American atheist philosopher Peter Boghossian recently hosted me as a guest on to his podcast to discuss some hot button ethical issues (and for those who are wondering, no, I didn’t have any say in the thumbnail).

I’m not sure it was one of my best media appearances, largely because I was initially told that we’d be discussing a completely different issue, but then as we were gearing up to hit record Peter told me that he actually wanted to talk about euthanasia, pornography, and abortion, and so I had to do a quick pivot and roll with the punches come what may.

So, here it is, warts and all.

“You love evil more than good,
lies more than truth.
You love the destructive word,
you tongue of deceit.”
- Psalm 52 -

I have long had an interest in media narrative shaping, and how people can be far too easily swayed by what is said, the way it is said, and, equally importantly, what is left unsaid in the coverage of a particular event.

This has been drawn ever more sharply into focus in recent weeks with the trial of Lindsay Clancy, the US woman who has admitted to killing her three children, and, at the time of writing, is still awaiting the jury verdict in a trial where she has claimed that she was psychotic and had lost all touch with reality when she carried out these horrific killings.

Leaving aside the question of subjective culpability (Clancy has already admitted to being guilty of the killings, so the central question is not about her guilt but about her mental state during the crimes), it seems to me that the baying social media mobs that have arisen around this case are the sociocultural equivalent of the Fujiwhara Effect, made inevitable when a social media addled society ran headlong into a troubling trend in true crime media that began more than 20 years ago.

There is nothing particularly new about media coverage of true crime stories.

Even though published accounts of real criminal cases date back for hundreds of years prior, Truman Capote’s 1966 nonfiction novel In Cold Blood is generally considered to be the work which birthed and popularised the modern true crime genre.

Twenty two years later, The Thin Blue Line would propel true crime media to an even more emotionally compelling height.

From a filmmaking perspective, I don’t think it would be unfair to say that Errol Morris’ groundbreaking 1988 true crime documentary movie The Thin Blue Line wasn’t just a gold standard masterpiece that changed documentary making for ever, but also another major milestone in the trajectory of the modern true crime genre.

Morris showed that a true crime documentary film could be just as compelling and artistically well crafted as any purely fictional cinema of note could be.

The inevitable and unavoidable outcome of sensationally breaking the mould like Morris did is that others will want to make their name by imitating what you have done, even if that means upping the ante by sacrificing caution and prudence in the pursuit of true crime film making accolades.

Which is pretty much what happened almost thirty years later when Netflix released the 10 episode Making a Murder documentary series about the crimes of convicted murderer Steven Avery in 2015.

The series instantly became a global true crime phenomenon that not only spawned a subsequent 10 episode sequel series, but also a multitude of other similarly styled true crime documentaries.

One of these was the 2017 Netflix documentary series The Keepers, about the murder of Catholic nun Sister Catherine Cesnik.

In my opinion, all of these series, including Making a Murder, marked a major and very concerning turning point in the true crime genre due to the selective and often deceptive narrative shaping and unfounded speculation that was a mainstay of these wildly popular documentary crime serials.

In fact, I was so troubled by the dishonest nature of The Keepers and the wildly irresponsible and unethical way in which major falsehoods and unsubstantiated allegations were made within the series that I created the following 30 minute video commentary back in 2017 to voice my concerns:

About a year after publishing this video, a commenter informed me that their criminology lecturer at a foreign university was recommending my video to their students as a resource that “demonstrates the inaccuracy and problems with true crime media”.

It was encouraging to hear that not everyone was unthinkingly drinking the Kool-Aid, and that students in this field are still being challenged to think more critically about true crime media.

But that was then, and this is now, and, as the Lindsay Clancy murder trial has shown, thanks to social media, unfounded allegations, speculations and blatant reputation destroying falsehoods have spiralled out of control in the now constantly simmering cauldron of true crime social media.

This isn’t the sort of inconsequential conjecture that one might engage in online about politics, an upcoming sporting match, or which actor should become the next James Bond (which we all know should be either Idris Elba or Henry Cavill).

The stakes couldn’t be much higher in this diabolical game of social oneupmanship, where people take circumstantial pieces of evidence, baseless Internet rumours, or even zodiac signs and use them to engage in viral gossip mongering that commonly indicts the innocent and acquits the guilty.

