I rarely see movies even once in the theater, let alone twice. I have now seen Project Hail Mary twice, and with the directors’ decision to release a TheaterEars commentary track (just the latest in a string of brilliant marketing decisions), I am even considering a return for thirds. Having gone into the movie blind before reading the original Andy Weir novel, I then purchased the audiobook, another thing I almost never do, and was bedazzled beginning to end by Ray Porter’s performance. And of course, I also have the book on Kindle. I have now spent more money on more versions of this one story than I have on any other one story I can recall at the moment. It is that engrossing.

The novel is hard sci-fi made easily digestible by being such a ripping good yarn, as the Brits would say. The movie, back in IMAX this weekend by popular demand, is old-school exuberant blockbuster filmmaking at its best, a visual and sonic feast whose cinematic magic is grounded in practical effects. The most magical of these effects is our hero’s alien sidekick, who has to be one of the best alien characters in all sci-fi. To film their scenes, Ryan Gosling physically interacted on physical sets every day with puppeteer James Ortiz, who not only handled but voiced the lovable creature in the venerable tradition of great puppeteers past like Frank Oz. Fans of the book complained that the alien’s reveal in the movie trailer was kind of a spoiler, but now that good old Rocky is everywhere, I feel okay acknowledging his existence (though I’ll be issuing a Major Spoiler Warning later in this piece for all who require it).

While Rocky has some qualities of a loyal pet, he is in fact what C. S. Lewis in his Ransom Trilogy would have called hnau—a fully rational creature, complete with his own intricate language, culture, and grand Quest, which turns out to be the same Quest on which Dr. Ryland Grace has found himself embarked. Through their combined heroically nerdy efforts, they must race to avert planetary apocalypse by thwarting a star-eating parasite. Their galactic buddy comedy is somehow managing to rescue heartfelt, wholesome masculine friendship from the cultural gutter, despite the modest limitation that one of the “men” is a faceless rock spider. Key to its success is the fact that beneath the comedy runs an undercurrent of deep melancholy. The story has been called optimistic, but its optimism has an inescapably tragic tinge, for it is the story of a man without a planet.

We meet Dr. Grace first as a terrified, apparently untrained astronaut who has woken up on a spaceship light-years away from Earth unable to recall his own name, with no companions except two long-dead fellow crewmembers and a robot. Through flashbacks, he slowly remembers the sweetly shy, overqualified middle-school science teacher he used to be before his particular research skills were abruptly…required. His life was happy enough then, if a bit isolated. As he goes through his crew’s kits in search of clues, he finds pictures of the dead astronauts with their families, but in his own kit there is only one picture of himself, alone. How exactly he got from there to here is a mystery whose full payoff will not be revealed for some time.

Recently, Andy Weir let his true feelings be known about the latest iterations of Star Trek and how far it’s fallen from its first conception. It is clear that he aspires to craft sci-fi in the spirit of the best Trek—funny but not too wacky, serious but not too preachy, and above all, full of heart. There was also in the best old Trek a willingness to grapple with painful moral conundrums, sometimes towards conclusions I didn’t agree with, but framed compellingly. The classic episode “City On the Edge of Forever” stands out, in which Captain Kirk holds the fate of a single innocent woman in one hand and the rest of the world’s fate in the other. For reasons I’ll be explicitly spoiling in a moment, that episode particularly came back to mind as I watched/read Project Hail Mary. The fascinating thing is that while on one level the film is a faithful adaptation, on another level it diverges so much that book and film appear to answer the story’s moral conundrum in nearly opposite ways. I find the reasons for this divergence understandable, but I am still forced to conclude that while the book gets my unreserved recommendation, the movie for all its ten thousand charms is ultimately built on a lie.

MAJOR SPOILERS NOW FOLLOW! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! COME BACK WHEN YOU HAVE READ, OR WATCHED, OR BOTH!

The story’s third major character, a Dutchwoman suggestively named Eva Stratt, is the person into whose hands all global authority has been delivered in this crisis. By the same token, it is her hands that will bear the damned spot of whatever blood is shed along the way. Her original book incarnation is, in Weir’s words, “an ice queen on heels,” setting about her tasks with a blood-chilling Germanic efficiency. If the Sahara Desert must be paved, it is done. If Antarctica must be nuked, she will make it so. And if a few brave souls must be sent to a corner of the universe so remote there will be no return journey, on a research mission whose chances of success are near-zero, she will unflinchingly orchestrate their desperate suicides for the greater good. Hence the name of the ship, and the project: Hail Mary. But no one will comfort Eve.

Stratt’s film incarnation, as played by the luminous Sandra Hüller, appears as a character with the same name who feels like a different woman. Where book Stratt is constantly, brutally reminding Dr. Grace that she has recruited him solely as a means to the end of saving the planet, movie Stratt nurtures him with a maternal warmth that occasionally edges into something more. This is felt most intensely in a film-exclusive scene where she delivers a karaoke performance that feels personally directed to Grace. Because Hüller and Ryan Gosling share the gift of being able to speak volumes with their eyes alone, the original cut of the scene was significantly trimmed in an attempt to tone down their unspoken chemistry. Volumes are spoken anyway:

In the end, for reasons that are explained far better in the book than the film, circumstances conspire to suddenly make Dr. Grace Stratt’s top candidate for the doomed spaceship’s science expert. For a few hours, she lets Grace think that he has a choice in the matter. When he comes back with a “No,” he discovers that she was lying. Book Stratt does this with barely a twinge, explaining precisely how she plans to trick the “annoyingly honorable” ship’s captain into believing Grace volunteered. In her final conversation with Grace, at the end of which he tells her to “go to hell,” she assures him, “Oh, I will.”

By contrast, movie Stratt seals his fate with obvious agony, watching out the window through tears as men chase him down and forcibly sedate him. “This may feel like betraying you,” she says, “but it’s actually me believing in you.” She is backed up by a government agent named Carl, who Grace thought was his best friend, and whose name is the last word he speaks on Earth. “You know who you are,” Carl says encouragingly. “You’re gonna do great.” When Dr. Grace emerges from his induced coma, we see the words “GOOD LUCK!” in sharpie on his bag.

This twist has functioned like a Rorschach blot, with opinions about equally split as to whether Stratt is making an excruciating but righteous choice or a pernicious choice. It seems clear that the filmmakers want to spin it as the former, while Weir himself meant it to be the latter. He’s said that at first he vigorously protested the karaoke scene because it didn’t fit book Stratt’s character, but this suggests a failure to grasp how movie Stratt was being rewritten top to bottom from the start. Had movie Stratt hewed more closely to book Stratt, the creators would have had an explicitly darker product on their hands, much harder to market to the whole-family audiences they wanted to court. It’s dark enough as it is, but spoonfuls of sugar are being added to try to make the medicine go down. Book Stratt in one sense “believes in” Grace, but with no trace of love. Movie Stratt, we are meant to think, really does love him. It’s just that love sometimes looks like forcing someone to sacrifice himself for the greater good. We might need someone else to believe in us before we can believe in ourselves. Or something.

Disturbingly, I’ve found that even some Christians are falling into this ethical trap as they discuss the story around the water cooler. Many basic distinctions are being missed in the arguments I see, like the difference between being ordered to make a calculated sacrificial risk and being ordered to commit suicide. (The book really drives home the creepiness of the fact that the astronauts are being offered their choice of suicide methods as if from a menu, so they don’t just have to starve slowly in space.) Someone shared a famous clip from the submarine thriller U-571 in which a formidable young Matthew McConaughey sends an even younger sailor to do a highly dangerous task only he can physically attempt. The boy panics, and the officer orders him with a pained, loving harshness to “Do your job, sailor!” Predictably, the task proves fatal, and though the ship is saved, the officer will be haunted forever. It’s a brutal scene, but disanalogous to the setup of Project Hail Mary. Better would be an example of an officer giving not merely dangerous but unequivocally suicidal orders, of which there are plenty of examples in military history, which of course does not make them ethical.

As I was discussing this with a friend who shared my intuition, he brought up the COVID crisis, and it flicked on a lightbulb in my mind. In that real-world scenario, as in this story, agents with far too much unchecked power took it upon themselves to force people into certain choices against their will, in the name of the “greater good,” against an ominous impersonal invader, because they elevated the priority of not dying from the virus above all else. And there, as here, I was startled by how many Christians matter-of-factly accepted this. Aside from the absolute wrongness of the choice, there is a hubristic failure to consider other factors. It’s left especially hand-wavy how movie Stratt is so sure that movie Grace—panicky, frightened, lacking astronaut training—could even complete the mission (never mind the actual eventuality that an accident wipes out the rest of the crew, forcing him to learn things he wasn’t supposed to have to learn).

Ironically, Stratt’s position is steelmanned better in the book, but as part of elevating the entire debate into a serious, full-bodied ethical clash. Grace makes the entirely reasonable case that even if against all odds the mission succeeds, Earth is looking at a brutal next 20-odd years, years for which a rising generation will have to be trained up. So why should he not stay in the classroom where he belongs, with kids he loves like the kids he never had? And in the likely event that no solution was found, why shouldn’t he be allowed to die comforting them? The argument is reminiscent of the case for allowing people to gather, touch, and embrace each other in defiance of the virus.

Someone pushing back on my take here was astonished that I favored Grace’s “just passively accepting death” on Earth as the sun dies, versus making some effort however insane to save it. It struck me that this person had an impoverished view of what it means to die. Death, from a Christian perspective, is not merely passive but active. This is perfectly captured in the great Catholic novel A Canticle for Leibowitz, in which an abbot is left behind to perish in the last nuclear holocaust while one monk is chosen to lead a remnant of the Church into space. The majority of Earth’s people will perish, but those Christians like the brave abbot who remain at their earthly posts while the world burns are no less active than those blasting off in a rocket. It is understood that they, too, have a calling to fulfil. Meanwhile, the scene where the young monk is chosen to lead the space-bound flock feels like a photo-negative of the scene where Grace receives his grim orders. Like Grace, the monk is a timid man daunted by the task before him, asking for a few hours to think it over. But unlike Grace, he is being sent to his life, not to his death.

Of course, Stratt has no way of knowing that Grace will meet his salvation, in the form of a pure-hearted alien whose ethical system is innocently free of consequentialism. From the moment they first meet and begin the thrilling process of learning each other’s languages, Rocky sees Grace as end in himself, not a means to an end. He has also suffered the loss of his crew, except he has spent many more lonely years in space without them (his people, Eridians, are a long-lived species). When Grace miraculously appears before his “eyes” which aren’t really eyes, because he “sees” by echolocation, he immediately loves the friendly, lonely human. He doesn't know how to do otherwise than love the person before him. And neither does Grace. And so friendship is born at that moment when they each say, “What? You too? I thought I was the only one!”

All of this, the film conveys beautifully. We are certainly meant to care deeply for Grace, to root at every turn for his survival and flourishing as Rocky carries him to heights he never dreamed of. But the film fails to understand that the Way of Rocky cannot be forced into a tenderly forgiving coexistence with the way of Stratt. In the book, her self-damning “Oh, I will” is understood to be final. Book Grace reflects bitterly that she was “right,” insofar as her ruthless game-theoretic calculations were not wrong. She was right that there was no one better qualified. She was right that he would know what to do once he was there. And she was right that even when the final knife-twist flashed back to him, he would be so invested, and so fundamentally decent, that he wouldn’t withhold whatever discoveries he’d made. But none of these things make her, in the fullest moral sense of the word, right.

This is sealed in the book’s choice to have Rocky deliver the triumphant news that Grace’s dispatched research landed safely, and our Sun has been restored. The deeply emotional moment is theirs to celebrate together. In the film, it is treated as a moment between Grace and Stratt, albeit asynchronous, as she bursts into tears while watching his breakthrough dispatches and prepares her team to get to work. That is not a moment book Stratt has earned, and so it’s reserved for those who have.

Of course, the great paradox of the story is that without Stratt’s betrayal, Grace would never have met Rocky. The biblically-flavored catch-phrases write themselves. “You meant evil against me, but Rocky meant it for good.” “Rocky works all things together for good.” “But Rocky!”

In the end, as Grace takes his place in another classroom, on another planet, clapping his hands in the way he does when he is brimming over with joy, he appears as a man stepping into his afterlife. This is actually felt more strongly in the film than in the book, where Grace is content but older, wearier, touched with a little more melancholy as he considers his last decades on this planet that can never really be his home. In the film, Grace’s biodome appears much more paradisal and earthlike, even including a beach with foamy waves. In the words of the uncannily chosen closing credits song, he feels better, so much better, since he laid his burdens down.

Every now and then, a public intellectual pops up in the discourse with a new book/podcast/whatever, and you think, “Oh yeah, that guy. He’s still doing stuff?” I had this feeling when I saw that Bart Ehrman is making the rounds to promote his newest work. Ehrman is best known for writing sophistical popular-level books about the New Testament. But Love Thy Stranger, similar to his book The Triumph of Christianity, is one of these “Why Christianity is still good for the world and stuff while of course not being literally true” affairs—not strictly against Christianity, but rendering a vaguely patronizing verdict on its historical impact. I’m not rushing out to procure a copy, but I got the gist from a recent debate with Sean McDowell, in which Ehrman repeatedly asserted that there are no moral absolutes, McDowell politely demurred with actual arguments, and Ehrman waved his hands and feigned exasperation in lieu of making a coherent counterargument. I would say Ehrman shouldn’t quit his day job to become a moral philosopher, but then of course I don’t think he’s good at his day job either. Perhaps he missed his true calling as a used car salesman.

However, I was very entertained by Ehrman’s appearance on Ross Douthat’s Interesting Times podcast, which continues to be essential listening. (Or reading, if you prefer a transcript.) Douthat has mastered the art of the very gentle sick burn when guests say something especially dubious, and he was in fine form here. I was especially interested to hear how Douthat would handle Ehrman around New Testament questions, since Ehrman is famous for steamrolling anyone who tries to catch his sophistry and pin it down. It’s possible Ehrman assumed that since Douthat is a fellow elite, a non-specialist, and a non-evangelical, he could be easily steamrolled. If so, that was a mistake. In fact, I come away from the interview inclined to think that when it comes to public discourse about religion and the Bible, we are approaching the End of an Era—or I should say, an Ehra.

For those familiar with Ehrman’s schtick, there are no surprises here. He played his greatest hits—the Humean Tap Dance, the Gospel Contradictions Polka, all the classics. One of his favorite assertions, per Hume, is the claim that historians can never “establish” a miracle. My father, Tim McGrew, in his Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on miracles, neatly repackages Ehrman’s version of this old chestnut in premise-conclusion form:

1. A miracle is by definition the most improbable of events; the probability of a miracle is infinitesimally remote.

2. An historian can establish only what probably happened in the past.

Therefore,

3. An historian can never establish that a miracle happened.

Dad then goes on: “Waiving the tendentious definition in premise 1, the supposed contradiction involved in denying the conclusion — ‘that the most improbable event is the most probable’ (Ehrman 2003: 229)—is merely verbal, arising from a failure to distinguish between the probability of a miracle claim considered apart from the evidence and the probability of the claim given that evidence.”

In other words, no, Dr. Ehrman didn’t really pull the quarter out of your ear. Moving on.

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Happy Easter to all my readers! For those new to the Stack, you can enjoy older Easter reflections here. As always, thank you so much for reading.

Two summers ago, I had the chance to spend a week in Europe connecting with old friends and making some new ones. We enjoyed loosely structured conversations around a plethora of topics, everyone bringing his own distinct perspective. A number of us were Christians of an evangelical stripe, but some weren’t, which meant there was never a dull moment. Some of them were Jewish, and the events of the previous October were heavy on their minds. One Israeli friend, a Messianic Jew, wore a yellow ribbon pin. Before giving a brief talk, he said people had been asking him how he was doing, and he pointed to the pin and said bluntly, “Not well.” Under the Florence sun, we would all sit and chat and walk around a garden paradise in twos or threes, lifting our eyes to the hills, talking of wars and rumors of wars.

One scientist was devoting his constant research energy to the problem of how (or whether) we can save the world from apocalypse. To his way of thinking, the Christians were altogether too resigned to the end of everything, too ready to give up and accept it without a fight. If the rest of us wanted to sit around waiting for the apocalyptic tsunami, that was fine. Not him. He had too much European Jew in him, he liked to say. He told a joke about world leaders giving their last speeches as the end drew nigh. The American President and the British Prime Minister say some noble, flowery words about going down bravely, wishing everyone Godspeed, saying God bless this great nation, and so on and so forth. The Israeli Prime Minister stands up and simply says, “You all have 27 minutes to learn how to live underwater.”

Recently Benjamin Netanyahu found himself unexpectedly in the middle of an Internet discourse over a speech in which he hat-tipped Will and Ariel Durant on Genghis Khan and Jesus. In their book Lessons of History, the Durants describe history as “at bottom a natural selection of the fittest individuals and groups in a struggle wherein goodness receives no favors.” This is part of their extended narrative of the decline of religious faith in the West, whose leaders “assured their followers that the good spirit would win in the end.” But alas, they conclude, “the universe has no prejudice in favor of Christ as against Genghis Khan.”  Netanyahu underscored this not with the goal of patronizing Jesus, but of justifying the constant vigilantly warlike ways of Israel to the rest of the world. Israel, along with all of the world’s democracies, has “no choice” but to “oppose their enemies in time, while there’s still time.” Otherwise, per the Durants, there is nothing to stop evil from overcoming good, like it has so many times before.  Evil prospers when good men do nothing.

Of course, as soon as the clip escaped containment on Twitter, everyone took turns hearing what they wanted to hear. Netanyahu attempted to issue an apology and clarification, but such things rarely change minds. I understood and sympathized with what he meant. Still, I watched Christian reactions and Jewish counterreactions with great interest. Jewish Twitter had a right to be annoyed with bad Christian takes, but I also detected some of that same general exasperation I detected from the scientist who’s always thinking about the apocalypse, the idea that Christians are just constitutionally incapable of getting Jews. The history of the Jewish people has been a history of repeatedly managing not to die. And now that they have built themselves into a world power, they see themselves not only as the last best hope for their own people, but for all of civilization. They are saving the world right here, right now. What exactly are Christians doing, they’d like to know? Singing songs about flying away to be with Jesus by and by? What kind of luxury belief is that?

We answer that this belief has sustained Christians down the ages through all manner of circumstances—through plague, through war, through famine, through grinding poverty, through sorrows beyond human naming. Indeed, it is those who live least in luxury who are often most unshakably rooted in it. It was in the assurance of that hope that humble working-class Christians like Corrie ten Boom’s family, with little to share except their home, faced death to protect Jews in the Holocaust. And for the first followers of Christ, it was the assurance of what their own eyes had seen, what their own hands had handled, that sustained them through lives of voluntarily undertaken hardship and humiliation, in and out of prison, perpetually poor, perpetually expendable to the ruling authorities.

We answer as well that we have failed to understand Jesus if we understand him as merely a “good man.” It was not for telling us all to “be kind” that he was sentenced to death, but for making himself equal with God. In him alone did he say we would find forgiveness of sins. In him alone did he say we would have life eternal. For however ingenious we may be, however long we may outwit and outrun death, though we plumb the depths of the ocean, though we build a spaceship and blast off in search of a new world to colonize, in Adam we will all die. But in Christ we will be raised incorruptible.

This hope is ours, but the gospel of Christ, the great good news, is that it may be yours as well.

My Messianic Jewish friend, the one who wore the yellow ribbon and was not doing well, is fond of bringing up Jesus with great frequency, even in contexts where it’s implied that one should try to make one’s points while mostly avoiding Jesus, the Bible, etc. We were in such a context once, but as the conversation had turned again to the end of all things, he couldn’t help himself. “I know I’m not ‘supposed’ to do this,” he said, adjusting his glasses and pulling out his phone, “but I’m gonna do it anyway.” And with a firm voice, he began to read from the Book of Revelation:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth passed away, and there is no longer any sea. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne, saying, “Behold, the tabernacle of God is among the people, and He will dwell among them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself will be among them, and He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away.” And He who sits on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.”

In my work as a columnist, I try to keep up with the progress of legislation related to so-called “assisted dying” in various states and European countries. It is a generally dispiriting beat for a pro-life journalist, although these stories always have their heroes too, even in defeat. Occasionally you get to cover a victory, like the recent surprise upset of a death bill in Scotland. But the arc of such bills’ history has tended to bend towards injustice.

