The announcement of the reappearance of this painting of Luther’s prince, with his bushy beard and regal fur collar (and with the spot-it-if-you-can flying serpent that functioned as the artist’s signature), is fitting because this month marks the anniversary of Frederick’s death on May 5, 1525. So much of what happened in the early Reformation had ties to the Elector of Saxon that it’s no exaggeration to say it may not have happened, if not for Frederick.

The Prince Elector came into his office in 1486 with his primary seat at Torgau. Another of his holdings was the fairly inconsequential city of Wittenberg. Frederick had another castle there (among several others), and he wanted to raise the city’s profile. Two projects ensued: first, he rebuilt his castle, bringing it back from some disrepair. Attached to the castle was the All Saints Church, to whose doors Luther is said to have nailed the 95 Theses, igniting the whole Reformation fire.

More important, though, is that Frederick founded the University of Wittenberg in 1502. He hoped to increase the city’s renown and have it claim a place with universities in Heidelberg, Erfurt, and Tübingen as a center of scholarship and learning. It was Frederick’s school to which Luther was appointed by his Augustinian monastic order as a Bible professor in 1512. Luther regarded Wittenberg as Nowheresville and took up his university post reluctantly but obediently. His position as a doctor of the church, that is, as one of its public theologians, both demanded that he speak out and also provided a platform to do so.

The 95 Theses were written from a sense of obligation (and with some indignation) to raise questions about the validity of the church’s practices. Most people know the Theses were written in response to Johann Tetzel’s indulgence-mongering drive in nearby territories. Tetzel promised the penitent donors to Rome’s capital campaign to build St. Peter’s Basilica that their coins would gain a loved one’s release from purgatory.

But Frederick was also tied to the Theses. The prince owned nearly 19,000 relics — objects of veneration, like martyrs’ bones, a drop of the Virgin Mary’s breast milk, or a splinter from Christ’s cross. The prince’s holdings were opened up for viewing annually and, like indulgences, venerating the relics could knock off hundreds of years from your time in purgatory. These practices seemed to Luther counter to the promises he found in scripture about Christ’s actual benefits. Indulgences and relics provided no relief, and their empty claims (even those offered though his own Prince) meant people were sold a bill of goods.

When the 95 Theses exploded across Europe, Rome’s eye was drawn to the backwater university town in Frederick’s Electoral Saxony. It was, perhaps, more attention than Frederick wanted for his city (or, with its infamy, the wrong kind of attention). But the prince was a personage of some influence. As one of the Electors of the Holy Roman Empire, he was among the seven people who chose the emperor. Frederick had been the leading candidate for the job, but he cast his support to the young prince Charles V of Spain who was elected in 1519.

Rome needed the Empire’s support, and to move against the upstart friar and professor in Wittenberg meant asking Charles to make the poor political move of threatening a subject of the man he owed his position to. Charles’ options were limited. What’s more, he needed to raise armies and funds to battle the warlord Suleiman the Magnificent, whose forces were moving up the Balkan Peninsula. Frederick had both soldiers and coins to contribute and could protect his suddenly famous monk with some impunity.

When the Empire pushed back against the Turks, Charles had enough breathing room for a maneuver against Luther. The reformer was called to defend himself in what was nearly a show trial at the imperial diet at the city of Worms in 1521. It was there that Luther delivered his “Here I Stand” speech and where the Edict of Worms against him was drawn up. The edict condemned Luther, demanded that his books be burned, and threatened anyone who supported him.

Because of his political power, however, Frederick the Wise — who was present at the diet — never signed the document. The result was that Luther was wanted dead or alive throughout the Holy Roman Empire, except in Electoral Saxony. The Reformer and, thus, the gospel promises he preached and taught were protected.

It was Frederick who worked behind the scenes through members of his court and friends of Luther to arrange for a fake kidnapping outside of Eisenach, where the prince held another castle, the Wartburg. Because of Frederick’s protection, Luther could lie low in the mountaintop fortress where he grew out his tonsure and beard, wrote continuously, and produced his German translation of the New Testament (in just eleven weeks). At the end of the decade and five years after Frederick’s death, Luther holed up at the Coburg Castle (as good an example of a mighty fortress as you could find), the Saxon prince’s southernmost holding during the Diet at Augsburg, which was outside the territory and where Luther wasn’t safe. Frederick’s power and influence held even when he was gone from the scene.

When the prince died on May 5, 1925, the transition to the new Elector, Frederick’s brother John the Steadfast, was one of a string of important events that made the year one of the most important in Luther’s life. John was, if anything, even more supportive than Frederick. With that succession in place, Luther contended with the rebellion of the peasants in southern German who claimed him as their inspiration. He responded to the humanist thinker Erasmus of Rotterdam’s argument against him by writing what Luther considered one of his best works, On the Bondage of the Will. And that summer, he found himself marrying the escaped nun Katarina von Bora just down Kollegienstrasse from Frederick’s castle and church in Wittenberg.

Among the many paintings that Lucas Cranach produced, the portrait of Frederick the Wise that has come back to Dresden is not the most significant. Frederick’s death created a market for these portraits, and this is one of over thirty we know came out of the Cranach studio. It was easy money. Compared to the artist’s major paintings, it’s a wee turquoise thing. But its size belies the greatness of the person within the frame.

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We translate our values into the buildings we erect too. And those values often demand justification. Like any political party, the cosmetics of “style,” religion, and building can find validation in public opinion. Recent polls attempt to connect “style” and “faith” in architecture. Christianity Today just published the results of a Barna Group Survey: the article is titled “Americans Think Church Should Look Churchy,” i.e., “traditional.”

The tally of the vote count in the survey is amazingly even: 90% favor “easily identifiable” (interpreted in the article as “traditional”) churches — it is broken down into 38% who love “modern” in feel and 28% who say they love “trendy” in sacred space — and the article says that churches are overwhelmingly desired to be “timeless and transcendent.” Is THAT “traditional”?

Other surveys show a cultural shift away from “traditional” weekly worship. Yet 2025 has seen an uptick in church attendance. Our buildings do not shape these realities: our buildings only reflect them.

Places where we come to God are devoted to capturing the intimate universality of connection beyond ourselves. There is no recipe, no rule book, no Bible to follow in designing sacred space. But we try to control the definitions of what design can employ in making places of faith. So “style” becomes a spiritual expression. And we can vote for whatever “style” reinforces our hope to legitimize the exquisitely intimate.

Historically, the connection between the infinite and the intimate has been transformed in the cauldron of places of worship. Architecture becomes a cultural manifestation that accommodates the inexplicable.

Is sacred “traditional?” Is it “modern?” Is it voted in, or already in each of us? I think it’s just human. We love beauty, in all the ways we know it — we do not worship “style.” I think sacred has no “style,” but we want it to.

But like all buildings, places of worship are filled with all the baggage of humanity. No matter how we use them, all buildings either embrace us, remain neutral to our use or, worse, the architecture we create actively fights our hopes. In creating sacred space, those hopes are exquisitely personal, and any aesthetic misfit challenges our faith. (Before COVID, a group desperately tried to validate the “good” of “traditional” architecture in a Harris Poll.)

When our culture tries to apply “right” and “wrong” to the styles that define what we like and don’t like, the rheostat of our hearts is force-fit into the toggle switch of the Law. But there is no Law of Beauty, not in any formal sense. God has given us the gift of beauty in our lives — we did not define it. When we use what we do — buildings, music, words — to touch God, we are not doing the work; we are trying to see through the armor of faithless fear that separates us from him. And find beauty.

We discover the love of God in beauty, with no need for voting to confer its legitimacy. And we find him in the places where we can listen and hear over the constructions of our hope to validate our faith. Faith and grace are simply there — without ratings, style, or election.

In faith we are all just human. In religion, faith becomes cultural too — with all its prejudices and burdens. In architecture, “style” becomes the religion designers are devoted to. But God does not create buildings or fix elections: God is just in us, without justification. Other than love and grace, that has nothing to do with the things humans make.

We try to make the sacred democratic when God simply loves us: good/evil/traditional/modern. No matter what we create to capture that love, we can only discover it.

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Is your 70-year-old boomer uncle who spends all day on Facebook, eBay, and political news sites really all that different from your 15-year-old zoomer neighbor who spends all his time watching TikTok and YouTube Shorts? I doubt it. To me, generational stereotypes are only slightly more helpful than horoscopes. I’m with Louis Zorich’s character, Pete, in The Muppets Take Manhattan: “Peoples is peoples.”

Dodson writes that the main way Gen Z differs from past generations is “in how digital media exposes young people to suffering, oppression, and violence against others en masse.” That Gen Z’s “interest in imprecation and justice comes not only from their personal experiences but also from their daily witness of the harm done to others around the world.”