Errol Morris didn’t simply create the greatest documentary of all time when he made The Thin Blue Line, it was also a meticulously researched and carefully presented account of injustice, and it led to the wrongful conviction and imprisonment of Randall Dale Adams being overturned.

Today’s TikTok Tanyas and true crime Tylers aren’t so much researching as they are imprudently purveying speedily constructed sentiment fuelled sensationalism that is commonly crafted for click-based monetisation.

And whether it’s for dollars or dopamine hits, when it comes to social media, the more sensationalistic the content you create, the greater the payoff becomes.

Article #2479 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church offers a stark warning that we would be wise to heed in light of all of this:

“Detraction and calumny destroy the reputation and honour of one’s neighbour. Honour is the social witness given to human dignity, and everyone enjoys a natural right to the honour of his name and reputation and to respect. Thus, detraction and calumny offend against the virtues of justice and charity.”

Dishonest Narrative framing in true crime media is not new.

It was a trend that began several decades ago when creators started to shape their narratives around certain aspects of a case, or to omit pertinent facts according to a predetermined belief they held about the crimes they were documenting.

It is easy to understand how the appeal of becoming the next Errol Morris with your own new documentary exposing a miscarriage of justice could be extremely compelling for a creator, or how a jaundiced or myopic view of a particular crime could easily result in a misguided crusade instead of genuine balanced documentary filmmaking on their part.

This is to say nothing of the fact that such an approach also provides a unique angle and hook which separates your project from all the other true crime documentaries, podcasts, YouTube videos, and TikTok reels which now saturate the marketplace.

It would also be naive to think that media outlets and streaming services were ignorant of the fact that salacious true crime narratives - particularly ones which presented conspiratorial elements such as wrongful conviction or malfeasance on the part of lawmakers or prosecutors - were not going to attract much higher viewership and revenue earnings.

Such a lack of care when it came to full and honest disclosure about true crime media has now spiralled out of control after becoming coupled with the runaway freight train that is social media.

Anyone with an internet connection account can now fire all sorts of wild speculations and abominable falsehoods into the public square with little to no meaningful accountability.

As the Lindsay Clancy murder case has shown, social media has allowed gallon after gallon of petrol to be poured on the fire of true crime selective narrative shaping to the point where it has become a raging inferno.

I personally believe it would be extremely unwise to think that such a sociocultural situation does not pose any risk of morphing into an institutionally corrupting effect - even if only at the level of undue influence on juries in criminal trials.

Perhaps it’s time for social media companies to be required to adopt a new policy which algorithmically throttles and also prohibits the monetisation of any content which involves speculation about any active criminal cases or trials?

The Falsified Divide
By Brendan Malone

The falsified divide,
the vacuum of privation that envelops and separates us all.
Even the best of us now seduced and ensnared by the falsified divide.
The space where community is abandoned to diminish
while we imitate community in this disembodied state.
State of being?
There is no being in the falsified divide, only doing.
But not the doing of embodied souls,
merely the mimicry of embodied doing.
If we would only but abandon the tumult of the falsified divide,
for the return to corporeal communion, our true home and calling.

It seems to me that several key policies of The Opportunity Party either outright violate or are antithetical to Catholic social teaching.

Firstly, what they are calling the ‘citizen’s income payment’ is actually just a welfare payment that would be administered to all citizens by the state.

This is different from typical welfare schemes, which are rightly established as a safety net targeted only to those in genuine need (like those without employment facing economic hardship, or those who cannot work because of serious illness or disability, etc.)

It is also different from taxation relief, or cost of living relief that is targeted to families or retirees, etc. Such schemes allow families and individuals to govern their own earnings with less taxation restriction or cost related burdens.

But the ‘citizen’s income payment’ is not either of these. It does not involve the state simply alleviating the conditions of those in need, instead it would turn the majority of the NZ population into state dependant welfare recipients.

Leaving aside the obvious question of who exactly will be funding this welfare payment, the bigger issue here is the clear threat to subsidiarity that this represents.

Dignified work is an essential good where the human person finds important meaning. For the state to insert itself into this fundamental aspect of the human experience without due cause is harmful in multiple ways.