The debate-floor arguments in favor of these bills follow predictable patterns. People often share testimonies designed to shock about the slow, painfully humiliating ways their loved ones died—or occasionally, like one of the lawmakers who was just voted down in Scotland, testimonies about a loved one who avoided that kind of death by finding the quicker kind in another country. She waxes tearfully eloquent about how beautiful and peaceful her father’s Canadian deathbed was, with all his daughters gathered around, getting to say goodbye properly before he lost his faculties. If others prefer not to make that choice, she says that’s their affair, but they have no right to impose their preference on people like her father.

Recently I wrote about the especially horrifying recent euthanasia of a 25-year-old Spanish girl who had rendered herself paraplegic in a botched suicide attempt. She was suffering severe depression and PTSD from sexual assault, and she repeatedly expressed a desire to end her life. She was not imminently dying. She simply didn’t want to live. So, against her father’s desperate attempts to save her in the courts, the state helped her finish the job properly. A Spanish archbishop lamented the shame of his beloved country. God is dead in Spain, he said, and when God is dead, everything is permitted.

To make things yet more gruesome, her organs were marked for donation, which would have provided a perverse moral incentive if she ever tried to change her mind. I picked up a report claiming she had last-minute second thoughts but was locked in because of this, although on a closer look it seems this was actually referring to a letter she signed two years ago, which was thrown out on the claim that some crazy Christians brainwashed her into doing it. So we’re expected to assume she was lucid enough to sign her death warrant, but not sufficiently lucid to be afraid of death.

One report mentioned the typical humiliating effects of paraplegia that this poor, beautiful young woman had to deal with daily—the incontinence, the need for constant assistance. Not everyone with this condition is depressed, indeed some turn it into their own content creation business. But young Noelia just suffered, and it became her single-minded obsession to end that suffering once and for all.

The ghoulish pundit Richard Hanania has written some of the most deliberately offensive popular pro-euthanasia pieces, and he likes to bang his drum whenever the topic returns to the discourse. This week, he was back on his beat, making fun of pro-lifers who try to point to the inevitable pattern of legal expansion from assisted suicide for the terminally ill only to assisted suicide for people who are just slowly getting more miserable. “This interferes with my desire to see people tortured for decades with no end in sight,” he mockingly imitated them. “Put on those diapers and drool on yourself, because I believe in human dignity.” To which the Jewish pro-life journalist Alexander Raikin replied that all “autonomy” talk is a fig leaf here. Hanania simply believes there’s a certain class of people better off dead than alive, and suicide prevention resources should be rationed accordingly.

In such times, it is especially meaningful to meditate on the fact that Christ did not merely die for us, but he did so humiliatingly. For obvious reasons, Passion films cover his nakedness with a loincloth, but in reality, he was completely exposed to the mocking world. Some of the oldest Passion art we have reflects this before the tradition changed. “The Sovereign has been made unrecognisable by his naked body, and is not even allowed a garment to keep him from view,” writes the 2nd-century Bishop Melito of Sardonis. “That is why the luminaries turned away, and the day was darkened, so that he might hide the one stripped bare upon the tree.” As the death process progressed, it’s plausible that Jesus would have lost control of his bladder and bowels and that his slow suffocation would have caused involuntary erection.

Many books have been written on the theological necessity of Jesus’ dying this particular death. Prophecies foretell it, of course, but then that seems only to push the question back. To me it seems intuitive that in whatever age he chose to be born, his death had to be at once violent, lingering, and humiliating. Had he died of natural causes, this might have been humiliating, but he had to die by way of betrayal and murder. Had he been murdered by some method like beheading or stoning, the ordeal would be violent, but over too soon, and too dignified. Indignity had to be of the essence of his death. While there are a thousand ways for the human body to experience indignity that he didn’t experience, it still had to be said of him, as it will one way or another one day be said of us all, that his body had felt the meaning of the word.

Lately I’ve been both saddened and heartened to watch interviews with former Senator Ben Sasse as he chooses to die of pancreatic cancer in public. He’s always smiling, but he’s always in at least some pain. His face looks raw as he undergoes an aggressive treatment to eke out a few more months before the inevitable. He’s matter-of-factly described how the treatment attacks his skin, and how his face was “falling off” before some skilled oncologists helped him to piece it back together. To make it worse, he’s a stomach sleeper, and he describes how his face would clot against the pillow. Meanwhile, of course there are all the tumors all over his vitals, so many it would be pointless to pluck out a couple here and there with surgery. He’s joked about the indignity of having to answer repeated questions from doctors about how his bowels are doing. He and his family sustain themselves with gallows humor, as one does, as one must.

They also take long walks through cemeteries, a habit he’d practiced in the before times anyway. He recalls a particularly glorious one in New Haven, Connecticut, with big stone columns erected in the height of mid-19th-century industrial pride. Over the entrance is a massive crossbar. In all capital letters, it reads AND THE DEAD SHALL BE RAISED.

W. H. Auden, in his commonplace book, jotted down reflections on the exercise of asking ourselves who we would have been on the first Good Friday, and what we would have been doing. It’s hard to imagine oneself as a disciple, or as one of the bigwigs condemning Jesus to death. This is how Auden imagined himself:

In my most optimistic mood I see myself as a Hellenized Jew from Alexandria visiting an intellectual friend. We are walking along, engaged in philosophical argument. Our path takes us past the base of Golgotha. Looking up, we see an all too familiar sight — three crosses surrounded by a jeering crowd. Frowning with prim distaste, I say, ‘It’s disgusting the way the mob enjoy such things. Why can’t the authorities execute people humanely and in private by giving them hemlock to drink, as they did with Socrates?’ Then, averting my eyes from the disagreeable spectacle, I resume our fascinating discussion about the True, the Good and the Beautiful.

Greetings! I will be writing something for free and paid subscribers to mark the week, but meanwhile, here’s an exclusive for my paid readers in which I gather together some of what I’ve been reading, listening to, and watching to get myself in the proper mood. If in the process I introduce someone to a new favorite something, my work here is done.

What I’m Watching

This week I watched Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Gospel According to St. Matthew for the first time. This 1964 Italian neo-realist classic is considered by some to be the best life of Christ put to film. I haven’t quite seen enough of them to form a definite opinion, but all I can say is this would be difficult to top. I’m starting to develop a “deeply screwed-up auteur” thesis of the life of Jesus movie, that a director has to be not quite sane or normal to really do the story justice. (Pasolini was a gay Marxist atheist—yes, really, all the things—who was one of these guys always at loggerheads with the church while thinking Jesus was a pretty cool dude. Much of his other work is obscene in the extreme. He was murdered under mysterious circumstances, some thinking a crime syndicate like the Mafia pushed a male prostitute into taking the fall. A colorful life, to say the least.)

This piece was shot in black and white on a very low budget in rural Italy, using non-actors, with no extra dialogue except what’s in the text of the gospel. A critic noted that so far from constricting Pasolini’s cinematic imagination, it actually freed him up to paint with silent imagery and music. From the first appearance of the girlish Virgin Mary, one corner of her lips quirking up like the Mona Lisa, you know you’re watching something special. This is a film-length stress test of the British actor Michael Kitchen’s criticism of a wordy script, “I could do that with a look.” With such spare dialogue, much of its power rests in significant looks, the more impressive because the camera is lingering on the faces of people unused to a camera.

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The great world-tilting scandal of the Christian gospel is that forgiveness of sin is available to whosoever will come and receive it. We might face the just consequences of that sin, in many ways and places, but in Christ Jesus, we are no longer condemned.

Christians with a particularly dark and brutal salvation testimony must consider carefully how to steward that testimony. Some keep it closely guarded and share only with a privileged few. Some choose to make it public in hopes that other sinners will be encouraged and Christ will be glorified. Reasonable arguments could be made for either choice. There is no one-size-fits-all right way for the Christian to proceed here. Much of the choice is down to a variety of factors that will differ from individual to individual, because people are people and not widgets.

This week, a Christian husband named Trevor Sheatz caused an enormous stir by posting his side of his wife Ashley’s testimony, which she’s chosen to share freely online for some years. It’s a heartbreaking story, full of promiscuity, addiction, and abuse. But God, as they say. However, because this woman doesn’t have a large public speaking platform, her story had never gone “viral” in the Internet way. It was just there for anyone to discover in her corner of Christian Twitter.

For some reason, all of that changed when her husband made this long post, including far less detail than she’s shared herself, but reflecting on how God can redeem and transform anyone with such a past. He was replying to an ongoing discourse about whether formerly promiscuous women are “damaged goods” to be permanently avoided by Christian men. Something about the post unlocked the secret to Twitter virality. Who knows why anything goes viral, but maybe it was the “hook” that he contrasted his wife’s former promiscuity with his virginity, to the end of offering hope that God can make this kind of union fruitful. In any case, all hell broke loose in the comments, in some of the most appalling ways you could imagine and some you hopefully couldn’t. (Her wedding picture alone drew an avalanche of ugly comments—a perfectly nice picture, but I guess her nose is a little large, which I guess is a particular trigger for antisemitic trolls, who share Venn diagram overlap with the sort of trolls who call women whores. Anyhow.)

Well, trolls will be trolls. But the backlash didn’t end at the level of Twitter trolling. It stirred up responses from people who present themselves as serious commentators with serious commentating platforms. Most notably, this segment from the Daily Wire, in which Ben Shapiro, Michael Knowles, and Andrew Klavan took turns mocking the post. All speak as if the man sprang this on his wife out of the blue, apparently lacking basic facts Grok could have handed them with one prompt. Knowles says the husband “called his wife a whore online,” but of course it is Knowles who is doing this, not the husband. Klavan jokes that the millions of impressions must be “all those guys coming back,” and throws in an extra throwaway line that he was one of them (here even Knowles and Shapiro cringe).

Knowles expanded more on his thoughts elsewhere, evidently unchanged by the knowledge that the husband has his wife’s permission. She really shouldn’t have put the story out there either, he suggests, and it would have been appropriate for her husband to stop her, because we should all know less about each other, etc. “Testimony tell-all” culture is a real problem, and we need to recover the lost art of discretion, keeping private sin private, and practicing freedom in Christ by letting the past be the past.

Now, I’m not saying there is nothing to these points. But double standards abound. Klavan’s flippant crudeness is especially…interesting, given that his own memoir (which I’ve recommended widely) is all about his wayward youth and Christian redemption arc, including many casual trysts. Is Knowles going to lecture him about the need for “discretion” when it comes to past sexual sin? No? Didn’t think so. Meanwhile, a little walk down recent memory lane on Knowles’s podcast will turn up multiple interviews with former prostitutes. One was a pastor, Joshua Broome, who’s written an entire book about his former life as a pornographic actor. Then there was former OnlyFans star Nala Ray, who joined Knowles not once but twice to talk about her Christian conversion, the second time with her husband. Knowles has tried to defend himself by saying it’s different when a public figure has made his or her sexual past part of a platform. But allegedly, his whole point was that making one’s sexual past part of a public speaking platform should not be a done thing for Christians.

It would seem this commentary comes with an asterisk: “It should not be a done thing, unless you’ve already gotten kind of famous by doing it, in which case please come on the show so we can harvest your Content together.”

It’s also odd that Knowles wraps this up with a sneer at evangelical testimony culture, in particular. The Daily Wire recently acquired Matt Fradd’s Catholic show Pints With Aquinas, which just invited former Baylor professor Trent Dougherty to come opine at length about his less-than-a-decade-old adulterous fall from grace. I would ask Knowles who has less “discretion”: a distinguished Catholic academic still publicly talking about the adultery he committed in the middle of his Catholic academic career, or an ordinary evangelical woman sharing her testimony of how God rescued her from paganism?

All to say, I’m not interested in Takes from people who run their Takes business on business logic. They should at least be men enough to admit that’s what they’re doing, instead of feigning consistency. Or women enough. The Catholic woman behind Evie Magazine also falls in this category. She held forth with a rather cynical take here, all about how average men are so demoralized that “every girl is on OnlyFans or sleeping around,” and how triggering posts like this are, etc., etc. It didn’t take much googling to find Evie’s glowing profile of the formerly mentioned porn actor turned pastor. Again: Something else besides actual principle is setting the standard here.

It thus falls to the rest of us to find a better and non-hypocritical way to talk about all this. Because I do in fact think there is a broader conversation worth having here about discretion, evangelical “oversharing” culture, testimony-as-content, and all that. There is also a broader conversation worth having about Christians’ place in the dating scene, and how Christians should think about prospects with “a past.”

I myself can think of quite a few people among my Christian friends and acquaintances who have “a past,” some of whom have gone on to have fruitful marriages. My good friend Meg Basham movingly incorporated the story of her prodigal 20s into a book. Another writer, Ashley Lande, wrote a book I blurbed about her past addiction to psychedelics. (My first book blurb, which I took as a sign that I’ve Made It as a writer.) It focuses more on her addiction and less on promiscuity, but that’s an element in there and part of both her and her husband’s testimonies. They’re jointly open about it and enjoy a strong marriage.

But other people I know and respect have approached this differently. One Catholic friend around my age recently sat down and gave me a generous few hours of his time so I could tell his story in a long article I’m working on about men who’ve recently joined the church. Because the story dives into some very weird, dark corners of millennial Internet culture, including homosexual elements, and because he earnestly doesn’t want to scandalize anyone who knows him and his wife in person, he’s requested that I use his middle name. To me this strikes a very healthy prudential balance. His story can still be a blessing, but he and his wife get to keep their privacy. Other people in their friends circle aren’t even aware of it. I think this can be wholly appropriate. I do take issue with church subcultures where people are pressured to “share with the small group,” creating embarrassing moments for everyone involved. As long as the people who need to know already know, the willingness to share one’s past sin openly doesn’t make you more or less Christian.

I also think about the wife of a couple I know who opened up about her wayward youth to me over a meal, but hasn’t even talked about it with her own kids. One criticism of Trevor and Ashley was that their kids shouldn’t know about their mother’s past until they’re grown, because of the problems this could cause with discipline and such. There might be something to this, and likewise there might be something to the criticism that kids should have a say in whether Mom’s past is shared with the Internet. Trevor and Ashley are younger, and I’m not sure if they even have children yet. They’re understandably full of zeal and thinking in terms of how many people could be blessed by the testimony, but there are other factors to consider.

However, I do reject a false dichotomy Matt Walsh set up in his take, though unlike his Daily Wire colleagues he was at least trying to be balanced. He asserted that “your story of past misdeeds is only really a good teaching tool and cautionary tale, and therefore edifying, if your life is right now currently in shambles.” But young Trevor and Ashley are happy and content together now. And “‘I sinned a lot and now I’m happy and not suffering any significant consequences for my evil behavior’ just isn’t a very useful moral lesson for most people.” To which I would ask how Matt knows there have been “zero significant consequences,” for Trevor and Ashley or for anyone whose life isn’t “currently in shambles.” Sexual sin leaves scars. Sometimes it leaves people unable to find a mate at all, or causes problems for a couple. We don’t know the particular intimate challenges Trevor and Ashley may have had to navigate together, nor do we need to.

Walsh, like others, is especially put off by the fact that Trevor calls his wife “more pure than most virgins.” I admit, I also take some issue with that phrasing. Trevor has doubled down, saying it’s true because most virgins aren’t Christians, but I think that shows a tin ear. There were other and better ways to convey what he meant. I also react with mixed feelings when he says his wife can now “more easily live out a life of passionate love for her Savior.” While taking the point that he (or she) who has been forgiven much will love much, I would gently suggest that such things don’t need to be a competition. It is a beautiful paradox that God can bring great good out of great evil, and I think Christians can simply rest in that paradox.

Also, while I think there’s been a fair amount of strawmanning from the “Christian manosphere” (“They want to force all us guys to marry reformed whores!”), I don’t think such ambient pressure is nonexistent either—for both men and women. I interacted a little bit with one woman who literally said she would shame any young Christian woman who restricted her dating pool to Christian men who’ve never used pornography, because pornography usage is so common, and women need to be realistic. As long as a man has been clean for six months (!) or more, this woman said the girl needs to consider him, or else she’s being self-righteous, in ways that will cause problems in her marriage (!!) One hardly knows where to begin with this nonsense, which only enables the troll who protests too much that fornication is “leagues worse” than porn use. I got her to back off slightly on the six months (!), and to sort of agree that these things can come in degrees (are we talking about a man who had a rough patch in high school and is now clean in his 30s? a man who’s had rolling addiction patterns up to two years ago?) but not by too much.

But sure, I admit that as a single 33-year-old woman, I face an uphill slope. I’m personally blessed not to have “a past,” but I realize it’s already not easy to find even a Christian man whose background matches mine, especially if you take porn addiction seriously (which I do), and it will only get worse from here. There’s also the entire subtopic of divorce, which can leave a man entirely blameless, yet also for understandable reasons not a woman’s first dating choice if she’s a virgin (and vice versa when genders are swapped). A girlfriend was curious to know if I’d (hypothetically) be open to dating a man with children, which in my social circles will 9 times out of 10 mean he’s divorced. I said I wasn’t completely closed, but I’d have quite a lot of questions. I’m not prepared to say I would have the mental, emotional and spiritual stamina to take on the baggage such a relationship would bring.

It doesn’t feel fair to categorize this reluctance as precisely the same kind of reluctance I would have about dating a formerly promiscuous man, but we could say there’s some shared DNA. In neither case do I want to be dogmatically closed, but let’s just say other factors would have to be so overridingly powerful that it became a second-tier issue. I think Christian men and women alike should feel comfortable saying this out loud without judgment.

In summary: Jesus saves. Trevor and Ashley didn’t do anything wrong. Trolls are gonna troll, grifters are gonna grift. But also, these things are complicated. It’s important to be able to discuss complicated things normally.

However, this requires people to be normal first. That seems to have been a challenge for a lot of people this week, but the option is still available.

Last week, I caused some outrage in Literary Catholic Twitter by mentioning that I’m not a great fan of the much-revered Southern Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor. This is not unusual for me. I hardly miss a chance to air my beef with St. Flannery. For some reason, this time things snowballed to the point where before I knew it, I’d created a whole micro-discourse, with angry lit-Caths (and some vicariously angry lit-Prots) coming out of the woodwork from hither and yon to take their whack at me.

What had begun in good fun got rather aggressively weird rather quickly, and I was glad when it finally blew over. Among other things, a few people thought it would be terribly funny to quote at/about me the most famous line from O’Connor’s most famous short story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” in which a possessive grandmother is brutally murdered along with her entire family after they take a fatal wrong turn on a road trip. The murderer, who is given an entirely unearned mad-prophet-gone-wrong aura, pronounces the unlucky old woman’s supposedly profound epitaph: “She would have been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” For the uninitiated, I have not spoiled this story. I have spared you from it.

Someone graciously said he’d host a piece where I organized my anti-Flannery beef into a more considered shape, and one of these days I mean to take him up on it, but first I wanted to put some somewhat less shapeful thoughts down here, and to encompass more writers than just Flannery. By chance, Chris Rufo also recently got himself into hot water by confessing that he’s not a big fan of Cormac McCarthy. After reading the first 100 pages of The Road and Blood Meridian, he gave up on both works, finding the nihilism too overpowering. Evidently, McCarthy’s fanbase is about as thin-skinned as O’Connor’s. I do, however, think both writers were considerably talented, and I don’t dislike everything they wrote. In fact, I would encourage Rufo to give The Road another try, and in this post I’ll talk a little about why, as well as the one O’Connor story I’m really partial to. Along the way, I want to try to articulate some of my philosophy of dark fiction—why not all dark fiction is created equal, what I look for by way of compensation for the darkness, and why it’s not a sign of uncultured something-something not to care for some writers conventionally considered Great.

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Well folks, another Oscars night has come and gone, and I couldn’t care less. Really, I couldn’t. I tried! Though as a certified cinephile, I don’t say this out of a generalized hatred for the movie business. Even in recent memory, there have been much stronger nominee slates. If you’d like a better 2025 sampler, I’ve unlocked this piece from back when the nominees were announced. A few nominated performances did make it into that list, but by and large, the Best Picture slate just didn’t do much for me. However, since I don’t write enough on movies hereabouts, I thought a few people might like a throwback look at five winners of the little statuette and why I think they particularly deserve a watch from Christians.

