This spring, an American YouTube entrepreneur and his wife, accustomed to turning every other aspect of their life into Content, decided to do the same with their birth journey. After the initial reaction video, the gender reveal, the ultrasound showing the baby developed to a quite visibly babyish stage, they were crushed to learn he probably had Trisomy 21. I will not link to the video they subsequently made where the diagnosis was confirmed. The YouTuber opens the report on his phone while his wife is already crying in fearful anticipation. When he reads it out, she begins wailing. The contrast between her cries and his attempt to keep up a painfully stilted little stream of Content Creator patter for the camera is excruciating. They’d been hoping for a “little ray of sunlight,” he tells us, but this was obviously not that.

This week, he made a long Twitter post explaining to his audience that they had made “the very difficult decision to terminate the pregnancy.” The whole post is just as eerie and depressing as you would imagine, including an obligatory “we appreciate you” to fans who have autism, Down’s syndrome, etc. and might find this announcement disturbing (you think?) He’s glad their parents didn’t kill them in utero, but he and his wife have simply made a different choice. They hope for “a better outcome” in the future. After the backlash, he returned with an indignant followup congratulating himself for the “bravery” to start this “conversation.”

Richard Dawkins once said that when he affirmed the basic commonsensical goodness of targeted abortion for children with disabilities, he was saying nothing controversial. He was simply saying the quiet part out loud for all the parents who share exactly his view but are a little too embarrassed to admit it in public. I thought Dawkins’s view was repulsive, but I also didn’t think he was that wrong about the social reality. In the US, it’s estimated that something like 2/3 of babies who receive a prenatal diagnosis of Down’s Syndrome are aborted. (Meanwhile, in Iceland, only a couple of babies per year will survive the diagnosis to birth.)

The eugenicist pundit Richard Hanania is always lurking around the corner to chime in ghoulishly whenever there’s a new discourse about killing disabled babies. Right on cue he popped up again here to inform everyone that only the super-duper “religious” would say this couple is wrong, but thankfully, most normal people are ignoring them. Richard himself has shared with the class that having children of his own has only made him more pro-choice, and it’s just lucky that he and his wife never got a bad prenatal diagnosis. Phew.

Now, I don’t actually believe Richard is correct about this. I’m positive you could find cases of couples who were not super-duper Christian or religious but simply had a strong human intuition that killing their baby was not a thing they should do. As we’ve also seen in the euthanasia discourse, various disability rights groups even pride themselves on making their case without recourse to religious principles. (Whether they’re borrowing without wanting to admit it is a separate question.)

What is true, however, is that it is very difficult for couples to choose life outside of a collective body willing to make that choice together with them. I don’t just mean economically difficult. This couple, the Ridgways, are multi-millionaires. One of the first videos to pop up if you visit their channel is a tour of their million-dollar lake house. Suffice it to say, theirs was not a decision made out of financial distress. They do not need friends with money. What they need, and apparently lack, are friends willing and able to normalize suffering.

Heartbreakingly, it appears that the people in the Ridgways’ life—friends, medical professionals—told them the precise opposite of what they needed to hear. Instead of “You’re not weird to want this baby. This is a good thing. Let’s celebrate together,” they heard, “This will ruin your life. This will ruin your child’s life. There’s a simple way to make this go away.”

By chance, yesterday the algorithm fed me this clip from a podcast with Sam Harris and Winston Marshall, in which Harris rehashes his usual complaints about society’s perplexing inability to move on from the Abrahamic religions. Marshall puts it to him that the story of Christ’s passion has endured because “it is the ultimate story of suffering, and suffering is the human universal.” But it’s more than a story of a suffering, Harris counters. It’s a story of human sacrifice. And goodness knows everyone moved on from that long ago. Didn’t we?

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Happy Memorial Day. I never do this, but since I’ve gained so many readers since this essay was first published back in 2023, and since it’s always been one of my personal favorites, I’m dusting it off today. It’s free to share, so share away.

My childhood was unusually defined by radio. We didn’t have cable, so the time other kids spent watching television was time I spent listening to kids’ radio programs. My favorite was a particularly long-running, popular show called Adventures in Odyssey, a small-town sitcom in evangelical Christian perspective. It wasn’t high art, but it was clever and earnest and well-presented. Among other wholesome things it gave me, various episodes instilled a healthy respect for American veterans. The writers weren’t interested in complexifying simple values like patriotism, duty, and courage, for which in hindsight I’m grateful. I was a child, and I didn’t need this stuff to be complicated. More nuance would come later, but it was important that my foundation was laid without cynicism.

