“Highlights and Interstices”

We think of lifetimes as mostly the exceptional
and sorrows. Marriage we remember as the children,
vacations, and emergencies. The uncommon parts.
But the best is often when nothing is happening.
The way a mother picks up the child almost without
noticing and carries her across Waller Street
while talking with the other woman. What if she
could keep all of that? Our lives happen between
the memorable. I have lost two thousand habitual
breakfasts with Michiko. What I miss most about
her is that commonplace I can no longer remember.
—Jack Gilbert from The Great Fires (1996)

“Calling the Phoenix”

The artifacts with which you hope to summon
the bird are unassuming—pinecones, twigs,
a lump of dust the breeze keeps trying to steal—

common things to welcome the uncommon.
You chant some words. The morning gently drags
its plumage down the sidewalk. This is real,

but you are disappointed, wanting clearly
demarcated spectacle. All right,
the phoenix wasn’t quite what you expected,

no feathery bursts of ash or fingers nearly
burned down to the knuckle. Only light,
everyday light, and you here to collect it

with your eyes, your skin, your hands and hair—
real fire completing its unlikely flight.
You soak it up, still pouting, unaware.
—Hilary Biehl from Image Journal, Summer 2026

Jack Gilbert’s poems appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. His collections include Views of Jeopardy and Refusing Heaven, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. “Highlights and Interstices” appeared in The Great Fires (Knopf, 1994).

Hilary Biehl’s poems have appeared in Blue Unicorn, Think, New Verse Review, and elsewhere. Her collection, Giants Crossing, was selected for publication through a juried poetry competition. “Calling the Phoenix” has not, so far, been republished beyond Image.

The Humanity of God

About 2 + 2 = 5

The humanity of God sounds like a theologian’s problem, if not double-talk. Yet the question matters. If God becomes human, what does that say about humanity—and about God?

Christianity has always had a habit of making its paradoxes sound like contradictions until one looks more closely. It makes an astonishing claim and then spends centuries trying not to domesticate it: the eternal God is known in a human life.

Not merely represented there. Not merely reflected there. Known there.

That claim creates the tension at the heart of Christian theology. If God is beyond the world, how can God be present within it? If Jesus is truly human, what does it mean to say that God is revealed in him? The Bible refuses to resolve the tension by choosing one side.

God is beyond human grasp, yet speaks, loves, judges, forgives, liberates, and binds himself to a people. The Hebrew Scriptures—the Old Testament—refuse divine remoteness. God acts in history.

The New Testament makes the claim more daring still.

Christianity is stubbornly material. The incarnation rules out any religion or philosophy that dismisses matter, flesh, or earthly life. The Word took flesh—walking, eating, sleeping, working, and dying here. The incarnation did not make the earth holy; it revealed the holiness already given in creation. All ground is holy ground. The recurring religious mistake is to imagine holiness as more disembodied than the God revealed in Christ—or, as one wit put it, to try to become more spiritual than God.

In Jesus, divine life becomes visible as the fulfillment toward which human life is ordered.

Athanasius, the fourth-century bishop of Alexandria, gave one of Christianity’s boldest answers. God became human so that human beings might share in the life of God. Salvation is more than pardon. The incarnation does more than repair what sin has damaged. It restores humanity to what God intended from the beginning.

Gregory of Nazianzus, the fourth-century bishop and poet known as “the Theologian,” sharpened the point. His argument was simple: what Christ does not take on, Christ does not heal. If Jesus is only partly human, then only part of humanity is restored. Christ must share fully in human existence.

Maximus the Confessor, the seventh-century monk and theologian, extends the argument to all creation. Christ does not merely reconcile individual souls to God. He heals the divisions running through creation: between God and humanity, spirit and matter, heaven and earth, and within the human person.

Humanity’s destiny is to become fully what it was created to be.

In influential strands of Western Christianity, however, guilt moved to the center of the account of sin. Salvation became acquittal. Christ’s work was described chiefly in terms of debt, judgment, and restored standing before God. The trouble comes when those ideas displace the larger claim that salvation is participation, transformation, and fulfillment.

None of the things people prize most—talent, success, accomplishment—is essential. We often treat them as measures of our worth. What God gives every person alike is life itself, created in God, and a heart able to love and find joy in love.

Karl Barth, the influential twentieth-century Swiss theologian, argues in “The Humanity of God” that God is not more divine for being remote. God’s freedom includes the freedom to turn toward humanity and bind himself to it in Christ. Divine majesty is not aloofness.

David Bentley Hart, the contemporary Orthodox theologian and philosopher, presses the argument further. Human beings are incomplete apart from God, who gives them existence at every moment. Their deepest desires—for truth, goodness, beauty, and love—find their fulfillment in God. In Christ, divine and human natures are united, opening humanity to participation in divine life. Grace does not override human freedom but brings it to fulfillment. Salvation rests finally with God, not with the unaided human will.