Firstly, a welfare dependant is even more subservient to the whims of the state than a non recipient, because the state now exercises a substantial level of new control over their affairs through the mechanism of a sizeable ongoing welfare payment.

A substantial ongoing welfare payment provided by the state is also one that can be rescinded at any time by the state as a means of control if they so desire. It is far easier to find a new means of employment to provide you income than it is to find a new state to provide this for you.

In Catholic social teaching, the state is called upon to respect the self-leadership of families and individuals by not inserting itself into their governance affairs without just cause because the “initiative, freedom and responsibility [of families and individuals] must not be supplanted” (The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church #186).

Then there is TOP’s harmful punitive policy of imposing new taxation penalties on all landowners.

Although Catholic social teaching does not teach that private ownership is an absolute and untouchable right, it still considers the ownership of private property (as long as there is no violation of the common good involved) to be an essential principle and good that (according to the teachings of the Second Vatican Council):

“assures a person a highly necessary sphere for the exercise of his personal and family autonomy and ought to be considered as an extension of human freedom ... stimulating exercise of responsibility, it constitutes one of the conditions for civil liberty”.

In his encyclical Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII is unflinching in teaching about the importance of private property, stating that:

“The first and most fundamental principle, therefore, if one would undertake to alleviate the [economic] condition of the masses, must be the inviolability of private property”.

No matter how well intentioned they imagine it to be, any policy (quoting from today’s media reporting about The Opportunity Party’s tax policy) that would create a situation where: “66% of households who own a home will be worse off to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost value”, would represent an unjust punishment upon private ownership, as well as being a policy that is hostile to the wellbeing of families, and as such, it would clearly be antithetical the social teachings of the Church.

Their ardent support for abortion-up-to-birth (the current NZ law) is also obviously a grave violation of the first and most important doctrine of Catholic social teaching: that the right to life of every innocent human person must always be respected.

I have now lived enough years on God’s good earth to have learnt that there is no such thing as a free lunch (and I say this with the experience of someone who was raised in a poor welfare class family), and that markets and national economies are not simple things that can be subjected to radical social experimentation without major risk or harm.

The obvious question that everyone needs to consider is this: if what TOP is proposing really is as obvious and straightforward as they are claiming it to be, then why have no prior governments - on either the left or the right - seen and initiated such policies before now?

There are other ways to address the issue of housing affordability, the loss of financial mobility, and economy disparity, even through changes to current taxation policy, that do not require the sort of threats to Catholic social teaching that TOP wants to see wrought upon NZ families and individuals.

A failed attempt at a leadership change, the loss of a skilled and virtuous MP, and a speedily approaching election where the race is much tighter than it really should be. In this episode I share my thoughts about the crisis of leadership in the National Party that is still just as bad today as it was before this week’s firestorm.

In this episode of The Dispatches podcast I discuss an extremely disturbing story that has appeared in the NZ media as part of a new campaign to expand our ‘assisted dying’ laws and make it possible for even more people to be euthanised by the NZ state.

The incident and the emotionally manipulative way it is being reported is troubling enough, but what is truly disturbing is the premise that this campaign wants us to accept about what authentic care should look like in our country. This story also raises serious questions about the role and obligations of the media when they become embroiled in political crusades for major law changes, especially when this involves the deliberate and potentially preventable death of the subject in the story.

The issue of COVID era policy making and its impacts has returned to the public square in a major way this past week with attempts to subject Dr. Anthony Fauci to official scrutiny in the United States. In this episode of The Dispatches Podcast I share my thoughts on why I believe this scrutiny matters, and why seeking to downplay problematic aspects of Fauci’s conduct keeps us trapped in an unhealthy state of affairs.

I really don’t envy any man called by God to serve the Church as a Bishop.

It’s a thankless task with no shortage of voices eager to quickly, and sometimes very loudly critique, or even vociferously condemn any action, or perceived lack of action, that they take issue with. This tendency has become even more pronounced in the age of social media - a technology which has removed almost all former restraining barriers to purely reactive and hastily made public declarations.

Yesterday’s official announcement about the design for the new cathedral by Bishop Michael Gielen, the bishop of my diocese of Christchurch - and a good man I am proud to call a friend - was one of these occasions.

