I DIDN’T YET love Dolly Parton, when I was a child, but I was fascinated by her. I remember poring over the folded paper inlay of my mom’s Trio cassette tape, which we would listen to in the car. I did love paper dolls, so I always lingered over those paper doll images with their fancy cowgirl getups. And I can remember thinking that, of the three of them, none looked as much like a real life doll—like a Barbie—as Dolly Parton.

As a child I didn’t yet understand what that meant, or how such a thing might come to pass. But I had some intuition about it, because I can remember that her particular sort of beauty was unsettling to me. I saw small glimpses, or intimations, of it in the women who lived around me. I saw faces that, functionally, came on and off like masks. And garments that caused enough pain to leave enduring marks behind on bodies, or even change their shape. I was starting to become aware of the beautiful violence many women endured, and even embraced, so that it might be traded for forms of status or other currency. I can’t even recall the first time I heard a woman’s voice say, with dry humor, “beauty hurts.” It’s a mantra that’s embedded so deep in my memory of being alive that it simply feels true.

It wasn’t until I’d made it through adolescence, and become adept at doing beautiful violence to myself, that I started to love Dolly Parton. I loved the story (which I’ve now heard over and over) about how she decided to emulate the town tramp because she found her to be the most beautiful woman around. I appreciated the way that Dolly confounded the virgin/whore binary that had long been so vital to policing women’s bodies. Virtue clearly mattered to her, but I could see that this wasn’t where she found it.

I think what really endeared her to me, however, was learning that she embraced her status as a drag icon. I’m not sure that anything was as paradigm shifting for me, in terms of how I understood my own gender, as her acknowledgement that these performances of hyperfemininity among women are essentially a form of drag. It hurt a little, maybe, to acknowledge the contingent superficiality of things I was once convinced were “me” or “mine”. And I knew that she went through far more pain than I could stomach, for that performance: the cut of blades, bruised misrecognitions in the bathroom mirror. But that pain was never her story; she seemed to float above it. And living downstream of her felt a little liberating, to me. I would never have named, or recognized, the feeling of buoyancy she gave me as theological. But I can see, now, that this is what it was.

It wouldn’t have been, of course, if she hadn’t so consistently used her power for other things. She offered constant reminders (through the things she said and the things she did) that she always understood herself to be bigger than that beautiful violence. Had she used her power to make that beautiful violence louder, or more prominent, or something more like her own personal mystical riches, she would have been reducible: a handmaiden to it. Instead, she simply acknowledged that she took whatever advantages it offered her, but lived for other things.

I was, and am, in awe of her incredible trove of songs. I wanted my daughter to learn to love Dolly, too, and so several years ago we began to compile a playlist of our Top 100 Dolly songs. We went back to her earliest recordings, uncovering gems I’d never heard of like “I’ll Oilwells Love You” and (one of my personal favorites) “These Old Bones”. The combination of creativity and discipline it must have taken to make those thousands of tunes manifest and real enough that others could sing and play them is singular. And while this talent gave her celebrity, she didn’t simply exploit that celebrity for personal gain. She used it to help children learn to read, and fund the COVID-19 vaccine, among other things.

Because I work in the field of theology, I’ve read many hagiographies. And I am so cynical about hagiographies that are merely sentimental. It’s such an injustice, I believe, because the best hagiographies always illuminate how a saint’s more than human power inhabits this world so full of both beauty and violence. Sentimentality never feels quite real, or somehow too free of ugliness. I’ve also never—once in my life—felt inspired to write a hagiography. Until now. But Dolly was someone who made me take a hard, and yet compassionate, look at myself. She helped me see, with more clarity, how stingy I can be with my kindness. She showed me what it could look like to wield gentle powers. And, while she has always reminded me that I can be bigger than that beautiful violence, she has also made me admit that I’m not yet. Not quite.

LAST WEEK, ON A writing retreat, I was immersing myself in a lot of old books: ones I haven’t read for years, and ones I’ve never had the chance to read. One of them, which I haven’t thought about much since I was in graduate school, was Derrida’s Specters of Marx. I won’t get into why I was reading it, but I will tell you that it wasn’t because everyone seems to be re-evaluating French theory right now (again). What I will say is that his claim—that all men and women of the earth are, to some extent, the heirs of Marx—made me think about a recent encounter I had, with the back of someone’s pickup, in Louisville, Kentucky (where I live.)

I was sitting, the other day, at a traffic light near my house drifting off to the sounds of some podcast or playlist when I reconnected with reality and saw that I was stopped behind an absolutely massive pickup, bedecked with an exhaust stack and flying a Confederate flag. It was also covered with a significant number of bumper stickers, including a large one—in red, white, and blue—that very clearly read “Fuck Communism.” I knew, abstractly, that this sticker was meant for “people like me”, despite the fact that I’m not a communist, or even a member of the DSA. In the end, none of that really matters. I’m too far left, and this truck was trying to scare me to slide a bit to the right, through a little Marx-inspired American-style intimidation. It was invoking the specter of Marx for (conservative) political purposes.

There’s been a lot of discussion, recently, about how socialist the American left is (or isn’t) right now. Commentators are filled with analyses and predictions about how far left the DSA is going to convince voters to move, through the primaries, into November, and on into 2028. I know that I spend a lot of time immersed in history, so perhaps it’s predictable for me to say this, but I’ve been a little surprised by how disconnected these conversations are from American history. There seems to be a sense that socialism has been sneaking up on the left from some strange and foreign place, and it may finally be ready to sink its teeth in. But the specter of Marx has been in America for a very long time, and it’s often surprising to notice who keeps it alive. Lately I’ve been thinking about how much (and I say this with the utmost respect), Catholics have played a role in this strange legacy.

I’VE ONLY BEEN thinking about this because of Catholics themselves. I am not a Catholic, but I have seen a couple of Catholic writers recently make note of the fact that, whatever the socialists have, left Catholics seem to have in spades. Christopher Hale recently argued that the Catholic Church is the origin point of the DSA. The DSA was created by someone who was shaped by catholic social teaching, in other words, and might not exist without catholicism. And a bit before the Michigan primary election, Jesuit priest Thomas Reese publicly pondered: “Is Pope Leo a Democratic Socialist?” I’ll spoil the article for you: Reese doesn’t think the pope is a member of the DSA. But he does argue that the DSA and the pope are both guarding a constellation of things that seem to appeal to many Americans on the left right now.

In his commentary, Reese walks through a shortlist of factors that drive the resonance between Pope Leo XIV and the DSA. Both are concerned enough with workers, and the lives of workers, that they support something like a living wage. Both believe that wealth should be more widely distributed, rather than concentrated in the hands of a select few. They both see rampant injustice in our current economic system, in other words. Both are also in support of universal healthcare. Both believe that one of the primary functions of our social and political system is to help care for one another. Both the pope and the DSA have also expressed plenty of concern about the impact of AI. They worry about what will happen to the lives of workers, because of this new technology, as well as the kind of damage that this technology might inflict on our shared ecological context (what Pope Francis referred to as our “common home”). They are both concerned about what the most economically powerful new technology might do to erode the things that shape our common life.

Reese even links the pope and the DSA together in their shared critique of American policies that have led to military engagement in Iran, Gaza, and Lebanon. The DSA is arguably much more pointedly antizionist than the pope. In that sense, their positions might actually differ more than Reese allows for in his analysis. But there may still be something resonant in their positions, nevertheless. Both seem to be aware of the fact that zones of war cannot foster a common life: they can only be the territory of one side or another, and the quest to adjudicate that matter is a violent disruption of the commons itself.

Reese ultimately makes the comparison between the pope and the DSA because he seems to want to pull the Democratic Party a little closer to the pope’s own position. Reese recognizes that there are some elements of the pope’s value system that are irreconcilable with that of Democrats (his position on abortion, for instance). But, he says, “Democratic Socialists are having mixed results winning over the Democratic Party, let alone American society.” And he notes that Leo appears to be more popular, among Americans, than either party. “Democratic Socialists, as well as the Democratic Party as a whole,” he says, “would be wise to emphasize the areas where they agree with him rather than the topics where they disagree.”

One could argue that Reese is essentially commending a kind of mainstreaming of the DSA’s message, making it a bit less alienating for American voters and somehow more appealing for the masses. And he’s offering the pope—and the church he leads—as a kind of model for that political work. What he doesn’t mention is that the Catholic Church has been strategically disinheriting the legacy of Marx for more than a century, making it palatable for the masses in the way that Marxism and socialism have never been. Yes, of course, there are deeply conservative sectors of the Catholic Church that are so anti-communist they probably find everything about Pope Leo XIV’s politics abhorrent. But they’re just one sector of a massive institution. And the specter of Marx has a mixed legacy in the church.

POPE LEO XIV has intentionally chosen to inherit his name from Pope Leo XIII, and I think this should be a clear cue that he’s tapping into a stream of tradition in the Catholic Church that has a complex but intimate relationship with socialism. Both socialists and those who followed Catholic social teaching were pitted against American industry at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, as they reacted to the crush of industrialization and extreme wealth inequality. Socialists pushed for the organization of workers, and for shared (public) ownership of resources. The Catholic Church, while studiously uncritical of private property, was pushing forward a resonant view through Pope Leo XIII. Leo XIII was clear and explicit that he wasn’t commending Marxism, and this was indicated in his embrace of the principle of private property. But the resonances between these positions were nevertheless deep, and clear.

Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum founded Catholic social teaching, and emphasized the rights of workers to fair wages and a comfortable quality of life. The dreams for a better common life that socialists and Catholics were both dreaming around that same moment of history became dreams that were shared by many Americans on the left (including many Protestants, who went on to participate in the Social Gospel movement). And many of the people who inherited this dream of a better common life for all people—and the dream of what I might call a sort of labor-friendly approach to resource-sharing—was something that many Americans inherited not through Marx directly, but through the Catholic Church’s strategic disinheritance of marxism. Until they became preoccupied with other things.

The dream did not die, even if it did go a bit dormant (protected by many true believers, including but not limited to socialists and catholics). And it was reactivated, in different shapes and forms, at other moments in 20th century history. The Catholic Church itself became, because of this legacy, a kind of refuge for people on the left who couldn’t quite make their peace with marxism or socialism (even before Michael Harrington helped to found the DSA.)

Dorothy Day is perhaps the most famous example. She was a leftist whose labor movement work drew her directly towards marxism, but she was put off by its explicit materialism (she wanted more room for spiritual matters). And she wanted to align with an institution that was a bit more distributed than the state itself. This strategic disinheritance isn’t entirely unlike what you also see in the work of liberation theologians like Gustavo Gutiérrez. While it’s certainly the case that the anti-oppressive bent of liberation theology can “feel” a bit like marxism (especially to those who find themselves very allergic to it), Gutiérrez was as clear as Day was about the fact that he was actively disinheriting dimensions of Marx’s legacy (like Marx’s distaste for religion). Although she refused baptism in the Catholic Church, I would also throw Simone Weil onto this list, only just because it was Catholics like Gustave Thibon and Joseph-Marie Perrin (to whom Weil entrusted her literary legacy, before she died in 1943) who were largely responsible for bringing her work to the world. And Weil was someone who was very clearly both attracted to, and repelled by, marxism. She found an interesting but resonant replacement, one could argue, in the church (that, like marxism, she also couldn’t completely accept).

THE POINT, I SUPPOSE, isn’t merely to contest the idea that the Catholic Church created the DSA (I think it played a role, but the line of inheritance is more complex). Nor is it to argue, like Reese, that Americans will inevitably find a more appealing mainstream version of the DSA’s message in the Catholic Church (though I’m sure that this will be true for many people). Perhaps all I’m really saying is that the DSA and left-leaning Catholics make pretty “natural” allies in a coalition. And not because they have, for some odd reason, suddenly converged on a set of issues. They’ve both been tangling, for more than a century, with the specter of Marx in very different ways. Socialists might be carefully and conscientiously inheriting Marx’s legacy, and the Catholic Church might be strategically disinheriting it. But his ghost looks at least a little bit friendly to many Catholics today (unlike the way it looks to that truck, driving around Kentucky somewhere, aggressively but unintentionally keeping the ghost alive with that “Fuck Communism” bumpersticker.)

Spoilers ahead...

I WILL ALWAYS BE a “the book was better” person. And I told myself, when I went to see The Odyssey with friends last week, that I wasn’t going to write about it. I was just going to take part in the cultural phenomenon. But people kept talking about it in ways that were like catnip for me (like what’s going on with the gods in this film?, and does the adaptation do them some injustice?) So, I couldn’t help myself. I will admit, to show my hand, that Nolan’s Odyssey made me cry. If you’ve seen it, you can probably guess the scene: it was the tears of Athena.

Late in the film, after Odysseus has finally landed back on Ithaca, as he’s testing his welcome with Penelope, he admits that—for the many years he was gone—he couldn’t come back home because he didn’t know how. We’ve already sat through the great battle at Troy, as viewers. We’ve seen how the acts of cunning played out. We watched the soldiers shit themselves as they waited in the horse, beyond the city gates, for days. But now, we re-enter the story through the filter of Odysseus’s narration and we see it with all of the violence, and none of the glory. It becomes what we know that war is; an incredible violation of any common or shared sense of humanity. Athena—who can only be seen by us (the viewers) and Odysseus—sits next to him and listens, as he speaks. And his telling makes her cry. When Zendaya’s Athena wrinkled up her face, I had to cry too.

Why did I cry? Maybe, in part, because I knew that so many other Americans were watching this same scene. Maybe because I knew that they would know that Athena was crying for Odysseus, and for Troy, but also for humanity. Which means that she was crying for us. Maybe I cried because I felt like we needed to be cried for, here in this place where so many terrible things have happened, and keep happening, and which has become a great engine for producing terrible things. Maybe I cried because I knew that so many of the people who saw this film would wonder what it’s done to them, this world of war. And they will wonder what it will take for us to be able to go home to some time and place where there’s not war. Because it does feel, to so many of us, as if we are lost.

Of course, I also cried because I love movies, and I love to cry when I watch movies. It’s cathartic. We’ve been introducing my ten-year-old daughter to Great Movies of the 20th century, like Trading Places and Ghostbusters. We’ve even got her watching Chaplin films, and sometimes I cry a little bit when it hits me that he’s walking around, in those ridiculous shoes, more than 100 years ago and I am watching him tromp around from my living room couch, in 2026, while my tiny dog sleeps on my lap. And then I say, “can you believe that we’re looking so deep into the past right now?” Or “oh my God, look at those cars!” And my family says “quiet, please, we’re watching the movie right now.” So, it’s not rare for me to cry about movies. But still, Athena’s tears were a sign, for me, that the film had preserved a certain kind of important (and, I would argue, beautiful) power.

WHAT NOLAN HAS produced is a blockbuster Hollywood film, and it has all of the trappings of the genre. He plays by the Hollywood rule books, when it comes to the gods, for the most part. He makes them appear in ways that won’t offend secular viewers (Poseidon is present, for instance, but as the sheer power of the ocean). On social media, many of my colleagues in religious studies and theology have been noting Nolan’s failure to allow the gods to appear with the full range of power and agency that Homer (or other ancient texts) gives them. And (though I read Andrew Thayer’s essay before I went, and found myself sympathetic with his argument) I can’t really disagree with that. Nolan’s Athena, Zendaya’s Athena, is not the Athena who leaps, screaming, from the crack in a godhead. She doesn’t brandish a sword. And she’s not a great political strategist. Nevertheless, Athena does keep some of her power in this film. Chiefly, she keeps the wisdom.

Early in the film, her execution of it looks a little clumsy. She chastises, or even scolds, Odysseus for believing that he’s not bound by prophecy or that he (and not the gods) is somehow responsible for monitoring the line between life and death. She wields her judgement and wisdom in a heavy-handed way. But I think she wielded that power masterfully, through her tears.

A number of my colleagues have commented that Athena’s role in the film has been reduced to impotence through another secularizing strategy that’s commonly applied to supernatural phenomena in Hollywood films: psychologization. By presenting us with an Athena who appears to Odysseus alone, the film makes it look as if she is merely a figment of his imagination. She doesn’t have to be real, she can just be “in his head.” This sort of critique is commonplace enough that Jacobin ran this teaser, for an essay by Eileen Jones that decimates the film. It’s presented as completely godless, against the background of a deity who is featured as a character in the film. Talk about erasure.

What looks (on the surface) like impotence or mere psychology is not actually alien to Homer’s narrative, however. One of the features of his telling that I actually enjoyed was the way that, when Athena showed up in the life of people, it was either in complete disguise or in a form that’s only visible to the person she wants to engage with. She has the power of relative invisibility, in that sense. What I see in that sort of exchange is not impotence, but selective intimacy. Sure, in Homer’s narrative she appears to other characters, like Telemachus. And I do think that his character would have been enriched, in the film, by some conversations with Athena. It would have strengthened his bond with his father and made him less puerile. But I think the intimacy Athena chooses with specific people is part of what makes her apparition powerful. She doesn’t give her wisdom cheaply.

I also don’t think that the film would have worked without Athena as a figure: a real character with presence, and dialogue. Odysseus crying all alone about what he did, in Troy, would have been just that. I didn’t find Matt Damon’s performance, in that culminating scene, to be the most powerful. He’s just another male hero who earned his wisdom too late, after too many people were dead. He didn’t make me cry, she did. It was Zendaya’s beautiful face, turning a little wrinkly with sorrow that provoked me. And it was the moment when Odysseus’s own memory pictures began to change: when, in his mind, the figure being slaughtered in Troy was Athena herself, bound by the arms of soldiers. Or when her statue is beheaded, the head rolling down the steps like a ball. The war sacrificed the sense of common humanity, and wisdom itself was slaughtered. This understanding didn’t come to Odysseus on his own, it was relational: it was an understanding, a form of wisdom, that emerged when he understood what he had done to the only god that he actually respected, or listened to.

I learned, from feminist theologians like Dorothee Sölle, about something that once seemed like an oxymoron to me: divine vulnerability. Before I knew anything about theology I always assumed that divine power was the power to make miracles, to have complete sovereignty over action, or to simply be absolute. But there are moments, even in ancient texts, where it becomes clear that divine power is sensitive to what humans do and can be affected by it. This sensitivity might look like God getting really, really angry when his people break the covenant with him. Or it might look like a god being put to death. Or a god staging a great weaving contest because she’s so jealous about the skill of a little human, and now we have spiders. Either way, those moments of divine vulnerability—wherever they lead—are often powerful in the lives of humans. They have a powerful effect. Divine vulnerability can generate powerful reactions, not unlike watching your mother cry over what you’ve done.

ATHENA HAS ALWAYS been, for me, the most compelling of the Greek gods. I’m not into war, but I do love a woman who can brandish a sword. More than that, however, her wisdom is something that has always intrigued me. It’s seemed, to me, like the best and most beautiful sort of power: the kind that doesn’t corrode you, or eventually eat you alive. It seems like the only power worth having, really. But it’s the kind that’s most difficult to find. It doesn’t respond to active searching, as if it can sense desperation, and you only tend to find it after real pain.

I am still a little childish about the magic of movies, most especially when I am watching them with other people, and I feel a mood passing through the room. There are so few ways to share feelings like that these days. People in America, notoriously, are quite lonely. It’s kind of miraculous that we’re still going to movie theaters, after everything that’s happened. So, I will admit that it felt powerful to be in the theater with others, in a moment when I knew that at least some of us could feel that incipient wisdom.

Part of the pleasure of watching a film like The Odyssey, is the sense that we are taking part in something quasi-eternal. We’re engaging in an adaptation of a story that’s so ancient, it almost feels as if it came from the beginning of time. It didn’t, of course. And the adaptation is actually so new, and fresh, and current that it’s really just a flash in the pan. But people take these stories more seriously because they make us feel as if we are part of the long flow of time, connected to something so much bigger than the moment we inhabit, as if we live in a world where there really is such a thing as a homecoming, or a world after war, or wisdom. And maybe we’re lying to ourselves a bit. Or maybe you could say that we’re dreaming. There’s something about a movie that feels, oddly, like a collective dream.

Why not let this new Athena have that power, to make people cry? To make people feel the unsettling charge of wisdom, the power that can work through us without also corrupting us? The kind of power that might even make people feel a little stronger for what we have to face? I’ll let her have it.

LATE IN HER CAREER, after she’d already become famous for her critique of the medicalization of death in America, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross published a letter that she’d written to a child: a little boy with a terminal cancer diagnosis. He’d written to ask her to explain death, and tell him why children have to die. Her response was published as she’d written it: by hand, illustrated in felt marker with images of dandelion seeds, sunshine, trees shedding their leaves, and butterflies. The image of the butterfly was especially important. Death, Kübler-Ross wrote, is a natural process in which we shed our bodies like a butterfly sheds a cocoon. This is when we return “home to God”, or “a place where we are never alone” one where, “we are with those we loved (who shed their cocoons earlier).”

People familiar with Kübler-Ross’s famous book On Death & Dying (the one where she laid out that contentious theory on the five stages of grief) tend to be unfamiliar with what happened to her career after that book came out. But those who are often see her later work and ideas as strange aberrations. She started her career as a psychiatrist who wanted to fix the medical system, but she ended it as the discredited purveyor of a California retreat center who espoused fringe spiritualist afterlife theories about resurrection and Near Death Experiences.

I’ve always struggled with Kübler-Ross’s ideas. In some ways, the points I made in my book Sister Death are pitched against her argument that death is something we must accept. I argued that it’s a fact we can’t help but be ambivalent about, at best. But I’ve always thought of her as a theologian, and I’ve used this letter in my theology course on death and the afterlife many times. I tell my students, when we read it, that some day someone they love (maybe a child, maybe someone who’s dying) may want to talk to them about what happens after death. And they might find themselves wanting to say something that feels real, and true; like something they actually think. But also something that doesn’t erase the grandeur of life, the incredible gift of the time they spent together, something that will illuminate the powerful (but easy to overlook) ways in which the other person will continue to endure. This is the thing, the rather theological thing, that I think Kübler-Ross is struggling to articulate. And I read her as a kind of tragic story about theology, and the strange ways that it gets muted, and erased, and can stop evolving.

THIS SUMMER I’M working on final revisions for my second book, More Than Human Power: The Afterlives of Theology. Although the afterlife is in the subtitle, it’s not really a book about life after death. But I’ve been thinking about it, nevertheless, and a couple of recent conversations have reminded me that it’s one of my oldest and most enduring intellectual obsessions. In the preface to Sister Death I wrote about a story from my childhood; at the age of three I became obsessed with the question of what happens after death and asked any adult I came across until I found an answer that felt good enough for the moment (I didn’t like the stale white idea of heaven, I preferred the more poetic and verdant image of a paradise; they were totally different things, for me). I’ve always been curious about these kinds of speculations. I’ve always been interested in repeating patterns. Even in my most skeptical moments, I’ve been convinced that both life and death are more mysterious and less formulaic than most accounts tend to allow for.

