As many Just FYI regulars know, I have spent much of the last few summers on the road, taking long drives and living out of suitcases. If this sounds like a lost chapter from Kerouac—trust me, it’s not. My travel companion has been one or the other of my two baseball-playing sons, now 19 and 17 respectively. For those who understand the world of high-level amateur baseball—a niche group if there ever was one—my peregrinations will hardly come as a surprise. The “summer baseball circuit” is not altogether unlike the professional game: players arrive in a city, take part in a series of workouts and games, and then move on to the next one. The principal difference is: they are accompanied by their parents, who are also footing the bill. It’s a “grind,” as they say, and it’s expensive. But there can be rewards as well. My 19-year-old son was drafted by the Chicago Cubs in July 2025, though he ultimately chose to play baseball at the University of Alabama. Now, my 17- year-old is pursuing his own goal of playing baseball at the next level. Currently, he’s set to join his brother at Alabama, though the July 2027 MLB draft may intervene. Time will tell!

Needless to say, all of this summer traveling makes it hard, if not impossible, to work. Typically, I can squeeze in a decent amount of writing once we’re settled in a place, though I have to be flexible about where I work. Coffee shops, hotel lobbies, parking lots, and bleacher seats—I have chipped away at book chapters, Substack posts, and review essays in each of these places. Sometimes it’s weirdly inspiring; mostly it’s uncomfortable!

But there are other limitations as well. The subject matter of Just FYI is certainly capacious: “Art, Ideas, Life.” And yet, while life comes in waves during these summers, the art-and-ideas part is trickier. It’s hard, for example, to find time to watch movies and/or television. A rainy afternoon may provide enough time to sneak in a blockbuster hit like The Odyssey, but I have to wait to catch up on new television releases. I don’t have the focus at, say, 10:00 P.M. to start a new series. So, instead, I go back through a show that I’ve watched before. During the summer of 2026, that show has been the well-known period drama Mad Men, which aired on AMC from July 2007 to May 2015.

Mad Men follows Don Draper (Jon Hamm), a New York advertising executive who grew up as Dick Whitman in rural Illinois—a secret he has concealed from nearly everyone in his life. Don is handsome and intelligent; he is also a womanizer and an alcoholic. Over the course of the series, he goes through two failed marriages: first, to the beautiful yet self-conscious Betty Draper (January Jones) and later to the young, free-spirited Megan Calvet (Jessica Paré). Meanwhile, Don’s colleagues on Madison Avenue undergo their own transformations: Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss) emerges as a trailblazer in the advertising world, rising from Don’s secretary to a prominent copywriter; office manager and single mother Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks) controversially (but unapologetically) becomes a partner at Don’s firm; senior executive Roger Sterling (John Slattery) expertly wines and dines clients while repeatedly wrecking his own home life; and account man Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser) learns that his patrician heritage and Ivy League education mean nothing in the cutthroat, results-driven world of ad agencies.

Over the course of the series, the personal upheavals of the principal characters are mirrored by the social and political upheavals of American life writ large. Mad Men begins in 1960 and ends in 1970, and it looks back on this era with equal parts apprehension and nostalgia. While, for example, Don embodies the unraveling of the postwar male ideal—he’s square-jawed, stoic, and virile, but also morally bankrupt—the show never tires of exploiting this very characterization. In a 2008 skit, Saturday Night Live picked up on this irony, suggesting that Don represents an erotic standard that no other male can hope to attain:

Mad Men’s female characters fare similarly. They are sexually objectified both diegetically and non-diegetically, even as they are meant to illustrate the repression of the era. For example, Peggy and Joan variously reflect the struggle that women then faced in entering professional life, while Betty represents the frustrations of traditional domesticity—a point that Saturday Night Live also lampooned in this 2009 skit:

Yet, far from a mere “complicit critique,” Mad Men is smart enough to realize that such contradictions are bound to wreak havoc downstream. The upheavals of domestic and professional life accordingly find their counterparts in the era’s larger political and social transformations. The show ticks off a number of the major events of the 1960s, including the civil rights movement (ca. 1954–68), the Vietnam War (ca. 1955–75), the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), the assassinations of John F. Kennedy (1963), Martin Luther King Jr. (1968) and Robert F. Kennedy (1968), and the Apollo 11 moon landing (1969). By the end of the series, both Madison Avenue and the characters themselves are, for all intents and purposes, existing in a different world. Past conceptions of gender, marriage, race, authority, and identity have seemingly collapsed, and new ones are being born.

It’s hard to believe—but, alas, so very true—that the twentieth anniversary of Mad Men’s July 2007 debut is fast approaching. Needless to say, much has happened in Western society since then, and perhaps for that reason retrospective pieces about the series have begun to appear. An October 2024 piece in GQ argues that Mad Men is “the most rewatchable show of the Peak TV era.” The argument, it seems, is that Mad Men is not just about this or that character. Rather, it’s “explicitly about the passage of time.” To watch the show, in other words, is to ponder how temporality unfolds for us “in a benighted linear fashion.” An August 2025 review puts a more strident, politically charged spin on the series:

[The] broadly positive attitude towards the cultural shifts brought on during the later part of the 60s is reflective of Mad Men’s creation around the 2010s. In fact, the show’s 8-year run roughly spans the years of the Obama presidency (2008-2016), a time when liberal America was at the height of its power and the country was edging closer towards realizing demands that young people raised 40 years earlier. Now, 10 years after the series finale aired, America is a very different place. Gone is the liberal optimism that shaped the Obama years. Rather, the country is being governed by a movement that looks back to the 1950s and early 1960s with a sense of great nostalgia. MAGA has made it its mission to turn back the clock and return to the values that the 68 generation contested so vehemently, undoing the impact of the movement and its legacy. In this context Mad Men is an important show for the way in which it pushes back against the idea of the early 1960s being a lost golden age.

A third retrospective, issued in September 2020, takes an entirely different point of view. It argues that Mad Men is off-putting precisely to the extent that its characters continually “make terrible choices and screw things up.” On this reading, the show doesn’t represent “liberal optimism.” In fact, quite the opposite: “What would make this series more appealing to me? I’d like a ‘good’ character that I can relate to. See them struggling to make things work in the midst of all these bad people. Let them have some victories, to make the struggle of this life worthwhile.”

There is, I think, a degree of truth in each of these assessments. The sheer length (92 episodes total!) and emotional complexity of Mad Men do indeed repay a second viewing. And while the show does present a “broadly positive attitude” towards the 1960s, the characters are sophisticated and, yes, miserable enough to keep Mad Men from being a straightforward endorsement of countercultural progressivism. Consider the following scene from Season 7, Episode 4. Roger and his ex-wife, Mona (Talia Balsam), travel to a hippie commune in upstate New York, where they attempt to rescue their daughter Margaret (Elizabeth Rice) after she abandons her husband and young son. But Margaret (now called “Marigold”) won’t budge. She answers that Roger repeatedly abandoned her for work, drinking, and women. Thus her flight from responsibility and the so-called “American Dream” is but an extension of Roger’s legacy:

For my own part, watching Mad Men a second time has attuned me to the show’s spiritual interests, both explicitly and implicitly. Throughout the series a number of characters go through what might be considered “crises of faith” or, at least, variations of spiritual searching. Paul Kinsey (Michael Gladis) was always a poor fit for the advertising world—bookish, grandiloquent, and more than a little insecure. Eventually, he is sacrificed in a corporate merger, only to resurface in Season 5 as a member of the Hare Krishna movement—a form of devotional Hinduism then gaining visibility within the American counterculture. In the scene below, this move shocks Paul’s former colleague Harry Crane (Rich Sommer), though it’s implied (and later becomes clear) that Paul’s spiritual quest is actually motivated by his romantic love for a fellow devotee. In this way, Mad Men humorously explores a recognizably Kierkegaardian possibility: religious commitment itself can be appropriated aesthetically, whether as a new identity, social performance, or vehicle for erotic desire.

Other religious encounters are more sobering. In Season 2, Peggy develops a relationship with Father John Gill (Colin Hanks)—a young Catholic priest at the Church of the Holy Innocents in Brooklyn, where Peggy’s family is part of the parish. While Gill recognizes Peggy's intelligence and asks her to help with church publicity, he also senses (accurately, it should be noted) that she is carrying considerable guilt and emotional conflict. Over the course of the season, their relationship becomes increasingly tense as Father Gill tries to draw Peggy back towards reconciliation with the Church. But Peggy refuses, thereby making clear her growing independence from the religious and familial world in which she was raised:

Father John Gill: [Reluctantly] Peggy, do you have something you need to talk about?

Peggy Olson: [Surprised] Excuse me?

Father John Gill: Well, I’ve noticed you don’t take Communion. I don’t think it’s too much of a leap to ask if there’s something you need to talk about.

Peggy Olson: No.

Father John Gill: God already knows whatever it is, Peggy.

Peggy Olson: [Dismissively] Well then, I don’t need to talk.

Gill’s motives towards Peggy are generally depicted in a good light, though there are indications that Gill, too, is struggling with his vocation. After learning about Peggy’s unmarried pregnancy and her subsequent decision to place her child for adoption, Gill seems to feel betrayed. Rather than speak to Peggy directly, he reproaches obliquely her instead:

But there is another possibility. Maybe—just maybe—Gill envies Peggy’s boldness and independence. In one of Mad Men’s most intriguing closing sequences, we are given a peek into Gill’s private life. Late one evening, he returns to his room, removes his clerical garb, grabs an acoustic guitar, and plays a rousing rendition of Peter, Paul and Mary’s gospel-tinged song “Early in the Morning” (1962):

Of course, Peter, Paul and Mary were among the seminal acts of the American folk music revival, which began in the 1940s and crested in New York City in the early 1960s, spearheaded by a young Bob Dylan. Though a complex movement in many ways—as I’ve written about before, Dylan’s eponymous first album (1962) can be placed in the gospel blues tradition—the folk revival was nevertheless synonymous with left-wing politics and causes. It would appear, then, that Gill feels caught between worlds: he wants to uphold Catholic teaching, even as he is drawn to the emerging cultural zeitgeist. It can hardly be an accident that the second season of Mad Men concludes with Gill delivering an apocalyptic sermon during the Cuban Missile Crisis—an event that, in truth, began just days after Pope Saint John XXIII (1881–1963) opened the landmark Second Vatican Council (1962–65).

Indeed, almost every character on Mad Men is struggling with self-integration, and this is paradigmatically true of the show’s dashing protagonist Don Draper. Like other leads from the “Peak TV” era (Tony Soprano and Walter White come immediately to mind), Don is essentially an antihero. To all appearances, he’s a “normal” family man who lives in the suburbs, commutes to work, pays the bills, and so on. But there is a shadow side to his conventional lifestyle. Yes, Don is a philanderer—over the course of the series, he has nearly twenty mistresses—but his womanizing is symptomatic of a deeper psycho-spiritual crisis. Don hates himself. What’s more, he believes that others hate him too.

Famously, Mad Men ties Don’s inner turmoil to his impoverished upbringing in the Depression-era Midwest. His mother was a prostitute who died in childbirth; his father was an abusive alcoholic. After his father died, Don was raised by his stepmother in a brothel—a harrowing experience from which he was emotionally and sexually scarred. Amazingly, a macabre stroke of luck later seemed to offer a way out. While serving in the Korean War (1950-53), Don’s commanding officer was killed and burned beyond all recognition, allowing Don (then known as Dick Whitman) to switch dog tags and assume a completely new identity.

The trouble is: Don can’t do it. No matter how hard he tries, he remains a neglected child who longs for the unconditional maternal love he never experienced. This profound sense of lack drives Don’s creative work on Madison Avenue. He knows that the goal of advertising is to make people want things—to make them feel what they don’t have. The more Don taps into the inadequacy of the human condition, the more he is able to get people to fill this absence with material goods. In short, Don’s genius lies precisely in his despair. He can only write great copy if he himself is attuned to his own unhappiness. In one of the most famous scenes in Mad Men, Don draws on his failing marriage to Betty to craft a beautiful advertising pitch about familial bliss:

From Paul Kinsey to Don Draper, each of the above character sketches indicates that Mad Men is a show about the conflict between external, societal roles and expectations on the one hand and internal, personal desires and designs on the other. How one presents oneself to the world stands in dialectical tension with who one actually is. This is a perennial concern in human affairs, but Mad Men’s particular genius is to frame it against the backdrop of America in the 1960s. As a period of palpable sociopolitical change—one that continues to resonate with viewers today—the 1960s are a near-ideal context to explore the inner/outer problem. The pairing of the two is, in fact, the throughline of the entire series.

As noted above, many interpret this central theme in terms of politics. But I would argue that Mad Men’s enduring insights are spiritual in nature. This point can be fleshed out, albeit briefly and provisionally, by drawing on Søren Kierkegaard’s 1843 work Either/Or (Enten — Eller). The book begins by casting doubt on the Hegelian proposition that “the outer is the inner and the inner is the outer,” and its collection of aphorisms, essays, and sketches is meant to illustrate this very point. In particular, the pseudonymous aesthete referred to as “A” exemplifies the sorts of contradictions found in Mad Men. Beneath A’s witty, sophisticated, and charming exterior lies melancholy and despair. But he does not merely conceal his inwardness. No, he transforms it into poetry, irony, and erotic performance. As A puts it, the poet is “an unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart,” insofar as reflective sorrow occurs when “the interior and the exterior are out of balance.” In “The Seducer’s Diary” (Forførerens Dagbog), A imagines how the inner/outer split can be weaponized. His own antihero, known as Johannes, uses outward words and gestures to control others without making a corresponding inward commitment. Johannes doesn’t just want sex; he is turned on by his ability to elicit authentic feelings from others while offering nothing of himself.

But will he get away with it? In the second part of Either/Or, Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Judge William argues that A’s embrace of concealment has deleterious psycho-spiritual consequences. The aesthete is an enigma not only to others but also to himself; his personality is nothing more than a jumble of moods, possibilities, and masks. According to the Judge, A needs to break from his aesthetic lifestyle and pursue an ethical worldview instead. In other words, he needs to bring his external and internal lives into correspondence through choice, commitment, and self-disclosure. The ethical person chooses himself concretely—accepting his history, relationships, vocation, and responsibilities—and this gives his inward commitments a durable outward form. In this way, the ethical individual becomes “transparent to himself.” As the Judge concludes, “It is every human being’s duty to become open,” for the person who cannot reveal himself cannot genuinely love.

Kierkegaard develops this spiritual architecture more fully in later works such as The Sickness unto Death (Sygdommen til Døden, 1849). Attributed to the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, who is presented as a Christian psychologist of penetrating insight, The Sickness unto Death radicalizes Either/Or’s inner/outer incongruence by interpreting it as “despair” (Fortvivlelse). What Judge William calls becoming “transparent to himself” is a precursor to Anti-Climacus’s definition of the self of faith—namely, that this self “in relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, rests transparently in the power that established it.” This is a crucial addition, for it exposes the incompleteness of the Judge’s ethical solution. For Anti-Climacus, self-choice, openness, marriage, and vocation can help integrate the personality, but they cannot finally ground it. That is why the contradiction between inner and outer can only be overcome in the religious life, when the self accepts both what it is concretely and its dependence upon God.

In a controversial ending, Mad Men brings Don to this point. Over the course of the series, Don oscillates between what Kierkegaard would term the aesthetic and ethical spheres. After choosing self-gratification time and time again—often in booze and paramours—Don regularly retreats to marital life or makes difficult but admirable moral decisions. In Season 2, he tries to protect the kind but pitiful alcoholic Freddy Rumsen (Joel Murray) from getting fired. In Season 6, he cedes his position in a new Los Angeles office to Ted Chaough (Kevin Rahm), knowing that the move may save Ted’s collapsing marriage. But these attempts to grab hold of the ethical aren’t enough to sustain him. And so, as the show barrels towards its conclusion, Don finds himself on the road, heading West.

It is indeed a journey of self-discovery, but what it reveals is not pleasant: Don’s money and success have not solved (and will never solve) his need to claim his true identity—his true self. At last, he hits rock bottom at a spiritual retreat in Big Sur, California, where he makes a tearful confession to Peggy over the phone and, during a group therapy session, shares an emotional breakthrough with a stranger named Leonard (Evan Arnold). The following morning, he joins a Buddhist-inflected meditation overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Sitting cross-legged among the other participants, Don closes his eyes, chants, and finally smiles—just before the scene gives way to Coca-Cola’s famous “Hilltop” commercial (1971):

Sure, it could be argued that Don’s apparent vision of the “Hilltop” ad—where strangers of different races harmoniously sing “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke”—proves that he hasn’t changed at all. On this reading, he simply converts his newfound spiritual insight into a commodity. But I would make a different case. Don remains an ad man, yes. However, he is no longer writing commercials from the perspective of lack; he’s now writing (to draw on Anti-Climacus’s idiom) from the perspective of “rest.” In a word, Don’s new ad reflects the insight that material things can only occasion a happiness whose true source is transcendent peace.

Needless to say, I’m not drawing a one-to-one correspondence between Don’s character arc and Kierkegaard’s spirituality. After all, Mad Men situates Don’s inner renewal in California in 1970, amid a syncretistic combination of Gestalt theory and Buddhist meditation. This is a long way from Lutheran Denmark in the 1840s! Nevertheless, Kierkegaard and Buddhism converge upon a crucial spiritual insight: suffering arises from the self’s compulsive effort to construct, secure, and conceal itself, and freedom requires a relinquishment of that effort. Don’s final smile can therefore be read as a moment akin to what Anti-Climacus calls “rest.” It is not a Christian conversion per se, but a Buddhist-inflected analogue to the self-acceptance that becomes possible when the self receives itself from the power that established it.

On a recent podcast episode, Amy Welborn and I offered our respective analyses of The Odyssey—the latest film by acclaimed director Christopher Nolan. Our opinions were divided: I mostly liked it; she mostly didn’t. Still, the conversation gave us an opportunity to think about Nolan’s filmography as a whole, and we each named our three favorite films by the auteur. My number one was Dunkirk, which was released in July 2017.

I wrote a review essay on Dunkirk when it first came out, and I have decided to republish it here—a practice that I may repeat on Just FYI, if and when the occasion warrants. While I have only made a handful of revisions to the text, I did elect to add clips from the film itself. For they show (rather than tell) why Dunkirk remains Nolan’s masterpiece—no matter how much money The Odyssey makes!

At just 47 years of age, Christopher Nolan has become an anomaly in Hollywood — a critically acclaimed filmmaker who is also bankable at the box office. Moreover, he has done so with a series of films that, on the surface, bear little resemblance to one another: Memento (2000) is basically low-budget noir; The Dark Knight (2008) belongs to the superhero genre; Inception (2010) plumbs the human unconscious; Interstellar (2014, which I also reviewed) is sci-fi for armchair physicists. There is, then, a protean quality to Nolan’s output, which makes him an enigmatic figure among contemporary directors. Unlike the work of, say, Martin Scorsese, it is hard to define what a “Nolan film” is like. His works tend to experiment as much with Weltanschauungen as with genre and style. Perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that Nolan followed Interstellar, a space opera set in the future, with Dunkirk, a war film set in the past.