For what it’s worth, here’s my response to the two major criticisms I have seen circulating online in the past 24 hours:

‘What would Jesus think of His Church spending millions on buildings when that money could be given to the poor instead?’

We don’t have to look too far to find an answer to this question, because Jesus confronted this same sort of criticism during His earthly ministry, and the Gospel of John chapter 12 tells us exactly how Christ responded:

“Six days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. There they gave a dinner for him. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those at the table with him. Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.

But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (the one who was about to betray him), said, “Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” …Jesus said, “Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”

For those who might not be aware, a pound of nard cost the equivalent of approximately one year of wages for an average labourer in the time of Christ - somewhere in the vicinity of tens of thousands of dollars in today’s money.

The secular world demands excellence. God deserves it. When we use our treasure to honour God, we are engaging in an act of worship and adoration that speaks volumes about our deep love for Him.

Not only that, but we are creating something which points our culture back to Christ, and to His teachings, including His commands to love and care for the poor in our midst.

We should remember that poverty comes in many different guises, not just a deficiency of material goods.

In the modern West, our greatest poverty has long been spiritual, rather than material in nature - the very crisis that a Christian cathedral (a house of worship and spiritual solace) offers the people of this region a remedy to.

As Saint (Mother) Teresa of Calcutta once wrote:

“You in the West have the spiritually poorest of the poor much more than you have the physically poor. Often among the rich are very spiritually poor people. I find it is easy to give a plate of rice to a hungry person, to furnish a bed to a person who has no bed, but to console or to remove the bitterness, anger, and loneliness that comes from being spiritually deprived, that takes a long time.”

When the Church builds public houses of worship, she is sharing wealth with the world by creating something accessible to all people regardless of economic or social status, and doing so in such a way that offers remedy to the greatest need of our age - existential impoverishment.

Over the successive generations of its lifespan, how many people will enter that new cathedral and be profoundly changed, leaving there with a renewed commitment to care for the materially poor in our region as a direct result of the spiritual treasures they have discovered there?

It’s also important to note that this criticism often presents a false economy.

You see, the first incorrect assumption people consistently make is that the money for the cathedral is being diverted from the work of caring for the poor.

This is untrue. Fundraising for a cathedral does not involve robbing the poor to pay for a building. Instead, it sees us fundraising new and extra funds separate from, and on top of all the money already being contributed by the Catholics in this diocese to the many good works that are done for the poor.

The second incorrect assumption is that if money is not fundraised and spent on a cathedral, then it will go directly to those who are in economic need instead.

In actual fact, that’s highly unlikely to be the case. Instead, no extra money will be raised at all, with those who would have otherwise donated to a new cathedral simply keeping their treasure to use on their own wants and needs instead.

An important irony to note about the incident recorded in the Gospel of John chapter 12 is that Judas Iscariot, the man who condemned the spending of a years worth of wages out of love for Christ, would, not long after this incident, sell Jesus for a mere 30 pieces of silver - a much lesser amount, and the compensation for the death of a slave in the ancient world.

‘The new cathedral design isn’t beautiful enough’

The desire for sacred beauty is a good thing, but we shouldn’t be too hasty to rush to judgment about the final form of this new cathedral.

David Gianotti, a friend who specialises in creating sacred art, has posted the following important clarification online about the new cathedral design images:

“For the benefit of commentators, these are pure architectural renderings by architects who are only concerned with form and structure so look past the implied ecclesial appointments and the neutral tones that the architect has used in the renderings. They are not representative of the final beautification.”

I would also add to this by encouraging people to remember that the building of a new cathedral was always going to be constrained by the restrictions imposed by cost.

It’s one thing to propose ideas for how you believe the design could have been aesthetically different, or to contrast the Christchurch Cathedral design with other cathedrals that have been built in foreign countries, but its a whole other thing to properly cost and then come up with the extra money required to realise such things.

It’s possible that many people are also unaware of the fact that our diocese isn’t simply fundraising for one new cathedral at this present moment. We are also currently embarking upon a journey to fundraise for the building of other parish churches in desperate need of rebuilding since the Christchurch earthquakes as well.