Of course, on one level, he’s right. Digital media has replaced carefully chosen images in newspapers and professionally edited TV news segments with a constant barrage of raw depictions sent straight to the device pinging in our pocket. But I suspect the impulse toward fairness and justice over mercy is, overall, the default human position and therefore our natural starting point when we’re young. Before we’re made fully aware of our limitations and culpability, before we’ve had it revealed to us that mercy or grace in one form or another is the true agent behind all the best things in our lives, how could it really be otherwise? If we check back in on Gen Z in 15–25 years, I have a feeling (maybe also a hope) that this propensity will have slackened.

Douglas John Hall’s God & Human Suffering, a wonderful 40-year-old book of theology, sheds some light on all of this by digging into what C. S. Lewis (45 years earlier) called the problem of pain.

One argument he makes is that there are two kinds of suffering: suffering that leads to integration and suffering that only serves to further disintegrate. The difference between the two is “the criterion of life.” Hall is careful here, though. He notes that “while there are numerous criteria for what the Judeo-Christian tradition understands by life and the fullness of life, there is no fixed enunciation of the types of human suffering that can contribute to the life-giving process or, conversely, of those that cannot.” Meaning, we can’t generalize. A form of suffering that might be ultimately beneficial to me could completely wreck you, and vice versa.

Hall also engages with Harold Kushner’s perennially popular When Bad Things Happen to Good People, which Kushner wrote on the heels of losing his fourteen-year-old son to a rare genetic disorder that caused premature aging. Hall acknowledges that much of what draws readers to the book is the immediacy of a writer wrestling not with theoretical pain but an actual recent situation. There is no doubt that Kushner takes human suffering very seriously. Where Hall pushes back is Kushner’s reading of Job, in which he argues against God’s omnipotence, writing that “God would like people to get what they deserve in life, but He cannot always arrange it.”

Hall doesn’t think that is a satisfying answer. God’s problem is not powerlessness, it’s that God loves. That’s why words like “good” fail to capture the reality. God is good, but not in the way that we usually conceive of it. Moralistic goodness is largely beside the point because of how it devolves into “deserving,” into quid pro quo, which is not what God is ultimately interested in. Instead, Hall points us to a God whose power expresses itself not in rewarding the deserving but in the weakness of love. And this more complex, truer God is also more accessible to us because “every one of us knows, if we’ve lived and loved at all, something of the meaning of that yearning, that weak power, that powerful weakness.”

Gen Z is not a monolith, and plenty of people two or three times their age are asking the same questions. As a group, however, their lives have been saturated with disintegrative suffering, and many of them haven’t yet experienced a lot of love. They haven’t yet had enough experience with integrative suffering and all that comes with it. This is not a reason to wring our hands. It takes life experience, including experiences of suffering and love, to break any of us free from the rigidity of good and bad, deserving and undeserving, and to receive what has always been true, that mercy undergirds everything.

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Thanks be to God for James Parker’s instant classic Get Me Through the Next Five Minutes. It is not merely a spark of joy but a whole shower of sparks. The book is a collection of his “Odes” column from the Atlantic (“Ode to Small Talk,” “Ode to Squirrels,” “Ode to Sitting There”). They are, as Parker says, “short exercises in gratitude.” The small stuff of life projected on a big stage to give them their proper due. Parker has a knack for locating the glory of God in the overlooked corners of life. He is constantly scouring his surroundings for something outside of himself: “The grace of God, the piece of toast, whatever gets me through the next five minutes,” as he says. Like John the Baptist, he points away from himself and toward God and simply says, “Look!”

The book is a refreshing reminder that God is everywhere. Anywhere you look. From crying babies to BBQ chips to cold showers to mood swings. “Heaven and earth are full of thy glory,” Parker seems to sing as he pays tribute to everything from balloons to brain farts. He quotes John Donne and the Apostle Paul but pays equal homage to Jason Bourne and Conor McGregor. His “Ode to the Lost Cup of Tea” belongs alongside the parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin. Everything, in its particular way, sings praise to its Maker. In this way, Parker proves that the old saying, in fact, is wrong. The devil is not in the details. The details, in fact, have God’s fingerprints all over them. Like James Joyce once said, “In the particular is contained the universal.” And God, it turns out, is a sucker for the particular.

Parker has assigned himself the task of reminding people of the joy of life. Ever since the Enlightenment cast its shadow of doubt on the world, he argues, we have felt obligated to be in touch with our inner despair. “Today I’m beginning to think that joy, in the face of everything, is the big secret,” he writes. As so many of us spiral down the pit of despair, he reminds us of the miracle of life. 

He does so, thankfully, without dripping with earnestness. He is playful, not instructional. Parker never tells us what to do. He merely points. There’s an “Ode to Meditation,” and then, 63 pages later, there’s an “Ode to Not Meditating.” Parker isn’t prescribing anything, but he’s giving you eyes to see. The odes do not tell you how to live; they simply show you what it means to be a person.

Don’t mistake Parker for some woo woo guru though. He is not singing to the universe. He goes beyond Mary Oliver’s call to merely pay attention. He intentionally avoids branding himself with the vapid “spiritual but not religious” moniker. While he respectfully refrains from ever showing his cards of personal beliefs, he has dropped enough breadcrumbs over the years to indicate that he is a Christian. He goes so far as to suggest that Jesus was not some moral compass to live by but the very same “Son of the Father who taketh away the sins of the world” from our Sunday morning Gloria. And, oh, he does it very well.

Whether intentionally or not, Parker returns the playfulness and wonder to steady Christian doctrine. “Ode to the Left Hand” is a physical expression of Luther’s theology of left-handed power. “Why?” he writes. “What’s it for, the weaker hand? Why this built-in asymmetry, this out-of-whack distribution of strength and fine motor skills?” His “Ode to Sitting There” unapologetically praises the bondage of the will: “I don’t know of any human beings that are free — they all have to make up their minds if they’re going to stay with Judy or go to work.” His piece on AC/DC begins as a tribute to the Nazareth Principle:

Beautiful world-altering things, when they enter history, when they enter time, it kind of happens off to one side. The cameras are always pointing in the other direction. The crowd is always looking the wrong way. So it was with the birth of Jesus. So it was with the sound of AC/DC.

Perhaps greatest of all is his tribute to the man himself. In “Ode to Sleeping Jesus,” Parker contrasts his own existential anxiety with the peace that passes understanding. True peace, he says, is not only exemplified but also personified in Jesus while he snoozes through a storm. To paraphrase it would rob Parker of his genius:

Ever been smashed by a big wave? Plucked from your feet, not far from the shore, and mashed face-first into the gritty floor by a racing heap of water with a delicately toppling crest? It’s phenomenally uninterested in who you are. You feel this quite clearly as the weight pushes you down, as the wave closes its fist on you: no venom in it, nothing personal, just this veering, crushing, glassily unthinking warp of sea strength in which you happen to be caught. Identity — the fragile shell, the craft, the little boat — is moot.

“And there arose a great storm of wind,” as Mark’s Gospel has it, “and the waves beat into the ship, so that it was now full.” The disciples begin to freak out: where’s Jesus? Where is he? For crying out loud? Shouldn’t he be addressing this? But Jesus is asleep. Very comfortably — and for the first and last time in the Gospels — asleep. “And he was in the hinder part of the ship, asleep on a pillow.”

The disciples wake him with their fussing, Jesus (in perhaps a sleep-thickened, slightly irritated voice) “rebukes the wind,” and the situation is resolved. But this — the swatting down of the storm — is not the power image in this scene. The power image is sleeping Jesus, his lovely pillowed unperturbedness as the waves pile up outside. This surface agitation is nothing to him: His mind attaches to the depth, where the ocean sways on its quiet root. Afloat, preserved by his own fragility, he carries a secret that is no secret at all.

We can imagine him smiling as he sleeps.

So behold, my Summer Reading Staff Pick. Like manna from heaven, this book could easily be devoured all at once, but I recommend prescribing yourself one to two servings each day. It is full of sermon fodder, but is also a shot in the arm for anyone who has lost their joie de vivre. It is not meant to replace the Gloria on Sundays. But it will help bring you back to the heart of worship.

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When it arrived, I started reading it. I didn’t get far. Brueggemann was bewildering to me; I’d read a page, be confused, then consider whether to forge ahead or to reread. After a few days, I lost steam and tucked the book away in my nightstand drawer. It stayed there for a few years. I looked at it every now and then but never had the brain energy to tackle the thing. More on Brueggemann in a bit.