Dunkirk is based on the Dunkirk evacuation (codenamed Operation Dynamo) of 1940. Tomes have been written on this event, its impact on World War II, and its role in shaping Britain’s identity, but Nolan condenses this abundant material into a taut, 106-minute film. The decision to prioritize cinematic intensity over historical contextualization has been met with controversy, and it’s fair to say that Dunkirk teaches us next to nothing about the persons behind the event. After all, Tom Hardy’s character is known as “Farrier” (though he is loosely based on the New Zealand pilot Alan Deere), while Cillian Murphy plays a man simply listed as “Shivering Soldier.” What Nolan’s film does capture (or, at least, strives to capture) is the evacuation’s sense of desperation and urgency.

Ever fond of playing with chronology, Nolan divides the film into three plots, each beginning at a different temporal point in relation to the operation’s completion — namely, a week (“The Mole”), a day (“The Sea”), and an hour (“The Air”). The first of these timelines centers on a group of soldiers, stranded on Dunkirk beach, who are trying to board a ship back to England. They are all but defenseless against the bombardment of the Luftwaffe, and they scurry, almost silently, from vessel to vessel in hopes of deliverance.

The second timeline features a civilian, his teenage son, and his son’s friend, who depart on a fishing boat from Weymouth and head towards Dunkirk, hoping to aid in the evacuation. As they cross the English Channel, they pick up a soldier stranded at sea, who is suffering from shell shock — a fateful decision, which puts their mission in jeopardy.

The third timeline centers on a pair of British pilots, who are trying to provide much-needed cover for the evacuation. This is the most sublime sequence in the film. By using genuine Spitfires and mounting cameras on the planes’ wings, Nolan comes as close as possible to recreating an aerial dogfight.

Because the film represents a historical event, the audience already knows how Dunkirk is going to end. Still, the denouement comes as a relief nonetheless. When, at last, Nolan permits us to hear Winston Churchill’s famous “We Shall Fight on the Beaches” address, we have a sense of how it must have been received by the soldiers who survived the evacuation — weary but hardened, traumatized yet grateful.

In many respects, it would seem that this accomplishment alone is significant, and that Dunkirk‘s critical acclaim (including eight Oscar nominations) is merited. I, for one, would agree. Dunkirk is a transfixing experience and, as a technical achievement, bests Nolan’s other tour de force, The Dark Knight. But Dunkirk has its detractors too. As mentioned, much of the criticism has centered on the film’s minimal interest in historical context and character development. This is a problem that at least one commentator views as inherent in Nolan’s “postmodern narrativity”:

By focusing on the visual—elevating image over word—he wants us to feel rather than think, to re-experience rather than remember.” In giving priority to imagery, Nolan gives priority to “simulation,” that is, to overlaying the real event (the Dunkirk evacuation) with a series of sublime images that falsely pretend to repeat them (Dunkirk). That is why there is no God in Dunkirk either. Nolan has set himself up as the quasi-divine author of the world of Dunkirk (if not Dunkirk): “What Nolan does suggest…is that a virtual form of transcendence is available within the world, simply as a heightened experience of the world.”

This is an intriguing argument, which harks back to one of the classic debates in film theory. Is the cinematic medium principally oriented towards recording and disclosing reality (per Siegfried Kracauer), or is cinema an illusion all the way down, giving the appearance of continuous movement when, in truth, it is a series of manipulated photographs projected at a certain speed (per Jean-Louis Baudry)? On the latter view, Nolan’s Dunkirk is surely a master class in illusory technique, cajoling the viewer (for the price of a ticket no less!) into believing that he or she is “right there” in battle, even though nothing could be farther from the truth. On the former view, Nolan’s techniques are persuasive precisely because they indicate and indeed mediate reality, and thus Dunkirk is a means of understanding our world, disclosing, among other things, the elemental human experiences of beauty, fear, love, mortality, and so on.

In the end, I tend towards cinematic realism, and so I am not terribly worried about Dunkirk‘s thin historicity. There is a sense in which Nolan’s approach here resembles that of Terrence Malick, contemporary cinema’s paragon of “realism.” As is well known, Malick was a Heidegger scholar and translator before becoming a filmmaker, and, accordingly, Malick treats art as a site where the “unconcealment” (ἀλήθεια) and “concealment” of entities are manifested, and the presence of “divinities” [die Göttlichen] intimated. Might one say something similar about Nolan’s Dunkirk? Certainly it is a film attuned to things in themselves, to the interplay of earth and sky and mortals. Moreover, as a World War II film, Dunkirk views these elements over against the “enframing” (Gestell) of modern technology: entities are controlled and set aside for use. Air, land, and sea, even the human being as such, are revealed as tools of the technological order. In this sense, the anonymity of the characters discloses their instrumental status.

Still, there are points in Dunkirk where an excess nevertheless breaks through. The sublimity of clouds and sun, the perilous beauty of the ocean, the human being’s primordial urge to live, to be home — all captured brilliantly by Hans Zimmer’s pealing score. In these moments, Dunkirk becomes a conduit for anthropological and theological reflection, perhaps even sacral experience. Here film does not just tell us about these themes; it makes us feel them.

Is this not the genius of cinema itself?

The overarching theme of JUST FYI POD: CULTURE‘s third season is: “The Future of American Christianity: A Conversation in Ten Questions.” On today’s episode—our season finale—my cohost Amy Welborn and I take a more indirect approach to our guiding question. In previous discussions, we have explored topics such as Pope Leo XIV’s recent encyclical on AI and the changing landscape of American religion, but today we will dig into a broader cultural issue—namely, the release of Christopher Nolan’s latest film, The Odyssey.

By almost any conventional measure, The Odyssey has garnered an almost pious reception. The movie has eye-popping scores on Rotten Tomatoes from critics and audiences alike. As one commentator sums it up, The Odyssey is “a masterpiece in every way.” Coming on the heels of Nolan’s widely acclaimed 2023 biopic Oppenheimer, The Odyssey is thus poised to cement its director’s status as “the voice of our generation.” But what is that voice saying? After a survey of Nolan’s diverse filmography, Amy and I wrestle with this question and, in the process, probe what films like The Odyssey say about Western culture today.

You can listen to the pod right here on Substack, or you can access it via Spotify and/or Apple Podcasts. Links are provided below. As always, your generosity and support are much appreciated. Please consider liking or sharing our work. Subscribe for free today!

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When Apple TV released Widow’s Bay in April, I immediately decided to give it a try. At this point in my life, I think it’s fair to say that I have an affinity for nautical fiction. From novels such as Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) and Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1952) to films such as Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) and Peter Weir’s Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003), adapted from Patrick O’Brian’s excellent Aubrey-Maturin book series (1969-2004), I have always gravitated towards stories about humanity’s relationship with the dread sublimity of the sea. And if you throw in a coastal New England setting, that’s even better. Widow’s Bay, then, had me at hello.

And yet, while the show borrows from the genres of nautical fiction and New England gothic—making Jaws a particularly apt comparison—it combines additional elements of comedy, mystery, and horror to produce a unique and captivating first season of television. The show is set in the fictional town of Widow’s Bay, located on an eponymous New England island whose history is marked by disappearances, hauntings, unexplained deaths, and an ever-present belief that the town is cursed. At the center of the narrative is Mayor Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys), a kind if also ambitious widower, who hopes to revive the island’s struggling economy by attracting tourism and convincing outsiders that the legends surrounding Widow’s Bay are nothing more than local color. As increasingly supernatural events undermine his efforts, Tom is joined by his eccentric assistant Patricia Moyer (Kate O’Flynn), the island’s folklore expert Wyck Crawford (Stephen Root), the weary Sheriff Bechir Clemmons (Kevin Carroll), and a cast of quirky townspeople who have insight into the island’s hidden past. Meanwhile, Tom’s rebellious teenage son Evan (Kingston Rumi Southwick) becomes entangled in the island’s mysteries, while flashbacks gradually reveal that the curse’s origins date back to the seventeenth century.

Indeed, as the investigation unfolds, Tom discovers that Widow’s Bay is sustained by a centuries-old covenant forged between the community’s founder Richard Warren (Hamish Linklater) and an unidentified malevolent force. In particular, the island’s relative peace has long been dependent on human sacrifice, transforming the town into what might be called a “sacrificial economy” wherein communal survival is purchased through the deaths of selected victims. What begins, then, as Tom’s campaign to modernize Widow’s Bay becomes an existential crisis, as he realizes that his office has always entailed the stewardship of a murderous inheritance. The season therefore culminates in an impossible moral dilemma: Tom learns that ending the curse requires sacrificing someone from Warren’s bloodline, though the identity of that person remains in doubt until the last scene of the season’s tenth and final episode. By the end, Widow’s Bay shifts from a quirky New England mystery into a meditation on inherited guilt, communal violence, and the persistence of sacrificial systems that bind generations together—whether they choose them or not.

Critics have interpreted Widow’s Bay in a variety of ways. For James Poniewozik of The New York Times, the series is a meditation on the tension between ancient superstition and post-Enlightenment reason, between supernatural belief and secular progress:

The conflicts [in Widow’s Bay] are echoed in communities everywhere. Do newcomers owe deference to long-timers, or do the preservationists need to step aside and let the future roll in? How do we deal with the buried secrets of our ancestors?

For that reason, he adds, it’s a show very much about America itself. Just as the nation “wrestles with how to celebrate its own history and which parts to ignore,” so do the denizens of Widow’s Bay live uneasily with the unresolved tragedies of its civic past.

Saloni Gajjar of The A.V. Club gives the show a more intimate reading. As she sees it, Widow’s Bay tells the “story of how Tom and his pals deal with dangers lurking below the surface,” particularly those of a psycho-spiritual variety:

The show digs into how this trio isn’t being haunted only by a potentially centuries-old enigma but also by their own traumas. Tom and Wyck each lost a loved one, while Patricia survived a serial killer’s spree. The series acts as a thoughtful rumination on the difficulty of letting go of the past, even if it insists on chasing you down in weird, scary ways.

On this reading, Tom’s “existential crisis” is not so much tied to his mayoral duties as to his wife’s passing. The force that stalks the island is not some demonic thing; it is the death that stalks us all.

These approaches to Widow’s Bay have merit, but they both elide the show’s defining motif of “sacrificial economies.” The first such economy—or a systemic order in which civic peace is repeatedly won through the killing of selected victims—involves the island itself. Episode 6 traces the historical origins of Widow’s Bay, recounting how the community’s founder Richard Warren made a secret pact with a demonic entity controlling the island. According to this covenant, if the inhabitants of Widow’s Bay were to survive their first winter, human sacrifices would be necessary. Moreover, the sacrifices would have to be renewed over time, if the island’s curses were to be held at bay.

But this crisis begets another. Through a series of events, Tom and Wyck become convinced that the only way to break the curse is to end Warren’s bloodline for good. The contract, in other words, extends beyond Warren to all of his kin, meaning that the curse can only be broken by reenacting the sacrificial logic from which it sprang. Hence, as a terrifying storm bears down on the island, there is also a frantic effort to identify Warren’s remaining descendants. Eventually the search zeroes in on Ruth (K Callan), Tom’s elderly secretary. In no way does Tom want to harm Ruth—she’s gentle and warmhearted—but he’s not sure that he has a choice. After all, Ruth’s life is nearing its end, and her death can save everyone in Widow’s Bay. With this in mind, Tom goes to her house and, with nervous indirection, compares his dilemma to the so-called “trolley problem,” as the scene below shows:

This sort of crisis has a significant history in moral philosophy and psychology. In her 1957 essay “The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of Double Effect,” British philosopher Philippa Foot (1920—2010) articulates the issue in this way:

Suppose that a judge or magistrate is faced with rioters demanding that a culprit be found for a certain crime and threatening otherwise to take their own bloody revenge on a particular section of the community. The real culprit being unknown, the judge sees himself as able to prevent the bloodshed only by framing some innocent person and having him executed. Beside this example is placed another in which a pilot whose airplane is about to crash is deciding whether to steer from a more to a less inhabited area. To make the parallel as close as possible, it may rather be supposed that he is the driver of a runaway tram, which he can only steer from one narrow track on to another; five men are working on one track and one man on the other; anyone on the track he enters is bound to be killed.

So, what is one to do? For classical utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham (1748—1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806—73), this is not a particularly difficult decision: since morality entails securing the greatest good for the greatest number, persons in Tom’s (unfortunate) position have no choice but to sacrifice the Ruths of the world.

Others would disagree. After all, it’s neither Tom’s nor Ruth’s fault that they are in this position. If Widow’s Bay is destroyed, the blame lies with Warren and, ultimately, with the evil entity ruling the island. On the other hand, if Tom elects to murder Ruth, he is now a participant in the system of immorality presiding over Widow’s Bay. On this logic, it would be better for Tom to do nothing and to let fate decide. In his 2017 book On Human Nature, Sir Roger Scruton critiques the “trolley problem” in this way: “These 'dilemmas' have the useful character of eliminating from the situation just about every morally relevant relationship and reducing the problem to one of arithmetic alone.”

Nevertheless, within the sacrificial logic of Widow’s Bay, it may well appear that Tom has no choice: a single life is, relatively speaking, a small price to pay to save everyone else on the island. In fact, Tom’s situation recalls one of the great tales of Greek mythology. In Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (Ἀγαμέμνων), the first of three tragedies that make up the collection known as the Oresteia (Ὀρέστεια), the eponymous king of Mycenae returns home victorious after the Trojan War. But all is not well. Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra, is plotting his murder. Her motivations are manifold—the desire for the throne, her adulterous relationship with Aegisthus, and, above all, her unquenchable rage over Agamemnon’s sacrifice of their daughter, Iphigenia, at the port of Aulis. Before the Greek fleet could sail for Troy, unfavorable winds—sent by the goddess Artemis—left the army stranded. The seer Calchas declared that only the death of Iphigenia would appease the goddess and allow the expedition to proceed. Torn between his duty as a father and his obligation as commander of the Greek coalition, Agamemnon chose the latter, consigning his daughter to death for the sake of the larger cause.

In short, Agamemnon inherits a world governed by a sacrificial logic. He does not invent the system, but he accepts its terms and discovers that the preservation of community can exact a terrible human price. The same, it seems, is true of Tom. In referencing the trolley problem, he suggests that sacrificing one life to save many is morally permissible on utilitarian grounds. In this regard, Tom’s dilemma resembles the logic of the “tragic hero,” as detailed in Søren Kierkegaard’s masterwork Fear and Trembling (Frygt og Bæven, 1843). According to Kierkegaard’s pseudonym, Johannes de silentio, Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia is an act that, while heartbreaking, garners pity and even support. Agamemnon takes on personal guilt and grief for the sake of a higher ethical obligation that others can recognize. As Johannes puts it:

When an enterprise of concern to a whole nation is impeded, when such a project is halted by divine displeasure, when the angry deity sends a dead calm that mocks every effort, when the soothsayer carries out his sad task and announces that the deity demands a young girl as sacrifice—then the father must heroically bring this sacrifice. He must nobly conceal his agony, even though he could wish he were “the lowly man who dares to weep” and not the king who must behave in a kingly manner. Although the lonely agony penetrates his breast and there are only three persons in the whole nation who know his agony, soon the whole nation will be initiated into his agony and also into his deed, that for the welfare of all he will sacrifice her, his daughter, this lovely young girl. O bosom! O fair cheeks, flaxen hair (v. 687). And the daughter’s tears will agitate him, and the father will turn away his face, but the hero must raise the knife. And when the news of it reaches the father’s house, the beautiful Greek maidens will blush with enthusiasm, and if the daughter was engaged, her betrothed will not be angry but will be proud to share in the father’s deed, for the girl belonged more tenderly to him than to the father.1

Johannes adds that this sort of scenario crops up time and again in world literature, whether in the Bible (Judges 11) or in the great histories of the past (Livy, History of Rome). What unites these cases is the fact that the tragic figures in question receive “admiration for their deed.” In other words, the act of murder is met with “tears of compassion,” since it is done in the name of a higher good:

The tragic hero is still within the ethical. He allows an expression of the ethical to have its τέλος in a higher expression of the ethical; he scales down the ethical relation between father and son or daughter and father to a feeling that has its dialectic in its relation to the idea of moral conduct.

This is the very dilemma that Widow’s Bay sets up, and it’s made even more dramatic in the season’s final moments, when [‼️spoiler alert‼️] Tom learns that his son Evan is also a descendant of Richard Warren. Suddenly, he finds himself in the very shoes of an Agamemnon, confronting whether or not he has the mettle to sacrifice his only son to satisfy a supernatural covenant and, in turn, preserve his community.

Human notions of tragedy, it seems, have proven remarkably durable, from the ancient Theatre of Dionysus (Θέατρο του Διονύσου) to Apple TV’s popular streaming service today. But there is a dark side to this constancy as well. Can we ever escape the notion that, when all is said and done, life is destined to conclude in tragedy? That even our greatest heroes are constrained by a worldly order permeated by misfortune, suffering, and despair?

This is a question that Johannes keeps bumping up against in Fear and Trembling. Yes, the “tragic hero” elicits pity and admiration, but is there another kind of hero that we can turn to? One might respond by highlighting a religious figure such as the Hebrew patriarch Abraham, but Johannes refuses to do so in trite fashion. The “knight of faith,” as he calls Abraham, cannot be easily assimilated to our categories of thinking. Johannes cites Genesis 22 (the so-called “Binding of Isaac”) as a case in point. In this well-known story, Abraham is ordered by God to sacrifice his son Isaac. Though distressed, Abraham is ready to comply when an Angel of the Lord (מַלְאַךְ יְהוָה) stays his hand, and a ram appears in Isaac’s stead. Nevertheless, Abraham’s faithfulness has won him divine favor:

By myself have I sworn, saith the Lord, for because thou hast done this thing, and hast not withheld thy son, thine only son: That in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore; and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies; And in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed; because thou hast obeyed my voice (Gen 22:15—18).

According to Johannes, Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac is markedly different from Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia. First, and most obviously, Agamemnon is seen to be acting within a publicly intelligible ethical framework, whereas Abraham suspends normative ethics in order to comply with a divine command given to him alone. “It is not to save a nation,” Johannes remarks, “not to uphold the idea of the state that Abraham does it; it is not to appease the angry gods. … Abraham’s act is totally unrelated to the universal, is a purely private endeavor.” Moreover, while Abraham’s obedience to God is almost impossible to understand, his faith in God is even more mysterious. For, unlike Agamemnon, Abraham trusts that a beneficent God will provide in the end:

And Isaac spake unto Abraham his father, and said, My father: and he said, Here am I, my son. And he said, Behold the fire and the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?

And Abraham said, My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering (Gen 22:7—8).

This point is stressed in both the Old and New Testaments (Matt 9:13, 12:7). The God of Abraham wants love and trust, not blood and fear: “For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings” (Hos 6:6). Abraham’s faith seems to apprehend this truth. “By virtue of the absurd,” to borrow Johannes’ memorable phrase, Abraham believes that God will somehow give Isaac back—and, therefore, that sacrifice does not underlie the very structure of reality. As Johannes puts it, “By faith Abraham did not renounce Isaac, but by faith Abraham received Isaac.” Abraham thereby experiences what the tragic hero doesn’t: even with “the sword hanging over the beloved’s head,” he does not “find rest in the pain of resignation” but “joy by virtue of the absurd.”