The show first aired in 1987, when Vietnam was still a fresh wound and World War II was still within living memory for the fictional town’s wise older characters. Several throwback episodes revisited those memories, Old Hollywood style. But the couple episodes handling Vietnam had a different flavor. They didn’t give the listener a “worm’s-eye view” of the Vietnam conflict. The writers knew there would be no good way to do this without making the show too grim for a child. Instead, they explored the memories of the families left behind—the man whose big brother chose not to dodge the draft, the widow whose husband didn’t live to meet his son.

Even these episodes, sad as they were, remained consistently patriotic. The noble big brother, modeled on the writer’s own brother, is contrasted in memory with a scruffy, draft-dodging hippie friend. The widow delivers a stirring Memorial Day speech pushing back on the anti-war sentiment her son has encountered in school. The take-home message is that however messy the conflict, honor and courage still mean something, should still be memorialized.

I still believe in that message. And yet, in revisiting the episode about the war widow this weekend, I couldn’t help feeling sympathy for the character of the teacher who gives his student an anti-Vietnam book. Unaware that the student’s mother is a war widow, he launches into a bit of heavy-handed dialogue about how all the soldiers “went over there and died for nothing,” or worse, became murderers. The town’s father figure, a World War II veteran, later pays a visit to chide the teacher for the damage he’s unknowingly caused. Predictably, it emerges that the teacher lost a brother in the war. One really feels sorry for everyone in the story—both the teacher whose grief is inevitably mixed with anger and the boy now haunted by dreams where his father is accused of being a murderer.

There’s a philosophy of war within which even though the boy’s father was not a murderer, he was still, in some sense, indirectly complicit in murder. By participating in the system, in the “machine,” he still struck a terrible bargain. He became a cog in a wheel. He lost himself. Then he died, for nothing.

The episode rejects this philosophy to place the focus back on the individual soldier, the individual honorable man who lives and dies with his own hands clean. By Memorial Day, the son has lost his appetite for battle reenactments. So, for the first time, his mother stands up and reads her husband’s last letter, where he anticipates what will be written about the war in future years. He can only write from what he has seen and done, and all he’s ever seen and done has been about fighting evil and protecting the innocent. These are the memories he shares. This is the legacy he leaves.

But I still understand that teacher. I understand him, because I hear in his voice the same dull ache that I hear in the voices of my own generation. Like the war writer Phil Klay in this essay passage about visiting the graves of 90s kids at Arlington, he can’t simply grieve. He can’t simply memorialize:

Their mission, we were told, “will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil.” They would conduct “supervise, train and assist” missions. They wouldn’t constitute “boots on the ground.”

So when they die, our government does what former defense secretary Robert Gates calls “semantic backflips” to avoid saying that our troops are in combat. At a recent press conference where journalists repeatedly asked the Pentagon press secretary whether or not we were “in combat,” he had the unenviable job of explaining that, well, they’re “in harm’s way” or “in combat situations,” or “they have found themselves under fire.”

Such evasions grate on me, especially around Memorial Day. This year’s war dead—nine so far—didn’t slip, trip, and find themselves in combat. We sent them there to fight a war on our behalf, whether we like to acknowledge that or not. They went, they fought, and they died.

So my sadness this weekend, the same sadness I felt walking through Arlington, is mixed with something else. I can’t simply reflect on the dead of my war. I can’t simply memorialize.

Last year, I had a high school student who was very earnestly considering a career in the Marines. He talked quietly about the videogames he’d grown up on, the things he looked up to in veterans, the longing to experience the brotherhood of war. A gentle, thoughtful kid. Privately, I hoped he would take a different path. When he decided to go to trade school instead, I breathed a sigh of relief.

There’s a cliché that only two men ever died for you: Jesus Christ and the American soldier. Growing up, I heard and earnestly loved a number of very well-meaning songs built on that premise. Later, I came to feel an unease around them—not because my respect for the dead American soldier had grown any dimmer, but because my understanding of his death had grown sadder. Because he wasn’t Jesus, and because his wasn’t the blood that could take away the sins of the world, or the nation.

Did the soldiers of Vietnam die for nothing? Did the soldiers of my war, and every other sad, murky, messy war we’ve ever tried to fight, die for nothing? How do you answer these things, quantify them? And as you try to answer, how do you look the widow in the eye, and the widow’s son?