I should clarify, this isn’t the same as my top five list overall, i.e. “Best Pictures Every Human Being Should See.” That list would include things like The Sound of Music and Casablanca, which I’m just going to assume you all have seen, and if not…I try not to judge, but I will judge you a bit. Sorry. I was moved to reflect, though, that many of my all-time favorites have historically fallen in the “honor to be nominated” category, though some are much better remembered than whatever did win that year. It’s a Wonderful Life, for example, has endured long after The Best Years of Our Lives was forgotten, not that the latter was bad or unpopular in its day, just not immortal. Fiddler On the Roof lost to The French Connection. Many such cases. Somewhere around the late 60s, there was a turn where the awards criteria started to become progressively more nichey, though perhaps still sometimes awarding good work. Time was, the most popular films were also the most awarded were also objectively the best. That stopped being the case long ago.

At least one of my picks here is going to pull from that “not wildly popular but worthy” pool however, because I am still after all a critic, so I need to hold onto my card somehow. But what they all share in common is that they offer something to instruct, edify, or move the Christian viewer. Herewith: five best pictures every Christian should see.

Chariots of Fire (1981)

“But He also made me FAST. And when I run, I feel his pleasure.”

I’m not sure why, but aside from the score, people don’t talk much about this film. Even Andrew Klavan, in his new rapid-fire “rate the Best Pictures” series, gave it a B and moved on without much fanfare. And while evangelicals of my parents’ generation quoted it all the time, among younger Christians I get the sense that it’s falling out of familiarity. This is a real shame. So many things about the craft of this movie deserve close study: the casting, the writing, the cinematography, and of course the way all these things improbably mesh with that score. Perhaps it goes underrated because it’s relatively understated. Apart from a handful of explosive race scenes, it operates more as a quiet character study than a sports film. You really need to pay attention to pick up all the little touches that make scriptwriter Colin Welland’s dialogue so crisp, and occasionally so funny. (“That’s a matter for the committee,” says one pompous character at a crucial moment in the prolonged sequence where they’ve gathered to discuss Eric Liddell’s implacable Sabbatarianism. “We are the committee,” comes the irritated reply from a fellow peer.)

Among Christians, the film is chiefly remembered for Liddell’s famous line, “I believe God made me for a purpose. But He also made me fast. And when I run, I feel his pleasure.” So far as we know, the real Eric Liddell never said this, just like we don’t know that his father ever really said the complementary brilliant line, “You can praise God by peeling a spud if you peel it to perfection.” What the film accomplishes so movingly is to match the glory of this man’s life with a simple eloquence of language he never found for himself, while somehow never feeling overwrought or pretentious.

The rivalry between Liddell and the tortured young Jewish sprinter Harold Abrahams is not the conventional sort. In fact, they barely share any screentime, and by the third act they’re on the same team. Technically, Abrahams is the protagonist. We’re always in touch with his volcanic, sometimes childish emotions, and we observe the uncanny young “flying Scot” through his jealous, wondering eyes. In one sense, as I once saw a Jewish writer provocatively argue, you could say Liddell was more Jewish than Abrahams, with his willingness to sacrifice everything for the sake of the Law. (The real Abrahams didn’t keep the Sabbath and believed Jewish athletes shouldn’t have to.) But Liddell’s effortless gift also functions as an echo of the gospel, by contrast with Abrahams’ endless agonized striving. In Liddell’s moments of triumph, we watch Abrahams watch him from the sidelines, lost in uncomprehending awe.

Playing Liddell would catapult young Ian Charleson to breakout stardom and wealth. Like Liddell, Charleson also hailed from Edinburgh. But his own relationship with organized religion was, in producer David Puttnam’s words, “a bit haphazard.” A profligate bisexual, he would reap the same deadly harvest as so many young men of his generation. Less than ten years before his death, Chariots marked the peak of his film career. Though on paper he couldn’t have been more different from the man he played, he desperately wanted the role. Puttnam wrote about the “desultory” first lunch meeting where he and director Hugh Hudson tried to sound out the shy young actor. Charleson would only much later explain this was because he was so terrified of not getting the part, he could hardly say anything.

Once committed, Charleson gave the performance everything, even personally crafting Liddell’s sermon scene. When he asked for permission to do this, Colin Welland asked how well he knew the Bible. “I’ve almost finished it,” he said, on his first read through the “most closely annotated copy” Puttnam had ever seen. Hudson recalled that he was still working over the sermon scene up to an hour before filming, so when it was time to roll, he tucked it into a hat he held close to his chest, allowing himself an occasional smooth glance downward. As a child, of course I had no awareness whatsoever of this great poignant contrast between actor and character, but I often think about it now—a son of Scotland’s decadent post-Christian present, whole-heartedly reaching back to a son of its Christian past.

“You’re a real man,” Charleson once said wryly to a straight friend. “I wish I could be a real man.” Perhaps he embraced this part with such intense dedication because he knew he would never again play a more real man. I can think of no more honorable epitaph than these reflections to Hudson from Liddell’s widow: “You know, Eric’s great sadness was that he was a poor preacher—he had bags of conviction but lacked a way with words. Your Mr. Charleson made it all come right. He said what Eric always wanted to say, and to millions of people around the world. That would have made Eric very happy.”

A Man for All Seasons (1966)

“When a man takes an oath, he’s holding his own self in his own hands, like water. And if he opens his fingers then, he needn’t hope to find himself again.”

This celebrated play-to-film stars Paul Scofield in a career-defining role as Sir Thomas More, a Catholic statesman who became a martyr when he refused to sanction King Henry VIII’s illicit divorce. Normally, one would assume that a play about a 16th-century saint was written by a Christian. Not A Man For All Seasons. Playwright Robert Bolt felt a need to explain this in his remarkable preface to the original script. Despite his own atheism, he found that the integrity of this brilliant, stubborn, deeply Catholic lawyer commanded his attention and respect. And through his play, it commands ours, blending material from More’s letters with Bolt’s inspired additions. Is Bolt really channeling the Thomas More of history though, or More by way of Bolt’s favorite existentialist philosophers? Paid readers can find me opining at more length about this here, and if you really can’t get enough of my thoughts, you can find a very fun little podcast discussion I recorded with John Miller for National Review’s Great Books series (RIP).

Using nearly all the actors from the original stage production, the film is shot as sparely as possible. The dialogue—by turns humorous, heartbreaking, and chilling—speaks for itself with no music to underscore it. As the stakes grow progressively higher, More must explain to his friends and even his own family why he cannot take an oath legitimizing the king’s authority to re-marry. To them, it’s just words on a page. To More, it is the difference between saving or damning his own soul. Where other atheists might dismiss More’s execution as a grisly footnote of history, Bolt has turned it into a profound, perpetually relevant tale of conscience.

On the Great Books podcast, Miller and I discussed Kenneth Tynan’s criticism of the play for, in his reading, subjectifying More’s “truth.” For Bolt, it didn’t seem to matter whether Catholicism was true or false. He could be given “irrefutable evidence that every tenet of Catholicism was a palpable falsehood,” yet “his admiration for More would not be diminished.” That was an accurate assessment. As I put it in my old piece, Bolt admired More not because he could identify himself with More, but simply because to his own self, More was true.

By contrast, young ladder-climbing Richard Rich betrays More and thereby betrays himself. I think of Rich often when I consider people in Christian circles who have sold out in various ways (cough, David French). So many occasions to quote More’s scathing little line, “But for Wales?” when he hears that, for his treachery, Rich has been made Attorney General of the small country. The young man could have been a good teacher, More gently tells him at one point. When Rich asks who would know it if he was, More says, “You; your pupils; your friends; God. Not a bad public, that.” Not enough for Rich, though.

Bolt would continue pursuing his fascination with Christianity in The Mission, also well regarded, though not as strong a script as this one. To my knowledge, he never converted. But he created the sort of art that makes good men want to convert.

On the Waterfront (1954)

“Conscience. That stuff can drive you nuts.”

If I ever taught a film class, I would pair A Man for All Seasons with On the Waterfront, because both of these films are about conscience. Based on a true 40s crime exposé, it tells the story of how the mob exploited and cowed New Jersey’s longshoremen. Slow-witted but streetwise Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) has eyewitness testimony that could put the union boss away for murder. But he’s not exactly running to the nearest cop, and he defies you to blame him for it. Fortunately for Terry’s soul, there’s a priest who has something to say about that.

For Christian viewers, On the Waterfront is an especially welcome reminder of a time when the church and its clergy had a voice in Hollywood. Based on a real priest who fought waterfront corruption, the character of Father Barry is tough, fearless and relentless in his pursuit of the truth. In one scene, he preaches over the body of one of the mob’s victims. When they tell him to “go back to church,” he is ready with an answer: “Boys, this is my church. And if you think Christ isn’t down here on the waterfront, you’ve got another thought coming.” Meanwhile, he challenges young Terry to stand up and be counted, even if it costs him his life.

The real-life Father Barry was Reverend John Corridan, whom you can read all about at La Wik here—a Jesuit, of the sort they don’t make like they used to. Screenwriter Budd Schulberg consulted extensively with him while crafting the script. He recalled the priest as a “tall, youthful, balding, energetic, ruddy-faced Irishman whose speech was a fascinating blend of Hell’s Kitchen jargon, baseball slang, the facts and figures of a master in economics and the undeniable humanity of Christ.” Somehow, Corridan made it alive out of his tussles with the waterfront crime-lords, lived out his days as a professor and a hospital chaplain, and died of a heart attack in his 70s.

For director Elia Kazan, the film was his veiled battle cry against the Hollywood communists he chose to testify against—or “rat out,” as the mobsters in the film would put it. But like Terry, Kazan would have replied, “I was ratting on myself all those years.” I used an old YouTube channel to upload a short clip of Kazan justifying this choice, and the comments it drew are interesting, to say the least. Famously, some actors refused to stand up and applaud when Kazan received a lifetime achievement award. If you’ve read Whittaker Chambers’ book Witness, none of this is a surprise. “I don’t mind losing friends,” Kazan says in that clip, “if it’s in a good cause. I also gained a lot of friends.”

Schindler’s List (1993)

“The list is an absolute good. The list is life. All around the margins lies the gulf.”

Andrew Klavan has expressed a strong dislike for this film, believing it is fundamentally based on (his words) “a lie.” The lie, in his view, is that it put itself forward as the definitive Holocaust movie while focusing on a handful of Jews who were heroically saved. But the handful of Jews Schindler saved were not the story of the Holocaust. The 6 million dead were.

I have never really understood this perspective, and after freshly rewatching this film the other night, I understand it even less. Hardly a scene goes by that the viewer is not excruciatingly reminded of “the gulf” which, in the words of Schindler’s assistant Itzhak Stern, lies “all around the margins” of The List. I include it among films every Christian should see, but I feel I need to add an asterisk exempting those who can’t bear scenes of wanton bloody executions, degrading nudity, or sexually charged abuse. Then of course there’s the crushing final scene where Schindler dissolves into sobs and cries, “I could have gotten more!” Yes, in that moment Stern urges him to concentrate on the 1,200 people snatched from the fire, but we understand very well why he cannot. It’s worth noting that Spielberg donated his share of the film’s profits to the Shoah Foundation, which is dedicated to preserving firsthand accounts of the horror.

Klavan also says the film bothers him because just as most of the Jews were in fact not saved, most of the people around the Jews were in fact not heroic, and if you were honest you would probably not have been heroic either. I wonder if Klavan believes this means the heroes’ stories should have remained indefinitely untold, or at least untold through the medium of film. Does he feel the same way about Raoul Wallenberg or Corrie ten Boom?

There is also the fact that the film does not portray Schindler as purely and simply heroic, which is part of why it’s so great. He squirms repeatedly at being called a “good man.” At first, he complains when Stern sneaks in clearly less than “essential” workers, like the pitiful one-armed man who is the film’s first executed victim. Through all kinds of visual cues, the viewer is constantly reminded that Schindler and the villainous Amon Göth are two sides of one coin. There are moments where Schindler raises his voice with an unnerving guttural harshness, and we glimpse the kind of man he could be, if he chose. At a birthday party, he impulsively kisses a Jewish woman, intending her no harm, but she has no way of knowing this and begins quaking all over. (Göth, with his own personal stake in this area, intervenes to help wheedle Schindler’s way out of the fact that he’s broken a Nazi regulation.)

Roger Ebert praised Spielberg for “disappearing” into the work of the film, eschewing directorial flourishes. There are of course those very few haunting touches of color flaming up in the black and white cinematography—the fire of a candle, the red coat on a little girl. On the negative side, one could make the case that a couple scenes are a bit cheap/exploitative, like the scene where a train of women gets mistakenly routed to Auschwitz and they believe they’re about to be gassed, only for water to come out of the showerheads. Moments like this risk tilting the whole venture into horror-movie territory, but then again in some sense it already is a horror movie.

While I’ve picked my bones here with Klavan’s criticism, there is another kind of criticism that’s much more insidious and launches itself specifically in the guise of Christianity. After finishing my rewatch, I was closing tabs and found a YouTube video from a roundtable podcast featuring some 30-40-something pastors in name only who’d all gotten together to blather about Christianity and Judaism. Among other mind-numbingly stupid things, they were explaining why it’s a trap to say that Jesus was Jewish. These PINOs also like to sneer about the “sacred number” of 6 million and hold forth on the dangers of “Holocaustianity,” which has been used to “bludgeon” white men into believing they can’t have a country—or something.

If all was well with the church, we could just laugh off this crackpottery and get on with our lives. As it is, it seems to be spreading among quite a few younger people in the pews, including Catholics and Protestants, men and women. Much more needs to be written about this, but suffice it to say I fear some older pastors and priests are asleep at the wheel. The sad thing is, it will no longer work to simply show a film like this for educational purposes. An entire generation is being immunized to it. Which is all the more reason for Christians to watch it.

Spotlight (2015)

“If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse one.”

I don’t rate this film as highly as my other picks here, but it is hauntingly made, a sober dramatization of the exposé that blew the Catholic Church’s abusive priest scandal wide open. Though I understand why Bishop Barron was frustrated by the closing credits’ list of cities and dioceses implying that the Church had failed to respond wherever the rot had been found. This was not in fact true, and so I think a good bishop like Barron is entitled to a little irritation in response. Yet at no point has anyone denied the scope of the rot. The slow unfolding horror of the film is that it’s not even difficult to prove, in the sense that these cases are overflowing with hard evidence. Getting one’s hands on said evidence is the rub.

I’m not Catholic, nor have I ever been tempted across the Tiber, much as I respect my neighbors over the way. I’ve had friends who crossed the river in both directions. In at least one case I know, sadly, someone crossed it all the way from Catholicism to atheism. The journalists in this film are already less than completely devout, after the usual fashion of lapsed New England Catholics. But there’s a heartbreaking scene where Mark Ruffalo’s character says he’d always been drawn to the Church, even though he’d fallen away over the same “typical shit” as everyone else. But, he says half-laughing, half-crying, “I figured one day I might actually go back. I was holding on to that.”

Rod Dreher has written movingly about how his own journalistic journey into the scandals led him out of the Church, for which a lot of Catholics continue to excoriate him. He was accused of allowing himself to be led by emotions and throwing reason out the window, to which he responded—justifiably I think—that it was not a purely emotional response. Catholicism makes certain very bold claims about itself that are cast in doubt by corruption on this scale. One can of course still remain in the Church as a faithful layman or priest, and while it may sound a bit odd coming from a Protestant, I’m glad so many have. But I also see why so many haven’t. The tragedy is that so many believe their only alternative is nothing at all.

This film will hit especially hard if you’ve known any male clerical abuse victims. There’s a scene where the female lead speaks to a damaged, effeminate young man who explains that she has to understand, “this was the first time anyone had told me it was okay to be gay. And it was a priest!” And my heart breaks, because that’s exactly what my friend said too.

There is of course such a thing as overzealous activism, pushing so hard that the very concepts of due process or “innocent until proven guilty” are called into question, or people are tainted by association at many degrees removed. I’ve seen how this dynamic can sometimes play out with abuse advocacy in a church context, and it’s endlessly frustrating because it keeps cycling in an endless loop with actual coverup culture.

Still, when whistle-blower Phil Saviano speaks in this scene, you can’t blame him for sounding like a man on the edge of sanity when he says, “This is all right here in the box. I sent this all to you guys five years ago.”

What are your Oscar favorites? Comment below and let me know!

Good Tuesday morning to all you fully paid-up readers of Further Up, who are finally getting exclusive access to this third and last part of my little New York winter adventure. I apologize for the delayed delivery, but my excuse is that I’ve just wrapped up a very intense week of HOUSE-HUNTING (maybe worth a Stack unto itself), which has been exciting and exhausting in equal measure. Many different factors have made this step possible, but the income I’ve been able to generate from this little corner of the Internet has played a significant role in giving me the stability to take it. This year will mark Further Up’s 5th anniversary. From the bottom of my heart, THANK YOU ALL for putting a little of your hard-earned cash into my plate. In the gig economy, nothing is certain, but somehow I’ve grown my earnings in this spot from nothing to something like 30% of my annual income. And I have no intention of stopping!

Before I pick up where I left off with my New York adventures, I’ll invite people to leave comments on this post if you want to let me know what topics interest you most, what you’d like to see more of/less of. I have multiple ideas I’ve been wanting to develop, on everything from masculinity to AI to the Jews (yes, it’s coming, and no for the concerned I haven’t gone insane). But I’d like to hear from you. You can also let me know if my posts are just too dang long. A couple people have voiced that latter criticism, and I don’t want to dismiss it entirely, although I confess I do see this space as a place to let topics marinate without the tight constraints of an op-ed. This is where my thoughts go to bake when I’m told I just didn’t whip them up quite fast enough to be a sizzling hot take. (Which has been happening with increasing frequency these days. Is this…aging?) Anyway, with that said, I also acknowledge that without an editorial hand, I can tend to ramble a little. Or a lot. I’ve been working on a couple big print magazine features for which I’m told I have only 3,000 words max, and it did occur to me that maybe, just maybe, I could trim my Stacks a little more proactively. Anyway, if in fact you are madly in love with my long rambling, feel free to comment below and let me know this as well.

With that, here’s how I spent my last two days in New York! But first, I realized that I forgot something very important in my last entry, namely the unbelievable pizza I ate before going to the off-Broadway theater on Tuesday. This, my friends, is burraprosciutto pizza, topped with a combination of burrata cheese and prosciutto. Oh yes. Feast your eyes:

I also forgot to mention the sweet rolls we relished that night, it being Shrove Tuesday and the last day Bethany was allowing herself to enjoy sweets before Lent. We bought these at the little pizzeria where we always waited for our bus after getting off the train home. One or the other of us sometimes broke down and just bought a pizza slice, because whatever we’d eaten earlier in the evening, we had walked so much that we were at least a bit hungry again.

Okay, back to…

Ash Wednesday: Smudge and Swing

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After my full Saturday in New York, I did precisely nothing on Sunday, being deprived of my public transport guardian angel (Bethany), whose church work kept her out into the afternoon. I soothed my conscience with our plans to attend an Ash Wednesday service at an Anglican church. Meanwhile, I’d brought my laptop with noble ideas of getting some writing done, but as I should have predicted, these were vain. I slept, sampled my book haul from The Strand, slept some more, and watched TV with Bethany and her sister (Person of Interest, a show that ended badly but for which I will always have a soft spot). In the evening, Bethany continued my ongoing initiation into Bollywood with an Indian film called Newton, a wry, tragicomic little piece about Indian elections. The titular Newton is a pure soul determined to help the poorest rural Indians exercise their voting rights, but police corruption makes the whole process farcical. I was worried that things would end badly for poor Newton, but thankfully he emerges intact, as does his love interest.

It was just as well that I took the sabbath rest seriously, as Monday would be yet another jam-packed day, ending with a bang as we took in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child on Broadway. I used TodayTix for tickets, which informed me that last-minute seats had opened up for Marcel on the Train, a small play about how the great French Jewish mime Marcel Marceau smuggled orphan children away from the Nazis over the Swiss border. I literally made this discovery in my Broadway seat and impulsively decided to buy a ticket for Tuesday night. I’m not a regular theater-goer, so it was a real treat to enjoy these two very different theatrical experiences back-to-back, from lavish spectacle to intimate blackbox performance. Paid readers can enjoy both of my reviews after the free preview.