In the summer of 2023, I began taking acting classes. At this point I was seven years into my engineering education, so a subject with less mathematical analysis sounded refreshing. Our class started working on Jen Silverman’s play Witch. The play follows a junior devil named Scratch as he goes about a medieval village purchasing souls.^[1] The titular witch, Elizabeth, is visited by Scratch. However, despite the muttered accusations of the local villagers, she’s not a witch. She’s just an outcast. And unlike the rest of Scratch’s customers, Elizabeth does not immediately sell her soul. She is contemplative; Scratch visits her many times to make offers for her soul. Eventually, Scratch and Elizabeth develop feelings for one another.

Throughout the play, Elizabeth considers what her soul is worth. At the end, after some drama, Elizabeth concludes that the world is too far gone. (Interestingly, the characters of the play tear each other apart without Scratch’s help.) Elizabeth decides that the best thing to do is to “pull the plug” (Silverman 85) on the world. Everything should be swept away; let’s just start this thing over.

It is a moody work. The opening monologue from Elizabeth states, “Here is the single thing you should be asking yourself: Do I have hope that things can get better? And if you do, then ignore me. You’re fine. But if you don’t … then maybe this is where we start” (Silverman 1–2). At the time, I was cynical about Elizabeth’s cynicism. Sure, the world is dark, blah blah blah, but that’s not the whole story. I was one of those that Elizabeth said should ignore her, and I did. I couldn’t allow myself to really engage with the questions of the play, with brokenness and hope and whether things ever do change for the better, so I brushed them off with pat answers. As a person of faith, those answers were mainly: “Jesus … so … yeah.” When we finished working on the scenes for my acting class, I put the script away and didn’t think much about it.

Meanwhile, I was in the middle of my PhD (which was objectively going well) and was deeply depressed (which I was denying). I was meeting program milestones and wasn’t even being persecuted as a woman in engineering. So why was I so sad? This is adulthood, baby! I suspected part of the problem was loneliness, which I thought would eventually go away. I was taking acting classes! I was in a book club! I was working remotely at hipster coffee shops! What’s the problem?

But by that fall, things were worse. There were occasional radiant moments — my older sister was baby-bumping; I got to pet a horse — but mostly I was sad. There were too many solitary evenings and too many mornings anxiously lying in bed convincing myself to get up. I couldn’t tolerate being alone at home, so I went to coffee shops and tried not to cry at my laptop. Increasingly, I felt like a hot-air balloon tethered to earth with a million gossamer threads. Every day more threads were broken, and I couldn’t get enough new threads placed to make up for the losses. One day I’d float away.

I was also angry. God was silent. I’d been promised a “still small voice,” or comfort, or something! Something! Some token from God that he heard my prayers, some small tendril of his peace or his presence to weave through my soul and hold it together. Church seemed to imply that the solution was to try harder. You need to go harder putting your identity in Christ (whatever the hell that means), or pray more, or read your Bible more, or feel more grateful, you ungrateful—! How much more faithful could I have been? I wasn’t rejecting faith altogether; I still believed in God. But life seemed dumb, full of meaningless misery and mean people. I didn’t want life to feel that way.

If you’d asked me then, I’d have said, “Yes, absolutely — mental health is similar to physical health, deserving of care. You don’t just pray the illness away.” Yet, I had a hard time making the connection for my own mind. It felt more personal — the problem was that God was a mysterious, silent meanie head, not that I was anxious and depressed. I see now that I was, in a way, asking to dissociate from my experience and feel ok despite my emotional needs not being met. I thought that if I worked really hard, I could either distract myself or prepare a fail-safe script that would plug all the brain holes that kept letting in The Sadness. Unfortunately, there were too many holes, and The Sadness would seep in. So I alternated between the depths of despair and anxiously looking for a way to talk myself out of my feelings.

Sometime that autumn, post–Witch, I reopened my nightstand drawer and picked up The Prophetic Imagination. I figured sure, life’s a vale of tears, but I can still be an intellectual. I thought it would keep my brain occupied to read dry analysis of Old Testament prophets and laborious descriptions of ancient Near East literary techniques. The book is not what I expected. It’s about the role of the prophets and their task of “prophetic imagination.” Prophetic imagination is a way to energize God’s people toward the hope of Jesus. I’m not sure I understand all of Brueggemann’s nuances, but that fall, I understood enough to be deeply touched. I know people tend to frown on “reading yourself into the Bible,” and that’s a fair point. I’m going to disregard it. Truth is often fractal. What applies to a people may also apply to a person, and vice versa.

That fall, I was frustrated. I was trying to keep going, to find something new or different, and I felt like I was spinning my wheels. So when Brueggemann states, “We do not believe that there will be newness, but only that there will be merely a moving of the pieces into new patterns” (Brueggemann 23), I was able to take it in. He was speaking here about the “royal consciousness,” which is inherently in opposition to the “prophetic imagination,” which enables newness. After several years of depression, I was beginning to suspect that maybe life doesn’t get better. In a way, it was incredibly validating to hear that life can and often does feel like this, and that it is hard to hope for something better.

Later, he says again of the royal consciousness that “passion, as the capacity and readiness to care, to suffer, to die, and to feel is the enemy of imperial reality … its (imperial) politics is intended to block out the cries of the denied ones. Its religion is to be an opiate so that no one discerns misery alive in the heart of God” (40–41). Yes, he’s commenting on an “imperial society” and the big-picture social woes that occur when society views life as a zero-sum game. He’s also hinting at passion as a way to bring change. What struck me most was that we are allowed to feel, to grieve, to be miserable in miserable circumstances. God also grieves; he’s not mad that I’m sad and can’t shake it off. It is not God who says all grief is inappropriate or something we’re not supposed to feel.

Throughout the book, Brueggemann also highlights imperial reality’s “denial of endings.” This denial is used to help with the denial of our feelings and the denial of grief. Again, on page 60, Brueggemann says, “Jeremiah, faithful to Moses, understood what numb people will never know, that only grievers can experience their experiences and move on.” I was beginning to hope that Brueggemann was right. That maybe allowing myself to feel wasn’t a never-ending loop of wallowing, but it could be a part of a journey.

Another central theme in the book is the ability to imagine something new. Brueggemann asks, “How can we have enough freedom to imagine a real historical newness in our situation? … We need to ask not whether it is realistic or practical or viable but whether it is imaginable” (44). Here is where I started to notice that Brueggemann’s language felt familiar. Where had I heard this before? I thought about it then went to my bookshelf and pulled out my script for Witch.

Toward the end of the play, a villager named Winnifred decides to sell her soul to the Devil. The pregnant and newly widowed Winnifred offers her soul in exchange for “more of the same.” Winnefred asks for this in front of Elizabeth, the witch. Elizabeth pushes back:

ELIZABETH. If you’re gonna sell your soul, sell it for something better.

WINNIFRED. (Gestures to their surroundings) What, like this?

ELIZABETH. So pick something different. Pick a new / thing—

WINNIFRED. There are no new things! There’s a certain set of things, and whether you’re in the castle or in a hut — they’d still be the same thing. And what’s more, you know that. (Silverman 83)

There are no new things — there’s only a certain set of things — no new things.

This echoed in my head. Returning to Prophetic Imagination:

The inability to imagine or even tolerate a new intrusion is predictable, given the characteristic royal capacity to manage all the pieces. It is so even in our personal lives, in which we conclude that the given dimensions we have frequently rearranged are the only dimensions that exist. To imagine a new gift given from the outside violates our reason. (65)

Elizabeth, at this point in the play, has had a while to think about this. What does she want? Now it’s a bit different, as Elizabeth is contemplating a bargain with the Devil rather than a gift from God, but the idea is similar: if you can have anything, what do you want? What would change your life? Winnifred asks for a “rearrangement of the pieces.” What else is there to ask for?

Continuing in the same scene, after Winnifred says “There are no new things … ”

ELIZABETH. So we have to imagine one, we have to imagine things differently.

WINNIFRED.  I can’t. Everything I can think of, it looks like what I know. I can’t see what a new world would look like. (Really asking) Can you?

(A beat. ELIZABETH tries. She really tries. And … she can’t. Her silence says it all.) (Silverman 83)

After this exchange, Elizabeth tells Scratch to burn it all down. The world is too far gone, and she can’t imagine how to make it better. During this read through, the idea that there is no hope after all struck a chord. Both Witch and Prophetic Imagination acknowledge that there is a lot of awful in the world, and it is really hard to imagine anything better. Witch seemed to imply that the options are to 1) take what you can get and make the best of it, or 2) burn it all down. I was hoping that Brueggemann would offer another option. Please, Lord, let there be a third option.