When I look back into the long stretch of available and recorded history, the afterlife appears to me like a changing and evolving collective dream. But it doesn’t really look that way right now, in 21st century mainstream American life. It looks more like a secret that you’re not really supposed to talk about. If you do, you end up looking like either a hammer of tradition or a wacky conspiracy theorist.

I’ve argued that death is the least secular part of secular life, and the least religious part of religious life. It’s something that sits in the strange middle zone that’s often neglected by both. And the afterlife is a kind of casualty of the fact that the space where death actually lives has become something of a no-man’s land in some regards. Religious traditions (or Christianity, at least) seem to want to claim ownership or sole possession of the afterlife, given that their archives tend to hold some of the oldest and most influential speculations that are still in active circulation. And secular spaces and traditions tend to let them have it. They’ve claimed something else: what exists, what we can use science to study. But there’s no real boundary where secular life begins and religious life ends. Nothing is actually fixed permanently on one side or the other.

The afterlife stops evolving when it becomes frozen in tradition. And even secular people want speculative resources for coping with mortality, despite the fact that this can mean something that looks a bit like an afterlife. So in my view, everyone sort of loses when the afterlife becomes privatized and frozen in this way.

ONE OF THE APPEALING things about Kübler-Ross’s first book, On Death & Dying, is that it seems as if she’s able to contain death within a secular setting. Colin Dickey has described it as a secular ars moriendi. Kübler-Ross was somewhat critical of religious ideas in that book, and the way that they can sometimes do damage to dying or grieving people (like when mourners are discouraged from grieving, because the dead have gone to be with God). But if we think of that book as a secular one, or we think of her project as secular, then we end up looking at her career as kind of self-betrayal. It looks as if she went from being someone with secular and scientific aspirations and became someone who went off the rails with strange fringe spiritual ideas and poisoned her own thinking.

Kübler-Ross’s late career has been pretty uniformly criticized. And I’m not trying to absolve her, or validate her claims that she’d lived during the time of Jesus and had been reincarnated. I also won’t defend her retreat center collaboration with a spiritual leader who was later accused of sexual assault. What I do think is that she was was probably pretty theologically inclined for her whole career. The traces are there, even in On Death & Dying, if we know how to look for them. And I think the fact that she was never quite able to find a comfortable public space to say what she really wanted to about death is what drove her towards those fringes in the first place. She was too religious for secular spaces, and too secular for religious spaces. So she ended up in the no-man’s land where things happen that no institution with aspirations to legitimacy will claim.

IN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ACCOUNTS Kübler-Ross has been clear about the fact that death, and the boundaries of our mortal (individual) selves, are things that she was always fixated on. She was born as one of a set of triplets, and was identical to one of her sisters. This made her immediately curious about the boundaries of individuality, and the ways in which it doesn’t always hold up as we often assume it to. When she was five she was hospitalized with a life-threatening illness, and the little girl who was sharing her hospital room actually died. Kübler-Ross grew up near farms, where she saw people die during routine accidents. And late in her adolescence (in Switzerland) she volunteered in WWII recovery efforts. This is how butterflies were carved into her imagination as an icon that hovers just beyond death.

In the recently liberated Majdanek concentration camp, in Poland, Kübler-Ross apparently saw hundreds of butterflies carved into the walls, some probably carved out with stones others perhaps with fingernails. The image stayed with her, as a kind of message from that liminal space between life and death. It was a message written from hell, but it was a message about beauty.

The link between butterflies and that life just beyond death isn’t an entirely novel association. It’s one of those recurring images that shows up in different, disconnected, cultural traditions across the course of time. Butterflies are little flying flowers; fleeting and ethereal reminders of the fragile power of beauty. Kübler-Ross grew up in a religious world, but she herself wasn’t especially pious. The butterflies were, for her, messengers from the world of nature, which is where she’d always found the most moving and acute forms of spiritual power.

This power of nature, perhaps even especially in its spiritual guises, was precisely what she was trying to reintroduce into conversations about death, in medical settings. When death is treated as a disease to be cured, or a problem to eliminate, it becomes something like a form of evil. On Death & Dying is an argument that death is not evil, but natural. And what’s evil is something apart from nature. These are essentially theological points. One can draw any number of conclusions from them. It doesn’t have to mean that death is “the end”, but it can. Kübler-Ross never really seemed to be drawn toward that reading.

She was cautious about her messaging in On Death & Dying, however. She seemed to understand that she would be taken more seriously, by medical professionals, if her ideas weren’t couched in religious language. She wanted to be widely read. She wanted to have a structural impact on her field; the field of medicine. She knew that she needed to tone down the spiritual content, even if she sometimes couldn’t quite help herself.

But I think it’s important to remember that her whole public platform was essentially built alongside theologians. In 1964 she gave a talk during which she critiqued the medical field for failing dying people. The following year she was, famously, approached by four students from Chicago Theological Seminary whose names I have never been able to find. They wanted to work, with her, on a pastoral project to bring more dignity to dying people. I’m not sure that they were ever credited anywhere, publicly. I don’t know what they made of that collaboration, in their own careers, or how it impacted them. But it was a collaboration, and I’m sure that Kübler-Ross learned from, and borrowed from, their pastoral and theological knowledge in the conversations they had with dying people.

In 1966 Kübler-Ross published the essay that would eventually become On Death & Dying in a theological journal: the Chicago Theological Seminary Register. It was apparently spotted by an editor at Macmillan (because editors at trade presses apparently used to read academic journals!) who helped her turn it into a book. While I know that she was critical of the way that religion, or at least Christianity, treated death I can’t help but imagine that this editorial process was part of the way that the theological dimensions of her project became actively muted.

I don’t think that her theological curiosity about death, and what might endure in the wake of it, disappeared however. It might have gone temporarily underground. And by the time she decided to bring it back, or bring it into the open, people felt as if it were a distraction or even a betrayal of her initial agenda. The American public wanted a more secular ars moriendi, and they didn’t want its purveyor to look as if she were pillaging religious archives for content. Secularization is supposed to make its connections to religion look invisible, if they exist at all.

WHAT EMERGED OVER the latter half of the 20th century, from a kind of tacit agreement between avatars of religious and secular authority, made the concept of the afterlife as a living, collective, speculative idea sort of unspeakable. In religious contexts, it became an element of tradition that’s been fixed by the tradition. It’s something to inherit and if you don’t like it as it is, you can either speak little or of it, or go elsewhere. In secular spaces it’s assumed to be something not worth talking about, or an awkward conversation if you’re foolish enough to bring it up. But, I think the fact that we still see countless images of heaven on steroids emerging from evangelical pop culture (translating it into the media of the moment) and a lot of wacky scientistic ideas from people who want science to validate our impulse to resist death though collective dreaming is a sign that many people just can’t help themselves. There’s a really powerful speculative drive to resist the silence of the afterlife. Maybe it’s not a drive that everyone has. But many of us do.

What’s missing I suppose, is the space for more boring and mundane visions to emerge. And these tend to be the sort that feel a bit more real, or true, to most people. This is the space where people imagine, for instance, that at the boundary between life and death we become something like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon.

Try a little theological experiment, for me. Think of your own little theory about what remains or endures in the wake of death, about what’s a little stronger than death, about how the powerful star of someone that we love keeps burning. Try your theory out on someone you love, not out of necessity but just for fun. Just to see what they say. See if it triggers, in them, a recognition of something you both know on a gut level but often forget about. See if it makes mortality glow a bit more for both of you, even just for a moment. See if it affirms something that you both know, and love, about the incredible powers that brought us here in the first place, into life.

YOU MIGHT BE morally disgusted by things like optimization culture and self-enhancement, rendering you morally immune to its effects. And perhaps you decided to read this because the title made you expect the moral equivalent of a bad car accident, and you couldn’t look away. If that’s you; I offer congratulations. I am, myself, morally disgusted by the pervasive culture of optimization and self-enhancement. It seems to me politically myopic, narcissistic, and evidence of the extent to which our lives and imaginations have been captured by projects that erode our commitment to any sort of commons, and just draw us always toward the most superficial and enclosed forms of inner life (like digestion). And yet, I know myself well enough to recognize that I am not immune to its effects.

I have an antagonistic relationship with my FitBit, which I wear religiously. Nevertheless, I serve it. I mock myself, like when I say out loud to my husband that I need to go out for a short walk, or get to bed early, so that I can “get my points.” But below the mockery is the seriousness of a driving sense of discipline that I choose to expend in a way that is not quite beyond my own contempt.

I appreciated ’s recent critical take on this current American moment in self-enhancement. And I agreed with much that he had to say. But I disagree with his argument that this iteration of self-enhancement is different from others in the sense that it’s not religious. It may indeed be more secular, in the sense that it’s not primarily driven by a religious organization or explicit religious ideology. But I would counter that our current culture of optimization and self-enhancement is deeply theological. That’s what makes optimization feel, for many, as if it produces what seems oddly and uncannily like a thing that might only really be described as virtue.

THE QUESTION AT the heart of Thompson’s recent essay is one that has probably ghosted me for my entire adult life, or perhaps since I was sixteen and got an after-school job scanning member cards behind the desk of our local YMCA. With my new free membership I started taking yoga classes, lifting weights, running on their treadmills, trying new diets, and becoming mildly obsessed—like so many of my fellow Americans—with the pursuit of the sort of “health” that can be best measured by mirrors and PRs. Thompson, like me, recognizes the extent to which he’s susceptible to the collective drive toward self-enhancement. But he’s curious to know “at what point is it unhealthy” for people (nations, individuals) “to be obsessed with health?” Interesting that even the question itself is health-oriented, isn’t it? What better way to convince health-obsessed people to stop obsessing over health than to convince them that their obsession is unhealthy?

Thompson acknowledges that American culture has, for most of its history, always been obsessed with self-improvement of various sorts. But, he argues, “these earlier iterations of self-improvement drew their power from religion, community, or characterological projects to promote civic virtue.” Self-improvement used to be sort of deep, but now it’s shallow. Temperance, for instance, was fundamentally a social enterprise. There were many campaigners who believed that temperance would reduce poverty and domestic abuse. What makes the current era of self-improvement different, Thompson argues, is that it’s fundamentally asocial and apolitical: it’s just about the self. It’s about nothing but our own individual bodily perfection. It’s selfish, and it’s one of the factors that’s eroding our fragile social connections.

Because I study religion and theology, I’m always a little suspicious when people say “this has absolutely nothing to do with religion.” It’s rarely the case: religion has its tentacles in most dimensions of American life, if often subtly. And one of the most common tropes for pointing out the absence of religion, in a given cultural practice or discourse, is to say “this can’t possibility be about religion, because it seems self-oriented or self-obsessed” (as if religious ideas or religious people are never self-obsessive and religion is only ever prosocial). ’s recent work (including her new book Beyond Wellness) has also made me much more aware of the extent to which many facets of contemporary American wellness culture are drawing on religion (even when it seems as if they’re not). So I was immediately skeptical about Thompson’s claim, but I couldn’t quite articulate why.

It wasn’t until I read the end of his essay—a coda, on death—that I understood where my skepticism was coming from. It’s in this section that Thompson tries out his argument that “at bottom, enhancement culture is a disposition towards death.” It’s a form of “thinking about death” and “calculating distance from death”. This is why the self-enhancement of wellness culture has experienced such a boom since the COVID-19 pandemic. I totally agree with him that our culture of optimization and self-enhancement is a disposition towards death. I think it’s a massive mortality cope. And that’s precisely why I think it’s religious, or theological.

DEATH IS ONE OF THE least secular aspects of secular life. It’s one of the areas of life that most resists being detached from religious powers and cosmovisions. Even very secular people often default to what they know are religious burial or mourning traditions, because they’ve found nothing richer or more resonant to replace them. And even very secular people often find their skepticism eroding (and some other strange thing blooming) when they sit with a dying person, or experience a genuine brush with death.

It’s also, we could say, one of the least religious aspects of religious life. It’s one of the areas of life where the confidence of religious answers tend to quickly unravel. I recognize that one of the great and enduring appeals of Christianity, for many people, is the fact that prominent forms of it promise to do away with (or erase) death for the faithful. But I also know, from conversations with many Christians, that this tends to be the part of the faith that raises the most skeptical questions for them. Clear religious explanations or dogmas tend to fall apart, in the enduringly mysterious face of death, and even religion often obligates us to make some degree of peace with its mystery.

In other words, I think that death is the crossroads where religious and secular culture become most tangled up with one another, whether we recognize that publicly or not. It’s perhaps the most difficult area of life, where a great abyss opens up and all the powers we have at our disposal (religious and secular) seem to need marshaling. Death is a phenomenon that tends to make it difficult to draw hard lines between the religious and the secular.

Even Thompson exhibits this, in his own essay, where he wants to make the argument that contemporary self-enhancement culture is non-religious. It’s not about religion, he argues, it’s about death. And yet Thompson nevertheless draws upon the language of religion as he describes enhancement culture as “worshipping death like some Aztec priest offering sacrifices to appease the angry sun god.” Does the fact that he’s referring to an indigenous tradition make it seem like something more primitive and fanatical than “real” religion? Does it make it sound like mere superstition? Maybe to him. But I read it as a sign that talking about death draws him ineluctably back toward religious (or quasi-religious) language.

In my book Sister Death, I write about an understanding of death that floats easily between religious and secular contexts (what I call a political theology). But it has its origins in ancient religious ideas, and you can easily find it at work in mainstream Christian discourses on life and death (where this particular ideology has really had a powerful, though not a singular, grip). It’s a theological argument that you can find the Apostle Paul (among others) advancing pretty clearly in biblical texts: the idea that life and death are enemies, and life is on the side of God. In this view, death becomes a kind of demonic double of life. It becomes the force of evil, in essence, that works against life at all odds. In the battle between good and evil, death is on the side of evil and it’s fundamentally at odds with the divine. It’s a horrible curse.

This is a religious, a theological, a fundamentally metaphysical idea that we can also see everywhere in secular culture when we really start to look around. We can see it in our wars against cancer, as well as our contemporary enhancement culture. Shallow and vapid as it might actually be, I think that part of what contemporary enhancement culture teaches people is that the more we can increase the vital signs within our own bodies (the more we feel alive) the more it looks or feels like we are getting the evil out.

This is why enhancement and self-optimization can feel so uncannily close to virtue.

I DON’T THINK that my FitBit makes me more virtuous: I want to be clear about that. I do think that it can sometimes make me feel something, and that thing feels strangely like what I (perhaps mistakenly) might describe as virtue. I think that feeling can be seductive. And I think it probably scratches an itch that many people feel.

Many people (though perhaps not all) want to be good. They want to do good things. They want to bring more good into the world, and enjoy those little moments when they feel as if they have. But maybe they’re not living for that feeling in every moment. So, once that feeling has been sated (once you feel as if you’ve participated in the good thing, acted on behalf of life, or created something like more life in your own body), they’re willing to let that drive go for a bit and focus on other things. Maybe optimization or self-enhancement sates them just enough. It gives them just enough of the feeling of being good, or on the side of the good. They get a bit of the evil out, so it’s time to move on and do something else.

Maybe it’s enough to simply dismiss this as false virtue or self-deception. Maybe it’s enough to tell people to go do something more genuinely virtuous. But that doesn’t seem like enough, for me. None of that makes us more aware of the fact that we might be doing this because we fear death. Or that our fear of death is a really profound and ancient religio-secular mystery that humans have been trying to cope with, in new ways, for our entire history.

If our current obsession with wellness can take us anywhere, I think it should at least take us to the edge of the great and mysterious conundrum of mortality. There’s not a lot of dopamine to be found there, on the edge of that abyss. But it is a place where more than human powers (ones that don’t clearly resolve into either life or death) have been feeding people, existentially and metaphysically, for centuries and centuries. There’s inevitably something more for us there, at that crossroads.

IN THE CHICAGO O’HARE AIRPORT, in the midst of a 15-hour travel purgatory as we waited for our one-hour connecting flight back home to Louisville, my ten-year-old daughter told me that the toilets back home in America seemed angry and impatient. I’m sure you know the airport toilets she’s talking about: the ones that flush dramatically and aggressively while you’re still sitting on them. It was a bit of a culture shock, after two weeks in Japan where even the most public of restrooms are impeccably clean and the overwhelming majority of toilets all patiently sit there, offering up bidets. On our trip we’d encountered toilets whose lids rise up automatically when you open the door, and countless toilets with “privacy” buttons that play nature sounds or even music (including, at one, “Pomp and Circumstance”). “You can tell a lot about a country from its toilets,” my daughter sagely observed.

I laughed, of course, because talking about toilets is always a little disgusting and inappropriate and so requires a bit of laughter. But I’ve been thinking about her comment because the rather striking difference that these toilets highlight (toilets that are aggressive and demanding versus toilets that are at your service) also captures something I found myself thinking about, with some frequency, while we traveled in Japan.

Travel makes the familiar feel strange, including the thoughts that have been inhabiting the back of your own mind, rent-free. During my trip I inevitably found myself incredibly dependent upon technology (especially the flat rectangular map/translator/researcher/camera/wallet that I carried around in my purse). But I also found myself noticing what a prominent, yet unobtrusive, role technology seems to play in Japan. The experience left me feeling as if life back home in the United States has been fueling so much antipathy towards technology that I’ve come to think about it as something inherently antagonistic to human life and dignity. In essence I’ve come to think about technology as something that we’re increasingly forced to serve, rather than something that might be used in the service of life.1 I’m not saying that this is true, but it is a sentiment that I think I’ve been harboring even if half unconsciously. And I think America today really makes me feel this way.

NOT TO BELABOR the toilet example too much, but I’ve already used it so I think it’s worth expounding. I recognize that there’s something very simple and elemental about a toilet, and so it might be a bit counterintuitive to use in a discussion about technology. But things like sewage and sanitation infrastructure are often included in broad histories of technology. These are the kinds of things that have allowed massive groups of people to gather in condensed shapes and forms that we often refer to as civilizations. They’re the subterranean networks that almost invisibly facilitate a radical shift in the way that people live alongside one another. We take these things for granted, now, as forms of technology. But that’s what they are. So, toilets can give us a window into not only a culture, but their technology.

The automatically flushing toilet is a decidedly modern (and even cutting edge!) form of technology. It relies on things like infrared sensors to discern the user’s movement. It was presumably designed to solve something that threatens public and communal life: failure to flush. I am not an expert on this form of technology, so I really have no idea why so many auto-flush toilets in the US are so aggressive. But I’m going to venture a guess that it has something to do with cheap sensors that don’t work well (and seem to break easily) but are nevertheless ubiquitous. And it might even have something to do with programming. It might be assumed (for good reason) that Americans are particularly bad at taking responsibility for the collective care of communal spaces, and so are especially likely to succumb to the failure to flush. The result is a form of technology that is only somewhat effective, but also intimidating and hostile. It’s not really there to serve you, but to persecute and even punish you. You’re at its mercy. It’s a situation without much dignity for us.

I was recently speaking with a fellow American who confessed that she was disgusted by bidets. But when I pointed out that the water used for the bidet comes from outside the toilet bowl, while the water splashed about by an aggressive auto-flush toilet is water from the bowl itself, she had to admit that this was definitely more disgusting.

While they might exist, I have to say that during my entire trip to Japan I didn’t encounter a single aggressive auto-flush toilet. I suspect that they probably invest, in both public and private spaces, in better sensors. Many toilets even have sensors that close the lid before flushing. There are an overwhelming number of buttons on many of these toilets, such that foreigners have to do actual research to learn more about what these complex technologies are designed to do. Some have heated seats. Some glow in the dark. Many toilets are self-cleaning models that use detergents. Many of them have an automatic deodorizer. These are toilets that are designed not only to serve individual people, but to be an asset to a culture that values cleanliness. These aren’t toilets that are aggressive and suspicious of people. They exist to serve a broader communal value, and to ensure that this value is present in communal spaces. They serve life, and the living. This supports not only the dignity of individuals, but of the collective they create together.

BUT LET’S TALK ABOUT other things, because this was only one hyperbolic example. The example that most people will talk about, when they talk about technology in Japan, is the transportation system. I was prepared to be impressed by it, but I have to admit that I often had to force myself to observe it. It’s so well-designed and smoothly operated that it feels almost seamlessly integrated, and it fades into the background of consciousness.

We rode on the celebrated bullet trains, and reached speeds that more than doubled my fastest speed in a car on the American interstate. The ride felt calm and peaceful. The trains were shockingly punctual. I can’t even imagine what sort of complex technological apparatus exists to facilitate that sort of coordination.

I was anxious about using the rail system, in Tokyo, given that it’s such a massive city. It took me a long time to feel confident navigating the NYC subway system, when I lived there. But I was able to download a pass for the Japanese rail system on my phone before I even walked into the first station. All of the digital information that I could access through Apple Maps about my route was incredibly precise, and accurate. And I never had an issue getting cell service in the stations, or on the trains (or anywhere I went in Japan, really).

You might think that this efficient transportation system is just that: a form of advanced technology that helps people get around. What sort of discernible difference would that really make, on the rest of life in a city like that? An incredible amount, as it turns out.

The rest of life shifts in response to this advanced technology. The streets of Tokyo (again, a massive city) are calm and peaceful. When you walk around, you feel as if you’re in a city built for people, not for cars. In Louisville, where I live (and where I have actually seen a car hit a child, and send her flying in the air, on the street I live on) I feel the imminent threat of cars and traffic when I walk out the door. I didn’t feel that in Japan. The bikes in Kyoto did feel a little wild, but that was more of a point of confusion or mild annoyance.

When we were outside, in these cities, feeling as if we were in spaces built for people, I couldn’t help but notice the abundant green, and all the park space. Part of this is more deeply rooted. The shrines and temples throughout places like Tokyo and Kyoto are already, themselves, like little parks. They are lined with gardens both inside and outside their own walls. So it makes sense that something like a park or a garden would be a non-negotiable element in these urban landscapes. I can’t help but assume, however, that because the air is cleaner, and the environment feels sort of humane, that things like trees, and flowers, and well placed rocks just belong in a place like that. They are simple marks of an environment worth living in, in an environment that’s still loosely organized around the living (instead of their machines).

I’m not claiming that Japan is a utopia. I understand that people, especially workers, in Japan have their own concrete struggles, like incredibly long work days and work weeks. I’m not ignoring that, even it if’s not the point I’m trying to make. And I also understand that many of my American eccentricities are out of place in Japan. I’m an American, and I love and accept my Americanness. So please don’t misunderstand me. But my travels in Japan have left me lamenting the role that technology seems to be playing in our culture right now, and I want better for us.

TECHNOLOGY MAKES US, as Americans, more capitalist. That’s what it does. Technological advancement allows us the opportunity to purchase new consumer products, and to make the producers of those products more rich. We value the accumulation of capital, and we use technology to advance our capitalist economy. That’s how it serves “us”.

