms of American postliberalism—complicating Borg’s neat British-American divide. What unites them is the insistence that the Church is not a voluntary association concerned exclusively with “private” and otherworldly realities, but a public body. To be sure, Borg does note that Deneen gestures in this direction, particularly in his critique of post-Westphalian nationalism, wherein the modern state sought to eliminate rival claims to sovereignty—above all those of the Catholic Church. In this settlement, the Church was progressively reduced by secular sovereigns who claimed the authority to determine the boundaries of acceptable religion within their respective realms. Yet Borg does not develop this line of analysis beyond a brief summary of Deneen’s point. Moreover, he appears to treat the Church as merely one intermediate institution among others situated between the individual and the state. 

What is missing—and what the Communio and Civitas strands of postliberalism help recover—is the political significance of the Church itself. Borg rightly highlights how postliberals critique liberalism for recognizing only non-state communities formed on liberal premises: voluntary associations of contracting individuals pursuing shared interests. The Church cannot be understood in these terms. She is not simply one voluntary society within civil society, constructed by individual choice and ranked beneath the state. She is a reality that confronts all persons. She is the body of Christ on earth (Rom. 12; 1 Cor. 12; Eph. 1; Col. 1), the pillar and bulwark of the truth (1 Tim. 3:15), and the Christian’s more ultimate family (Matt. 12:48–50), nation (1 Pet. 2), and polis (Eph. 2:19; cf. Phil. 3:20; Heb. 12:22–23). The Church is the most comprehensive community, summoning all persons and, in doing so, relativizing and challenging the totalizing claims of other social bodies and purported sovereigns. Yet she does so not by withdrawing from history, but by seeking to be instantiated within every society and to receive—purified and redeemed—the fruits of each. Precisely as a multinational and transnational body, the Church also serves as a source of reconciliation and healing among the nations.

Leithart explains how liberalism systematically marginalizes the Church by reshaping its ecclesiology, focusing especially on the foundational figures of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. Hobbes, Leithart contends, domesticated the Church by subordinating it to the civil sovereign, thereby resolving the problem of divided loyalties between temporal and spiritual authority. Locke, by contrast, domesticated the Church by spiritualizing and privatizing it, reducing it to a voluntary association concerned with inward belief rather than public truth. In both cases, liberalism strips the Church of any genuinely public status.

Leithart’s analysis here echoes the work of the sociologist of religion José Casanova, who has argued that the liberal state’s “preferred form of religion” is a privatized one. On this account, the liberal assumption is that religion is—and ought to remain—a “private affair.” The consequence is that the Church is stripped of any genuinely public status. It is no longer understood as a commonwealth (πολιτείας), no longer a society of “citizens” (συμπολῖται) gathered in the public assembly of the household of God (Eph. 2:12, 19). Instead, the modern liberal order ultimately recognizes only two actors as politically salient: the sovereign individual and the state. By marginalizing the Church as a public body, liberalism effectively eliminates any competing form of authority or allegiance.

Modern liberal orders have sought to privatize religion and to emancipate social life from ecclesial authority. The Church’s jurisdiction is thereby restricted to those who voluntarily choose her, while the state is increasingly treated as a comprehensive authority from which no one may opt out. Over time, the state comes to be viewed as the most ultimate and indispensable community, and loyalties once oriented toward the Church are gradually redirected toward political sovereignty. Liberalism’s deepest error, according to these postliberals, is its ecclesiological one: privatizing the Church while rendering the state ultimate. Any postliberalism that fails to recognize this fundamental ecclesiological heresy at the root of the liberal order—and the religious dangers it entails—remains incomplete.

Despite these omissions, Borg’s book is an indispensable primer on postliberalism. It is the clearest, most charitable map of the terrain currently available—and it will be my default recommendation … at least once it appears in paperback.

The following excerpt from Joseph Orso, On the Threshold of Worlds: Tending My Father Before and After His Last Breath is published with permission from Front Porch Republic Books and Wipf & Stock.

***

These things can go poorly.

Some time ago, another resident in the memory care facility died and the family cared for the body themselves. Though surely well-intentioned, they were unprepared. The details are not important, but workers were asked to do too much. Stories spread, and one young staff-member tells me the experience still gives her nightmares.

There’s no blame here. Our civilization has commodified all aspects of experience and relationship, and provides little support for our sacred responsibilities to each other. Most of us have never washed a breathless body, nor dug a grave, nor sat round-the-clock vigil with a loved one’s body after death. Our parents have not done this, nor our grandparents. Rather, cultural norms have neglected these responsibilities and replaced them with secular, economic transactions. In such a context, tending our dead ourselves is no simple task, and mistakes aren’t surprising.

That said, knowing what happened, we realize early on that caring for Dad after death, without a funeral home, is going to involve repair in this place. We speak extensively with the director of the facility, the nurses, and the staff about our plans—about how we are in touch with a community organization that supports families in doing this, how friends and family will be here to help us wash Dad’s body when the time comes, to carry him to a waiting vehicle, to sing as we carry him out.

When the time comes, we tell them, nothing will be asked of them, though they will be welcome to be present if they choose.

***

Dad’s breathing goes on beyond the hospice nurse’s guess of seventy- two hours, and the days feel liminal. During this dying time, it has taken no beckoning for the sacred to intrude upon our days. Dad is dying, and the thing to do has been obvious: sit around him as we’d sit around a fire, gazing at the flames, and telling stories and making music and eating cake until the flame burns out.

Yet there’s also work to do.

Ages upon ages ago, a prophet cried out, “Prepare the way of the Lord.” The command stands, an ever-present calling for every generation. If we do not want to hand over death to the nearest industry, there are indeed preparations to be made. Cultural patterns no longer exist for how to tend Dad between his death and his burial, so knowledge must be recovered. We must remember skills our ancestors took for granted.

We make plans and back-up plans and to-do lists. We email friends about helping carry his body from his room to the vehicle. We prepare Mom’s spare bedroom downstairs for the vigil; prepare the gravesite at the edge of the woods on our land; clean up behind the garage; pick up the ice packs for keeping Dad’s body cool during the vigil, put them in the garage freezer, and make sure someone can bring several to the facility when the time comes; get the paperwork ready so we can transport Dad’s body legally; talk to friends about helping us organize the vigil, in which people will take shifts sitting and praying with his body.

And there are questions: Do we know enough to wash the body ourselves? If it snows—and there’s a blizzard in the forecast, and the blizzard will come—how will that change things? And how are we going to lower Dad’s body into the grave? And when his flame goes out, is it possible for someone from Threshold Care Circle to be here—in case we need help washing the body, in case we need someone who has done this before to help us with something that comes up that we haven’t thought about and are totally unprepared for?

“Prepare the way!” cried Isaiah.

I call Susan from Threshold again, and she says someone can certainly be with us when the time comes, but that we won’t need them. She is sure of this.

“Do you remember when Adrianne birthed your first child?” she asks me over the phone. “She knew just what to do. And when you first had to bathe her? You knew just what to do. Maybe it didn’t go perfectly, but you did it, and you can do this, too.”

She goes on, describing how tending our loved ones in death is a natural human experience and dwells in our cellular memories. If we lead with our hearts, she says, we can do nothing wrong. And we should also remember that we can’t hurt him. If something goes imperfectly—and it probably will—it might even be humorous, and that’s okay. Everything will be okay. Just lead with our hearts.

Her words fill in for lost knowledge. They conjure a culture, prepare a way. They remind me of what Adrianne’s midwife said to her over and over: Don’t worry. Your body is strong, wise, capable. When the time comes, you’ll know exactly what to do.

And she did.

And so will we.

***

“Prepare the way of the Lord,” Isaiah says.

Yet in the rest of Isaiah 40, he goes on to describe a God unfathomable, who “sits above the circle of the earth . . . Who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them out like a tent to dwell in” and “brings the princes to nothing.”

Before God, nations are less than nothing and worthless, a drop in a bucket, the dust on the scales. Before the Creator, people are like grasshoppers, withering grass, fading flowers.

And yet the holy voice still commands us: Prepare the way, grasshopper. Align with starlight, you speck of dust.

***

Death is a fire we sit around, something warming and mysterious, something transcending comprehension, a journey no one living—not even the wisest—has completed. It is a cosmos beyond our cosmos, an experience beyond our experience. Convictions and identities loosen their grip as we sit before this holy fire, his flame growing brighter than us even while his breath fades like a flower. 

The prophet speaks: “Prepare the way!”

But we sit here like wood, consumed in total awe. We sit here like ashes, not knowing what to do.

Yet the prophet speaks: “Prepare the way!”

And we sit here like humans have always sat here, tending the fire, watching it flicker, grow, die down.

“Prepare the way!” he says.

It is evening now, and we are all sitting with Dad while he sleeps. They say when his feet begin to grow cool, the end is near. But his feet are still warm.

At Adrianne’s suggestion, we open the laptop, go to YouTube, and find a video about how to lower a body into a grave. The easiest way, this video suggests, is for some people to step into the grave themselves to receive the body.

We’re all convinced. When the time comes, we decide, this is the way we will do it. We will stand in the grave together. We will go into the grave before our father, receive his body from above, then gently lay him on the earth.

Joseph Orso. On the Threshold of Worlds: Tending My Father Before and After His Last Breath. Front Porch Republic Books, 2026. $20.00. 156 pp.

The shelves in our libraries and bookstores groan under the weight of all the tomes that have been published lately purporting to teach us this or guide us on a path to that. Whether step-by-step guides or collections of anecdotes, such books aim to pass on a skillset or serve as a guidepost for setting out on a brave new path.

In his book On the Threshold of Worlds: Tending My Father Before and After His Last Breath, Joseph Orso explores what it's like to reclaim the work and ritual of caring for our own dead, rather than turning those very important tasks over to an industry that replaces intimacy with efficiency. But the book does not clearly mark out a journey on a map or provide detailed instructions. Orso has written a call to a return to old practices we once knew, not a listicle or "For Dummies" manual.

The book is nearer to a Viking sun stone—if you turn it this way and that until the light shines brightly through its shaft, it will point out the position of the markers that will allow us to take a bearing and determine which direction to take.

Orso sets out to share his experience with the death of his father and the choice to bring his body home to hold a vigil and then bury him on his family’s own land, in their own way. It is not a simple temporal narrative, although there are narrative elements. Likewise, he does not delineate all the steps that were involved to navigate the legal, biological, and practical considerations, although he does not shy away from a frank discussion of some of them. He does not solely concern himself in this book with the philosophical, sociological, and theological questions that we must grapple with in our decisions about death, mourning, and funerary culture.

Instead, Orso asks what we might gain, should we choose to take the work of caring for the bodies of our dead back from the funeral industry and rebuild the ritual around such work at home. What do we owe the soul of our departed, and how do we honor the body that once housed it? Then he shows us.

The book reads as if you are sitting in that room with Orso and his father. Sometimes, it is filled with family and friends. Other times, it is dim and quiet, and a window opens into the past, allowing us to see Orso and his father, both before Alzheimer’s altered their relationship, and after. Then the window slides shut, and you are sitting alone with Orso as he ponders our creatureliness and the things we owe one another. As death moves closer, memories, faith, and discernment begin to blur together, before he moves back into a more traditional account of vigil and burial.

It is the experience of losing his father twice—first to Alzheimer’s, and then to death. Orso and his family have chosen to live with great intentionality and without indoor plumbing or electricity. But the very act of having chosen that type of hard for themselves in order to reap its blessings makes caring for an aging parent who is rapidly losing both mental and physical function a near impossibility. Honoring father and mother sometimes means making difficult decisions.

Still, the choice to lead a profoundly local life leads almost inevitably to the decision to care for his father's body at home and then to bury him in that place that they have chosen to call their own. 

Orso's prose ranges from simple confessions and explanations of the procedures necessary to accomplish this into vivid recollection of the man being honored by his household and community. It then climbs another register in a near-poetic contemplation of the nature of grief and ritual. Ripples of Job shimmer underneath questions about holiness, Creation, and veneration.

It should be noted that Orso is Eastern Orthodox, his parents Catholic, and he sometimes uses language about ritual that can be a bit discomfiting to those of us of a more staid, Protestant background. It's worth it to ride that out, however, and absorb the experience as Orso draws the reader in. 

Orso paints a picture rich with meaning and deep appeal, plucking at something that is almost a memory we all share. While he does acknowledge that not everyone has the capability to follow the path he marks out, I am not sure he has truly reckoned with all of the difficulties. 

It's obvious that only someone who owns a sufficient piece of land—and lives in a jurisdiction that allows such burials—can inter their loved ones themselves. This presumes the intention of lifetime ownership of that property as well. After all, how could you sell Grandma's grave? But beyond that is an aspect that Orso does not acknowledge fully.