Monday the 16th: The Breaking of the Fellowship

That’s an overdramatic title to capture the fact that we had to say goodbye to Duncan today, but not before getting in a last little burst of sightseeing. Bethany and I endured the molasses-slow President’s Day morning commute to meet him at the Museum of Natural History. Bethany told us that half the fun of this museum is watching kids react to it. One little girl was very excited by this picture: “It looks like a shark!”

The highlight was, of course, the dinosaurs, which made Duncan think about his little brother back home.

Behind the T-Rex, you can see the Apatosaurus, which is so massive it’s impossible to capture in full when you get close enough for a good look.

One wonders how these enormous creatures could sustain themselves on an herbivore diet. So much of the deep past is shrouded in mystery. You can see why some mad scientist might scheme to resurrect it, even as you very much don’t want him to. The dinosaurs don’t tempt me personally, but this mammoth on the other hand…

Of course, there are giants walking (or swimming) among us still. “IT’S SO BIG!” one little boy kept squealing. “MOM, IT’S SO BIG! IT’S SO BIG!”

Other parts of the museum lacked a comparable thrill, although there were things I didn’t expect to see. I liked this visual timeline of the history of Middle Eastern nations:

I enjoyed the bird section too, particularly when baby birds were involved. This might be my favorite: Lunch on a cactus.

One more dinosaur awaited us in the Roosevelt rotunda, along with some inspiring words from the man—words that now seem out of step with the times, in the best possible way. (Don’t ask me why there aren’t any apostrophes, maybe they were hard to carve or something.)

For the rest of the afternoon, we relaxed in the Marlton Espresso Bar at Susannah’s invitation. I treated myself to some salmon and toast, which I ate so fast I didn’t fulfill my millennial obligation to take a picture and post it. But I did take this picture of my coffee and Kindle, open to Eli Sharabi’s gripping Hamas captivity memoir Hostage. This was apparently Susannah’s first time seeing a Kindle in the wild, which she mistook for “the biggest phone I have ever seen.” Here Bethany chimed in that in fairness to Susannah, I do make it look bigger.

Somehow, Susannah was able to simultaneously edit an essay and gossip away with me about various New Yorky/very onliney things, about which I will not blog because what happens at The Marlton stays at The Marlton.

Eventually Duncan had to go his own way, leaving me and Bethany with a couple of dog tags to remember him by. We took one last trio selfie and bade him a fond farewell.

Thus concluded our weekend with Duncan. But for me and Bethany, the week was just beginning. To hear all about my back-to-back nights at the theater, the first of which landed me in some hilarious embarrassment, consider becoming a paid reader!

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Recently, it came to my attention that two of my best friends were hatching a plot to meet each other in New York City over President’s Day weekend. Not wanting to be left out, I made like Sam Gamgee and announced, “Of course you are. And I’m coming with you!”

You see, if you’re like me, most of your friends are online. And while the nature of online-ness can lead to some line-blurring, confusion and heartbreak when you’re trying to figure out who your friends are, sometimes it can also lead you to meet real kindred spirits. And occasionally, when stars align, you get the chance to leap out of the Internet into real life together.

My friend Bethany, a New York native who works in publishing and seems to know almost everyone worth knowing in the city, simultaneously served as my host and tour guide. This made the trip orders of magnitude more fun and relaxing than it would have been otherwise. I am emphatically not a city mouse, so I make it a habit never to visit and try to navigate a big city without local help. Bethany’s family warmly welcomed me into their home and cooked delicious food for the days when we weren’t eating out on the town.

The third corner of this friendship triangle is Duncan, our honorary little brother. He is an officer in the Marines, currently working his way through what he likes to call “college with guns.” In a bold move, he drove a car all the way up from Washington and picked me up at the airport on the very night of his arrival. Duncan is an exceptionally thoughtful writer with a Substack here, where he posts reflections on his former life as an EMT and his current life as a Marine. I have told him many times that he should write more. I also have his permission to tell the (younger 20-something conservative Protestant) ladies that he is single and yearning. Bethany and I love Duncan and have a wonderful plan for his life.

Perhaps you can tell already that I chose wisely, and to convince you of the same, I’ve prepared a little diary of my week’s adventures in sight-seeing, eating, theatergoing, subway people-watching, walking, walking, and more walking. (Bethany remarked that in New York, you’re likely to walk off the extra calories you’d otherwise accumulate from New York food.) In fact, I packed so much into the week that I’m splitting the diary into a few parts. This part the first is free. Parts the second (and third?) will be mostly reserved for paid readers.

Friday the 13th: The Journey Begins

I am not a superstitious person. I set out late Friday afternoon blissfully confident that my evening travels would go smoothly, and I would touch down to meet my intrepid Marine escort at a reasonable 10 PM or so, headed for a reasonable bedtime no later than midnight. It’s not like it was Friday the 13th or anything. Ha, ha!

The first leg, my “puddle-jumper” from Michigan to Chicago O’Hare, was uneventful enough. And it seemed, at first, as if my connecting flight would be the same. Boarding proceeded as usual. As per tradition, being smol and weak, I asked the person behind me to help schlep my carryon into the overhead bin, then settled in and waited for takeoff. The two books I had packed were both gifts from Duncan: Karl Marlantes’ What It is Like to Go To War, a favorite of his, and James Matthew Wilson’s little monograph The Wayward Thomist, about the forgotten poet John Finlay, which I’d requested when Duncan asked what book I wanted for Christmas. Because friends give each other books like that. In fact, he ended up sending the latter to me twice, and I ended up leaving this extra copy behind with Bethany, because friends like the same books like that.

About half an hour later, our plane had not moved, in either the second or the third dimension. Then we heard the captain’s voice sheepishly inform us over the intercom that they were only now realizing this plane had, in fact, been completely grounded by a maintenance team before we ever boarded. We would all need to return to the gate and await further instructions. The time was approximately 7:45 PM.

The gate agents appeared to be as clueless and frazzled as we were, but we were finally given an alternate gate and made our heavy-laden way over, like the Exodus, or The Grapes of Wrath. The next hour was punctuated by gradual updates on the preparations for our new plane. First it had to be cleaned, then catering had to get set up, etc., etc., and so on and so forth. Finally, finally, we were boarding again.

And then, the line stopped. We all stood in the bridge and waited. And waited. At the back, I saw one of the agents tiffing a little with a passenger, something to do with the fact that he had three bags. “Well, you didn’t comply when I asked, so I’m gonna have to ask you to…” I wondered if this might explain the delay, but we’d already been held up before this tiff broke out, and while it seemed to fizzle without further drama, we remained stalled. We started to make small talk with each other. The two ladies ahead of me were chatting away about their kids’ school routines. Maybe they knew each other, but at this point that wasn’t a necessary condition. I sent a ripple of laughter along the line by suggesting a “Why are we not boarding yet? Wrong answers only” poll.

Our frazzled gate agent walked past us into the plane, then came back out a few minutes later looking no less frazzled. It would be “a few more minutes,” he said, apologizing. I asked what was wrong. “Uhhhh, they didn’t tell us. They never tell us anything.” As he passed us by, someone muttered, “Maybe they’ll have the first flight fixed by now.”

I sat down, backpack for my pillow. Others did the same. “Think we’ll board today?” someone wondered. “50/50?” “I’ll fly the plane,” someone else offered, “I got my pilot license.” We remained clueless as to what sort of situation would strand us precisely here, on the bridge, instead of having us sit back down in the gating area. But a philosophically-minded passenger concluded that “it’s meaningful, whatever it is.” The time was now 9:15 PM.

Then, all of a sudden, we were told to move forward. It was happening! It was really happening! Slowly, I made my way back to the same seat I’d had on the previous plane. The same gentleman was already seated behind me and, with an elaborately wry face, signaled his readiness to help me with my carry-on a second time. “I feel like we’ve done this before,” he said. It occurred to me that this would make a great hook for a Hallmark movie.

The inciting incident, we were now informed, was that catering had created a door seal, requiring the services of maintenance. Why we had been kept standing in line the whole time this drama unfolded, we would never know. All that mattered to me was that I was on my way at last. Meanwhile, in the group chat with Duncan and Bethany, I confirmed to my relief that we are all night owls and that Duncan had gun college homework to keep himself happily occupied until my arrival.

This story wouldn’t be complete without one last epilogue delay in which Duncan and I endeavored to locate each other in the vast LaGuardia Airport, but we finally succeeded, to our great joy.

As I unpacked, I anxiously checked on the status of the lembas bread apple cookies I’d thrown together the night before and tried to wrap protectively in my carry-on. They were already an inferior batch, owing to the overmelted butter, for which I’d been ruthlessly roasted by Christian Housewife Twitter, but I had deemed them edible. Alas and alack, they were now broken up as well. But then they were meant for Duncan, who’s less bothered about such things than I am.

Saturday the 14th: A Grand Valentine’s Day Out

Valentine’s Day is traditionally a day to celebrate erotic and (hopefully) agapic love between a man and a woman. But for us three, it was a day to celebrate phileō love, the love of friendship. The weather arranged itself accordingly. Looking at the forecast for this week and the week before my arrival, I’m struck by our good luck.

There were, however, a few more slight misadventures in transportation, partly owing to weekend subway track construction. This forced Bethany and me to take a shuttle between trains, breaking up what she assured me was normally a pleasantly straightforward commute. On the shuttle, we sat across from a group of three black girls. The littlest one wore a paper crown and had a puckish smile. Were they three sisters? Mother, daughter, and aunt? No way to tell, but they were beautiful.

We met Duncan in a small coffeeshop and plotted our (Bethany’s) itinerary—first to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, for artistic education (riding Bethany’s coattails since she’s a certified New Yorker), then to Williamsburg for pizza, then to The Strand for book-browsing, then to an evening at New York Encounter, a free annual Catholic conference where I hoped to meet a couple other Twitter acquaintances. Looking out the shop window, I noticed one of these little advertisements for a Jewish cult. I have some good news for whoever made it, but I’m not sure they’re going to like it.

At the Met, we were greeted by the Guardian Squirrel:

Before looking at the paintings, we lost ourselves in the displays of beautiful old weaponry.

The detail of the craftsmanship was extraordinary, sometimes even whimsical, like this design involving flowers, birds and bunnies:

One of my personal favorites was this horsy sword pommel:

You can’t see it well in this picture, but this priming flask depicts the near-sacrifice of Isaac. It was seized by the Nazis from the collection of one Baron Rothschild.

Among the art pieces, I loved discovering not just works by the masters but pieces by artists I’d never heard of before. Sometimes, one finds a work whose origin is debated—was it the master himself or a student, or an admirer? The painting Old Woman Cutting Her Nails is a lovely example of something that may or may not be a Rembrandt:

This piece was also very striking to me, by Borgianni:

A poignant Goya piece:

Among the landscapes, we lingered a bit at van der Neer’s Sports On a Frozen Lake. Duncan said he could feel the cold blowing off the picture:

Volaire’s Eruption of Vesuvius caught my eye:

Of course we can’t forget the Venetian landscapes. I love the washing hung out to dry, the tiny dogs darting around:

Among the sacred art, I was drawn to Ricci’s Baptism of Christ. The chubby cherubic angels are silly, but I like the way the bystanders seem shook up:

Shout-out to these glorified Royal Hungarian saints, welcomed into Paradise by St. Stephen at the summit:

A very famous El Greco Christ:

By contrast, this is a striking “ugly Christ,” whose title and artist escape me at the moment. “He had no beauty that we should desire him…”

I don’t technically approve of fox hunts, but this massive painting of one was kind of awesome. Look how tiny we are!

Duncan carried a Polaroid camera in his backpack, and for one heart-stopping minute we feared he had lost it, but thankfully all was well. Some of the Polaroids came out better than others, but all will be treasured.

In the Japanese section, Bethany guided us to a lovely resting spot in the style of a garden. The resident fishies welcomed us politely:

As you know if you’ve visited, the view from the Met steps is great. Here is the tourist in her natural habitat:

The pizza at Williamsburg was amazingly cheap and high quality, worth noting for whenever you visit. I had three different kinds of pizza that week, and this may have been the best. I wished we all could have had more than one lunch together here.

From here, if memory serves, we took a train to The Strand. On one of the trains we took today, a woman and child came walking past us trying to sell candy. Duncan, ever the gentleman, was ready to leap up and give away his seat, only to realize they were in perpetual motion. One of the times we were walking out of the subway, I can’t recall which day it was, he noticed a forlorn-looking older woman hovering by the entry, apparently unable to pay for a ticket. In passing, he swiped his own card for her.

At one point in our walking we passed by a vendors’ table with lots of hats, one of which Bethany generously bought me as replacement for the hat I lost in the Michigan airport. Naturally, I would then proceed to almost lose the new hat at least twice.

At The Strand, we spent a generous chunk of the afternoon browsing, with special attention to the sections for vintage classics, poetry, history, and mass market paperbacks.

Duncan heroically restrained himself from buying anything. After some agonizing, Bethany picked out an O. Henry folio collection, and I picked out…a few things.

We still had some time before heading to New York Encounter, which we spent eating gelato for dinner.

Then it was a brisk night walk to the venue, with the Empire State Building lit up pink in the distance. I like how this picture makes Duncan look like a ghost:

At The Encounter, we mingled a bit and took in two panel discussions. We learned that earlier discussions had disappointed, but we arrived in time to catch a wonderfully moving short conversation with Joe Gleason, the editor of Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life. For those who don’t know the film, it depicts the life and martyrdom of Franz Jagerstatter, a farmer who refused to fight for the Nazis when he was called up. I consider it Malick’s best work, and Gleason’s editing is a strong part of what makes it so good. Apparently he got the job after writing Malick a fan letter. He also happens to be a devout Catholic, and he offered insightful reflections on Franz and his wife Franziska’s legacy, the symbolism of the film, and how it can teach us to live our own “hidden lives” well. While Franz is a “red” martyr, suffering the cross of an early death, Gleason suggested that Franziska should be remembered as a “white” martyr, carrying her cross of a long life without Franz.

At one point, Gleason took a single shot from the picture and broke down the significance of each element: The hero and heroine holding scythes, a symbol of death. The grass cut down in its prime, like Franz. The church hovers behind them, and we hear the church bell ringing throughout the film, like Franz’s voice of truth. And looming over all, the mountains, where in the film’s last line Franny promises Franz she will meet him. Gleason reflects that “these mountains become icons of hope and of resurrection, as well as icons of struggle and sacrifice. Because in order to meet in the mountains, we first have to climb the mountains.”

The young student woman interviewing Gleason also offered a beautiful reflection about how the film made her consider the hiddenness of her own life, serving at a school, performing minor tasks that she could nevertheless see as laden with significance. Even the fact that the ketchup dispenser now had less ketchup on it was significant.

The next panel was a three-way discussion about the conception of a “dwelling place” in Jewish and Arabic traditions. I have to confess that the Arab philologist didn’t keep my attention very well. But the Jewish panelist, Malka Simkovich, had some touching reflections on what it meant to her to grow up Jewish-American. As a schoolchild, she began her day in the gym with two flagpoles, one for the American flag, one for the flag of Israel, and went through her daily liturgy: saying the Pledge of Allegiance, singing “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” and singing “Hatikvah.” What could be more normal? For Malka, the phrase “dual loyalty” strikes her oddly, because she doesn’t see why it should be a slur. Who in the room didn’t have more than one loyalty—not just double but for some of us triple, quadruple, and more?

I was sitting next to my friend Susannah, a Jewish-American convert to Christianity, and somewhere around this point she passed me a phone note saying “ok that got me in the feels.”

Afterwards, Susannah kidnapped all three of us along with a few of her assorted other friends for cocktails, because this is what Susannah does. A mutual acquaintance picked a spot he remembered as being quiet. In the event, it was not quiet at all, but we enjoyed ourselves anyway. Susannah used an excellent icebreaker question, asking us to go around and state our most off-brand opinions—that is, the opinions that might surprise someone who had a certain (perhaps stereotypical) idea of what we think about things. Since I try not to leave anyone in suspense about what I think about anything, I had a bit of trouble with this one. Probably my best answer would have been that I think conservatives have a hard time discussing police violence well, which seemed to surprise quite a few people in my right-wing circles a few weeks ago. In the event, I said that I thought lefties tended to make better art than righties—although I could be persuaded out of this, and I recognize that our sample size has been distorted by considerations other than merit (plus, of course, including much terrible left-wing art).

Thus concluded my first full day in New York. Coming up: two nights at the theater (one on Broadway, including a seating debacle you will not want to miss, and the other at the Classic Stage Company), Ash Wednesday jazz on a roof, lunch at a fancy club, and more!

A woman is sitting on the toilet, staring at her pregnancy test stick, wishing not to see what she’s seeing. The camera lingers on the two red lines. Then, in a very clever bit of editing, it zooms rapidly down and cuts to an overhead shot of the woman caught in the space between, with a crowd on her left and a crowd on her right. One side screams “My body, my choice!” The other side, equally loud, screams “Choose life! Choose life!” Their faces are contorted, angry.

The woman turns back to see flickers of the life she’d imagined for herself as it were projected on a giant theater screen—graduation, marriage. First baby.

“They’re telling you that you’ve only got two choices,” the sympathetic female narrator says. “But the truth is, there’s three.”

I am a child whose existence was only made possible by adoption. I’ve written before about my mother’s stunningly providential origin story. Her birth mother, having decided that the father of her child was a father she did not want that child ever to meet, made the brave choice to place the baby into someone else’s loving arms. She did this even though she wasn’t especially conservative in her politics, and never would be.

I should have loved this Super Bowl ad. Or at least the idea of it, on paper. Alas, I hated it. To my surprise, various pro-lifers hyped it, including Lila Rose. It must be said that Lila has done more for unborn babies and their mothers than I ever will, so it pains me to disagree with her. But the spot is so terrible, so casually ugly in its depiction of the pro-lifers who have so earnestly loved these women for decades, that I’m forced to. And once again, I am moved to despair that for young women in crisis pregnancies, adoption remains the most poorly marketed option.

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I’m jetting off on a bit of an impulsive trip to New York for the week, so to help tide you all over, my mom has graciously agreed to lend her very particular set of skills to a free assessment of Tom Holland’s recent conversation with Peter Williams and Justin Brierley about Jesus, the gospels, and the intersection of history and Christianity. For some of you, Mom needs no introduction. Others might have recently started looking into her work thanks to a generous shout-out from Ross Douthat on the Bishop Barron show. Here’s a little laundry list of her accomplishments:

Dr. Lydia McGrew is a widely published analytic philosopher and author. She received her PhD in English from Vanderbilt University in 1995. She has published extensively in the theory of knowledge, specializing in formal epistemology and in its application to the evaluation of testimony and to the philosophy of religion. (See here for her curriculum vitae.) She defends the reliability of the Gospels and Acts in four books, Hidden in Plain View: Undesigned Coincidences in the Gospels and Acts, The Mirror or the Mask: Liberating the Gospels From Literary Devices, The Eye of the Beholder: The Gospel of John as Historical Reportage, and Testimonies to the Truth: Why You Can Trust the Gospels. Testimonies to the Truth has recently become available in audiobook form in addition to other formats (read by yours truly).

Mom’s comments are primarily focused on the more scholarly elements of the dialogue. Tom and Peter also ventured into some interesting waters around “cultural Christianity,” on which I might add a few thoughts later. For now, please enjoy Mom’s take!

I have been asked to write some comments on “Is there evidence for Jesus?” an erudite debate between historian Tom Holland and biblical scholar Peter Williams, deftly moderated by Justin Brierley.