Ultimately, then, Agamemnon inhabits a closed sacrificial economy in which one life must be exchanged for many, whereas Abraham trusts that God is not bound by such a calculus. Widow’s Bay, meanwhile, situates Tom at the crossroads between the two. Will he be an Agamemnon or an Abraham? Or, even more pointedly, is it possible to be an Abraham in a world governed by sacrificial logic? If Tom sacrifices Evan, he saves the island only by participating in Warren’s murderous covenant. If he refuses, he risks everything on an apparently “absurd” belief that tragedy doesn’t have the final word. This crisis opens onto a much larger one: does communal survival require that some be sacrificed—or is this rationale rooted in a violent worldview that itself must be renounced?

This is the fourth part of a series that, as I wrote last July, I plan to slowly unfold over the next couple of years. In the late 2000s, when I was finishing my doctorate at the University of Oxford, I started translating The Mystery of Kierkegaard (Das Geheimnis Kierkegaards) by the Prussian Catholic thinker Erich Przywara, S.J. In time, I would use this side project as the basis for a proper book chapter—namely, “Erich Przywara: Catholicism’s Great Expositor of the ‘Mystery’ of Kierkegaard,” which was published in the 2012 book Kierkegaard’s Influence on Theology: Catholic and Jewish Theology (Volume 10, Tome III). Now my goal is to present Das Geheimnis Kierkegaards in its entirety.

In my most recent post in this series (linked below), I completed my translation

of the book’s first major division, “Mystery of Style.” Today’s post moves on to Part II of The Mystery of Kierkegaard, which is entitled “The Mystery of the Authorship“ (Geheimnis des Werkes). The first chapter of this part, “Existential Philosophy,” centers on the enduring significance of Kierkegaard in and for modern philosophy.

According to Przywara, Kierkegaard’s thinking continually and variously reappears within what he calls Existenz-Philosophie, where it challenges every closed philosophical system by insisting that truth is rooted in concrete, lived existence rather than abstract speculation. He traces Kierkegaard's influence through thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Karl Barth, Romano Guardini, and others, observing that each figure appropriates only part of Kierkegaard’s legacy, ranging from his characteristic emphases on “existential spheres” and “paradox” to concepts such as "the moment."

To be sure, the results can be confusing. Przywara insists that much existential philosophy, especially in Heidegger, ultimately transforms Kierkegaard by collapsing his fundamentally religious vision into an immanent philosophy of human existence, replacing humanity's orientation towards God with an inward concern for "care" and “being-in-the-world.” In this way, Heidegger unsuccessfully attempts to resolve the core tension in Kierkegaard’s thinking. In fact, the “philosophical Kierkegaard” is caught between two dichotomous interpretations: either the psychoanalytic reduction of existence to temporality alone, or the theological affirmation that eternity breaks into time. Might there be a better way, Przywara implies, of coming to grips with this profound existential dialectic?

The Mystery of the Authorship

1. Existential Philosophy (Existenz-Philosophie)

The problem, as it presented itself to us in the “Mystery of Style,” next takes an obvious turn to the main objective of the authorship. It follows that, given the prevailing direction of the inquiry, we shall have to examine Kierkegaard’s work especially in light of its transhistorical character—that is, starting from his present-day revival within the problems of our time and working back to his inner form. For we can reveal his thought more clearly if we attend to its transhistorical continuance.

The second methodological aspect is this: we begin with, as it were, the philosophically neutral Kierkegaard—with the Kierkegaard of existential philosophy in the broad sense. Thus the question of the deeper meaning of “existence,” whether in its psychological or religious aspect, is to be dealt with first.

Yet, since the ambiguity noted at the outset emerges here once again, a third methodological point becomes clear: the relativity of each image of Kierkegaard—the philosophical, the psychoanalytic, the religious, the Lutheran, and the Catholic. It will be necessary to look into each image with real earnestness. But this seriousness must not obscure the fact that what is at issue each time is only a relative standpoint, whose significance is derived from the fabric of the whole. Here the way of the dialectical method has its particular place, even as it also presents a difficulty.

Existential philosophy lies at the foreground of Kierkegaard’s work. Its continued relevance lies it what we might call the aporetic mentality of the present age: the rejection of the all-knowing system with an eye towards the inexplicability of life. Naturally, the task here will not be to look into direct literary dependencies, even though these are evident in certain cases. Rather, given the way we have posed the question, what is at issue is that deeper dimension on which everything must hinge—namely, with that, as it were, subterranean and invisible reawakening, the phenomenon of the inexplicable resurrection of a great spirit in ever different and new forms, of a resurrection that may not be so much tied to a thorough study of his writings, and may even precede such study as its first impulse, and thus bears the most compelling witness to the immortality of spiritual life

The aporetic mentality of the present age, in which Kierkegaard’s existential philosophy again comes to life, has as its first formula: living thought against abstract thought. For living thought is the opened-towardness (Hin-zu) in the inexhaustibleness of life. Therefore it undergirds a thinking that engages life’s aporias. But abstract thought, in the highest degree, aims at the resolution of the aporias outside of time by a conceptual, unified system: statically in Wolff, dynamically in Hegel.

First, this “living thinking” appears as personal thinking—in other words, as a thinking in which the conceptual language has value only insofar as it is a particular expression of the struggling movement of thought. The stationary result of thinking is grasped in the highest degree as a verbum mentis—that is, not so much as a result that, resting in itself, stands over against the contemplating mind, but rather in actu nascendi, in that between state where it is already spoken out and yet still being spoken.

From this perspective, as Guardini and Haecker suggest, it is personal thinking in the sense of thinking as personal act, as persona in actu. In Guardini, this is a mode of thought in which the flowing interplay and mutual penetration of the forces of the personality are given clear expression. In Haecker, there is a stronger emphasis on a mode of thinking in which the resoluteness of personal self-assertion is expressed in opposition to the world. With obvious clarity, both see how Kierkegaard comes alive here. Indeed, Kierkegaard’s journals also explicitly speak in these terms: “I certainly do not deny that I still accept an imperative of knowledge and that through it men may be influenced, but then it must come alive in me.” (TG I, 29). Seen in this light, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments is even clearer:

Instead of having the task of understanding the concrete abstractly…the subjective thinker has the opposite task of understanding the abstract concretely. Abstract thinking turns from concrete human beings to humankind in general; the subjective thinker understands the abstract concept to the be the concrete human being. (TG I, 68).1

What is at stake, then, is the work of recovering “the lost power and meaning of words” (TG I, 68). And, in this sense, it is thinking as a concrete encounter with the concrete, in the living vitality of the one who thinks concretely, but not in the sense of relativistic subjectivism (because, for Kierkegaard, the ultimate sense of “inwardness” is that of a more decisive and more successful way into “objectivity” TG II, 123). Concluding Unscientific Postscript puts it even more pointedly: “Truth is subjectivity” (GW VI, 265).2

This same living thinking presents itself further as ethical thinking—that is, as a thinking that, to an extent, fulfills the demand of a concrete thinking. It does not adopt the posture of a self-sufficient contemplation, nor does it turn inward in self-recollection (Grisebach). Instead, it lives on the level of action—action understood as lived contact with what is other, not the absorption of things into the self, but the encounter of the “I” with the real “Thou” (Du). For only then is there any real assurance that the thinker does not see himself in things, but rather encounters real things as they are different from the thinker. By the same token, the thinker recognizes himself in his concreteness only insofar as he apprehends his distinctness from things. This clearly refers to Eberhard Grisebach’s philosophy, in which two theses are decisive—first, that of action as an encounter that establishes borders between thing and thing, and thus as the stance in which concrete knowledge becomes possible; and, second, “presence” as the key term of such a mode of knowing—the here-and-now of the encounter between subject and object as the “the object as it presents itself within my field of vision—turned towards me or advancing towards me,” as Grimm’s dictionary derives the word (IV, 2281).3

But this is, again, a characteristic revival of Kierkegaard. It is the common epistemological-theoretical formula, as it were, of Kierkegaard’s journals and the Postscript: “True subjectivity is not a matter of knowing but rather that of the ethical-existing subjectivity, for knowledge places one in the realm of possibility” (GW VI, 15).4 “The only certain thing is the ethico-religious.” (TG I, 299). That is why Hegelian philosophy must be rejected outright, because “it has no ethics” (Buch über Adler; ed. Haecker 255): “From this it follows quite simply that every living person who with help of Hegelian philosophy wants to understand himself in his own personal life falls into the most foolish confusion” (ibid.). Hence, as remarks from his journals show, Kierkegaard considers the philosophy of Philosophical Fragments as a collection of all the questions of philosophy under the heading of “ethics.” Aesthetics (Either-Or and Stages on Life’s Way), ethics (Philosophical Fragments), and “religion” (the others) are the three key aspects his work. Thus, it follows logically that the final point is the ethically conditioned “presence” of thinking. “In their religiousness, the majority of people at most become present to themselves in a past or in a future, but not in a present.” (Buch über Adler 227). “It is rare that my thinking is essentially present” (TG I, 403).

Third and finally, then, living thinking thereby becomes dialectical thinking in the living moment. It is dialectical thinking in the Platonic sense of the word—that is, thinking in the conflict of living conversation, yet not in that way a thinking that objectifies its temporally structured environment of past–present–future into a factual nexus to which it stands opposed. Rather, it is a thinking that lives in that ineffable region in which this entire expanse lies gathered together—the past as a future in the making, the future as a past that is evolving, the present as the indefinable intersection of this double movement of becoming: the “moment.”

Therefore it is communal thinking, but in the living act of community: in the intersecting of conversation itself (dia-legein). It is thinking face-to-face, but in the living act of story: in the compressed and quivering moment. In this case, detailed citations are hardly necessary. For it is evident that we have before us here that theory of thinking which was already worked out by Karl Barth in his early work and further elaborated by Emil Brunner (the Gespräch) and Friedrich Gogarten (the “moment”). It is the dialectic of dialogue versus the “solitary” dialectic of Hegel (that is, the dialectic of a “pure” thought that opposes itself to itself, in which the living vitality of individuals dissolves into a mere participation in the universal—the ‘individual’ recast within the idealism of pure thought as an individuum de ratione materiae. This is the historicity of the moment against the historicity of the system found in Hegel. But it is just as evident how this—and indeed in exactly the same way according to the express intent of the tendency identified above—is the most formal renewal of Kierkegaard’s philosophy: the renewal of the Platonic dialectic of dialogue, with which it begins (GW VI, 8ff.), and the theory of the moment, which is its center. “While Greek pathos is itself concentrated on recollection, the pathos of our project is concentrated on the moment” (VI, 18).

If we say dialogue and moment, however, then the deeper aspect of the same aporetic mentality is already pronounced: the explicit failure to penetrate and to master pure thinking; the brokenness and limitation of the movement of thought; the more profound vitality of living thinking—that is, of a dynamic inner being and practical life, of the depth of life (and not only of lived experience): its insufficiency in itself. Living thought is: broken thinking over against pure thinking.

Hence, within a certain initially descriptive and relatively neutral perspective, what we have here is a mode of thinking that ultimately breaks down. This breakdown passes through nearly all the objectively possible forms found in contemporary currents of thought:

• In Nikolai Hartmann’s aporetic philosophy: a thinking that finally loses its way amid the disconnected plenitude of reality;

• In Guardini: a mode of thought that reaches precisely to the point where the fluid oppositions begin to disclose the whole;

• In Grisebach: a collision with the “boundary” that turns into a critical protest against every system that aspires to closure;

• In the implicit philosophy of the early Karl Barth, as well as of Emil Brunner and Knittermeyer, there emerges an unsparing humiliation of all definitive thought into a final pure questioning before the ultimate paradox—or dialectic understood as the “qualitative” dialectic of the leap, that is, not a process of continuous advance, but distinct spheres standing sharply opposed to one another;

• In the manner of Hedwig Conrad-Martius (above all in her book Time): the “existence of contact,” that is, in having what we have, there is a deeper not-having (cf. Kierkegaard, Buch über Adler, 194).

If we remind ourselves of that which Kierkegaard’s purely formal style revealed to us, then it should now be clear how, throughout all of this, a whole spiritual movement has arisen from his spirit: the radical rejection of every closed, all-explaining system, the fundamental categories of “paradox” and “the leap” (in Philosophical Fragments) as the rallying cry against the same enemy—speculative Idealism, with Hegel as its head—towards whom the whole group of names mentioned above is likewise directed

This becomes even more evident in what could be called the inner emotional tone of this sputtering mode of thought: it is a suffering and strained thinking. For here the most characteristic aspect of Kierkegaard’s thinking breaks through: that the deepest “groaning of the creature” must itself become a mode of thinking—indeed, precisely a mode of thought—if thought is to be the genuine thinking that belongs to this real creature. Therefore we find here the hidden, and often openly acknowledged, paternity of Søren Kierkegaard for all those contemporary movements in which this element is operative.

When Peter Wust and the representatives of the so-called Catholic phenomenology contrast an actively constructive mode of thought grounded in Cartesian doubt (that is, a thinking self-contained within itself) to the thinking of open, reverent, and receptive wonder, then it calls to mind how Kierkegaard took precisely this position against German Idealism:

• “Aristotle’s view that philosophy begins with wonder, not as in our day with doubt, is a positive point of departure for philosophy.”

• “That which prompts a beginning is wonder. That by which a beginning is made is a resolution,” corresponding to the manner in which wonder stands outside all immanent oppositional pairs, “has no opposite” according to Descartes, and according to Spinoza does not belong “among the three emotions (cupiditas, lætitia, tristitia) from

  which he deduces everything” (TG I, 244).

• “Wonder is the beginning of every deeper understanding” (Rel. Red. 147).

• “If the presuppositionless of the philosophers were the case, an account would still have to be made of language and its entire importance and relation to speculation, because in it speculation does indeed have a medium that it has not provided itself, and what the eternal secret of

  consciousness is for speculation as a union of a qualification of nature and a qualification of freedom, so also language is [for speculation] partly an original given and partly something freely developing. And just as the individual, no matter how freely he develops, can never reach the point of

  becoming absolutely independent, since true freedom consists, on the contrary, in appropriating the given and consequently in being absolutely dependent through freedom, so it is also with language” (TG I, 148).

If, for Paul Tillich, the ultimate ground of the posture in anxiety consists in a knowing-oneself-to-be-threatened, that is, in the breaking of smug security into a state of constant insecurity; this is, as is evident without many words, a marked revival of Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety, in the sense particularly emphasized by a diary entry: “The majority of people live far too securely in life and therefore get to know God so little” (TG I, 311-12).

If the Strindbergian dialectic of Ludwig Marcuse (as a type of a certain direction within the philosophy of polarity) is marked by a restless unevenness and an emotional squinting, by a caricatural language for the inner despair of a human being who finds his footing nowhere, then yet another Kierkegaardian work emerges from the depths—namely, his Sickness unto Death, which is centered on despair. We are reminded of the way Kierkegaard singles out precisely these broken, intermediate affects: pathos and comedy as emotional expressions of thought in its constant becoming, in its positive-and-negative relation to truth (GW VI, 167); and irony and humor as the respective confinia between the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious (GW VIII, 187).

And finally, if for the worldview of Karl Barth and Eduard Thurneysen, two words were decisive: cross and death (that is, the ever-renewed gash that runs straight through a thinking that seeks to attain its goal, and the true apprehension that is attained only in death), then here the most personal accents of Søren Kierkegaard sound forth once again: “to grasp that one cannot grasp it” (TG I, 409); a “crucifixion of the understanding” (GW VII, 245); the spiritual attitude of “living as one already dead” (TG II, 405).

Thus, if we now consider together the two sides of aporetic thinking—that of living thinking and that of failing thinking—we find here the strongest possible contrast to what, in the spirit of German Idealism, one might call “ideal thinking.” In opposition to a mode of thought that, in the strongest sense, ignores the concrete, real existence of the thinking person for a “thinking in itself” stands a thinking that must be described outright as this concrete, real existence in actu: the concretely real existential being as a thinking-being. With that, however, we stand at the resurrection of Kierkegaard’s existential thinking in the way that Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology defines existence as the essence of being and, in that capacity, as the essence of truth and value.

Heidegger’s phenomenology5 can be formally grasped in the following statement. It is occupied (first) with the being of that which presently exists, in the sense that the being in question is always myself (231), and that the substance of the human being is existence (314). It does so (second) on the basis of the epistemological insight that every understanding of being (every apprehension of being) is not only itself a being (something that exists), but is, in its deepest nature as an understanding of being, a self-understanding and self-expression of being itself (34, 165, 171, 183, 207ff). Finally (third), it puts this insight into methodological practice by treating the concretely ethical-affective phenomena (care, concern, conscience, anxiety, guilt, and so forth) as “existentials,” that is, by seeking to penetrate to existence through these “existentials,” and thus looking through them toward existence while at the same time seeing existence within them, so that (fourth) existence is no longer understood abstractly as mere becoming or as a particular mode of being-there, but instead appears in an ethical and affective form (or “care” in Heidegger’s language).

Yet, this is almost entirely the inner formal structure of Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments. In the first place (with regard to the “being of that which presently exists”), the Postscript stresses: “For an existing individual, existence is the highest interest” (GW VII, 13). Interesse should be understood in the sense of inter-esse, that is, in the sense of “actuality” as “an interest between the hypothetically posited abstract unity of thought and being” (ibid.). “Existence corresponds to the individual” (TG II, 128). “The only actuality that there is for an existing person is his own ethical one” (GW VII, 15).

In the second place (with regard to the reduction of understanding to being), the Postscript says:

• “That the knowing spirit is an existing spirit, and that every human being is such a spirit existing for himself, I cannot repeat often enough,” (GW VI, 265).

• “To understand oneself in existence is the Greek principle” (GW VII, 49).

• “Existence has joined thinking and existing…inasmuch as an existing person is a thinking person” (ibid., 13).

In the third place (with regard to the ethical-affective method as existential), the practical orientation of the same Postscript is manifested yet again: to grasp existence in and through the ethical-affective, since anxiety, guilt, despair, faith, and so forth are “determinations of existence” (see ibid., 89).

Finally, in the fourth place (the ethical-affective aspect of existence as such) is expressly articulated in the following statements by Kierkegaard:

• “The only actuality there is for an existing person is his own ethical actuality” (ibid., 15).

• “The actual subjectivity is…the ethically existing subjectivity” (ibid.)

• “The subjective thinker understands the abstract concept to be the concrete human being, to be this individual existing human being” (ibid., 49).

By way of contrast, the content of the resurrection imagery is less uniform, though, at first glance, the points of agreement seem to continue. For Heidegger, existence is a constant “not yet” (243f.); for Kierkegaard, it is “a striving, a constant dwelling in the in-between” (GW VII, 210). For Heidegger, guilt, angst, death, etc. are “existentials,” that is, expressions of the essence of existence, by which existence manifests itself in a “privileged mode of disclosedness” as “the reticent, anxiety-disposed projection of itself onto its ownmost guilt” (297). Here we hear not only the Kierkegaard of guilt, anxiety, and hidden inwardness, but quite explicitly his claim that “an essential consciousness of guilt” constitutes “the deepest possible deepening into existence” (GW VII, 215).