However radically locally we may choose to live, that decision only lasts as long as we do. Or until we, like Orso's father, lose our ability to participate in these very same decisions. It does not follow that our descendants can, or will, retain that same place or a relationship to it. What then?

As the de facto family historian, I have had cause to wrestle with this issue. My third-great-grandmother, Aaltje Sprik, and five of her children were laid to rest on the farm where they died. A marker was placed a century and a half ago, and a new granite monument was added in the late 1990s. But since then, the old homestead has been sold for development. The house is gone, although the silo and some outbuildings remain on the edges of the subdivision that now occupies the site. The markers have seemingly vanished into the ether. No one seems to know what has become of them. Were Aaltje and her children moved to another local cemetery? There is no record of it. Was the marker simply tidied away by the developer so the new residents wouldn't be bothered by their proximity to the graves? 

When another century and a half has gone by, will Orso's great-great-grandchildren be able to find his father's grave?

I can walk down the lines of Atwood Cemetery and greet six generations of my ancestors as I move from north to south. That ground is, for me, thick with the known dead. 

Which way truly ties us more tightly to our places? Orso does not ask. He borrows Paul Kingsnorth's Machine language to elucidate the industrialization of modern funerary practices. He is certainly correct that it is more common historically for us to care for our own dead, even if it is a largely forgotten practice in the modern West. Graveyards, however, are as ancient as human culture itself. There may be space between abdicating our responsibilities to our loved ones in death, and taking all those things on ourselves, up to and including interring them on our own lands. A middle ground of caring for our loved ones at home, while still burying our dead in cemeteries, is more accessible to most people. This would also be more aligned with historical and cultural practice, not less. 

Minor quibbles about practicalities aside, this book about caring for our dead and reclaiming old rituals and practices that once made up the fabric of community is really asking a deeper question: What stitches us to our places?

In "Anne's House of Dreams," Marilla remarks to Mrs. Lynde, on the eve of Anne's wedding, "When I was a child I heard an old minister say that a house was not a real home until it had been consecrated by a birth, a wedding and a death." We have, bit by bit, turned all three into businesses rather than sacraments. And in so doing, allow the fabric of our places to become so frayed and moth-eaten that it seems it cannot hold us anymore. It falls to us to rewarp the loom, so that we can reweave the "underneath," until our places can hold the weight of our creatureliness again.

What Orso is really asking: is caring for our dead with our own hands and burying them in our own places one of the warp threads? Perhaps it is. His book makes a case for it, at least, without stridently insisting that everyone follow where he leads. It is entirely worthwhile to read On the Threshold of Worlds while keeping in mind not just what Orso says about caring for our dead but also what he doesn't.

Carrie Gress. Something Wicked: Why Feminism Can’t Be Fused with Christianity. Sophia Institute Press, 2026. $21.95. 256 pp.

Carrie Gress’ new book certainly begins on an ominous note. Her central argument, as the subtitle has it, is that “feminism can’t be fused with Christianity.” It’s either God or the devil. Choose at your own peril. 

The story goes something like this. Once, before Enlightenment rationalism and revolutionary ideals took over—replacing faith in God and in God-given hierarchies—Western people lived peacefully. Women accepted patriarchy as ordained by God in his wisdom, and the relationship between the sexes was harmonious. When Mary Wollstonecraft joined forces with the big bads of Enlightenment philosophy (Hume et al.), she threw the “woman issue” into the mix. Over two hundred years later, feminism has repeatedly aligned itself with dangerous ideologies, from Marxism and communism to occult practices, and more recently to the pro-choice movement. It’s time to eradicate this way of thought and free women from their feminist shackles. Only then will Christianity prevail once again.

Something Wicked proposes an attractive intellectual history of feminism. Yet overly tidy narratives are often untrue. I believe it’s important for Christians to consider arguments both in favour and against any given ideology, but we should focus on the best of those arguments, so that we may develop our capacity to reason well. Unfortunately, Gress doesn’t deliver on her promise of a rigorous, methodical takedown of feminism as an ideology. Her account is partial at best, and misleading at worst. 

This would not particularly matter, were it not for the fact that Gress has considerable public credibility: she holds a PhD from the Catholic University of America (where she is a fellow at the Institute for Human Ecology), she is a former fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and has several books already under her belt (including her popular Theology of Home series). Something Wicked has been endorsed by well-respected scholars such as the psychiatrist and philosopher Ian McGilchrist, and Gress regularly promotes her books on Catholic media outlets. She has enough influence over young Christian women that we must engage with her ideas, if only to decide that we won’t be recommending Something Wicked to our sisters, nieces, and daughters. 

A False Premise

The book’s greatest flaw is that it is based on a false premise. Gress claims that Christian women have been fooled into trying to reconcile two incompatible ideologies, feminism and Christianity. As feminism has grown more powerful, Christianity correspondingly declined. 

There are several problems with this claim. 

First, it posits Christianity and feminism as competing ideologies. This is false. While feminism fits the description of an ideology (i.e., a set of beliefs which can be used to shape social, economic, or political action), Christianity can only be considered an ideology if viewed as a cultural set of practices and morals (what one might call “thin Christianity”). By contrast, “thick” Christianity is a practice of faith. It’s an all-encompassing worldview—in the words of C.S. Lewis, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” Of course, some ideologies are more dangerous or, conversely, more aligned with the Christian faith than others; but anything good to be found in any given ideology (whether that is conservatism, socialism, etc.) will inevitably be contained within Christianity. 

There is no competition there, Gress implies. There is, however, a choice for Christians. They may choose to retreat altogether from the political issues of secular society as they view engagement as futile or even corruptive. Or they may choose to engage with particular political ideologies that they judge to be conducive to the fostering and spreading of Christian faith, doctrine, or moral teaching. 

This will inevitably lead to disagreement. Some have objected to the Marxist influence on 20^th century Catholic liberation theology. Others point out that Christianity has repeatedly been weaponized by far-right governments (most famously, of course, during Hitler’s regime). But as long as it remains clear that our true “citizenship is in heaven” (Philippians 3:20), Christians can engage in public life by subscribing to specific sets of political goals. It is, in theory at least, entirely possible for individuals to identify as “feminists” while retaining their overarching, inalienable allegiance to the Kingdom of God.

The question, then, is not actually whether Christianity can be fused with feminism, as Gress claims, but whether feminism is worth supporting. Gress very confidently answers in the negative. She sees such a vast divide in how philosophers pre- and post-Enlightenment envision ideas of virtue, duty, and faith, that any post-Enlightenment social and political movement, such as feminism, is in the grip of secularism. Thus it can’t contribute anything morally acceptable to faithful Christians. 

This is a compelling narrative, because it provides a simple solution to a very complex problem. But here we stumble upon the second issue with Gress’s central claim: Correlation does not necessarily imply causation. 

Gress has correctly identified the inverse correlation between the rise of Enlightenment philosophy and the decline of Christianity. It is the rest of her argument that gets muddled. Two of her main targets, Mary Wollstonecraft and Erika Bachiochi, exemplify her view of the role of feminism within this decline. She blames Wollstonecraft, an 18th-century writer who advocated for improved female education within the developing philosophical context of human rights, for promoting a genderless idea of woman. And she blames Bachochi, a contemporary legal scholar who has argued in her book The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision that Wollstonecraft in fact presented a view of rights based on mutual duties and responsibility, for trying to merge feminism with Christianity. 

The Enlightenment Chasm 

Gress requires her readers to make several assumptions as part of this blame game. First, we would have to agree that feminism began with Mary Wollstonecraft. Next, we’d have to accept that Wollstonecraft was irredeemably immersed in rationalistic and empirical philosophy, to the point that her views on women’s rights and her political priorities more broadly can’t be separated from her Enlightenment-style abandonment of God and the embracing of Deism. We would also need to agree that she did, in fact, abandon a belief in the divine. Then, we would have to prove that all the figures associated with the women’s rights movement and with subsequent waves of feminism accepted Wollstonecraft’s views and continued directly on that path, and that the views of contemporary feminists are indeed a direct result of her ideas.

Gress simply doesn’t substantiate these claims. The first inconsistency is her treatment of the industrial revolution. She is not unaware of the legal and technological changes which contributed to the sweeping changes of the 18^th century. In her introduction, she does name industrialization, marriage and property laws (which left women unable to support themselves if their husbands passed away or if they were abusive), secularization, and middle to upper class women being treated as ornamental as relevant factors. 

And yet, she promptly forgets all this. In the second part of Something Wicked, she goes into a little more detail, claiming that “Homelife was significantly disrupted by a surge in factories and the mechanization of work, as small cottage industries were swallowed up by enormous factories. The home ceased to be the locus of activity.” This is a well-known phenomenon in social history, with which I entirely agree, and to which Christopher Lasch devoted much of his seminal book Women and the Common Life. But the next step in Gress’s argument is a historical non sequitur. “The Industrial Revolution,” she continues, “coupled with the disvaluing of female gifts created a vacuum that the feminist ideology easily moved into. The simultaneous loss of home and mother eliminated the glue that holds Western civilization together.” 

Gress does not take into consideration the fact that many “feminists” (though the term is anachronistic for the late 18^th century) in fact campaigned against the injustices and inequalities that arose as a result of said technological changes. As English society became more industrial and less agrarian, women were still expected to contribute to the household economy, but now they worked long shifts in factories, away from the home, and often were paid less than men (another change was that wage work became the norm). Small children were often brought along and had to start working while still very young until child labour laws kicked in in the latter half of the 19^th century. None of this is the consequence of “feminist ideology.” Under such conditions, is it surprising that women started to campaign for fair wages? Or for the right to purchase property in their own right? 

The less interdependent society becomes, the more harm women and children incur. On that, Gress and I agree. But why, I kept thinking as I read this book, does she not put two and two together, and realize that figures of the women’s rights movement were in large part critiquing a situation not of their own making?

When it comes to middle- and upper-class women, Gress admits that in the 18^th century their role was often ornamental. That is precisely Mary Wollstonecraft’s complaint, and yet Gress fails to notice any affinity between Wollstonecraft’s thought and her own. Her argument instead rests on the premises that 1) Wollstonecraft is the mother of feminism, and 2) she sowed the seeds of all the societal evils we see today. 

Witch Hunting

Gress’s first wicked witch is Mary Wollstonecraft. She is not the first woman to write about female education (Christine de Pizan and Mary Astell are two prominent predecessors, though neither is mentioned), but Gress takes Wollstonecraft’s work as the beginning of all the evils of feminism.

One reason for this is that, along with the French proto-feminist Olympe de Gouges, Wollstonecraft was an early supporter of the French Revolution, which Gress takes to signify a wholesale rejection of any notions of hierarchy or authority. Sadly, she neglects to mention that writers such as de Gouges were ultimately guillotined for criticizing Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, and that Wollstonecraft herself became disillusioned with the excesses of the revolution. Gress also criticizes Wollstonecraft’s promotion of female education as opposed to Christianity, despite the fact that Wollstonecraft’s Female Reader, an anthology for young girls, includes many scriptural passages. 

Her greatest accusation, however, is that Wollstonecraft has an erroneous understanding of virtue. She believes that Wollstonecraft followed David Hume, who saw morality as merely based on feelings of approval or disapproval and as detached from divine authority. This allows Gress to discredit the entirety of Wollstonecraft’s thought as being severed from the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition of Christian philosophy. 

However, Wollstonecraft’s account of the virtues does not, in fact, square with Hume’s. She simply doesn’t advocate for moral relativism in the way that Gress needs her to do, in order to prove that feminism was rotten from the very beginning. 

Many other witches follow Wollstonecraft in Gress’ account, from those who engaged in occult practices, like Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, to those who were hostile to Christianity, like Matilda Gage; from the terrorist UK suffragettes like Emily Pankhurst, to the abortion rights advocates of second-wave feminism like Kate Millett and Shulamith Firestone.

Yet for each of these figures, there are women whom Gress neglects. Many first-wave women’s rights advocates, contrary to Gress’ claim that “Feminism is abortion’s engine,” openly opposed abortion. Susan B. Anthony and Mary Fenn Davis are just two of the examples Monica Klem and Madeleine McDowell discuss in Pity for Evil: Suffrage, Abortion, and Women’s Empowerment in Reconstruction America (2023). Not all feminists were irreligious, either. The 19^th-century abolitionist and women’s suffrage activists Sarah and Angelina Grimké, for example, were devout Quakers. In the UK, between the late 19^th- and early 20^th-centuries the suffragettes were opposed by the suffragists. While also seeking women’s suffrage, the suffragists campaigned peacefully under the leadership of Millicent Garrett Fawcett. Among their ranks was Josephine Butler (not to be confused with the contemporary gender theorist Judith Butler), a devout Anglican Christian who, among other efforts, also campaigned for the abolition of child prostitution and human trafficking. Closer to our time, Gress ignores Andrea Dworkin, who radically (and unpopularly) condemned both prostitution and pornography in the 1970s and 80s, just as sex-positive feminism was gaining momentum. These women don’t deserve to be forgotten.