It will come as no surprise that this article comes down rather strongly on Williams’s side, despite some differences of emphasis. But before you dismiss this as merely a matter of “Christian agrees with Christian,” a few points to counter that impression: First, I am (infamously) no stranger to disagreeing, even disagreeing sharply, with fellow Christians. Second, the areas in this dialogue on which I disagree with Holland and agree with Williams, particularly faith vs. reason and the literal truthfulness of the Gospel authors, are places where Christians often disagree strongly with other Christians. There are, for example, Christians who hold as firmly as Holland does to an opposition between faith and evidence, and in this respect differ from both Williams and me, while there are skeptics who would agree with Williams and me, over against Holland, that religious faith ought to be supported by evidence in the rough and tumble of historical inquiry. Of course, any such skeptics think it isn’t supported thus (or they wouldn’t be skeptics), while Williams and I think it is, which leads me to a third note: While I gratefully acknowledge and cite Williams’s information at multiple points in two of my own books, there are goodly swathes of territory which he and I have evaluated independently of one another, from which we have both concluded that the claims of Christianity are strongly supported in an evidential, historical manner.

My notes on the Holland-Williams discussion fall broadly under two thematic headings. One of these concerns a pair of concepts that Holland tends to conflate or, at least, to bounce back and forth between, while I think they should be kept sharply distinct. The other concerns a pair of concepts that he opposes to one another, while I think they should be seen as complementary.

Repeatedly in the discussion, Holland will state something uncontroversial: That people sometimes make mistakes in writing history, implying thereby that the Gospel authors might have made some mistakes.

These kind of SNAFUs are absolutely common in ancient literature. I mean, so I’m preparing a series for The Rest is History at the moment on Hannibal, and we have a very detailed account of the wars that Hannibal fought against the Romans from this guy Polybius who was writing maybe 40, 50 years afterwards, so that’s maybe the distance between Jesus and the gospel writers, and he gets quite a lot of things right, but he clearly gets things wrong as well, and that’s what you’d expect. I mean journalists have been known to get things wrong, and they’re reporting things on the day. So I think it’s not unusual for historians in antiquity.

And later:

There are lots of passages in ancient history where you have similar bits where people have got things wrong—you know, people fighting who would have died six years previously or something like that—and it’s obvious that, you know, writing in antiquity, you don’t have the Internet. You often maybe don’t have access to the texts that you need. It’s very easy to get things wrong.

From a purely human, historical point of view, the implication that the Gospel authors may have made a mistake is not improbable. Indeed, when one has enough propositions in a particular set of texts, it becomes increasingly probable that one or another of those propositions is false (an issue known in philosophy as the paradox of the preface). Even if a scholar is religiously committed to the view that the Gospels and Acts are completely without error, he may not find that view supported by the concrete data. If he merely thinks they are “inerrant” in the more boring sense in which any writing by any person might happen to be inerrant—namely, that he hasn’t yet found anything in them that he thinks is an error—this, too, is subject to historical refutation. To put my own cards on the table, I am not an inerrantist in either sense. I think the Gospels have a few relatively minor, non-deliberate errors.

But interspersed with these statements, which one takes to refer to non-deliberate errors, are Holland’s implications of something both more interesting and more open to question—namely, that the Gospel authors considered it quite legitimate to make up historical statements and to narrate them seamlessly as if they were true, while knowing that they were false. And that they sometimes did just that.

In fact, one of the above references to what sounds like mere error was Holland’s answer to a question from Justin Brierley about deliberate change. Holland’s mention of SNAFUs and Polybius is his response to this implicit question from Brierley:

But then as you say Tom, you’ve got some concerns about bits where you feel there’s been obviously some sort of fabrication or exaggeration.

Brierley is correct. Holland’s concern isn’t just about accidental errors. For example,

There are passages that are being determined by considerations other than a concern with documentary accuracy. But I don’t think documentary accuracy is really what the Gospels are about. I mean they kind of do reflect, I think there is a kind of documentary quality to them, but that’s not what the Gospel writers are setting out to do. They’re not setting out you know like Boswell writing the life of Johnson to make it…the accuracy is not the prime consideration in terms of that, the concern is to demonstrate that Jesus is what the Gospel writers say he is.

And,

I don’t think that getting the granular documentary detail 100% accurate is the prime concern of either Matthew or Luke. Their prime concern is to demonstrate that Jesus is what Christians say he is, and occasionally their attempt to convey that leads them into thinking in terms of poetry, I think. And I think that there is a poetry about the angel appearing to the shepherds, or the wise men coming, or even the massacre of the innocents in all its horror that is, for the writers of the Gospels, profounder.

And even,

I think also it’s clear that in all the Gospels and in Paul’s letters as well, there is a sense that Jesus’ life and death and resurrection are fulfillments of Scripture. I mean, I think it’s evident that Paul, who we know didn’t believe—thought Jesus was a scoundrel and a scam—then has this incredible, literally blinding moment of revelation. And I think he clearly goes away, and he reads through the Scriptures and he says, “Ah, this…” you know, it’s like in an Agatha Christie novel, you suddenly get the solution, and everything that you’ve seen in one way, suddenly you’re seeing it in a different way. I think there is an element in which that is clearly true of the Gospel writers as well. And there is a sense that, you know, it’s great if Jesus is a descendant of David, it’s great if it’s a fulfillment of a prophecy in Micah, and all kinds of clues that people who believe that Jesus is the risen Messiah. They are obviously going through Scripture trying to find evidence for this. And in their lives, their proclamations of good news, their Gospels, understandably, they are working that in, and they don’t see this as fraudulent. They see this as being conclusive proof of what they believe. But it maybe gives rise to traditions that may not be entirely historically accurate.

So not only did the Gospel authors consider it legitimate to change and invent facts on purpose to fit with their religious commitments, they also didn’t “see that as fraudulent.”

Now all of this goes far beyond the claim that people make mistakes. We all know many fallible people who never deliberately fabricate while making their fabrications appear seamlessly historical. At least I know many such people, and I think that I’m such a person myself. And, crucially, we trust such people’s accounts accordingly when they tell us about things that lie within their own knowledge.

Moreover, even when a person does fabricate and thinks he’s justified in doing so, one normally assumes that he is capable of “seeing it as” a deception. It may well be morally allowable to lie to searching Nazis about the location of fugitives’ hiding place, but to think so is not to be confused about the fact that one is conveying false propositional content. Indeed, doing so is exactly the point—one is trying to deceive and confuse the evil searchers. A person who deliberately misleads others while telling himself that he isn’t doing so is a person with a rather serious problem.

To say that the Gospel authors thought they were licensed to change facts and even “didn’t see it as fraudulent” is an unfortunately popular claim but one that does not square with the evidence. There was no “ancient view of truth” that made ancient people in general incapable of knowing the difference between literal truth and literal falsehood when it concerned a matter of importance to themselves. As classicist Colin Hemer says,

Ancient biography, no less than ancient historiography, may need to serve as a historical source. The question here is whether the work is a good source. And it needs to be measured by the stricter rather than the laxer measure. Rigorous concepts of history existed in Luke’s world.[1]

Nor is a loose or confused view of empirical facts typical of early Christians, a point I have documented extensively in my book The Mirror or the Mask. To give just a few examples, Acts portrays Peter and John as telling the religious leaders that they will not stop preaching that Jesus has risen from the dead, because, “We cannot stop speaking about what we have seen and heard” (Acts 4:20). I Peter 1:16 explicitly states, “We did not follow cleverly devised tales when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of His majesty.” Luke is extremely explicit:

It seemed fitting to me as well, having investigated everything carefully from the beginning, to write it out for you in an orderly sequence, most excellent Theophilus; so that you may know the exact truth about the things you have been taught. (Luke 1:3-4)

You may say that these statements are false, that the early Christians, including both the apostles and the authors of the Gospels, really are both following and purveying made-up tales, but it is simply historically inaccurate to say that, in religious matters, they don’t understand the difference between literal truth and falsehood or that they don’t present themselves as telling the literal truth. If they are not doing so, they are committing a rather serious type of fraud, attempting to induce others to think that their stories are true and to order their lives accordingly, while knowingly including made-up tales as history.

This point is especially relevant in precisely the area where Holland suggests a weak Christian view of literal truth—the fulfillment of prophecy. As a matter of mere logic, if a particular event did not really occur in history, then the prophecy in question was not really fulfilled by that event. I have elsewhere referred to this principle by the phrase “Fake points don’t make points.” The evangelists understood this quite well. The Fourth Evangelist is quite explicit. He insists that he knows that Jesus fulfilled an Old Testament verse (“not a bone of him shall be broken”) because he personally saw that Jesus’ legs were not broken at the crucifixion, because Jesus was already dead, and that instead a soldier pierced his side with a spear, bringing forth blood and water (John 19:31-37). The gory nitty-grittiness of the statement should not be airbrushed out. It is not good historical practice to claim that, yes, he says that but he doesn’t really mean it because those ancient Christians were grappling with a big religious epiphany and hence didn’t think that making things up and presenting them as true counted as lying.

The famous question of the census mentioned in Luke 2 was a focal point of the debate, including the question of whether Luke sometimes fabricated events. Williams suggests that Luke has enough confirmed accuracy elsewhere to merit historical trust on this particular point and that we should let the matter be thrashed out in the arena of historical research rather than assuming that Luke invented the census at the time of Jesus’ birth. Holland suggests that Luke invented things in his birth narrative, apparently including placing a census at that time, to compare and contrast Jesus with Caesar Augustus. And Holland dismisses any solution to the alleged contradiction with Josephus which places an emphasis upon the Greek word “prōtē” in Luke’s account, which is sometimes translated “first.” The NASB renders it, “This was the first census taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria” (Luke 2:2). Holland goes so far as to suggest that attempts at harmonizing Luke with Josephus here are the equivalent of Jesus mythicism on the other side, clearly springing from ideologically motivated thinking.[2]

Without being tempted into a long digression on the census, I will simply say that harmonization is actually an entirely legitimate “secular” enterprise. If a historian many centuries hence reads in a 21^st-century source that Donald Trump was elected President of the United States in 2016, and if another source declares that he was elected President in 2024, it would not be religious ad hocery for the historian to suggest that it might have been possible to be elected President more than once in non-continuous terms. In The Mirror or the Mask I several times suggest harmonizations of Plutarch’s Lives with one another or with other ancient historians, though of course I have no religious commitment to Plutarch. Harmonization is just another historical tool to be used as reasonably as one can while trying to account for all the available data.

My own preferred solution to the census issue is that Luke is not referring to the A.D. 6 census (which he is well aware of in its proper time frame, as shown in Acts 5:37) but to another census which Josephus does not directly record and that he has made a minor memory slip between “Quirinius” and “Quinctilius.” P. Quinctilius Varus was indeed governor of Syria during the reign of Herod the Great, which is when Luke places the birth of Jesus (Luke 1:5).[3] This idea is suggested by classicist John Thorley.[4] The point here is that this is not a religious suggestion but a historical one, an attempt to decide the truth of the matter about the history of the region in question, using multiple historical sources. Williams alludes repeatedly and rightly in the conversation to the fact that the “desperate Christians need Luke to be right about the census” narrative simply does not fit.

But in the context of the birth narratives, Holland himself makes an interesting slip. After accurately stating that the massacre of the innocents occurs in Matthew, Holland later seems to imply that it occurs in Luke and is part of a pattern of thematic historical invention on Luke’s part:

I think that particularly in Luke’s Gospel there is a sense of the cult of Augustus and that there is a degree to which the life of Jesus is a counterpoint to the life of Augustus, and that’s what Augustus is… you know Augustus is there at the beginning, it has to be Augustus, that’s why it’s a global tax, because it’s the global sweep of Caesar, and the birth of Jesus in poverty and obscurity is a deliberate counterpoint to the birth narratives of Augustus, which have an eerie parallel to those of Jesus. So there is a kind of proposed massacre of the innocents, for instance in Suetonius’s life of Augustus. So I think there are kind of, all kinds of complicated things going on there.[5]

But Luke does not record any massacre of innocents; only Matthew does. Nor is this merely a slip of the tongue. Luke’s infancy narrative is the only one that mentions Augustus; Matthew’s does not. Since Holland’s theory is that Luke in particular is inventing things to contrast Jesus and Augustus, the slaughter of the innocents cannot be evidence of any such intention.

The point is instructive. The more common invention theory says that Matthew invented the slaughter of the innocents to make the baby Jesus look like the infant Moses. It would be easy enough, if desired, for Holland to swap the Augustus theory for a Moses theory. But the very ease of such horse-switching in mid-stream should raise the concern that this whole approach is without objective control. Perhaps critical scholars are discovering the extent of their own ingenuity rather than the intent of the author.

That the Gospel authors are presenting their stories as historically true is closely bound up with the issue of faith and evidence. For the historically oriented nature of Christianity from the very beginning is part and parcel of its evidential and even empirical nature.

On this point Williams and Holland parted company quite clearly, and Williams had many good points to make: “There is this constant theme in all the early Christian writings and since of Christians using evidence….” “Faith in the last couple hundred years can be a belief without any evidence, and I don’t think that’s what’s going on in the Bible….Faith is a rational response to our maker. It’s future trust, but based on things that have already been shown to us.”

Holland, in contrast, says surprisingly, “In the opinion of the Gospel writers and of the early Christians, you will feel it in your heart…Paul…is preaching the need to feel it in your heart.” He even gives a strong “no” answer to Brierley’s tentatively worded question about whether or not history can be used to suggest that something supernatural has occurred like this: “It’s ruled out by the evidence of the Gospels themselves, which clearly integrate within their narratives the possibility of disbelief and miscomprehension.”

What is most striking about such claims is the fact that they are not at all what any of the texts say. Where does Paul say that “you will feel it in your heart” and that this is true faith, as opposed to a response to evidence? Nowhere. On the contrary, although the direct evidential value of the list of appearances of the risen Jesus in I Corinthians 15 has been (in my opinion) overblown by popular apologists, one should at least recognize that Paul is suggesting that the resurrection of Jesus is evidentially supported, not based on emotional faith in lieu of evidence. His brief list of the people who saw Jesus after his resurrection doesn’t constitute the whole of that support; it’s just too short. But it is a far cry from saying that the way that the Corinthians can know that Jesus rose again is because they will “feel it in their hearts.” It appears that Holland’s assertion that Paul is saying you just have to feel it in your heart arises merely from Paul’s use of the word “faith” in various places, but this of course need not at all mean that Paul’s concept of faith is something anti-evidential; indeed it seems clear that it is not and that such an anti-evidential interpretation is being imposed anachronistically on the text.

Nor is there a single record in the book of Acts of a single apostle teaching anything of the sort. On the contrary, again, the apostles refer again and again to themselves as eyewitnesses of the resurrected Jesus (Acts 1:8, 22; 2:22; 3:15; 4:20; 5:32), and Peter even emphasizes in a sermon to a Gentile group of converts that Jesus ate and drank with himself and others (10:41). In Acts 1 the disciples are particularly concerned to choose a replacement for Judas Iscariot who is able to be an eyewitness to Jesus’ resurrection, a point that Richard Bauckham has noted, comparing it with John 15:27.[6] Paul as portrayed in Acts shows the same evidential emphasis (Acts 13:30-31), which is consonant with his teaching in the epistles. Of course you can say that Luke just made all of this up and that Peter, the other apostles, and Paul never said these things. But it is simply a non-starter to say that Paul and the apostles as portrayed in our best and earliest records of their message are preaching a fideistic religion in which you just have to “feel in your heart” that Jesus rose from the dead.

A similar point applies to the Gospel accounts. Though Jesus does tell Doubting Thomas, “Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed” (John 20:29), a verse to which Holland alludes, it is ignoring the entire context of the story to cast this as an advocacy of “feeling it in your heart.” On the contrary, both the Mary Magdalene story and the Doubting Thomas story in John have a distinctively empirical narrative arc: Both characters are not over-optimistic but rather at first withhold assent, because they have (at first) a limited data set. Mary Magdalene is weeping and has just turned away from looking into a dark tomb; Thomas was not with the male disciples who first saw Jesus. Both then receive further, decisive, sensory evidence that Jesus is indeed present. Mary recognizes Jesus’ voice when he says her name, and then is able to touch him.

In a rather striking reversal of the actual vector of the passage, Holland takes Mary’s temporary confusion to make an anti-evidential point, namely, that the possibility of explaining away Jesus’ resurrection as a case of mistaken identity is somehow supported by the story itself. But Mary Magdalene temporarily mistakes Jesus for the gardener. No one in any of the stories mistakes a gardener for Jesus! The two things are epistemically quite different, and the difference cannot be dismissed by a wave of the hand. To mistake someone else for Jesus and to proclaim the resurrection on that basis would be a result of epistemic carelessness, presumably arising from religious enthusiasm and a desire to believe what one hopes is true. But to think momentarily that Jesus at the tomb is someone else arises quite naturally from the commonsense knowledge that Jesus has died and that dead men (at least usually) do not rise. It is to be hesitant, not over-eager, to affirm the resurrection.

Thomas eventually sees Jesus and his scars up close for himself—evidence that Jesus explicitly offers to him. In neither story is it the case that, as Holland says of the Doubting Thomas story, “Doubt is as possible as faith.” Very much to the contrary. The other disciples have already received strong evidence that Jesus is risen. They recognize Jesus immediately in John 20:20. Luke 24:37-42 probably refers to this same appearance experience, and in Luke’s story, Jesus spontaneously lays to rest the disciples’ worry that he might be a ghost by offering to let them verify that he is solid and by eating in their presence. In John, Thomas at first hyper-skeptically discounts the evidence of the other disciples’ joint testimony. But even Thomas hesitates only until Jesus shows up a week later and gives him decisive evidence. That Jesus says that there will be others who will have to take their word for what they have seen (a natural interpretation of his reference to those who believe without seeing) is a straightforward matter of historical contingency, but in John 15:27 Jesus tells the disciples that they will later be witnesses to him because of their direct association with him—a distinctly evidential point amply illustrated in complementary passages in Acts, as already noted.

To say, as Holland does, that there is a theme of doubt in the Gospel resurrection stories and therefore that the Gospels are saying that doubt is just as possible as belief is to read them far too cursorily. One may, of course, doubt that the accounts are true. But again and again, the message of the accounts on their own narrative terms is that doubts are resolved by evidence, not that the evidence is insufficient and therefore that one must feel it in one’s heart. The only resurrection account that does not say in so many words that some initial confusion or doubt is resolved by further evidence is Matthew 28:17, but that account is notably brief in any event, and earlier in that same chapter Matthew portrays the female disciples as recognizing Jesus immediately and grasping his feet (vs. 9).

In fact, there is a tension between Holland’s implication that the Gospel authors told stories about the resurrection that are untrue, due to their sense of epiphany surrounding the life of Jesus, and his claim that they are teaching that faith is opposed to reason. If the latter is their message, why should their “Aha!” moments about Jesus result in resurrection stories that are so strongly sensory and bodily? And why would they encourage catechumens such as Theophilus to believe such stories? Would doing so not be (in addition to deception) a betrayal of the fideistic essence of Christianity, as Holland sees it?

On the matter of doubt, Williams is perhaps a bit too politely concessive, saying, “Tom’s quite right, there’s a lot of doubt going on in the resurrection narratives,” but he then turns this around with regard to Matthew 28:17 by pointing out that Matthew’s admission of this doubt is anticlimactic. Williams is hinting that it satisfies what is known as the criterion of embarrassment.[7]

There is no getting around the fact that I think Williams had the better of this dialogue. In fact, there are even places where I think he did especially well (the claims of the canonical Gospels and the reasons why they were accepted by the early Christians) that I don’t have time to discuss. And there are even more things that Williams said that made me want to stand up and cheer than those I have already mentioned: E.g., “Why shouldn’t God choose to show Himself? Well, the argument of Christians is that He did.” Nor, as far as I can tell, did Williams make any outright errors such as those I have noted here from Holland (e.g., basing an argument crucially on the occurrence of an episode in the wrong Gospel). I can’t pretend that Williams did less well than I thought he did do.

In the interests of fairness, however, I should say that sometimes when Williams had the microphone, he emphasized arguments that I don’t think are as compelling as he does. Williams’s approach to arguments from prophecy appears to be more typological than mine; hence, he emphasizes the fact that in the Old Testament man falls by eating from a tree while in the New Testament Jesus saves by hanging on a tree. He also thinks that Jesus’ Eucharistic words, “Take, eat,” are intended as a reversal of the (bad) eating in the story in Genesis 3. While these sorts of parallels have a rightful and beautiful place in Christian liturgy and reflection, I would say that such conjectures about authorial or divine intentions are not evidential in themselves but rather arise as possibilities only at the end of a separate, more crudely evidential, argument.