The decisive difference, however, begins when the ultimate meaning of this existence, marked by conscience, guilt, anxiety, and death, is called into question. Here all the directions pointing beyond themselves (towards God) bend back into immanence. Whereas in Kierkegaard the statement about “deepening oneself into one’s own existence” continues by characterizing this deepening as “an expression of the fact that an existing individual stands in relation to an eternal happiness” (GW VII, 215), Heidegger reshapes this deepening formally into the fundamental “being-in-the-world” of all existence and, in terms of its content, into “care” as its essential nature—that is, not an opening up out of oneself, but an anxious withdrawal into oneself.

Hence, when Heidegger repeatedly and in the strongest possible terms denounces philosophy’s corruption at the hands of theological influences, what is disclosed is a stubborn and passionate attempt to break free from something that, in Kierkegaard, can only be stripped off with violence: the innermost religious, and indeed the innermost Christian, heart of his philosophy of existence.

* * *

With this merging of the two levels of the present age’s aporetic mentality into a philosophy of existence, we have reached, however, the high point of our entire first inquiry: the question of the enduring influence of the philosophical Kierkegaard. It is a high point in a twofold sense: a peak, and a point from which one looks into both depth and height. As a peak: in Kierkegaard's continuing influence within Heidegger's phenomenology, the distinctive historical position of his philosophy is revealed. As a view into depth and height: in the way Heidegger presses Kierkegaard into the immanence of the self’s “being-in-the-world,” while Kierkegaard proves to be the explosive material that blasts every immanence into the highest height of transcendence, there reveals itself the consciously provisional character of Kierkegaard's philosophy. It is the coolness of a “philosophy” of existence as a more or less artificial cooling of that ambiguous “life” of existence of which we spoke in the first part; existence as aesthetic-sensuous or as religious-catastrophic, to use Kierkegaard's own expressions

We certainly seem to be standing at the summit. For the philosophy of existence is, according to the explicit intention of its creator, the sharpest “No” to Hegel—and indeed to Hegel as the philosopher of essence: philosophy of existence against philosophy of essence (der Essenz).

Certainly, “movement in logic, that is Hegel’s achievement” (GW V, 6), but “no movement may come into logic” (ibid.). In other words, even when logic takes existence into account within its philosophical inquiry, that very inclusion transforms it into nothing more than “existence as concept, existence as ideality” (TG II, 127). Once the living process of becoming that marks existence is elevated into the timeless repose of concepts, existence itself is consequently transformed into a mode of fixed determinate being. What remains is talk only of the “essence” (Wesen) or “suchness” (Sosein) of existence as existence, not of the surging, living “existence” (Dasein) of existence itself. “The eternal principle of logic is that which the Eleatics mistakenly applied to existence: nothing ever comes to be; everything simply is” (GW V, 6). Therefore:

Kant is right in saying, “Existence brings no new predicate to a concept.”6 Obviously Kant honestly thinks of existence as not being absorbed into the concept, empirical existence. In all the relationships of ideality it holds true that essentia is existentia. … Nothing is added to a concept whether it has existence or not; it is a matter of complete indifference; it indeed has existence, i.e., concept-existence, ideal existence. But existence corresponds to the individual; as Aristotle has already taught…and is not absorbed in the concept. (TG 127-28)

For that reason, if we keep in mind how both the Hegelian and the Heideggerian versions of existential philosophy, in confronting the fundamental problem of all philosophy—the problem of the relation between Dasein (Existenz) and Sosein (Essenz)—set the scholastic analogy between the identity of existence and essence in God and the tension-filled unity of existence and essence in the creature in opposition to the univocality of an identity that unfolds tension from within itself (as the self-movement of the Idea in Hegel, as the care or restlessness of existence in Heidegger and Kierkegaard respectively ), thereby setting the unity of identity and contradiction against the analogia entis (as we always formulated it)7—then it is here that this observation takes on its full force.

Because Hegel's philosophy, in its explicit systematic form, is a philosophy of essence, its unity of identity and contradiction between existence and essence amounts to the absorption of existence into essence: a unity of existence and essence determined from the standpoint of essence, an idealized movement of existence within essence, the ideality of “pure becoming.” When Kierkegaard, as reformulated by Heidegger—that is, once every relation to the empirical vitality of life and to religious transcendence has been bracketed or severed—becomes a philosophy of existence, it amounts to a unity of existence and essence determined from the standpoint of existence—an absorption of essence into existence. Existence becomes a “movement of itself toward itself within itself,” a kind of “curvature back into itself” (corresponding to Heidegger's notion of “care” as the meaning of existence), the reality of “existential becoming” folded back upon itself. Hegel and Kierkegaard-Heidegger represent two opposing yet mutually dependent forms of absolute philosophy—that is, of a philosophy in which the creature becomes God.

1. In Hegel, where existence is absorbed into essence, absolute philosophy interprets the creature as the self-movement of God and is therefore chiefly theopanistic.

2. In the philosophy of Kierkegaard-Heidegger, in which essence has become existence, there appears a corresponding absolute philosophy in which the creature closes in upon itself (with “being-in-the-world” as the formal essence of existence and “care” as its material essence), and is therefore predominantly pantheistic

But precisely this extreme intensification becomes a surpassing of itself—a view into depth and height. For even Hegelian philosophy, in the extremity of its “pure becoming” appears historically as the subsequent fate of the profound thought that governs the treatise The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s Systems of Philosophy (1801): “becoming” (das Werden) against the absoluteness of Fichte and Schelling. And if we add in the influence of Romanticism, which, at the very least, has been identified as an undercurrent of the later Hegel, so must we say that every philosophy of essence, just as it stood before us as a rigid, cold type, is inwardly shaken by the reality creature-consciousness. However, this is now the case to an incomparably greater degree with the opposite pole. For what we have just presented as the typical philosophy of existence is, in its very essence, as we saw above, a single explosive charge: the twisting of Kierkegaard's “anxiety,” originally directed transcendently (towards God), into Heidegger's “care,” fixed upon immanence

In this way, the entire image of the contemporary aporetic mentality is shattered in its apparent self-enclosure and philosophical detachment. For in the form that Kierkegaard's philosophy of existence assumes within Heidegger's phenomenology of existence, two deeper interpretations of this radical concentration upon existence force their way to the surface. On the one hand, this concentration can be understood as a turning inward upon the self—as a disturbance retreating into the ego, psychoanalytically speaking, as inversion, as a being-turned-in-oneself. But then: the concentration as a turning inward into the innermost mystery of creaturely existence, as the tearing open of every worldly idealism (every creaturely “pure,” of a “pure thinking,” “pure willing,” “pure becoming,” and so forth) into the utterly naked “is not,” and therein the immediacy to every true “Is,” to the One for whom alone every “pure” is permissible and required—to God, and indeed to God as He is, in the strictest sense, “separated and distinguished from everything that is outside Him or can be thought” (Vatic. sess 3, cap. 1).

In other words: the Kierkegaard appropriated by contemporary existential philosophy is merely a visible foreground through which one can still see the Kierkegaard of Either/Or between psychoanalysis and radical religion.

If, with good reason, we can say that “existence” (the fundamental word of Kierkegaard’s philosophy and of the whole philosophy of existence today) finds a kind of watchword in the other word moment (Augenblick)—both the fullness of life and the nothingness of the “moment”—then Kierkegaard himself clearly delineates, in sharp terms, this provisional character of the philosophy of existence as a problem suspended between psychoanalysis and rigorous religion. First of all:

The sensuous life is sometimes defined as existing in the moment and only in the moment …; (however this) moment signifies a present that possesses neither past nor future, and therein lies the deficiency of sensuous existence.

Yet, on another level, the moment becomes the most precise expression for the eternal:

The eternal also signifies the present as that which has no past and no future, and this is the perfection of the eternal…; so it clearly emerges that the moment is not only a determination of time; the moment is not properly an atom of time but an atom of eternity. It is the first reflection of eternity in time, its first attempt, as it were, at stopping time. (GW V, 83-85)

The moment is that ambiguity in which time and eternity touch each other, and with this the concept of temporality is posited, whereby time constantly intersects eternity and eternity constantly pervades time.8

And, with that, our conflict rises to the extreme. Indeed, this is already Goethe's deepest inner tension: for him the Augenblick is simultaneously the fundamental term of sensuous existence—the concentration of all pleasure into a single “delicious” moment—and yet the very same word also signifies the unforeseeable gift that comes from above, the “favorable” or rather the “granted,” moment. These two meanings genuinely and ambiguously flow into one another. On the one hand, the word leans toward the sensuous moment, towards Goethe's emphasis on the eye, as expressed in Gottfried Keller's line: “Drink with your eyes what the eyelash holds.”9

I know that nothing is truly mine

Save the thought that freely flows

From the depths of my soul,

And every blessed moment

That a loving providence

Grants me to enjoy from the depths of my being.10

But then again, in a sense that allows the “from-above” character of the moment to flash forth, as Goethe's “eye” comes to understand itself as the medium through which the divine light shines:

If the eye weren’t like the sun,

how could we behold the light?

If God’s own power did not live in us,

how could the divine delight us?11

In the Kierkegaard texts cited above, however, the somewhat domesticated serenity of Goethe has been rent open into the most extreme either-or between earth and heaven. It is torn open in precisely such a way that the two deeper systematic interpretations of existential philosophy today emerge in their sharpest possible opposition.

Psychoanalysis is such a radical “tearing away of eternity by time” that all “eternal life” becomes nothing—death as the purely negative cessation of the only “full” temporality (Vetter 289ff.). But a rigorous form of religion (as seen in Karl Barth’s resurrection of Kierkegaard) is such a “penetration of time by eternity” that time becomes the judged and condemned nothingness of death before the sole reality of eternity.

Once again, the relentlessness of the ancient problem confronts us. We stand between the “aesthetic-sensuous” and the religious.

The main task of Just FYI Pod: Ideas’ third season is to consider: “Higher Ed in the ChatGPT Era: How Did We Get Here? Where Is It Going?” On today’s season finale, my cohost Clark Elliston and I will explore the topic: “What Will Higher Ed Look Like in 2050?: Three Theses.”

After a substantial introduction, in which Clark and I discuss the release of my latest book Kierkegaard, Statecraft, and Political Theology, we turn our attention to a trio of “theses” or contentions about education over the next 25 years:

1. The American South Will Be the Vanguard for Educational Achievement.

2. The Humanities Will Cease to Be a Proper Academic Field.

3. The Professorate Will No Longer Exist.

The goal of our debate is not to make predictions. It is to ponder both why, and why not, these claims make sense. After all, in an era of rapid technological change, a variety of possibilities exist. Thus our task here is to sketch out potential trajectories and, in doing so, to draw our season to a proper close.

You can listen to the pod right here on Substack, or you can access it via Spotify and/or Apple Podcasts, both of which are linked below. Subscribe for free today. As ever, consider following, liking, rating, and sharing our work. Your generosity and support are much appreciated!

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I’m happy to announce that my latest book—Kierkegaard, Statecraft, and Political Theology—has now been published. Here’s the official synopsis from Bloomsbury’s website:

Written against the fractured landscape of contemporary Christianity and the increasing popularity of “political theology,” Christopher B. Barnett wrestles with the question: what if Søren Kierkegaard's rejection of modern politics was not a form of spiritual quietism, but of Christian resistance?

Tracing the rise of the modern secular state, Barnett argues that Kierkegaard's refusal of “the political” anticipates a crisis now impossible to ignore. For Kierkegaard, obsessive political passion signals a theological inversion: as the state grows in importance, God is displaced. The upshot is not freedom but moral exhaustion—a society saturated with envy, despair, and groupthink.

Barnett contends that Kierkegaard's reflections on politics and the modern state find a receptive audience in a trio of twentieth-century figures: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Jacques Ellul, and René Girard. Loosely gathered under the heading of “apostolical radicalism,” each of these thinkers demonstrates that the modern state organizes contemporary life through bureaucracy, technique, propaganda, and ritualized antagonism. State politics may promise meaning, identity, and moral clarity, but as the rise of political theology shows, it ultimately absorbs all aspects of life into the sphere of politics.

Kierkegaard, Statecraft, and Political Theology unleashes Kierkegaard's political thought as a live provocation, drawing unexpected lines between Christian theology and praxis and our present age of social media, tribalized politics, and permanent war. Ultimately, this book challenges readers to ask whether the modern state leads towards salvation—or the apocalypse.

When, after years of work, I submitted my manuscript to the publisher last fall, I wondered if the world’s political situation would stabilize in the coming months, thereby necessitating a revision (if not a retraction) of my core thesis. But, alas, recent events have only confirmed the argument of Kierkegaard, Statecraft, and Political Theology, making it all the more urgent to heed the voices of Kierkegaard, Bonhoeffer, Ellul, and Girard.

Doubtless disagreements will remain, but, as I see it, the important thing is to keep asking questions. For it is by questioning that we resist the totalizing logic of the state system. In this way, we’re able to relate to one another as individuals and, indeed, as neighbors (Matt 22:37-39).

Below is a Table of Contents. I hope you will find it of interest!

Preface

Chapter 1: The Origin and Development of the Modern State: A Survey

Chapter 2: Kierkegaard at War: Slesvig-Holsten and Christian Resistance to the Modern State

Chapter 3: “Apostolical Radicalism” after Kierkegaard: Bonhoeffer, Ellul, and Girard

Chapter 4: The Politization of the Sacred; or, the Danger of “Political Theology”

Epilogue: “My Kingdom Is Not of This World”: Apostolical Radicalism and the Future

Works Cited

The overarching theme of JUST FYI POD: CULTURE‘s third season is: “The Future of American Christianity: A Conversation in Ten Questions.” On today’s episode, my cohost Amy Welborn and I focus on the following issue: “Has the Digital Age Helped or Hurt the Church?”

However, before delving into that controversial topic, Amy and I discuss Pope Leo XIV’s recent (and much celebrated) encyclical Magnifica Humanitas. Famously, the pope’s first encyclical confronts the emergence of generative artificial intelligence over the last few years—a topic that I am quite interested in as well—but Amy and I endeavor to set Magnifica Humanitas in the wider context of church teaching on information and communications technology, including film, the Internet, and social media. Only then can we properly address the question of how the Church has been impacted by the Digital Age.

You can listen to the pod right here on Substack, or you can access it via Spotify and/or Apple Podcasts. Links are provided below. As always, your generosity and support are much appreciated. Please consider liking or sharing our work. Subscribe for free today!

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Let me be clear upfront: this is not a post on the so-called “rift” between President Donald J. Trump and Pope Leo XIV. After all, Amy Welborn and I discussed what I playfully dubbed “The Thrilla at the Basilica” on Just FYI Pod: Culture a few weeks ago (linked below), and, in any case, a plethora of ink has

been spilled on this subject from all corners of the political spectrum. Enough is enough.

What I do want to do, however, is explore the philosophical and theological tension underlying this debate. Yet, even here, I need to be careful. Discussions about “the separation of Church and state” are often conceptually imprecise and historically negligent. There is a good reason for that: the conditions that brought about this division are incredibly complex, so much so that they simply can’t be addressed in a New York Times column or a Substack essay, much less a Twitter thread! Thus my goals here are more modest. First, I want to narrow my focus to a key question: what does the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) teach about the separation of Church and state? Second, after having addressed this matter, I want to put a few questions to the CCC—not in treacherous opposition but in a spirit of humble inquiry.

Before beginning, I should note why I have chosen to exegete the CCC. First, it is significant that not one but two popes spearheaded its development. The first was Pope Saint John Paul II (1920-2005), who, in November 1985, convened a synod to assess the Church’s implementation of the goals of the Second Vatican Council. It was at this time that the idea of a proper catechism was introduced. As John Paul II later put it:

On that occasion the Synod Fathers stated: "Very many have expressed the desire that a catechism or compendium of all Catholic doctrine regarding both faith and morals be composed, that it might be, as it were, a point of reference for the catechisms or compendiums that are prepared in various regions. The presentation of doctrine must be biblical and liturgical. It must be sound doctrine suited to the present life of Christians. After the Synod ended, I made this desire my own, considering it as "fully responding to a real need both of the universal Church and of the particular Churches". For this reason we thank the Lord wholeheartedly on this day when we can offer the entire Church this reference text entitled the Catechism of the Catholic Church, for a catechesis renewed at the living sources of the faith!

The second pope involved in the CCC was, of course, not a pope at that time. His name was Joseph Ratzinger—former Archbishop of Munich and Freising (1977-82) and Prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith from 1981 until his election as Pope Benedict XVI in 2005. It was Ratzinger who chaired a commission of 12 cardinals and bishops who prepared the foundational draft of the CCC. Yet, as he remarked in 2011, the preparation of the CCC was more than a human, bureaucratic endeavor: “I must confess that even today [2011] it seems a miracle to me that this project was ultimately successful.”

There is, then, legitimate ecclesial and theological heft undergirding the CCC. This was hardly a document put together without sincerity or thoughtfulness. But there is a second, even more important reason to give priority to the CCC: it has been deemed standard for Catholic teaching and life. In his apostolic constitution Fidei Depositum, published in October 1992, John Paul II states:

The Catechism of the Catholic Church…is a statement of the Church's faith and of Catholic doctrine, attested to or illumined by Sacred Scripture, Apostolic Tradition and the Church's Magisterium. I declare it to be a valid and legitimate instrument for ecclesial communion and a sure norm for teaching the faith. May it serve the renewal to which the Holy Spirit ceaselessly calls the Church of God, the Body of Christ, on her pilgrimage to the undiminished light of the kingdom!

The word “catechism” stems from the Greek verb κατηχέω, which in a biblical context means “to instruct,” “to teach,” or “to inform.” Thus a catechism is indeed an extension of the “magisterium” of the Church—a word that itself is related to Latin noun magister (“teacher”). Given this status, it’s hardly surprising that, as of May 2024, the CCC had been published in 44 languages and sold nearly 20 million copies worldwide.

It’s fair to say, then, that the CCC is a substantial work in terms of its composition, authority, and reach. Whatever it says about the relationship between Church and state should be taken seriously. The first significant discussion of the state is found in Chapter Two of Section One of the CCC’s third overarching division called “Life in Christ.” The title of this chapter is “The Human Community,” and it is subdivided into three articles.

The first article lays out a number of broad principles about human sociality. Since all human beings have God as their origin and end, and since Scripture inextricably links both love of God and love of neighbor (Matthew 22:36-40), the CCC presupposes a “fraternity that men are to establish among themselves in truth and love” (§ 1878). The individual, then, is never a fully autonomous unit; each person “needs to live in society” (§ 1879). Of course, any number of societies are implied here, from fantasy baseball leagues to the local Kiwanis club. Yet, the CCC insists that two forms of society are essential: “Certain societies, such as the family and the state, correspond more directly to the nature of man; they are necessary to him” (§ 1882). But there is a careful dialectic at play here: while individuals are supposed to respect and serve the communities to which they belong, communities are only considered valid insofar as they promote the good of individuals. Drawing on the pastoral constitution Gaudium et spes (1965), the CCC states: “Each community is defined by its purpose and consequently obeys specific rules; but ‘the human person... is and ought to be the principle, the subject and the end of all social institutions.’” (§ 1881). Indeed, when this principle is lacking, “socialization also presents dangers” (§ 1883).