To do this, you would have to define “nothing.” And “something.” And in trying to do this, you would find that there is no one way to do this. A man enters a war of dubious origins, with dubious outcomes. He does what he can. He loves his family. He loves his brothers in arms. One day, he gives his life for them. Is that “nothing”? He didn’t have to fight this war. It was not a necessary war. It was not a necessary death. It was a death that, through another career choice, could have been avoided as honorably as it was embraced. But was it “nothing”?

Perhaps not, in his case, because his death had meaning through sacrifice. But what of the soldier who’s robbed of such meaning in death, who never does anything heroic, unless one counts the simple act of risking a meaningless death? What of him?

We remember him. Today, we remember him. That is all we can do.

Greetings, dear readers! Things have been quiet hereabouts, unusually so, for which I humbly ask everyone’s forgiveness. This piece will be a long overdue offering for my paying subscribers. If you’re a recent free subscriber, I hope the free preview piques your curiosity. My posting is typically more frequent, but I’ve been occupied with well and truly moving into my newly purchased home, a whirlwind process very graciously assisted by local friends. I want to write something about becoming/being a homeowner, but for now I’m just wandering around in a daze and pinching myself.

While I’ve been getting settled, I’ve been following an entertaining little scandal in the world of literary publishing. The magazine Granta had a deal that its website would publish the finalists for the prestigious Commonwealth Short Story Prize. After they were announced and published, three out of five of these entries came under suspicion of using AI. Each was submitted from a different region of the world. The Caribbean entry was so bad it went viral. It was “written” by a Jamir Nazir from Trinidad and Tobago, whose previous literary achievements seem to consist mostly of some terrible romantic poetry. Entitled “The Serpent in the Grove,” it’s a mish-mash of “exotic” prose and incoherent metaphors wrapped around half a plot—so, a perfect imitation of what currently passes for literature among the sort of people who judge this sort of thing.

One can’t decide whether to mock Mr. Nazir or thank him for exposing just how unserious the whole “literary” enterprise has become in postmodern times. The story was briefly taken down but appears to have been restored. We’ll see how long it lasts. Read it here for now if you want a good chuckle. And if you really want to risk spewing your morning coffee, read this old Onion gem that’s getting a new lease on life as people are reminded of it, in which advice column questions are answered by an Elderly Black Woman As Depicted By A Sophomore Creative Writing Major.

The plot has thickened as both the Commonwealth prize committee and Granta have made laughably inadequate official statements. Most amusingly, Granta said they had been consulting AI to try to figure out whether the work was AI or not—a long and complex process, apparently.

But among the mockery, I’ve seen a few responses from readers who somehow didn’t pick up the artificial tells and were genuinely disappointed to hear about the scandal. They had connected emotionally with the piece. AI or not, it made them feel something. And once a piece of writing can do that, how much does it matter?

As the AI writing debate has evolved, I’ve heard this question more than once, as well as people asking how much it matters as long as a piece “conveys information effectively.” They don’t see a problem with liberal AI use in a variety of contexts, including non-fiction books or even sermons. Sometimes, this gets framed in strange class warfare terms, as if an amorphous elite “they” are painting AI as evil so that the proletariat can’t seize and advance with this new tech. But with increasingly more examples of “elite” writers shamelessly using it themselves, I’m unconvinced by this framing. The rot is setting in everywhere, Sam Altman’s assurances to the contrary. So now seems like a good moment to ask, “What is writing actually for?”

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The First Law of Content Creation is that you have no way of predicting what pieces of your content will be ignored and what will explode. One day you can sweat and strain like Van Gogh over your little masterpiece and have everyone miss your artistry. The next day you can dash something off in five minutes and come back an hour later to find it going viral, along with the inevitable small dumpster fires in your comments.

That second kind of day was my day yesterday. It all started with a comment on some much smaller-scale threading I’d done about male loneliness and Christian vocation. A whole topic unto itself, sparked by some very sad breaking church news about a conservative Anglican minister who was burdened with being a poster boy for “gay Christian” celibacy and has now confessed a moral failing. The basic gist of my thread was that unhappy celibacy can make a ministry leadership vocation imprudent, and this is one of many reasons why it’s important not to make earnestly restless Christian men feel inferior for not applying their gifts in a “ministry”-specific context. I’ll probably develop those thoughts some more, but I prefer to wait a minute on writing a full Take when heavy news like this is barely a couple days old.