The argument widens at every step: from Athanasius’s deification, through Gregory’s healing of the whole human person and Maximus’s reconciliation of creation, to Barth’s claim that God’s turn toward humanity reveals God’s own divinity.

Hart draws the final inference: universal salvation. If every rational creature is created for the Good, then eternal rejection of the Good cannot be freedom’s final achievement. Freedom becomes complete when illusion falls away, and the Good is freely known and loved. Anything short of the best possible ending would mean, in some sense, that God had failed as creator.

God becomes human not only to show humanity what God is like. God becomes human to show humanity what humanity is for.

“I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.”

Notes and reading

Frederick Buechner—American novelist, minister, and theological writer. The remark about trying to become “more spiritual than God” comes from Wishful Thinking and was later reprinted in Beyond Words.

Athanasius—Fourth-century bishop of Alexandria and a formative theologian of Christian orthodoxy. The essay paraphrases On the Incarnation 54.3: “He was made man that we might be made God”—not that human beings cease to be creatures, but that they are drawn by grace into the life of God.

Gregory of Nazianzus—Fourth-century bishop, poet, and theologian, known in the Eastern Church as “the Theologian.” He was one of the three Cappadocian Fathers, together with Basil of Caesarea and Basil’s younger brother, Gregory of Nyssa. Against claims that Christ lacked a fully human mind, Nazianzus wrote: “What has not been assumed has not been healed” (Letter 101). Christ heals humanity by assuming it fully.

Maximus the Confessor—Seventh-century monk and theologian. In Ambiguum 41, Christ heals the divisions within creation and draws all things toward unity in God. Human fulfillment and cosmic reconciliation belong to the same story.

Sergius Bulgakov—Twentieth-century Russian Orthodox priest and theologian. The paragraph beginning “None of the things people prize most” paraphrases a passage from Spiritual Diary contrasting talent, success, and accomplishment with the life God gives each person and the capacity to love.

Karl Barth—Twentieth-century Swiss Reformed theologian. His 1956 lecture “The Humanity of God” argues that divine greatness does not mean distance: God’s freedom is revealed in turning toward humanity and being for humanity in Christ.

David Bentley Hart—Contemporary Eastern Orthodox philosopher and theologian. You Are Gods (2022) argues that creation and grace belong together in humanity’s fulfillment in God. In Jesus of Nazareth, human nature is revealed as made for divine life. That All Shall Be Saved (2019) presents Hart’s case for universal salvation: creatures made for the Good cannot remain eternally alienated from it.

Other religions—Hart rejects both Christian exclusivism and the easy claim that all religions teach the same thing. He regards religious traditions as containing differing measures of truth and error, while Christianity claims that the divine mystery is fully disclosed in Christ—a Christ who cannot be confined to Christianity as an institution. See “David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought”, Conversations with Tyler, hosted by Tyler Cowen, July 12, 2023.

Damnation—Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories, “O-Gin.” Akutagawa, one of Japan’s masters of the short story, gives the problem of damnation a human form: what would heaven mean if those one loves remained damned? He treats Christianity with fascination but no sentimentality. (I discovered Akutagawa through Patti Smith’s enthusiastic recommendation.)

“I came that they may have life . . .”—Jesus, John 10:10. In the Good Shepherd discourse, Jesus contrasts the life he gives with what diminishes and destroys it. The final phrase is variously rendered “abundantly,” “in abundance,” or “to the full”: salvation as fullness of life.

We’re Tired. AI Isn’t.

What Fatigue Knows

About 2 + 2 = 5

Editorial note: I sometimes use AI-assisted tools for proofreading, clarification, and revision. The ideas, judgments, and final wording remain my own.

Politics today has a depressing predictability. On abortion, taxes, immigration, guns, and climate, battle lines are drawn, incentives clear, and tracks well worn.

AI is different. Politicians, commentators, and voters are still making up their minds. The lines have not hardened. Yet.

Futurists have long anticipated a technological “singularity,” when machine intelligence becomes so powerful that unenhanced humans can no longer keep pace. Computer scientist Ray Kurzweil helped popularize this vision. In The Singularity Is Nearer, he dates it to 2045, envisioning human intelligence amplified through AI, nanotechnology, and other augmentations.

Futurist predictions often miss. Flying cars remain where Back to the Future Part II left them. Yet AI makes Kurzweil’s question harder to dismiss. What happens when machines stop looking like tools and start to resemble another intelligence?

Sebastian Mallaby of the Council on Foreign Relations argues that the quest for superintelligence has acquired an almost religious intensity. Kurzweil sees biological and technological evolution moving toward qualities traditionally ascribed to God. AI raises questions of identity, consciousness, mortality, and destiny. The issue is not simply what machines will become, but what their becoming forces us to say about ourselves.