The Decay of the Christian West

The purpose of Gress’s witch-hunting is to prove that all kinds of contemporary social ills, including porn addiction, transgender ideology, single-sex parents adoption, child trafficking, prostitution, and drug addiction (her list, not mine) can be blamed on feminism. Men bear no blame in this calculus. According to Gress, men are rejecting marriage because women have made themselves too sexually available after the sexual revolution; the existence of the manosphere, while unfortunate, is a predictable reaction against feminism; domestic violence has become “commonplace,” but that is also, somehow, the fault of women. 

As we have seen, Gress is arguing that Christianity declined because of feminism, and that the only way for it to flourish again is for feminism to be eradicated. Just as the original fall is (reminds Gress) about Eve’s sin, so has our contemporary decline been at the hands of women. Something Wicked’s target readership is young girls and mothers, and I doubt that coming this close to outright misogyny is a helpful strategy for the supposed goal of converting women’s hearts.

It’s very difficult to read such an account and not walk away with the suspicion that Something Wicked is somewhat of an example of grifting. Given the number of commentators who have recently argued in favour of cultural Christianity as a means to reclaim traditional Western culture, Gress’s book catches the zeitgeist of a certain right-wing, religious-adjacent subculture. For example, she extensively engages with (and praises) the thought of Jordan Peterson—who, while very open about the West’s need for the Christian faith, has not openly converted. She likewise praises Erica Komisar, who, as of 2022, was openly opposed to restrictions on abortion in the wake of the overturn of Roe v. Wade (a view which should be anathema to Gress). 

Yet on the other hand, she accuses “a new group of Catholic women” of trying to “forge together” the teachings of Pope John Paul II with those of feminists and proto-feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft. Gress even comes dangerously close to slandering one of said women, Erika Bachiochi, by claiming that the blending of Catholicism and secularism—as evidenced the fact that Catholic women “contracept” and “abort” at similar rates to secular women—is best seen in Bachiochi’s work. This could easily be interpreted by unaware readers to mean that Bachiochi herself approves of contraception and abortion—but, in fact, she is a Catholic mother of seven who is publicly pro-life. If not outright slander, this is at best an ad hominem attack. 

My point is not that Gress isn’t allowed to take secular thinkers seriously—there is indeed a long Christian tradition of doing precisely this—but rather that her intellectual allegiances reveal a confused set of priorities. Why would Gress close off potentially fruitful debate with fellow Christians in such a vindictive manner?  

Ultimately, Gress will leave readers unsure of whether the goal is to develop a truly Christian vision of womanhood, or to restore political patriarchy and with it the “Christian West.” Gress would undoubtedly see these goals as interdependent, but they are not necessarily so. I wholeheartedly agree with Gress that women and children have historically been most cherished and safeguarded in those cultures where the influence of the Christian faith has been stronger. But this is because of the very tenets of the Christian faith. Contrary to Gress’s claim that we needed political patriarchy for the “dissemination and maintenance of Christianity,” Christianity had already been spreading before Constantine I made it the official religion of the Roman empire, in part because its insistence of equal dignity was so attractive to women. 

And to Gress’ claim that “civilization depends” on finding a road out of feminism, I would retort that it depends on finding a road out of secularism instead. St Augustine argued that Rome fell because of its own moral decadence, and that peace can only be found in the city of God. So, too, we should remember that adopting the Christian faith should not be a matter of civilizational flourishing, but rather of belief. It’s disappointing to see Gress, a sincere Christian, tap into the trend of cultural Christianity. 

Whether the intention is the genuine flourishing of a Christian society or merely the restoration of the Christian West, a movement as diverse in both political aims and philosophical underpinnings as feminism is the perfect scapegoat. I share Gress’ desire for motherhood and domestic work to be once again valued. But I can’t take Something Wicked seriously as a work of scholarship, because it is lacking in rigour and riddled with logical fallacies. In fact, its greatest flaw is not that it fails as an intellectual history of feminism (though it does that, too), but that it will inevitably teach its intended audience (i.e., young women) to reason badly. It teaches them to look for single-factor, simplistic causes to explain complex social phenomena spanning centuries. And it teaches them to adopt a tribal outlook in their intellectual life, dismissing any thinkers who don’t neatly fall into the group who hold the “right opinion,” rather than examining thinkers individually, their good and bad ideas alike. 

I will not be giving this book to my daughter once she is old enough. I will expose her to arguments both for and against feminism so that she may grapple with them and come to her own conclusions, but Something Wicked won’t be my book of choice.

This excerpt from The Search for a Rational Faith: Reason and Belief in the History of American Christianity (2026) is published with permission from Oxford University Press.

Any Londoner who visited Chew’s Coffeehouse on a Monday evening in the 1720s or 1730s and made his way through the haze of smoke coming from clay pipes and the excited chattering of small groups of men passionately debating the latest news would have encountered, among other gatherings at the scattered tables, a meeting of a local literary club. 

Coffeehouse intellectual clubs were common in the early eighteenth century, when Enlightenment would-be philosophers, gadflies, and local wags from the middle and upper classes gathered in a caffeine-fueled environment to discuss the latest ideas and test them with the standard of reason. The gathering at Chew’s Coffeehouse was, like others of its type, a venue for the intellectually curious. Each Monday evening, the chairman of the club proposed two questions for debate, and each member of the club presented an essay for discussion. 

These clubs were sometimes a magnet for deists and skeptics, but at this particular society, one of the members, Nathaniel Lardner, was a London minister—but one who was just as committed to reason as any deist. He was already in his forties at this point and so hard of hearing that he had trouble figuring out when the choir at his church had stopped singing, but he still loved to discuss ideas with people who held contrary opinions. He was also intellectually flexible enough to change his mind when presented with new evidence. 

As a lifelong Dissenter, he was used to being a nonconformist theologically and intellectually, and as a result, he enjoyed corresponding with deists, even though he thought they were entirely wrong. He was certainly no stranger to skepticism, because his pursuit of graduate training in theology had taken him to such leading centers of skeptical opinion as Utrecht, Leiden, and finally back to London. While participating in the literary club, he was in the process of rethinking his view of the Trinity. At first, he ardently defended the orthodox position, but after a few years of study, he became convinced by Unitarian arguments that the Son was not eternally preexistent, as orthodox Christians claimed ever since the Council of Nicaea.

In some respects, Lardner was a bit of an oddball. He never married, he lived with his father until he was in his mid-fifties, and, despite his graduate education at some of Europe’s best universities, he found it impossible to secure a permanent ministerial post until he was forty- five—and even then, he served in pulpit ministry for only a short time. 

The chief obstacle that he faced in finding ministerial employment was probably not his passion for argument or his propensity to change his mind on such key points of Christian doctrine as the Trinity—the latter of which might have alienated him from some of the more theologically conservative Presbyterian churches of his youth, but which was no obstacle for the increasing number of Unitarian-minded congregations among the English Dissenters. Rather, one of his biographers speculated, his greatest barrier to parish ministry was probably his near-deafness, which prevented his friends from communicating with him except by passing him written notes. 

Lardner’s coffeehouse friends were apparently willing to tolerate the inconvenience, but he seems to have felt self-conscious about imposing his disability on a congregation. When a leading Dissenting church invited him to serve as co-pastor, he turned down the offer. Though he did preach frequently, he would primarily make his mark on Christian apologetics through his writings. And it would be through the written word that he would remain devoted to the life of the mind, exploring new ideas and choosing to accept or reject them on the basis of reason.

Changes in intellectual conviction, when presented with sufficient evidence, were common for Lardner, because he believed in freedom of thought. In the late 1720s, when the London deist Thomas Woolston was arrested and imprisoned for repeatedly publishing material denying Jesus’s miracles, Lardner argued that the deist had the right to hold his own religious opinions without coercion, even if they might be erroneous. “Nothing is so voluntary as Religion,” he wrote, quoting the Dominican friar Raymond Martini. “Faith is to be wrought by persuasion, not by compulsion.” 

In the interest of producing this “persuasion” by rational means, Lardner published a book explaining why it was “rational, consistent, and credible” to interpret the accounts of three of Jesus’s most spectacular miracles—the raising of three people from the dead—as “literal histories.” He accomplished this task by carefully comparing each of the gospels with the others in order to show that the gospel writers were not prone to distortions and exaggerations when recounting the same events, but instead demonstrated the qualities of careful, trustworthy reporters. The deists therefore had no grounds to dismiss the accounts of Jesus’s miracles.

Lardner’s A Vindication of Three of Our Blessed Savior’s Miracles, as he titled this refutation of the deists’ arguments, was only the beginning of his career as a Christian apologist. After spending his Monday evenings each week at the coffeeshop conversing with the literati, he spent his Tuesday evenings among ministers whom he hoped to turn into apologists. 

The young Dissenting ministers who gathered with Lardner each Tuesday at a meetinghouse in the heart of London’s financial district were an eclectic bunch theologically, because “Dissenter” in early eighteenth-century England was a broad category that encompassed nearly every Protestant outside the Church of England—which meant everyone from Puritans to Unitarians. Besides Lardner, the group included two Baptists, three Presbyterians, and one Congregationalist whose views on scripture were suspected of being somewhat liberal. 

Perhaps they could have spent their time bickering over their divergent interpretations of Christian doctrine if they had wanted, but they decided instead to focus on a more constructive project: the defense of the Christian faith against deism. Each minister in the group, they decided, would deliver a short series of sermons on some aspect of the “the evidences of natural and revealed religion”—in other words, natural theology and a reasoned defense of the divine origin of scripture. 

For his own set of three lectures, Lardner chose to focus specifically on refuting historical criticisms that deists made of the four gospels. The topic quickly became a life focus for Lardner. His three lectures expanded into a two-volume book, published in 1730, but this was only the beginning: he continued working on the project throughout his life, until it eventually reached seventeen volumes.

Lardner’s work functioned as the first comprehensive encyclopedia of historical criticism of the gospels, organized around a list of problematic passages. For each passage whose historical accuracy skeptics had questioned, Lardner engaged in a detailed, exhaustive analysis of every classical reference or piece of historical evidence that might have bearing on the question. He left no stone unturned. His discussion of Luke’s one-verse reference to the census of Quirinius, for instance, continued for eighty-six pages. In each case, Lardner attempted to show that historical evidence vindicated the gospel accounts. The census of Quirinius, he argued, was historically plausible, despite what the deists had said. And so was every other gospel passage that the deists had questioned.

Lardner especially focused on the question of whether information that was mentioned in only one of the four gospels—or that was never mentioned in Josephus or any classical histories—could be trusted. For instance, was it reasonable to believe John’s account of the raising of Lazarus when that miracle—as spectacular as it was—did not appear in any of the Synoptic gospels? Was it reasonable to believe that the Roman emperor Augustus had ordered an empire-wide census, as Luke suggested, even though this was never mentioned in any classical source?

Lardner treated these skeptical questions seriously and respectfully, and unlike many previous Christian apologists, he never resorted to invective or denigration when debating his skeptical opponents. Instead, he treated their criticisms of the biblical text as an opportunity for serious intellectual investigation, and at each point, he thought that an exhaustive study of all relevant ancient sources and all possible objections would show that, in the end, the biblical account was credible. His work became a massive compendium of all possible confirmations of the historical narrative of the four gospels from the nonbiblical sources of classical antiquity.

Lardner believed in the historical accuracy of the Bible, but he was hardly an adamantine reactionary; he was open to novel interpretations, as long as they sustained the Bible’s historicity. In the case of the census of Quirinius, for instance, he argued for a very limited imperial order that applied only to Judea—which explained its absence from classical sources. This meant that the Authorized Version’s rendering of Luke 2:1 as “all the world should be taxed” was incorrect; a more accurate translation, Lardner argued from the Greek, was “all the land should be taxed”— thus making it possible that the census could apply only to Judea. 

Lardner’s methodology and presuppositions were in keeping with Enlightenment rationalism, but his end goal was conservative: he wanted to defend the historical integrity and authenticity of the original Greek biblical text, because he believed, as John Locke had, that if he could prove that the gospel narrative was historically trustworthy, its divine origins and authority would be confirmed as well. Jesus’s miracles and resurrection, he believed, could have occurred only through the power of God, so if he could prove that these miracles really happened—that is, that the reports about them were historically credible—he had essentially proved the truth of Christianity and subverted the deists. This was such an important goal that it was worth becoming the project of a lifetime. 

Three decades after embarking on his project, Lardner, now seventy years old, reflected on the purpose of his undertaking as he picked up his pen to begin the fourteenth volume of his ever- expanding work. “The design of this work, from the beginning, and all along,” he wrote, “has been to shew the truth of the evangelical historie, and thereby the truth of the Christian Religion. For if the facts related in the Gospels, and confirmed by the Epistles of the New Testament, may be relied upon, the Christian Religion is from heaven.”