And what this means for people, as individuals, is that they have to serve the economy that’s developed around these technological advancements, even when these advancements are actively destroying things (like social institutions) that were set up to serve us as living people, such as education. We are being told that we just have to accept what’s happening to our communal life because this is how technological advancement works in our culture. And it seems to be the case that we have to sit back and watch the other things we value being eroded and destroyed, because we’ve been told that these newest and most advanced technologies are basically the only thing that’s propping up our communal value system (the accumulation of capital).

We deserve better. We deserve better lives, and better communities. We deserve technology that facilitates the enrichment of collective life and communal spaces. We deserve technologies like high speed trains that make the air cleaner and better smelling, that make our parks and streets more beautiful, and ensure that fewer people are slaughtered on our streets by rouge machines. We deserve high tech toilets that don’t attack us, and that help to keep our collective spaces clean enough that we might even be inspired to contribute to, or carry on, that cleanliness.

People will tell you that this is impossible. But that’s not true. We do have to want something different, however. We have to, en masse, value things that most people here don’t value right now. Not just abstractly but deeply and concretely, in the way that touches on our deepest desires and our nervous systems. We have to talk about these things, publicly, collectively, incessantly. We have to empower the people who will fight and struggle to try and secure these things in our public spaces for us. It’s not impossible, but it’s a reach. I sometimes feel as if people are starting to reach.

The difference between technology that’s cutting edge and technology that slaughters people is that the former is oriented around life and the living, it’s there to serve life and the living, not to persecute or punish it. I think that American culture has lost whatever connections we might have had to technologies that serve life. We aren’t living, right now, in a culture where technology works in the service of life. We are living in the machine that capitalism has built to grow more technology, and our lives are being managed accordingly.

Go ahead and come at me with arguments about infeasibility, or about the need to be realistic and accept reality. I know how many people there are who believe that we just have to accept the cards we are dealt, and deal with them. And I also know how many people there are who are caught up in escapist fantasies in which this whole corrupt world just ends and falls apart. I don’t care. This is me, dreaming about a better world in the wake of a journey to another dimension. Dreaming is a fundamental human activity that has been devalued and debased in favor of mass produced fantasies that we buy from someone else. Reality matters less to me right now than that dream state, where we imagine how it’s still possible for us to live lives of dignity, even in the midst of incredible technological change.

I DON’T ACTUALLY intend to go up against the pope; my title is a little hyperbolic. I spend a lot of time thinking about theology, and over the last several years I’ve also spent a lot of time thinking about AI. So, I agree with much of what Pope Leo XIV has to say in his new encyclical, especially what he has to say about the role that schools and education play in his moral vision. Our educational systems are so incredibly overdue for a renaissance, and I really want to believe that this might help to push our schools in that direction.

I also found myself genuinely surprised by how pluralistic this encyclical was. The last time I was this intrigued by a papal encyclical was upon the release of Pope Francis’s Laudato si’—a document that I’ve frequently used, in my classes, and have much appreciation for. But, when I read Francis’s encyclical, as a non-religious theologian, I found myself disappointed by the limits of his pluralism. As much as he celebrated biodiversity, it seemed to me that he lacked an appreciation for what ecofeminist theologian Ivonne Gebara called religious biodiversity. As someone who is essentially a pluralist, I was irritated enough that I ended up publishing an article with this critique. So, I was pleased that Leo’s encyclical seemed more capacious in this regard.

The value that Leo places on pluralism and diversity comes, in part, from his critique of AI as a new Babel; it’s a technological project, he argues, that seeks to build a kind of unified language and, as such, it’s part of an ancient (and constantly doomed) human temptation toward a hubristic violation of our actual limits. Against this, Leo celebrates the “plurality of voices and visions which, even though they sometimes remind us of the confusion caused by the diversity of spoken language, a bright possibility emerges.” I get the sense, from his encyclical, that Leo is genuinely interested in the church’s vision of a just future joining together with other visions (rather than dominating them, or towering over them with moral superiority).

And yet, as I wandered deeper into the encyclical, I was able to see where Leo’s pluralistic visions crumble. And I think it points to a limitation on Leo’s own analysis, particularly his celebration of the power of limits, contingency, and limitedness, that I think is worth taking account of.

THE MOST GLARING EXAMPLE of the limits of Leo’s pluralism is, to me, exhibited in his critical dismissal of posthumanism. In his analysis Leo (like many other commentators today, especially here on Substack) essentially collapses transhumanism and posthumanism together. Transhumanism, he writes, is an intellectual movement that “envisions the enhancement of human beings through technologies—such as biomedicine, body engineering, devices and algorithms—with the aim of increasing performance and capabilities.” Posthumanism, on the other hand, is something even worse. It’s an intellectual movement, he argues, that “challenges anthropocentrism” and even more than that, “envisions a hybridization of human beings, machines and the environment” even anticipating “a threshold where humanity surpasses itself in a new evolutionary stage.”

It’s clear to me that his critique of transhumanism is targeting thinkers like Ray Kurzweil, whose theory of the singularity eagerly anticipated the moment when the rate of technological change would advance so rapidly that it would permanently alter our world and our lives. But I don’t really know who Leo has in mind when he critiques posthumanism, and the scarecrow that he’s built actually just sounds like transhumanism. He needs posthumanism to be a kind of scapegoat because it’s kind of a perfect foil for him: it invokes the more than human but, for Leo, it’s the wrong kind of more than human. And so it essentially provides what he sees as the necessary corrective.

I think there are many reasons to critique posthumanism. I don’t identify as a posthumanist, and I’ve even been questioning my own embedded critiques of anthropocentrism in recent years, as life in America has become increasingly more dehumanizing. I used to think that anthropocentrism was a cardinal sin. Now, I’m a little less sure. But I know enough about posthumanism that I had to say something, because I actually think that Leo is making an enemy out of an intellectual movement that might have a few resources for him.

What Leo completely misses is the ecological side of posthumanism. As an intellectual movement, posthumanism has been pulled in different directions. In essence, posthumanism is little more than a critical examination of what humanism elided, evaded, left out of the story, or tried to silence. It’s a critique of the boundary lines that humanism drew around us: who and what it suggested that we are. What distinguishes posthumanism from humanism is not that it was simply an intellectual movement attempting to fuse humans with technology (as the pope and many other commenters assume) but that it was a movement examining and exposing both the narrowness and the hubris of humanism. Posthumanism wanted to make explicit what humanism was designed to naturalize, or hide. It took on a view of the human from its own liminal edges.

A figure like Donna Haraway (who I wrote about, not long ago, here on Substack) is perhaps the paradigmatic example of a posthumanist thinker. Haraway shocked readers in the mid-1980s by exploring, in full intellectual seriousness, the figure of the cyborg. This was, for her, a challenge to acknowledge that the actual line between humans and machines is much blurrier than we tend to assume. Many of us are already cyborgs in ways that we think of as blessings: we have pacemakers in our hearts, and titanium in our legs, and these are things that help us survive and thrive. But Haraway also pointed out the fact that the human, in intellectual culture, had long been gendered (by default) as typologically male. And she noted that the figure of the human had long been sustained by the denial of its own animality.

Posthumanist thinkers like Haraway were not interested in “upgrading” the human into some sort of limitless technological beings. She was interested in exposing these complications, and asking people to think about them. Haraway wanted us to see ourselves as caught up in a web of sorts: her aims were fundamentally ecological. It was a deconstructive gesture, and even Jacques Derrida (the “progenitor” of deconstruction) became invested in unsettling the lines between the human and the animal, gesturing towards an excluded zone or space just beyond human subjectivity where the gods and animals have hovered, haunting the human. We could call that zone, as some have been drawn to do, more than human.

This figure of the more than human appears not only in the title of my forthcoming book (yes, shameless plug) but in Leo’s encyclical. In his encyclical Leo again engages critically with posthumanism by claiming—for Christian theology—a kind of authoritative existential monopoly on more than human power. Leo is especially intent on clarifying what “authentic” more than human power looks like: his vision in this regard is not pluralistic. In essence, it looks like God, articulated and described by Christian theologians like him. This authentic more than human power, Leo writes, is only to be found in the Christian faith. It’s a power that “does not arise from technological divinization, but through God’s grace received in Christ.” Authentic more than human power is Christ-shaped grace.

Leo seems to know, on some level, that this figure of more than human power has something to do with posthumanism. But he’s mistaken in his understanding of where it comes from. The figure of more than human power is not (in its origins) a dream of transhumanists and technologists like Ray Kurzweil. It comes from ecological thought.

So far as I can tell, the term “more-than-human” (typically with hyphens like this, marking it off as a phrase) comes from the work of ecological philosopher David Abram. The term appears in the title of his 1996 book The Spell of the Sensuous: Language and Perception in a More-Than-Human World. The idea, of the more-than-human world, was meant to get around a problem with the word “nature”: it’s become a term that we often see opposed to the human, and our cultures. The more-than-human world is the figure of our ecological context: a world of beings, powers, forces, and potencies that are broader than the human and yet also carry, contain, and sustain the human. It’s not an antihuman or inhuman form of power; it’s constitutive of, and supportive of, our humanity. Abram is anything but a technologist. Indeed, he is even critical of the technology of alphabetic language!

Abram is someone who would probably agree with much of what Leo has to say, in his new encyclical. But more than that, I think he’s someone whose ideas resonate pretty deeply with Pope Francis’s ecological orientation. In fact, I even think that people like Donna Haraway are pretty resonant with his ideas. By making enemies of them, and characterizing the entirety of posthumanism as the dream of technologists, Leo is exposing the extent to which an ecological orientation isn’t really part of his critical frame, perhaps to his own detriment. He frequently cites Francis, and lauds him for the way that he uses ecological thought to charge people with the responsibility to care for their common home. But, whether he can see it or not, Leo’s project is much more defensively anthropocentric. That’s its project and focus.

In that sense, I think it’s very much in keeping with the general direction that intellectual culture seems to be pushing right now. I can see this defensive anthropocentrism creeping up even in myself (in my willingness to question what I’d once understood as a given). But I also see it in the evaporation of ecological politics. Over the last couple of years it seems to me as if conversations about the environment have, increasingly, been fading from public view. As technology has been dehumanizing us, and dissolving the boundaries between human and machine, it seems to me that people are also less and less willing to challenge or dissolve the boundaries between humans and animals, or humans and nature. And even the loudest conversations about the environment now seem to oscillate around AI (and its environmental impact).

The dissolution of boundaries is, we could say, a kind of erotic project that’s been particularly important to idealizations of American democracy. I’ve been reading Walt Whitman lately, and I’m thinking of the kinds of promiscuous mixing and blending that he saw as so fundamental to the project of American democracy. I see the dissolution of boundaries like this in posthumanist projects like Donna Haraway’s. I think it’s genuinely aimed at a hopeful democratization of life, whether it succeeds in that task or not. It’s part of a political sense that there’s something urgent in questioning the lines between things, and categories, that have conventionally been drawn and experimenting with what it might look like to draw those lines differently.

But everyday life in America has become too deeply riddled with uncertainty and suddenly it seems as if all we talk about now are where to draw lines, how to build walls, and how to protect whatever it is we might still have. I see this, in Leo’s encyclical, too. For all that he is celebrating the magnificence of humanity, it’s clear that he’s doing this as a protective measure, because he feels that the dehumanizing forces are closing in around us. He’s drawing a hard protective line, and that hard line is being drawn around the human. I’m not saying that this is wrong. I’m just pointing it out.

PERHAPS IT’S BECAUSE OF his dismissal of posthumanism, and the particular way in which he elevates the human, that I find Leo’s celebration of limits, limitation, contingency, and finitude a little disingenuous. Against the culture of optimization that we’re caught up in, Leo encourages us to celebrate (rather than deny) our limits. The hopes and dreams of the AI boom are built on exceeding the productivity limits of human beings. “We must remember that humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them,” he writes, adding that “the light of faith offers a perspective on reality that helps us recognize what we call the ‘contingency’ of the things of this world.” Against the hubris of a new Babel, Leo encourages us to accept the limitations of our finitude—the limitations of our human being. I appreciate all of this. But I also know that, in theology and in humanism, the human has often been appealing precisely because of its apparent lack of limits.

I wrote my PhD dissertation, in theology, on the figure of the creature. I was interested in mortality (evidenced by the fact that I later wrote a book on death) and I’d come to see that humans, in much of the theological tradition, seemed to have become something more than mere mortals. This annoyed me, a bit, because it seemed to me that the mortality we share with other animals was deeply and ecologically important, especially if we want to talk about things like ethics. So, I wanted to better understand why the figure of the creature had been so theologically sidelined, or ignored.

Some of this, I learned, had to do with Jesus: the figure at the center of Christian faith was both human and divine. And, while centuries of Christian theologians recognized that humans weren’t gods (and that it was inappropriate hubris to be confused on this matter), many theologians really did wrestle with what this upgrade for humanity meant, metaphysically, ontologically, existentially, and morally. So, in the history of Christian thought, while many theologians conceded that humans were creatures, there was equally as much theological work presenting humans as so much more than mere creatures, as better than creatures, as destined for a form of greatness that mere creatures could never hope for.

Eventually, it was secularization that threw this into sharper relief. In modernity, as secular artists and thinkers began to translate and transform theological concepts, they put on display what was only subtly implied in Christian theology. Those dimensions of theology that weren’t actively erased came into sharper relief. These secular thinkers understood that it was the human who had the promise, as a figure or a subject. It was the human who deserved to be celebrated. It was the human that was, essentially, divine. Or closer to the divine than any other living being. It was around the littlest of gods, the least transcendent of gods, that humanism itself was shaped and formed.

Creatureliness was just a form of contingency. Creatureliness was mortality incarnate. Creatureliness was limitation, imposed without escape. And so, creatureliness was what had to be escaped, in order to become truly human. Creatureliness was not an ideal, but a monstrosity. Creatureliness was Shakespeare’s creature Caliban, or Mary Shelley’s creature (Frankenstein’s perverted creation): dejected, rejected, foreclosed, pathetic, and always less than human.

This wasn’t secular thinkers mauling or maligning a cherished concept that theologians had been holding as sacred. It was secular thinkers making explicit (in their translation of theological figures) what had become a dominant (though not uniform or exclusive) theological point of view. It was secular thinkers recognizing that, while the human did indeed have some limits (it wasn’t God), it had far fewer limits than any other existent being on earth and it was to be celebrated not despite, but precisely because of, that. It was the closest one could get to living without limitation. And the job (or the central task, or perhaps the impulse) of the human was to always and forever keep pushing against those limits.

As a PhD student, I found myself gravitating towards posthumanism because it was clear to me that the figure of the creature was a bit at odds with the figure of the human in ways that only posthumanists could really help me explain. I didn’t become a posthumanist, but I did come to appreciate the way that their critique helped me understand the reality of human limits (finitude and mortality) in ways that neither theology nor humanism did.

Of course, theology and humanism are complex intellectual traditions and there are many, many visions and images in their archives of the wisdom of acknowledging our limits. And there are many celebrations of finitude. But we certainly can’t say that either theology or the humanist tradition offers an unambiguous or uniform celebration of finitude and contingency. Theology has, in ways that Leo seems not to see or acknowledge, an incredibly complex relationship with the limitations of finitude.

WHY DOES ANY OF THIS MATTER right now? Because it might appear that Leo wants to highlight the value or importance of limitation, finitude, and contingency. But I think it’s worth noting that he only does this because his real focus is actually that which infinitely exceeds and structures that finitude and contingency. He can celebrate and accept finitude because he believes that it’s the loving creation of an infinite God. And humans, for Leo, are magnificent not simply because they are finite, but because they are the one being that has no real limit except for God. He’s not really saying “accept that you are mortal,” but something more like, “accept that your mortality was designed by, and is held by, and will be returned to God.” Those are different visions.

There’s a part of me that wants to critique him for this reason. It’s a sign that he’s being a little disingenuous, in his encyclical. It’s a sign that finitude isn’t quite what he’s making it out to be. It’s not valuable in and of itself. It’s valuable because it points to God. But I’m not sure that I can really fault him for this, in the end. Because I will admit that I’ve come to see the acceptance of limits as, itself, limited.

You might know that my first book was about death. And one of the things I’m doing, in that book, is critiquing the hostility towards death that was perpetuated by centuries of mainstream Christian theologians (and secularists who adopted their frameworks for thinking, without even really trying). People have often asked me how I could stomach thinking so much about death. And, honestly, it’s because that book forced me to acknowledge that I was holding onto something I felt was a bit stronger than death: love. It’s something that can cross over, or in some ways dissolve, the boundaries between life and death. We are sustained, in life, by our love for those who have died. And anyone who has ever been born and touched with the love of another manifests, in life, in a way that exceeds their own mortal limits. We probably wouldn’t love one another the way we do, if we weren’t mortal. But our love is so excessive, it pushes back against limits that death appears to impose.

We can embrace limits, and limitation. But, perhaps, only so far or only for so long. I’m not sure that it’s possible to remove (at least collectively) our desire to survive, against the odds. And perhaps it’s important to have some sense of what it is we are folded into, when we run up against our ultimate limits. Contingency is always contingent to something. Isn’t the temptation always going to be that we will celebrate what’s bigger than the contingent, or what exceeds it? Can a limit ever really be loved for what it is? Or is the temptation always going to be to love or give reverence to what makes that limit exist? Are we destined to push up against our limits, and seek to dissolve them?

READING IS AN act shot through with various forms of power, but because it’s also so mundane these powers are easy to disregard. We all know that power in our society (a position of power and privilege) is rarely accessible for those who aren’t literate. But the powers of reading are greater than that, and irreducible to instrumental calculations. Reading offers us not only a method for tapping into streams of information, but a way to intimately encounter the strange and wondrous worlds of other minds. It expands our imaginations and, some have argued, may even give us access to wisdom, or a portal into the mind of God. Reading is, in many ways, an unnatural thing to do, and a truly incredible human achievement. It’s also something I’ve learned to take for granted as the foundation of my intellectual life.

Lately, though, as it feels like something is shifting in the basement regions where that intellectual life was forged, I’ve been forced to stop taking it for granted. Admittedly it’s been difficult, as a college professor in the humanities, not to be sucked into the doom spiral of discourse on the decline of literacy. And I can’t deny that I’ve watched the reading habits of my students, and even my own reading habits, rapidly change. Since 2020, when everything went suddenly online, I’ve found myself giving fewer (and smaller) reading assignments to students. It’s clear that they aren’t absorbing or metabolizing text like they used to. And if I’m being honest, my own “natural” inclination right now is to read much less than I used to. If I want to stop scrolling through content and read something printed on paper, I have to be very deliberate. I make the effort, but it’s notable to me that it’s an effort.

There seems to be something missing from the dominant conversations about what’s happening to reading, however. Rachel Gabriel recently made the case that, somewhat absurdly, both the people who claim that no one is reading anymore and the people who claim that reading is fashionable again are both right. Fewer people are turning to books (both in school and in their leisure time). And yet, more books than ever are being published, and they’ve become fashion accessories of a sort. It’s a strange knot to untie. But I’ve come to realize that neither of these things are really my central concern. My concerns about reading are baldly existential and spiritual (if not religious). Luckily, my academic field is religious studies and theology, which is uniquely placed to address such concerns (even if it tends not to).

EVERY MAY, as part of my teaching contract, I have to offer a May term intensive course. I have truly mixed feelings about the May term because it’s exhausting and always leaves me completely drained, but it’s also an opportunity to teach whatever whimsical thing I like (last May I taught a course about nothing). This year, I decided to offer a course on reading. I called it “How to Read a Sacred Text”. I designed and proposed the course last year, so by the time May rolled around, I’d already forgotten why I proposed the course, in the first place. Ostensibly, it was for the reasons that you’re probably imagining: everyone seems to be debating about whether or not we’re living through a literacy crisis, or even the end of literacy itself. This is an especially pressing question on college campuses, and in humanities departments like mine. But I had other motives for offering the course, even if I almost forgot what they were.

I had a sudden shock of remembrance as we were reading through the passages I’d assigned, from Ivan Illich’s In the Vineyard of Text. Writing in the early 1990s (in the wake of Amusing Ourselves to Death), Illich proclaims the death of “universal bookishness”, a phenomenon which had become, he argued “the core of western secular religion” (whose church was the school). Illich cedes the future, as perhaps we all have, to the screen. But he makes the argument that perhaps this is a good thing for reading, even if it means the death of bookishness. Perhaps bookishness itself was more about status and prestige, and less about reading. Perhaps reading has actually been limited by the age of bookishness.

Illich is disappointed by the death of the book and the rise of the screen, as he anticipates his inevitably bookish reader will be. Indeed, it’s the very sense of disappointment and even despair that led me to his book in the first place. But he’s interested in the forms of reading (like contemplative reading, the sort practiced by early medieval monastics) that were functionally squelched by the rise of scholasticism, which eventually gave way to print culture’s bookishness. In this transition reading becomes less frequently an act of seeking out God, or an attempt to interface with wisdom, and instead becomes the accumulation of knowledge. Perhaps now, in this moment when bookishness is dying, Illich suggests, we can finally witness the rise of what he calls houses of reading: particular spaces in which much more idiosyncratic reading practices are cultivated and preserved.

It was this idea—the concept of houses of reading—that had inspired my course on reading, to begin with. This idea, that perhaps even in the midst of what feels like a decline, there could be the renewal of something else felt like one way to combat my despair. When I had my students read James Marriott’s much cited and critiqued essay on the decline of literacy on the very first day of class, one of my students responded as I had when I first read the piece: “OK, so if this makes me feel despair, what do I do?”, she wanted to know. I’d felt the same way, and I suppose my answer had been: build a house of reading and invite people in.

Of course, I had no real idea what that meant. I knew that I wasn’t going to build a monastery. I’d read, with some envy, about the professor at Penn who offers a course where students do nothing but read, in a kind of late night collective isolation. But I have a ten year old to usher to bed: that wasn’t going to be the foundation of my house, either. It had begun to occur to me, however, that the religious traditions I spend so much time teaching and talking about had, each of them, many little houses of reading built up within them in which to cultivate a relationship with their sacralized texts. Even if I wasn’t yet ready to build a house of reading, I could at least offer a bit of a tour into what these traditions had already built, the ones I’d had occasion to wander in.

That was the idea for the course: it was a way to wander into different houses of reading, to see what we might find there. And the hope was that it would also be a pathway out of a kind of despair (for me) and an adventure for my students, who might suspect that reading opens a small door into a wild interior cosmos, but had probably gotten lost in the drudgery of what reading has become in the dying gasps of bookishness, and its increasingly decrepit and derelict schools.

YOU PROBABLY WANT to know how the class went. I haven’t read the evaluations yet, but I really loved it. It’s where this whole idea of the powers of reading came from (though I suppose it’s not especially novel, coming from someone who grew up with Reading Rainbow). It’s one of those ideas that surfaced, in one of our conversations, and just seemed to efficiently capture something about what we were all trying to get at. Despite the fact that I teach in the field of theology, I am not a sermonizer. I seek to open up worlds of ideas for my students, to convince them to get on a spaceship to the outermost regions of thought. I’m a fellow traveler, and sometimes an eccentric tour guide. But I don’t typically sermonize. I did find myself sermonizing this May, however. I couldn’t help it. I would get caught up in the gospel of the book, of reading, of the adventure of ideas, and I couldn’t stop. In part, it’s because I could see that my students were listening, and they started to adopt the language of these sermons, and make it their own.