Although the CCC recommends “subsidiarity” to cope with dangers such as “excessive intervention by the state” (§ 1883), it does not deny the role that authority plays in human social life: “Every human community needs an authority to govern it. The foundation of such authority lies in human nature. It is necessary for the unity of the state. Its role is to ensure as far as possible the common good of the society” (§ 1898). So political leaders are essential, and obedience to such leaders is nothing short of a “duty” (§ 1900). These points are firmly asserted, though the CCC refrains from specifying how political leaders are to be selected:

If authority belongs to the order established by God, “the choice of the political regime and the appointment of rulers are left to the free decision of the citizens.” The diversity of political regimes is morally acceptable, provided they serve the legitimate good of the communities that adopt them. Regimes whose nature is contrary to the natural law, to the public order, and to the fundamental rights of persons cannot achieve the common good of the nations on which they have been imposed. (§ 1901)

Catholics, then, are not required to support federal republics along the lines of the United States. Yes, a legislative system of “checks and balances” is preferred (§ 1904), but the non-negotiable point is that political power, however structured, is meant to serve the common good: “Authority is exercised legitimately only when it seeks the common good of the group concerned and if it employs morally licit means to attain it. If rulers were to enact unjust laws or take measures contrary to the moral order, such arrangements would not be binding in conscience” (§ 1903).

The CCC provides a threefold definition of the “common good.” First, this notion assumes a “respect for the person as such,” whereby each individual is free to exercise “the natural freedoms indispensable for the development of the human vocation” (§ 1907). Second, the common good entails access to that which “is needed to lead a truly human life: food, clothing, health, work, education and culture, suitable information, the right to establish a family, and so on” (§ 1908). Third, and finally, the common good requires “the stability and security of a just order” (§ 1909). Now, each form of human association presupposes a common good—to be sure, my fantasy baseball league would collapse if a few members were prevented from making waiver claims, or if a cadre of league members colluded against the others—but the CCC is clear that the state is the ultimate guarantor of the common good:

Each human community possesses a common good which permits it to be recognized as such; it is in the political community that its most complete realization is found. It is the role of the state to defend and promote the common good of civil society, its citizens, and intermediate bodies (§ 1910).

In this situation, the role of the citizen is to participate in the advancement of the common good. This form of engagement entails taking an “active part in public life,” though the CCC is careful not to prescribe the manner or the amount of one’s public participation (§ 1915). On the other hand, the CCC is clear that the normative way to support the common good is to live a good and meaningful individual life, with an eye to care for those in one’s immediate environment: “Participation is achieved first of all by taking charge of the areas for which one assumes personal responsibility: by the care taken for the education of his family, by conscientious work, and so forth, man participates in the good of others and of society” (§ 1914). This point even extends to matters of “social justice,” which is inseparable from the notion of the common good and thereby “proceeds by way of respect for the principle that ‘everyone should look upon his neighbor (without any exception) as another self, above all bearing in mind his life and the means necessary for living it with dignity’” (§ 1931).

So where, then, does the state itself come into play? The CCC pivots back to this question in “Life in Christ,” this time in the second chapter of Section Two. The title of this chapter is “You Shall Love Your Neighbor as Yourself,” and it is subdivided into seven articles. The main discussion of the state occurs in Article IV, “The Family and the Kingdom.” While acknowledging that each Christian should be “convinced that the first vocation of the Christian is to follow Jesus” (§ 2232), the CCC also “enjoins us to honor all who for our good have received authority in society from God” (§ 2234). A significant portion of what follows reiterates the material from “The Human Community.” Yes, politicians “are obliged to respect the fundamental rights of the human person” (§ 2237), and, yes, citizens are to “regard those in authority as representatives of God, who has made them stewards of his gifts” (§ 2238). This is the CCC’s core dialectic of Church and state, articulating a relationship of mutual respect that (i) preserves law and order while (ii) simultaneously promoting the common good for each and every individual.

Still, Article IV also makes a number of new and more practical points. For example, citing the need for citizens to advance the common good, the CCC argues that it is “morally obligatory to pay taxes, to exercise the right to vote, and to defend one’s country” (§ 2240). Such duties, it is said, follow the plain teaching of Scripture (Rom 13:7, 1 Tim 2:2). The CCC also touches on the perennially controversial subject of immigration, though, notably, it does not deviate from the dialectic outlined above. On the one side, the “more prosperous nations are obliged, to the extent they are able, to welcome the foreigner in search of the security and the means of livelihood which he cannot find in his country of origin” (§ 2241). And yet, this obligation is not absolute, since “[p]olitical authorities, for the sake of the common good for which they are responsible, may make the exercise of the right to immigrate subject to various juridical conditions” (§ 2241). In a nutshell, citizens should be open to immigration, even as they should also recognize that it’s not an inalienable right. Discretion is not only permitted; it is presupposed.

This is, of course, thorny ground in the contemporary West. In 2026 alone, dozens and dozens of protests over immigration have taken place in the United States, and in some cases people have lost their lives. And yet, the CCC is clear that governments have the right to limit immigration, insofar as they are sincerely acting in accordance with the common good. Any such protests, then, need to rest on grave and well-substantiated grounds. So, what conditions must be present for a person or group to protest, or even to disobey, those who currently hold political power?

Here the CCC draws a distinction between refusing to comply with unjust laws and violently opposing an unjust regime. The former seems more straightforward than the latter. Christianity has long held that “serving God” takes precedence over “serving the political community” (§ 2242; cf. Acts 5:29). Thus the CCC reasons that when a government makes demands that “are contrary to those of an upright conscience,” individuals have warrant to disobey civil authorities (§ 2242). I take this to mean that, if a person in good conscience thought another was being wrongfully persecuted by the legal and political establishment, she would not violate Catholic teaching by refusing to disclose, say, the location of the oppressed person. Her love of God and neighbor eo ipso takes precedence over regnant sociopolitical conceptions and applications of justice.

By way of contrast, forceful resistance to the government is only permissible when a number of specific conditions are concurrent:

Armed resistance to oppression by political authority is not legitimate, unless all the following conditions are met: 1) there is certain, grave, and prolonged violation of fundamental rights; 2) all other means of redress have been exhausted; 3) such resistance will not provoke worse disorders; 4) there is well–founded hope of success; and 5) it is impossible reasonably to foresee any better solution (§ 2243).

In effect, the CCC sets the bar very high for violent protests, to say nothing of full-blown revolutions. If a governmental agency were said to be abusing the rights of a certain group of people, that still does not justify brutality against the authorities in question. Before attacking municipal or federal agents and their property, dissidents are asked to exhaust all other “means of redress,” including the political process itself and the possibility that future solutions may emerge. Hence, in the vast majority of cases, the CCC insists that violent rebellion is not morally justified.

That this counsel would be ill-received by rioters, looters, and would-be rebels on both Right and Left is likely. Even the CCC seems to anticipate objections, since it goes on to insist that the Church’s vision of the political community is influenced by “inspired truth about God and man” (§ 2244), a truth that’s not derived from human principles alone:

Every institution is inspired, at least implicitly, by a vision of man and his destiny, from which it derives the point of reference for its judgment, its hierarchy of values, its line of conduct. Most societies have formed their institutions in the recognition of a certain preeminence of man over things. Only the divinely revealed religion has clearly recognized man’s origin and destiny in God, the Creator and Redeemer (§ 2244).

Yet, groups or societies who reject the Church’s teaching are warned that they do so at their own peril. Citing John Paul II’s 1991 encyclical Centesimus annus, the CCC points out that, in the absence of a transcendent criterion, political institutions “arrogate to themselves an explicit or implicit totalitarian power over man and his destiny, as history shows” (§ 2244). Thus tragedy ensues. For that reason, it is crucial that the Church continue “to pass moral judgments” (§ 2246) in matters of state, even though the Church itself “is not to be confused in any way with the political community” (§ 2245). Ecclesial judgment is “in accord with the Gospel and the welfare of all men” and thereby serves “the transcendent character of the human person” (§ 2245-46), rather than any coercive power.

This is a conceptually dense, if not utterly exhaustive, synopsis of the CCC’s teaching on the relationship between Church and state. Taken as a whole, I think the CCC tenders a worthwhile and, at times, edifying account of how Christians are to engage the secular political order. Still, as noted at the outset, I have questions. I do not pose them as a provocation; I pose them as a mode of reflection. For, as a Catholic (however unworthy), I want to be able to apply the CCC’s teaching on Church and state to my own life and thinking. At times, however, it’s not clear to me how to do so. Framing these questions, then, is a way of elucidating what I think I understand about the CCC’s position—and what I’m pretty sure I don’t.

1. When the CCC declares that the state is “necessary” (§ 1882) to human life, is this conclusion sufficiently nuanced? After all, many tribal peoples (e.g., the Mbuti in the Congo Basin, the Yanomami of the Amazon rainforest) have long subsisted without the political organization known as “the state.” Elsewhere the CCC allows for a “diversity of political regimes” (§ 1901), but this allowance seems to be within the statist paradigm (from federations to theocracies). It never accounts for the historically contingent birth of the state as such.

2. The CCC warns against the state’s “excessive intervention” (§ 1883) in the lives of individuals, but what, exactly, does this mean? Presumably it includes governmental intervention in religious matters—say, forcing Catholic hospitals to provide abortions—but would it also include softer but no less manipulative forms of intervention? Is it “excessive” if a political party actively engages in disinformation campaigns online (astroturfing, sockpuppeting, etc.), even though no one is physically harmed? What if all politicians and/or political groups do so to one degree or another? Is it possible to distinguish between “excessive intervention” and “sensible intervention”?

3. If the state is meant to provide the “just order” (§ 1909) by which each individual is able to exercise her “natural freedoms” (§ 1907) and thereby “lead a truly human life” (§ 1908), at what point does the state abrogate its moral and political authority by failing to secure such an order? I recently finished reading Erik Larson’s 2011 book In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin, which sees the rise of Nazism through the eyes of the American historian and diplomat William Dodd. One of the most compelling aspects of Larson’s text is how real-time observers, both in Germany and abroad, had a hard time deciding if the Nazis were a genuine threat to the global order—or just an overzealous party of bullies and fools. Early attacks against Jews (and non-Jewish Americans, for that matter) were dismissed as “anomalous” or “unfortunate;” it was not at all self-evident that the Nazis were preparing the ground for an epoch of murder and tyranny. Of course, people today would like to think that it won’t happen again, and doubtless there is plenty of Nazi fearmongering in the news and on social media. But what if the state has gotten smarter? What if the limitation of our “natural freedoms” is now accomplished in more subtle ways? “Ah,” one might say, “but nothing is as bad as the Shoah.” That is likely true; it is also the point at issue. In an age of mass propaganda, fueled by the interests of both states and corporations, are we supposed to just shrug off the infinitesimal injustices that happen online? And, if we do shrug them off (as most of us do), what then? Are we, in effect, dispensing with the very ideal of a “just order”?

4. The CCC insists that citizens have a moral obligation to vote (§ 2240), but it would seem that this responsibility is bound up with the presupposition that the state is necessary to human flourishing (§ 1882). Yet, if the latter is questionable, is the Catholic obligation to vote still binding? Famously, the American activist and Benedictine oblate Dorothy Day (1897-1980) refused to exercise her right to vote. It would seem, then, that the CCC puts too great an emphasis on this duty. Moreover, there is an even bigger problem lurking beneath the surface. Given the number of state-driven tragedies over the last, say, 250 years, should the matter be inverted? That is to say, should Catholics assume that, until better governments and better leaders emerge, voting is the riskier and arguably less moral option?

5. If, according to the CCC, the Church is not to be confused with “the political community” (§ 2245), a point that Pope Leo XIV has recently echoed as well, then how can the Church tender its “moral judgments” (§ 2246) of state politics without getting tangled up in partisan conflicts itself? Whether it’s bishops aligning themselves with particular politicians, or Catholic universities encouraging active involvement in political parties and governmental affairs, it appears that the fine line between promoting “the message of the Gospel” (as the Holy Father put it) and state involvement is often blurred. But is this blurring a “feature” or a “bug” of the CCC’s treatment of Church and state?

I could multiply such questions, but, again, the fundamental concern of this post is to sum up the CCC’s position on matters of Church and state and to register a few (rather than an abundance) of questions stemming therefrom. Of course, how one might respond to these queries is a different matter altogether. Myself, I am at least sympathetic to the perspectives of thinkers like Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55) and Jacques Ellul (1912-94), who argue that, in an age of mass media, even the Church’s moral critique of political policy is simply absorbed and flattened into the equilibrium of the modern liberal state. That doesn’t mean that such critiques are ipso facto empty and foolish. It does mean that they are more performative than effectual and that a subtler approach than the one found in the CCC may be needed.

As for that subject, however, a fuller discussion will have to wait until the upcoming release of my new book Kierkegaard, Statecraft, and Political Theology, which concludes by pondering (not prescribing) a number of “principles” for Christian political involvement.

The main task of JUST FYI POD: IDEAS’ third season is to discuss: “Higher Ed in the ChatGPT Era: How Did We Get Here? Where Is It Going?” On today’s episode, my cohost Clark Elliston and I will explore the topic: “Why Have Universities Embraced AI in the Classroom?” As usual, this is a wide-ranging discussion, which will touch on a variety of topics, including data on the prevalence of AI in higher education, student perceptions of (and fears about!) generative AI, and the increasing “mission drift” of the university in an era of cost-cutting efficiency and techno-fatalism.

You can listen to the pod right here on Substack, or you can access it via Spotify and/or Apple Podcasts, both of which are linked below. Subscribe for free today. As ever, consider following, liking, rating, and sharing our work. Your generosity and support are much appreciated!

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Any digital search about “Denmark and Easter” will turn up a number of articles about the nation’s folk traditions. Unsuprisingly, many of these cultural practices are formally present in other countries, though the content tends to vary. For example, while a typical Easter lunch in England will consist of roasted leg of lamb (paradoxically enough!) along with potatoes and vegetables, the Danish Påskefrokost centers on open-faced rye sandwiches called Smørrebrød, which are topped with boiled eggs, pickled herring, fresh cress, and various cheeses.

Other Danish traditions, however, are more unique. For well over a century, Danes have celebrated Easter (Påske) by sending decorative notes called Gækkebreve. The word itself can be clumsily (but not inaptly) translated as “tricky letters.” The person who sends such letters includes a riddle designed to tease, but also fool, the recipient. The recipient must guess the name of the sender. If they fail on the first guess, they owe the sender a prize. If the guess is successful, the sender is responsible for the gift. In the eighteenth century, this practice was largely associated with courtship, but, in time, it emerged as an Easter tradition, with children bestowing chocolate Easter eggs as the prize in question. This connection is not incidental. In both cases, Gækkebreve are linked with lightheaded fun and, on a deeper level, communal celebration. Just as eggs (even chocolate ones!) symbolize fertility and new life, so, it seems, they are fitting icons for the Christian celebration of the resurrection of Jesus.

Such an understanding of Easter wouldn’t have surprised Kierkegaard. It is well known that significant portions of the Dane’s authorship—particularly in the wake of his public clash with the satirical magazine Corsaren in the mid-1840s—are dedicated to lampooning and ultimately attacking the blithe conformism of the Danish church.

He viewed Easter in related terms. To celebrate the Paschal mystery with chocolate eggs and “tricky letters” is to miss the existential weight of the solemnity. It is, for Kierkegaard, a holiday “about the incomprehensibility of faith” (NB 13:54). Indeed, in an 1852 journal passage, Kierkegaard outlines a sermon for the second day of Easter, drawing on Luke 24:24: “And certain of them which were with us went to the sepulchre, and found it even so as the women had said: but him they saw not.” The theme of not seeing Jesus, he points out, is crucial to the post-Resurrection narratives. When Jesus conversed with a pair of disciples as they walked to a town (probably located in today’s West Bank) called Emmaus, the disciples failed to recognize their Master until they shared a meal together, at which point “he vanished out of their sight” (Luke 24:31). Yes, they could literally interact with Jesus, but, as Kierkegaard puts it, “him they did not see” (NB25:94).

Of course, this raises an additional question: why is it so hard to see the resurrected Christ? What is it, in other words, that obscures our view? Perhaps it’s the aesthetic delights of the holiday, which are symptomatic of a decidedly secular perspective. For example, on the VisitDenmark website, Easter is associated with “happy times” and explicitly distanced from supernatural meaning:

Påske, as we call it, brings not only great food and festivities, but weird and wonderful traditions too. Less of a religious holiday these days, it’s more focused on welcoming spring, celebrating with family or friends and injecting some colour into our usually toned-down homes.

Still, isn’t the problem deeper than “tricky letters” and Easter schnapps? After all, the disciples didn’t celebrate Påskefrokost, and they too struggled to recognize the risen Savior. Despite his bemused and ultimately polemical stance towards secular-minded jocularity, Kierkegaard underlines precisely this point. As he sees it, what unites those who cannot discern the Paschal mystery is a failure to transcend historical categories. When Jesus confronts Cleopas on the road to Emmaus, the latter adopts the tone of a social-media watchdog: “Art thou only a stranger in Jerusalem, and hast not known the things which are come to pass there in these days?” (Luke 24:18). Cleopas then goes on to more or less describe an abuse of political power, in which a social and spiritual leader was unjustly executed by local authorities, thereby dashing his followers’ hopes for a “redeemed Israel” (Luke 23:21). Sure, he goes on, a few people (“certain women also of our company”) have reported that this leader’s body was no longer in the tomb, but Cleopas shrugs it off as so much gossip. For when additional partisans went to check for themselves, “him they saw not” (αὐτὸν δὲ οὐκ εἶδον).

Famously, it is at this point that Jesus scolds Cleopas and others whose perspectives have failed to account for God’s transcendent activity in the world: “O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken” (Luke 24:25). In an 1852 journal passage, Kierkegaard applies Jesus’ insight to the prevailing historicism of modern thinking, particularly vis-à-vis the historical-critical method of biblical scholarship and the person of Jesus Christ:

It was just the same with the disciples who walked to Emmaus while Christ walked along with them—but him they did not see. So also with us. Here a little skirmish about historical knowledge, which also comes and looks and finds it exactly as related—but him it does not see. (NB25:94)

Notably, in his 1844 “trial sermon” (Dimisprædiken) for ordination in the Church of Denmark, based on 1 Corinthians 2:6-9,1 Kierkegaard already links the Emmaus story to sight—in particular, to the tension between “the earthly eye” (det jordiske Øie) and “the eye of faith” (Troens Øie). As Kierkegaard explains:

The glory of which we speak was not pleasant to the earthly eye, since it was an offense to the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks. Consequently the eye that saw it was not the earthly eye but the eye of faith, which looked trustingly through the terror in order to see what the earthly eye did not discover, what the seer was unaware of, what there was to see, just as the disciples did not see it when they walked to Emmaus, and Mary Magdalen did not see it when she stood by the grave—in order to see what would trouble earthly eyes if the seer knew what he should see. (Papir 306)

Kierkegaard did not idly take up this position. In fact, he came of age in the midst of a number of spirited debates about how to read and interpret the Bible. To cite just one example, he studied under the theologian, biblical hermeneut, and liberal politician Henrik Nicolai Clausen (1793-1877). As a “rationalist,” who thereby insisted that reason (rather than, say, faith or sensory experience) is the best adjudicator of human knowledge, Clausen pressed a critical (if not entirely unsympathetic) reading of traditional church teaching. Kierkegaard knew Clausen’s work well, attending his lectures on the synoptic Gospels in 1832-33 and, later on, taking his courses on New Testament hermeneutics and the Acts of Apostles. It is notable, then, that Kierkegaard would soon grow tired of Clausen’s approach to the material. In an 1835 journal entry, Kierkegaard even wondered if “the enormous mass of interpreters has on the whole done more harm than good to the understanding of the New Testament.”