In 1757, thirty-three years after he had begun the project—and after battling several severe fevers that nearly killed him—Lardner finally finished the seventeenth volume and put down his pen. But even though he wanted to write more, the multivolume analysis that he did produce was so comprehensive that it was not repeated for more than a century. 

Lardner taught orthodox Christians that they did not have to be afraid of skeptical objections; exhaustive historical study, he showed, would refute the critics’ charges and uphold the historicity of the biblical text.

Earlier this summer, the government of the United Kingdom made international news. Both Hasan Piker and Cenk Uyger, prominent left-wing influencers, were barred from entry into the country, “on the grounds that their presence … may not be conducive to the public good.” Piker and Uyger were set to make appearances at the Oxford Union, the hallowed speech and debate society at the University of Oxford. As it happens, I was also invited to be among Union chamber speeches during this very same week. My charge wasn’t to speak about political ideology, but instead about why young people today are miserable.     

Ironically, part of the answer is ideological politics and activism—a mission on both the left and right that promises to provide followers with an avenue to find themselves and their meaning in life. Instead, the opposite occurs: it ignites a vicious cycle of self-focus that makes young people anxious and depressed.  

This problem, though culture-wide, is acute among elite universities. I’ve seen this personally: six years ago, I was a graduate student at Oxford; thereafter, I spent several years as a researcher at Harvard; and these days, I am a researcher at Vanderbilt studying human flourishing. Given that I was raised in a lower-middle class Midwestern family, I am grateful and thrilled to have found myself in such places. For me, these universities have helped me to realize the American dream of upward mobility; of moving to strange, unknown places, and charting out on an adventure with a nontrivial chance of failure. But a huge majority of elite university students are neither grateful nor thrilled. They are bitter, resentful, and unhappy. 

So, in my own chamber speech at the Oxford Union, I called attention to what happens when we become fully consumed with the ideas of “safetyism,” online influencers, and campus activism: in our bitterness and resentment, we become fully consumed with ourselves. This stands in stark contrast to the more transcendent habits that traditionally brought about meaning, ones that push us beyond ourselves. 

Let us, then, explore two big questions. Why, in the deepest sense, does self-focus make us miserable? And how can university students unshackle themselves from this tyranny? Two men—Oxford’s C. S. Lewis and Harvard’s William James—illuminated answers to these questions long ago, which we have forgotten. Their ideas, along with modern science, will chart the North Star for elite university students who are suffering today. 

The Mirror’s Tyranny

“Look for yourself,” wrote C. S. Lewis in Mere Christianity (1952), “and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay.”

These words were drafted during the Second World War while Lewis taught at Magdalen College, Oxford. As a graduate student at the University of Oxford, I was a stone’s throw away from Lewis’s old stomping grounds—but I was hardly in the perils of war. The coronavirus epidemic had just set in, and terrible as it was, I can’t say it was akin to war-torn Europe. My bomb shelter, so to speak, was a nice little flat with a view of tulips. 

In those days, I was studying the outgrowths of Enlightenment thought and how those ideas found their way to America. It was my view then that the Enlightenment’s ideals—a focus on progress, tolerance, reason, and the scientific method—led to a great boon of human dignity. It seemed to me that these ideals ignited a more generative (albeit imperfect) “pursuit of happiness” for ordinary people. Those intellectual origins are in no small part why I study human happiness today.

However, C. S. Lewis would have disagreed with my rosy view of the Enlightenment. And as the years have gone on, I have come to think that he may have had a point.

In The Abolition of Man (1943), Lewis argued that Enlightenment thinking created subjective morality, the too-tolerant idea that no one morality was better than another. He called the people who inherited this tradition “men without chests.” By this, he meant that society was full of individuals with smarts and an appetite to succeed; but since they lacked a moral framework to connect their intelligence with their ambition, this made them vulnerable to manipulation by nefarious actors. In terms we might understand today: talented young people were susceptible to getting conscripted into culture wars—ones that would lower their happiness and boost the power and influence of the folks leading, and profiting from, the charge.

Let’s start with the types of arguments that university students hear every day. Organized religion is but a corrupt fairy-tale, they are told, so it’s best to avoid it. Marriage and child-rearing are old relics that lower one’s individual freedom, so it’s best to never start a family. And as for your current family and friends who hold different political views than you? They threaten your way of life, so it’s best to go “no contact” with them, and to go “full contact” with the ideological influencers who are cashing in on your clicks. Lewis believed victims of manipulation would be easier to control, and in turn, their views would become less heterodox. Small wonder that university life has become an epicenter of ideological orthodoxy.

But the point goes beyond that. The thing to understand is that young people—whether they are forgoing God, marriage, children, or friends and family—are doing so because of an intense focus on themselves. And indeed, as we “look for [ourselves],” we inadvertently throw away the very things that make life meaningful.

This is why some scholars argue that the Enlightenment—despite the extraordinary ways it has protected individual liberties—has done a poor job at creating shared, durable meaning across culture. This is the core hypothesis in Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007), where he argues that meaning across the West is now fragmented, optional, and individually constructed. The result? Take it from Taylor: “There is a widespread sense of loss [in the West], if not always of God, then at least of meaning.”

But we should not stop with this mere cultural critique; deeper psychological phenomena are at play. This brings us to William James, the great 19^th century psychologist at Harvard. James is often credited as the father of modern psychology. And in his magnum opus The Principles of Psychology (1890), he distinguishes between two conceptions of ourselves: the “I-self” and the “me-self.” The former refers to the mental state in which we look outward and observe the world; the latter refers to the mental state in which we observe ourselves. 

Of course, we need to spend appropriate time in both the I-self and me-self to survive and succeed in life. Without observing beyond ourselves (via the I-self), we would make no effort to bond with other people, and we might turn a blind eye to threats or predators. On the other hand, without ever observing ourselves (via the me-self), we would have no sense of identity or self-conception. More practically, the me-self is the mental state that encourages you to look sharp for, say, a job interview—and not to show up in pajamas. By healthily observing oneself, one can put their best foot forward in life.

But to flourish, the properly ordered person must find the correct balance between time spent in the I- and me-selves. James himself alluded to this, arguing that we must spend time “contemplating” our dual nature so that the I- and me-selves can “work out their drama together.” But this balancing act is a tall task. As James argued, “for each of us almost all of the interest attaches to one of the halves.” And to which half was he referring? That’s right: the me-self. 

Put differently, humanity’s natural tendency was, and has always been, to spend disproportionate time in the me-self, wrapped in self-focus. Today, in our era of digital mediation and identity obsession, we are more prone than ever to be lodged into this half of ourselves. 

Modern science demonstrates that we become more miserable because of it. For example, psychologists have long known that constant self-focus is highly predictive of strong negative emotions. In general, these negative feelings arise because thinking about oneself causes life’s worries and troubles to dominate one’s attention, which crowds out feelings of, say, gratitude and generosity. Indeed, long before science demonstrated this empirically, St. Augustine made this point. His concept of homo incurvatus en se refers to the natural human tendency to be “curved in on itself,” making our own desires and self-interest the center of our world. 

Unfortunately, this is the dominant reality for elite university students today.

The Era of Self-Focus

Modern social media and technology have fashioned incurvatus en se into a way of life—every waking minute—for many college students. Welcome, then, to what we might call The Era of Self-Focus.

This era is uniquely spurred by digital mediation—through which we compare our real lives to everyone’s fake lives. For young people searching for a job, every LinkedIn post from one’s network might as well read: “I’m thrilled to announce that I’m better than you.” Worse is the self-focus paradigm generated by the influencer class—all of whom are richer and more beautiful than their followers. And worst of all is the online grievance culture that facilitates people to dwell endlessly on their problems. As bitterness and resentment rise, scholars have shown that the gumption to use one’s agency to solve life’s problems seriously declines. It shouldn’t surprise us, then, that chronically online college students are uniquely miserable. 

This data help to explain how social media acts as a mirror to, and facilitates a curvature within, ourselves. For example, in 2010—the year that social media apps became ubiquitous on the smartphone—rates of anxiety, depression, and affirmative responses to the statement “my life feels meaningless” began to rise. This has led scholars such as Arthur Brooks, whose research team I lead, to argue that meaninglessness resides at the core of the so-called unhappiness epidemic. 

The outcomes of intense self-focus are evident, especially at elite places like the University of Oxford. According to recent data from the Oxford Student Union, nearly 40 percent of undergraduates admitted that since entering their degree program, their mental health had “worsened” or “slightly worsened.” And fully 55 percent of students said that their mental health was negatively affected by “family, romantic, or familial relationships.” Some of this might be innocuous—the surveyed students might have been homesick after all, and undergraduates are not known for stable dating lives—but something about university life clearly leads to self-focus. Baked within this dataset are surely students who created family schism based on their newfound political views.

During my own time at Oxford, I saw this among my program-mates. Some were terribly affected by the temporary lockdowns; others used their free time to wade into hot-button activism; hardly any sought romance; precisely zero were religious.

Not all of this can be blamed on Oxford—or, in fact, any other university whose students deal with these problems—but it is no secret that universities have intensified The Era of Self-Focus by centering campus life around self-care and grievance-based ideas. For example, while I was at Oxford during the coronavirus epidemic, we were inundated with self-care messages from the university administration asking about our well-being. Though well-intentioned, I found this mildly baffling. I was fantastic! I was at Oxford having an intellectual adventure! Yet even in my optimism, I noticed that the more messages I received to this effect, the more I began to question my own well-being. Put another way, I became more focused on myself, and less focused on ideas bigger than myself. A more realistic version of the administration’s messages might have been: Are you thinking about yourself enough today? 

Of course, the answer for many students is: Yes, all the time. For instance, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, “developing a meaningful life philosophy” was the top goal of university students, and “being financially very well-off” was the least important objective. Today, those goals have inverted: finding meaning ranks last, whereas getting rich ranks highest. This is a good proxy measure for the fact that the search for meaning—and thus a focus beyond oneself—has cratered.

Again, during my time at Oxford, I made this inversion myself. My top reason for pursuing the degree was to explore ideas that would help me see the world more clearly. Color me naive, but upon entering my program, I had utterly no plans for what to “do next.” But after a mere six months, my friends in the program—who were frenetically securing their next step in the ladder—made me second guess my aims. In no time, I became a data figure in the study above. Forget developing a meaningful life philosophy, I thought. My main goal became something like: Don’t be the loser without a prestigious job.

Thankfully, at that time, university life in the UK wasn’t filled with vitriolic levels of grievance. But the same cannot be said for many American universities. In their book The Coddling of the American Mind (2018), Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff explore the 2010s rise of universities marrying a “safetyist” campus culture with one of grievance. Across scores of American data and case studies, they argue that American universities—in spotlighting so-called “trigger warnings” and “microaggressions” in the name of students’ well-being—inadvertently educated young people to equate emotional discomfort with physical harm. This was especially true at elite universities, in which students were highly attuned to the politics of the day. 

For the last five or so years, a degree of backlash has been underway within academia. But the point to underscore is that universities—like social media—have metastasized The Era of Self-Focus. They have curved students further inward, within the tyranny of the me-self. 

 But there is good news. The solution is not to dismantle university life, a place in which I have spent one-third of my life, and one that I believe in. Instead, universities should work on returning to their founding principles, which were once avenues to push students beyond themselves. For ideas on how this can be achieved, we must first unpack the paradox of self-focus—and finally return to our friends William James and C. S. Lewis.

Escaping Oneself, to Know Oneself

Self-focus is a strange phenomenon. We are naturally drawn to it, and in modern life, we have become quite good at it. But here’s the paradox: if we do, indeed, spend all day focused on ourselves, shouldn’t we know ourselves better? 

 Researchers have answered this in many clever ways. Consider one novel experiment, in which participants first had a photo taken of their face. In a separate room, the researchers made many several photoshopped copies of the original—a 10 percent more attractive copy, a 20 percent more attractive copy, and so on; and likewise for unattractive copies. When the participants were asked to select the photo of their real face from the dozen or so existing images, they were most likely to choose the 20 percent more beautified image—believing that was their real face.

In other words, despite our rampant self-focus, we don’t really know ourselves. There is a reason why we can’t pick our own face out of a lineup, why we can’t accurately assess our own personality, and why self-focus makes us a stranger to ourselves. What university students need today—across the US and the UK—is to be persuaded of a basic metaphysical truth, one that has unfortunately been waylaid by the spoils of Enlightenment thinking. The mysterious truth is that the only way to truly know yourself is by escaping yourself, in deep communion with big ideas, other people, and the divine.

But in The Era of Self-Focus, young adults do just the opposite. By naval gazing all day long, college students are crowding out these pursuits. They date less, have fewer friends, fear big ideas, are less spiritual or religious, and ignite more schism with their families because of partisan politics. 