I think it’s also worth considering the fact that, like all creative endeavours, it is always much easier to critique and find fault with a design that others have already created, than it is to envisage and then create a complete new design of your own from scratch.

This makes critical appraisal the much easier and far less labour intensive (some might even say ‘zero effort’) thing to engage in - something I think we all need to be aware of when considering our response in moments like this.

Finally, I also wonder how many of the people now offering public ideas for alternative design proposals - no matter how beautiful they might be (and some of them I really like) - took the time to communicate and present their ideas in a serious and concrete fashion to the Bishop well before yesterday’s public announcement?

For those who might be wondering, I do not work for the diocese, nor have I had any involvement whatsoever in the design process of our new cathedral. Everything I say here, I say solely as a freethinking and faithful son of the Church who, like a great many others, also laid eyes on the design for our new cathedral for the very first time this weekend.

Ad majorem Dei gloriam!

Hi everyone,

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Earlier this week I sat down with the kids to watch the new film The Sheep Detectives.

I went in assuming it would be your standard modern family movie fare - an adventure tale about some talking animals with a smattering of chuckle inducing gags and some politically coded messages of a progressive bent thrown in for good measure.

I don’t mean to sound too cynical, but for a cinephile like me, it’s been slim pickings on the celluloid mythology front for almost two decades now!

I’m not a movie snob who expects every film to be Babette’s Feast, On The Waterfront, or The Godfather. I’m a realist who appreciates the nuances of genre and enjoys the diverse panoply of experiences that the silver screen can offer. Not every filmmaker needs to be an auteur producing arthouse cinema or complex masterpieces rich with layer upon layer of symbolism and meaning.

At the very least though, even a popcorn blockbuster needs to be founded on authentic mythology to ensure that the movie is a touchstone which brings alive the universal drama of the human experience in its audience.

Without this, film becomes little more than bland agitprop or corporate product.

As J.R.R. Tolkien once put it:

“We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming ‘sub-creator’ and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic ‘progress’ leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil.”

I suspect that Tolkien would have enjoyed The Sheep Detectives - a film which is a welcome tonic for any jaded moviegoer desperate to rediscover the transcendent enchantment that used to be possible from a trip to the cinema.

There is something almost Watership Down-esque about this movie.

It doesn’t have the same darkness or sombre tone, but neither does it shy away from confronting the reality of death and questions of existential meaning. None of which it handles with glibness.

The premise of the film is fairly straightforward: a flock of sheep in a rural English village seek to solve the murder of their beloved shepherd George Hardy (played by Hugh Jackman) based on the insights they have garnered after years of him reading mystery novels aloud to them at the end of each day.

The movie trailer presents the film as a winsome and quirky adventure tale where farm animals solve a whodunnit - think Murder on the Orient Express meets Babe.

In reality however, The Sheep Detectives offers something much deeper.

It is a beautifully crafted mythology which grapples with some of the most profound and important questions of the human experience, from suffering, to death, to faith, redemption, and personal eschatology.

Although it deftly avoids answering the question of whether life persists after death or not, the movie does still subtly hint that this is something worthy to hope for, with the final scene pointing firmly in this direction.

It could be tempting to look at a movie like this and read its references to keeping people alive in our memories as a rejection of the Christian idea that the soul lives on after death, but I think this would be shortsighted and reductionist.

This is one of those moments where Christianity would say that it should be both/and not either/or. The human soul persists after death and we should also keep the deceased alive in our memories long after the final shovel has been heaped upon their casket.

In fact, the latter truth is vitally important in an age that has cast off tradition and contemplation and now finds itself subject to the tyranny of presentism and incessant stimuli.

The safeguarding and passing on of memory is essential to tradition. It is how those who have gone before can still maintain a tangible presence in our midst and transmit truths from the storehouse of wisdom that we have no hope of accumulating over just our one lifetime. This is what G.K. Chesterton is referring to when he speaks of tradition as the ‘democracy of the dead’.

Irregardless of the intentions of its creators, and even though it never presents itself as an explicitly Christian parable, this is a film baked in the ovens of Christianity.