What did we actually do? We read a lot, naturally. We talked about the decline of literacy, we talked about AI and digital reading and audiobooks, we talked about Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong. We also looked back into history so that we could talk about reading in monastic settings, about the printing press and the Protestant Reformation (they loved discovering Martin Luther’s disdain for the theological slop he hated to see emerging all around him, in print), about the way that reading enables political resistance, and about censorship. We talked about lectio divina, about the ritual performance of texts in bar and bat mitzvahs, and about the people who memorize the Qur’an. One of my students, who is a practicing Christian, told me that she finally felt like she knew how to read the Bible by the end of this semester. She could understand how different that sort of devotional reading is from the reading she does for school.

We also spent time thinking about, and engaging in, reading practices. They all checked a book out from the library, and I challenged them to finish it before the end of the month (3/4 of them did!) I asked each one of them to memorize a poem, and recite it for us on the last day (everyone pulled it off!) I brought in a stack of picture books from my daughter’s shelf and we read them to one another, while sitting in a circle. I asked them each to host a meeting of a “reading club”, where they would meet in a random location and read together, silently. One of the most memorable activities was a visit to our campus archives, where our archivist had pulled together some of the oldest texts in our holdings. There was a small corner of an ancient Egyptian papyrus with an interesting acquisition story, medieval manuscripts adorned with gold, polemic tomes from the 17th century, ostentatious 19th century family Bibles. Students kept referring to this visit as the moment when they really began to understand how much care, and effort, goes into the production of a text. Or how much used to go into this sort of production.

One of the surprises, for me, was the role that orality and oral traditions ended up playing in the course. Walter Ong wouldn’t have been surprised, perhaps, but this was about more than the way that orality enables literacy. Part of what I wanted to them to see was the way that reading can give us the ability to think and speak differently. This is why I gave them an oral exam, as the final, rather than asking them to write something down. And it’s probably also one of the reasons why I found myself so often adopting what Robert Bellah called the most American form of public expression: the sermon.

During their oral exams, every single one of the students talked explicitly about the powers of reading. And each of them had their own unique take. They talked about that certain kind of freedom that opens up, when you see that interpretation is yours for the taking, the text’s power to hold up an invisible mirror so you can see another reflection of yourself, the power to become an individual in the first place, the power to think against the social and political structures that might otherwise dominate you, the power to feel connected to the thin thread of a God who often feels so absent, the power to stand up in front of a community and speak to them in a language that’s more ancient than any of you and that binds you together, the power to situate yourself in a story until you can feel it in the marrow of your bones.

I’ve always believed, sometimes only subliminally, that there’s something sacred about the kinds of conversations that we have in a classroom, and about the particular sets of texts we assemble to help us have that long conversation we call a course. But I’ve never really spoken about it this way. It’s seemed out of line, somehow. I was recently in conversation with someone who teaches literature, who was despairing over how to convince students to connect with books, and texts, in this moment we’re living through. “Just tell them how sacred it all is!”, I said flippantly. Of course, they laughed at me, and listed off all the reasons why they would never be able to say that in their classroom, even if they believed it.

I suppose that’s the odd privilege I have, in my particular discipline. I can use that word with something like a straight face. What do I have to lose? Perhaps they won’t believe me. And perhaps history (or my contemporary colleagues) will judge me as a charlatan or a quixotic fool. Or perhaps there will be a historical gaze that looks back with a strange sort of reverence on the reading practices that we’ve managed to develop, and protect, and continue to cultivate. And I suppose it’s that flickering possibility that makes me feel as if I have nothing to lose, if I can convince my students that there’s something sacred in reading practices. That, if they have something like a soul, it might have been so deeply shaped by reading that the matter of this soul itself would all but disappear without a text to read it against.

A COUPLE OF weeks ago, I started to actually think about language again. I’d been at an event where the subjects under discussion were technology, devotion, and language. It struck me that I’d spent much of the recent past thinking about the first two, maybe even a bit obsessively, but I’d been taking language for granted. Part of it was, I will admit, that I’m bored by language about language. I love using language, and I love working with it like raw matter. I love shaping it, crafting it, singing it, speaking it, and absorbing it. And yet when people want to talk to me about language, and the rules, and structures, and logic, and processes that govern it, my eyes glaze over. But something shifted for me, recently. It’s as if language came back to life.

I’ve been concerned, as perhaps you are too, about what’s felt like a new sort of existential condition. But I’ve been thinking about it as a technological problem, or perhaps an attention problem. I’ve been feeling as if there’s something I’m trying to protect, but I haven’t been able to figure out what it is. I’ve tried to describe it in various ways: perhaps it’s interiority, I thought to myself at one point. But now, I think it’s language. I fear for language. Not that my trust was ever robust, but I’ve stopped trusting that we are creating, investing in, sharing, building, developing the right vessels to carry language into the future.

There are opposing tensions, built into language itself, between what I will describe as its magical and mechanical facets. As a whole, language itself is both. But when it becomes subject to analysis, it tends to be the most mechanical things that we focus on (the rules of grammar, the shape or function of words, the processes through which it becomes replicable). We want to understand it, so we search for the marks and patterns that simplify and explain it. This makes it easier to understand, and replicate. But a myopic focus on mechanics can kill magic. It’s always been poetry, perhaps, in its various forms and guises that works to bring these functions back together, to reweave them into a more integral fabric.

The morning after the event, as I was having breakfast in my hotel lobby, I noticed that one of my readers had posted a link to an essay, in the comment section of a post from weeks ago. I had a little time, so I clicked on the link and read it. It turned out to be one of those things that shows up in your life with timing that’s so strange and synchronous, it makes you want to believe in things like fate.

The essay wasn’t necessarily revelatory. What felt sort of revelatory to me was the way that I read it. The essay was by a neuropsychologist, Nicholas Humphrey. It’s essentially a theological essay, written by a scientist. Humphrey is making a defense of the soul. Unlike many, he’s willing to call it a soul (a term so charged that even I, a theologian, tend to avoid it!) But he’s willing to do this because, he insists, the soul is constructed by language. It’s something that culture creates for us, like a passport, and it bestows us with a “spiritual identity and rights.” We weave one another souls, he’s sort of suggesting, with language.

I think it’s actually a beautiful way to put it, and there’s a tenderness to this craft of weaving that I don’t think he really illuminates (he also spends a bit too much time on illusionism). But I’m trying to imagine how I would have read this same essay even a week or two earlier. I think, honestly, that I would have found it a bit reductive. Over the years I’ve grown to mistrust language about language. I’ve worried that it’s somehow designed to disregard the rich terrain of precognitive life that escapes capture in language. I’ve felt as if it doesn’t really take seriously the matter of dreams, or the deeply shared and collective nature of something like an idea that feels irreducibly magical, to me. I’ve felt as if it doesn’t have enough respect for the complex and messy matter of our bodies that actually make the language. I’d grown to feel as if so much language about language was subjecting it to logic and process and function, and that really disenchanted language for me. But because I’d somehow re-enchanted it, I was reading the whole thing differently. I didn’t find it reductive at all. It felt true.

For the last several years I’ve been thinking, somewhat obsessively, about reading and writing. I’ve been thinking about the practices (the technologies, really, as I’ve recently argued) that we’ve created to use and share language in particular ways. But I haven’t been thinking much about what they do with language, or what language does with them. And yet, why do I care so much about reading and writing? It’s because of their intimate relationship to language, how much these practices have become part of the way that we speak to one another, and hold one another, and welcome one another into the world. It’s because of the incredible and mysterious power that language has.

But I think that language, at least in the spaces of American culture where I use and encounter it, has been reduced to its own bare life. It’s been cheapened. People (perhaps even people like me) have convinced themselves that it isn’t really mysterious or powerful at all.

SAM ALTMAN IS the purveyor of what might be the apex product of this cheapening of language. He is the CEO of a company that has enriched itself on the cheapening of language. He’s reduced the value of language, so we might believe that we need his new language processing machine more than we need our own language. Not that he’s made the conditions for this possible. The conditions were there. The LLM was born into our culture because our culture allowed it to be, because it created the conditions to manifest, and then nurture, it. But Altman has become insanely rich because he’s so dramatically accelerated this cheapening of language.

It’s not simply that the LLM appeared in the world and made words cheap. Our educational systems had already decided that words, and language, were almost beside the point. They’d been taking them for granted for a very long time. Reading and writing have become cheap and simple tools everyone needs so that they can access the real goods of education: the toys you can learn how to play with, and the credentials you can use to make people afraid of you, so that they give you money. Forget about actually learning to speak other languages: why should Americans worry about that? And the leader of our nation seems to prove to us, over and over again, that language might just be a form of mental diarrhea. The rise of the LLM was possible because this is what language has become to our culture: something cheap, something to take for granted, or waste, or exploit. But, I think, the LLM is also a technology that’s rapidly accelerated this cheapening.

A couple of weeks ago, after the news stories appeared about the threats against his life, I saw one account in which Altman confessed to having underestimated the power of words. He was connecting the dots between the New Yorker profile of him, and that threat against his life. He seemed somehow shocked that something as simple and cheap as a string of written words in some elitist publication with declining stock could actually become a threat against his life: a thing worth billions of dollars, if you quantify life that way. Apparently Altman thought words were just some mental objects that could be operated, almost mechanically. He didn’t realize that they were, instead, something akin to life itself.

I was struck by the tragedy of that statement. This man, who has so irresponsibly contributed to the cheapening of what might actually be our most precious resource, merely to enrich his own company, finally (when it’s too late) begins to understand the weight of what he has done. Or what he has helped to do. I felt so angry. But I also felt so completely torn apart. I think I just felt, acutely, the tragedy of what’s happened: how cheap language has become, how seemingly without value, monetary or otherwise.

But what I’ve realized, since then, is that this cheapening has affected me more than I’ve realized. I’ve spent the last several years thinking about (mourning, grieving over) writing and reading. These are technologies that language has created, or that we’ve created to share language in new ways. Because they are technologies that have structured my entire identity and form of life, really, I understand them as embodied practices. They feel real and concrete to me. But I’ve ignored their relationship to language. And I don’t think it’s because language had become cheap to me. But I do think that it had been disenchanted.

I’d stopped actually thinking about language. I’d been taking it for granted, and relying on my own sense that it would always just be powerful, no matter what. I’d let something hide the magic of language, for me, so that it was only the technologies I used to channel and reshape language that felt sacred to me. I didn’t have the capacity to fight against the cheapening of language, because I wasn’t paying enough attention. Or I wasn’t paying attention to the right thing.

It’s ironic, of course, because I spend hours and hours in the classroom every week trying to help my students understand the power of words. It’s because I was so incredibly confused about the way that one particular word (God) could have so much social and political and cultural power that I was drawn, like a curious child, to get a PhD in theology. But all of this had been swept under the rug of my mind, I think. It had become part of the underworld of my ideas. I’d started to experience all of this only with a sense of amnesia.

I’ve also lost my sense of what a galactic underworld really is, since I first started this blog. I’ve actually thought, numerous times, that I might as well just change the name. No one really understands it, sometimes not even me. It sounds cool. But perhaps at the cost of being comprehensible. And yet, I haven’t been able to surrender it. But I’m realizing that language is the galactic underworld. Words are the little stars, illuminating that beautiful but abyssal set of powers circulating in and around us. Phrases are the little constellations that let us find the names to help us float, so we don’t drown in that abyss and can build worlds on it instead. So we can build one another souls.

I want to live in a world where language will still be strange enough, and extravagant enough, and intricate enough, and mysterious enough to do that.

Last week I was invited to speak at an event called Artifice: Questions of Language, Technology, and Devotion in Contemporary Classrooms hosted by a program called Teaching Religion in Public (TRiP) at Indiana University’s Center for Religion & the Human. It was hosted and organized by Constance Furey and Hannah Garvey (who did such a brilliant job curating the event, down to the smallest details). The impetus for the conversation was to think about AI as artifice, and to think about artifice more broadly. I had many good conversations, with many interesting people. And I’m left with a lot to think about. I’m especially struck by the fact that, while I’ve been thinking quite a bit about technology and devotion, over the last couple of years, I haven’t been thinking about language. Not really, or not explicitly. I plan to work out some thoughts about that, over the next couple of weeks. But, for now, I wanted to share with you an abridged and lightly edited version of the talk I gave.

FOR MANY PEOPLE, and I would include myself among them, OpenAI’s 2022 release of ChatGPT drove them back toward older cultural forms—writing chief among them—as refuge from the artifice of AI. Writing created by real, living, human people has felt like something authentic as opposed to the artifice of AI. It’s led people back to their humanist roots. It’s sent them ad fontes, or back to the sources that AI has gobbled up and digested as its data, back towards the physical matter of the printed book, back towards old texts written by human hands, towards practices of writing with our own hands, on paper that we can smell and touch with our animal bodies. In this emerging intellectual environment, writing and reading can feel like very authentic and human things to do, against the anti-humanist methods of an AI (which doesn’t really go ad fontes but instead chews sources up and makes them into a kind of hamburger for the mind).

I will admit that I’ve found myself, since November of 2022, more deeply invested in writing and reading than I’ve ever been. I’ve always considered myself, above anything else, a writer. So, I’ve always cared about writing. But I’ve found myself becoming profoundly emotional about things I never thought I cared about. I have shed actual tears for The College Essay. It’s a cultural product that (as a college professor) I’ve often resented. Nothing fills me with as much dread as a massive stack of college essays that I’m charged with grading on a deadline. It’s really one of the worst feelings because you know that you won’t be able to fight off the boredom inevitably embedded into so many of them. And yet, I’ve found myself literally grieving and weeping over this hated thing. Because I have felt, on some level, as if it’s a thing that keeps me rooted in a world, and a set of practices. And it’s been one reliable tool I can use to get to know my students, as real and living humans. At best, it can be a window into the way that they’re processing the course, internally. That’s valuable.

But, at least for a moment, I want to ask some critical questions about this reaction. To be clear, I am very critical of what AI is, and how it’s been rolled out in our society. I maintain a lot of trepidation about how it will inevitably be used (and is already being used) to amplify the ongoing enshittification of our educational and democratic political systems. And I want to be part of whatever movement there is to preserve reading and writing practices as essential to these systems, rather than watch them become luxury or boutique educational products that only a few learn to employ well. But I’m beginning to think that if we genuinely want to preserve some cultural centrality for writing and reading, we might actually be better off if we regard these as the (ambivalent) works of artifice that they are.

Writing and reading are technological products that we have figured out, in essence, how to hack for human (rather than antihuman) purposes. This wasn’t inevitable, and that achievement can show us a lot about who we are.

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IT WAS LAST SUMMER, I believe, when I started to think a little differently about this whole matter. I’d spent a couple of years immersed in copious, perhaps even excessive, negative feelings about AI. I wrote bitter things about it on Substack (which, I’d discovered, had become a treasure trove of commentary and debate about AI). And I spoke about it, resentfully, with anyone who would listen to me in my actual life. I worried about books. I worried over the practice of writing, both for myself and for my students. And then I read an essay, on Substack, that began to shift my thinking: ’s “How to Do Soul-Craft With State Tools”.

In it, Mullen is speaking directly to people like me. “We seem to be grieving literacy in public lately,” he writes. So much is at stake in this grief, he notes: our memory, our sense of interiority, even the sense of self that we’ve learned (in our literate culture) to develop. He understands the sorrow. But Mullen’s deeper concern is that, as he puts it, “grief alone cannot safeguard what it mourns.” If we want to safeguard something we have to understand what it actually is, where it comes from, what its roots look like, and why it appears to be so endangered in the first place.

What Mullen offers, in that essay, is a sort of ecological history of writing. He recounts the fact that writing itself began as a state tool. It was used, administratively, to keep track of economic records. It was part of a method that states used to enrich themselves. It took centuries, and waves of cultural and political change, for anything like mass literacy to develop. And all of this helps him make the point that writing is fragile, and unnatural.

We find ourselves, now, at a similar or resonant sort of crossroads. It’s one where AI is rendering us vulnerable to state power and control in new ways. And it’s genuinely disconcerting. We are vulnerable to the surveillance that it makes possible, and to the economic destabilization that it can also make possible. But (as I read him) Mullen sees, in the transformation of literacy from a method of state coercion to something that can shape interiority itself in incredibly creative (we might even say transcendent) ways, a kind of parable that offers hope for our “cognitive commons”. Writing can remind us how brilliant humans can be at hacking the systems that threaten to dominate and control them.

This ecological view of literacy, and the sort of frame it offered for the practices of reading and writing, helped to ease some of my bitterness. It gave me a little more hope for our cognitive commons, that not all would be lost. Perhaps this was, in part, because it helped me to denaturalize, or even deromanticize, writing. While it’s a technology that might create a particular sort of human it isn’t, itself, the foundation or fountain of that humanness. And, as a technology, writing too has had its own ambivalent effects on human cultures and societies. In creating the conditions of possibility for one sort of (literate) human, it also helped to erode the conditions of possibility for other (more oral) ways of being human. I’m not saying that this is good or bad. It just is. This ambivalent effect becomes easier to see, or recall, when we study the historical emergence of writing.

Writing is an incredible technological system for sharing signs and symbols, and so for shaping human consciousness. It’s a technology without which I would not feel like myself. I’m entirely dependent upon it for a sense of identity (and so, we could say, survival) at this point in my life and career, if I’m being honest. We could say the same thing about American culture, at this point in its own history. There are, as commentators have increasingly been observing, elements of our democratic culture that fall apart (that are arguably already falling apart) with literacy’s loss of centrality. It impacts far more than our educational system. It changes participation in the civic sphere—the democratic system—itself.

But writing can also be a technology for abstracting, or detaching, ourselves from the physical world we inhabit. Writing has helped people like me become very comfortable in isolation, often to their own detriment. It’s a technology that’s allowed generation after generation of monastically-inclined writers and scholars shut themselves off and commune with the dead. Personally, I love this form of solitude. I feed on it. And I will fight for anyone who wants to make it part of their life. But I will also concede that this sort of isolation has arguably laid the groundwork for us to engage with our computers and phones in the almost monastically isolated trance that I’m sure you are all familiar with. And it’s probably not unrelated to the perception that writing is an elite activity, most accessible to those who can afford that form of solitude.

If we want to protect the practice of writing, and if we want it to remain culturally central, I think that its ambivalence needs to remain at the front of our minds. Writing is something that I want to protect. But it’s not a neutral good. It’s not morally superior to technology, it is a technology. It’s something we must, as with all things (especially technology) engage with critically. Especially if we want to protect, or even revive it. The future of writing shouldn’t look exactly like its past. It has to live in a new world, and it needs a new kind of steward or defender. I think it needs to inhabit our cognitive commons in ways that it hasn’t quite, at least not yet.

IT’S NOT INCIDENTAL that writing practices can feel like a site of resistance, or a way to escape from the proliferation of generative AI. But it’s not because writing itself is more natural, or more human. Writing is also a practice that calls us into artifice. Rather, it’s because LLMs like ChatGPT offer us what I think Marshall McLuhan might describe as a useable hybrid of old and new technological forms. It’s because LLMs so seamlessly (almost magically) appear to produce what it is we humans produce, when we engage in the practice of writing. It’s because it’s not actually all that easy (despite the many claims and rumors) to make out that hard and firm line between writing produced by a human and the writing produced by an LLM. What we see, in the LLM, is arguably a hybrid form of human and artificial intelligence. It’s the meeting point of two modes of cognition.

We might experience the page that we write on (whether that be paper or a screen) and the prompting system of the LLM as two distinct media. The page is flat, blank, open, and high in friction (its openness calls us into it, but it’s only filled through our difficult labor). The prompt is engaging, low friction, and already feels full of data and information (it can make our labor appear superlative or unnecessary, as we know from so many economic predictions). We engage with the page, cognitively, in a different manner than the way we engage with the prompt. We might feel like a different sort of being, as we face into each medium.

At the same time, the prompt wouldn’t be what it is if the LLM hadn’t consumed billions of pages. And it needs native page producers to engage with it, so that it has more data. It’s dependent upon the page in that way. So, in this sense, the LLM is more of a hybrid form of media. The LLM isn’t just a prompter that contrasts with the page, it’s a page-prompter. McLuhan argued that the meeting point of media forms can be explosive. This encounter can “breed [a] furious release of energy and change,” as he put it. This can obviously be highly destructive, and even terrifying. It can destroy worlds (as literacy eroded oral cultures). But McLuhan also argued that this explosivity is ambivalent. It can also be revealing. “The hybrid meeting of two media is a moment of truth and revelation from which new form is born,” he wrote.

Crucially, perhaps, in order for this hybrid encounter of media to be revealing (rather than simply destructive) we may need to maintain an awareness of how the old medium is being rendered, by the new technology, into an art form. “Every new technology creates an environment that is itself regarded as corrupt and degrading,” McLuhan wrote. And, in so doing, it “turns its predecessor into an art form”. As art forms, they become “anti-environments” or “counter-environments” to the emerging technology that “provide us with the means of perceiving the environment itself”. As art, they become a form of resistance to the emerging technology, even as they are incorporated into the new technology.

The LLM has created an environment that is, increasingly I think, regarded as morally corrupt and degrading. In the face of this, writing (even the worst of it) now appears to many as an art form. I’m sure you’ve heard the celebrations, or perhaps you’ve even celebrated, bad writing in new ways. I’ve heard many of my academic colleagues claim that they even encourage their students to produce bad writing, because it’s a reminder of what a human actually sounds like. Bad writing feels, to them, like a form of relief. Any writing that takes place between a human and a page (even the most degraded and unreadable) now appears as a work of art.

I worry that a perspective like this threatens to make writing itself too precious. It risks becoming less of an art form to practice, and more of an over-valued consumer commodity. As a commodity, this bad form of writing becomes a precious relic that we can aestheticize and marvel over as a window into our human past. This sort of art, McLuhan argues, is “ludicrous and snobbish”. But when we remember that writing itself has always been a technology (one that many of us have learned to use artfully) to accomplish specific things, I think the perspective shifts. It becomes more possible, I think, to consider it a form of art that is what McLuhan describes as “a means of training perception”. This is art, as what he also calls “a radar” for “the function of indispensable perceptual training” rather than art as “a privileged diet for the elite”.

Writing, beautiful though it may be, may ultimately be of less social and cultural value to us as something to merely consume and more valuable as an old technology that can be used to help train our perception in a new technological environment. Writing as a form of art that trains our perception has the ability to help us think prophetically.