Instead of contributing to this problem, universities can play a role in fixing it. They need only listen to great ideas of the past. 

Let’s begin with William James. In an 1899 essay, James recounted his weeklong stint at Chautauqua Assembly, an adult-education meeting venue in upstate New York. There he experienced “security, intelligence, humanity, and order,” a utopian-like venue without conflict—much like what modern universities hope (but struggle) to emulate. Yet James found himself inexplicably dissatisfied. Here’s what he observed:

What excites and interests the looker-on at life, what the romances and the statues celebrate and the grim civic monuments remind us of, is the everlasting battle of the powers of light with those of darkness; with heroism, reduced to its bare chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory from the jaws of death. But in this unspeakable Chautauqua there was no potentiality of death in sight anywhere, and no point of the compass visible from which danger might possibly appear.

What James longed for was a window into his own I-self, to become a “looker-on at life.” And what exactly did James wish to see? He desired to bask in awe of the greatest things that had ever been said and done, while also being challenged—even thrilled—by a sense of danger. That, in essence, is the classic role of great universities. Great universities once gave students an unfiltered prism into their I-selves, in which they could study and relive the greatest achievements of human beings, while also being challenged by ideas that didn’t match their worldview. Today’s universities must first return to that forgotten mission. 

Second, universities ought to learn from C. S. Lewis to help students transcend their self-focus. Lewis correctly noted that “look[ing] for yourself” will lead to “hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay.” But he followed up that sentiment with this: “Look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”

And indeed, looking for God was classically part and parcel with the intellectual venture at great universities—until recently, at least. For example, Oxford’s founding motto (“The Lord is my light”) and Harvard’s original mission (“Let every student be instructed…to know God”) each expressed a fundamental conviction: intellectual illumination and divine light were the same thing. Although neither university has been strictly tied to a religious sect for several hundred years—and while neither will (or should) return to a dogmatically religious approach—each would do well to require its students to reckon with theological arguments, perhaps through required coursework, taught by the best faculty each university has to offer. All students must confront the basic idea that underpins the West’s entire university project: the creator must not be separated in our scientific understanding and investigation of nature.

These two rules, from these two great men, are exactly the path toward a more vibrant university life today—as institutions, yes, but also as individuals. In short: these days university students neither stand in awe of great ideas nor worship the divine. But in returning to both pursuits, students will find what they seek, and they will be happy.

In the end, these strategies will unshackle today’s students from the tyranny of self-focus and open new avenues toward meaning. The alternative, which universities are haplessly pursuing today, will pull students further into a blackhole of themselves, despite all the empty promises to the contrary.

Michael McEwen. The Devil Reads Nietzsche: A Public Theology for a Post-Christian Age. B&H Academic, 2025. $27.99. 224 pp.

As a young parent, I was not prepared for how early my children exhibited skeptical tendencies and posed very difficult questions. My son was four years old when he told me, in all seriousness, that he was bigger than God. It happened during a very tense moment, when he repeatedly refused to obey me and finally demanded that I tell him why he should do what I asked. I was not prepared for a metaphysical discussion on the nature of obedience, but I knew that a simple “because I told you so” would not suffice.

The situation demanded a good answer, as I faced an open revolt from a very serious four-year-old. I fumbled through something along the lines of how obeying our parents helps us learn to obey God, our heavenly Father. It is at this point that my son proclaimed that he is bigger than God, hence no obeying is required. How did I get a little Nietzsche on my hands?

It was, of course, a very comical situation, but the seriousness with which my son was speaking scared me. Really, I thought, questioning faith can start this early! In the years since that day, more questions followed. Some were not openly skeptical. When he was about six years old, he asked me where he was before he was in my belly. At this point, I already knew that my kid could handle abstract talk. Recognizing that he was deeply troubled by the question of his existence, I told him that before he appeared in my belly, he was in the mind of God. That answer actually satisfied him, for it was better to think that he was somewhere, rather than nowhere at all. 

Still, another time, when I felt it was my duty as a Christian parent to encourage my son to pray more for a specific situation, he asked me, “What if, when I pray, I just talk to myself and nothing more?” How did I end up with a young Nietzsche and Feuerbach in one? I really had a hard time answering that one, as I could sense the depth of that doubt and the void that was opening up in front of my son. One misstep on my part, and he might fall into it. The best I could do on that occasion was to explain that ultimately God permeates all of creation and our whole being, for he is a creator of everything. Therefore, even when it feels like we talk to ourselves, we, in fact, speak to God. 

As his younger sister grew older, she too joined in with questions that were far more difficult for me to handle. As a middle schooler, she asked me why God doesn’t just free everyone from hell and save everyone. If, as we were taught in weekly sermons, God is truly good and there is nothing we can do to save ourselves, He has to save us all. I realized then that I have a little skeptic, who listens to Sunday sermons, analyses them, and looks for logical inconsistencies.

Imagine for a moment that I told her that God, a supreme being, has the right to send those who disobey him to eternal torment. Would this be a satisfying answer to a skeptic? In her question, the issue was not only the fate of helpless human beings and apparent unfairness, but the very character of God. What kind of God is it, and would she want to believe in that God? Once again, I knew that I had to tread carefully and give an answer that would be satisfying to a young, skeptical mind. I told her that it is good to wish that everyone would be saved. It is something we should hope for and pray for whenever we can. But we cannot tell God what he should or shouldn’t do, for he is indeed God—and is greater than all our thoughts about Him.

What I found most striking about all these questions is that my children asked them when they were fairly young, before these questions could be appropriately attributed to profound cultural influence. In other words, their questions arose not from the outside culture, but internally, from their own interactions with church and experiences with Christianity. Now, suppose I did not answer these questions, perhaps shut them down, or gave a simplistic answer that they found unsatisfactory. How would my children have thought and felt once they got older and came into direct contact with the raging atheistic culture all around? 

Most parents or Sunday school teachers are not prepared intellectually or emotionally to answer the difficult questions children so naturally ask. Oftentimes, they can’t answer them for themselves, let alone for little schoolchildren or defiant teenagers. As a result, we desperately need popular-level engagement with skepticism, especially the Nietzschean kind, in our churches. Michael McEwen’s new book The Devil Reads Nietzsche is a timely resource for many Christians, who might feel beaten down by the skepticism and even nihilism of our times. 

To engage Nietzsche is no small feat; he is a fierce and powerful opponent whose writing aims to intimidate, demoralize, and even hurt anybody who wishes to stand up to him. Therefore, McEwen deserves due respect for approaching such a formidable adversary. He also, it must be noted, approaches Nietzsche charitably, in good faith, wishing to understand Nietzsche’s line of thought and arguments, rather than operating with flat generalizations or, worse, false pretenses. 

Treating Nietzsche charitably is the only way to approach such a thinker, not only because our faith demands such treatment of human beings or out of pity (Nietzsche’s capacious mind drove him to madness), but, more important, because Nietzsche rebelled against a lifeless cultural Christianity of his time. As Nikolai Berdyaev said, behind any atheistic rebellion against God is the rebellion for a greater vision of God against a low and unworthy view of the Divine. Nietzsche was, first and foremost, a cultural critic, not a metaphysical philosopher. It was Heidegger who first attributed metaphysics to Nietzsche. It is fitting, then, that McEwen reads Nietzsche carefully and points out Nietzsche’s project as the great skeptic himself understood it—that is, dismantling cultural and religious ideologies.

While McEwen offers a charitable reading of Nietzsche, he makes his stance clear: He does so with a full commitment to the truthfulness of the Christian metanarrative. McEwen, in other words, offers a critique of Nietzsche, a necessary pushback to his narrative from the point of view of Scripture, exposing the logical inconsistencies in Nietzschean proposals. 

Building on the work of such giants of contemporary theology as Charles Taylor and John Milbank, McEwen follows the prompting of Christopher Watkin, who calls on contemporary Christians to think critically about the narratives with which secular culture operates, rather than passively absorbing them. This critical posture requires understanding the ideas and ideologies we are exposed to and offering an alternative, thoroughly Biblical narrative in their place. McEwen provides just that: an attempt to understand Nietzsche on his own terms, while pointing out his fallacies, an account of how he has influenced our current culture, and finally a counter-narrative. 

How does he do that? McEwen follows a twofold pattern of argumentation. First, he demonstrates how Nietzsche borrows and parodies Christian ideas, twisting them to suit his purpose—to challenge Christianity. Second, he shows how Biblical narrative already has answers to Nietzsche’s challenges. For example, in his chapter on Imago Dei and human identity, McEwen looks at how Nietzsche addresses the question of what it means to be human.

The classical Christian understanding of human nature combined the Greco-Roman idea of rational (unchangeable) essence with Imago Dei, or Divine image bearers, to formulate a theological anthropology. Nietzsche offers an alternative vision of humans in his Ecce Homo. In this work, he calls for a radical breakaway from the Greco-Christian view of human beings. Human beings, according to Nietzsche, do not have a static essence or unchangeable nature. Rather, they evolve; they become something through their will to power. We do not know ourselves, and the constant becoming means that we change over time. The idea of change and becoming is tied to a particular view of history. Hence, an equally important concept to Nietzsche’s understanding of human beings is the idea of eternal return—a cyclical view of history and human development. While this may sound radically different from classical Christianity, McEwen contends that Nietzsche has retained the idea of eternity and appropriated or re-packaged the Christian concept of sanctification and transformation towards the resurrected body of Christ, but leaving out God. 

McEwen offers an alternative narrative in order to “out-narrate” Nietzsche and show how the Scripture already has a response to his claims. To summarize his response: The New Testament apostolic witness firmly proclaims our future resurrection in the manner of Jesus Christ. In Col. 1:15-18, Paul brings together Christology, our existence, and our identity so that we would know ourselves as Christ’s. In other words, we know who we are when we recognize ourselves as belonging to Christ. The answer to the question of who we are has already been given to us in Christ.

The mode of engagement McEwen suggests and models in his book is a helpful start. It gives Christian readers hope that even Nietzsche is not impervious to a critique; he can even be beaten at his own game. Although McEwen’s retelling of the Biblical narrative is rather short, it points to the depth and breadth of Christian tradition. And yet, his approach left me with a few questions.

First, what if our alternative narrative is not that alternative at all, but the same old narrative that Nietzsche reacts against? Nietzsche knew the Bible and came from a religiously devout home. He was well aware of the central role of Jesus Christ in forming our identity and the historical Christian view of human nature. Retelling the same narrative back to Nietzsche may not produce a different result, since this is precisely what Nietzsche is reacting against. 

How does a Biblical narrative help make sense of the history and human development we, as a civilization, have undergone over the last two hundred years? How does our understanding of our identity in Christ help a skeptical person understand dramatic historical and social changes that a given society, say Communist Russia, had experienced in the last hundred years? Nietzsche was not a theologian, not even a metaphysician, as he understood his own work. He was concerned with human culture, something we build or destroy. Therefore, to counter a Nietzschian skepticism, especially when it is raised against Christianity, we have to extract a vision of human history, human culture, and, crucially, development from a Biblical metanarrative. 

No less significant, what if “out-narrating” is not enough to address the widespread skepticism and nihilism in our world today? What if what’s required is not only an alternative critical theory, but something much more demanding—love for people, bearing their burdens, compassion, and giving of ourselves in love? When dealing with skeptics, even very young ones, a robust intellectual response is critical. But at some point, our actions will speak louder than our words.

McEwen’s book is a much-needed introduction to engaging the intellectual ideas of our time. We need more work like this. Christians can no longer ignore the world of secular ideas. We have entered a new era, where our culture no longer possesses strong Christian intuitions. We will have to learn to live in this culture and engage it anew, drawing from our Christian tradition answers befitting our times.

Augustine’s Confessions has become one of my longest reading journeys. By that, I don’t mean it’s a book I’ve reread repeatedly, though I hope that to ultimately be true. What I mean is that I began the book over six months ago. Granted, I am naturally a slow reader, yet nearly every sentence is arresting, offering pause to interweave thought and interleave Scripture.

Yet one autobiographical and historical detail provided by Augustine has repeatedly caused me to set the book down for “a think,” struck by the detail’s significance not only to Augustine but also, perhaps, to the Christian life. The detail concerns a habit of Ambrose, the renowned bishop whom Augustine met—and by whom he was deeply influenced—after moving to Milan to teach rhetoric. The habit of Ambrose that Augustine preserves in Book VI, chapter 3, is this: silent reading.

It’s not that silent reading, of itself, was unknown. What specifically seems to have impressed itself upon Augustine was Ambrose’s habit of reading silently even while others entered, waited, and watched in Ambrose’s presence. The bishop’s door was always open, but the man himself had—in silent reading and reflection—entered a space they could not follow. To Augustine, himself thoroughly trained in rhetoric and the sonorous life of words, the scene was one he preserved of necessity in his autobiography.