Bruggeman begins to hint at an alternative when he says, “And as Israel is invited to grieve God’s grief over the ending, so Israel is now invited to hope in God’s promises” (Brueggemann 68). There is an invitation to hope in God’s promises. What is promised? What are we being invited into? He says, “Jesus had the capacity to give voice to the very hurt that had been muted and therefore newness could come. Newness comes precisely from expressed pain. Suffering made audible and visible produces hope, articulated grief is the gate of newness, and the history of Jesus is the history of entering into pain and giving it voice” (Brueggemann 88).

In the end, the diagnosis I took from Prophetic Imagination was to grieve. Only the mourning can be comforted. I liked the idea that something new could happen, that maybe there was something new already happening. That maybe, counterintuitively, I was perpetuating my own misery by denying it. It was a relief to think that there was something on the other side of this, though I couldn’t imagine it yet.

However, time passed, and things seemed to get worse. Witch or Prophetic Imagination? became a kind of shorthand for me. Do I choose to believe in hope and that maybe I could taste and see and feel the goodness of God in the land of the living? I wanted to imagine a better story, but I couldn’t. I didn’t know what else to do. I looked back at the opening monologue of Witch:

ELIZABETH.  Do I have hope that things can get better?

And if you do, then ignore me. You’re fine.

But if you don’t …

then maybe this is where we start. (Silverman 2)

What to make of all of this? I didn’t know. The Lord and I were at an impasse. Some stubborn root in me didn’t believe there was no hope, despite the emotional turbulence. Another part was hurt, overwhelmed, and didn’t quite dare to believe. Time kept passing. That spring, many good things started to happen, though it took a while to feel their effects. Tangibly, I got a roommate and started therapy. I watched Ted Lasso. I told my friends I was sad. There were innumerable other helpful things, and I slowly began to see sparkles of light in my foggy mind. This part is harder to track; seeds grow underground first. Tornados and their desolation are easier to see.

So what am I trying to say? I’m not sure. Though they’re different, I don’t even see Witch and Prophetic Imagination as entirely contradictory anymore. When Elizabeth gives voice to the longings suppressed by the patriarchal powers of her own world, newness does come. This is the pattern Brueggemann describes: expressed pain allows for newness. Elizabeth expresses her grievances to Scratch, and he hears her. A strange love (Scratch is a devil, after all) springs between them. Maybe the problem in Witch was the means; folk wisdom says selling your soul never leads to anything good.

I think I could ramble on forever. Yes, I can write mathematical proofs, but at heart I’m a wanderer, a meanderer, a circler-backer. In the book of Exodus, God sends the prophet Moses to the Israelites to guide the people from slavery in Egypt to life in the promised land. The Israelites wander through the wilderness for 40 years, struggling through liminality and frustration and sameness. Somehow, they come through the other side as the people of God. Graduate school during a global pandemic is not 1:1 with the biblical account of Exodus. Obviously. Meanwhile, I’m learning not to dismiss all pain just because it’s not the absolute worst-case scenario. The biggest thing I needed in graduate school was to integrate my big dumb brain with my “big dumb heart,” (á la historian Kate Bowler). On some level, I knew this. Big feelings were easier to avoid, until they weren’t. When I was finally ready to deal with things, the witches and devils and prophets were there to help. I’m grateful.

^[1] Coincidentally, that summer, my book club was reading C. S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, also about devils strategizing for souls.

The post Witch or Prophetic Imagination? appeared first on Mockingbird.

Years later, I was talking with a pastor friend and his wife. They had previously served at the church with the statue of “Mr. Sideburns,” and so I asked them about it. Of course, they were aware of the statue. They had seen it many times. But then they told me a fascinating detail — few in the church could tell you who the statue was, and the urban legend known around the church was that the minister who was depicted in the statue had commissioned it himself.

Now, I wasn’t there when the statue was commissioned, and I acknowledge my ignorance of the pastor’s motivation. However, it’s not hard to speculate what goes through a person’s heart and mind when they have a statue of themselves built. They want to be remembered. Or to put it another way, they are afraid of being forgotten.

It seems like our world plays off this fear. From Longfellow the poet who said, “Lives of great men all remind us we can make our lives sublime, and departing, leave behind us footprints on the sands of time,” to Maya Angelou, who challenged us by saying, “If you’re going to live, leave a legacy. Make a mark on the world that can’t be erased,” to movies like Gladiator that claim “what we do in life echoes in eternity,” we are encouraged to live in such a way that we will be remembered — or at least that our influence will be felt. I’m not saying that our lives won’t have an impact on those we encounter. After all, my children will bear the wounds that I caused as well as the blessings I brought. Yet will I have the same impact if I’m seeking to make that impact?

What if our footprints in the sand are erased by a small breeze? What about the fact that we have no say on whether what we do will remain or be erased? What if what we do in this life is not heard a generation after we’ve departed?

I remember an older man who was part of my community many years ago. He regularly talked about his children and grandchildren. But he didn’t talk about what was wonderful or unique about them; instead, he opined about the legacy he wanted to leave them. Yet, when I engaged with his children, it became apparent that for all his talk about “leaving a legacy,” they found him to be a burden, an annoyance, someone they, shamefully, rolled their eyes at. He was so concerned about being remembered as a man of wisdom, faith, and steadfastness that he forgot to just be present.

I’d like to think that in some way, somehow, I’ll be spoken of by people who are 50, 75, 100 years still to be born. But honestly, within a generation after my death, I will be forgotten. And what if there’s a blessing to being forgotten? Think about that for a second: could there be relief found in curtailing our attempts to leave a legacy?

Hear me out: can any of us bear the burden of ensuring our life will be remembered beyond our days?

Perhaps a better way forward might be to relinquish concern over how future generations will or will not remember us and instead be content knowing that we are remembered by God.

I find it beautiful how frequently the Bible gives us names of saints, church members, and co-laborers whom we know nothing about. Read the Old Testament chronologies. Or note the women and men who worked alongside the Apostle Paul. While the original readers and writers of those passages would’ve known these people, we’re left wondering what they did, why they were significant, and what their stories were. They’re just names to us. But to the Lord, they’re known and beloved.

These unknown people remind me of Francis Schaeffer’s essay “No Little People, No Little Places.” In God’s economy, there’s no such thing as a little person. Sure, I may not know their names or know what they’ve done, but God has written their names in his book of life. Maybe you feel forgotten, that your efforts are ignored, and you think, “No one sees my sacrifice, my efforts, my attempts at service and love.” That may be true — but those efforts aren’t hidden from the Lord. He sees your love, your sacrifice, your service, and to him it’s beautiful. Though you may be forgotten by man, you’re remembered by God.

I recognize that this pushes against our instinct to pursue meaning through our efforts. Francis Schaeffer once wrote in “Death of the City”: “All men … have a deep longing for significance, a longing for meaning … no man, regardless of his theoretical system, is content to look at himself as a finally meaningless machine.”[1] That longing for significance and meaning is ultimately not the problem. The problem is that we seek to satisfy this longing in the wrong things: notoriety, legacy, being remembered, “greatness” (however we might define that). What would happen if we truly believed that God remembers us even if we’re forgotten in a generation? I suspect we wouldn’t stop caring about how our actions impact others. We would simply be more concerned with whether our lives are oriented towards pleasing the Lord than impressing the peanut gallery.

Perhaps that sounds like a burden of its own. Yet there is tremendous freedom here, especially for those of us who’ve been ignored, forgotten, or seen as having little importance in the world. We are remembered by God, not because of anything we’ve done or accomplished but because of his grace. After all, what causes God to write our names in his book of life is not our work but Christ’s work on our behalf. We are told in Revelation that those who will dwell in God’s new heaven and new earth are those whose names “are written in the Lamb’s book of life” (Rev 21:27). They have been freed from striving endlessly after the acclaim of men and can instead rest in the finished work of Christ. Though we may be forgotten by man, we can rejoice that by his grace, we are remembered by God.

[1] Francis Schaeffer, Death in the City (InterVarsity Press, 1970), 98.

The post The Blessing of Being Forgotten appeared first on Mockingbird.

2. Graduations are natural occasions to contemplate next chapters, to think about not just where we’ve been but where we’re heading. I remember reading an early description of social media as an “endless high school reunion” in which you and I are inundated on an hour-to-hour basis by what our peers are up to and what we missed out on. Makes sense.

If that’s true, then I wonder if our larger discourse has turned into an endless graduation, where we are assaulted by descriptions of what comes next, especially if it’s “doom” colored. I know I can’t scroll through any feeds, social or otherwise, without being bombarded by predictions. Predictions about elections, predictions about gas prices, predictions about birthrates, predictions about the church, and so on. During COVID, one commentator went so far as to diagnose us with a “prediction addiction,” and I think he was right.