In a recent Foreign Affairs essay, Mallaby turns to Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, which defends human distinctiveness against equating machine intelligence with human consciousness or moral agency. Human beings are not information-processing machines but embodied persons capable of forgiveness, vulnerability, and moral responsibility. Their dignity rests in the image of God; the incarnation discloses what it means to be human.

The prospect of humanity surpassed by its inventions or consciousness uploaded as eternal life is hardly welcome. Asserting human uniqueness does not explain what distinguishes us.

A machine might answer convincingly without understanding meaning, but modern AI complicates that distinction. Large language models encode relationships among words and concepts and learn from feedback. Multimodal systems also combine language with images and detect patterns linked to emotion and intention.

None of this proves consciousness. Machines do not bleed or inhabit bodies; there is no evidence that they suffer, love, or mourn. Embodiment may be indispensable. Calling machine intelligence mere imitation does not settle the matter. The boundary between processing information and understanding it is harder to draw than the imitation label implies.

The argument turns back on us. Human brains are physical systems. They receive sensory information, learn from experience, and process electrochemical signals. If these facts do not fully explain what it means to be human, what remains? Consciousness, freedom, love, a soul, or the image of God?

The more machines reason, learn, create, and respond to human emotion, the less explanatory “mere imitation” becomes. Competence does not prove consciousness, and intelligence does not establish moral personhood.

The most unsettling possibility is not that machines will become human, but that, in explaining why they are not, we may discover how little agreement exists about what being human means.

Governing AI amid a global race for supremacy will require tradeoffs. Technology is never just engineering; it also asks what we are willing to sacrifice for growth, comfort, and efficiency. Greater safety may cost innovation, openness, or national advantage.

A demand for purity leads to paralysis and leaves decisions to the companies and states moving fastest. It is better to acknowledge tradeoffs than pretend they do not exist. If governments fail to choose deliberately, markets and strategic rivalry will choose by default.

Hedging is not indecision. It means pursuing gains while building safeguards and preserving room to change course. When stakes are high, and uncertainty is pervasive, that is the sounder bet.

AI alarmists and enthusiasts share more than either side admits. Both are intoxicated by exaggeration. Alarmists turn every advance into evidence of catastrophe. Enthusiasts treat technical achievement as moral progress and assume whatever is faster, smarter, and more profitable must be better.

One side mistakes uncertainty for catastrophe; the other mistakes capability for wisdom. Both prefer conviction to argument and evade the harder task: neither to worship AI nor to fear it, but to govern it.

AI grows more consequential by the day. The real danger begins when human beings surrender judgment, whether from panic or enthusiasm, to the systems they have built. The task is not to wish those systems away, but to accept responsibility for what has already been set in motion.

Ursula K. Le Guin, author of The Left Hand of Darkness, put that burden more starkly in A Wizard of Earthsea: “He knew now, and the knowledge was hard, that his task had never been to undo what he had done, but to finish what he had begun.”

Notes and reading

The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI—Ray Kurzweil (2024). Kurzweil appears to be hedging his tenses. His 2005 bestseller was The Singularity Is Near. Kurzweil—computer scientist, inventor, futurist, and the singularity’s most tireless evangelist. In a 2024 Guardian interview: “We are going to expand intelligence a millionfold by 2045, and it is going to deepen our awareness and consciousness.”

“AI and the Myth of the Machine”—Conor McGlynn in Compact (March 19, 2026). Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) was a pioneering thinker on cities, architecture, and technology. McGlynn reads techno-optimism through Mumford’s “myth of the machine,” which Mumford called the “ultimate religion of our seemingly rational age.”

“God From the Machine: AI and the Future of Humanity”—Sebastian Mallaby, Foreign Affairs (August 10, 2026). Mallaby is Paul A. Volcker Senior Fellow for International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“America’s Superintelligence Dilemma: How to Avoid an AI Catastrophe”—Hal Brands, Foreign Affairs (August 5, 2026). Brands is Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Ursula K. Le Guin—novelist, essayist, poet, and one of speculative fiction’s great moral imaginations. In her introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness: “Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.”

What Fatigue Knows

Neglected Courage

About 2 + 2 = 5

Editorial note: I sometimes use AI-assisted tools for proofreading, clarification, and revision. The ideas, judgments, and final wording remain my own.

Fatigue has a public-relations problem. Beyond ordinary tiredness, it is usually seen as a failure of discipline, a sign of boredom, or proof that one more cup of coffee is needed. The afternoon brain crash is not a moral lapse but a biological cue: attention has limits, mental effort has costs, and the brain keeps accounts. By three o’clock, what seems like laziness may be the mind presenting the bill.