From Anthony Esolen’s recent translation, Augustine’s surprise and wonderment:

But when he read, his eyes went through the pages, while his heart spied into the sense, and his voice and tongue were still. Often when we were there—for no one was kept from entering his house, nor was it his custom to have visitors announced—we would see him reading in this way, silently, and never otherwise. We might then sit in daylong silence—for who would dare be a burden to someone so intent?—and finally take our leave.

There are arresting parallels between Augustine’s vision of Ambrose and the 1981 film The Chosen, based on Chaim Potok’s novel of the same name. Although I would rarely reference a film over the book from which it was adapted, Rod Steiger’s portrayal of Reb Saunders is remarkable. He believably reveals Saunders’ heart and—more importantly here—the nature of Reb Saunders’ relationship with his son, Danny. Gifted with a nearly perfect memory and an ability to see Scripture in every aspect of life and learning, Danny has been raised to follow in his father’s footsteps and eventually become the rabbi of their community. Yet, parceled with Danny’s talent was also an arrogance toward others, and an absence of real compassion.

Observing this early, Saunders resolved to withhold basic and direct conversation from his son, though he continued to care for and to teach him attentively as a mentor. It was a silence that hurt Danny deeply. But it was a silence, too, by which his father hoped to awaken in Danny an inward hearing: a capacity to perceive the suffering of others and receive the voice of his own heart and the voice of Torah.

Now, Ambrose’s silence was certainly of another kind, and he did converse with Augustine. Still, I suspect that his manner of silence planted a similar seed in Augustine, himself tremendously gifted and—by his own account—arrogant in his early life. Augustine was clearly surprised by this silence, and although it may not have been instructionally deliberate, surprise often awakens something in us, sometimes for a moment, sometimes for a lifetime. It is that “something” awakened in Augustine through his presence in the silence of that room—resonant even with the experience of a fictional character, Danny—that has made this brief episode in the Confessions a kind of hub from which my continued reading of Confessions proceeds.

For another moment, though, before I carry on with my own reading, I want to remain with Augustine, observing Ambrose in wonderment, while considering the ripples of another silence: one destined also to pour forth in proclamation.

Consider the Hebrew word: rāqîaʿ. It means “the firmament” or “the expanse.” It first appears in Genesis 1:6, where God establishes “the expanse” as a separation between the waters. At first, the expanse appears almost as silence itself: a mute space opened and held between waters above and waters below. God names it Heaven. Later, he sets the lights within the expanse to distinguish day from night and to mark days, seasons, and years.

Yet Scripture continues to reveal the rāqîaʿ as something more. By Psalm 19, the expanse is no longer shown merely as a boundary within creation, nor simply as a massive vault in which the lights move. It has become proclamatory, itself a herald.

The heavens declare the glory of God,and the sky above [from the Hebrew rāqîaʿ] proclaims his handiwork.Day to day pours out speech,and night to night reveals knowledge.There is no speech, nor are there words,whose voice is not heard.(Ps. 19:1–3)

Then at Psalm 150, at the terminus of the Psalter, the heraldic movement becomes explicitly human. We are, in the psalm, summoned to join the praise already resounding in creation. We are called to praise God "in his sanctuary" and "in his mighty heavens," the living God in the rāqîaʿ of his power: “Praise the Lord! Praise God in his sanctuary; praise him in his mighty heavens [from the Hebrew rāqîaʿ]!” (Ps. 150:1)

Yet, if we continue to let Scripture intertwine, before praise there comes another invitation. The prophet Isaiah bids us to slow down. "Listen to me in silence, O coastlands..." (Isa. 41:1). The coastlands, representing scattered peoples, are not summoned first to action, or even to praise. They are called to silence. Only then comes the invitation in the same verse: "...let them approach, then let them speak..."

That sequence is consequential. In a world ruled by noise and assertion, and by endless mechanisms of mind, silence is never emptiness. Silence is where revelation may be received. It is like the rāqîaʿ, like a sandbar set between lashing waters. It is perhaps what Augustine sensed while watching Ambrose read. It is what Danny, by his father’s hard love, came upon. And into silence God speaks: "I AM WHO I AM" (Ex. 3:14). 

Is that the silence we ourselves so often resist? Is this the silence that surprises? Before the heavens declare his glory and before humanity joins, God simply is. However, God does not remain hidden, culminating in what C. S. Lewis names the greatest miracle: the One who made, who named, the rāqîaʿ enters the world that he spoke into being. The eternal “I AM,” who eternally loves, takes flesh. The Word, through whom all things were made, is among us. And then comes the greatest surprise: the One before whom Isaiah’s coastlands fell silent now speaks forgiveness and stretches out his hands upon a cross to the still point of “It is finished” (John 19:30).

Silence ripples. On the pages of Scripture, somewhere between the “I AM” and the “It is finished,” we encounter another silence, this time with Elijah (1 Kgs. 19:11-13):

And [the Lord] said, “Go out and stand on the mount before the Lord.” And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind tore the mountains and broke in pieces the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. And after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. And after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire the sound of a low whisper [qōl dĕmāmāh daqqāh].

In this verse, then comes the qōl dĕmāmāh daqqāh. Not the mountain-whipping of wind, nor the ruckus of rocks, nor even flame, but—in translation—the low whisper, the thin silence. Then:

When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his cloak and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. And behold, there came a voice to him and said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”

What are we doing here? Silence will surprise. Silence may prepare, expose, humble, awaken. Yet silence was never the destination, just as Psalm 150 is not a psalm of silence. Elijah does not remain standing before a silent cave. Augustine does not remain forever sitting, watching Ambrose read. And The Chosen ends with Danny walking on, not trapped in his father's silence, but going out into the world to serve.

God speaks. The Word makes. And we? Sometimes we must linger in the silence between. Out of the stillness, the heavens still declare his glory. The Church now declares his Gospel. And faith comes. It comes not from our striving, our observations, or, ultimately, even our silence, but “from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” (Rom. 10:17). O coastlands, Christ is risen.

Allison Daminger. What’s on Her Mind: The Mental Workload of Family Life. Princeton University Press (2025). $29.95. 248 pp.

A woman whose kids were in the same activities as mine when young used to send a warning text to the moms’ group when she left town. She gave heads-up that the B team would be on, which meant that her husband would be showing up instead. She told us, so we would pick up the slack.

Allison Daminger’s book pokes a sore spot in domestic relations. At issue is not the easily reckoned load of practical chores, now subject to decades’ worth of gendered time-use studies. Here is a category harder to measure. Cognitive labor can be invisible, but it generates loud grievances. Women might combust with exasperation that they do so much of this and still have to explain what it is. Men might express frustration that after years of taking on more housework, they still get faulted for not doing enough. 

Consider how much dads’ doings have changed in a few generations. A man now might remember that his grandfather never packed kids’ lunches, for instance, while his father might have done them occasionally when mom was out of commission (like maybe in the hospital). This contemporary man might insist: I fill the lunchboxes three times every week. Can’t you see I’m doing a lot, he might demand, while a spouse who plans meals, buys groceries, monitors school allergy protocols, remembers her kids’ tastes, and keeps track of brown-bag field-trip days, might ask why he wants praise and gratitude for sticking a sandwich in a bag.  

If readers confronting Daminger’s title wonder, what do American moms think about when they let their minds wander, the answer is not a beach cabin on Bora Bora. The book fills in the blanks. Its clever cover is composed of color-coded thought bubbles asking things like: Should we switch her pediatrician? What have the kids eaten this week? See something on social media about swimming registration? It is true that some of these items seem urgent but are trifles. But raising kids in a society that pins identity to employment status and makes family a kind of side hustle raises stakes of this stuff. America does not bless the household as a little church or a little commonwealth. Amid atomized individualism, parents’ cognitive labor may come as close as anything to constructing a common good.  

Daminger, a sociologist, addresses her book to academics who study American families and to political figures who can help them. But in the process, she speaks just as much to men and women like the ones she interviews. Like time-use studies, her investigations into cognitive-labor patterns confirm that many couples do not have a balance. In heterosexual pairs, women still do a greater share. Same-sex couples also demonstrate imbalance although she finds them more flexible.

The author lays out the problem neatly. A "cognitive labor episode” entails four components: anticipate, identify options, decide, and monitor. Action comes in ten “domains,” including food, childcare, children’s engagement, logistics, cleaning, finances, social relationships, shopping, home maintenance, and leisure. Changing sheets is an example of cleaning. Tracking report cards is an example of children’s engagement. These lists not only clarify her terms but function inadvertently for readers as a diagnostic tool. For readers who recognize this stuff because they do it all the time, the lists provide satisfying recognition of the invisible parts of American childcare. Those who register surprise at these items are hoisted by their own petard. 

Just as some physical chores are harder or nicer than other kinds, Daminger names the burdens and benefits of cognitive ones. Overseeing home renovation is high-burden/high-benefit; taking out trash is low-burden/low-benefit; managing family calendars is high-burden but “usually only moderately beneficial” and “extremely abstract.” Moms often manage family calendars. Couples might conform to stereotypes to explain themselves, so women sometimes appear as “Superhuman” control freaks, men sometimes “Bumblers.”

Daminger is generous with the couples she interviews, giving benefit of the doubt even to dysfunctional ones. Her charitable assessment of her interviewees accentuates the book’s central puzzle. Why do otherwise considerate men and women with pretty up-to-date notions about gender stick with patterns that are so clearly unfair? She argues that cognitive labor is tilted sharply because society still stresses traditional characteristics for men and women. While interviewees mostly shun gender essentialism, many uphold a personal essentialism that yields basically the same result. So, a mom might say she handles birthday parties or meal planning just from preference. The author is not persuaded. What interviewees might claim as merely a “me thing” is reinforced by social and institutional norms. Humans invest in skills and deploy them. That means that mom does not have to be the one to maintain the family calendar. The author uses the example of a middle-school principal to call the bluff in this case. Can it really be true that the reason he lets his wife handle family schedules is that he, who plans the schedules of a school full of adolescents, is not good at organization?  

The book’s assessment of patterns around cognitive labor is perceptive. But the analysis shies away from first-principle arguments about why this matters. The real problem around mental load is not just the size of it but the shape. 

Why is there so much? Some of what American parents do for their kids arises from physical need. Kids have bodies that change rapidly, get dirty, need food and shelter.  But consumer-culture childhood bundles inanities together with necessities. Much gets added to mental load by individualism and the imperatives of intensive parenting—the reigning style of American childrearing. In this system, adults define themselves by their paid work and support kids who define themselves by attributes with economic futures. In its late-twentieth-century heyday, scholars like Viviana Zelizer, Annette Lareau, and Sharon Hays traced intensive parenting to economic insecurity: Because parents do not know what job kids will need to keep a middle-class standard of living, they have to prepare for everything. 

Nineteenth-century industrialization inscribed men and women in separate spheres, the former at work and the latter presiding angelically in the home, at least in middle-class families. Women going to work in high percentages since the 1970s shattered those spheres. Weirdly, the residuum of separate-spheres ideology that persists does not mostly divide men and women, whose spheres now overlap, but parents and children. Parents work. Parents work for pay in an office, for pay from home, and in home for maintenance and hygiene. Children do not work. Middle-class parents are supposed to use all meritocratic levers to elevate offspring, who are to compose a self out of hobbies, preferences, diagnoses, and quirks. The sports, activities, lessons, and enrichments that middle-class children have come to take as normal are pleasant in the present and aimed at the future, at least at the pie-in-the-sky of college admission. Childhood leisure often is protected as contrast to the future work it enables. As a friend of mine advised her teen, she’d do better spending summer on standardized-test prep than a part-time job because potential scholarships that may result would cash out for more than a paycheck. 

Cultural standards of childhood dictate the terms of parenthood. These standards made parenthood a bigger job, handed down when mothers were presumed to be the ones doing it. Its parameters not only reflect standards of a bygone decade (1950s? 1980s?), but also the ever-shifting requirements of American middle-class childhood. 

Why do women do this stuff? Cultivating children’s aspiring individuality is the work middle-class women were assigned and told to get good at. Part of mothers’ job is keeping up with what the job is, which means that part of their job is keeping up with all of its attendant tasks in order to delegate some. All this means that, as parental roles currently stand, it is the mother’s job to supervise the mental load of family life, even in order to offload some.

Why don’t men do this stuff? For sure, some do. Still, the disparity in cognitive labor that Daminger finds is potent provocation. It’s a bitter joke among women that dads get praise for doing basic kid stuff that moms do all the time unsung: Isn’t it great that he took the kiddos to the playground and brought a snack?! Some men, involved in children’s lives in ways their own fathers never would have dreamed, resent being impugned for underperformance. But conflicts around this load also might arise because one party feels pressured to assume a greater share of a job whose terms he never would have agreed to. The same system that multiplied mothers’ tasks erased the value of some older fatherhood duties. 