Even when it comes to prophecy, and despite skeptical claims that the narratives were embellished to give an appearance of fulfilled prophecy, I think that a detail like the guards parceling out Jesus’ clothes and dicing for his woven garment in John 19:23-24 is much more evidential than a typological parallel such as those listed above. This is all the more true since we know independently that a quaternion was indeed a normal guard grouping (John casually mentions their making four piles of Jesus’ clothes) and also that executioners were permitted to take a victim’s garments. I also do not see the parable of the Prodigal Son and its alleged Old Testament parallels as particularly evidential, an argument made in Williams’s The Surprising Genius of Jesus which he refers to briefly.

I have an epistemological preference for other evidences of reliability that Williams discusses in his book Can We Trust the Gospels?, including name disambiguation and name statistics, linguistically accurate Aramaic words, accurate cultural references to practices such as tithing herbs, and more. My own work on Gospel reliability has emphasized not only these but also internal evidences such as unexplained allusions and undesigned coincidences.

But admittedly it is difficult to induce an interlocutor to see these arguments in their full force if he is committed to the view that the authors were willing to fabricate in the service of a fuzzy religious creed to which they themselves were fideistically committed. Once we recognize that the documents of early Christianity themselves do not leave open the option of a tertium quid between careful reportage and perfidious fakery, the external and internal indications of historicity in the Gospels and Acts can take their rightful place in an evidential case that Jesus not only existed but was something much more than merely an extraordinary man.

[1] Colin J. Hemer, The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History, WUNT 49 (Tübingen: J.C. B. Mohr, 1989), pp. 93-94.

[2] An oddity here is Holland’s simultaneous suggestion that Luke is “working from” Josephus on the census and also contradicts Josephus by approximately a decade. This seems backwards. If Luke were dependent on Josephus for the census and is referring to the same census, he would know that his account would appear to contradict Josephus’s and could avoid the problem. Contradiction is rightly considered evidence against dependence. And there are many less cumbersome ways in which, if Luke is not constrained by truth, he could place Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem without inventing/moving a census.

[3] Not the tetrarch Herod Antipas, contra a comment Holland makes, alleging another error on the part of Luke on the grounds that Joseph, being a resident of Galilee, would have been a subject of Antipas and therefore not subject to Rome. Luke explicitly places Jesus’ birth, like that of John the Baptist six months earlier, under Herod the Great (Luke 1:5, 36). Perhaps what Holland should have said was that Herod the Great was a client king under Rome and hence that Augustus would not have ordered a census of Herod the Great’s subjects in either Galilee or Judea—an argument often made by those skeptical of the Lukan narrative. I have addressed the client king claim elsewhere. <https://lydiaswebpage.blogspot.com/2020/12/some-more-notes-on-census-in-luke.html>

[4] John Thorley, “The Nativity Census: What Does Luke Actually Say?” Greece and Rome 26:1, 1979, pp. 81-84. See especially endnote 5 of that article. See also Thorley’s endnote 4 on the client king objection.

[5] Holland is referring here to a story passed on by Suetonius in his Life of Augustus 94.3. In response to an alleged prophecy, the Senate supposedly passed a decree that no male child born in that year should be allowed to live, but some senators prevented the decree from being properly registered, so it was not enforced.

[6] Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 2017), p. 117.

[7] As pointed out by John Wenham (Easter Enigma, Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1992, p. 114), even though Matthew mentions only the eleven as present on this occasion, he does not exclude the presence of others, and the phrase “they worshiped him, but some doubted” may indicate that the worshipers and the (initial) doubters are two different groups of people, the latter being those who had not previously seen Jesus after his resurrection. The outdoor location of this particular appearance is also consonant with the presence of a larger group than just the eleven. I also stress again that harmonization is an attempt to account for all evidence available and, if done judiciously, need not be a desperate, much less a religious, activity.

Christians can get a little too excited about celebrities. I say this in love. It comes from a goodhearted place, because we really do earnestly desire that all men should be saved. But if the man (or woman) happens to be a Professionally Cool Person, we might as well admit that we secretly do think that would be a little bit extra cool, because we’re only human. Unfortunately, this goodhearted enthusiasm can lead us to grasp at straws, and occasionally to get sucker punched. (Kanye West. Need I say more?)

Don’t get me wrong: If Nicki Minaj wants to use her platform to speak out for persecuted Christians in Nigeria, I approve. I’m…not exactly sure what else she’s tweeting about these days, but it sounds sort of cool in an ominous way. That post appears to be some kind of Christian imprecation against this year’s Grammy Awards. Then again, her Twitter bio still advertises her own latest record, featuring lyrics so pornographic you don’t even want me to give vague summaries here (really, you don’t). People have noted this while questioning the wisdom of having Erika Kirk interview her at the last TPUSA shindig. They have a point.

Speaking of the Grammys, for all Nicki’s imprecations that ceremony actually did yield a surprising “God moment” from the country artist known as Jelly Roll, who gave an admittedly heartfelt shout-out to Jesus while accepting his award for the album Beautifully Broken. There seems to have been a lot going on in this gentleman’s life, and his lately acquired public Christian passion seems sincere. I like a nice gritty redemption story as much as anyone, although disappointment can tend to lurk around the corner with such things (again, see Kanye West). I’m not entirely sure what all is going on with Sir Jelly either, but I wish him only the best.

Still, I confess I tend to err on the side of curmudgeonliness around such things, and the splashier the alleged “conversion” arc, the more curmudgeonly I get. This may be unworthy of me, but I don’t think it’s always unfounded. Perhaps the splashiest recent example is Russell Brand, a British entertainer who’s built a large transatlantic media following. Brand has shared lengthy theological reflections, been photographed baptizing people in his underwear, and led prayer at right-wing political rallies. I’m not alone in smelling something a bit off in all this, particularly in light of the fact that the man has accumulated multiple sexual offense charges (including minors). For similar reasons, my antennae were similarly twitchy when Shia LaBeouf announced his conversion to Catholicism. It’s not that I doubt the reach of God’s saving arm, or the power of the gospel to convict sinners. It’s just that when it comes to people who perform in public for a living, I seek evidence that this sort of thing is more than performance art. As my friend Ben Sixsmith once quipped about Brand, “I have the mean suspicion that if Mr. Brand embraced humility, it would inspire him to launch on online course on ‘How to Be More Humble’.” Ben is not a Christian himself, but he’s gathered enough to be confident that “it’s not like becoming a fan of Man United.” Shouldn’t it involve a little less, er, branding, a little more private reflection and Bible reading?

Which brings me to Tim Allen.

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When I wrote something about the shooting of Renee Good, I didn’t expect to revisit the tangled web of discourse around ICE and ICE-related violence within the month. Immigration law and its enforcement has never been one of my “beats,” and I’m generally put off by discourse cycles around these kinds of violent deaths. But I unexpectedly found myself in the thick of one of those discourses last week as pundits left and right dissected the footage of Alex Pretti’s death to, well, death.

For those who are not very online or simply don’t feel like watching 50 angles of a man getting shot to death, here in plain jargon-free English are the bare facts of the case as we currently have them: At around 9 AM on January 24th, Pretti was observing and recording the movements of several Border Patrol agents (not ICE, as has been misreported in some places), along with a few women, all apparently part of the same loose community network of leftist agitators. Two of the women were in the street blowing whistles and shouting while agents tried to detain a man in a donut shop, who allegedly had a criminal record of domestic abuse. The agents were clearly annoyed by this, and a video shows one of them backing Pretti out of the street at one point.

The crucial video shows Pretti back in the street directing a car through the drama, after which an agent gets abruptly physical with the two whistle-blowing women and starts shoving them towards the curb. Pretti catches one woman falling back and maneuvers her away from the agent. Then he steps between the agent and the other woman just as she’s shoved into a snowbank. The agent whips out pepper spray, and Pretti turns away with a shielding hand up to focus his attention on helping the woman out of the snowbank. The agent then drags Pretti into the street, where he’s rapidly joined by several colleagues. One of them nervously tries to direct more pepper spray at the women, but after his canister jams, he pulls his gun upon hearing someone shout “Gun!” That cry came from an agent who had just discovered Pretti was armed, then evidently failed to signal that he had successfully slipped the gun out of Pretti’s waistband. Multiple shots were fired—whether one was a misfire from Pretti’s own gun is still unclear—and Pretti lay dead on the pavement. This whole interaction is over in less than 40 seconds.

My article on Renee Good looked back at the tragic shooting of Ashli Babbitt on January 6th, considering how both women became devoted to misguided causes that brought them into these confrontations with law enforcement. While I still questioned the judgment of the officers in both shoots, I could see the argument that they were justified. But when I saw the footage of Pretti’s death, I couldn’t make that case.

I was prepared for this take to be somewhat unpopular in my social media circles, but I wasn’t quite prepared for just how unpopular. In light of this, I want to propose that the right needs to find better ways to talk about these cases. And by that, I don’t just mean finding better ways to talk about clashes between ICE and anti-ICE, but talking about clashes between civilians and law enforcement in general.

I remain sympathetic to the intractable problems of immigration law enforcement, and I write in the full awareness that anti-ICE agitators are not my political friends. I think there are legitimate unaddressed concerns about how ICE and Border Patrol are conducting their operations, but I’m well aware that the other side is for its part quite capable of thuggery and violence, and I’m happy to blame officials like Tim Walz and Jacob Frey for their part in stoking it. Already, it looks like activists are trying to run Portland 2.0 in Minneapolis, setting up roadblocks and aggressively intimidating people like this journalist here:

The leftist thug in that video is, in a bit of grim aesthetic irony, masked up and wearing camo.

This flyer is an example of the incitement to violence that’s circulating among some of these protestors:

For a deeper dive on all this, this City Journal article is pretty thorough.

However, a problem still remains for the right here. Because there is a range of behaviors that, while they may in their way be irritating, fall short of actually thuggish, violent agitation. They may even fall within constitutionally protected bounds. Every American citizen gets the same set of constitutional rights—yes, even the haters and leftists and commies. But to hear the way some on the right have talked about Alex Pretti, you would think one can forfeit one’s constitutional rights by being a commie.

Extreme recklessness and dishonesty about this case was modeled at the highest levels of the administration in statements by Greg Bovino, Kristy Noem, and Steve Miller, the latter further amplified in a retweet by J. D. Vance. The DHS’s original “report” gave the impression that Pretti had made a threatening approach with his gun, then “violently resisted” in an “armed struggle” when agents attempted to disarm him, so that one of them, “fearing for his life and the lives and safety of fellow officers,” was forced to fire “defensive shots.” This “report,” as footage from all angles quickly showed, was unmitigated bullshit. Incredibly, even after being shown the footage on live television, Bovino refused to retract his initial assertion that Pretti had the intent to “massacre” agents, and he praised the agents for taking Pretti down “before he was able to [shoot anyone].” He then proceeded to decry the radical leftist ideology that may have influenced Pretti. And there’s the implication: He was a radical leftist, so there you go. That’s all.

I’ve talked about how this cycle plays itself out every time, this cycle of opinions and counter-opinions where the salient feature is not “Was this killing lawful?” but “Do I personally have warm feelings toward the person who wound up dead?” Was Ashli Babbitt a salt-of-the-earth, small-business-owning military veteran, or a troubled QAnon conspiracist with anger management issues? Was George Floyd a meth-addled bum with a violent criminal past, or a gentle giant who mentored young men and worked with church ministries? The false dichotomy presumes that a narrative—either narrative—must trump reality. And right on cue, everyone did this dance all over again with Pretti, one side literally giving him a halo (or making him look more handsome with AI, because that’s the timeline we’re in now) and going on about his work as a veterans’ nurse while the other side pointed to his track record of radical leftist agitation. Maybe the footage of his shooting is kind of iffy, but hey, look over here at this footage of him on a different day kicking out a taillight and goading the agents with obscenities! So there you have it. He was “no angel.” He “wasn’t innocent,” by which we don’t mean we have any more clarity about the facts of his death, but we now have permission to care even less about it.

Am I saying it was maximally wise for Alex Pretti to drive to the scene of a Border Patrol operation and pull out his phone while carrying a concealed weapon? No. Am I denying that it would have been better for everyone, including Alex, had he been detained for the previous week’s aggressive behavior, which for whatever combination of reasons didn’t happen? Also no. And am I saying his female co-agitators bear no blame in all this for refusing to get out of the street and stop blowing insanely shrill whistles? Also no. What I am saying is that it is very clear the agents in this picture did not have an orderly plan for what to do with these people who, while making themselves annoying, weren’t posing a violent threat. So they began to act on impulse and adrenaline instead, and they screwed up, and within seconds, someone was dead. And it seems all but impossible for anyone on the right who’s not named Rand Paul to admit this out loud.

Even after a suggestion of turnover and backpedaling at the level of the administration, various influencers like Benny Johnson, Matt Walsh, and Chris Rufo kept the train rolling. Then there was this fellow who I don’t follow, though somehow or other he seems to have amassed 200k followers, boiling it down very succinctly:

More dispiriting for me personally, though, were the various people who kept popping up to argue with me in my comments on Twitter and Facebook. In real time, I could see little lies and half-lies becoming memes, even in the mouths of conservative acquaintances: He “assaulted” or “put his hands on” the agent. He was “grappling,” “fighting,” “resisting,” or even “violently resisting.” (To my disappointment, even Ben Shapiro recycled the “resisting arrest” cliché.) One person kept insistently trying to convince me that the mere act of taking a step towards the agent constituted “violent assault” before any physical contact. Sometimes the goalposts would shift from “He pushed an officer” to “Well, whether or not he pushed an officer, he was still impeding law enforcement,” or “He was still resisting arrest.” Someone else said I really wasn’t qualified to assess the footage, because I’m a woman who’s never been involved in a physical struggle with a grown man. This same person kept repeating that “the state gets a monopoly on violence.”

Several people breathlessly recommended I watch this take, in which someone pontificates for 8 excruciating minutes on the importance of discussing “responsibilities” at the same time we discuss “rights.” Okay. I agree. That’s a good discussion to have. So at what point, I’d like to know, do we have a conversation about the responsibilities of law enforcement? At what point do we say that as the entity capable of acting with overwhelming force, LEOs have an extra responsibility not to “escalate” or increase the risk of violence needlessly? At what point are we allowed to notice when the word “resisting” is being defined down to within an inch of its life, or when the word “reasonably” is being stretched to the breaking point in the phrase, “The officer reasonably feared for his life”? (Although as a side note, I actually don’t place the lion’s share of blame in Pretti’s case with the agent who pulled the trigger, but with the agent who first kicked off the scrum and with the agent who screamed “GUN!” without further alerting anyone that the gun was in his own hands. Footage of the aftermath shows one of them scrabbling around and asking, “Where’s the f*cking gun?”)

I submit that right-wing Americans have never sat down to have these conversations properly over the years, partly because racial politics have created so much static around them, thus obscuring what I think is the actual root problem: not a white supremacy problem, but a “cop supremacy” problem. The problem of an unspoken class divide in which cops belong to one caste, and ordinary citizens belong to another. In which yes, yes, mistakes happen, but we really ought to remember how hard cops have it out there, and the most important thing is that the cop isn’t the one leaving the scene in a body bag.

Whenever I try to do a reductio and ask, “Where is the line? What if officers go out of their way to tackle and try to arrest someone for no good reason whatsoever, perhaps because he ‘fits a description,’ or maybe even just for the heck of it?” the stock answer is “Just comply and fight it in the courts.” Well, number one, “not complying” is defined so sweepingly that the slightest twitch can get binned in that category (particularly dangerous for anyone who’s not fully with it cognitively or socially, or for anyone who’s involuntarily reacting to something like mace). And number two, “fighting it in the courts” is an infamously slow and expensive mechanism for getting justice in even one case, let alone for effecting a change of practice across the board. If there is some level on which the violation of civil rights has become an engrained habit for law enforcement, then something needs to change at that level. And the more blank checks conservatives write them with their rhetoric, the less likely that is.

We need look no further from home than Dearborn, Michigan to see an example of how a whole police department can act in lockstep with a tyrannical (in this case de facto Muslim) government. In that case, several Christian missionaries were arrested for sharing their faith in the street with Muslims. One officer told a girl to stop filming on her phone, then asserted that she had broken the law by refusing. The missionaries eventually settled and were awarded damages, but their case remains instructive. You could easily come up with similar scenarios in a context where thuggish law enforcement is going after pro-life protesters. I’m giving examples like this not to say that every leftist agitator is pure as the driven snow or has just as legitimate a complaint as a missionary or a pro-life protester, but to warn against language that allows very bad precedent to be set for what LEOs can do with impunity.

Returning to the present context of federal law enforcement, I want to draw out a detail in another case where a woman was apprehended and ordered out of her SUV at gunpoint for “impeding a federal operation,” which could have meant anything from merely observing agents to trying to ram them with her car. The official DHS account is that she engaged in the latter, which would make the agents’ reaction understandable. Then again, the official DHS account said Alex Pretti had shown up to assassinate agents and engaged in an “armed struggle” with them, so people might now be understandably reluctant to take the official DHS account of anything with any seriousness. In any case, when the woman’s husband arrived and started to ask why the agents were constitutionally allowed to search her car, it’s been claimed that one of them brusquely replied “I’m not getting into the legality of everything.” This suggests a rather alarming state of affairs in which federal officers neither know, nor particularly care, nor are particularly trained to care what the “legality” of a given situation might be, beyond the training to keep repeating that they have a right to arrest anyone they decide is “impeding a federal operation” (language taken from 18 U.S.C 111, which a few have explicitly cited).

Here is a concrete example of how that MO can affect even people who are literally doing nothing, courtesy of a friend of mine who’s a drone pilot. In aviation, there’s something called TFRs, or temporary flight restrictions, published weeks in advance in a public database so that pilots know which areas to avoid—Washington DC, for example, or certain military bases, or an air show or a wildfire in progress. Well, apparently ICE has now created their own dedicated moving TFRs, which are not published anywhere, and which are fluid by definition. So, picture Mr. Smith the drone pilot, legally flying his drone, when suddenly ICE drives within 3000 feet of him. And just like that, Mr. Smith is violating a TFR he couldn’t have detected or proactively avoided. Before he knows it, half a dozen shouting agents are approaching him with guns drawn, demanding he land the drone with no chance to explain himself or exercise his obligation to complete this landing sans outsider interference. My friend points out that this would pose a risk to manned aviators and individuals on the ground.

As I stated at the outset here, I am aware that multiple people on multiple levels have a share of the blame for this present state of affairs, including agitators themselves. But this present state of affairs will continue to go on unresolved as long as both sides insist that the blame is one-sided, and federal law enforcement officers are trained that they don’t need to “get into the legality” of their actions beyond a dubiously sweeping application of 18 U.S.C 111. And I fear that on the political right, the groundwork for allowing this to keep sliding has been laid over years of habitually deferring to the whims of law enforcement.

I realize that old habits die hard. But maybe now is a good time to practice some new ones.

Another year, another slate of Oscar-nominated movies I’ve mostly ignored, because by and large the Academy tends not to nominate the kind of movies I actually like. I hear this time it’s going to come down to the wire between the virulently reverse racist movie with 16 nominations and [checks notes] the other virulently reverse racist movie with 13 nominations. Oh, the suspense!

The good news is, there were some good movies in 2025, and as we settle in for a winter storm, I’m helpfully putting them all in one place for you. You’re welcome. The full list is reserved for paid readers, but you can read about my personal Best Picture for free. I also wrote two pieces last year on the documentaries We Will Dance Again (about the October 7 massacre at the Nova Music Festival) and I Like Me (about John Candy). You can browse more of my film writing here. As always, thanks for visiting this corner of the Internet.

Best Picture: Homebound

Where to watch: Netflix

“Bollywood” is the popular name for Hindi cinema, a portmanteau of “Bombay” and “Hollywood.” As a genre, it’s not taken very seriously. Its chief export is kitschy song-and-dance musicals. But writer-director Neeraj Ghaywan has been quietly working to make India a contender in serious realist cinema. Homebound is not just one of the best foreign films I’ve seen in recent years, but one of the best films, period.