ART, FOR McLuhan, had the ability to serve an almost prophetic function. He believed that this sort of art (which, for him, was really nothing more than a means and method for training perception) had the capacity to anticipate future social and technological developments. And, as something older and more established than the latest form of technology (as something that might have become art only because of the newest form of technology), he believed that art also had the more conservative capacity to remind us of the “futility of changing our goals as often as we change our technology”.

I’m highlighting the almost religious (the prophetic) function of art, such as the practice of writing, because I think that religious traditions, perhaps more than any other archive that houses reserves of text, can show us how writing has functioned as a social technology not merely among elites but across social classes and across great stretches of time and space. I think that religious traditions (especially, but not exclusively, those that hold words and text to be divine in some shape or form) offer us a window into what it looks like when writing becomes something that shapes and trains perception.

As I see it, religious traditions have been experimenting with the technology of writing for a long time (for centuries and centuries). They’ve done incredible and terrible things with it. And I think that record can be of value for the world at-large today, in new ways.

In religious traditions we are offered a glimpse at various ways in which writing itself (and reading) has been preserved as a sacred practice. They show us (reading the Bardo Thodol over the bodies of the dead, for instance) how texts can cross the lines between life and death. Religious traditions show us how writing has functioned as a technology of power, control, and domination. Religious traditions have had to navigate the tension between using writing as a state tool versus using writing as soul-craft over and over again. For centuries. Religious traditions have experimented with democratizing precious technology (like text) and they’ve had to watch the good and the bad things that happen when they do. Religious traditions have worked to use writing to train perception across social classes (beyond the elite.)

The knowledge we might gain (about writing, about religion, about ourselves) in this understanding might be, on balance, ambivalent. But the better we can understand writing in its ambivalence, the better we will be able to understand what it does to, and for, us. The better we understand these ambivalent effects of writing, the better we will be able to sense and predict the ambivalent effects of the technology that’s consumed it. And that claims, now, to be producing it. The more we can see and understand this ambivalence, the more we can maintain a sense of agency, I think. And the more we can maintain a sense of agency, the more we can preserve a sense of interiority that feels recognizable. Ultimately, it was centuries of good writing that taught me, at least, to understand ambivalent things as a little more true.

THE LIFE OF THE MIND can feel a bit dismal these days, what with the disinvestment in education and the rise of generative AI. Especially for a humanist. Of the many humanists I know, and love, I find most split between hope and despair. Those who despair see before us, in the future, the intensification of older trends which foretell of even bleaker prospects for the humanities. Those who hope feed on statements, like the claim from Anthropic co-founder Daniela Amodei, that the humanities are poised to become more relevant than ever.

I would like to believe that those who are hopeful are right. The survival of the humanities feels, strangely, like my own survival in some way. But that might be a little disingenuous. Because, if the truth be told, I’m a bit of an imposter or an interloper in the humanities.

Sure, I’m a professor of theology whose department is housed in the humanities division of a small liberal arts college. So, institutionally, I’m a humanist. But the field I work in (religious studies & theology) is an interdisciplinary field, full of humanists as well as social scientists. It was an interdisciplinary field before interdisciplinarity was cool (and long before it stopped being cool). And the humanities (for good reasons, which I promise to discuss) tends to host a lot of tension with religion. So, I’ve been treated as an alien outsider by many academics, especially the native humanists in literary studies who often disdain (or are made anxious by) the taint of religion on my PhD.

But I also happen to think that whether or not you are an identifiable humanist is also the least important thing about the humanities. Sounds like something a pseudo-humanist would say, doesn’t it?

I WAS A DOUBLE MAJOR in comparative literature and Spanish, as an undergrad. I liked to think of myself as a humanist, though I didn’t quite know what that meant. It felt like a certain kind of style, or aesthetic. I was the kind of person who took lots of classes in literature. I liked books. I liked people who liked books. I liked to write. Sometimes I liked the other people who also liked to write. I knew that much.

During my final year at university, I planned to apply to PhD programs in literature. But I had a crisis of confidence when I was forced to pick a specific period to specialize in. I toyed with 19th-century American, but ultimately it all seemed too narrow to me and committing felt like an arbitrary form of self-betrayal. So I dropped the idea, worked in a bar for a while, and eventually became a daily newspaper reporter for a few years instead. A professor once told me that it would be like boot camp for writing, and it essentially was.

That time away from academic life also gave me some clarity about what I was actually interested in. I learned that I wasn’t necessarily interested in being a humanist. Nor was I interested in literature so much as I was interested in that strange ethereal matter that so much poetry, and also some fiction, was both erasing and yet also preserving. I didn’t understand it, and it fascinated me. I discovered that talking about religion, and especially theology, gave me a different point of access to it. So I went to graduate school, to study theology.

It was in a class on Reformation history, during my master’s, that I finally learned what the humanities actually are. Despite the fact that I’d always gravitated towards the humanities, I’d never quite understood them. I knew they had something to with books, and reading, and writing. And history, and philosophy. And art, at least to some extent. But was the humanities merely a collection of academic disciplines? Was the humanities the community of people who identified as humanists, rather than scientists? It had always seemed as if, when I tried to understand the humanities, there was nothing behind the curtain but a bunch of people who called themselves humanists.

But, studying the history of theology, I finally understood that the humanities are a method. Or a set of methods. I learned about, for instance, Desiderius Erasmus and his contemporaries, who—despite their religious commitments—did intellectual work that was incredibly destabilizing for religious institutions. In their move ad fontes (to the sources), they studied scripture in its original languages and discovered how much had been altered in translation. They didn’t keep this to themselves. They pointed it out. They offered critiques, and new translations in new languages.

To understand the incredible impact this had on religious life, we need only to look to Martin Luther who inherited, and utilized, these methods. I don’t think it’s particularly controversial to claim that the Protestant Reformation, to which Luther and so many others contributed, was a radical and dramatic reorientation in religious life. It was a reformation sparked by many things (including the usual suspects: politics and economics). But it was also driven by the humanities, and its incessant move to go ad fontes.

This move toward the sources—ad fontes—is a practice. It’s a way of doing something, not a way of identifying yourself. It’s a way to develop a kind of relationship with sources. You listen to them carefully, you speak to them, ask them questions, trace their lineages, peel back the layers and look at what comprises them. In many cases, you end up engaging with the voices of the dead. It’s important to have a good method, or set of methods, to do something wild like that.

It’s a practice that’s inherently destabilizing, because it’s interrupting the very things that, in so many cases, have been used to establish forms of power and authority: sacred texts, letters of the law, etc... This is why the humanities are often in tension with religion. And it’s because there have been so many theologians (like Luther) who use these methods that theology itself has often been in tension with religion (despite the fact that it’s also, more often, associated with it.)

I THINK THE DRAW towards the humanities, and books, that many people seem to feel right now is for a certain style, aesthetic, or feeling. It’s the longing for a less digital way of being. And I think this can serve to draw attention to the humanities. It can help to create a scene. And a scene can do things. It can point you towards the people you want to be like, and away from the people you don’t want to be like. But if what we want is to protect an intellectual heritage against corporate exploitation, a scene is not enough. We need the boring and difficult thing: the means and the methods.

Despite my own inner conviction that the humanities are methods and practices (not types of people) I know that this isn’t how many people tend to think about them today. In academic institutions the humanities tend to be a collection of underfunded departments staffed by people who identify as humanists, who often understand themselves to be in a battle with the scientists (or technologists) for administrative sympathy and resources.

This understanding of the humanities (let’s call it, for the sake of expediency, the identitarian approach) makes it resonate in strange ways with the rightward-leaning push for a revival of the classics. Many of the sources that are included in the right-wing return to “western” roots in Ancient Greece and Rome are sources that plenty of humanists also read. If there were to be a humanist revival that unfolds as an identity movement, what would distinguish the humanist’s relationship with Cicero from that of the rightward leaning classicist? To be the type of person who reads Cicero, and who refuses to sever that nourishing connection to the past, is a nostalgic sort of hunger for roots that could potentially bridge a humanist revival with a right-wing return to the classics. Here, the sources authorize your present identity. You go ad fontes to determine, or authorize, what sort of person you are.

I think that the humanities, as a method, offers something else. It’s the embrace of a certain kind of tension. It’s the willingness to unsettle, and be unsettled. Or the hunger to peel back layers, and to take the risks (including the dissolution of who you thought you were) implied in doing so. You go ad fontes to remake the present, including yourself, in a strange conversation with the past.

This isn’t to suggest that the use of a method doesn’t change who you are, and how you function in the world. Of course it does. But, I think, if you take this particular method seriously enough you will be inclined to resist an understanding of your identity as genuinely contained by that method.

One of the reasons why so many people are interested in the humanities right now is because the proliferation of generative AI has forced us to ask (as we have always, in various ways, been asking) what makes us human. It’s the reason why everyone seems to be talking about consciousness right now. Interest in the humanities is a different variation on the same theme.

Given that this is the case, I think it’s the humanities as a method or a practice, rather than an identity, that offers us the best chance at maintaining any sense of intellectual sovereignty in the midst of AI proliferation. Generative AI is essentially anti-humanist in method. These LLMs may have absorbed millions of sources (more than any scholar could ever dream of reading). But they don’t develop relationships with them. They don’t begin to revise their sense of self, or their frame of mind, in relation to them. LLMs make a hamburger out of the sources, and feed it to us so that it’s processed for easy digestion. The humanist method for thinking, and encountering text, knows that there are real pigs (or maybe cows) in that hamburger, and is willing to take the absurd next step to try and find out where that pig (or cow) actually came from.

Books aren’t sacred objects (even though I sometimes feel tempted to believe that they are). But they are very special technologies, for humanist methods, because they claim to be the creation of a specific person, or set of people. If that was a lie then there is, at least, an interesting story to discover. And if it wasn’t, the sparse technology of black ink on white paper offers you a strange and potentially electrifying point of access to another mind, moving through time and space. That might be sacred.

But maybe you shouldn’t take my word for it. I might only be a pseudo-humanist.

OVER THE PAST several weeks I’ve been writing about public theology: how theological (or quasi-theological) ideas appear in public, and do things in the polis. Meanwhile, to the dismay of many in the American public, people like Pete Hegseth have essentially been doing public theology as they try to make holy meaning out of acts of war. I know (because I’ve heard people say so) that it’s a sign for a lot of Americans that theology has no place in the public sphere. It makes them wish that theology would just disappear and leave us in peace.

Unfortunately, theology doesn’t disappear. It just goes underground (where it waits to explode, like a land mine). It is, nevertheless, the case in American culture that only a select group of people feel authorized to talk about, and comment on, matters that verge into the theological. Hegseth claims this authority, as a certain sort of Christian. And words like peace or human rights have come to feel like hollow or exhausted responses, to many. What if a certain (dare I say) theological investment might revivify them? I’m talking about the sort of investment that both religious and non-religious people might benefit from: the sense (for instance) that more than human powers actually want, for us, a world without vindictive violent destruction. I think that’s something we could say pretty confidently (but also speculatively) about either God or nature.

But part of the reason why Americans don’t tend to say things like that in public is because such theological claims have been privatized. That is (for better and for worse!) what secularization has done. This doesn’t mean that they’ve been domesticated and kept within the home. It means that such claims exist within a private corporate network that functions as a shadow to the civic world. And if you don’t belong to one of these private corporate networks, theology is not meant for you. Meanwhile, the theology produced in this corporate context continues to act on whatever is left of your civic world.

You might wish that theology would just disappear. And you might think that my framing question here (who gets to do theology?) is the wrong question to ask. I get it. But I’m asking the question anyhow, because I think it’s worth talking about how it got to be the case that here in America non-religious people aren’t typically authorized to talk about, or trusted to comment on, theology. And what that means.

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MANY PEOPLE ASSUME that the reason why non-religious people don’t study or talk about theology is because secularization banished it from the public sphere, to protect the public from undue or coercive religious influence. People tend to assume that secularization in the US was a move to protect people from theology, in other words. But, really, it might be more accurate to say that it was a move to protect theology from people. Or from the secular world at large.

In the early years of the American experiment, colleges here didn’t look much like they did in Europe. This was, in large part, because some of the first universities in Europe were founded in the early Middle Ages not to study religion, but to study the practice of law. Trade was booming, and rulers wanted bureaucrats who could write trade laws and develop contracts. Eventually, theologians ended up making their way into those universities. But that was sometimes controversial. Their relative freedom from the church, in that academic setting, was always a bit of a liability. Too much freedom meant that you were flirting with heresy. If you wanted to think theologically, it was safer to just join a monastery where religious affairs were always orderly. But it was useful to have theologians in those universities, because creating trade laws means that you need to be good at thinking about power. And theologians are good at thinking about the nature and shape of power.

In early America, the situation was quite different. Education here was deeply Protestant from the very beginning, in part because Protestants didn’t have monasteries. Their clergy were secular people. But it was also the case that educational institutions (especially on the “frontier”, in places like Indiana where the little college where I teach was founded) played a crucial role in the development of civic life. These schools were often tiny, but they were training the professionals who would become the region’s ministers, teachers, and other local bureaucrats or civic functionaries. At this time the Master of Divinity degree was the most predominant professional degree in the country.

Eventually, however, as these small colleges evolved (if they didn’t close) they began to offer more courses, in more subjects. Their curricula began to tilt in a secular direction. The strong influence, here, was the research university model that began in Germany and was, especially after the founding of institutions like my alma mater the University of Michigan, on the rise after the mid-19th century. The smallest of these colleges retained the more intimate (and often more open to religion) liberal arts model. But the majority of these institutions slowly began to offer an education that was more and more secular.

One of the key reasons for this is because the denominations that founded these institutions moved their departments of theology (and all associated programming) to seminaries. They separated the seminaries from the colleges. At my college, Hanover, the Indiana Presbyterians moved the seminary to New Albany. That seminary later folded, and was incorporated into McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago. The aim of such moves was not to erase theology, but to control it.

Rather than let theology run wild and become unpredictably managed in a secular institution where people might allow experimental new forms of it to foment and develop, this allowed religious denominations to manage their theology. They kept it standardized, and ensured that all pastors in the tradition would receive that standard version. If you were a Methodist then you learned about Methodist theology. If you were a Catholic, you learned about Catholic theology. You weren’t encouraged to think about how other sects might interpret theological ideas (unless you were being encouraged to think about their views as inaccurate or insufficient in some way).

Many schools removed departments of theology from their institutions completely, or turned theology departments into departments that more objectively studied religion, rather than getting involved with the ideological quagmire that is theology. Today departments of theology in undergraduate institutions (like the one I teach in) are rare. There are some catholic schools that teach catholic theology, or evangelical schools that teach evangelical theology. But few schools have a theology department where the nature of that theology hasn’t already been predetermined. Where even non-religious ideas or practices can be contemplated as theological.

Theology has snuck into other disciplines in subtle and somewhat subterranean ways. Famously, and controversially, there are a number of scholars of religion who have been accused of being undercover theologians of a sort. Such a charge has been leveled against “historians” of religion like Mircea Eliade and Rudolph Otto, for instance. They’ve pretended to be doing an objective study of religion when, really, they’re just doing theology (is the charge.) And it’s also the case that literature and art are both cultural sites where theology often bubbles just below the surface but is never quite spoken about in explicitly theological terms. The subtle theological, or religious, or maybe just spiritual dimensions remain a bit unspoken so that the conversations can continue. Theology, properly speaking, is often taboo in settings that don’t actually seek a kind of revenge against the secular or civic world.

There is something very Protestant, I will acknowledge, about the idea that you can talk about theology beyond the institutional confines of a specific religion. Protestantism has, as one of its animating impulses, this anti-authoritarian—perhaps even, if we’re being generous, a bit democratic—impulse to make religious materials as broadly and widely accessible as possible. And yet there is also a counter-impulse within Protestantism towards sectarianism, which can have the tendency to work against the democratization of things, and lend itself instead to the creation of little elite spheres of influence that are thought to be predestined for greatness.

To the extent that I have been influenced by the Protestant tradition (I earned my PhD in theology from a Methodist college, my mother’s side of the family has historic ties to Latvian Lutheranism, and perhaps more influential than anything else, I grew up in the USA), I will own that I might be drawing a little something from that more democratizing well of the tradition. But I do so not to maintain Protestantism but for the dream of a complex multireligious democratic politics, which is not a dream that belongs to Protestantism alone.

NOT LONG AGO, in one of my theology classes, a non-religious student offered a kind of perfect mirror, to show me what they’d been learning. “Theology just exists in the public sphere”, my student said to the room. “It’s there. It’s doing things. It impacts us.” This is true, whether you’re religious or you’re not. She was recognizing that this as a problem, but also a fact.

I teach my students to see this. And I also teach them to believe that they can speak into that world, critique it, and reshape it, no matter who they are. For me, doing theology means seeing how and where theology has shaped the world you inhabit (your view of nature, or your politics). It means being able to think critically about this. But it also means recognizing that these ideas might be empowering or disempowering you, whatever you believe. And you have a right to speak about that, and make judgements. We teach people to study biology without making them into biologists, because we believe that this is knowledge they need about the world. I think about theology in that way.

For some commentators, like Ross Douthat, the theology that’s stuck there at some of the deepest layers of American public life and policy is perhaps the only thing that’s holding us together. For people like Douthat, the loss of the (white) Protestant majority means nothing less than the loss of American identity. And he’s open to a kind of cultural switch, in which catholicism might now rise to take on the mantle of cultural authority in America. But he fears a world where the public sphere isn’t essentially animated by Christian theology. I don’t want to live in Douthat’s world. I have a different set of concerns, as you might. I often wonder, for instance, whether a democracy is ever really possible when a near majority of the people within it actually worship a king.

I know that many people have lost their faith in democracy as such. The Kamala Harris campaign tried to run their campaign on what felt, to me, like a political theology of democracy. The campaign assumed that we cared enough about democracy to vote for it. That we valued democracy in an almost religious way. And they lost that wager. But I’m not ready to give up and live in Douthat’s world, where the only alternative is to invest in the authority of the Christian tradition. I am going to keep assuming that something like a pluralistic democracy is possible, even if it’s currently broken. But I also happen to believe that, if such a thing is going to be possible, it might need something like a theology to animate it. Even if the community to which that theology is accountable isn’t religious in any sort of uniform way.

AFTER MY POST last week, on the thorny matter of public theology, I was drawn (especially by the comments) to think a bit more about the people who are most likely to be shut out of conversations about theology: people who aren’t religious. This is something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about, as a non-religious person who also (perhaps counterintuitively) has a PhD in theology. There are a lot of non-religious people who have no interest in thinking about religion. But there are also, I know, a lot of non-religious people (like me) who simply feel locked out of conversations about religion, as if they’re straying where they don’t belong. And there are a lot of people who exist at the uncomfortable fringes of their own religious tradition, and feel as if the public conversations about religion have shut them out.

I’ve been thinking about this problem for a long time. And I don’t necessarily have any good answers. But I do think that I have some insights into the way that this problem shapes public life (and is shaped by public life) that I think are worth sharing. There’s a short passage from my new (and forthcoming) book More Than Human Power: On the Afterlives of Theology that I wanted to share with you. It’s getting, I think, at the strange conundrum of being one of those non-religious people who can’t/won’t stop talking or thinking about religion. And it’s reflecting on how uncomfortable that can be, especially because I tend to resist the labels that are available to me. None of them seem to actually describe the complexity of the situation, as it appears to me. Here’s the passage:

WHEN THEY LEARN that I’m a theologian, people always want to know if I’m religious. I usually say, “no.” I was never baptized, or converted into any sort of tradition. And the traditions I was born into were only very gently passed along to me, to the extent that I’ve often lost track of them. I sometimes don’t even feel as if they were ever really mine in the first place: like a beautiful old set of sterling silver cutlery, in a box in the basement. Explicitly or exclusively religious spaces can feel uncomfortable, and maybe even a little bit dangerous, to me. The United States of America is a political space that asks people to carry some sort of passport to identify themselves religiously. If pushed, I tend to check the “non-religious” or “secular” box on the form. That feels like the form of life I was born into: it’s just who I am, or how I was made. It’s my tradition, it describes my practices. I’m secular by formation, you could say.

I am, however, a theologian by trade and training. I am trained to think about God and other divinities. People often see this as a contradiction in terms. Theology is associated with religion. How can you be a non-religious or secular person and also a theologian? This is, perhaps, why I always resist describing myself as a secularist. I’m not trying to convert others into some form of non-religion, or remove all traces of religion from public life. I’m not an ideologue with a secular vision of public order. For me, religion and theology are part of the ecology of secular spaces. And secular concepts, spaces, and people have complicated the ecosystems of religious traditions.

I believe in the beauty and importance of a pluralistic public world: one where various forms of difference, including multiple religious traditions, can thrive and co-exist. One where people can even comfortably belong to, or practice, multiple religions. I like to see spaces being created within religious traditions themselves for people who might otherwise have been excluded from them (especially exclusions that happen because of gender, sexuality, race, or class). And I think that some sort of social or political tension with religious authority (some sort of secularity) can be useful, in order to make this sort of complexity possible.

The pluralized, or pluralizable, social world that that I would like to live in only seems possible against a particular sort of background. This doesn’t necessarily need to be a gray, or beige, neutral background. But it does need to be one where surprising mixtures are possible. It needs to be a little messy, or chaotic, perhaps. So, I appreciate the way that secular social cultures have sometimes allowed for this sort of pluralistic religious complexity to develop. It’s allowed for the production of complex and hybrid identities, like mine. Religion and the secular are like different sorts of social or political instruments, which can produce different phenomena. They are often co-dependent, and mutually constitutive. They are bound together, ecologically.

But the reality is that I’ve often been met with hostility because I exist in the zone between two spaces that many people imagine are mutually exclusive. There are many secular people, especially in academia, who have written me off, or actively excluded me, because my degree in theology stinks too much of religion. And there are also plenty of religious people, especially in my field, who have written me off because they don’t understand which of their boxes I fit into. Or they resent the fact that I disregard their boxes. “Maybe you’d like this spiritual, but not religious box?”, they might ask me. But I don’t find the category “spiritual”, which has been actively rendered apolitical, to be very useful as a form for identification that is ultimately political.

The zone I inhabit can feel a bit lonely. But I’ve discovered, over time, that I am far from alone here. There are more people in this zone than most of us realize. There are a lot of people who are uncomfortable with the forms they’ve been asked to fill out, in order to pass through the religiously inflected terrain of American political life. There are a lot of people who don’t actually see themselves (their lives, their identities, their practices, their traditions) on these forms. But, especially as religion has been increasingly politicized in American life, people are expected to clearly situate themselves in relation to religion. Even if the relation to religion is simply negative, or non-existent. It is ultimately a political matter. If you become religiously unidentifiable, or you have no papers as you pass through this zone of public life, you become a problem. Someone is always coming after you, with a box.

WHEN I WAS EARLY in my career as a theology graduate student, I remember having a conversation with my mom that reflected my developing understanding of (and anxiety about) this particular issue. We’d already had a lot of existential conversations about death, love, friendship, fear and bravery, kindness, how to be good... all of the things that really matter. I knew what sort of person my mother was, and I knew a lot about her. But I realized that I didn’t actually know what she thought about God. I might have been in my late 20s or early 30s when I finally asked her. What she said was, essentially, “I don’t really know. I think it’s a mystery.”