As has been seen, this comment was proleptic. Kierkegaard was already anticipating an objection to the historical-critical method—one that he would further develop in the latter half of his authorship. Perhaps the most programmatic example of this concern is found in the discourse “What Is Required in Order to Look at Oneself with True Blessing in the Mirror of the Word?”, which opens the last proper book that Kierkegaard would publish in his lifetime, For Self-Examination: Recommended to the Present Age (Til Selvprøvelse: Samtiden Anbefalet, 1851). The “Mirror of the Word” was first conceived as a sermon, though, in its present form, it would’ve been far too long for the pulpit. Still, its homiletic origins are noteworthy, since Kierkegaard based his reflections on James 1:22-27, which was the scheduled epistle reading for the fifth Sunday after Easter.

That Kierkegaard would link questions about biblical historicity and interpretation with the Easter season is hardly surprising. First, as has been seen, this was a connection he would make elsewhere in his authorship—an extension, no doubt, of the fact that the Paschal celebration of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead forces biblical hermeneutics to the surface. Indeed, just a few decades before Kierkegaard’s birth, the German litterateur Gotthold Lessing (1729-81) issued parts of Hermann Reimarus’ previously unpublished treatise Apology, or Defense, for the Rational Worshippers of God (Apologie oder Schutzschrift für die vernünftigen Verehrer Gottes). Reimarus, who had died in 1768, drew a sharp distinction between the “Christ of history” and the “Christ of faith.” As he saw it, the former was a political revolutionary, the latter an unnecessary fiction, conjured up by his disciples for their own gain. Reimarus’ position, as it happens, is neatly dramatized in Martin Scorsese’s 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ, in which a smarmy Paul of Tarsus (Harry Dean Stanton) has an unexpected encounter with Jesus (Willem Defoe). When Jesus balks at Paul’s tales of healings and miracles (“He conquered death!”), Paul reminds him that it’s the “resurrected Jesus,” and not the historical Jesus, who gives human beings what they need:

Since Reimarus, the so-called “Quest for the Historical Jesus” has undergone a number of “waves”. Lessing’s own notion of “the ugly broad ditch” (der garstige breite Graben) separating Christian revelation from historical truth was prominent enough to draw a notable response from Kierkegaard in the pseudonymous Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (1846). What really intensified the Quest, however, was the publication of David Friedrich Strauß’ The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined (Das Leben Jesu kritisch bearbeitet, 1835-36), which, not incidentally, Kierkegaard makes a note of reading during the summer of 1838. Decades later, Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965) would reinvent the field with his 1906 treatise From Reimarus to Wrede: A History of the Research into the Life of Jesus (Von Reimarus zu Wrede: eine Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung). And, of course, the Quest is still raging today. Just a few weeks ago, New York Times columnist (and avowed Catholic) Ross Douthat issued a lengthy, Easter-themed interview with well-known New Testament scholar-turned-atheist Bart Ehrman, who has updated Reimarus’ core argument in works such as How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee (2014).

It is plain, then, that the historicization of Easter was a major topic in Kierkegaard’s day, and it remains so in 2026. Yet, in contrast to Douthat’s searching curiosity, Kierkegaard chooses to approach this problem in characteristically provocative fashion. Rather than “outhistoricize” the historical-critical method, he probes the existential implications of adopting such a mindset.

Consider, for example, “There Will Be the Resurrection of the Dead, of the Righteous—and of the Unrighteous” (De Dødes Opstandelse forestaaer, de Retfærdiges—og de Uretfærdiges), the fourth discourse in “Thoughts That Wound from Behind—for Upbuilding,” a seven-part collection included in Kierkegaard’s 1848 book Christian Discourses (Christelige Taler). Kierkegaard begins by drawing a correlation between modern bourgeois society and modern intellectual proclivities: people want and expect security. Just as the denizens of Copenhagen “calmly walk home even late at night without fearing any danger,” so do people desire assurance and safety when it comes to what they buy, sell, or vow.

But can the promises of Easter be approached in the same way? The Apostles’ Creed professes that Jesus “was crucified, died, and was buried” and yet “rose again from the dead,” thereby achieving “the resurrection of the body” and “life everlasting” for those who believe in him. It is, then, a feast bound up with “immortality” (Udødeligheden). But, Kierkegaard underlines, Scripture does not treat immortality as if it were an object for academic analysis, much less a podcast discussion! Kierkegaard cites Acts 24 to make this point. In this chapter, Paul the Apostle appears at a hearing before the Roman procurator of Judea, Antonius Felix. Accused by the Sanhedrin of being a seditious, “pestilent fellow,” who has “gone about to profane the temple” (Acts 24:5-6), Paul responds that he believes “all things which are written in the law and in the prophets,” including the common (if not uncontroversial) belief in bodily resurrection and personal immortality. “[I] have hope toward God,” Paul declares, “which they themselves also allow, that there shall be a resurrection of the dead, both of the just and unjust” (Acts 24:15).

According to Kierkegaard, Paul’s association of the resurrection of the dead with a question about individual righteousness is “unscholarly and uncultured.” That is precisely why it’s crucial. Paul is not interested in a debate about, or a test of, the Paschal mystery. “Do not doubt whether you are immortal,” Kierkegaard imagines Paul saying, “tremble, because you are immortal.” This may seem like a version of fideism, but, in Kierkegaard’s view, it is a precondition for taking the question seriously at all: “Truly, the one who never had his immortality decided in such a way that he became anxious and afraid has never really believed in his immortality.”

Of course, as Kierkegaard points out, this sort of personal investment is jettisoned whenever the Easter story is cast into a speculative, historical-critical register—whenever the quest for immortality is “turned into a question for thought.” One may dismiss this shift as a necessity in the context of contemporary Western culture—after all, people do enjoy debating issues on Facebook, podcasts, Twitter, and so on—but Kierkegaard detects a deft yet problematic maneuver at play:

Would not the most corrupt of all ages be one that managed to have “duty” completely changed into a problem for thought? What is duty? Duty is what one ought to do. There ought not to be a question about duty, but there ought to be only the question about whether I am doing my duty. There ought not to be a question about immortality…but the question ought to be whether I am living in such a way as my immortality requires of me.

Underlying Kierkegaard’s point is the tension between modern reflection and biblical proclamation or, as he puts it elsewhere, the difference between a genius and an apostle. Indeed, in Acts 24, what is precisely not at stake is the scholarly question about Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. Instead, Paul takes this kerygmatic assertion as a jumping-off point to discuss what he’s really interested in—namely, the eschatological revelation of righteousness and unrighteousness. On this understanding, eternal life is not a “controversial subject,” nor is it an occasion for holiday games and sweets. It is the falling away of all early differences—those obtaining between genders, educational backgrounds, socio-economic statuses, religions, nationalities, linguistic forms, political ideologies, even sports allegiances—except for a final one: “What, then, is the eternal? It is the difference between right and wrong. All else is transitory.”

For Kierkegaard, this realization not only changes how we look at the Easter story; it also changes how we relate to other people. If eternal life is real—and the apostles do not doubt that it is—then ipso facto it’s not permeated by the ambiguity of human life. It cannot be bought off, shrugged off, or thrown off. It simply is. No individual can escape the resurrection of the dead, and thus it becomes an intensely personal and passionate concern: Eternal life “pertains to me, in my view it pertains to me most of all, just as in your view it pertains to you most of all.”2

In and through this mindset, one comes to relate to Easter in the right way. The resurrection of the dead and eternal life are tasks to be pursued, not treats to be consumed or concepts to be parsed. The one primarily invested in the latter is, as Kierkegaard envisions it, akin to a wife who has come to take her husband for granted. She is certain of his affection, certain of her standing in society, certain that she is superior to other wives—and it’s this certainty that secures her downfall. “She is not trying to find anything; she…is now pleased with herself; she is completely sure.”

So it is with one who takes Easter for granted. As soon as the Paschal feast becomes a cultural event or a topic for speculative chatter, it is lost. “The true, the essential expression of [something] being by grace is the very fear and trembling of unsureness. There lies faith—as far, just as far, from despair as from sureness.”

The overarching theme of JUST FYI POD: CULTURE‘s third season is: “The Future of American Christianity: A Conversation in Ten Questions.” On today’s episode, my cohost Amy Welborn and I focus on the following question: “Does the Future of Catholicism Lie with ‘Trad Catholics’?” However, before delving into that controversial topic, Amy and I discuss the recent (and much ballyhooed) “rift” between the White House and the Holy See. In both cases, we detect the long-simmering tension between Church and State, religion and politics, bubbling up to the cultural surface. Is this, then, “business as usual,” or is something new emerging?

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In the Winter 1962-63 issue of Film Culture, an aspiring critic named Andrew Sarris (1928-2012) published an essay entitled “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962.” The piece would prove highly controversial, though that was hardly Sarris’ purpose. A stint with the United States Army Signal Corps during the Korean War had landed the Columbia graduate in Paris, where he encountered France’s burgeoning film culture. In and through the cutting-edge magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, which, in 1951, was cofounded by the great film theorist André Bazin (1918-58) and featured writers (and future filmmakers) Jean-Luc Godard (1930-2022) and François Truffaut (1932-84), Sarris developed an interest in the so-called politique des auteurs. Literally meaning “policy of the authors,” this name indicated a stance towards cinema rather than a discrete theory about cinema: to champion la politique des auteurs was to view a film’s director as its key artistic force. On this reading, a movie is not the mere “staging” of a script; it is a vehicle for the self-expression of the director.

La politique des auteurs was not exactly an original idea. Already in 1916, the early and influential silent film director Lois Weber (1879-1939) had already espoused a similar understanding of filmmaking:

A real director should be absolute. He alone knows the effects he wants to produce, and he alone should have the authority in the arrangement, cutting, titling or anything else that may seem necessary to the finished product…. We ought to realize that the work of a picture director, worthy of a name, is creative.

Subsequent thinkers agreed, including the early film theorist (and eventual Nazi) Walter Julius Bloem (1898-1945), the great American novelist and screenwriter James Agee (1909-55), and Bazin himself. What each of these figures, however different, saw in the movie director was a source of artistic credibility. At its inception, cinema was dismissed as nothing more than a popular diversion. It was not considered a serious art form, because it captured life as it is. In fact, the word “cinema” itself is adapted from the Greek words κίνημα and γράφω, which together mean “to record movement.” Hence, if this new medium was to contribute to Western aesthetics, it would have to be shepherded by visionary artists along the lines of composers, painters, and poets.

Sarris agreed. Upon returning to New York, he penned “Notes on the Auteur Theory” as a kind of apologetic for la politique des auteurs. He begins, first, by noting that “the Cahiers critics” were in no way trying to say that a film’s quality is guaranteed by the director: a good director can make a bad film, and vice versa. Auteur theory, in other words, is not an attempt to sidestep film criticism. It does, however, presuppose that “the distinguishable personality of the director [stands] as a criterion of value.” A movie “looks and moves” in the way that “a director thinks and feels.” This emphasis on personality dovetails with a third assumption—that film directors imbue their projects with a kind of “interior meaning,” “an élan of the soul” that emerges “from the tension between a director’s personality and his material.” Sarris sums up his argument in this way:

The three premises of the auteur theory may be visualized as three concentric circles: the outer circle as technique; the middle circle, personal style; and the inner circle, interior meaning. The corresponding roles of the director may be designated as those of a technician, a stylist, and an auteur.

Sarris’ “auteurism” is so robust that he ultimately concludes that a director’s individual movies matter far less than his total authorial vision. “As Renoir has observed,” Sarris adds, “a director spends his life on variations of the same film.”

Such a “hot take” was bound to invite criticism, and Sarris received more than a little in his heyday, particularly from outspoken New York Times film critic Pauline Kael (1919-2001). For Kael, filmmaking is a collaborative and collective art. Thus great films are not the products of individual genius, but of finely-tuned teamwork. If anything, an auteur convinced of his own personal brilliance is likely to make a bad film, because he will treat his actors poorly, disregard the advice of his editor, make unwarranted changes to the script, and so on.

Nevertheless, it’s hard to deny that Sarris’ auteur theory has proven influential. Even today, cinephiles will turn out for the “big directors” in Hollywood—auteurs such as Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Christopher Nolan. Pace Kael, the movies made by these directors are often heralded as must-see “events,” and they tend to garner multiple critical nominations and awards. Sometimes, as in the case of a Scorsese, an auteur will even emerge as an important cultural figure, who is asked to address political issues or the state of cinema itself. Perhaps Kael would still object that the fame and popularity of such auteurs does not ipso facto render their films successful—and this is undoubtedly true. But the reality is that most moviegoers act as if Sarris’ auteur theory were true, and major motion picture organizations are no different: five persons were nominated for “Best Directing” in this year’s Academy Awards, and all five could easily lay claim to the title “auteur.”

Among this year’s nominees is Paul Thomas Anderson (1970-), who has joined Nolan as a bona fide Gen X auteur. Anderson (or, as he is often called, “PTA”) burst on the scene in 1996 with Hard Eight and has made nine films since then. His most popular movie is Boogie Nights (1997), though his most celebrated work is One Battle After Another, which was released in September 2025 to great critical acclaim. Oddsmakers long (and, it turns out, rightly) viewed One Battle After Another as the clear favorite to win “Best Picture” at the 98th Academy Awards. It is the fourth of PTA’s films to be nominated, though There Will Be Blood (2008), Phantom Thread (2018), and Licorice Pizza (2022) all failed to win. As a PTA fan, I saw One Battle After Another during its opening weekend, and, though I liked it, my immediate takeaway was one of disappointment. I initially shrugged this feeling off as a post-hype letdown—after all, there has been talk that One Battle After Another is the “greatest movie of all time”—but on a second viewing I decided that, no, there was something “off” with the film. To put it in the terms of “auteur theory”: the “interior meaning” of One Battle After Another didn’t seem to match that of PTA’s other work. The question is: iwhy?

Indeed, if there is a “through line” in PTA’s filmography, it’s that human beings have a deep and abiding need to belong. In most cases, this need is expressed in terms of direct interpersonal relationships (family, friends, lovers, etc.). Indeed, a number of PTA films begin precisely by identifying this need in the protagonist. In Hard Eight, for example, Philip Baker Hall plays Sydney Brown—an aging gambler, who becomes a surrogate father to a pair of down-on-their-luck drifters (played by John C. Reilly and Gwyneth Paltrow respectively). At the outset of the film, Sydney seemingly happens upon John, alone and broke, sitting outside of a Nevada diner:

In time, Sydney is able to help the couple escape a dangerous situation and to start a new life together, even telling John, “I love you like you were my own son.” Yet, in making this confession, Sydney also knows that he is condemning himself. On account of his dark past—revealed in a surprising scene late Hard Eight—Sydney’s redemption remains incomplete. In helping John, he is fated to remain alone.

Boogie Nights centers on precisely the same theme, albeit with a comic (rather than tragic) ending. Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg) is a young man from an abusive home, but he knows that his, um, male endowment could be his ticket out. He approaches porn filmmaker Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds, in an Oscar-nominated role) for a part in one of his films. The two, along with Jack’s troupe of regular actors, find unprecedented success. At last Dirk has a sense of belonging; he has a family. And yet, the excesses of the emerging porn industry prove overwhelming. Dirk develops a drug problem, fights with Jack, and gets caught up in petty crime. Late in the film, in an attempt to scam a drug dealer, he hits rock-bottom:

After narrowly escaping with his life, Dirk returns to Jack as if he were a kind of prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32). The two reconcile, and their peculiar but nevertheless loving family is restored. Dirk belongs again.

In both Hard Eight and Boogie Nights, happiness is found outside the system. “Family” can appear in any number of contexts—even otherwise dysfunctional ones—but PTA does not ground family in, or link it to, institutional structures and/or political power. Human life is quirky, ironic, fickle, and often melancholy. For that reason, it is also frequently disappointing, even tragic. Yet, in most of PTA’s movies, hope remains in that which can’t be assimilated into social convention or political rationalism. In Magnolia (1999)—which, for my money, is PTA’s masterpiece to date—a series of broken relationships only finds healing when a rain of frogs (Exodus 8:1-4) descends upon Los Angeles. In Punch-Drunk Love (2002), one of PTA’s most underrated movies, the romantic bond between Barry Egan (Adam Sandler) and Lena Leonard (Emily Watson) defies all expectations—and that’s precisely why it works. Licorice Pizza (2021) is the thematic sequel to Punch-Drunk Love but carries its thesis to the extreme, suggesting that true love does not just defy societal expectations but our own as well.

In other PTA films, the inverse is true. That is to say, the system betrays those who otherwise profit from it. In There Will Be Blood (2007), oilman Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis, in one of his most iconic performances) strikes it rich in his trade, only to die alone, drunk, and wretched. In a key scene, Daniel rejects his adopted son H.W. (Russell Harvard), who, as a child, had lent Daniel’s business an air of decency but became a burden when a gas blowout cost him his hearing:

As we learn, H.W. was an orphan, who had once longed for a father. But in this scene Daniel definitively cuts himself off from H.W. and therefore from any possibility of having a loving relationship. In the end, Daniel’s successful pursuit of material gain has secured his spiritual demise—a metaphor for a nation bent on serving the machine.

PTA’s psychological drama The Master (2012) makes a similar point, albeit from a different perspective. The film’s “Daniel Plainview” character is Lancaster Dodd (the late Philip Seymour Hoffmann, who nails it as usual), an intelligent but seductive leader of a philosophical movement known as “The Cause.” Set in the aftermath of World War II, The Master frames Dodd’s movement as a response to the West’s postwar spiritual malaise. The only problem is that it’s built upon deceit, manipulation, and hypocrisy:

For much of the film, the viewer experiences “The Cause” through the eyes of Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix, another PTA regular), a Navy veteran who has fallen on hard times. Lonely, hypersexual, and addicted to drink, Freddie is taken less by Dodd’s philosophy than by the man himself. Like H.W. in There Will Be Blood, Freddie wants a father, a leader, but Dodd proves to be neither. For him, the abstract system trumps personal loyalty. If Freddie won’t bend the proverbial knee, he must be discarded.