The script is loosely based on a true story, but I recommend going into it as cold as possible, because too much googling will spoil the ending. It’s a coming-of-age story about two best friends, both of whom are struggling to provide for their families in the face of harsh prejudice. Chandan is a Dalit, born on the lowest rung of India’s caste ladder. Shoaib is a Muslim, a distinctly unwelcome minority. Both boys dream of earning police badges and the social status that comes with them. But when dreams wither and die, they must find another way to live.

This movie doesn’t over-explain itself for a Western audience, which is refreshing but might leave viewers a bit confused at times. One running tension is Chandan’s inner struggle over how to identify himself on forms—as a member of a “scheduled” caste, which includes Dalits, or a member of a “regular” caste. Officially, the scheduled castes are eligible for affirmative action under the Indian constitution. The father of that constitution, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, hovers in the background of several scenes as families display his portrait in a place of honor. Chandan keeps checking the “regular” box, ashamed to own his identity. Yet he can’t fool the police administrator who looks right through him with a curl of the lip, casually sneering at those “quota rats.”

None other than Martin Scorsese served as the project’s executive producer and gave Ghaywan script notes, including the wise instruction to “stay with the boys” and resist the temptation to pursue too many side threads. (Watch a touching conversation between them here.) There are a few strong supporting performances, but the boys are indeed the film’s heart and soul—impulsive, imperfect, determined to cheat the hands fate has dealt them. Sometimes a door is closed in their face, sometimes they walk out, head held high. With each humbling test, we slowly begin to see the men they might become, men who might make their exhausted fathers proud.

Among many things I love about this movie is its depiction of male friendship. It’s a very physically affectionate friendship—the boys freely embrace, kiss on the head, and cry together—but there are no sexual undertones. This is increasingly rare in Western films. Maybe it’s easier to depict in a culture where the men are more naturally demonstrative. I’m dancing around spoilers, but there’s an especially pivotal moment that recalls the bond between Frodo and Sam in LOTR (except that unlike Frodo and Sam, the boys are of the same social status).

I wish I’d seen the theatrical cut of the film, which apparently had some scenes that got censored for Netflix at the whim of the Indian government. But the authorities come off looking bad enough to make the point. The final cut was shortlisted for Best International Feature at the Oscars, but it didn’t ultimately earn a nomination, which is a shame. It should have been in the conversation, for acting as well as writing. By a good margin, it’s my best picture of the year.

And now, we turn to various other movies I also liked, organized by some custom categories I just made up.

Best Quirky Melancomedy: The Ballad of Wallis Island

Where to watch: Free on Amazon Prime

Quirky little indie movies tend to be hit or miss for me. They’re either really my thing or really not my thing. The Ballad of Wallis Island is an odd duck, but somehow it’s my thing. It’s hard to summarize, but it’s like a mashup of This is Spinal Tap and Planes, Trains & Automobiles. Like the former, it has some fun at the expense of musicians who are past their prime and a little too high on their own supply. Like the latter, it’s an odd couple comedy piece for a gruff straight man (Tom Basden as Herb McGwyer, our washed-up folk star) and a childlike funny man who absolutely, positively will not shut up (Tim Key as Charles, Herb’s innocently adoring audience of one). Basden and Key are long-time comedy partners, and they adapted the script together from an old short film, first made when they were really too young to play the characters. With age has come the wisdom to expand the idea into something that works as more than a comedy. The music isn’t half bad either.

Herb arrives on Wallis Island (not the actual island in the Pacific, but a fictitious island off the British coast) to play what he understands will be a small gig. But he quickly learns that “small” literally means just Charles, a lonely widower mysteriously flush with cash. Charles is happy to talk about where the cash came from though (along with everything else). He won the lottery not just once but twice, you see. The first time, he traveled the world with his beloved wife. The second time, they decided to put the money in a suitcase. But it’s been five years since she died, and now all he wants is to get her favorite folk duo back together one last time. Because before McGwyer, there was McGwyer and Mortimer.

There are a few directions this premise could have gone. While I’m not completely satisfied with the execution, I mostly approve of its chosen path. In the end, it correctly recognizes that the story really isn’t about McGwyer and Mortimer. It’s about how to let go of a lost past and love the people life has put in our present path, with or without our consent. It’s about generously sharing a gift with whoever appreciates it, whether or not it’s the audience you wanted. In the process, it’s kind to both Herb and Charles—an affectionate tribute to the talented, self-absorbed, messy people who write our favorite songs and to the fans who love them.

Best Dad Movie: Last Breath

I’m a real sucker for Dad Movies, and this is a good one. Think Apollo 13, but smaller-scale. Based on a remarkable true story about the rescue of a diver deep under the North Sea, it’s one of those movies that depends on the execution, because everyone knows there wouldn’t have been a movie if they didn’t save the guy. But there are all kinds of little touches that just make it work. Woody Harrelson is great as the team’s grizzled leader, trying to joke through his sadness at being ushered into an early retirement. The two young divers under the sea with him are established with admirable economy as distinct, likable characters. It’s tricky to write good setup banter before the Big Disaster in a film like this, but it doesn’t feel forced here. Instead of checking your watch, you actually wouldn’t mind spending a little more time watching these guys bond. And in the Apollo 13 spirit, smaller players also get little moments to shine. In short, this film understands that it has exactly one job, and it does that job perfectly. Your dad will love it.

Honorable mention: The Lost Bus is another based-on-true-story, about a heroic bus driver who drove a bus full of kids out of a California wildfire. Matthew McConaughey does strong work as ever, nicely supported by America Ferreira as the kids’ teacher. The movie is bogged down by a sluggish first act, which tries to cake on way too much expository dialogue about just how miserable our hero’s life is and exactly how many vectors of Family Conflict we need to be aware of. But once things, um, heat up (sorry), then it really starts to cook (sorry, sorry).

Other movies that might work in this category are Warfare and Not Without Hope, but only if your dad doesn’t mind being depressed.

Best Mom Movie: Song Sung Blue

Where to watch: On Amazon VOD, but currently still at that ridiculous new film pricing where they charge you an arm and a leg just to rent it.

This is another based-on-a-true-story that you really, really shouldn’t google if you’re planning to watch it. Seriously, if you care, avoid as much prior knowledge about this movie and its characters as you can, except what I’m about to give you of course. I like the trailer though, which for once actually does what a trailer is supposed to do and only teases the picture without speed-running/spoiling the whole thing.

When I first saw the poster, I thought this was a Neil Diamond biopic, but no, it is in fact the story of a Neil Diamond impersonator—or excuse me, Neil Diamond interpreter. The difference matters. Hugh Jackman plays Mike Sardina, half of a musical power couple who rose to 90s fame as a tribute act who was just that extra bit better than an average tribute act. Kate Hudson is Claire, who first catches Mike’s eye with a Patsy Cline impression on what happens to be his 20th birthday—sober birthday, that is. They hit it off like lightning and thunder, which becomes the name of their double act.

Both Mike and Claire bring an assortment of baggage, regrets, and children from previous marriages into the relationship. But they’re so earnestly committed to each other, so happy when their proudly uncool music makes proudly uncool people happy, you immediately root for them. They make me like Neil Diamond, and I’ve never even especially liked Neil Diamond. Mike is anxious to make sure you know Diamond had other and better songs besides “Sweet Caroline,” which he’s also willing to play, but only if people insist. (I admit I started laughing when I recognized a tune from Dave Barry’s Book of Bad Songs, the one with the line “And no one heard at all, not even the chair.”)

With a title like “Song Sung Blue,” you can guess there are going to be some sad moments in this story, but provided you do what I say and don’t google it, the twists will take you by surprise. Jackman and Hudson don’t strike a single false note together. What I like about their performances is that Mike and Claire were such unfussy, down-to-earth working-class people, and they’re portrayed here with such love and dignity. I’ve always thought Jackman was one of the most unpretentious actors in Hollywood, and one of the most versatile—he does his own singing here, as does Hudson, who’s earned a well-deserved Oscar nod.

Praise is also due to the young actors playing their children, who tolerate their “scattered” parents with admirable grace and affection. (An unexpected pro-life subplot emerges when one of them becomes pregnant out of wedlock.) However, not all of the couple’s children are featured here, which I gather really didn’t make one of them happy. Michael’s son from a previous marriage, Michael Jr., is generally upset about the various fictionalizing changes, and while I guess I can sympathize to a point, it seems like he doesn’t understand how movies work. The movie Shadowlands cut one of C. S. Lewis’s stepsons, partly because Douglas Gresham was keeping his brother’s mental illness private, partly because it would have completely disrupted the film’s arc as a film. Similarly, when Sardina’s son alludes to the violent tensions between himself and his stepbrother growing up, the editing choices are obvious to anyone who knows anything about screenwriting. And the film already explores darker territory as Mike and Claire navigate the “for worse” part of their wedding vows.

I’ve rambled longer than I’d planned to about this movie, but I just love it so much, except for one scene where Mike and Claire are getting a little, uh, excited, and we see her take off far too many clothes before the camera looks away. Moments like this in otherwise not risqué films especially frustrate me. I guess that’s my inner mom coming out. But with that caveat, your mom will love it (once the rental price comes down).

Best Teen Movie: Brave the Dark

Where to watch: VOD everywhere or streaming with an Angel subscription

I wouldn’t have predicted that I’d put an Angel Studios movie on my best of the year list, but this one snuck up on me. As a former teacher, I really have a soft spot for “teacher + troubled yooth” stories, especially when they honor a real-life teacher like this one does. Jared Harris is very compelling as Stan Deen, a small-town drama teacher who poured his whole career into mentoring high school students. This obituary captures the scope of his legacy. Brave the Dark tells the story of an orphaned teenager whose life was so profoundly changed by Stan, he took the name “Deen” for himself.

Angel is known for faith-based content, but it’s been acquiring more films that are more generically family-oriented than faith-based per se. Although Deen was a Christian, and I would have liked seeing more of that come through in this screenplay, I wouldn’t call it a Christian movie. It’s just a very good redemptive story. Characters like Nathan, the boy, are very tricky to write, because they need to be both flawed and likable enough for the audience to root for them. He’s capable of deeply hurting Stan, but you can still see what Stan sees in him.

On a small technical note, the movie’s hair and costuming isn’t quite consistent with the 80s setting. Pictures of the real Nate Deen show him with a mullet, and most of his male peers should probably be sporting the same. But maybe the filmmakers thought this would hurt the film’s appeal to today’s yooth. In any case, a good film to watch with mature teens who can handle darker content, including some non-graphic but intense flashbacks to a murder-suicide in young Nate’s deep past.

Honorable mention: The Netflix movie Steve, starring Cillian Murphy, is playing with similar themes, though it doesn’t succeed as well. It’s based on a novella called Shy, which chronicles a single day in the life of a troubled teen in a reformatory school. The film, adapted by the author, tells the story of that same day from the perspective of Steve, his science teacher. It’s one of those days from Hell where every possible thing that can go wrong will go wrong. Although Murphy does fine work as a good man crushed by the weight of circumstance, it’s hard to lock into the film as a whole because the pace is so frenetically artsy (or artsily frenetic). I haven’t read the novella, but I gather that’s the writer’s style, and I suppose it’s not quite my tea. The whole thing seems inexorably headed towards the worst possible ending for both Steve and Shy, until, mercifully, the worst thing doesn’t actually happen. Yet many loose ends remain, which you could say is honest and realistic, but it’s rough going for the viewer. Still, worth mention as a worthy tribute to those unsung heroes who care enough to do the thankless work no one else will.

Best Incredibly Depressing Movie I’m Never Watching Again: Souleymane’s Story

Where to watch: On Amazon VOD

This is a haunting little film about a few days in the life of a Guinean migrant racing against the clock to procure what he needs for an asylum application in Paris. The significance of the title, “Souleymane’s Story,” gradually becomes clear as we realize he’s being coached to tell the interviewer a story that is not, in fact, his own. Nor is it the story of other men like him who have received similar coaching. The more urgently it’s impressed on him that the details of this untrue story will matter, the more lost he becomes.

As we watch him hustle around the city doing DoorDash-style deliveries on his bike, we’re so immersed in his world we can almost smell it. All sorts of characters weave in and out of his path. There’s Emmanuel, who’s renting his digital ID to Souleymane so he can work…for a heavy price. There’s the blind old man in a 7th-floor apartment whose son places long-distance orders for him, so vulnerable that Souleymane spends a few moments he doesn’t have to ask if there’s anything the man needs. There’s the eager fellow migrant who keeps annoyingly popping up full of optimism and hope that Souleymane can help him out. There are the gendarmes who lightly harass Souleymane after he delivers food to them, wryly shaking their heads when he tells them how he’s forced to split his earnings 50/50 with the man renting him his work account. They could arrest him, but it’s late, and they’re hungry.

Then there’s the kind man who encourages him at a homeless shelter with the words “You are not a liar.” In one sense, this is true: Lying doesn’t come naturally to Souleymane.

You could say this is a movie with its thumb on the political scales when it comes to immigration, but it has a light enough touch that I didn’t find it too overbearing. It’s certainly all too realistic about how immigrants can prey on each other as they clamber to the top of the pecking order in a foreign land. (The most overtly racist dialogue in the film is uttered by Souleymane’s fellow Africans.) To me, it’s a film that simply recognizes the tragedy of existence. For some reason, my mind kept going back to this monologue by Jordan Peterson about oppression and the suffering individual. Of course oppression is real, he says. Everyone could tell a story: “Well, I’m a black woman who has two children and one of them isn’t very healthy. And then well, I’m a Hispanic woman and I have a genius son who doesn’t have any money, so that he can’t go to university, and you know, I had a hell of a time getting across the border, it was really hard on me to get my citizenship, my husband is an alcoholic brute… It’s like, well yeah, that sucks too, and so... Well, so let’s fix all your oppressive...oppression, and we’ll take every single thing into account. And then we’ll fix yours too. We’ll take every single thing into account. It’s like ‘No, you won’t’, because you can’t! You can’t!”

There’s a small moment in that homeless shelter when a local man gets confused about which bed is his and tries to take Souleymane’s. There’s no dramatic scene as he’s kindly guided over to his actual bed. But it’s a poignant reminder: The people of France have their own tragedies. Is there room for all the rest of the world’s tragedies? This movie has no easy answers. It can only tell Souleymane’s story.

Honorable mention: Ethan Hawke is a dark horse contender for Best Actor in Blue Moon, a stagey piece about the decline of forgotten tunesmith Lorenz Hart. Hart most famously collaborated with Richard Rodgers on the movie’s titular song, but little of his other work has really endured in popular memory. I first heard of him while watching an episode of American Idol where a girl was covering “My Funny Valentine” under Harry Connick, Jr.’s coaching. Connick, Jr. gently but firmly scolded the girl for trying to sing the song on autopilot without carefully considering the pain behind its lyrics. He pointed out that they were clearly written by a man who struggled with self-esteem, with not feeling attractive. Somehow, through the trickery of makeup and clever staging, Hawke brings that man to acutely painful life.

The film is staged as one long night in a bar, the opening night of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! Everyone loves it except Hart, because he recognizes that this is the beginning of his end. So he talks, and drinks, and talks, and talks, to whoever is long-suffering enough to listen, about everything—writing, beauty, love, sex. Even his own sexuality (unrealistically) becomes fair game, as he tries to convince his captive audience that he’s fallen madly in love with a young woman. A number of things in this script aren’t very realistic, but Hawke transcends it, channeling notes of Amadeus and even a little Richard III. Famously short, Hart is a figurative and literal embodiment of St. Augustine’s curvatus in se—curved in self. For all that we pity him, the door to his private hell is locked from the inside.

Best Movie With No Plot That Mostly Works Anyway: Rebuilding

Where to watch: Amazon VOD

Josh O’Connor was the year’s breakout star with a string of notable performances, most popularly the earnest young priest at the heart of Knives Out: Wake Up Dead Man. I didn’t like that movie as much as a lot of people did, but O’Connor was very watchable in it, as in everything else. Rebuilding puts a whole solid film around his performance as Dusty, a gentle Colorado cowboy who loses his ranch in a fire. Technically, not much happens in the movie, but some “rebuilding” takes place between Dusty and his little girl, Callie-Rose, whose mom is married to another man. I do have to confess a pet peeve about movies where a sweet single dad wistfully reconnects with his cute kid in a context where everyone has matter-of-factly accepted the mom’s divorce and remarriage. Ant Man bugs me the same way, although at least there the mom could point to the MC’s past in petty thievery. Here, it remains a complete mystery why this marriage failed. The narrative hands it to us and we move on.

Still, there’s a lot to like here, and as Dusty makes his temporary trailer home in a FEMA camp with a few other souls who’ve lost everything, including a woman who lost her husband, the story invites deep reflection on what it means to make a home, or a community. Dusty doesn’t want to think of the trailer as a real home, or the people around him as real neighbors. But then, as naturally as breathing, they become neighbors, everyone offering something someone else needs—a hot meal, a helping hand with the plumbing, a younger pair of eyes to help navigate online red tape. By the end, they don’t want to lose what they’ve built. (Whether they can keep it is I suppose a real plot point, which I won’t spoil.)

I was also affected by a scene where community members are taking turns sharing meaningful things they lost, and Dusty says it actually perturbs him most to think about the things he’s lost that he’ll never remember. Maybe moments like this hit a bit close to home with my recent reflections on decluttering. In another scene, he goes through a couple boxes of things he managed to pack before evacuating. “It’s so strange,” he says to himself, “the things you save.” He pulls out a tiny notebook full of little messages people left when they visited the ranch, which had been passed down to him through generations. His daughter giggles as they read what sounds like a whimsical lover’s poem from one of his great-grandmother’s suitors (or was it great-great-grandmother?) Writer-director Max Walker-Silverman was inspired to write this piece by the fire loss of his grandmother’s house, and that inspiration feels tangible in little scenes like this.

There’s also a beautiful unsung performance here by Amy Madigan as Dusty’s mother-in-law, Bess, who lives with his ex-wife’s family. One night, as they’re filling out a family tree school project with Callie-Rose, Bess suddenly shares that she had a miscarried little brother she never told anyone about. Her voice quavers as she explains haltingly, “I just…didn’t want him to be forgotten.”

This is the kind of film where no one is forgotten, and I guess that’s why I like it.

Honorable mention: Train Dreams is the only film nominated for Best Picture that I’ve actually seen and liked. Like Rebuilding, it’s also a story about a lonely man left behind by modernity who loses everything he’s built in a fire. Except the hero of Train Dreams, a logger who’s not home with his wife and child when the fire comes, is left with even less to go on with. If Wendell Berry and Terrence Malick tried to make a movie together, it might look something like this. In the end, I didn’t think there was enough story meat on the bones to make it a full meal, but it’s a haunting piece, full of beautiful images that will stay with me.

Did you see anything memorable this year? Leave a comment and let me know if I didn’t mention your favorite. I’ve noticed my list is pretty heavy on sad films, even the lighter ones, so I might have missed some happier titles!

My father hoards, and my mother purges. I take after my father. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a strong reluctance to let go of physical objects. A friend with a similar struggle told me he now asks people not to give him physical things at all, because he knows himself, and he knows once he becomes attached to a thing, it’s impossible for him to let go of it. I’m not quite there, but I know what he means.

I was newly forced to confront this part of my personality over last Christmas break while cleaning my childhood bedroom. Just as I was embarking on this project, a storm sent rainwater seeping into a storage room in the basement of my parents’ home (not the room pictured above, which is much more photogenic). Our basement is finished, and so over the years it’s become a repository for much of the family’s accumulated stuff. This storage room in particular has been an entropy sink. It houses our furnace, but it’s large enough to hold shelves full of books, along with all manner of boxes piled around the floor. What’s in these boxes? Easier to answer what’s not in them.

The rain-flood was, thankfully, not the disaster it could have been. A few of the boxes were rendered unusable, but nearly all our stuff was unharmed. Still, it catalyzed a reckoning.

Most of the burden fell on my dad, who spent the next week patiently and painfully sifting through some of the largest boxes. I didn’t know the totality of what was in them and knew better than to ask. Some of the paraphernalia was related to chess, a cherished family hobby—old clocks, boards vinyl and wooden, piece sets. Some of the stuff went back to that time when Dad was really getting into bookbinding. He’d practiced on old public-domain works of apologetics, carefully cleaning up the texts, then printing out and binding them into handy little booklets. They were adorable, once he actually finished them. But plans for more were arrested and abandoned at the stage of printing out the covers. One box was full of these. He still has the binding jig. There’s just not enough time. There never is.