I remember telling her that I thought this was a little irresponsible. “I feel like you should at least know where you stand on the God thing,” I can remember saying.

I’d internalized this American sensibility that everyone needs to understand their position in the map of religious identities and theological takes. I’d taken on this idea as my own, and I was expecting my own mother—who has every right not to know! Who might know better than to know!—to be more politically accountable to this regulatory ideal. To be more comprehensible to the identity-marking system. Since then, I’ve wrestled a lot with how to account for myself, and also how to evade this accounting for myself. But I’ve pushed myself to become semi-comprehensible (partially packaged) because I want to be part of these conversations about religion and life (especially political life). And this is part of the ticket to entry. The PhD in theology gets me partly there. But I’ve always had a lot of trouble trying to articulate exactly who I am, when I join these conversations.

Part of what you get, when you can identify yourself clearly, is a community of other (hopefully) like-minded people. And I don’t want to make it sound as if I find this without value. I am always on the lookout for little groups of like-minded others. I value them deeply. So I don’t mean to undersell the importance of this.

But I’ve also come to adopt the position that this American practice of checking papers at the border of religious life, and refusing entry on what is ultimately often superficial or suspect grounds, isn’t particularly good for us collectively. We’ve platformed a lot of terrible people, simply because they’ve leaned hard (if unconvincingly) into some ultraprocessed version of a Christian identity. And we’ve denied a lot of powerful leaders any real social power because they didn’t check the right box on the form.

I’m not saying that your religious identity doesn’t matter, or that your own particular take on a theological issue doesn’t matter. I obviously think that these things matter, or I wouldn’t be a professor of theology. These things matter to people, and so they matter to the collectives in which people gather. But I don’t think that the forms and the boxes and the documents we’re made to carry really tell us who we are anymore (if they ever really did). They don’t tell other people who we are. This is certainly true for people who get branded as non-religious, but it’s true for many religious people as well. I think we can live in a more borderless world, at least in this regard. But, for many reasons, we don’t.

Regardless of the way things actually are, I refuse to accept that it’s all inevitable. The worlds we inhabit (and our internal worlds, our inner ecologies) are in fact highly complex. They can’t be processed and packaged for FDA approval. They can’t be boiled down into boxes that we can check, on a form. None of us who live in the United States exists in either a purely secular or a purely religious state of being, no matter how much we might fervently want to believe that we do.

I resent the passport system not even just because I believe that it keeps certain people locked out of conversations about religion. More than that, I think it keeps us closed off from ourselves, and from one another. It keeps us from understanding the world we live in. I know that the United States is a political space that can feel (and can be) torturous. I won’t deny that. But there are nevertheless so many things about living here that I deeply love and value. And I think that, ultimately, this is not unrelated to the fact that it’s a place cut through in strange ways with many wild hybridizations of religious and secular forms of life. And it’s a place where those hybrids keep growing (often in a way that’s totally out of control). I think I like the creative chaos of that, even if it sometimes scares me.

This isn’t a given. It’s partly an accident of history, and partly an achievement of creative people who were given a lot of materials, and a lot room to work. I think it’s worth preserving, in some form. But this can only happen if we stop policing the borders, maybe especially in our own minds. We have to be able to walk into the agora (or maybe just the supermarket) and regard one another, and ourselves, differently.

Religious people need to understand how much they are reaping the spiritual and existential benefits that rain down upon them because of the work that secular people, and secular politics, have done. And secular people need to be able to reach deep down and find that religious other within, who is hiding in their winding inner world, and feeding them little forms of power now and then. I understand that, in this political experiment we’re living in, you may harbor very real feelings about the violence that this other has done to you. But we are so much more entangled than we’ve come to believe. That’s not just a good thing. It’s sometimes a very ugly thing. And yet, we have to be able to stand in line at the supermarket, and see ourselves in the bizarro mirror that is the weirdo in line in front of us, who’s lost in his phone.

THERE IS A New York Times op-ed that’s been making the rounds in my network, which is dense with people (like me) in the field of religious studies and theology. In it, New York Times columnist Lauren Jackson argues that—in the face of war, economic collapse, and political upheaval—Americans seem eager to engage in the form of public discourse that is theology. It’s not entirely clear what she thinks people want, when they want theology. It sounds like she could just mean “being Christian in public.” Or it could be she’s just noticing a hunger for that mixed brew of existential meaning and good feelings.

The irony, of course, is that many people (especially on the left) are no longer religious. But in this dismal moment, perhaps, they are looking for something that religion used to do, or used to provide. Jackson ends up in a conversation with several of my colleagues, trying to figure out what exactly that thing is. She calls it public theology.

The other irony, for me, is something that I’ve been writing about in my new book More Than Human Power: On the Afterlives of Theology (which is forthcoming with Columbia University Press). It’s that precisely at this moment when theology is something the wider public might want, it’s also something that’s essentially being starved into nonexistence in American higher education. This is true about many things in American higher education right now, of course, like scientific research. The American public is hungry for good scientific research, and yet here we are in a situation where that is being economically starved.

But the situation with theology is special. This has been happening for decades, because of the secularization of American culture. But it’s even happening in American seminaries where the conceptual, speculative, metaphysical work of theology is being sidelined in favor of more practical and pastoral approaches. Pastoral and therapeutic approaches are a better fit in a wellness-oriented culture like ours. The strange speculative work of conceptual theology is not. And yet, I don’t think that any pastoral or therapeutic method worth its salt should avoid the unsettling speculative questions that theology puts you into contact with. It’s not because they will make you feel good. Rather, I think it just gives you a better sense of what you’re actually dealing with, and how to navigate through it (hopefully without becoming more evil, in the process.)

WHEN I WAS WORKING on my book, I sat down with a lot of my colleagues in theology, for interviews. I wrote about them here. But there were a few insights that have stayed with me, and that I keep thinking about. My colleague Amaryah Armstrong, for instance, observed that there’s a kind expectation about what theology is that’s overtaken conversations in seminaries, especially. People come to theology looking for positivity and good feelings. “People want hope, people want solidarity, people want to feel some kind of unity,” Amaryah told me. “Maybe they’re willing to go through some kind of melancholy or lament. But they want to get to the other side of that by the end of the book, or whatever.” For Amaryah this is a problem because, “it always puts a limit on how you’re thinking about something. To me, honestly, it puts a limit on the study of God. The reason I left fundamentalism was that there was that kind of limit, in terms of the sorts of questions we should be asking.” It’s in part because of this demand that Amaryah has been part of a diaspora out of the field.

To me, this seems like a clear result of secularization. In a cultural context where religion is often present in public discourse as a political problem, and where it’s aspirationally sequestered in the private sphere, religion has to work hard to make itself look acceptable and appealing. It needs to look like something that helps, rather than something that challenges or unsettles you. It needs to look like something that will make you feel good, rather than something that will make you feel uncomfortable. It needs to look like something that will fix your problems, rather than cause them. Even in seminary contexts (or perhaps especially in seminary contexts) the aim is to cultivate religion as a feel-good resource for a wellness-oriented culture. This is how it makes a positive (rather than a negative) social contribution.

But, if you are taking theological questions, seriously, they often make you feel very uncomfortable. Some of the most important theological questions are some of the most uncomfortable. Why do we die? There are many predictable and easy ways to answer this theologically, but those are also often the least intellectually credible and the most unsatisfying. Why is there so much evil in the world? That’s always a hard one, and it’s not like asking that question will make the evil go away. What am I supposed to do with my life? Again, lots of easy ways to answer that one, and those are often the least satisfying. The ones that feel real and honest are often the most difficult to contend with. Or, one of my personal favorites: what’s the relationship between God and nothingness? Why does thinking about divine things (or even just what Paul Tillich called ultimate concerns) often feel like staring into the abyss? Not an easy question to answer, but an important one to struggle with.

One of the open secrets in the academic field of theology is that studying theology often leads people to disaffiliate with the religious traditions they were raised in. When they take these theological questions seriously, they often feel a sense of betrayal over the fact that these questions are often elided, and not engaged with seriously, in a pastoral context. It might be the case that the pastoral aim is to provide a certain kind of therapeutic resource, but many people feel cheated when they realize that the therapeutic resource they were offered didn’t actually show them what kind of a cosmos they were dealing with. It didn’t show them the voices from their own tradition that were hidden from them, for the sake of expediency.

Is this unsettling what Jackson imagines that the public really wants? I kind of doubt it. Would the American public benefit from contending with questions like this? I don’t know.

JACKSON CITES AN old article by theologians Charles Mathewes and Paul Dafydd Jones, as a kind of gloss on what public theology might look like now (as opposed to the mid-20th century, when American Protestant thinkers established it as a category). In that essay, they address the positivity question to some degree. Public theology, they write, is a form of civic engagement “that combines contemplation, prudence and a hopeful democratic sensibility.” But what interests me about this point is what this form of hope is oriented around: hope for democracy, for this complex and messy shared life that’s conditioned by our political framework.

Right now, cultivating hope for democracy also necessarily means cultivating some critical reflection about your own religious (or anti-religious) sensibilities. That’s not really therapeutic work. It doesn’t offer people flattering pictures of who they are. It’s not easy to fit into a feel-good narrative for our wellness-oriented culture. And it’s unclear to me that the New York Times, or our social media ecology, can really accommodate that sort of difficult labor right now. Even here on Substack, people tend to click on the links that promise to make them feel good, and righteous. I’m guilty of it, too.

In my book, part of what I’m reflecting on is the death of theology. But of course, as I acknowledge, people are going to keep doing theology in public. People are never going to stop talking about divine things. God, other gods, questions of ultimate existential uncertainty: as long as we are human, these things will exist in our publics. That never dies. But what concerns me is that the fragile institutions of higher education that have allegedly been designed to prepare people to live in this aspirationally democratic world increasingly find this kind of formation (this kind of intellectual training) to be a luxury product, or unnecessary. These institutions are disinvesting, not only in theology but also other fields in the humanities, which take similar questions on in different ways.

People will always do theology, don’t worry! That’s a refrain I’ve heard from many people, as I’ve talked about this book project. I’m not worried about that. What I’m worried about is the disappearance of formal spaces where people (especially people who aren’t part of a religious institution) can struggle with some of the most difficult and unsettling elements of this kind of knowledge, in community with one another. If you don’t have an actual community of human beings to struggle through these questions with, you may never find the fortitude to explore the most difficult, unsettling, and ultimately important questions. Speaking things aloud to real people builds courage. A small room of other people is a nascent public.

This semester I’m teaching a new course that I’m calling Food, Fitness & Faith. We’re talking about religion and wellness culture from all kinds of different angles. The other day, in a conversation about collective effervescence and team prayer, one of my students uttered a phrase that made me feel pretty good about what we’ve been doing in that class together. Acknowledging the ambivalence of both collective effervescence and team prayer, the student said, “sometimes you kind of have to pick your poison.” Nothing is pure. And yet we have to live, and make decisions. That’s one of the things that we’ve been talking about all semester, though not in quite those words.

Poison isn’t necessarily a good thing. Not always. But medicine can be poison. So, in other words, poison can sometimes provide a little bit of healing. It doesn’t mean you should forget that it’s poison. Talking about theology, or doing theology, doesn’t necessarily offer redemption. But I do think it can do a kind of harm reduction. I think the public sphere is better off when the people who exist within it know how to pick their poison. They know what kind of medicine they might need. They know what happens when you take too much of it. They know what happens when you give it to the wrong people, who don’t need it. But poison is a hard sell. Nobody thinks that they want it.

WAR IS IN THE PSYCHE these days, in the way that things like plastics get into the water. There have been several nights, over the past week or so, when the last images that have flashed across my mind’s eye as I drift off into sleep are images from the news: cars flooding the highways outside of Beirut as people flee, burning clouds billowing over oil storage facilities in Tehran.

It’s not that I am in denial about the world as it is, or that I feel I deserve to escape it, but I will admit that I recently went looking for some existential comfort food. A book, I thought, will offer me something different. An old book. One that’s buoyed me in some way, perhaps a long time ago. This is one of the things that we’ve always asked books to do: to help us surface, so we can breathe again.

For some reason (perhaps, in part, because it’s been nagging me from the shelf for a couple of months now), I opened Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. It’s a text that I associate with optimism—the sort of American optimism that feels like a bygone relic of my 1990s childhood, and the earlier eras that fed it. But it was also, at least during some phases of my life, rather like a sacred text to me. It seemed like it would be existential comfort food.

I felt almost offended, then, to re-encounter that second inscription in the book, right there on the first page: “Know’st thou there is but one theme for ever-enduring bards? And that is the theme of War.”

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WHEN I WAS AN UNDERGRAD at the University of Michigan, I spent a spring semester in Maine. It was part of a program in the English Department that (for decades now) has been bringing students to live an isolated existence—without cell phones or computers—in the New England woods for six weeks, so they can read old books.

I was already familiar with many of the figures we read (Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Ralph Waldo Emerson among others). But reading them in that place, in that particular way, with that particular group of people turned them into very different texts. We existed in a rugged little bubble where our books, and our conversations about them, became the most important thing happening in our world. We talked about these books while we cooked our meals, and ate them. We wrote about them in our little paper journals that we carried everywhere and scribbled in constantly. The writers became the subjects of running jokes, as if they were a living part of our makeshift community.

Those six weeks, in the Maine woods, were probably the closest thing I’ve ever had to a monastic experience. We’d all taken a vow to leave our technologies behind for six weeks which (even in the early 2000s) felt quite ascetic. We’d also vowed not to introduce socially divisive intoxicating substances (though I do recall that cigarettes were very much a part of the experience). This too felt quite ascetic, after the years I’d already spent in a university that was notorious for its party scene.

I don’t know how many others felt this way, but at the end of the six weeks I was probably, effectively, a transcendentalist convert. Some of those books, like Leaves of Grass, had become like religious objects to me. The woods were like a chapel, to me. And I felt like I understood why Whitman believed that democracy needed a beautiful, pulsing, messy, earthy, queer, ecstatic song with a thousand different entry points, if it was ever going to matter to people. That became, I think, part of what I understood democracy to be: a pulsing, messy, ecstatic idea that was as fragile as a lacy black verse on a white page. It, too, felt sort of like a religious phenomenon. I suppose that’s not especially comforting, but for some reason I ended up filing this poem away in my memory as existential comfort food.

WHITMAN DIDN’T REALLY think that Leaves of Grass was a war poem. Not exactly. He’s having a bit of a face-off with the poets of the past in that inscription I’ve referenced (“As I Ponder’d in Silence”). They come to him like a singular phantom, chiding him for his strange, wandering, political poem that attempts to sing about the people as if they were somehow one. And yet also, somehow, beautiful. How could you have convinced yourself that this thing is poetry? They seem to be asking him. It’s not even about war. All good poetry is about war. Whitman knows that he’s doing something else. And yet, he also claims to be waging a war of sorts.

Perhaps it’s because he felt the Civil War brewing, as he sat down to write the initial draft of Leaves of Grass. Whatever the reason, he responds to the phantom poet: “I too haughty Shade also sing war, and a longer and greater one than any.” It’s a war “For life and death, for the Body and the eternal Soul.” And he’s looking to promote, he writes, “brave soldiers.” He knew that his book was a battle for hearts and minds. It mattered, in some ultimate sense. It was an attempt to fill a political form up with something that would keep it alive, and it needed spiritual material for that—the sort of material that is most difficult to gather, and that people are most reticent to sacrifice. He knew it was a book of political theology.

It’s difficult to read Leaves of Grass today without feeling as if Whitman lost that war. In his inscription “To Foreign Lands” he speaks to a world beyond the US that appears to be asking for “something to prove this puzzle of the New World”, something to help them understand America’s “athletic democracy”. America is still a puzzle to the world today, perhaps, but in a very different—much more horrifying—way. There’s something pointless about reading Leaves of Grass in the midst of whatever is happening around us right now. I will say that it doesn’t actually feel like existential comfort food.

And yet, I’ve been reading it. I’ve felt oddly drawn in. It feels like an old text that’s worth revisiting right now, though I haven’t yet settled—with myself—why that is. I am planning to write something else about it; something a little more thought out. Perhaps I will even end up writing more than one thing. Read it with me (Project Gutenberg has a version online). In the poem, Whitman describes it as a “history of the future”. Now it’s the future and the world is caught up in a different sort of war. Perhaps the poem can be a kind of mirror, where we can study the ugly blemishes without mistaking them for the whole face.

I AM AN ACADEMIC, but I won’t pretend as if I believe that there’s anything moral about the structure of higher education in America today. I know many, many principled people who do incredible work in academic institutions. Nevertheless, the institutions themselves have become extractive. Though I know this, reading Jay Caspian Kang’s recent essay for the New Yorker—in which he argues that the university has become the new church of secular liberals—made me itch with a little bit of rage.

The issue, for me, isn’t that I thought he was completely wrong. I think he got a lot of things right, in fact. But something about his political strategy, and his genealogical amnesia, felt sort of dangerous to me.

I am among what seems to me a growing number of people who are recognizing that the politicization of religion has become a major issue for the left. It’s something that people are talking about. My colleague has written about this here on Substack, and I recently picked up ’s new book. But, especially because I can imagine that Kang’s work will be seductive for many progressives, I felt like I needed to challenge his argument that there is a church-shaped hole on the American left.

I WILL START, however, with what I think that Kang gets right. This essay was the culmination of a series that he wrote for the New Yorker, reflecting on what I’m going to describe as a church-shaped hole on the American left. His series examines what it’s meant, politically, for the left to become essentially untethered from religious institutions as a critical element of the Democratic base. This final essay in the series, on the university, argues that the left has relied on universities to be the new center of moral authority. They’ve asked universities to do something that people used to expect from their church.

Meanwhile, these institutions have abandoned moral formation as part of their central educational impetus, instead becoming credentialing factories that serve up a residual byproduct of thin moral film.

We’ve ended up, Kang argues, in a situation where this “church” costs people more than $100,000 a year to attend, leaving them with a lifetime of debt and (more often than not) mediocre employment. Even when people depart with some values or principles in tow, these often feel hollow and rootless. I agree with Kang that this has happened, and that it’s a huge problem.

One of the things that really irked me about his essay, however, was the fact that he seems to be accepting conservatives’ narratives (from people like Chris Rufo, Roger Kimball, and Peter Wood) about what the university in America is, and how it functions. Such critiques are fueled by what pundits like Rufo believe is the moral corruption of wokeness. And they are critical of universities because they (coercively, if we follow this narrative) produce woke progressives. “These critics do not want to change the basically religious function of the university,” Kang writes, “so much as they want to swap out the sermons.” They want to make the university a different sort of ideological factory.

Kang understands his own strategy to be a sort of counter-MAGA positioning. “Rather than fighting about so-called viewpoint diversity in higher education, and swapping different ideologies back and forth to match our political beliefs,” he writes, “we need to ask whether the university should have this role at all.” The university, he argues, is “not good at incubating social-justice movements”. Its “priests” are just “cloistered faculty.” And it’s an institution for elites. All of these these things make the university undesirable as a center for moral value. With all of this in mind, Kang believes that progressives need to essentially minimize the role that the university plays in moral life.

What does Kang believe the left should do, instead? He doesn’t really address that matter, in this particular essay. But if you look back through the other essays in his series, it becomes clearer. He believes that the left should turn, instead, to the church. Instead of asking the university to be a church, in other words, he thinks that the left needs to get back in touch with the church.

Like MAGA conservatives, Kang looks back nostalgically to earlier periods of greatness in American life. Unlike conservatives, of course, he’s looking for great moments in left politics. He finds this (unsurprisingly) in the Civil Rights era, and phenomena like the sanctuary movement. If only we could go back, he suggests, we might make the American left great again. Maybe the church can get us there, like it did back then.

I have no desire to minimize the historical import of these movements. Nor do I want to pretend as if I don’t think that religion is, in some ways, an underutilized dimension of politics on the left. I think it could be. But Kang’s framing reads, to me, like just another example of the fact that the left seems to have been entirely evacuated of vision and values, becoming nothing but a reactionary mirror of the MAGA movement. With little to say anymore but “not that!” the left has ceded the narrative about what political life in America should look like to conservatives. Despite the fact that the Kamala Harris campaign showed us that this didn’t work, Kang’s counter-MAGA positioning illuminates how many on the left can’t leave this strategy behind.

What Kang misses, by accepting the MAGA framing of what the university is and how it functions, is the actual history of colleges and universities in the United States. Notably, the university didn’t replace the church in the US. Rather, in many cases, colleges and universities in America were produced by and for the church. Church and academy have been caught up in a rather tempestuous sort of entanglement for centuries, in and beyond America. The church-academy connection is a relational struggle that is almost as old as universities themselves. Kang’s replacement thesis doesn’t really work.

Have Americans on the left struggled to secularize higher education? Sure. But the secularization of institutions of higher education in America, like the small liberal arts college where I teach (founded by and for Presbyterians), wasn’t motivated by a cynical distaste for religion. In part, it was a genuine (if partial) attempt at pluralism. Many of these institutions understood that religious life in America was becoming more diverse and complex. They wanted to reflect this in their curriculum, to represent a changing student body. Did this have moral consequences? Sure. Were some of these consequences unfortunate? Probably. But this is a complex problem to investigate and understand. And Kang’s argument encourages us to look away from it, and instead turn to the church.

Even if the university becomes nothing but a crude and amoral credentialing factory, it still plays a role in the ecology of moral life in America. Producing credentialed laborers for the capitalist economy is a social function with moral stakes. I agree that we should not expect the university to be a church. Nor do I think that we should turn to universities as the sole arbiters of moral value. I don’t think there is any one center to moral life in America. But I also think that if colleges and universities divest from the work of formation (moral and otherwise), they are completely and entirely lost.

To suggest that colleges and universities play a role in our moral ecology, in America, is one way to ensure that Christian churches aren’t the only spaces where people can engage in the sort of formation that generates moral leadership. In a country where many people are not Christian, or they are Christians who feel as if the church doesn’t acknowledge their humanity or values, colleges and universities have become an alternate space where they can explore the shape and structure of their moral lives.

This doesn’t mean that colleges and universities should be the only place where this is happening. Nor does it mean that colleges and universities have been doing a particularly good job at providing this service. But to deemphasize or eliminate the role that these institutions play in our moral ecology is to accept a hit to the kind of pluralism that the left has often claimed to value. The question of how to practice this sort of pluralism in these institutions is a genuinely difficult, and unresolved, question that should not be pushed to the side. Colleges and universities have failed at this aspirational project, in some crucial ways, which is something to confront.