Course, if anything could’ve jolted us out of such an addiction, it would’ve been a global pandemic that no one saw coming — or grasped the fallout of. But here we are, more strung out than ever, and just as terrible at seeing into the future. Cue a terrific article in the New Yorker by Joshua Rothman, which asks “Do We Think Too Much About the Future?” Um, yes.

First, since no one actually knows the future, guessing, speculating, or simply making things up remains the state of the art for almost everyone involved in describing it. (Prediction markets, the biggest recent innovation in forecasting, are based on the recognition that experts are often wrong.) And second, our views of the future tend to be dark, and seem to be getting darker. Young people, in particular, increasingly report that they’ve “lost the future” as something to look forward to; they feel trapped in a world careening out of control. A survey conducted by Pew Research found that only fourteen per cent of Americans would transport themselves to the future, if given the choice; nearly half say that they’d prefer to live in the past. Looking ahead, we see mostly malevolent inevitabilities—climate change, oligarchy, autocracy, A.I. overlords, and the like. The open future has closed up on us; we’re back in the end times, where we started. […]

Putting visions of the future at the center of society seemed reasonable, [philosopher at the University of Oxford Carissa] Véliz argues, only because so many took a “naive view of prediction,” imagining “predictions as quests for truth.” In fact, “predictions are power moves much more than they are attempts at acquiring knowledge”; often, they are actually “commands disguised as descriptions,” made by those who know that “the most effective way to predict the future is to determine it.” […]

To begin with, making good predictions is simply more difficult than we’d like. Would-be predictors face “data troubles” (numbers can be incomplete, deceptive, or outright fraudulent); “social troubles” (people are weird); “scientific troubles” (“We cannot predict through any rational or scientific methods the future of our scientific knowledge”); “coincidental troubles” (“flukes that forever alter the path ahead”); and “ironical troubles” (by “selling risk management,” predictors can actually increase systemic risk). These are all reasons to take any given prediction less seriously.

Which is another way of saying the only thing we know for certain about the future is that it won’t look the way we think it will. I suspect things will be much like they are now, getting better and worse at the same time. Alas, like all addictions, I doubt any of these “reasons” to abstain from prediction will have much of an impact. I find it a comfort nonetheless that the hysteria that surrounds us is ultimately just that.

A wise father figure once told me that the gospel means that your past has been dealt with and your future secured. God, meanwhile, dwells in the present. This is good news, since that’s all we have anyway.

One of the warning-less ways God showed up this week was with the announcement of a new Mountain Goats record:

3. When it comes to predictions about the future, there is no topic more irresistible than artificial intelligence. I’ve been asked why Mockingbird has (mostly) avoided the subject, and the truth is, I just don’t feel like we have anything interesting to contribute (yet), beyond “keep your anthropology low and your pneumatology high.” Oh yeah and Blade Runner 2049 is a masterpiece.

You’d still be forgiven for mistaking this next one for a humor piece. If only! “Meet the Sad Wives of AI” by Alessandra Ram in Wired begins with this priceless admission: “If I had to listen to another minute of my husband talking about Claude Code, I might have actually died.” It goes on from there, lamenting the tunnel vision that AI is fueling for an increasing number of men on the coasts of this country.

Speaking as a peer of the doods in question, I share Ram’s suspicion that the topic functions just as much as a means of emotional and spiritual avoidance as it does a source of innovation or opportunity. We talked about this a bit on the most recent Mockingcast, but somehow the only thing guys my age are allowed to talk about anymore are sports (gambling!), real estate, and AI. It gets old fast, even if I can acknowledge that the hopes and fears (and pressures!) involved aren’t entirely fabricated or illegitimate. Which I guess means I share not only Ram’s reservations but also a bit of the accompanying self-righteousness.

Who will deliver us from this loneliness-inducing self-justification feedback loop? Hint: his name does not rhyme with “Maude.”

There’s a strange and under-discussed side effect of the AI boom: what it’s doing to family dynamics. By which I mean: how it’s potentially destroying family dynamics … Often it goes like this: He works in AI, and she does everything and anything else. Other times, it’s bleaker: He desperately wants to work in AI — or feels he must work in AI — and she wants him to do literally anything else […]

Here’s how Bridget Balajadia, a clinician in San Jose, characterizes the AI husband’s situation: “If you don’t respond to an email at midnight, you could wake up and not have a job.” It’s relentless. “In this industry, you’re reachable all the time. You’re thinking about it in the shower, when you’re having sex, it never leaves.” And when it never leaves, the relationship buckles. “It turns into this around-the-clock thing where neither partner is getting what they need. They’re both building walls of resentment.”

But then Balajadia tells me two surprising things. The first is that some sad wives of AI don’t want to talk to her about their husbands. Why? “I’ve already worked through this with my chat,” they say. By which they mean … ChatGPT. Yes. Not only is AI driving a wedge between couples. It’s also become a primary tool for attempting to salvage their marriage. Balajadia isn’t impressed. “They’re not having great outcomes,” she says. “It’s not going to challenge you. You end up being validated. Then both of you don’t move the needle in conflict.” […]

The question I ask everyone: Has any part of the AI boom made things better at home? Could it ever? The responses are generally uninspiring. Most of the time, the closest thing to a silver lining any sad wife can offer is that AI has given them something new to talk about at dinner.

4. On the Substack side of things, I found Alan Noble’s “I’m Free but Afraid” to be a fresh take on a familiar phenomenon. Noble, whose new book just hit shelves, hits on a peculiar irony of contemporary life: that the freedom to construct one’s identity/morality/cosmology from the ground up has ushered in a law far more crushing than the one it set out to dismantle. It’s a bit of a careful-what-you-wish-for situation, albeit on steroids. That is, if we truly insist on being our own gods, the mantle may turn out to be heavier than anticipated.

As another wise father/uncle figure once said, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Perhaps it’s no coincidence he was addressing a superhuman, hint hint. Here’s Alan:

Increasingly I am convinced that inhibition is a defining characteristic of contemporary culture. As a nation, we’re dating at lower rates, having less sex, young people are delaying getting their driver’s license, we’re in a loneliness epidemic, people are turning to AI companions for love and attention, we feel compelled to adopt AI, we feel controlled by our mental health diagnoses, we’re addicted to sports gambling and pornography and all sorts of substances — in other words, we seem to be helpless … We are subjects pushed around by massive forces: our biology, our environment, the government, corporations, social media, our passions, and so on.

And what’s so fascinating about this to me is that this inhibition comes at a time when we are promised and sold radical autonomy. We are told that we create our own lives. That we are masters of our own destinies. That we can and must make our lives meaningful and rich and exciting and purposeful. My theory is that it is precisely this promise of radical autonomy that has led to the widespread feelings of helplessness in contemporary society. To the degree that we have been told that we are responsible for our own individual sense of belonging, identity, meaning, value, and purpose, we freeze up, we feel helpless to act, and we allow others to choose for us. […]

In Alain Ehrenberg’s 2009 book, The Weariness of the Self, he argues that the contemporary experience of depression is marked by inhibition (12). Ehrenberg writes: “The individual, free from morality, creating herself by herself and aspiring to the superhuman, . . . is not our reality. But, instead of possessing the strength of the masters, she turns out to be fragile, lacking in being, weary of her sovereignty and full of complaints” (218–219).

In other words, we are weary of trying to be our own sovereign selves. We have radical freedom to remake our identities (think of social media’s powers of self-expression), but it has come at a great cost: “If moral constraints have grown lighter, psychic constraints have taken their place. Emancipation and action have stretched individual responsibility beyond all borders and have made us painfully aware that we are only ourselves” (226). Elsewhere he refers to this as the “illness of responsibility” (4). In other words, as we are burdened with responsibilities to “be ourselves”, we (ironically) grow less able to be ourselves in the sense of who God created us to be.

5. Thankfully this next one hints at the possibility of a lighter burden. Writing in the NY Times, David Epstein eulogizes Herbert Simon, AKA “The Nobel-Winning Psychologist Who Believed He Found the Secret to Happiness.” The secret is what Simon called “satisficing,” which is a mashup of satisfy and suffice. A satisficer makes their choices — from which socks to wear to which people to date — according to what is “good enough” as opposed to what is “best.”