Anyway, one of my most annoying regular followers decided to do some armchair psychologizing and declare that that thread was really all about me justifying my own “desire not to marry.” He then asked me (“serious question”) whether if I were Catholic, I would be a nun. I suppose I should have been mad, but it was just too ludicrously funny. To keep the joke going, another reader consulted Grok and concluded that I do look pretty good in a habit. Sound of Music references ensued. Then again, it was noted that for Maria, being a nun actually was a viable strategy for meeting a man. Let the record show that I too would accept marrying a young Christopher Plummer as the solution to my problem.

Where was I? Oh yes, so, inspired by this fatuous bit of psychologizing, I decided to write a thread solely devoted to Reasons Why Your Single Friends Aren’t Married Yet. “Straight” and “Christian” were unspoken but implied modifiers. I have various thoughts about how best to serve people who aren’t romantically inclined towards the opposite sex, but that wasn’t my focus here. Meanwhile, although some of these reasons are universal, I had a Christian audience in mind and wrote them from within a Christian frame, where premarital sex and marriage outside the faith are off the table. (I would also argue that deliberately childless marriage is off the table, but that’s a little hotter for some people to handle.) I had no great expectations for these musings. I was just irritated, and as I tend to do when I’m irritated, I posted through it.

As I write, this thread has accumulated thousands of likes, hundreds of bookmarks, and the aforementioned very lively replies. I should hasten to stress that comments have been overwhelmingly thoughtful, positive and encouraging, with various fellow singles thanking me for making them feel seen. It was a nice but strange new feeling for me, because I don’t do very much writing around this topic. The last time I touched on it hereabouts is here. Frankly, it’s a little personal, and I’m a little shy about personal essay-ing in general. Plus, I dread coming across as a whiner, which if I’m being brutally honest, some Professionally Single Christians kind of do. By whining I mean, for example, complaining when churches single out mothers on Mother’s Day and give them roses or something. Or guilt-tripping married couples for not “adopting” them like some kind of third wheel. I wish I was making this up. But things in this vein dominate much of the “Christian singleness” landscape, and it’s deeply embarrassing for those of us who are just trying to go about our normal single lives.

At the same time, I also think misconceptions can spring up about exactly what’s keeping us singles single. It can be assumed that this is something we’re all deliberately prolonging because we want a career more than we want a family, or because we simply like the freedom singleness offers. I don’t deny that we do find things to like about that freedom, but I speak for many people when I say it’s ongoingly touched with melancholy. To those who wonder, “Well in that case, why not just get married?” this is my attempt to start explaining why it’s not necessarily that simple. There were originally twelve “reasons,” but for tidiness, I have decided to collapse them into ten.

1. We missed the “school dating” boat.

Maybe we went to a high school where the pickings were slim. Maybe we were homeschooled and spent most of our social time hanging out with elderly folks, families, and little kids. Maybe we were just really awkward and nerdy, had no fashion sense, and never put ourselves out there on the teen dating market.

Then in college and/or graduate school, maybe we went to public universities where, for the Christian committed to not dating outside the faith, once again the pickings were slim. Or maybe we went to single-sex schools. One way or another, we missed this boat too.

2. We missed the “career dating” boat.

“In this economy,” we must all take the work we can get, and for many Christians this will look like taking work that doesn’t put them in ongoing contact with like-minded believing colleagues. They’re not teaching at a Christian university, working for a Christian magazine or think tank, or in other lines of work where they are surrounded by potentially dateable peers. And even if they are blessed to have “Christian ideas work,” it could be remote work that doesn’t provide many tangible mingling opportunities.

3. We missed the “church dating” boat.

Some of us simply didn’t grow up in churches where we had many opportunities to hang out with people of our own age. People raised in “big-box evangelical” subculture with youth groups etc. won’t be able to relate so much to this, but it was my own experience as someone raised in a very tiny splinter denomination where my fellow congregants were almost exclusively elderly. People might also be able to relate if they grew up in more conservative churches where social ties were built more family to family—which, to be clear, I don’t think is a bad thing at all. It just made it more likely that your first dating experience was going to happen somewhere else.

As for trying to date in “church pools” now, it’s a challenge for anyone north of 30 who looks around and sees congregations filled with mostly families, college kids, and older folks. This is particularly true in smaller towns. Once kids grow up, they tend to move away to school, move away to buy property, and if they don’t marry their high school sweethearts, they find love in another city.

4. We are regionally challenged.

But some of us never moved to the big cities, because honestly, we didn’t really want to. We preferred not to move across the country from our parents, if we could help it. We preferred to live in a town where we could own a car and drive it to all our errands and appointments in a timely fashion. We preferred rent that was under $2000 a month.