The right hasn’t been successful in America because they have religion on their side. The politicization and capture of Christianity by the right is part of their success, of course. But they’ve also been successful because they’ve integrated themselves into institutions at many levels (like school boards and city councils) and reformed them from within. People like Rufo hate the university because it’s resisted easy capture. People like Kang do Rufo and others a service, by presenting their arguments as authoritative narratives in venues like the New Yorker. Encouraging the left to stop pondering the difficult and thorny problem of morality in higher education is an abandonment that, I suspect, the left will later come to regret.

I SAY THIS BECAUSE I think that the left may be suffering from abandonments that have already been visited upon American colleges and universities. It’s a shame that someone like Kang can be educated in the American university system, and invited to write for publications like the New Yorker, and yet still have so much genealogical amnesia about the kinds of institutions that formed them. But it’s not a priority, in the curricula of most American colleges and universities, to transmit this sort of knowledge.

The genealogical amnesia that leads Kang to dissociate the university from the church in a simple manner (offering nothing but a wonky replacement theory to explain their strange institutional relationship) is pretty commonplace. Many disciplines outside the field of religious studies are loathe to discuss the role that religion has played in their own history and formation. And the field of religious studies is one of the most contingent and fragile, in many institutions of higher education today. This means that knowledge about religious genealogies tends to be hidden, muted, or excised.

Kang feels like universities have failed him, and other Americans. And I agree that they probably have. But I don’t think that it’s because they’ve failed to turn him, or others, into amazing professionalized social justice activists who can do Real Work for the left. Nor do I think this should be the university’s aim. I think it’s because genealogical amnesia is a problem that colleges and universities don’t seem to care about. And I think this is a detriment to both the right and the left.

In an interview about his series with Tyler Foggatt for the New Yorker’s Political Scene podcast, Kang and his interviewer descend into a vibes-based debate about the language of human rights that feels almost childish. They seem to disagree over which is more appealing: the thinner (but more universal) secular language of human rights, or the thicker (but religiously particular) language that calls all people children of God. The fact that there is a long social and political history that effectively entangles these different languages in complicated and challenging ways doesn’t happen to come up. If it had, it might have allowed for a conversation about the fact that these are resonant options, differently expressed. And they could have parsed what’s lost or gained in the secularization of that religious sentiment. But their exchange seems to present these as two unrelated ideas. That’s genealogical amnesia.

Kang argues that what he calls (in a rather self-aware and cynical manner) the “protest economy” feels hollow. Left protests are animated by thin secular ideas that people don’t really understand, he says. He proposes that it’s in contact with the church that people could thicken their moral language.

But even in his own writing, the strongest evidence he offers in favor of the church as a space for moral formation comes from a conversation with a graduate student, in pursuit of higher education. Kang interviews Wayne Hsiung, an animal-liberation activist turned seminary student, to talk about what the church might offer activists. Even Kang, in other words, turns to higher education for some wisdom about what’s happening to our moral lives. Although perhaps he doesn’t “count” seminaries as part of the ecology of university life in the US?

Hsiung, who is a student at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, doesn’t necessarily seem to be suggesting (like Kang) that the American left needs to turn to the church. But he does speak with wisdom about the value of moral communities, especially the value of ancient ones. They can provide, among other things, old stories that build a deep group cohesion. And they can also provide a form of contact with a “supreme” or more than human power that facilitates relational bonds across many other forms of difference. “I think left civilization, not just left movements, will die,” Hsiung tells him, “ unless there is some form of moral community to organize it all.”

I think that Hsiung has a clear sense of the genealogical bonds between contemporary activist politics and values and ancient traditions. This drew him to the church, but I don’t get the sense that he’s suggesting that Americans on the left need to become more Christian, like him. Perhaps he’s just offering people a reason to break out of their genealogical amnesia, and to better understand how the things they value are related, in complicated ways, to the moral worlds they thought they’d moved past and discarded.

I DO THINK THAT Kang seems to have a church-shaped hole in his heart, and that may be fueling more of his arguments than he realizes. In the opening to his first essay in the series he admits that, while he is non-religious, he does “feel a pang of jealousy for people of faith who seem animated by a higher mission.” They seem to have a sense of calm, and a form of humility, that he doesn’t always see in American protests or, he adds, when he looks “in the mirror.”

He also recognizes, in a general way, that the politicization of religion in America—which has made Christianity coincident, for many people, with conservatism—has hollowed out the American churches that lean left. But he doesn’t really seem to wrestle with what this means, nor does he seem to be aware of what he is effectively advocating for in these essays.

There is something almost extractive to the way that Kang is approaching, or thinking about, the church. As an admitted outsider who seems to envy the church’s deep moral roots, he seems to essentially be asking what the left can extract from these church communities for the left’s own political benefit. The church is presented, in his essays, like a natural moral resource that might be tapped for things like useful infrastructure, or moral authority, or community networks.

Framing the church as a space of possibility, and looking at it from the outside, seems to distract him from understanding the role that religious people on the left are already playing in left politics. He notes that the only place where religious leaders on the left seem to be showing up are in graphic images on social media, where they’re being attacked by ICE agents while wearing their collars. He calls for progressive clergy to be louder, suggesting that perhaps their moral authority could really change the immigration debate in the United States. Imagine, he suggests, if the Catholic Church spoke out against Trump’s immigration policies!

And yet the Catholic Church, indeed the pope himself, has spoken out against these very policies. This made it into the news cycle for a couple of days and was then discarded as no longer relevant. The fact that the most powerful progressive religious voice in the world gets a day of news coverage does not seem, to me, like a failure of left religious leaders to step up and speak out. It seems more like an issue with our media platforms and information ecologies. Perhaps these media outlets just assume that their mostly left-leaning readers don’t really care. So they keep unpacking the Epstein files.

If more Americans on the left start to care about what’s happening in churches, it will be because they’ve joined churches, and they’ve started to invest in the existential realities of that institutional dimension of American life. And if churches can be a resource for the American left in anything but an extractive manner, it will be because more people on the left have joined these churches and are supporting their existence as living communities.

The argument that Kang seems to be making that I don’t think he realizes he’s making is that more Americans should become religious and join churches. His series reads, to me, like an altar call.

I DON’T THINK there’s a church-shaped hole on the American left. But I do think there is a kind of existential void on the left that makes it feel sapped of vitality. This void leaves it trapped in a mimetic relationship to the right.

I think this void looks, from some angles, like a community-shaped hole. From other angles it looks like a utopia-shaped hole. From other angles it looks like a morality-shaped hole. From other angles it looks like a democracy-shaped hole. From other angles it looks like a religion-shaped hole. And so on. This void is shape-shifting, and I don’t think that any one structure or force will fill it. I think that the void is complex and plural, and if it’s going to be filled with anything, it should be filled with many things.

We are living in a social and political world that’s been stripped for parts, and we are dealing with the consequences. This is an insanely huge problem that’s rapidly getting worse. Solutions will not be easy or simple. But we are creative animals, and we’ve performed far greater feats at many other points in our shared histories.

I will say that (unsexy as this is for “revolutionary” leftists) investing some real love in the collapsing institutional formations in American life might do something tangible, effective, and real. This includes the church (and other religious institutions), but it also includes the university. It can include neighborhood organizations. And public schools. And so on.

The president of my college recently relayed to me something he’s learned in his time as an administrator: starting something new is always easier than changing things. But, often, it’s not what we really need. The secularization that the left has long depended upon has convinced many people that something new is not only always possible, but it’s always better. Meanwhile, it’s been pulling in subtle ways from religious tradition in order to source its own novel content. It’s been getting its fuel from change, not from novelty. But it’s presented itself as something different, better, and new.

Genealogical amnesia allows us to move forward bravely into the future, and try new things, with the confidence of someone who knows absolutely nothing and hopes for everything. Understanding the complex histories of the worlds that we’ve inherited, and understanding which parts we’re actually ready to surrender (and which we refuse to discard) is much more difficult. But I think it’s a better path forward. We inherit these histories, whether we want them or not. If we ignore them, they haunt us like ghosts. If we acknowledge them, they might become powerful relics that, with a little caution, help animate what we do.

I’VE FOUND MYSELF THINKING about shame lately. It started, I think, with a realization that so many people are bringing their shame (or their desire to avoid feeling shame) to chatbots. In my field, academia, the desire to avoid shame or embarrassment is one of the reasons why so many students are asking AI to compose simple emails to their professors. And it’s related to the fact that chatbots have, famously, become cheating machines on college campuses. Laziness isn’t the only issue. People ask AI to do their work because they want to avoid the shame of a bad grade.

But the issue isn’t limited to colleges and universities, of course. I think it’s also why, in dating, you’re hearing stories about lovers using AI to compose texts to one another. It’s feeding and enabling a self-protective impulse that people feel, in many areas of life right now. People like Clay Shirky see this as evidence that young folks are losing their capacity to conduct basic social interactions. But for me, it raises a lot of complicated questions about what’s happening to shame, and why.

Last week, after I wrote about love in America, my friend sent me an interview with the psychotherapist , whose work we’ve mutually appreciated for years. We talked about the fact that the lack of cosmic love, in America today, is related to this sense that there’s no real shared public place or space in which to genuinely affirm the presence or reality of unconditional love. Or to hope that such love might be possible. And Perel, in the interview, discusses the fact that this desire for unconditional love—the sort of love that sees you as you are, that accepts you without judgement—has been driving people to AI. It feels, to many people, like this unconditionality is what they’re getting from AI (though Perel does caution people never to forget that they’re engaging with “a business product”).

In the interview, it’s actually a query to ChatGPT that turns their attention to theology. To understand the origins of the desire for unconditional love, ChatGPT points them to (among other things) God as that unconditional source. It’s obvious to people like me that a force like unconditional love has theological dimensions, because I see theology everywhere (especially in love). But AI is making these genealogies more visible in the mainstream: it offers them up with a click. What clicked for me, as I listened, was that it’s the sense of unconditionality, and perhaps also that desire for an unconditionally loving presence, that’s leading so many people to bring their shame to chatbots.

The early 2020s left Americans with a lot to feel shame about, from the horrific legacies of racism and sexism to the way they chose to navigate the COVID-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, because religion in America has become politicized as the discursive property of the right, meeting this shame with responses that felt religious seemed out of line in the aspirationally secular public. So what the American public sphere put on offer, instead, was another empty shell: the tech infrastructure of social media that couldn’t transform this shame but could only recirculate it endlessly, like garbage, in the public sphere. Into this mess stepped the AI chatbot as a shame examiner, processor, and transformer (let’s call that the holy trinity for coping with shame). Instead of metastasized monstrous garbage, it gave people a place to put their shame, and turn it into something else.

SHAME IS A NECESSARY EMOTION. We can’t get rid of it. And we need people to be able to feel it. I won’t say it’s “natural” but it’s one of those emotions that seems, in some shape or form, almost universal. Especially in a massive society, people need to be able to feel something like shame or remorse for the damaging things they’ve been complicit in. Shame changes the way people behave, it’s a kind of inner recoil that nags at us from within. Without something like shame, terrible things don’t change.

But shame is an ugly thing to feel, and the way that it gets processed in public is (like anger) always messy and filled with controversy, because it’s a messy feeling. And it requires that someone either make themselves vulnerable or be made vulnerable. This requires either a form of tenderness or a form of violence that can feel shocking in public spaces that seek after a more respectable vanilla middle ground.

Liberal democracy is an empty shell or form that populates itself with institutions and communal structures drawn (obviously, surreptitiously, harmoniously, parasitically) from the life and history of The People. Here in America there are a host of tools for coping with shame. The legal system is an obvious one that allows for the examination, processing, and transformation of shame. But, increasingly, with the rise of media (newspapers, radio, film and TV, the Internet), “the media” itself has become a more “native” tool within liberal democracy for this examining, processing, and transforming of shame.

But subtly, all the while, religious structures have still been at work in American society to help people cope with shame. It’s not always obvious, in large part because of the privatization of religion that the aspirational secularism of liberal democracy has sought after. But everyone knows that this secularism has never really worked all that well, here in America. And so religion (notably, Christianity in its messy Protestant plurality) has been allowed to occupy a powerful and constant subterranean structural presence in American life, only becoming the target of critique when it seems to step significantly out of line.

But as Americans have grown less religious (and religious Americans have become less educated about their own religion), and as religion has increasingly become a political weapon on the right, it’s also become less and less of an appropriate, or desirable, place to turn with shame. God isn’t absolving people like he used to.

PERHAPS THE QUINTESSENTIAL religious tool for shame management is the confessional. It’s within the sealed and secretive confines of a confessional that Christians historically examined, processed, and transformed their sin and shame. Protestantism eliminated the booth, but kept the confessional practice at the heart of spiritual life. Therapy (and pop culture relics, like reality TV) have maintained the centrality of the confessional in secular culture. And, as I’ve argued, AI chatbots have emerged to occupy a new and ambiguous relationship to the confessional content that culture produces. Confessional practices endure, in other words.

But I do think that, when the theological dimensions of the shame management apparatus are erased, there are certain functions of the apparatus that collapse.

While it may be the case that the church has been doing shame management for centuries, it hasn’t always been explicit about it. In fact, it wasn’t until the 1990s that theologians really began to take shame seriously as an affect relevant to their own work. In the 1970s and 1980s, psychologists in the US became increasingly interested in the nature and function of shame. And it was in the wake of publications like Gershan Kaufman’s Shame: the Power of Caring that pastors and theologians began to reflect on the role that God played, in shame.

You might be thinking of God as a figure who generates shame. The failure, for instance, to live up to God’s expectations—as laid out in biblical texts—might seem to be a reason for a person to be ashamed of herself. And because of the way that religion has been so deeply politicized, and weaponized against gay, lesbian, and trans people, I think that there are many today who see the church primarily as an engine of shame rather than a resource for examining, processing, and transforming it.

But those who work within religious settings, or who study religious ideas, have maintained a focus on what it is that religion has historically done to acknowledge the function and reality of shame (even the necessity of it), without letting people be destroyed by it. If shame is ultimately the feeling of being worthless, the pastor Robert Albers wrote in 1995, then God addresses this through the power of unconditional divine love. This love, Albers wrote, “is not selective, nor is it qualified by human standards. It is an unconditional love that accepts the person for what she/he is rather than what she/he might be.” When a person brings their shame to God, what they receive in return—or what they interface with—is grace.

I happen to think the best book on theology and shame might be Virginia Burrus’s 2008 Saving Shame: Martyrs, Saints, and Other Abject Subjects. Virginia was a professor of mine, in graduate school, and her book completely changed the way that I read the accounts of Late Ancient martyrs and saints. She draws on theorists like Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, but also creates an analysis all her own.

Through the stories of figures like Perpetua—a 3rd century Christian martyr who was said to be nursing a baby right before she was thrown into a Roman arena to battle animals—Virginia finds stories of people who inhabit an strange middle ground between shame and shamelessness. They “lay claim to their own shame, at once intensifying it and converting [it],” she writes. In this strange operation, Virginia argues that figures like Perpetua embrace and perform their shame in order to throw the powerful Late Ancient concept of honor itself “into question.” They are figures with, Virginia writes, “a performatively queered identity that retrieves dignity without aspiring to honor.”

There’s something about these figures that Virginia finds valuable, she notes, for a culture like ours that seems to have become “ashamed of shame.”

While she acknowledges that shame can be “enormously destructive” and “can and often does stifle love”, she also notes that refusing shame might mean refusing love. Shame is the affect, Virginia writes, that “checks narcissism” and also “monitors interpersonal relatedness and communal commitments.” Shame is what we feel in those places where we both honor and overflow our limits. It’s a strangely intimate and yet also deeply public feeling that makes us vulnerable to one another in ways that nothing else can. Perhaps, around a difficult feeling like that, nothing but a little grace will suffice.

WHAT HAPPENS if (or when) AI becomes the primary or predominant shame manager for the American public? You could say that Americans would no longer be humanizing their shame management. But perhaps they never really have. The whole point of God absolving shame is that God is cosmic, and more-than-human. Even the legal system, as a shame manager, has its more-than-human aspects.

What seems more troubling, to me, is that AI works as a mirroring device. When you bring your shame to AI you might meet with something that feels a bit like unconditional love, but if you’re asking for something like absolution you’re mostly just absolving yourself. Your own framework becomes the standard against which you set your own expectations. Even the God you find, in a chatbot, is one that’s been incarnated in response to your prompts. This might help you, or work for you, but what happens to shame as a social affect? Does it still provide a check on narcissism? Does it still hold us accountable to our relationships and communal commitments?

I know there are many who believe that anyone who uses AI, in the first place, should be ashamed of themselves. Meanwhile, there are just as many (if not more) people who ignore them and use it shamelessly, anyhow. In between these two positions there are many others who remain hidden, in order to keep their shame (or shamelessness) obscured from public view, as the morality of this world has new technology is debated. But all of this seems sort of beside the point, to me.

While all of this plays out, I think that there’s a lot of stinky, rotten, garbage that’s circulating in the public sphere and going by the name of “public life”. And there’s no good apparatus for thinking in an honest way about how to examine, process, and transform all of that shameful stuff. People might be asking AI to transform their shame. But maybe all it’s doing in return is offering a new place to store the smelly garbage. Pretending like we don’t smell that rot won’t make it go away. But neither will pointing it out. It might be that the stench can only be processed socially; like so much compost that can later be used to feed flowers.

AMERICANS MIGHT BE deeply loving people. It might be the case that, if it were possible to objectively measure the depths of emotion in an individual person and then average it across the population, the per-capita love levels in the American polis would be quite high. But it certainly doesn’t feel that way, in America right now. The United States as a broad public space—as a national idea—often feels like an engine of aggression that’s sapped of care, concern, and other affects that tilt toward love.

This is, perhaps, simply what happens when the public sphere becomes dominated by the fear of state murder and military occupation. Or when looming state violence and basic economic survival feel like the most pressing collective concerns.

Despite that, there are people who seem to recognize the deep felt need—in a political atmosphere of violence and fear—to love and be loved. “The grief you are feeling for your country and your neighbors is love,” wrote on Substack, the day before Alex Pretti was killed, and just over two weeks after Renee Good’s murder. She posted the sentiment with a photo of a melancholy sunset, and last I checked, the post had been shared almost 900 times (one of those was me) and liked by more than 7,000 people. It was a little translator, reminding people of what it might look like to think about love as a civic force. People seemed to like seeing that. What better figure than love to lift people up above the horrors of politics?

I find this image, and the sentiment, incredibly poignant and moving. And yet, it’s also left me thinking about love and what sort of power it is now, in America 2026. Whatever else it could be love, in American pop culture and social media, tends to be a romantic thing more than a civic or communal thing. People have wondered, in fact, if love might be the undoing of civic bonds rather than their fortification. Perhaps too many Americans have been taught to want—more than anything—the most insular, restricted, and commodifiable form of love. Or is this just a reductive story about love that fails to illuminate its complex power?

THE AMERICAN LOVE STORY I grew up with, and the one that I still (despite an alleged lag in American romance) see everywhere around me is a story about romance. Love, as I was taught by the American pop culture I consumed growing up, always finds its apex in the romantic love that’s shared between a couple.

My childhood imaginary of love was shaped by the era of the great, and unavoidable, romantic comedies. I learned, from Pretty Woman, that romantic love can—and perhaps should—save you from destitution. And I learned, from You’ve Got Mail, that the purpose of the Internet was the sort of connectivity that might ultimately lead to romantic love. I was thirteen when that single glorious season of My So Called Life defined, for me, the structural shape of desire as the painful and unfulfilled longing for the crush who will always sort of ignore you.

Even when I thought I was learning about some other form of love—the love for family, or friends—I was usually actually being fed a romance. Shows like Friends, Sex in the City, or Girls all appear to be about friend groups. But the purpose of these friend groups seems to, essentially, be to help you navigate the rocky waters of romantic love.

I’ve seen whispers, in think piece after think piece, that this whole foundation might be shifting. It appears to be the case that for younger Americans, today, this sort of romantic relationship is less and less of a priority. Romance might apparently be on the verge of going extinct, and boyfriends are now cringe. But these sorts of takes seem to ignore the fact that Gen Z remain devotees of romantasy genres, and other viral phenomena.

It might be impossible to dethrone romantic love, in American pop culture. And perhaps this is a cause for collective concern. There are obvious ways in which even romantic love can be civic. One can, for instance, affirm one’s belief that all people should be permitted to love whomsoever they choose to. But this still frames love as a matter related to romance, and sexuality. Can love still bend itself in more Platonic directions in America today, or have the intimate particularities of romantic love too deeply eroded the power of love as a civic virtue?

SOCIOLOGIST OF LOVE, Eva Illouz, is deeply skeptical of the civic power of love. “Love cannot, in any way, be a candidate to form the basis of civil bonds,” she writes in her 2023 book The Emotional Life of Populism. Love, Illouz says, “always contains some form of narcissistic component: I love the other who loves me in return.” Love, for Illouz, has no real universal potential.

She’s thinking, to a great extent, about the sort of love that’s born out of populist nationalism. The Emotional Life of Populism is a study of the rise of this sentiment in Israel, where Illouz lives and teaches. Love, as a nationalist bond, can be deeply religious. For instance, religious people submit to God, and in so doing, they “intermix the love of God and the love of nation. They shroud the land and the nation in the same metaphysical grandeur and fiercely guarded sacredness as God.”

But nationalist love, the sort that feeds the populism Illouz critiques, doesn’t need to be religious. One can simply love the land that forms one’s nation. With this “alchemy of metaphors” the land that one loves is understood to give love back. This loving land “has quasi-agentic power and forms a bond of mutuality with the people who live on it.” This land, “rewards grief and death through flourishing enterprises: the land binds citizens to their history and true identity as well as to their economic success.” This sort of love has civic power, we could say, but it’s not the sort of civic power that leaves much room for liberal democracy.

What democracy needs, Illouz argues, is something more genuinely universal. It has to tap into a claim about who we are, as humans, that pushes us beyond the particularities of religion or nation. Love, even the love of land, is still too particular.

It’s not only the use of love in the politics of populist nationalism that’s led Illouz to be skeptical about the civic powers of love. She’s spent her career studying love. Her 1997 book Consuming the Romantic Utopia is an incisive critique of the way that modern media and advertising have turned love into a consumer product. In that book she ties her own critique of love to Friedrich Engels’ 1884 book The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. This, she suggests, was the beginning of a long argument (made by many others) that love and capitalism are codependent in troubling ways.

Illouz’s critical take on the way that romantic love has come to serve as the cornerstone of capitalism has led her to observe the way that love—in western culture—has become deeply (perhaps inextricably) bound up with sexuality and marriage. In this sense, perhaps, love can neither be liberated from nor offer liberation from these kinds of paticularities, or the capitalist dream that encourages us to believe that this is where we find our ultimate purpose or meaning. In this moment of late capitalism, love seems to have become entirely disconnected from Diotima’s ladder, which (according to Plato) connected the particularities of romantic love with a more universal, impersonal, and non-sexual love of the good.