Older models may have called for fathers’ active investment in equipping children, especially sons, with skills for future work or public roles. In some religious traditions fathers held more responsibility for children’s moral formation and for enforcing social expectations. An economy inviting middle-class youngsters to invent themselves by buying things and watching screens has less use for a dad’s plodding instruction on, say, how to sell a house or change a tire, let alone how to develop courage or equanimity. Once those offerings are spurned, some fathers, when offered a share of what remains in childrearing, like reminding kids to floss or monitoring parental-control software, might not want to lean in. They may lean the other way instead, armed with classic strategies of workplace resistance like feigning ignorance or breaking tools. So doing, they would resemble what Daminger calls a Bumbler.

The couples Daminger studies are admirable. They want to do well for their households, their children, their spouses. Wisely, solutions she presents in their service do not start with to-do lists for them. She bids first for broad legal and political fixes. Work should be made less totalizing and more flexible so parents don’t need to worry about families while on the clock. Parental leave and paperwork reduction acts would help. An economy marked by less dramatic inequality would mean less cultural competition. Daminger has the blessed temerity to bid child-serving institutions like schools and camps to support this revolution by limiting extra junk they assign parents to do. When Daminger turns reform back homeward, she de-escalates conflict, advising men and women who “identify a mismatch between your ideal and actual allocation,” to “develop a plan for bringing them into alignment.”    

 I have seen versions of alignment among couples who enforce on each other a kind of rigid equality, each task split down the middle. There are some good reasons why housekeeping and childrearing get configured as a slate of tasks to divvy up. Treating domestic duties like this reflects effort to rationalize and respect them, to neutralize gendered categories of drudgery and “real” work, to name tasks according to services they provide children rather than by particular relationships so that either parent is eligible to provide these services now generically labeled “parenting” or even just “caregiving.”  

But what is wrong with parents’ cognitive labor imbalance is not just the way it is divided but the compulsion to divide. The foundational problem with disproportionate mental load is failure to envision a common life. This problem afflicts American habits around courtship and coupling as well as parenthood, enshrining an ideal of two working spouses who affirm each other’s careers and compartmentalize the other parts of life, leaving the home as a staging area for stuff and kids. Sorting out the shares evenly is only the best goal when work is a mere series of components, discrete items on a checklist, interchangeably performed. 

Except, a family does not work that way. Life together is not an array of separate tasks that can be flipped into one basket or another but the coordination of them in toto. Cognitive labor has been left to carry so much weight because it is through little details of the everyday that common life is constituted, often outside recognition that such a thing exists. Thinking about due dates and expiration dates, clothing sizes and homeroom assignments, get-well cards and appliance repair, becomes the thread holding together discrete tasks. In some couples Daminger examines, women manage cognitive labor because with it they call into being the closest thing to a common life a household may have. The welter of little details is proof that somebody is thinking about the big picture.

There is no sense in romanticizing old-fashioned farm families or the time when fathers ruled. For sure, a common life could emerge from willingness of wife, children, and other dependents to fall in line with dictates from the head of the household, or with what economic pressures dictate to all through him. The remedy now is not best sought by teasing apart breadwinning and caregiving to fit an old model, whether one lapsed or actually mythical.

The key change necessary for righting cognitive labor is for people in households to understand that they are in this together, that they know what the “this” is, and they know whom “they” includes. Cognitive labor of the kind Daminger measures is the big human work of care, of seeing and knowing each other as particular people. It is what families need to do to make home the place where we are, from which bridges extend out to the world and back in. 

The other necessary step is to reimagine kids not as only objects of parental labor but as participants in the common life. This is the boast of big families—that parents worry less and kids do more because they have to. The remedy to parents’ maldistribution of work is to reduce and not just redistribute it, to have less work and also to allocate it in more than two baskets, mom’s and dad’s. Reduction can come with children’s management of more of their own stuff plus collaboration in the work that is left over. Obviously, I am not ordering babies to chop firewood. But children at fairly tender ages can be trusted, and honored, with shared responsibilities. 

Believe in it? I’ve seen it done. I know some twenty- and thirty-somethings raising young children, managing households collaboratively in ways tempting to envy but so beautiful that even that sin is cast out. There’s the couple who shift an infant from one’s sling to the other’s front-carrier at an academic conference. There’s the couple whose children flourish after a big move of house, job, and school, stabilized by the strong good that both parents built at home. There’s the pair with a child needing hands-on medical assistance, where both parents are adept with equipment and confident of the other’s competence to meet the child’s needs. I love Daminger’s suggestions, especially the institutional ones. My confidence about families in the future is fueled not so much by political reform or the normalizing of gender-neutral chore spreadsheets, but because I have seen so many astonishing young people who understand themselves as making together the life they value together. The men in these couples seem to think that children are good, that they like their particular family, and that they are willing to do what is needed to keep it all going.

I am not putting burdens on these lovely people to solve the problem Daminger names. I know their family dynamics only from a little peephole I breathed on the window, and do not know how effortful or hashed-out these arrangements are. I conclude on a note inspired by Daminger’s clever title. To ask what’s on her mind is to hint that something else should be on his. Men may be key to bringing change, although I think not strictly in the scheme of chore-distributing fairness. Men might push back against the dumb things competitiveness and consumer culture impose on the workload of being responsible for young humans in a home. American childrearing systems, built decades ago for stay-at-home mothers without asking their say, burden both parents. Fathers might advocate for their families by cheerfully refusing.

We are on the cusp of significant leadership transitions within the American church. As one generation retires and new leaders arise, we will face many difficult questions about what those transitions should look like as well as the dangers we risk if we get them wrong. For now, the range of possibilities open to us is quite broad, but it will narrow rapidly in the coming years. If we want to get it right, now is the time for thought, planning, and conversation about what makes for faithful and healthy leadership.

A Tragic Case Study

King Rehoboam in 1 Kings 12 offers a terrific (or tragic) case study in poor leadership transfer. Successor to his father, the famously wise King Solomon, Rehoboam is immediately approached by Solomon’s labor force. They don’t mind serving, but Solomon’s yoke has become heavy, and they want a reprieve. 

Rehoboam requests three days to consider the matter, during which he seeks counsel from two groups: first, the older men who had advised his father, Solomon, and then his younger friends who had “grown up with him.” The older men recommended lightening the load and thus securing the people’s devoted service. The younger men advised doubling down on Solomon’s yoke, lest the people think the new management is weak. 

Tragically, Rehoboam abandons the older men’s counsel and rules harshly. Ultimately, the kingdom was torn in two as a result of Rehoboam’s poor leadership.

Misguided Image

“Leadership” can conjure up many different images. The word itself can feel like a stuffy, florescent-lit boardroom. Or the hot soil of a colonial battlefield. Or even the sting of icicles clinging to Shackleton’s beard on the Endurance. These images are aggressive, grueling, and overwhelmingly male.  

However, leadership is not gender specific, nor is it relegated to a title, a corporate office, or a military grade watercraft. Leadership takes place wherever there is a system (a business, team, small group, or family) that needs to be managed, directed, or changed. 

Dan Allender appropriately broadens the imagery of leadership when he rightly says, “if there is one little girl who looks at you and says, ‘Mommy’, then you are a leader.” Indeed, anyone who uses their gifts, talents, and resources for the good and guidance of others is a leader. 

In his book, A Non-Anxious Presence, Mark Sayers skillfully adapts Edwin Friedman’s work on systems theory. Friedman identified that healthy organisms produce healthy systems. Individuals who can differentiate themselves from––not be affected by––the inevitable stress and anxiety in a system can impact the system positively. 

Sayers applies these principles when he argues that good leadership is not reducible to charisma, drive, intelligence, or achievements, but being a non-anxious presence. 

But how does one lead as a self-differentiated non-anxious presence?

Getting on the Balcony

In their excellent book on leadership, Linsky and Heifetz say a crucial first step for any leader is getting on the balcony. This is the thirty-thousand foot view of a system, in leader-speak. But at its simplest, this is a learned awareness of oneself, those around you, how the system fits together, and how it is doing. 

This balcony-view takes devoted time. Some have the luxury of multi-day retreats and custom analytics to gain such a view. Others manage it with a notepad after the kids go to bed. Many make mental notes as they sit bleary-eyed over breakfast. 

King Rehoboam took three days to reflect on the change of power from his father to himself. The people complained of heavy burdens. He needed to assess the situation and get counsel. Such reflection can be as broad as assessing cultural trends or as narrow as getting clear on where the few people around the dinner table are emotionally, spiritually, and physically.

From the balcony, it can be helpful to identify the broad system(s) or networks you inhabit, the dominant hubs, the individual nodes, and the connections between them:

Sayers helpfully parses these components of a system:

• Nodes – the individuals: family members, teammates, congregants
• Connections – how the nodes are related: friends, family, coworkers
• Hubs – highly connected nodes within the system: any leader, group, or platform that touches many nodes
• Protocols – the agreed upon rules of the system: bylaws, mission statements, values

We can see how just two systems can have many overlapping and dynamic connections, with many different areas for potential stress and anxiety.

Such anxiety can be the result of not knowing where we fit. It is on the balcony where we assess the big picture. 

The Necessary Work

Once you have clear eyes on the system in question, Linsky and Heifetz suggest four necessary tasks. One reason Rehoboam is a helpful case study is because, according to Linsky and Heifetz, he does just about everything wrong.

Distinguish between technical and adaptive problems.

Technical problems are problems that can be quickly resolved using techniques already at hand, usually by an authority figure. Technical solutions for technical problems are often easily implemented––top-down––and require little change in a system. 

In contrast, adaptive problems often are rooted in people’s values, behaviors, and motives. Because they are more embedded in the people of the system, they often require action from the people themselves.

A helpful example of this distinction is surgery and medicine versus lifestyle changes or physical therapy. Surgery and medicine are (relatively) easily implemented and require little on the part of the recipient. Surgery is performed; the problem is addressed. Lifestyle change and physical therapy are much more difficult and require a high level of buy-in from the beneficiary. Often such change pushes against deeply ingrained, unhealthy routines that are hard to quit. 

Both approaches are legitimate and one does not preclude the other, but knowing the difference is essential. Adaptive solutions to technical problems waste everyone’s time; technical solutions to adaptive problems will only mask the real issues. 

In the case of Rehoboam, he mistook an adaptive problem as a technical one. The people wanted a leader who cared about them, one who heard their cries of weariness, one who was committed to their flourishing. This would’ve likely taken a lot of emotional intelligence and character Rehoboam didn’t have and would’ve taken a lot of adjustment from everyone to figure out new routines and rhythms of working to ensure the people weren’t overwhelmed but the work didn’t suffer. 

Adaptive solutions often fizzle once the reality of required change sets in. It was much easier for Rehoboam to double down on the currently available technique of exploitation. 

While every system is constantly dealing with a mix of technical and adaptive problems, Sayers points out that Western society as a whole has historically adopted a technical-first approach to system management. Due to the success of industrialization, technical “programming” became the assumed leadership solution to all problems––good leadership was keeping the machine well-oiled and the people in line. 

However, with globalization and the explosion of the internet allowing system hubs to be decentralized, adaptive solutions are needed much more often. Sayers says a more helpful framework than a mechanical “program” approach is virology. Viruses constantly test themselves against their environment, adapting until they can gain a stronghold in a system. Leadership in the modern age must likewise be ruthlessly adaptive. 

Find out where people are.

Many systems have clear processes for people, such as organizational charts or discipleship sequences and pipelines. Good leaders know where each person is, both personally and organizationally:

Personally 

Where are they as human beings? A simple framework such as PRE/PS can be useful, noting where people are Physically, Relationally, Emotionally/Psychologically, and Spiritually. 

Staying aware of this will help in knowing where to focus one’s time and resources, and help to guide interactions.

Organizationally

Where are they as system nodes––what connections and alignments do they have and share with others? An important note here is to connect relationally in order to discern system location, rather than assuming you know based on actions or reactions. 

I recently attended the Presbyterian Church in America’s General Assembly and was enlightened after meeting and conversing with people across a large system. I was able to interact with numerous “nodes” outside my typical spheres. This relational connection brought new clarity on how people were aligned and connected in the system (not just how I assumed they would be!), and opened possibilities for future adaptive work. 

To find out where people are requires actually meeting people where they are. Call it “boots on the ground”; call it “grassroots”; there must be a relational connection with each member in the system, on some level. This personal knowledge often happens outside of formal meetings. There isn’t a “paper-trail” for these encounters; they’re not reflected in official minutes but they pave the way for collaborative adaptive solutions. 

Here, Rehoboam had a lay-up opportunity to hear from the people and learn where they were. They came forward offering their perspective. They’re willing to serve, but they want a change. They had been freed from slavery in Egypt, but their freedom had once again turned to exploitation. 

Now, it’s not totally fair to accuse Rehoboam of not being a man of the people; kings have a lot on their plates. However, I think it’s fair to assume a lack of relational connection for two reasons: his arrogance and his inexperience. 