The tradeoff for all this is that we’ve never experienced what it’s like to “network” in the flesh with a critical mass of like-minded, young, upwardly mobile Christian peers in a city like New York, or Washington, D. C. We’re okay with this tradeoff. But when we occasionally touch down in one of these places to see how the other half lives, we wonder idly what could have been.

5. We don’t love the apps.

Look, it’s not that we’re totally closed. Maybe we’ll try them again, one of these days. But they’re time-consuming, and the nicer ones cost money. And they’re kind of soul-crushing.

6. We’re choosy.

This is the most complicated and delicate one to explain, and the one for which I think singles take the most heat. We’re often warned against having a “Disneyfied” view of romance in which we demand to be “swept off our feet” by our “soulmate.” We’re told that passion is overrated, that finding someone who checks all your boxes or shares your interests is overrated, that we should just be grateful if we meet a kind, decent fellow Christian who doesn’t outright turn us off.

I think this advice is reductive and misguided. And as I think anyone with some dating experience can attest, romantic attraction is a many-splendored, many-layered, and sometimes frankly mysterious thing. People can find an intellectual spark but not be drawn to each other physically. They can find each other physically attractive but realize for whatever complicated reason that their personalities aren’t meshing. They can struggle to find a commonality of tastes, of loves, of things that get them excitedly talking to whoever has the patience to listen. Or maybe they do share a number of tastes in common, but one feels an uncomfortable sense of perpetually having to catch up with the other. Of course, not all of these things will matter to everyone, but we are all wired differently. Those of us who spend our waking hours obsessively playing with ideas know that we need someone who can play with us. For intellectually inclined women, it’s particularly important to find a man who is neither intimidated by us nor full of self-importance (and experience has taught us that sometimes these are really the same thing).

Even a single variable, like physical attraction, has many facets. Maybe a man is drawn to a woman’s body but finds her voice robotic. Maybe a woman finds a man handsome but wishes he moved and spoke more confidently. Someone could say this sort of thing is being too picky, and as a relationship deepens you can see sides of a person that shift your perspective. That is certainly possible. But sometimes these things are simply not in our power to control or change, and it’s better to know ourselves, admit what we need, and admit when something isn’t working than to shame ourselves into painfully trying to make it work. Christians need to find ways of talking maturely but forthrightly about all this instead of insisting that it’s “all about the heart,” thus leaving a vacuum where pickup artists and other cynical influencers can rush in.

Finally, for those of us who take theology seriously, there are additional challenges that can present themselves in certain kinds of cross-denominational dating. As a Protestant, I am disinclined to date a Catholic, because if he’s a good Catholic he will need to require that our children be raised Catholic as well. And then even within conservative Protestantism, important conversations need to happen about whether, say, children will be baptized as infants. One happy couple I know sat down to hash out this question early in their dating process, because they came from traditions with different answers. Because they were mature and thoughtful and falling quickly in love, they reached an agreement, and they’re now having adorable babies and living happily ever after.

Lord, I see what you’ve done for them, etc.

7. We have scars.

Many of us hesitate to throw ourselves into the dating pool as energetically as we could because we have painful memories of serious relationships that didn’t work. Whatever the circumstances, whichever side broke things off, our biggest fear is repeating old mistakes and reopening old wounds. We simply can’t bear the thought of being hurt again, or of causing hurt. We realize we need to get over this and try again, but it’s easier said than done.

8. Our pool is shrinking.

The older we get, the less likely it is that we’ll find viable choices at all, and increasingly our pool will be dominated by men and women who may be godly but have a sexual history (digital or physical), or a marital history. As I’ve written before, I don’t believe the past is unredeemable, nor do I believe that all remarriage after divorce is unbiblical. I’ve seen friends and acquaintances find healing in such marriages after being abandoned. Unions between the never-married and the innocently divorced can be fruitful. It’s just a very different sort of landscape to navigate.

9. Men are waiting for stability.

Even if there is an understanding that the woman will keep up some sort of partial/remote work she enjoys, a traditional Christian man ideally hopes to provide well enough that his wife can devote herself to their children. The economy is not kind to such men. They’re not being consumeristic, they’re not just overly attached to their soy lattes and Netflix subscriptions, they’re trying to reach basically solid financial ground. Unless they either strike it very lucky very early or enter a career path with the promise of a payoff on the other side of debt, this will take time. And the longer it takes for them to find their feet, the more defeated they feel.