Illouz’s work is also deeply informed by Hannah Arendt’s critique of love, which finds love to be too limited and particular to serve as a genuine civic bond. In Arendt’s view of love, which was developed initially in a critical study of the theology of Augustine of Hippo, love is a bond that ultimately strives for intimacy. And it’s this drive towards intimacy that makes love particular, and politically corrosive. Politics needs the kind of distance that builds a big shared world, and can create the relative remove of pluralism. Love, for Arendt, is a force that collapses this necessary distance into intimate sameness.

I find Illouz’s critiques of love convincing, on many levels. And I, like her, have lately found myself longing for a universalism that seems to have gone missing. Not what Illouz calls the imperial universalist drive to “make all countries and cultures enter in a common time, space, and culture.” But instead what she calls a more anthropological universalism, the idea that there is some sort of deeply desirable “oneness of humankind” that can be seen in any particular place where you find people. But perhaps I am still a little too drunk on the possibilities of love to believe that it can never have anything to do with this.

IT MAY BE THE CASE THAT Diotima’s ladder has been broken. It may be the case that, in late capitalist modernity (and in the rising tide of populist nationalism that we can blame, at least in part, upon this capitalist context) love can’t really live beyond the erotic particularities we tend to associate it with. This may be one reason, even in activist politics today, we’re likely to see public forms of benevolence expressed in the language of care rather than the language of love.

But thinkers like bell hooks—whose intellectual life was cultivated in the wake of a Black radical tradition, and a feminist tradition, that both drew on love for political force—have argued that something goes missing when love falls out of our political language. We lose, hooks wrote in her 1999 book All About Love, the sort of language in which “we can let our hearts speak.” More than that, she argued, Americans might need love. “All the great movements for social justice in our society have strongly emphasized a love ethic,” she wrote. Love has been a call towards action.

In 1999 hooks was concerned by what she described as the feeling that America was “turning away from love.” It felt, she wrote, as if the people around her were “moving into a wilderness of spirit so intense we may never find our way home again.” In this environment, hooks noted that love only seemed to show up in the pop culture products that celebrated romantic love. She even observed that talking about love and politics with her own audiences (many who were already disposed to agree with her, I can imagine) seemed only to generate antipathy and agitation.

Hooks refused to let the figure of love collapse into romance. But she also didn’t separate the figure of love from romance, either. She wrote about love in families, love in larger communal contexts, love between friends, and love between lovers. She preserved the term love for all of these forms of relation and found, in each of them, the signs or seeds of something that bought them all together. She didn’t seem to hold them in a hierarchical relation, as a ladder might. But they were all bound together in some sort of web, structured by a more ideal form of love.

What hooks acknowledged, however, was the fact that if we are going to use love in this way—if we are going to presume that it has the capacity surface above the particularities of one form of love (like romance)—we have to understand it as religious, or at least spiritual. She defined love, in fact, as “the will to nurture our own and another’s spiritual growth.”

She was keenly aware of who might object to such an understanding of love, and why. And she was quick to defend this view as spiritual rather than religious. “An individual does not need to be a believer in a religion to embrace the idea that there is an animating principle in the self—a life force (some of us call it soul) that when nurtured enhances our capacity to be more fully self-actualized and able to engage in communion with the world around us.”

And yet, much as she worked to create distance between love and religion, it was to religious ideas from her own heritage that she turned in order to articulate what love is, and how it works. “Living life in touch with divine spirit lets us see the light of love in all living beings,” she wrote, in a self-aware reflection on the way that her own Christian childhood shaped her view of love. “That light is a resurrecting life force. A culture that is dead in love can only be resurrected by spiritual awakening.” She even acknowledged that, for those children who are not lucky enough to know love in their own families of origin, their religious communities are often the first school of love that they encounter. If they are lucky.

I think that hooks is right, that the loss of love in America is ultimately a political loss. Americans lose something real, politically speaking, if they lose love. Perhaps they lose a certain kind of work for justice. But I also think hooks is right that love is essentially not secularizable. It’s a figure, or form, from which secularism has not managed to strip the “taint” of religion or spirituality. And I think that’s precisely what gives it enduring allure, as a figure, when it refuses to be reduced to romance. It’s the way that love works, as a theological relic, that gives it the imaginative potency and power to function beyond the romantic.

IF HOOKS IS RIGHT, that love is not secularizable, and Illouz is right that democracy needs something universal to function as an anthropological bond, then I think the shape of our impasse becomes pretty clear. If democracy needs universalism, and love has to recognize its religious roots (which are particular), then these two things feel entirely incompatible. And perhaps this is why love feels like such a strange sort of presence, in whatever remains of the civic sphere, today. Love might only have civic power if it can tap into religious feeling. And if it taps into the particularism of religious feeling, does it mean that we are cutting it off from a more universal appreciation of humankind?

One thing I will say is that liberal democracy has, for as long as it’s existed, been a bit of an empty shell without content. When it’s compelling, it’s often because it’s reaching outside of itself to fill itself up. It has relied on a certain minimum distance from any one religion, in order to ensure a degree of pluralism. But it’s also, especially in places like the United States always creatively, sometimes parasitically, and often controversially, sustained itself by sourcing and restyling religious materials. Perhaps liberal democracy (as some would seem to have it) is finally dead. Or perhaps it’s poised to do something new with love, for sake of humankind.

Would such a thing even work? I’m not in the business of prospecting. But I do have thoughts, about how to resource the archive of theological materials, if anyone should go looking.

Perhaps, for too long, love (in public) has been treated as just a form of human emotion. For all their differences, this is what it seems to be for both Illouz and hooks. It’s something that we do, as particular individuals, to bond us with others. In this sort of view little particular beings (us) are the engines that power this love.

One of the brilliant and strange ideas that theological texts have preserved is that love is actually cosmic force: a benevolence right at the heart of all things. It’s a wild speculative claim with absolutely no real evidence in its favor. But it’s a potent (and enduring) idea. And it’s not particularistic, like nationalist devotions. It’s a claim about how reality is structured, for anyone (whoever they might be). And so, it’s an anthropological claim about what shapes humankind. It’s a claim that people come from, and return to, something loving that stays with them. And it’s a claim that this power or force can’t be taken out of them (though it can be dimmed, or dampened). It’s a claim that there’s something holding you, so that you can hold others. It might be a wild and speculative claim, but it is—I think—properly civic.

I FIND MYSELF annoyed by lamentations on the loss of solitude that I find on the Internet: claims that our dependence on social media, and the Internet itself, is eroding the capacity to spend time in solitude. For me, the most grating take is the sort that promotes solitude as a way to be with yourself, or to discover yourself. I don’t think about solitude this way. If I want to learn about who I am, I spend time with my family and friends. This shows me more about who I am, and how I work, than sitting around by myself.

But, to be clear, I need solitude. I can’t function without it. I basically turn into a werewolf if I don’t have a regular dose of it. But I’m never alone there.

I call my solitude “writing”, because that’s what it often leads to, or culminates in. But I also use it to read, and sometimes to just stare at trees or birds or objects on my desk. And what I’m doing there, especially when I’m reading, is encountering the voices of other people in a very particular sort of way. It’s a space for being with others. Even the big other: otherness itself.

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SOLITUDE REMINDS ME how small I am and how big, and wild, and wise, and dangerous the world of others is.

Solitude is where I draw voices up, from my memory. Or imagination. It’s where I listen carefully to voices from the past, in the books that I read. It’s where I actually take the time to listen to the non-human voices that sound in the world all around me.

Solitude is deeply social, but the difference between the sociality of solitude and being with other people in the flesh is that there is a dark and closed dimension to these other social presences, in solitude. I listen to them. But they don’t usually listen to me. I try to speak back to them, but they don’t hear me. We are in a social relation, but it’s difficult, ethereal, and often opaque.

The social relationship I have with the people I engage with in solitude verges on the parasocial, except those voices conjured me, even if they didn’t expect me. Most of them wanted a reader and I became that, for them.

Writing is the missive I create, in response to them, and in the absence of their response. Everything I’ve ever written has been a secret note to some specific person or set of people (often long dead) who I can’t speak with directly but who I have met, in solitude.

Solitude is where I clear space and time (where I make a clearing in the forest) so that these voices can emerge, speak into my world, and refuse to respond to me. Thinking, and then writing, is what happens in the space of solitude that I’ve cleared, where I crave a conversation that will never really emerge. What I do, in solitude, is my response to that very present absence.

This, not some opportunity to get to know oneself, is what’s being displaced in the emerging technological ecosystem that surrounds us.

WHY IS IT SO EASY to displace this sort of solitude right now? The technologies embedded in our phones inhabit the spacetime that solitude alone once opened up in social, cultural, mental, and emotional space. Our digital devices assume that people can, and will, clear out space and time so that they can engage with something not-quite-present in an almost sealed off micro-environment.

Using your phone facilitates something that can feel like solitude, but that also feels far more actively social. It gives you immediate rewards, and a form of response, that a difficult and opaque sort of solitude simply won’t.

What you’re doing when you’re on your phone can feel much like the sort of solitude I’ve described. The phone clears a space with its bright light, and holds open great swaths of time in which it arrests your attention. And you tap directly into a world of other voices. Indeed, these voices are much more lively than the ones that emerge from books, or your memory and imagination. They are, often, live action voices. Even if you wonder if they were created by an AI, they still feel rather lively and real.

And then there are all of the immediate responses: from actual other people on social media, or from the pseudo-human presence of an LLM chatbot. It’s a solitude that feels social (maybe this is just a more positive take on Sherry Turkle’s description of being “alone together”). Why wouldn’t people choose that over a darker, lonelier, and more difficult solitude?

I will be honest and admit that it’s become much easier for me to choose that bright, engaging, social solitude over a difficult and opaque solitude. There are fewer barriers to entry. And it at least appears to be less lonely. But I keep creating new disciplines and rituals to force me into a difficult and opaque solitude because I’ve also noticed that without it there’s a kind of vacuousness—a non-productive and non-generative emptiness—that opens up inside of me. A wasteland of sorts. Too much time in front of that bright light makes me feel like I’m filled with little bits of trash. I need that darker spacetime.

I am someone who was trained to develop an inner life in a context where difficult and opaque solitude was really the only sort available. So I both depend upon, and thrive pretty exclusively within, the inner ecosystem it creates.

THIS SORT OF INNER ecosystem isn’t universal, and it’s not irreducibly human. But it’s very old. And it does differ from the way that solitude has come to be understood, in the mainstream, over the course of modernity.

The sort of solitude that most people seem to imagine, when they set out to find it, more nearly resembles the kind of solitude that Montaigne imagines in 16th century essays like “Of Solitude”. Montaigne describes solitude as a clearing in space and time where it becomes possible to get away from the “contagion” of crowds and truly rest in oneself. Solitude is for being totally and completely alone, says Montaigne:

We must reserve a backstop, wholly our own and entirely free, wherein to settle our true liberty, our principal solitude and retreat. And in this we must for the most part entertain ourselves with ourselves, and so privately that no exotic knowledge or communication be admitted there; there to laugh and talk, as if without wife, children, goods, train, or attendance, to the end, that when it shall so fall out that we must lose any or all of these, it may be no new thing to be without them.

This sort of solitude sounds, in part, like a preparation for abandonment and death. It sounds, forgive me, like a rugged and aspirationally masculine sort of solitude. I remain unconvinced that the shattering grief of losing loved ones, or being abandoned, are things that spiritual disciplines like solitude can really prepare us for. I’m not sure I can agree with him that “the greatest thing in the world is for a man to know that he is his own.” I think it would be better if more men understood how much they belong to, and with, others.

To be fair, there are things Montaigne says about solitude that I agree with. He writes about forms of contagion in the social world (“the crowd” as he derogatorily refers to it) that are dangerous because they are fundamentally vicious. In a world like this, he says, “a man must either imitate the vicious or hate them.” This is an excellent summation of what social media does to people, I think. But Montaigne cautions that both options are equally dangerous, “either to resemble them because they are too many or to hate many because they are unresembling to ourselves.” I would agree that both of these are corrosive options, and that solitude can provide a refuge. But so can a nice little supper with a few friends.

MY OWN SENSE of what solitude is, how it works, or what it’s for is probably a little more antiquated. In the Confessions, Augustine of Hippo famously recounts that he finds, or knows, God in his “innermost self”. This inner reservoir that he refers to is, especially, the deep sea of memory. It’s somewhere in the deepest reaches of his memory, Augustine suggests, that there is some primal oceanic memory of the creation of all things lodged within his own bodily form.

I’ve heard people, both in my field (theology) and outside of it, argue that Augustine more or less “invented” the sort of interiority that people like me think of as somehow natural. I’ve never really bought that. I suppose that, if you think of Democritus or John Dalton as having “invented” the atom because they found language (and a structure of thought) for making it more present in time and space, then I might concede that Augustine is also a bit of an inventor.

But I’ve always just read Augustine as having articulated something about the nature of an inner ecosystem that can sense the presence of, and listen to the voices of, those who aren’t really there in an evidentiary sense. This might be God, or it might be the dead who speak through books and dreams. Either way, these not-quite-absent others are close enough in space and time to feel present, and yet far enough removed from our physical presence that it becomes hubris to expect a clear and direct response from them.

Solitude, for me, is inhabiting that sort of social space. It’s developing the fortitude and clarity to be able to glean something from the silence, not to demand a response, and to ritualize your reaction in some way. Like writing your own voice into it.

IT ALSO SEEMS important, to me, to note just how much this dynamic (even primal or deep) sense of interiority that Augustine describes is entangled with book culture, and reading. Someone like Montaigne would probably tell me that reading, when I’m supposed to be in solitude, is a little inappropriate. I’m not really learning to be with myself if I’m reading. Instead, I’m being sort of social. Maybe I’m even trying to keep up with the other literary strivers, who add to the social contagion around me, by reading one of the hot new novels of the year. Books are a bit antithetical to Montaigne’s hyperindividualist solitude. But I think they’re much more fundamental to a social solitude like Augustine’s. There are figures in Augustine’s solitude that manifest primarily in text.

In his Confessions Augustine isn’t simply addressing some random deity that he happened to stumble upon, in his solitude. Rather, he spends his difficult and opaque solitude speaking to a deity who he has encountered as a character in a very specific book: the Bible. Presumably he has, by the time he writes the Confessions, already spent an incredible number of hours in a difficult and opaque form of solitude cohabited by this somewhat inaccessible character (and a host of accomplices). This book—the Bible—was a spiritual technology that opened up, and filled, Augustine’s monastic solitude with a particular sort of absent presence.

Augustine is fully aware of the dramatic ends that many people have gone to, before him, to seek out a form of solitude that will bring them into relation with this same difficult and opaque presence that shows up in the biblical text. Desert fathers and mothers sought out physical spaces that were remote, in the sense that the human presence there was sparse. But it was, as many hagiographies tell us, often quite rich with more-than-human forms of presence, even and especially animals. It was thought that, in this sort of environment, one could turn down the volume on one form of sociality in order to turn up another: the sort that had been promised, or at least testified to, in a singular sort of narrative or text.

Augustine was also writing, and thinking, in a cultural moment when a dramatic shift in book culture was afoot. One of the most striking passages of the Confessions, for me, has always been his description of his own mentor—the Bishop Ambrose—reading silently. “When he read his eyes would travel across the pages and his mind would explore the sense,” Augustine wrote, “but his voice and tongue were silent.” Augustine couldn’t, entirely, understand why Ambrose did this. Perhaps, Augustine suggested, it was a method for preserving his voice which was often “prone to hoarseness.”

But what was impressed upon me, as a grad student reading this text, was how rare it would have been at this time to see a person reading silently. Even for Augustine, who wrote books that billions of others would silently consume, reading would have been something he did out loud. I imagine him, and the other monastics around him, in some corner of their shared residence, reading aloud and infringing on one another’s private spaces with their voices, asserting themselves in time and space. Reading would have been social, embodied, tactile and a little messy. You would have heard someone reading, maybe you would have seen them spit a bit with a hard consonant.

Someone like Ambrose, reading silently, must have looked as if he were in another dimension. He must have looked as if he were spiriting himself away, removing himself from the shared social world, keeping secrets. Perhaps there were some around him who even found his silent reading a bit rude, or antisocial, the way that it can feel aggressively dismissive when someone suddenly pulls out their phone at a dinner table. Perhaps they longed to hear a bit of what Ambrose’s eyes saw.

But Ambrose would have known, intimately, what a shared social experience reading was. That wouldn’t have been buried knowledge for him, like it is today. He would have known that the practice of reading is hearing voices. I wonder if he knew that he was helping to carve out the architecture for a new sort of inner experience (one that would be quieter, less vocal, less explicitly embodied) and laying the foundation for an inner castle that would easily be filled with bright synthetic lights.

Watching someone read a book, today, isn’t all that different from watching someone consume information on their phone. From an external perspective it looks as if both of these people have willfully removed themselves from a shared social space and have plugged themselves into a portable solitude. But the effect of these actions on inner ecologies is not the same.

IT IS ANACHRONISTIC TO think about reading, or books, or solitude this way. It’s not how people engage with books anymore. It’s not how they think about their solitude. But maybe that’s why I like it. Because I know it wasn’t really all that long ago that people really did read this way, and inhabit their solitude as a darker and more difficult space. In the scheme of things, these changes happened rather fast.

So I don’t want to forget about what gets lost when these habits and disciplines and ancient spiritual technologies become even more anachronistic and incomprehensible.

For me, it’s not that we lose an opportunity to know or learn something about ourselves. Rather, what’s lost is an opportunity to know something about the world of others, and an opportunity to come into contact with a set of voices (and absent presences) who we might not otherwise meet. We lose an opportunity to see something about interior landscapes that we allegedly have access to, in the right conditions.

This means, for me, that the capacity for thinking is also eroded. I believe that thinking needs a spacetime in which to happen, or occur. It needs the bounded conditions of an interior. And it needs a lively environment in that interior: not simply the flow of one’s own feelings and impulses but the absent presence of others, their words, their challenge to your own sense of presence.

The voices, and figures, that we meet in a book emerge from something very concrete and particular: an object, a string of words created by a real living person at a particular moment in time. Those words get into our heads, quite literally, when we read. They become present to us, they live within us. But they are still unavailable to us: they often inhabit different dimensions (mythical, fictional, divine, beyond life as we know it). They don’t respond if we attempt to engage them. They don’t answer us when we call to them, even though they speak to us directly. They are like shades without voices.

In that strange solitude where we encounter them, we learn to live with spirits and ghosts in a very particular way. And we live in a culture that’s been built around the present absence of many of these spirits and ghosts. These are forms of presence that won’t adapt to us, who demand that we attend to them and give us little in return. This is how people become shaped, from the inside out, by powers and forces that are bigger than themselves. And the conditions for that sort of formation are being dismantled.

I KNOW THAT for most people the new year is a time of resolution and forward momentum, but for me it’s always a time of recollection. I find myself glancing back at the rush of moments from the previous year, like a dwarf surveying piles of gold in a treasure hall. On the eve of the new year, it feels like I have one night to take what I can from the 525,600 minutes that just flowed by and tell a little story with them.

This year, though, I find myself looking further back, to the half decade since 2020. More and more, every year, 2020 feels like a paradigm shift. It’s a moment that changed not just what happens in the world, but how I think about time itself. Do you feel that, too?

SOMETHING HAPPENED to the future, around 2020. The future is always a fiction, but in 2020 it became a big story that was more difficult to tell. Big things—like institutions—began to feel much more mortal. They were no longer great steamboats, hauling us into the future that modernity had promised.

When my daughter was born in 2016, for instance, we began optimistically setting aside money for her college education. We were certain it would be incredibly expensive. But I would never have predicted that less than ten years later, in 2025, I would be genuinely unsure whether anything that looks recognizably like college would even exist in 2035, when she’s ready to go.

I’m not making claims about the end of anything. But I am uncertain about my capacity to plan for the future in ways that I wasn’t five years ago, because the future itself looks cloudier (and less enticing) than it once did.

The past has changed, as well. I’m not nostalgic for it. But it feels closer, and more present, than it used to. As the future has stopped dragging me forward with such urgency, the past feels more hyperreal, its outlines look sharper and clearer. And problems of the past seem much less resolved.

I found myself thinking, recently, how ideas that once struck me as outdated, or naive, make a certain kind of strange sense to me now. I can recall, ages ago, finding it absurd to learn that when photography was a new technology many people had a kind of spiritual revulsion to it. They were anxious about what it might do to, existentially, to capture a person’s image like that and freeze it in time and space. Their hesitation and skepticism feels more accessible to me now; some discomfort from their world has pressed in against mine.

The past and the future seem to have convened, increasingly, into a thicker sense of the present.

TECHNOLOGY, AND massive changes in the way I live with and against it, is a large part of what’s changed my sense of time over the last five years. I’m thinking differently about both the past and the future in large part because of the existential disorientations, and reorientations, that technology has been driving, especially since 2020.

The Internet, as our portal into the digital, is a spacetime. It reworks our experience of both space and time, flattening and brightening the nature of experience itself.

In 2020, hiding away from a pandemic in the dark burrow of my home, I needed the digital to make the world feel accessible. Billions of other people felt the same way. So we became like moths, drawn to the bright flat light of the digital world and opening ourselves to it in ways that would have felt too risky, before. There was something people needed, then, from that bright flat present tense.

I think it’s fair to say that there’s a lot of social and political fallout from that rapid and dramatic (and irreversible) reorientation in space and time. The fallout is bad enough that some even seem convinced that the digital is the new face of evil (forgetting that evil is too old, and powerful, and endemic to limit itself to a paltry technological infrastructure.)

But I can see, and perhaps many of you also feel, that this paradigm shift, while offering much, has driven a lot of loss. Perhaps nothing marks this loss more clearly than the rapid adoption of AI, which is eroding already fragile infrastructures in order to hasten a digital shift that was already well underway. We’re told that whatever is happening is inevitable, and perhaps this feels believable because there’s been such a rapid shift in time and space since 2020. A massive change feels both inevitable and underway.

IF TIME HAS CHANGED, since 2020, then I think 2025 was the year I began to adapt.

I’ve always been an existential thinker. I’m preoccupied with finitude, uncertainty, and the layers upon layers of meaning that are always there to sort through. So perhaps it’s unsurprising that I would feel these temporal shifts so acutely. Technology has become more existential to me this year. It’s a new lens I’ve been looking through, as I think about the shape of the present, the past, and the future.

Over the last year, I’ve tried to trace these shifts, here on Substack. I’ve explored attention, inner life, the political theology of tech, chatbots as confessionals, friction as spiritual practice, and the erosion of what used to feel like the real. All of these pieces, I realize now, are attempts to respond to this new temporal reality.

I don’t predict a sudden shift in the coming year, but I find myself increasingly curious not just about what unfolds in the bright, flat spaces of the digital, but about how the darker zones of experience are shifting in response to it. I want to explore how those spaces, especially the ones that are interior (the zones of inner life) are shifting in response to these external changes in space and time. The bright flat present makes these dark inner spaces more difficult to see, and more incomprehensible. But I’m most interested in what we can’t see.