Rehoboam responds, “my pinky is thicker than my father’s thighs”––in other words, “You think it was bad before?… Hold my beer!” Such arrogance is a young man’s game. Few who have endured the true task of leadership over decades come out on the other side as arrogant. Leadership is a crucible. Again, a prime example of this is mothers: often working outside the home and still managing the lion’s share of household operations by default. I know many mothers refined by the fires of leadership; I know very few arrogant mothers. 

But Rehoboam’s arrogance is only compounded and supported by the unstable foundation of inexperience. Technique is always alluring to the inexperienced. Techniques can be adopted quickly and give the veneer of competence. Relational investment and compromise, on the other hand, is uncomfortable, takes time, and many mistakes and misjudgments must be made along the path toward wisdom. 

Listen to the music/subtext.

When connecting relationally, a good leader must be in tune to the underlying dynamics and unspoken melody that sit quietly between the lines. 

Rehoboam's arrogance and inexperience were a recipe for being an anxious presence. His anxiety led him to perceive threats where there were none. It also made him deaf to the music. He can’t accurately hear the subtext of their request: a longing for the freedom they once knew after Egypt. 

He perceives their request as a threat against his inexperience rather than a genuine plea for reprieve. His insecurity muffles his ears to their hearts; he reads their longing for freedom as a desire for leverage over a new king.

Anxiety limited his leadership toolbelt to reactive harshness. 

Pay attention to the leaders.

In a network system, stress typically manifests at the hub level. Organizationally, this is usually the location of the “leaders.” Having the most contact with each individual node, they absorb each node’s anxiety and often become overwhelmed long before any one individual. Unfortunately, this also means an anxious presence at the hub level can negatively affect multiple nodes simultaneously, causing anxiety to go “viral.”

In the case of Rehoboam, the leaders were the older men. They knew the people’s weariness, and encouraged Rehoboam to relieve them. Had the people come on their own, one could wonder about their motives. But Rehoboam should have realized that the complaint came also from the leading, older men––their experience and character should have vouched for the sincerity of the people’s request. Such is the value of not leading alone.

At this stage, we must also understand that hub “leadership” is not always held by a person. Digital, political, or ideological hubs can gain dominance quietly and quickly outside of system control. For example, social media itself can be a hub and is likely dominant across any system, touching nearly every node and posing the threat of extreme, unpredictable, and constant anxiety.

Paying attention to pervasive and decentralized influences require varying levels of expertise and involvement to discern and combat. Insights and hub-specific resources from leaders like Jonathan Haidt and his work in The Anxious Generation are needed to address such issues that extend beyond our own expertise.

Finding Partners for the Journey

Linsky and Heifetz highlight this need for outside help. This is true whether on a team, leading a group, or managing a family––no one can lead effectively on their own. We need the valuable input, insight, and oversight of others gifted in ways different than ourselves. 

Herein lies Rehoboam’s crucial mistake. The old men had “stood before Solomon” who was unsurpassed in wisdom. Not only this, but they had experience under their belts. They were standing before Solomon, gleaning his wisdom, before Rehoboam or his friends were even born. They’ve seen a thing or two. 

Not so with Rehoboam’s other friends. They’ve only stood before their peers. Simply put, they were unqualified to be offering advice to the new king. In his foolishness, Rehoboam promoted his friends to hub-leadership––inexperienced youths who have not honed the craft of non-anxious leadership.

The result was a divided kingdom.

Leadership Fail-Safe

While a tragic tale of leadership, it also offers an encouraging truth for those tasked with leading others: we can never out– or under-lead God. In verse 15, God’s providence is given as a divine leadership fail-safe: King Rehoboam didn’t listen to the people “for it was a turn of affairs brought about by the LORD that he might fulfill his word.” 

Of course there is wisdom in making plans and seeking to lead well, but ultimately even our best leadership efforts are beholden to the direction of God (Pr. 16:9). In a letter to a nobleman, John Newton wrote:

All changes, successes, disappointments, all that is memorable in the annals of history, all the risings and falls of empires, all the turns in human life, take place according to His plan.

Not even Rehoboam’s folly can undo God’s plan.

The Lord is in the business of using foolish counsel to fulfill his word. God used the foolishness of Rehoboam to fulfill his promise to Solomon that he would divide his kingdom. Likewise, God used the foolishness of the cross to fulfill his promise that a new King would crush the Serpent’s head, uniting a new kingdom in himself.

The God of the Balcony came low in the person of Jesus, rubbing shoulders with the people. He exercised perfect leadership, even giving his own life so that he could lead us to his Father. All our leadership––good and bad––is eclipsed by the Good Shepherd’s grace and promise to bring his people safely home, into a kingdom that can never be divided.

A new generation of leaders can lead in freedom, non-anxiously and adaptively, willing to risk failing under the grace of such a gospel fail-safe. 

This past summer, I tried to get a trend going. A friend and I thought it’d be funny to select an obscure figure - someone who’s on almost no one’s radar - and construct a whole fake narrative about how the general public was now dying to get on board with their work. And so naturally we chose Josef Pieper.

Yet in the midst of the wheelhouse of jokes we made about how everyone from the upper echelon of Tik Tok stars to Taylor Swift were hopping on the Pieper bandwagon, I was surprised to find that people actually started reading him. Not hundreds, but probably around 60. Which might not seem like a lot, but drumming up enough interest to get 60 people to read a dead German Thomistic philosopher is no small feat. 

And in the midst of championing a fake trend that became real, I started realizing why Pieper was so great. 

Pieper offers a generation inundated by irony, anxiety, productivity-obsession, and cynicism a unique account of joy that owes less to mindless optimism than the rational consequences of recognizing the goodness of reality.

—

I first ran across the name Josef Pieper while reading Alan Noble’s recent book To Live Well. Noble is older than I am, but he’s perceptive about our cultural aches and has a pulse on Gen Z’s core longings. Some of the Pieper quotes I read resonated with myself and friends around my age. So I picked up Leisure, his most famous book. Soon after, I bought 12 more copies to give away. Distilling the appeal of Josef Pieper is a tough task, but if I had to pick a phrase, I’d say joyous realism. 

It’s not that Pieper is all about fun and games and contentment in a simplistic way, though he is technically about all of those things. It’s more so that Pieper thinks of happiness as a byproduct of a virtuous life with God. Happiness is a result of leisure—the ability to rest and enjoy and contemplate the deeper facets of reality that go beyond mere work. And it is not illusory joy—it is joy rooted in philosophical and theological realism about the state of reality. 

He says that since loving another person is the desire to “share in beatitude with them,” then joy is the outcome, the fruit, the outpouring of all authentic love. As such, all acts of loving are necessarily knit together with and in pure joy. In fact, if we didn’t feel happy after acting in accordance with a genuine desire to love someone else, we wouldn’t really be acting out of love, but out of stoic duty. And stoic duty is, for Pieper, anathema to both cultivating real virtue and inhabiting life well. 

It’s partly his indebtedness to Aquinas that makes him willing to repeatedly return to this idea (which, at my current count, appears in six of his books), since Aquinas said “Man desires happiness naturally and by necessity” (ST I-I, q. 94, a. 1), “To desire to be happy is not a matter of free choice,” (I-I, q. 19, a. 10), and ultimately pointed to communion and union with God as the summon bonum (II-II, q. 1-5). 

But there’s something more complex about his orientation to happiness and joy that you’ll scarcely find elsewhere—especially not within the timid-to-get-associated-with-prosperity-gospel groups. It’s not just wishful thinking; it’s more like highlighting happiness as a logical, rational, necessary consequence of faithfully abiding in Jesus. It’s not something to be surprised about.

Part of what enables this emphasis is Pieper’s conviction that humans only “are” as they “become.” There is no “is” within a human being if that “is” doesn’t account for their being in a state of progression, movement, or continual momentum. He thought that we must understand that in the act of being created, we are all “shot toward our destination like an arrow.” We’re insanely and beautifully teleological. 

In other words, we’re pilgrims—perpetually on-the-way. And this reality that we have “not yet arrived,” that we’re in a perpetual state of pilgrimage, we come to accept an intrinsic lack of wholeness in our present state. But once accepted, it angles our desires so that we’re always aware that they’re restless for now. It disciplines the nagging craving for nirvana and metabolizes instead our slow and arduous pilgrimage toward eventual beatitude. It reminds us to wait longingly for this “state of bliss (Gückselikeit).” In his words, “The object of this dynamism, the destination of this journey, the aim, therefore, of this becoming and the moving force underlying it all, is the good.” And our pilgrimage is a constant journey of participatively receiving the good in all its forms.

In my personal favorite entry in Pieper’s bibliography, In Tune with the World, he lays the foundation for why someone with an astute background in philosophy, a field which has historically fertilized an immense number of brooding cynics, can actually rejoice and rejoice always. He asks the question of “why do we rejoice and have festivals?” It’s because of the realization and affirmation that everything around us is good. 

Even though many biblical texts indicate that the world is corrupted and ruled by “the evil one,” this doesn’t mean that it isn’t truly and thoroughly good. To borrow metaphysical terms, seeing the world as entirely evil is only feasible within a framework that accepts creation’s substance as taking on the necessary property of “evil”—having its substance altered. Instead, since God declared His creation “good/very good,” He bestowed upon us an essential nature that isn’t stripped away by the comingling of the properties of corruption and sin. Sin corrupts creation; but it doesn’t transform God’s good creation into an ontological mistake.

Central to this affirmation of the good is the rejection of what is evil, and the renunciation of all that’s not edifying even on a momentary basis. In affirming what’s good and true and right, we come to create a real and tangible reason for joy. Affirming isn’t a blind reduction or ignorance of what’s evil, but a thorough identification of the aspects of our reality that are praiseworthy. And this is where true joy comes from; it can’t come without a reason, as that would make for the artificial joy of hedonic pleasure. But affirming the goodness of the world and life and our being on-the-way toward God is where joy and festivity necessarily sprout from. 

So even though joy and festivity are intrinsically secondary (our purpose and sense of meaning cannot be scaffolded upon happiness alone) they are still healthy byproducts of a life that happily acknowledges that God exist—and how great it is that He exists! 

Conversely, “festivity is impossible to the naysayer.” Put another way: festivity is impossible for the cynic, the nihilist, the chronic pessimist. It’s only possible when one has meaningful affirmations to celebrate. Early Christians even called exclusion from the eucharist a banishment into “unfestivity.” This is where all religious festivals stem from—themselves reminders to live in accord with an affirmation of the goodness of creation and our embodied, fallible existence. 

Much of this is uncomfortable for those more used to hearing that the world is marred and a threat to righteousness. And Pieper acknowledges that the world can indeed threaten the faith. But it is not primarily and most significantly an environment that wreaks havoc on righteousness. 

Pieper is not just creating a useful fiction for generating good vibes or hollow optimism; he’s identifying reality: that there is a goodness to what is created, and part of loving the good (which occurs primarily through loving God, others, and what He’s made) involves the secondary consequence of realizing that happiness and joy must flow from this. 

Beyond his pure philosophy, there’s much about Pieper’s general posture that’s commendable. He knows how to communicate ideas to non-specialists. His work is dense, but not impenetrable. He is unafraid of crossing the boundaries of academic specializations. Though he is a philosopher, he oscillates between the theologian voice and historian voice at will. And this works to his benefit: he writes as a philosopher, but his conclusions are theological – opening up new ways to think and live and move and have our being as theologians. 

Pieper is also refreshingly ecumenical. He quotes C. S. Lewis in many of his books and even pays a painstakingly thorough compliment toward Chesterton’s scholarship on Aquinas. For a generation burnt out from “my denomination” triumphalism, reading a serious philosopher pay serious respect to those on the other side of denominational lines feels like an Advil knocking out a lingering headache. 

His work now exists as a time capsule. There aren’t really monographs written about him in the way that people write about Moltmann or Barth. So it’s purely the interest of readers that keeps his work alive. 

And yet, despite how seemingly unpalatable his work might seem to younger generations, there is a kind of post-postmodernism (or metamodern) angle to his work. It’s appealing. He’s hopeful. He knows all the worst things that could happen in the world, the sheer weight of our negativity bias that draws us into a perpetual rumination of all that’s wrong and all that could go wrong.

And yet, he still believes, he still hopes, he’s still confident in love’s power to overcome hate and fear. He identifies our formation into the virtues as a worthwhile battle. He realizes the worst possible scenarios but invites us to move forward anyway. For him, despair is the outcome of a life bent toward rejecting an affirmation of the good. His total allergy to cynicism speaks to a generation fatigued by mistrust and suspicion. For younger people who are arguably more inclined toward despair than any generation before, that’s the kind of affirmation we’re craving. We know that all is not well with our souls; but Pieper shows us why and then lights a way to follow.