10. Women are waiting for men.

Meanwhile, traditional Christian women are not feminists by nature, even if they have careers and higher degrees. They’re still waiting for a man to make the first move. It just feels wrong, on some fundamental level, to ask him out on a date. Now if you’re on the apps, this sort of thing can get evened out a bit more, but even so, the discomfort persists.

Thus, the single non-feminist Christian woman without a spiritual vocation to celibacy finds herself in a paradoxical position: She wants to be led by a man, but in the absence of a man, she must proceed to take control of her own future as productively as possible—launching a career, buying property by herself, eventually caring for aging parents by herself. And as she settles into the rhythms of this life she never foresaw, she admits that in many ways it’s a good life. She grows used to it. She’s content. Content, but never quite complete.

So those are the ten reasons. Now for the “what you can do about it,” where “you” are not single and earnestly wondering how to help your single brethren and sistren.

First, just see us. It sounds basic, but it means a lot to be seen.

Next, while I recognize that some of our aforementioned embarrassing single siblings might have turned you off of trying to matchmake, I can tell you not all singles resent this! However, what I will say is that we do appreciate being known and understood well enough that you have a reasonable sense of what we’re looking for. Be sensitive to the complexities and challenges I sketched in reason #6. And if you make a suggestion and it doesn’t work out, don’t feel too bad or take it too personally.

Finally, take an interest in our work, recognizing that if we never have children, our work is all that we will leave behind. And in the event that nothing ever does work out, that we seem called to carry on in that content not-quite-completeness of life as single people, continue to see us.

The Catholic journalist Julia Yost wrote an interesting piece recently about Catholicism among “the TikTok generation.” She is cautious not to strike a triumphalist tone about a “revival” that doesn’t exist, admitting that Catholicism is still losing a dozen deconverts for every convert it gains. Still, she notes that this Easter saw an uptick in converts who are skewing disproportionately young, and she observes the emergence of a Catholic subculture among urban young professionals. What could explain this?

She proposes that there’s the beginning of an answer in how different manifestations of Christianity pair with different stages in the evolution of online culture. In the Age of the Blog, we saw the rise of the Young, Restless and Reformed, because Reformed Protestantism inherently lent itself to long, verbally dense arguments. And Protestantism in general heavily emphasizes the Word. But in a postliterate Internet where Image trumps Word, Catholicism has the edge:

Protestantism, which began as a revolution against idolatry — the whitewashing of church interiors, the stripping of altars — has image-aversion in its DNA. The visual language of American Protestantism is accordingly limited. White steeples, Puritan clothing, snake handling: not much for an influencer to work with. Catholicism has icons and incense; rosaries, chapel veils and ashes; priestly black, cardinal red and papal white. … An old stereotype has it that Protestantism is for people who read books, and Catholicism is for people who want spectacle. Say hello to Gen Z.

There’s an awful lot going on here. I don’t think Yost is on to nothing, but I suspect she might be overselling the “trending” status of Catholicism. I clicked through to one of the Instagram pages she linked where some account was hyping Catholic clerical “drip.” What I found was a wall of chatbot text. Not a terribly aesthetic pitch, if you ask me.

Meanwhile, I also believe Yost short sells the resources of Protestantism. However, a proper discussion of this will require us to establish what we’re talking about when we talk about Protestantism. For any newcomers who don’t know my own background, I grew up in the Anglo-Catholic Church, which began life as a tiny conservative offshoot of the Episcopalian church. This meant that I was exposed early and often to the aesthetics of Anglicanism—with a Catholic twist, but the Catholic twists always felt optional. The Anglican aesthetic was very much its own well-defined thing. At the same time, I understood evangelicalism fairly well, since that was the tradition my parents came out of and since that was where we built most of our local community (because elderly Episcopalian refugees don’t really “do” community). And theologically, I retained a few lower Protestant distinctives.

The upshot is that I have always felt like I have one foot there, one foot in the magisterial Protestant tradition. I’ve jokingly called myself everything from a bad Anglican to a “high-Church Baptist.” I still think the Baptists have it right on some things, yet I’ve found it difficult to enter fully into the spirit of the service when I visit a Baptist church, because I feel no sense of separation between what’s happening on my side of the sanctuary and what’s happening at the front. With no altar, no sacrament, no sense that something different is going on up there, I feel rather adrift. The “stage” could just as well be the platform for a conference speaker.

Given all this, naturally I feel uniquely qualified to chime in on these interdenominational discourses.

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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.