My mom announced her implacable intention to dispose of a box full of old sheet music, some of which had absorbed moisture. My inner hoarder couldn’t resist seeing what could be salvaged first. And salvage a few things I did, including a couple of things even Mom had to admit were worth salvaging—a jazz piano piece signed to me as a gift from the composer, really too difficult if I was honest, but of course I’d kept it; the handwritten original of a psalm setting Mom composed in her schooldays, which she’d assumed was stored somewhere safer.

I didn’t really want to say goodbye to some other things in the box, like a couple books full of old gospel ladies’ trio arrangements. They brought back memories of singing with my mom and aunt. Probably I would have fished them out too had I known at the time that we were dealing with merely rainwater and not something worse. But I took a few pictures and consoled myself they could be found cheaply on eBay if I decided I absolutely couldn’t live without them.

Meanwhile, Mom unceremoniously marched several of the untouched boxes over to my room. This was my share of the burden: old school materials. My past hoarder self had kept almost every notebook, every folder, from college through graduate school. She’d never really wanted to keep these in the furnace room, but she tolerated them. No more. She was sorry to disrupt my bedroom-cleaning project, but the time had come. And so began my sifting process.

My bachelor’s degree was a double major in math and philosophy, followed by a doctorate in math. To earn a doctorate, you need to pass several qualifying exams (called prelims), even before producing a dissertation. Students were given two tries apiece to pass them. Some of my peers were talented enough to pass one or more on their first try. I used up all my tries for all three. You can imagine the sheer quantity of notebook paper this alone entailed, not even counting the books full of class lecture and scratchwork notes.

Why had I kept these? Initially, I had told myself it was because I might need to teach at least some of the material one day, when I got the university job I assumed I was aiming for. Then again, it’s not as if all my pages full of mathematical chicken scratch were error-free—quite the contrary. And the collection included courses I wasn’t likely to teach even if I did become a professor. No, what the collection really was—and this was the real reason I couldn’t part with it—was a monument to a version of myself that had faded away long ago. And if I were honest with myself, really honest, she wasn’t coming back.

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This January 6 marked five years since the infamous White House riots, in which a motley crew of Trump supporters converged on the Capitol building with vague plans to disrupt congressional proceedings after what they thought was a stolen election. Over the years, what happened that day has somehow been both underplayed and overplayed, depending on which magazine you’re reading. Some Republicans have rewritten the protest as entirely peaceful and toothless, while Democrats somberly commemorate it like another Pearl Harbor, complete with candlelight vigils.

Such demonstrations tend to mark mass shootings or mass losses of life. But the only person to lose her life that day was one of the protestors. Her name was Ashli Babbitt, and she is either a traitor or a martyr, depending on which magazine you’re reading.

By grim chance, her fate now lives side by side in American history with the fate of a woman shot dead by an ICE officer on January 7—a woman who, like Babbitt, was passionate, angry, and searching for her identity in political agitation. And, like Babbitt’s death, Renee Good’s death was caught on video, to be disseminated and dissected a thousand thousand times as public opinion parts like the Red Sea. In both cases, an armed officer makes a split-second choice to pull the trigger—lionized by those who believe he has enforced just law in the face of a threat, vilified by those who believe he has committed murder on behalf of a corrupt entity.

I’ve written before about my deep uneasiness with discourse cycles that take “scissor” events like this and instantly turn people into political avatars, on one side or the other. I feel this way even when my own sympathies tend in a clear direction. I was definitely in Kyle Rittenhouse’s corner after he shot two men in self-defense, but I was also relieved that the right failed to turn him into some kind of pundit. I was likewise glad that Daniel Penny was able to disappear back into obscurity, after being acquitted for the sad result of his have-a-go heroism.

My uneasiness runs even deeper when the person being made into an avatar is dead, and the wheels of political discourse start turning before the body is cold. To add anything to that discourse at all, however “careful” or “nuanced,” almost feels wrong. And when a case is still developing, new evidence can emerge that forces you to eat your words. Then again, evidence doesn’t move the needle as much as you might think. Witness the fact that a new video has just come out from the perspective of the officer who shot Renee Good, showing last words and close-up context around the moment, and both sides are claiming it as fresh support for their contradictory positions.

In comparing the cases of Babbitt and Good, I want to be careful not to imply that they’re identical. Though the differences don’t all cut one way. On the one hand, Babbitt was unarmed, while Good was behind the wheel of a car. On the other hand, Babbitt appeared to be spearheading an angry mob, while Good was alone. You could pick apart the similarities and discrepancies all day. But the cases’ general shape, and the shape of their political fallout, seem similar enough to prompt some sober reflection.

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Dear Scott,

I kind of hate this kind of thing. This open letter to a famous person thing. The chances of the famous person ever reading it are so low that it winds up just being a blog post disguised as a “letter.” Yet here I go, doing that thing I kind of hate, on the very slim chance that you will ever read it.

Yesterday you announced that you plan to convert to Christianity. Some friends have been bugging you about this for a while, and you don’t resent them for it, because this is after all The Most Important Thing Ever. You know that if they weren’t bugging you at this point in time, they wouldn’t be your friends. And time, for you right now, is of the essence.

When you announced your diagnosis last year, I was sad to hear you were considering the option of ending your own life. I understood why you were considering this, of course. But I very much hoped you could be persuaded out of it, and I’m thankful that you were. I admire the calm collectedness with which you are now facing death. Dying gracefully in public is quite a feat. Hats off.

Of course, the downside of dying in public is that when you make an announcement like you made yesterday, you’ll get thousands of replies, from Christians, atheists, and everyone in between. You’ve stated your intention not to respond to any of these suggestions, questions, complaints, etc. What happens next is, after all, between you and Jesus. You also sound irritated with people insisting there’s “one right way to do it.”

Well, fair enough. This little letter will be just one more reply among the many, and I am no more owed a response than any of those numerous others so eagerly crowding your mentions right now. But maybe it could still be helpful to someone, in some way.

Before I do any theology here, maybe I should start with a little epistemology. In the past, you’ve proposed that the true nature of reality is unknowable. Unfortunately, we will never have a leisurely chat in which I learn exactly what you mean by “knowledge.” I assume we would agree that there are at least a few things we can know for certain: “I exist.” “I am being appeared to laptoply.” “A circle is not a square.” But I don’t think knowledge is limited to what we know for certain. This includes knowledge about God.

In your announcement, you describe your conversion like a wager: Nothing lost if you’re wrong, everything gained if you’re right. I am obviously not privy to the conversations you’ve been having with your Christian friends, but I hope they’ve been offering you reasons to think this is better than a spin of the wheel. I’m sure you’ve heard some of those reasons at some point. I can’t say I know God exists in the same way I know 1 + 1 = 2, but I can say a whole lot of things about the nature of reality make a lot more sense if He does. And really, isn’t that how we come to know anything about anything?

So my first word is a word of encouragement: Good news! It looks like all this stuff is actually true! You are not in a Vegas casino spinning the wheel. Here, in the winter of your life, see yourself in a forest, following footprints in the snow.

Now for the part I don’t relish, because I’m afraid I’m going to sound like a lot of the people annoying you right now. You said, “The dominant Christian theory is that I would wake up in heaven if I have a good life.” With respect, if someone told you this, that someone is wrong. It is of course not your fault if this is how Christianity has been presented to you. But it’s not Christianity. Believe it or not, that’s good news too.

I realize this might not make much sense. We feel intuitively that having a good life, doing good stuff, must have something to do with where we go when we die. And there’s something to that intuition. Trying to be good, to do good, is like trying to follow a lit path. Light has a source. So does goodness.

Of course, we’re not always good. But we feel bad about that. So we do our best to assess the damage and pay for it, like good people do. “Sorry I broke your window. What do I owe you?” “Sorry I broke your heart. Where do I send the check?”

And, well. That’s not how it works.

I sing “Jesus paid it all,” but I’ll be honest, I’m not entirely sure how that works either. It still makes more sense than thinking I could write all those checks, though.

You’ve said one of your tests for a good worldview is that it makes you happy. That’s not nothing, I guess. But a lot of things can make us happy, at least for a while. The real question is, does truth make you happy?

You said all the replies were almost talking you out of this. I assume that was tongue in cheek. But maybe it expressed something real. Hopefully you understand that no one means to discourage you. They only want you to know how good the good news actually is.

Before your announcement, you talked a bit about the simulation hypothesis. I admit, I’ve never seen the appeal. Some have tried to put a God spin on it: This whole universe is God’s video game, and we’re all just living in it. I doubt this, because I doubt God is like that. I doubt He’s up there hoping I’ll think the tree or the waterfall are real when they’re just so many pixels on His screen. I think He made the first tree, and the first waterfall, and the first everything, because He thought a universe with trees and waterfalls and everything was better than a universe without them. And then He made the first man and the first woman, because that was better than a universe of trees and waterfalls and everything with no one to enjoy them. And then the man and the woman decided a universe with more humans was better than a universe with only two. And somewhere along the way, two people decided a universe with Scott Adams was better than a universe without him.

We think so too. And we hope to see you again soon.

My New Year’s sale continues. Upgrade to a paid annual subscription for just $30 to unlock exclusive content, along with my entire archive.

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A warm 2026 welcome to all my readers. Here’s to a new year in which we all stick to our resolutions for once. As is tradition, today I’m taking stock of the previous year’s work and putting it in one place for your browsing pleasure. To those who stumbled into my corner of the Internet late in 2025, welcome, and I hope you stick around.

2025 wasn’t my fullest or most exciting year in writing, partly because I’ve been kept busy with “offline” work that took up time I would otherwise have invested into content here or elsewhere. The fruits of that work should become announceable some time this year or the next. However, I was still able to (hopefully) contribute helpful ideas to the discussion around some of the year’s key moments, while developing thoughts in the niches where my writing seems most distinctive and appreciated. As always, this is thanks in no small part to everyone supporting me here, for which I’m perpetually humbled and grateful. In a sea of Substacks, I’ve tried to keep mine reasonably affordable, recognizing that you could be spending your money literally anywhere else and that in terms of sheer content volume, I tend to prioritize quality over quantity. (Although I hope to raise both in the coming year.) I’m proud of the fact that I’ve been able to build a steady following here from the ground up, despite never having gone to journalisming school, landed any fellowships, written any books, or any of those other done things.

On that note, these were my most popular Substack pieces of 2025:

N. T. Wright and The Inner Ring: I find that I do some of my best work when I’m very ticked off, and this piece was no exception. When N. T. Wright’s ideas about abortion surfaced at the popular level last summer (though I realized they’d always been simmering if you knew where to look), it sent a wave of disappointment through academic Protestant world. This piece looked at the social factors underlying a certain kind of Protestant elitism, reflecting on why figures like Wright, Francis Collins and others are so consistently disappointing/compromised. I didn’t expect it to strike such a chord, but people just kept sharing it. One of those pieces I wish I didn’t need to write, but I’m glad to have written it.

Reasonable Faith Strikes Back: On a happier note, biblical scholar Wesley Huff’s appearance on the Joe Rogan show was an immensely encouraging publicity boost for American evangelicals, who are poorly represented or understood in pop culture. Huff was a winsome ambassador who made them look casually cool. In this piece, I focused on some of Huff’s particular strengths as an academic and apologist. On the surface, it might seem as if he’s retreading old ground from the Christian-atheist wars, but on closer inspection, he’s actually breathing new life into an engagement paradigm that’s grown sclerotic and beholden to poor apologetic models.

The Conference of Misfit Souls: I wrote about a little conference experiment in Chicago, designed to help the very online find their frens IRL. It worked as intended and helped me make a new best friend myself. As part of promoting the conference, which featured speakers like Rod Dreher, Jonathan Pageau and John Vervaeke, I did a podcast chatting with Dreher about his new book Living in Wonder. I couldn’t love this book as much as some other people, and I’m less excited about the whole “reenchantment” discourse in general, but I was engaged as ever by Dreher’s writing. Read my full review of the book here.

Je Suis Charlie: The murder of Charlie Kirk cast a long shadow over the year’s last quarter. I confessed to not having paid much attention to Kirk in life, while trying to grapple with the significance of his death.

Will the Last Conservatives Please Stand Up?: Any hopes that Kirk’s murder might spark some great right-wing unification have been dashed as various grifters make their plays. In hindsight, this was inevitable, albeit very depressing. “The right” as it currently exists can’t and won’t be unified, because there is nothing of substance to unify it. I didn’t write about the recent drama at AmericaFest, but it only bore out my analysis here, and I’m afraid it will only get worse. I’m more thankful than ever for principled conservative voices whose public image doesn’t shift based on the political weather (cough, Megyn Kelly).

Here are some of my personal favorite articles of the year. Pieces reserved for paid readers are marked with an asterisk:

AI Art is Stupid*: I’m fascinated and horrified by how rapidly AI is taking over various human endeavors. Whatever benefits it brings, I fear that among those who don’t know how to harness this tech well (which is most people), those benefits are being swamped. In this piece, I discuss the difference between Grok “art” and the real deal. Also for paid readers, I made a similar exploration of AI “music” here. Paid readers were additionally treated to my ranting about digital necromancy and a contemplation of whether AI is just demons (short answer: I don’t think so, but it’s still very bad).

Optimizing Ourselves to Death: Ross Douthat’s Interesting Times was the breakout podcast of the year. This piece was inspired by his interview with a woman who sells couples the ability to optimize their unborn babies, which in turn reminded me that I still needed to cross Gattaca off my to-watch list. The film moved me to reflect on how the designer baby phenomenon dehumanizes not only the imperfect, but the “perfect” as well.

The Case of the Four Gospels: Only One Jesus: Part of a series introducing people to some of my mom’s work on the reliability of the New Testament. This year, I decided to make all of it free. I also have the exciting news that an audiobook of Mom’s latest book is in the works, narrated by yours truly and hopefully available later this year. Our timing is good, with her work getting unexpected citations in both Douthat’s Believe and Charles Murray’s Taking Religion Seriously. (Read my double review of those books here in case you missed it.)

A Woman, Not a Symbol: There were a number of flashpoint moments this year where a regular person was flung into social media virality. Such cycles always make me deeply uncomfortable. This essay reflects on how people’s particular humanity gets flattened when they become political avatars.

Reenchanted Evangelism*: There’s a tendency for bookish religion writers like me to more or less ignore what’s happening in mainstream evangelical world. I think that’s a mistake. This piece dives into the work of a young California street preacher, assessing the intertwined promise and peril of intensely charismatic Christianity.

The Evil Genius of Tom Lehrer*: We lost some giants of the arts last year. I wrote about what made Tom Lehrer great and why his material still has fans in 2025.

A Grand Man*: I reviewed a bittersweet new documentary about John Candy. (All my film writing here at the Stack is gathered in one spot here, for those interested. I’d like to write more about film this year.)

Shepherds at War: I didn’t end up doing as much with this series as I’d intended to, but for the 80th anniversary of World War II’s end, I wanted to do some work highlighting the unsung contributions of our chaplains. I told several stories in this piece, another story for paid readers here, and a particular favorite story for First Things here. All focus on Christian chaplains, but I’m working on something that tells the story of how our Jewish chaplains become advocates for Holocaust survivors.

Outside the Stack, I’ve continued to write regularly for First Things and World, two magazines that have been very good to me. I was back in print at World for a feature on books that have shaped me, loosely organized around a theme. I chose the theme of tragedy and said a few words about Chaim Potok’s The Chosen, Thomas Sowell’s Vision of the Anointed, and Walter Miller’s Canticle for Leibowitz. A fun perk of this commission was that I got a fresh set of headshots thanks to Genesis photography. It worked out that I was able to rendezvous with my photographer at the Chicago conference, and we got some nice shots around the church hosting the event. Here I am looking pensive:

Here’s me judging you:

Here’s me being less judgy and more smiley:

Alright, back to the writing. At World Opinions, among many other short columns I wrote a reflection on the 20th anniversary of Terri Schiavo’s murder. It’s hard to believe it’s been 20 years since Schiavo’s death, an event that played a huge formative role in my political consciousness. I had the honor of meeting her family at a small event in Lansing, Michigan.

I also looked back at the infamous gay activist handbook After the Ball, which happened to have a round anniversary coinciding with the 10th anniversary of gay marriage. Two new books came out at the end of this year taking stock of where the gay rights movement is now and whether “mistakes were made,” as they say. I didn’t have time to digest them properly before the year was out, but I’ll probably write more this month.

Turning to my year at First Things, I made my debut in their print magazine with a double review of Kelsey Osgood’s Godstruck and Lamorna Ash’s Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever, two journalistic explorations of religious conversion. This was an inspired pairing, and I really enjoyed reflecting on what both books have to say about the spiritual zeitgeist, particularly among young people. As for my online pieces, topics ranged from British MP Danny Kruger’s pro-life Christian witness to Glenn Greenwald’s fake gay victimhood to commonalities between Nick Fuentes and Richard Hanania. (My proposal is that Fuentes is relegated to the fringe because he’s a politically incorrect Nazi, while Hanania is courted by mainstream media because he’s a respectable Nazi.) I also did a brief assessment of the phenomenon of public intellectual friendliness to Christianity, and what’s needed for someone in that sphere to make the full leap to a robust Christian faith. It’s not been tried and found wanting, only found difficult and (mostly) untried. The conversion of Wikipedia founder Larry Sanger was one of the year’s most encouraging stories, a rare example of someone who actually “did the reading” and followed the argument where it led him. You can read a longer piece I did on Sanger for paid Stack readers here.

I kept my hand in over at British magazine The Critic with a piece marking the 80th anniversary of Eric Liddell’s death. This drew heavily from Duncan Hamilton’s beautifully written For the Glory, maybe my favorite book I read this year.

Finally, I continued to dip a toe in poetry, with several publications I’m proud of:

Psalm of the Flood: My first poem in New Verse Review, a growing new formalist outlet.

Stargazing: Also published at New Verse Review for a collection in memory of David Lynch. This was inspired by his film The Straight Story—my first piece in terza rima. You can read my full reflections on the film for paid Stack readers here.

Lines On the Death of a Friend: In honor of a dear family friend who was snatched away much too soon. Published by my friend Alex Rettie at Poems for Persons of Interest.

Dream Of the Old City: Also published by Alex Rettie as part of an Easter bouquet.

Trinity: On the atomic bomb, inspired by Richard Feynman’s memoirs—my first foray into blank verse. Alex picked this up as well, but you can read it with my poet’s notes at the link.

That was it for written work outside of Substack. For some reason, I’ve found it increasingly more difficult to place essays outside a couple of reliable outlets than I did in the past, but a goal for 2026 is to try to add at least one new byline. Meanwhile, I also had some unexpected podcast opportunities, most excitingly the chance to sit down with former Australian deputy prime minister John Anderson in London (my first ever visit, hopefully not the last!) This was a happy byproduct of having some time to kill when I flew over for the ARC conference. (I wrote all about my adventures in a few postcards here, here and here.) I’m far more comfortable behind a laptop than in front of a camera, but John’s team was so kind and made the experience lovely and smooth for me. Watch our full conversation, expertly stitched together so that no one could tell how many takes we flubbed in our severely jetlagged state:

Also at ARC, Justin Brierley offered me the opportunity to chat with James Lindsay and Carl Benjamin, two Internet personalities with a large contingent of haters, but our short conversations were equable. It was especially interesting to hear Benjamin sketch his version of the “religious but not spiritual” approach increasingly carved out by older millennials. I offered further reflections on our chat and on this phenomenon for paid readers here.

Finally, Brierley invited me to have a discussion with Dr. Nijay Gupta about Charlie Kirk’s murder here. This conversation took a few unexpected turns, to say the least. I did my best to offer a nuanced take on Kirk’s legacy while highlighting some of the more hopeful signs I saw amid the chaotic fallout from his murder, including many people who were earnestly inspired by his example to take Christianity seriously. That story was lost in all the sordid political back-and-forthing, and some dismissed it as a passing fad, but I suspect there was more to it. It’s a story I’d like to look into and tell at more length this year, if I can find enough people willing to talk to me.

With that, thanks to all of you who’ve invested in my work. I hope I can continue to give you your money’s worth in the months ahead. Onward!