It would be easy multiply examples—the woozy irony of Inherent Vice (2014), in which cannabis and surfing are treated as the last (and perhaps greatest?) forms of resistance to bureaucratic control; the psychological-erotic manipulation at the heart of Phantom Thread (2017), in which the artifice of romantic love is stripped bare. But let’s turn to One Battle After Another, which just recently racked up a number of major wins at the 98th Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actor. One might assume, then, that it marks the culmination of PTA’s career. I would argue that it’s actually a deviation.

The movie begins outside the Otay Mesa Detention Center, roughly 25 miles southeast of San Diego. A leftwing revolutionary group known as the French 75, led by “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), are on a mission to liberate detained immigrants. The two become lovers during their campaign but soon find their relationship fractured after Perfidia is captured and sexually coerced by U.S. military officer Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn, in what I think is an overrated performance). Lockjaw offers Perfidia personal leniency in exchange for political betrayal. Thus she abandons Pat and their infant daughter Charlene, thereby forcing father and daughter (not to mention other French 75 members) into hiding under false identities.

Sixteen years later, a perpetually stoned and increasingly paranoid Pat (now known as Bob Ferguson) lives off the grid with Charlene (now known as Willa Ferguson). In the meantime, Lockjaw has become a powerful security figure, who harbors designs of joining the Christmas Adventurers Club—a highly selective white supremacist secret society. In an effort to conceal his past with Perfidia (and, in turn, his fetish for Black women), Lockjaw uses law enforcement (essentially ICE) to seek and destroy Willa, whom he believes is his biological daughter. Lockjaw’s efforts trigger a violent chain of raids, rescues, and pursuits involving surviving French 75 members and other outside factions. Now a fugitive, Willa learns the truth about her mother’s duplicity, while Bob struggles to reach and protect her amid the chaos. Eventually, the two are reunited, and Lockjaw receives his comeuppance. In the movie’s final moments, Bob gives Willa a letter from Perfidia, in which she apologizes for what she’s done. Thus galvanized, Willa tells Bob that she is ready to join the leftwing resistance movement herself.

PTA adapted the script for One Battle After Another from Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland—his second adaptation of a Pynchon work, following Inherent Vice. However, while PTA’s rendering of Inherent Vice hews closely to the source material, One Battle After Another does not. This difference is in some ways accidental—Vineland has a famously labyrinthine plot, even by Pynchon’s standards—but it also allows PTA to rework Pynchon’s story of post-1960s burnout for twenty-first century audiences. The “love triangle” at the heart of Vineland is largely retained, but Pynchon’s critique of the Age of Reagan has given way PTA’s “takedown” of the Age of Trump.

In and of itself, this is neither an unusual nor a “bad” move: filmmakers have long adapted older stories to suit contemporary purposes. But it does raise a number of questions about PTA’s motivations, including just how One Battle After Another fits in with his larger authorial vision. As I have been arguing, one of the hallmarks of PTA’s career is the juxtaposition of family and system. Human beings want to belong—want to be loved—but this fundamental desire is threatened by impersonal forces of bureaucracy and control. In what might be called his “comic” mode, PTA celebrates characters who break free from the constraints of the system and, however improbably, opt for loving relationships. At times, it almost seems that the universe—or perhaps even God himself—urges people to make this choice. In Magnolia, only the unexpected arrival of a supernatural mystery is capable of shocking broken people into forgiveness and reconciliation:

Similarly, in his “tragic” mode, PTA depicts a world where the system prevails, leaving only death and despair in its wake. “I’m finished,” gasps Daniel Plainview at the end of There Will Be Blood, practically inverting Jesus’ last words: “It is finished” (John 19:30).

What’s unusual about One Battle After Another is that it displays elements of both modes. Lockjaw’s subservience to the military-industrial complex entangles him in a murderous web of corruption and power, even as Bob and Willa realize that their bond, however peculiar, is more important than the politically-inflected messiness of their past. In a sense, then, one could argue that One Battle After Another represents a kind of Hegelian synthesis of the dialectic that lies the heart of PTA’s entire oeuvre. Both the comic and the tragic are realized in the film’s riveting final hour.

But such a conclusion would tidy up, and therefore elide, the curious decision that PTA makes in the very last scene of One Battle After Another—a decision that represents a divergence from the general arc of his filmography. One might have expected the movie to end with Bob and Willa together, but it actually ends with them separating. Even though the systemic tribalism of the modern nation-state has caused undue destruction and mayhem—yes, the harassment and abuse of undocumented immigrants, but also Perfidia’s disingenuous commitment to the French 75 and her subsequent abandonment of her family—Willa bizarrely opts to follow in her mother’s footsteps and to become a political activist herself. Perfidia’s battle has become Willa’s battle. But why? What exactly has Perfidia accomplished, apart from adding to the tragedy of modern politics—its internecine violence and impersonal groupthink? Is her path not synonymous with her own name, which is derived from the Latin phrase per fidem decipere (“to deceive through trustingness”)?

One Battle After Another ends before such questions can be addressed. Indeed, a longtime fan of PTA might squint and wonder if, in fact, a note of irony might’ve been smuggled into the conclusion, as if PTA were underlining the dismal tension between system and person, politics and family, in the twenty-first century? Yet, the ending doesn’t support such an incredulous position. If anything, One Battle After Another’s very last frames, set non-diegetically to Tom Petty’s classic anthem “American Girl” (1977), suggest unbridled optimism. There’s Bob (pictured below), still smoking weed but now warming up to the idea of using an iPhone—a technology that he has eschewed while in hiding. Bob is reintegrating into society, quite possibly to fight again.

And then there’s Willa, not so much rejecting her surrogate father as resuming the battle he left behind years ago. The systemic machinations of partisan politics have divided her family and led to the deaths (literal and metaphorical) of family and friends. But Willa expresses no reservations. The lone certainty is that political battles never end. It is indeed “one battle after another.”

Doubtless this conclusion was persuasive to the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who rewarded PTA with multiple Oscars. Of course, whether or not it will satisfy all who watch One Battle After Another will vary. But what’s clear is that the movie ends in a way that runs contrary to what Sarris would call the “interior meaning” of PTA’s overarching authorship. In a career dedicated to undermining the system, PTA has finally succumbed to it. In One Battle After Another, “belonging” is conceived in partisan rather than interpersonal terms, and family has been politicized. In a paradoxical twist, then, it stands as the perfect representation of the Trump Era.

The overarching theme of JUST FYI POD: CULTURE‘s third season is: “The Future of American Christianity: A Conversation in Ten Questions.” On today’s episode, my cohost Amy Welborn and I focus on the following question: “Can Christian art be resurrected?” We approach this issue in a variety of ways. First, in a discussion recorded prior to last Sunday night’s awards ceremony, we offer an overview of the Oscars, noting that it was a good, if somewhat predictable, year in movies. Indeed, while political themes continue to abound in Hollywood, religious ones do not. Next, we turn to what might be called the “crisis” of Christian art today: like the “information silos” on social media, so it seems that Christian art has been siloed off from popular culture. To be sure, there are niche corners of the Christian art world, but they are ostensibly reserved for “believers.” Third, and finally, we consider the history and nature of Christian art—and why its “resurrection” depends on a rethinking of how contemporary Christians both receive and make art.

You can listen to the pod right here on Substack, or you can access it via Spotify and/or Apple Podcasts, both of which have been linked below. Subscribe for free today! As always, your generosity and support are much appreciated!

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The main task of JUST FYI POD: IDEAS’ third season is to discuss: “Higher Ed in the ChatGPT Era: How Did We Get Here? Where Is It Going?” On today’s episode, my cohost Clark Elliston and I will explore the topic: “What is a university for anyway?” This is a wide-ranging discussion, which will touch on student perceptions of university life, different models of higher education, and how twenty-first-century political polarization may very well lie downstream of university culture.

Listener pro tip: this episode opens with a fairly long (and very off-topic!) discussion about coaching youth sports. If you’re not interested—and that would be totally understandable—just skip to the break.

You can listen to the pod right here on Substack, or you can access it via Spotify and/or Apple Podcasts, both of which are linked below. Subscribe for free today. As ever, consider following, liking, rating, and sharing our work. Your generosity and support are much appreciated!

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This is the third part of a series that, as I wrote in July, I plan to slowly unfold over the next couple of years. In the late 2000s, when I was finishing my doctorate at the University of Oxford, I started translating The Mystery of Kierkegaard (Das Geheimnis Kierkegaards) by the Prussian Catholic thinker Erich Przywara, S.J. In time, I would use this side project as the basis for a proper book chapter—namely, “Erich Przywara: Catholicism’s Great Expositor of the ‘Mystery’ of Kierkegaard,” which was published in the 2012 book Kierkegaard’s Influence on Theology: Catholic and Jewish Theology (Volume 10, Tome III).

In my most recent post in this series (linked below), I presented “The Problem of Style” (Das Stil-Problem), the opening chapter of the book’s first major division, which Przywara simply entitles “Mystery of Style” (Geheimnis des Stils).

Today’s post presents the second chapter of “Mystery of Style,” which bears the equally pithy title “The Question at Issue” (Das Frage-Problem). Arguably the key concept in “The Question at Issue” is Przywara’s category of “the between” (das Zwischen), which builds off the problematic of “ambiguity” (Doppeldeutigkeit) that Przywara develops in the prior chapter. According to Przywara, Kierkegaard’s use of pseudonymous voices and conceptual irony marks him as a stylistically ambiguous writer, whose task to give form to the manifoldness of human existence.

In the present chapter, Przywara deepens this analysis by attending to Kierkegaard’s own person. For some commentators, the Dane is nothing more than an aesthetic genius, whose melancholy drove him to dialectically entertain, but never existentially assume, a determinate worldview. He is, on this reading, a psychologist of “the between.” But Przywara concludes by tendering an alternative possibility. What if the psycho-spiritual “betweenness” that marks Kierkegaard’s authorship indicates a personal attempt to force his way through to a higher reality? What if the darkness or “night” of his literary output reflects a longing for—perhaps even an intuition of—a light against which the darkness shall not prevail? What if, in short, Kierkegaard was not a psychologist but a kind of mystic?

Mystery of Style

2. The Question at Issue

With that, however, we have landed on the either-or that makes up the question at issue in Kierkegaard. It lies, at its sharpest, in the word that emotionally pervades everything in Kierkegaard’s thinking: melancholy (Schwermut).

Is melancholy, as Vetter maintains, perhaps the most powerful case of psychoanalytic sublimation? Is Kierkegaard’s religiousness the clearest symbolic language of eros? Is “melancholy,” therefore, a demonic melancholy in Kierkegaard’s negative sense, where, for him, there is indeed a correspondence between the demonic and music’s “actual genius of the sensory life” (TG I, 93)?

Or is it “melancholy” in a different sense — as R.H. Sorge writes of his own mystical experience of the “night of God”: “Frightful melancholy encloses me” (Gericht über Zarathustra 25)? Is it the last mystery of “the blessedness of those who mourn,” the mystery that, in a sign of the melancholy of love, John of the Cross himself metaphorically calls (in “El Pastorcico”) “del Amor muy lastimado” and “por…amor…lastimado,” “out of gloomy love”? Is it therefore meant in the deepest sense of Kierkegaard’s own short phrase, “religion is melancholy” (cf. at length TG II, 39), in the strongest performance of the “periissem, nisi periissem” as a “motto of my life” (TG I, 384)?1 As a consequence, has the “night of God” in the mystical tradition of the Church Fathers become the path of interpretation towards that which Kierkegaard himself, at the most mysterious point in his journals, calls “the night of the absolute”?

The human being has a natural horror to go into the dark—no wonder then that he, naturally, is terrified before the absolute, to get involved with the absolute, of whom it holds true that no night and “no darkness is half as black” as this darkness and this night, where all relative aims (the general milestones and signposts), where all purposes (the lanterns by which our way is normally illuminated), where even the most delicate and innermost feelings regarding conditions—are extinguished, because otherwise it is not absolutely the absolute (TG II, 339).

But must this be read in light of the earlier passage: “When, in the hour of death, it grows dark before a genuine Christian, that’s because the sunlight of blessedness is too strong for his eyes” (TG I, 101)?

As the above shows, Kierkegaard treats melancholy and night along the same lines as sacrifice, suffering, and death—though sacrifice and suffering and death represent the apex of passion. For Kierkegaard, these three words most strongly express what is central: melancholy and passion, and death as the form that gives them meaning. This leads our question further. Much as the ultimate element in Freud’s psychoanalysis is the death-wish, does Kierkegaard’s concept of death arise from melancholy-passion in the sense of a passion broken and inhibited and poisoned by melancholy? Or is it passion in the sense of John of the Cross’ llama de amor viva, which first rests in the muerta en vida, the holy passion that has its life in death? This would, therefore, correspond to Kierkegaard’s last journal entry: “Spirit is: to live as if dead (to die to something)” (TG II, 405).

There remains a final possibility of expression. As an explanation of the deepest religious dimension, the psychoanalytic interpretation here uses the same, utterly abstract codeword—namely, “id” (Es)—to grasp the signified phenomenon more clearly. Freud’s death-melancholy presents its metaphysical principle, so to speak, in the following way: because the “I” did not become lord of the “id”—that is, because it confusingly and unsuccessfully resisted the objective order of the drive, to which the “id” wants to succumb as a dark destiny. The downfall of eros—the impersonal id against which the ego drive struggled but failed—takes on the face of death: love and death are Janus-faced.

At the same time, it is also characteristic of the mystic in the state of “the night” to declare the love of his heart, his God in impersonal fashion: as a “vast desert,” as an “abyss” (Abgrund), as “darkness,” as the “night’s primordial source.” This is true to the extent that the German mysticism audaciously spoke of sinking down through the personal “God” into the “infinite vastness” of the “Godhead.”

In its paradoxicalness, which borders on frivolity, there is no doubt that the question that thereby reaches its apex is almost unbearable. But in this regard it corresponds precisely with Kierkegaard’s peculiar genius: the either–or that became his hallmark (TG II, 304) grasps the outermost extremes of the poles. And, objectively, it is in fact the shocking ambiguity of the word “love” itself (in keeping with Kierkegaard’s intention to restore all words from the dullness of their everyday use to the white-hot intensity of their original meaning, from their habitual facility to the extraordinary “leap” of their emergence) — thereby “love,” which at the same time stands for “desire” (Trieb) and for “God is love,” — indeed, not only that, because after all the word “desire” still points to both extreme poles as well, — “desire” as an existential drive (Getriebensein) of eros and as an existential drive in the sense of the Augustinian agi per Deum.2 It is that great riddle of life, well understood by the most significant teachers of asceticism and mysticism when they were unable to set up sufficient “rules of discernment” for the mystical states of mysticism and eros. — So what is it then: does the character of an impersonal existential drive, which Kierkegaard’s life and authorship unmistakably betray, point to the id of Freud or to John of the Cross?

However, in keeping with what we had to establish at the outset about Kierkegaard’s underlying ambiguity, a “no” must slice through the relative “yes” of this problem: is Kierkegaard, in the end, perhaps not at all “one or the other,“ but rather their unsolved and unclear between? Would not the following scattered comments—which speak of such a final, inexplicable indeterminacy, with explicit or implicit references to the question of one’s life and work—correspond to this conclusion? Kierkegaard writes of the “misfortune of my existence” in which “my interests are not particularly subordinated, but all are coordinated” (TG I, 22); — the “Romantic” lying therein, “that the two halves of an idea become distinguished through something alien lying in between” (ibid. 47); — the “Romantic in brokenness,” but consisting in this, “that it has conjured up an unfulfilled urge, but without finding its fulfillment therein” (ibid. 48).

In other words: we have arrived at the question to which the bulk of Christoph Schrempf’s passionate reckoning with Kierkegaard brings us. Is the whole problematic that we have hitherto unpacked basically nothing more than a pretext for Kierkegaard’s writings? Does Kierkegaard at all want a relation to realities of the sort implied in the two possibilities that, again and again, we set in opposition above? Or is everything, for him, only “authorial material’,” a movement that he breaks off shortly before it would flow into actual realization, in order to render it fruitful in the purely literary sphere—so that the interweaving of an aesthetic and religious stance of which Kierkegaard himself speaks would not mean, as he would have it, that even the earliest aesthetic-erotic writings are governed by the religious (TG I, 395), but rather, on the contrary, a continued domination, even over the final religious writings, of the peculiar distance from practical decision that is characteristic of the aesthetic?

One will have to grant, then, that there is no small amount to be said for the possibility of Schrempf’s suggestion. He speaks of the peculiar way that Kierkegaard centers on the intellectual: understanding and not understanding (TG I, 46, 47/48; GW VI, 23, 31); — his dream of a “clear, decisive, passionate understanding” as a relief from action (ibid. 420/1); — the notion that “every thought is to be thought down to the smallest” and “then thinking is to mean nothing other than to think” as a longed-for eternal life (ibid. 382-3). In addition, his express authorial mentality speaks to this: the idea that “the entire life of a person…can be seen as a great dialogue” “in which different persons represent different speaking parts” (TG I, 46); — the comment that “I only feel good when I’m producing” (ibid. 310) up to the overcoming of melancholy through the destiny of being a writer (ibid. II, 135f.).

It also could be said that he himself designates “armed neutrality” as his standpoint (ibid. I, 112) and, with it, a fundamental distance; that he further speaks of “intellectual elegance” (ibid. II, 149) as his “essence,” so that one could be quite tempted to see every point along the “stages on life’s way” as a self-confession, where he denotes the “psychological” as “the last border between the aesthetic and the religious” (GW IV, 413ff); therefore that which constitutes the particular nature of his entire authorship—the tremendously penetrating psychology as a between (ein Zwischen) in which the aesthetic is not quite aesthetic but also still not practical religion. This would also finally accord with what he himself says about himself:: “What I was missing was to lead a complete human life, and not only one of knowledge” (TG I, 30). And that is why he can jot down the following pointed statement: “What ability there is in an individual may be measured by the yardstick of how far there is between his understanding and his will. What a person can understand he must also be able to force himself to will. Between understanding and willing lie excuses and lies” (ibid. 247).

But precisely these last remarks illuminate our question in a different way. As these sentences show, if one so relentlessly sees the doom of being nothing more than a writer, then his distance from actuality is at least not a static distance but a strained and struggling on-the-way (Auf-dem-Wege) towards actuality. Further: if, as is necessary, we examine the whole of these references with an eye to the background of the entire development of our first part, then taking Schrempf’s possibility in dialectical fashion also follows as a matter of course—that is, to set its opposite over against it as a possibility. This opposite would be that the uncertain “between” of Kierkegaard (between a decisive erotic standpoint and a decisive God-standpoint) also could be a between that is not a personal intention but a mysterious act of providence (Schickung), not a refusal to keep going but a mystery of governance (TG II, 296), which Kierkegaard speaks about even in connection to his writings: to write “with a directed pen” (TG I, 134).