The Sheep Detectives is rich with allusions to Christ the Good Shepherd, who knows and loves each of his sheep intimately, especially the lost and broken ones whom he seeks out and saves, offering them the fullness of life and a dignity that can only be truly realised in Him.

The kids and I particularly enjoyed the scene where three of the sheep walk past the village church and the conversation ensues as follows:

Lily: What is this?

Sebastian: This is the church, where someone named God lives.

Lily: Who’s God?

Sebastian: It’s a bit confusing, God is a shepherd.

Mopple: So he could be our shepherd?

Sebastian: No. Because he’s also a lamb.

Lily: What?

Sebastian: And he’s also invisible. And he’s made of bread. And he damns things.

Lily: Dams things? Like a beaver?

Sebastian: Yes.

Lily: So God is a big invisible lamb beaver, made of... bread?

Sebastian: Yes. And they eat him on Sundays.

Mopple: Poor God.

Another aspect of The Sheep Detectives that I appreciated was the fact that, despite the sheep being anthropomorphised, this is never used to portray them as superior, more humane, or less animalistic than the human persons who also inhabit this story.

That particular ideological cudgel is frustratingly common today, wielded by those who talk of ‘speciesism’ and seek to drag us down to the level of being nothing more than ‘clever animals’ with no inherent dignity to mark out our exceptionalism in the order of creation.

This particular trend ultimately represents a rejection of the Incarnation and its elevation of our humanity into the very life of God.

It was refreshing to be immersed in a mythology which included personified animals without feeling the need to disparage the Imago Dei of the human person along the way.

In fact, the naivety and immaturity of the sheep is actually used as an important object lesson in the story about the vacuousness and superficiality that falls upon those who refuse to embrace their sufferings and opt instead for a superficial denial and suppression of grief.

There’s more I could say about The Sheep Detectives, but I don’t want to rob those who haven’t yet seen the film of being able to experience it without me ruining it for them by saying too much.

If you’re a parent, this is definitely a film worthy of a family movie night, especially if you’re looking for a shared experience that will open up the opportunity for important conversations about death without the bleakness of other films which tread the boards on such weighty matters.

Irregardless of your state in life, The Sheep Detectives is a piece of cinematic goodness, truth, and beauty that deserves to be seen by everyone at least once before they shuffle off this mortal coil.

Baa!

• Keir Starmer’s departure and the question it raises about democracy

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AND MORE!

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Thankfully the US/Israel war in Iran appears to have finally come to an end, but it is important to be clear-eyed about exactly where things stand at this present moment.

Thousands of people were killed, including US troops and approximately 1700 Iranian civilians by this war.

An Ayatollah Khamenei still remains in charge of Iran, with Trump stating today: “I never cared about regime change”.

This is also noteworthy because it was the essential justification that some were using to try and claim that the US/Israel war with Iran met the necessary criteria to be considered a Just War in the Christian Tradition.

On this point, it seems that all of the reasons people were citing as moral justifications for the war, and it’s promised speedy success now lie in tatters.

There is no clarity about a resolution to the nuclear issue, with Trump stating today: “We’ll get the nuclear dust later on when we’re ready to go in and do it. I’d say over the next month or two, there’s no rush”.

Iran still maintains a missile programme; still maintains support for their proxies; and it now has greater strategic awareness about the immense power it wields in controlling the strait if it is threatened again in future. Importantly, for them, so now does the rest of the world.

Needless financial pain has been inflicted on families, households, and businesses all over the globe, with still more to come as the slow process of restoring oil, helium, and fertiliser exports through the strait return to prewar levels.

Israel is probably now in a less secure position than what they were before launching this latest war with Iran, with public support for their cause waning in the US, and Trump now seeming to be losing his patience with Benjamin Netanyahu, telling the New York Times: “He’s a very difficult guy ... and to be honest with you, he should be very thankful to us for doing this. Because if Iran had a nuclear weapon, Israel wouldn’t be around for two hours.”

And that’s to say nothing of the previous expletive laden criticisms from Trump earlier today, in which he told an Axios reporter: “Why did Bibi have to do a f...ing attack? I was so pissed off. I let him know. He has no f...ing judgement. I let him know that”.

The US is now militarily weaker than before the war began, with essential stockpiles depleted and bases damaged or destroyed in the region.