A maximizer, on the other hand, makes decisions based on the best of all possible options. If you’ve ever spent hours on Google or Yelp looking for the single “right” place to have lunch, you understand the distinction — and the paralysis and regret it can produce. Simon’s insights have only been vindicated by tech:

Maximizers tend to be less satisfied with their decisions and their lives. They are typically less happy, more prone to regret and more likely to compare themselves endlessly with others. Satisficers don’t necessarily have low standards. Their standard is “good enough for me” rather than “the best out there,” and that makes it possible to feel satisfied with their choices, instead of haunted by the ones they didn’t make. […]

This is critical today because chronic maximizing has never been easier. In 2006 an economist calculated that the consumer options available to citizens of modern economies exceeded those of preindustrial societies roughly by a factor of 100 million. That is an almost incomprehensible multiplication of choice, and it extends well beyond consumer goods into questions of who to be, how to live, where to work and whom to love.

Social media has intensified the problem by functioning as an infinite comparison engine. When you can see a curated highlight reel of everyone else’s career, relationship, home and vacation, the very concept of “good enough” begins to feel like settling. The pull to keep searching for something better has poisoned even the most mundane moments. Research shows that giving viewers many videos to flip between makes them more bored than if they focus on just one. One way to interpret the findings is that the mere notion that something better might be out there spoils the moment.

See also: the beautiful reissue of our Law & Gospel book, which spells out the theological underpinnings of these insights. Namely, the command to love/behave/believe perfectly, no matter how laudable, does not produce harmony or peace — at least not where fallible men and women are concerned. Instead, those expectations produce anxiety, second-guessing, regret, and resentment. The proclamation that those standards have been satisfied by another — out of perfect love! — grants a person the space necessary to actually live and serve with abandon. Or so I’ve read.

6. Time to smile. The Australia-based Betoota Advocate is definitely my favorite recent humor discovery. It made me laugh/wince multiple times this week, a few highlights being:

• “Nerds Doing Lightsaber Choreography At Your Local Park Are Way Happier Than Miserable Doom Scrollers Like You”
• “Self Confessed ‘Bad Replier’ Pretty Good At Spending 6 Hours Scrolling Reels“
• “Local Woman Really Good At Sensing When A Guitar Is About To Come Out At A Party“
• “Taco Night For One Becomes Recently Single Man’s Lowest Point.”

Reductress got in on the action with a couple of hilarious headlines too: “Niece Now Old Enough to Hurt Your Feelings” and “English Teacher Sitting on Desk Again.” Oh and this guy’s beans-on-top-of-car prank keeps making me giggle. Genius. Can’t wait for this too:

7. We’ll give the final word this week to Charlie Ziemann, who took up “Thornton Wilder and The Problem of Death” as his subject in a piece for 1517, in the process referencing a brother figure of mine. You may know that Wilder, the author of Our Town (and Mbird hero), was born alongside a twin who died. Wilder would grapple with the question of why he lived and his brother died in his work, and nowhere more openly than in his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey. This story starts with a bridge in Peru collapsing, killing five, after which Wilder devotes much of the novel to exploring the lives of those who were affected by the tragedy.

Ziemann concludes the post by reflecting helpfully on the intersection of God’s providence and God’s revelation — how on Earth we are to interpret present pain (and future uncertainty) in light of eternity. The answer in the book, and the answer in the Bible, does not take the form of an argument or a prediction. It is Person-shaped:

Humanity, despite our best efforts, cannot answer the question as to why God allows evil to occur. However, that is not the end of the story, simply the first scene in the final chapter. The real answer comes in the two final interactions of the novel between a nun and two women who lost loved ones in the collapse of the bridge. In one of the exchanges, Doña Clara, who lost her mother in the accident, came with guilt and was given grace. In the other interaction Camila, who lost both a son and a close friend, converses with the same nun, Madre Maria del Pilar, while in Sister Juana’s garden, which I take to be a symbol of forgiveness and new life. While the specifics of the conversation are not noted in the novel, it ends with something that sounds quite similar to absolution: “And then the whole tide of Camila’s long despair, her lonely obstinate despair since her girlhood, found its rest on that dusty lap among Sister Juana’s fountains and roses.”

We will never be able to look into the events of this world and accurately see how God is at work. These events remain hidden to us; “That wisdom which sees the invisible things of God in works as perceived by man is completely puffed up, blinded, and hardened.” We cannot look to God hidden in the events of our daily lives and determine whether God loves us. Rather, God has told us precisely what his will is, precisely what he thinks of us. This was so important that he died to give us this good news. You can find the will of God when God became incarnate to forgive and give eternal life. God’s answer to death is resurrection, and this answer is much more powerful than any explanation as to why God allows death to happen. God doesn’t answer tragedy with empty words of rationalization, but with a Word so strong and full that it bestows hope and life upon its hearers.

Strays

• The Daily podcast ran an episode this week exploring “Why More Americans Are Exploring Religion.” The findings felt like they’d been ripped out of the Seculosity playbook.
• Don’t know the man’s music but am seriously intrigued after reading the BBC profile on Noah Kahan, which doubles as a stirring testimony of works-righteousness despair. “I got too attached to this idea that my value came from what I created. So when you’re not creating, it feels like you have no value. And, along with the diagnosis of OCD, this obsession of being successful and talented and having everything be perfect became really, really impossible for me to contend with.”
• This one stings. “My Daughter Died at 32. My Devices Won’t Let Me Rest.” by Danielle Crittenden in the Wall Street Journal. “The irony of the unwanted notifications is that big tech adamantly blocks access to the data we do want.” Brave New World indeed.
• Some happier news would be that 1517 has launched a new podcast, Dad Rod Legacy, which distributes lectures from the beloved late theologian and Mbird fave. Highly recommended.
• The NY Times reports that a lost Larry David script has reemerged for a film that gets famously name-checked in an episode of Seinfeld. The premise is about as LD-esque as could possibly be: “‘Prognosis: Negative’ centers on a man named Leo Black, who finds it impossible to commit to women. But when he learns that an ex-girlfriend is dying, he reignites a relationship with her. After all, she’ll be gone soon.” Amazing.
• On that note, rest in peace, Clarence Carter. I swear by his first four records and put his recording of “Patches” up there with the best singles ever released:

The post May 9-15 appeared first on Mockingbird.

I went downstairs the other day, into our basement. It can sometimes be a hard place to find grace — it was full of teenagers, their respective signature scents and hair care products rivalling the sweet animal-vegetal odors of Taquitos, Gummy Nerds, Coconut Water, discarded socks damp and muddy from chasing around the yard or, more accurately, filming themselves chasing around the yard. They were watching a horror movie — The Exorcist: Believer (2023), the latest entry in what’s become a decades-long franchise. I scoffed. I told them that if they wanted to watch a genuinely scary movie, they should watch the original Exorcist (1973), William Friedkin’s adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel. They scoffed back. There was no way a movie that old could still be scary. With Dad Swagger I told them to try it and see. I told them this was a classic, the classic horror movie, in fact. One of my daughters came upstairs a couple of hours later.

“And?” I asked.
“Huh?”
“A really scary movie, right?”
“Oh wait, you mean The Exorcist?”
“Yes.”
“Yeah we stopped watching that. It was really slow and the special effects were really fake. It wasn’t scary at all. We were kind of laughing and then we got bored and watched something else.”
“What did you watch?”
“It.”
“Why?”
“Well, we heard it was like a classic. Like you saying about The Exorcist.”
“And?”
“Not bad. The special effects were fake. But it was kind of scary, I guess.”

I have lamented this underwhelmed response to The Exorcist to friends and colleagues, and they’ve offered their own versions of the same evidence: Young people are losing their capacity to concentrate and, simultaneously, to be engaged at all by older media. Indeed, for them, a movie released in 2017 is, apparently, older media.

Based on Stephen King’s 1986 novel, It is set in the small town of Derry, Maine, in the 1980s. A group of teenage misfits tries to make sense of why people, and children in particular, go missing at a rate much higher than anywhere else in America. These disappearances have a particular significance for one character, Bill, whose little brother Georgie is one of the latest to go missing.

As the story develops, the characters have terrifying encounters, individually and collectively, with a malevolent clown, Pennywise, who, we learn, emerges from a netherworld every 27 years to feed on the children of Derry. With the adults either oblivious or purposefully ignoring the situation, the kids themselves decide to fight the clown and attempt to banish it from their town and their lives, for good.