Therefore our second question must be: if the mystery of Kierkegaard consists in an undecidable between, then is this between one that in the highest degree lies on the side of Kierkegaard himself? Is it a between of the writer who receives aesthetic pleasure yet remains fixed in the uncommitted realm of pure representation (as Schrempf has it), — or is it a between that mysteriously confronts the one who is opening up to actuality, just when he thinks he has it within his grasp. This is, in short, the situation that is expressed in the deeply distressing journal entry that gives a presentiment of his broken engagement with Regine Olsen: “Will I find what I am seeking here in this world? Will I experience the conclusion of all my life’s eccentric premises? Will I fold you in my arms? Or: Have you gone on ahead—you, my longing, do you beckon to me, transfigured, from another world?” (TG I, 125).

Because of that, however, it is clear how this second question—despite or perhaps in opposition to the first—becomes a sharper version of the first. For the aesthetic principle of “pleasure alone” is the entire concrete form in which the psychoanalytic explanation views Kierkegaard’s life—namely, as the erotic narcissism of self-indulgence in all things (Vetter 122ff, 167, 183, 289). Yet, the between of a being restrained “from above” would be the clearest form in which earth, humanity, and one’s own life more and more resemble a “night” wherein all realities turn into intangible shadows. This is the true between of the night, which is no longer a day on earth and still not a day in heaven—the night in which earth, humanity, and one’s own life slip away from the one who walks and acts, rather than resting in a firm, governing hand, and in which all change and activity tends rather towards a painful push and being pushed than towards ever-increasing success.

Hence, on the one hand, this condition corresponds almost word-for-word to what Kierkegaard’s journals describe in stammering fashion—he himself not fully understanding it—but which on the other hand compellingly reminds one of what the mystics say or, at least, are able to intimate of the “night.” The otherwise dominant motif of understanding and comprehension in Kierkegaard’s writings would thus receive an explanation altogether different than the one Schrempf and Vetter wish to give it, because they have no eye for the mysteries of inner religious life (or, for some reason, they harshly refuse to see it). In the journals of Kierkegaard’s last years, the process of “mortification” (Absterben) peculiarly grows as a sign of the love of God (TG II, 291ff., 294ff., etc.). This mortification indicates patience in the hardest sense, from God’s removal of the “thorn in the flesh” (TG II, 296) up to the ever-renewed recurrence of that reflection on Christ’s cry, “God, my God, why have you forsaken me!” (TG II, 333, 340, 364), which had already begun in For Self-Examination: Recommended to the Present Age (GW XI).

This intensification continues up to a participation in Christ’s God-forsakenness—a treatment that, in the journals, nevertheless remains reverently and timidly aware of the distance between the Christian and the God-man (TG II, 340). Would it, then, be entirely out of the question to illuminate this by way of Saint John of the Cross’ mysterious night-mysticism (Nachtmystik), which Jean Baruzi sees precisely in the mystical participation in Christ’s God-forsakenness on the cross as the height of the “anéantissement de tout notre être”?3 Is it not a night of a mysterious awareness of not being understood by God and the not-understanding of God?

It should be noted that we are not putting forward the hypothesis that Kierkegaard should be seen as a mystic. What is at issue is to show that the question only then becomes sufficiently broad and unprejudiced when it is posed in the spirit of Kierkegaard’s “radical Christianity” (TG I, 38, 41). Moreover, by driving the tension between opposing poles to the utmost, it still leaves room for the proximity of a possibility—just as a comparison of Kierkegaard’s language with the hymns of the Doctor of the Night would seem to force upon us.

The overarching theme of JUST FYI POD: CULTURE‘s third season is: “The Future of American Christianity: A Conversation in Ten Questions.” On today’s episode, my cohost Amy Welborn and I focus on the following question: “What, if Anything, Will Replace Mainline Protestantism?” We approach this question in two main ways. First, we examine a handful of new religious surveys, including (but not limited to) a major study released in December 2025 by the Pew Research Center. They all paint a similar picture: after a decades-long downturn, American religious affiliation, belief, and practice have begun to level off. But this overarching period of “stasis” comes with a number of qualifiers: markers of diminishment in one quarter suggest pockets of renewal in others. Next, we ponder what these findings tell us about American religious life going forward. If, as political scientist and statistician Ryan Burge has recently argued, the decline of mainline Protestantism is irreversible, then is some other religious institution poised to take its place?

You can listen to the pod right here on Substack, or you can access it via Spotify and/or Apple Podcasts, both of which have been linked below. Subscribe for free today! As always, your generosity and support are much appreciated!

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One of the most polarizing television series in recent memory is Apple TV’s Pluribus. Created by Vince Gilligan, who previously helmed the now iconic series Breaking Bad (2018-13) and its acclaimed successor Better Call Saul (2015-22), Pluribus has received more than a little critical approbation. According to the review-aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, 98% of professional critics gave Pluribus a positive appraisal. The Guardian’s Stuart Heritage exemplifies much of the critical reception:

It’s a thoughtfully written, thematically rich, beautifully directed sci-fi that feels like it has a very clear sense of self. The finale…ends on such an intriguing note that new episodes cannot come fast enough. It is currently the best show we have.

On the other hand, general audiences have been less impressed. The so-called “Popcornmeter” on Rotten Tomatoes registers a pedestrian 67% approval rating. This score could be worse when one considers how many people truly hated Pluribus. Rotten Tomatoes user “Audra D” calls it “LGBTQ propaganda” and “a big nothing burger.” In a slightly more charitable vein, “Troy B” concludes that the show’s success hinges on Gilligan’s reputation: “If this was a directorial debut it wouldn't have made it past youtube shorts. … I still feel genuine regret for having spent my free time watching…. Placing this at a borderline perfect show by critics is objectively vince meatriding and holier-than-thou bandwagoning.”

If the discrepancy between critics and general audiences is unusually sharp, it is not incomprehensible. Pluribus is an unconventional series in a number of ways. First and foremost, the show has what might be termed an “inverse structure.” Whereas most movies, novels, and TV series focus on the breakdown of a given society (say, a corporation, country, or family), Pluribus centers on the overall improvement of the global order—and then dares to question it.

Second, in a more cinematic register, the show is committed to making the viewer experience this very tension. The story begins when a mysterious extraterrestrial virus annihilates all human difference—thus the title Pluribus, which is Latin for “we”—and then asks us to imagine what it would be like to live in such an environment. Principally in and through the character of Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn), a romance novelist from Albuquerque, Pluribus spends a surprising amount of time showing how dull and monotonous the world of the “Joined” is. Since Carol is one of only thirteen people who have proven immune to the hive-mind virus, she spends much of her time alone, angry, and confused. Her manager and parter Helen (Miriam Shor) died on account of the infection, and she is left to sort out the ensuing situation more or less by herself.

Nevertheless, Carol’s efforts are often played for comedy, albeit of a dry and dark variety. In the scene below, Carol tells one of her fellow “survivors,” a Mauritanian hedonist named Koumba Diabaté (Samba Schutte), that she believes that the Others are eating people. Not only is Diabaté aware of this matter, but he shows her a video that details why the Others are converting dead human beings into a food source. Hilariously, the video is narrated by actor and pro wrestling icon John Cena, who has also succumbed to the hive mind:

A third and final way that Pluribus has proven unconventional is its unblinking, almost cold refusal of straightforward moral bookkeeping. The Others are kind, resourceful, and unfailingly polite; Carol is acerbic, self-indulgent, and often rude. So, are we sure that we should be rooting for her? In fact, if morality were a principally a utilitarian matter (“the greatest good for the greatest number”), then Carol might actually be the show’s villain. On the other hand, Pluribus gives Carol and her fellow malcontent—a Columbian expatriate living in Asunción named Manousos Oviedo (Carlos-Manuel Vesga)—plenty of time and space to work out their objections to the Others. Whereas most of the remaining human beings accept or, at least, tolerate the Joining, Carol and Manousos provide resistance in respective ways. The latter refuses to consort with the Joined altogether, while Carol befriends an Other named Zosia (Karolina Wydra) and tries to leverage her for information about how to reverse the hive mind. Carol’s actions prompt the Others to exclude her from any direction communication:

Indeed, this punishment is telling, because it underlines Pluribus’ core philosophical tension—the conflict between the individual and the collective. Gilligan himself has gestured at this theme with his recent disparagement of artificial intelligence: “I hate AI. AI is the world’s most expensive and energy-intensive plagiarism machine. I think there’s a very high possibility that this is all a bunch of horseshit.” The issue is that AI makes money by providing cheap, mass-produced copies of human creative genius: “My toaster oven isn’t suddenly Thomas Keller because it heats up a delicious pizza for me.” And yet, he adds, there is another problem: people are more than willing to settle for cheap, mass-produced copies. “Do you want to be fed a diet of crap?” Gilligan continues, “Is there enough calories in a diet of crap to keep you alive? The answer is yeah, probably. You could eat it.” These comments seem all the more significant in light of the disclaimer added to Pluribus’ credits: “This show was made by humans.”

To say that Pluribus was made by humans is not to say that it was made by “humanity.” No, the show was made by particular human beings—Gilligan, Seehorn, executive producer Gordon Smith, and so on. Commentators have assumed that the qualifier “made by humans” is meant to contrast Gilligan and his team from AI-generated movies. In and of itself, this assumption isn’t wrong, but it is simplistic. After all, human intelligence undergirds generative artificial intelligence in such a way that the distinction between AI and humanity is not (yet?) absolute. Thus the statement “This show was made by humans” is about more than AI; it expresses the opposition of individual human beings to depersonalized mass “systems.” AI chatbots are but types of a much larger modern phenomenon.

Indeed, long before Pluribus, a series of thinkers lodged a loosely affiliated attack against mass society, insisting that human meaning begins from lived, embodied, first-person existence, rather than from abstract systems (philosophical, bureaucratic, technological, ideological, etc.) that claim to explain or to manage life from above. These novelists, philosophers, poets, and theologians are often grouped under the heading of “existentialism.” Scholars have long debated whether or not this catchall term is suitable for such a disparate collection of figures, but, in this case, its breadth is useful. For it gestures towards the diversity and thus the prevalence of the existentialist protest against mass systems.

The “Father of Existentialism” is often said to be Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55), who in the mid-nineteenth century launched a multipronged critique of modern systemization. In philosophical circles, Kierkegaard is most famous for his witty but pointed evisceration of Hegelianism. But this “attack” was but a precursor to a later one, which would extend to the politics of the emerging nation-state, mass technology and the press, and ultimately the Danish state church. But Kierkegaard’s thinking was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg, so much so that it’s very much a stretch to see Kierkegaard as the founder of a movement as such. It would be more accurate, in fact, to see Kierkegaard as responding in an idiosyncratic way to a host of pressures that would impact the entire world.

Indeed, “existentialists” would pop up in any number of contexts over the ensuing century. In Russia, the great novelist and essayist Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-81) insisted in works such as Notes from Underground (1864), Demons (1871-72), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880) that the modern quest for comprehensive knowledge and rational order has an unmistakable antihuman quality. For Dostoevsky, the great symbol of this trajectory was the Crystal Palace—the prodigious iron and glass structure (pictured below) built to house the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, which was held in Hyde Park, London, from May to October 1851. Dostoevsky did not visit London until July 1862, by which point the Crystal Palace had been demolished and re-erected at Penge Peak adjacent to Sydenham Hill. This detail, however, would likely only confirm Dostoevsky’s worst fears about the palace. As he vents in “Winter Notes on Summer Impressions” (1863),

the Crystal Palace was more of an idol than a building—a monument to the “proud and dismal spirit” of material gain and utopian atheism. Yet, even more than that, the Crystal Palace was a structure so attractive, so easy, and so commodious that it could not be resisted. It presented the collective power of humanity as an inevitable and thus terrifying destiny: “You feel that something has already been achieved,” Dostoevsky writes, “that there is a victory, a triumph… and you begin to be afraid.”

Roughly two decades after Dostoevsky, the German philologist and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) would launch a similar critique, albeit in a more pugnacious spirit. For Nietzsche, the modern system is an extension of the Western philosophical and theological project writ large. Hence, if das System is to be overcome, Platonic rationalism and Christian religiosity must also be overcome. As Nietzsche puts it in Beyond Good and Evil (1886), “Morality in Europe today is herd animal morality.” Western cultural norms (“morality”) are thus inseparable from the “herd mentality.” A fictitious value structure has been imposed on the individual—and that’s exactly why so many people like it. To join the herd is to prefer comfort and safety over personal excellence.

The views of Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche would find a wider audience in the twentieth century. Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968) sharply broke with liberal Protestantism—and, later, Nazism—precisely over this issue. If Christianity is just a node in a larger cultural matrix, Barth reasoned, then it is ultimately meaningless. For Barth, God does not underwrite human systems; he annihilates them. The incisive and, to my thinking, underappreciated French sociologist Jacques Ellul (1912-94) presses a related criticism, though he takes aim more at modern technology than particular expressions of Christianity. As Ellul sees it—and here the connections with Pluribus and AI are obvious—the world is no longer run by institutions of eternal doctrine (church) or temporal power (state), because everything has been subordinated to technical efficiency. People may still talk about goodness, meaning and truth, but, Ellul argues, this is little more than lip-service. Today only one moral question remains: do you conform to a society of mass technology or not?

I could go on—from Albert Camus’ recognition that any putative social harmony is incapable of eradicating questions of personal meaning to Franz Kafka’s depiction of individual despair in the face of depersonalized bureaucracy. Indeed, it may even be that Gabriel Marcel’s 1951 book Man against Mass Society (Les Hommes contre l'humain) most fully anticipates Gilligan’s concerns in Pluribus. Raised in a nonreligious household in Paris, Marcel converted to Catholicism in 1929, though he considered himself a playwright and a philosopher rather than a theologian. In Man against Mass Society, Marcel begins by stating that his entire philosophy marks “an obstinate and untiring battle against the spirit of abstraction.” To be sure, many ideological movements—Marcel himself emphasizes the French Revolution, Stalinism, and Nazism in particular—have promised to better the world by fostering popular rule and communal principles. However, Marcel claims that he has never been seduced by such assurances: “When I was still very young I grasped the truth that it is impossible to build true peace on abstraction.”

It is with this in mind that Marcel turns to the overarching theme of his book: “The universal against the masses.” Specifically drawing on Plato, Marcel identifies “the universal” with “spirit or mind—and spirit or mind is love.” But, he goes on, only an individual can properly love, and only an individual can properly think. These are “the most concrete things in the world,” which no political movement or technical apparatus can instantiate. Almost perfectly describing the Others in Pluribus, Marcel writes:

The masses partake of the human only in a degraded state, they are themselves a degraded state of the human. Do not let us seek to persuade ourselves that an education of the masses is possible: that is a contradiction in terms. What is educable is only an individual, or more exactly a person. Everywhere else, there is no scope for anything but a training.

What appears to be a flourishing society, then, is actually the “abnormal and unhealthy life…of a cancer-tissue.” That is why Marcel views his work as a kind of warning, as if he were a doctor prescribing emergency treatment. The goal of the human endeavor, he says, can never be an optimized society as such, because optimization, construed poorly, can very well come at the expense of the irreducible dignity of the concrete individual. And, as Marcel writes, “There can be no authentic depth except where there can be real communion… The very notion of intersubjectivity…presupposes a reciprocal openness between individuals without which no kind of spirituality is conceivable.”

With this in mind, it is notable that the first season of Pluribus ends with an alliance, so to speak, between Carol and Manousos. They have different personalities, and they speak different languages. In fact, they don’t really like each other at all. Therein, paradoxically, lies the kernel of optimism that Gilligan sows in Pluribus. The Others lack genuine inwardness or, to use Marcel’s term, “availability” (disponibilité). There is a certain hollowness—indeed, an abstractness—to their interactions. Not so with Carol and Manousos. If the world of the Joining has reduced all human beings to a function, the respective doubt, indignation, and mettle of Carol and Manousos give birth to hope—both their hope and ours. Indeed, as Marcel puts it, “Hope is possible only where the human being is not treated as a thing.”

The main task of JUST FYI POD: IDEAS’ third season is to discuss: “Higher Ed in the ChatGPT Era: How Did We Get Here? Where Is It Going?” On today’s episode, my cohost Clark Elliston and I will explore the topic: “Does It Matter if Students Can’t Read Anymore?” This is an issue that has caused more than a little hand-wringing, both among educators and in the popular media. Indeed, the issue isn’t whether literacy is declining among young people, particularly in the United States. That much is certain. No, the real questions are:

• Why is this happening?

• What are its consequences?

Clark and I will take a look at the data and add in our own observations. Then, in conclusion, we will ponder how this trajectory has impacted and will continue to impact the United States and Western culture in general, paying special attention to religious and political concerns that are already emerging downstream.

You can listen to the pod right here on Substack, or you can access it via Spotify and/or Apple Podcasts, both of which are linked below. Subscribe for free today, and, as ever, consider following, liking, rating, and sharing our work. Your generosity and support are much appreciated!

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Amid the hum and hullabaloo of pre-Christmas activities, Amy Welborn and I found time to meet at Cahaba Brewing Co. in Avondale, where we discussed what we enjoyed (and, well, didn’t enjoy!) about 2025. Though interspersed with firsthand stories about international travel and biker gangs in Pennsylvania (!), our conversation centers on culture—in particular, our respective “Best of 2025” lists in the following categories:

• Movies

• Television

• Books

• Theater

• Music

So, pour a flute of champagne and join us as we look back on 2025 and get ready to usher in 2026. Te Deum laudámus!

You can listen to the pod right here on Substack, or you can access it via Spotify and/or Apple Podcasts, both of which are linked below. Start out the New Year right and subscribe for free today! As ever, your generosity and support are greatly appreciated!

PS — a few additional notes, speaking only for myself and not for Amy:

• I’ve had an opportunity to watch a few different things over the last week and, if possible, would’ve made a handful of changes to my “Best of 2025” lists. First, and most notably, I saw Marty Supreme on Christmas night and really liked it. If I could do it all over again, I would have situated it at number four or five on my movie list. Don’t be fooled: Marty Supreme really is a film about ping-pong. Yet, more than that, it is a movie about passion and the pursuit of excellence—to be sure, classic sports movie themes, but director/co-writer Josh Safdie and star actor Timothée Chalamet (who keeps living up to the hype) imbue them with fresh energy and insight.

• With regard to television, I finished the Netflix miniseries The Beast in Me (created by Gabe Rotter) over the break. I might, in a good mood, have added it to my “honorable mention” list. The show features an amazing cast (Claire Danes, Matthew Rhys, Jonathan Banks), but (for me, anyway) it started getting redundant around episode three. There are eight episodes in all. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions! Finally, I recently started the miniseries Death by Lightning (also on Netflix), and I think it would’ve had a very good chance of cracking my top four or five shows of the year—a fascinating, well-paced drama that probes a forgotten, yet fascinating, era in American history.

• My favorite songs of 2025 do not come up in this episode, but that didn’t stop me from linking a playlist below. Some (but not all) of these songs are found on my favorite albums of 2025, which I do enumerate in my conversation with Amy. Anyway, here the songs are presented in no particular order and without commentary. It’s something of a hodgepodge. My only criterion is this: have I found myself listening to the song in question over the course of 2025? The context may have varied (long drives or workouts or writing sessions), but, in one way or another, these tracks kept turning up. I hope at least a few of you will enjoy at least a few of these songs!

• Links to previous Just FYI posts that overlap with this episode ⬇️

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Playlist: My Favorite Songs of 2025