In light of the relative ease with which Iran was able to inflict damage on its neighbours, it seems possible that friendly Arab nations may now consider previous promises of US protection to be less reliable than initially claimed.

That’s to say nothing of how US military power now appears in the eyes of other nations with their own hegemony ambitions, ambitions that have thus far been kept in check by the perception of US military invincibility.

Trump will now be entering the upcoming midterms in an even weaker position than what he was prior to the war, with his only hope being that the Democrats campaign in such a way as to be less appealing to the voters than the Republican alternatives come November.

I’m sure minds far smarter than I will have many more astute things to say about this development in the coming days and weeks, but from where this humble observer sits, it’s hard to see how the world is much better off than we were prior to Saturday 28th February, or Trump’s abandonment of the previous US agreement with Iran.

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The other night I cried.

It happened while I was watching a movie.

Not that this is unusual for me. I have always been deeply moved by well crafted artistic goodness, truth, and beauty.

Years ago I penned the line ‘to hide a tear is to drown your heart’ for a song that I was writing. I don’t remember much else about that unfinished composition, but that line and the sentiment I was imperfectly grasping at has always struck me as true and important.

What made my tears the other night particularly noteworthy was their unexpected arrival, and the deep rooted sense of personal struggle they flowed from.

These tears were a surprise because they came while I was watching Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, the biographical drama based on Warren Zane’s book about Bruce Springsteen and the tumultuous personal journey that resulted in the creation of his 1982 album Nebraska.

I have been a Springsteen fan for many decades since first encountering his music as a nine year old boy, only a few short months after the release of his Born in the USA album - the record which propelled him to global superstardom and his enduring image as the archetypal blue-collar rock icon.

I have to admit though, that, despite the fact I was interested in seeing the film, I wasn’t expecting much more than a boilerplate musical biopic with an enjoyable soundtrack. Even then I had my fingers crossed that they wouldn’t butcher the music and legacy of the Boss too badly.

What I didn’t expect was the film that unfolded on the screen before me.

What played out was a lovingly attentive recreation of the artist and his artistry, but, more importantly, a profoundly moving portrayal of a man grappling with the demons of his childhood, particularly the weaknesses of his father and the complex relationship they shared.

The final scene, where a 32 year old Bruce Springsteen sits on his aging father’s lap for the very first time in his life, left me in tears and contemplating my own fears and faults as a father.

As my personal fatherly inadequacies came to mind, another recent moment of emotionally overwhelming profundity suddenly struck me as important.

This time it was the following clip of actor and filmmaker Shia LaBeouf responding to the question ‘what would you say to Jesus if you could meet him?’:

That poignant moment was recorded just days after LaBeouf had made global headlines for being arrested for drunk and disorderly behaviour, including a brawl outside a bar in New Orleans.

During this same conversation he would go on to say “I just try my best… I’m not refined… I’m one of them dirty Christians.”

Let him who has ears to hear, I am not trying to engage in some sort of vacuous and unwarranted canonisation of LaBeouf here, or downplay his serious public moral failings, but in this moment of raw honesty he expresses a contrition and longing for Christ that many of us more refined Christians desperately need to discover.

For I am the young Bruce Springsteen, grappling with the ghosts of my own lineage. Some real. Some imagined. Each complicated in its own way, and each the locus of insecurities I am plagued by.

I am the aging Douglas ‘Dutch’ Springsteen, painfully aware of my own fatherly deficiencies and desperately battling every day to ensure that they do not mar the lives of my children and their awareness of the Imago Dei they are.

I am the broken Shia LaBeouf, desperate to lie prostrate and kiss the feet of my Christ, allowing His merciful medicinal love to wash over me and make all things new.

I cried the other night because goodness, truth, and beauty unexpectedly overwhelmed and drew me back to Christ.

Hopefully I will unexpectedly cry again another night soon.

After 15 years of back-and-forth on various hot button issues, sometimes on opposing sides, Frank and I finally sat down together in dialogue as ecclesial brothers. In this episode of The Dispatches we discuss what led to Frank’s conversion to Catholic Christianity, his experiences as a media personality, the crisis of dehumanisation in public discourse, and lots more.