When it was first released, the movie’s trailer generated 197 million views in 24 hours, a record at the time. The movie itself, which had a budget of 35 million dollars, has grossed, worldwide, more than half a billion dollars and ranks as the highest-grossing horror movie of all time. At the time of its release, reviews were generally positive, but no critic ever pointed to this movie as some kind of signal masterpiece of American cinema. Why, then, did it prove so popular? For two reasons, I propose: First, to cite a representative assessment, New York Times critic A. O. Scott observed that the clown in the movie is “the literal, lethal manifestation of evil in the world.” Further, the clown’s success “is abetted and to some extent camouflaged by the ordinary human awfulness that also afflicts Derry … [namely] an ugly assortment of bullies … gossips, and abusive parents.” Unintentionally, perhaps, Scott invoked two traditional, intersecting conceptions of evil — evil as a phenomenon, and evil as the outcome of free will gone wrong. In so doing, he’s drawing our attention to the film’s investment in longstanding conceptions of the bad, false, and ugly (as opposed to the good, true, and beautiful). But in fact, the movie suggests we needn’t take seriously the phenomenon of evil: It’s just a clown — indeed, we can be entertained by it.

***

Evil itself, at least in the Catholic intellectual tradition, has two major and long-since synthesized source definitions that I think are especially germane to narrative arts like literature and film. The first account, from St. Augustine, portrays evil as a lesser result of the greater good of God’s creating man with a free will: This is the very line that divides and cuts through every human heart, as Russian writer Aleksander Solzhenitsyn famously put it. The second main account of evil comes from St. Thomas Aquinas, who, in consonance with Augustine, proposes in the Summa, “What evil is must be known from the nature of the good,” which eventually leads to an understanding of evil as deprivation, as the absence of the good.

From my vantage, as a novelist and professor of English, it’s to narratives that we often turn for understanding so much about human experience, including the problem of evil. As the French philosopher Paul Ricœur argued in his magisterial three-volume study, Time and Narrative, human beings are, by nature, storytelling creatures: We understand ourselves and our lives in narrative terms, and we seek the same understanding of people and phenomena around us. This is all straightforward enough when it comes to much of human experience, including, I add, evidence of evil that results from the disordered exercise of our free will, the most vivid and lasting representations of which, from across the Western literary tradition, come to us from Dante’s Inferno, as we will see. But — if we accept Aquinas’ definition of evil as privation, as absence of the good — this poses a natural paradox for any artist: How do you create something, a presence, to represent an absence? And what’s beauty’s place, in such an effort?

Before returning to It, I think the best way to make sense of all this is to go to hell — at least Dante’s version of it. In the thirty-fourth canto of the Inferno, Dante and Virgil reach the icy depths of hell, the fourth ring of the ninth circle, where they encounter Lucifer, the massive emperor of this inverted kingdom, who, we are reminded, “was once a handsome presence.” No longer, obviously, but in Dante’s rendering his present hideousness is a privation pointing to a presence. I think this might be the preeminent demonstration of how a literary artist gives shape and logic to evil: Dante observes of Lucifer that “if he was once as handsome as he now / is ugly and, despite that, raised his brows / against his Maker, one can understand / how every sorrow has its source in him!” Thereafter he offers us a striking view of this ugliness: “He had three faces: one — in front — bloodred; / and then another two that, just above / the midpoint of each shoulder, joined the first”: Each of Satan’s faces is winged; his six eyes weep tears and blood; and he is encased in ice and eternally eating and flaying and crushing three traitors: Judas, Brutus, and Cassius. Virgil informs Dante that as their last hike through hell, they must climb Satan’s icy, shaggy flanks, because “it is by such stairs that we must take our leave of so much evil.” Eventually, the poet and his guide emerge “to see — once more — the stars,” and from there make their way to Purgatory and, ultimately, to Paradise.

We’d be hard-pressed to find a better representation than Dante’s of evil as both an act of disordered free will (resulting in damnation) and an exterior phenomenon whose depravity affirms supreme goodness and presence. This is largely because Dante’s representation corresponds so fully to three qualities of beauty: clarity, proportion, and integrity, per Thomas Aquinas. These qualities have long been seen as objective, defining features of a work of art (by Étienne Gilson, Umberto Eco, and other modern scholars). When it comes to Inferno, the poem’s clarity is evident in the story’s intelligibility about the consequences of a disordered free will; the poem’s proportion is evident in its integration of metaphysical and physical logics, particularly with respect to the kinds of physical punishments sinners endure in proportion to their offences against the will of God; finally, the poem’s integrity is evident in its wholeness of imagined world — Inferno, Purgatory, Paradise — and the many syntheses, integrations, and harmonies that endow the poem with such force and meaning, beginning, most famously, with its rendering and revelation of “so much evil,” as Virgil puts it, throughout the nine circles of Hell and culminating in a direct encounter with Lucifer.

***

So now, from Augustine, Aquinas, and Dante, are we really going to move back to Stephen King and the movies? Yes, and here’s why. When it comes to art — whether we are seeking depictions of the good, true, and beautiful, or of the bad, false, and ugly — religiously serious people tend to look only in one direction: the past, as perhaps I did, myself, in evangelizing about the original Exorcist to my teenaged children and their friends. But let’s try to make sense of, for instance, why an at-best-pretty-good movie featuring an evil clown has enjoyed so much commercial success. It doesn’t hold up very well against St. Thomas’s criteria of clarity, proportion, and integrity, because, as we shall see, it’s governed by a final misunderstanding of evil itself.

Pennywise preys on children by identifying and then exploiting their fears. As such, each of the main characters is at multiple points terrified by the clown’s workings, in most every case by something ghoulish or strange and threatening that has its source in an unresolved childhood trauma, personal struggle, or family issue. These encounters often happen in the midst of grown-ups who never notice anything. Bill struggles with his little brother Georgie’s death and his having unintentionally played a part in it; Mike struggles with memories of a house fire that killed his parents; Beverly is going through puberty while living with an abusive father; Stanley, the son of a rabbi — a fact that has no religious meaning whatsoever in a movie about evil, I might add — is beset by anxieties, especially when he has to fetch things by himself from his father’s forbidding office; Eddie is a hypochondriac; and Richie, well, Richie doesn’t like clowns. Pennywise manifests to each child in ways that capitalize on these fears, and the power of his evil resides in his ability to scare them into submission, captivity, and death.

To be sure, the movie more broadly provides us with evidence of evil, especially when it comes to representations of free will enacted in fallen ways. The townspeople have a tacit collective capacity to choose to ignore the awfulness around them, nowhere more starkly than when an old lady watches from her front window while little Georgie struggles in front of a gutter and then, a moment later, disappears into it as the clown captures him. She does nothing about it. More immediately, in relation to the main characters of the story, Beverly’s father abuses her, and all the other kids are subjected to taunts, bullying, and brutal attacks by a vicious band of older teenagers led by a boy named Patrick. Patrick’s own rage and violence make him susceptible to Pennywise. The clown chooses not to prey on his fears but instead to tempt him to ever worse acts of violence, against both the main characters and even members of his own family. In these secondary ways, then, you could say the movie demonstrates clear and engaging components of St. Thomas’s criteria for beauty: clarity, proportion, and integrity. We can see this to the degree that we understand Patrick’s actions in and of themselves, how these actions make sense with the rest of the characters and events, and how they seamlessly fit into the work as a whole. In these respects, the film succeeds as an aesthetic representation of evil.

But can it point to its opposite: the good, true, and beautiful? As a film, it has sensory appeal. This is the case especially in its use of primary colors — the yellow of a boy’s rain slicker, the red of the clown’s balloon — but it’s hard to call the film beautiful if we hold that beauty and truth and goodness go together. The trouble with It is that the film’s overall intention and even ambition is too captive, alas, to the weak religious spirit of the age.

In the movie’s climactic sequence, Pennywise captures Bev and spirits her away to his sewer system dungeon, where he does not kill her but instead puts her in a levitating trance. To rescue her, her friends enter his lair and endure an escalating set of terrors, both collectively and individually tailored, culminating in Bill’s meeting what appears to be his murdered little brother, who pleads with Bill to bring him home. Through much suffering, Bill recognizes that this isn’t his little brother but instead a manifestation of Pennywise, which leads eventually to a kind of extended action-movie style battle that results in a stalemate between the kids and the clown.

It’s now that Bill and the other characters discover why the clown hasn’t killed them or, more accurately, why he can’t kill them. There are three reasons: First, their friendship provides solidarity and a call to courage and sacrifice that defeats the isolating fears and self-interest the clown depends upon; second, each character realizes that the terrors confronting them are nothing other than externalized psychological weaknesses and not real. Finally, Bill realizes the reason Bev isn’t dead yet: She’s not scared of Pennywise, and he can’t kill what’s not scared of him. The movie is tellingly silent, however, about why she’s not scared of him. It instead moves quickly into the next sequence, in which Bill and his friends turn the tables on Pennywise, noting that now he’s scared, and indeed he escapes away into a deep well, where he had to wait until the movie’s sequel, which came out in 2019.

With the clown gone, the kids rally around each other and the movie ends in a gauzy feel-good way: The music and imagery affirm that because they’ve believed in each other and believed in themselves, they have defeated evil. It’s an ending underpinned by “moral therapeutic deism,” sociologist Christian Smith’s provocative term for the abiding faith of, among others, most American teenagers (and therefore of no less than half of the audience who originally saw It). Moral therapeutic deism is characterized by belief in the following:

1. A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.

2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.

3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.

4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.

5. Good people go to heaven when they die.

Now, the great appeal of a movie like It resides in its offering a representation of evil that is as easy and mushy as moral therapeutic deism’s representation of the good. Evil exists, and it shows up in weird ways that grown-ups can’t understand; evil takes root in our lives because of psychological issues beyond our control; and only in coming to terms with these issues and through teamwork can we combat evil.

The problem with such a representation is that it’s too amenable to emphasizing the false and bad and ugly as individuated beyond the possibility of empathy (parents just don’t understand!), impossible to overcome (those psychological issues), or a little too easy to overcome (with teamwork!). All of this supports a claim about life itself that might sound just a little too easily right to the therapeutically attuned average North American teenager, whether in my basement or elsewhere. At the same time, for those formed by and committed to a higher-order understanding of the human person and of our place in the Divine Plan, for those seeking to right our lives and our culture according to the enduring truths of faith, beauty, and reason, it’s deviously hard to make sense of how evil exerts pressure on our efforts to participate in that plan if we can’t take evil — a clown — seriously while it’s enjoyed by millions of others as a clown.

This is what makes It a dark mirror for us: By making evil into a clown that occupies a natural spot in the cosmology and logic of moral therapeutic deism, it’s merely entertaining to encounter. Kind of scary, I guess.

This essay was adapted from a Newman Centre Faith & Reason lecture, from 2023.

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Perhaps such ideas sound too hifalutin for you. What could the posthuman phenomenon have to do with you? You, working a job you don’t particularly like, raising kids that frequently frustrate you. You, awaiting your Dasher with the meal you know you shouldn’t have ordered, but you didn’t make time last night because you ended up cleaning the kitchen and washing dishes after the kids had a Thunderdome-style row, and you detonated with more anger than was really appropriate. What does the question “What is humanity?” have to do with you?

Everything, actually.

To be human is to be more than an element of a story: it is to be an active participant in it. It is both a gift and an accomplishment. It is given to each one of us as a possibility, but like most gifts, it can be ignored or unrecognized or refused. This is why it’s also an accomplishment, as all who are called to this dignity do not attain it.

Those who do stand out. They accept responsibility for their lives — not only their choices but also the conditions and persons and consequences they did not choose but inherited. They possess a wisdom that is not easily rattled and that helps you, in your station, to carry on. They embody a hope that makes you ashamed of your routine frustration, that makes you wish you could bear up under the weight of your life with more joy, more peace, more dignity.

This is an accomplishment because most of us default to desperation and bitterness.

“Touch grass!” is a common prompt these days. Yet it is usually more of an imperative to get out of something than an overture to get in to something else. Let me ask you: when was the last time you wandered a trail you’ve never trudged before? When was the last time you allowed yourself to linger in the woods? To be still and let the frantic metronome of your heart match the speed of the creation? To grab a handful of soil and feel your kinship with the dust of this world? To tune yourself, just for a few minutes, to the resonant frequency of a particular place and its testimony to the Maker of all?

I don’t do this nearly enough — I’m usually too worried about dirtying my hands and mucking up one of the books I have set aside to never read. I have been preoccupied with protecting the pristine thing that does not actually exist. Clean hands spare me from the burden of being someone who actually does something.

But it’s not just me. Too often, we who have the theological vocabulary to do so rationalize our passivity by decrying works. As if breathing were a breach of faith in the finished work of Christ. The accomplishment I referenced earlier is a derivative accomplishment, as it is only ever rooted in and made possible by his accomplishment.

Do we believe a story that Jesus delivers us from ever having to do anything? Do we resent being alive because of the burden of responding to and caring for things?

If we look a little further than the screens that fill our lives, we may find an old idea, Martin Shaw says in his new book, Liturgies of the Wild. “That if you aren’t wrapped in the cloak of story and the cloak of place you are liable to experience huge rushes of angst as you age.”

Do you recognize yourself in that sentence? Do you taste a familiar, poignant sting in this warning? I certainly do. Without being so wrapped, Shaw cautions, “You are in some grievous way, unprepared for what the world will likely hurl at you. You remain adolescent, you remain at risk, and that itself makes you dangerous and your decisions likely unwieldy. You’re not grown” (3–4).

We are more prone to take offense at such an assessment than we are to acknowledge how true we know this to be. This is our fundamental dividedness, the split in ourselves inherited from Adam, that knows a thing to be true but loathes that knowledge and conceals it from consciousness. We hide it from ourselves because it threatens our desire to be self-sufficient and beautiful and powerful and every other thing that we are not in our natural estate.

This is cut, really, from the same cloth as Jesus coming to strangers and telling them to repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand. We read this and think, “Well, yeah. Repent, you dummies,” and in the same nanosecond think that we justify ourselves. Thou art the dummy. The scandal that dumped cold water on them needs to jolt you awake too. Because Jesus loves you, he comes to you and tells you, You are not well.

You have probably heard this, probably even believed it. But have you been fooling yourself that you are something now because you know this? We are not justified by works — let me repeat it yet again — but we are not justified by not-works either. All too often, you and I are swept into tide pools of wonderless drudgery because we tell ourselves this is the same thing, and it most emphatically is not.

“I don’t need a rule of life, I have Jesus!” isn’t the flex you think it is, when as a rule you are forlorn and despondent and boastful of all you don’t do. It is all too easy to justify ourselves with theology and resign ourselves to crawling in the muck than to take the risk that God’s justification opens us up to a better story.

A good litmus test is wonder. When is the last time you felt it? Or, more pointedly, allowed yourself to feel it? Wonder is the stirring that wakes us up out of the sleep of our accommodation to the world.

Wonder is dangerous. It whispers of something more that threatens what we’re used to, even when we loathe or are exhausted by the things we’re used to. But that “more” frightens us because we fear the demand that will come with it. This is why we settle so often: we can scarcely live with how things are, but the prospect of change terrifies us and makes the norm a tad more acceptable. We are afraid of a love that would not leave us the way we already are.

Wonder illuminates our lives; it shows that the things of this world are more than mere furniture in the space of our self-actualization (praise God). These are the creatures of a good God. As are you. They testify to the Creator and thus to a purpose that exceeds your own. Wonder testifies to a story that gathers up all of our stories.

Stories show us the stuff of life, Shaw writes, as depicting them in narratives clarifies them and their holds over us. We live every day but do not necessarily recognize our lives. We rely on stories to do the work of recognition. But more than simply clarifying these things, “Christ then lifts this all up into higher ideals — ideals that don’t just work within the murk of the passions, telling us that to step beyond their negative aspects is to dwell in the biggest story of all” (95).

Do you allow yourself to dream of something better that God has for you? Of a you that you aren’t tired of? Because “Christianity is a dream in which the very best of us is encouraged to emerge,” Shaw urges us. “A dream that challenges and inspires us. A dream in which God speaks directly to us” (163).

The gospel is the impossible taking root in the muck of our lives at God’s behest, just like Joseph’s vision, like Daniel’s insight, like the guidance given to Joseph, the guardian of our Lord. Of course there are dreams that are only dreams. But we also know, from the fact that they happened, that there are dreams that open different vistas, that change us by showing us an alternative or by disclosing what our truest, most heartbreaking desire is.

That fear of a love which is not content to leave us with what we think we need is the fear that often leads us to dismiss dreams. That vivid intimation of more is too pungent there and in the stories that grip and shape our imaginations. What if we weren’t so swift to dismiss that? And what if we didn’t rationalize it with misappropriated theology?

Shaw speaks directly to such a person — let’s be honest, me for too long a stretch of time — on the book’s final page. “How do we find by will something we were once gifted by grace?” Listen to what he says:

We can’t. We simply can’t, and we’re heading to an existential crack-up if we think we can. But we can take heart from the fairy tales and note that certain opportunities of the soul come around more than once. And that we can ready ourselves, deepen ourselves, humble ourselves. We have Christ’s full attention — let’s not waste it. In the end, it’s surrender to that loving attention that will get us home. (230)

What story are you living out? Where does your story fit into the story God is telling in Christ? What strength and resolve can you derive from other stories to help you live yours? Because every good story draws its goodness from the Great Story of God’s redeeming love, we have an embarrassment of riches to draw upon. I pray we will recognize how wonderful this truly is and that we will be surprised to find the scales of cynicism falling from our eyes as we recognize it.

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