My algorithms settled the matter. After years of study, neuroscience has arrived at this: sustained cortisol elevation can disrupt dopaminergic signaling. Take a break, drink water, go for a walk. Reconsider your relationship with reality. Worry less.

The market has other ideas. Energy drinks promise alertness; pharmacology goes further. More time and money than ever are devoted to buying a few more useful hours after the body says stop and the mind refuses to cooperate. When chemistry fails, the positive-thinking industry is ready to explain that the remaining obstacle is attitude.

We have made a virtue of overwork and a vice of looking tired. Exhaustion wastes time. It remains perfectly respectable so long as the work gets done. Hence the cult of busyness, where looking productive can become a job in itself.

Is tiredness really the enemy? Some problems survive every solution because they are not the problem. Perhaps the mistake is asking what is wrong before asking what still matters.

The desert monks of early Christianity gave one such problem a name. Evagrius of Pontus, an influential fourth-century monk and theologian, described acedia, literally a failure of care, as the peculiar affliction of midday. The word has largely disappeared but the experience has not. The monk grows restless in his cell. His work becomes intolerable. The day seems endless. Evagrius identified acedia with Psalm 91’s “destruction that wasteth at noonday,” the source of the “noonday demon,” and remarked that under its spell the sun barely moves.

This was not fatigue, depression, boredom, or laziness, though it could resemble all four. Its defining temptation was escape. At its deepest, acedia was a failure of care, a falling out of love with the life one had been given. The monk became convinced the trouble lay in the cell, the work, the hour, or the life he had chosen, anywhere except in the desire to flee from them. The noonday demon does not say that nothing matters, only that what matters must be somewhere else.

John Cassian, a fifth-century monk who carried the wisdom of the Egyptian desert into Western Christianity, later gave the subject its fullest treatment. His prescription sounds almost scandalous now: stay. Work. Do not assume relief equals cure. The feeling itself was not the failure; what counted was what the sufferer allowed it to decide.

That distinction is worth recovering without adopting the monks’ demonology. Modern medicine has taught a necessary lesson: illness is not sin. Exhaustion can be physiological and depression can require treatment. A miserable job may just be miserable. There is no virtue in staying where harm is done.

The older diagnosis catches something the language of efficiency misses. Fatigue can tell the truth without explaining what the truth means. The impulse to stop may be wisdom or escape. The impulse to continue may be courage or momentum. The feeling itself cannot decide.

John of the Cross, the sixteenth-century Spanish Carmelite mystic and one of Christianity’s great writers on spiritual desolation, pushed the thought further. Even spiritual desolation, he argued, need not mean that something has gone wrong. The loss of consolation can expose how easily consolation itself is mistaken for what matters. Darkness does not always provide an instruction to turn on more lights.

That leaves the noonday demon in an awkward place between the energy drink and the monastery cell. One says defeat the feeling. The other asks what the feeling is asking you to abandon?

Perhaps three o’clock answers both by making room for what counts.

Notes and reading

Acedia differs from ennui in more than degree. Ennui is weariness with experience; acedia is weariness that tempts a person to abandon what may still matter. The first says, “Nothing interests me.” The second asks, more dangerously, “Why not give up?”

The Sayings of the Desert Fathers—Benedicta Ward (1984). “If you cannot understand my silence, you will never understand my words.” The desert tradition trusted silence to reveal what agitation conceals.

Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life—Kathleen Norris (2008). “Acedia is a thoroughly modern affliction, not just a relic of the fourth century.” It can hide inside modern busyness: doing more while caring less. Norris also traces it through marriage, where disillusionment tests whether love depends on feeling.

Self-Help from the Middle Ages—Peter Jones (2026). After a bleak winter at the University of Tyumen in Siberia, Jones turned to medieval writers, saints, and artists—from Dante and Margery Kempe to Francis of Assisi and Hieronymus Bosch—for practical wisdom about despair, stress, and spiritual exhaustion. The supposedly benighted Middle Ages were also something like a golden age of self-help.

Anthony Zanesco, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Kentucky, recommends screen-free breaks, hydration, brief attention practice, and phone-free walks when focus flags. “Why Your Brain Crashes at 3 P.M.,” Men’s Journal, August 6, 2026.

Neglected Courage

Before We Know Better

About 2 + 2 = 5

Editorial note: I sometimes use AI-assisted tools for proofreading, clarification, and revision. The ideas, judgments, and final wording remain my own.

Rizpah’s vigil in 2 Samuel 21:1–14 is a haunting biblical story of remembered violence, yet many readers have never heard it. After the brutal deaths of her two sons and five other descendants of Saul, Rizpah refuses to leave their bodies unguarded. Her rarely told story feels disturbingly close to our own time.

Rizpah had been a secondary wife of Saul, Israel’s former king, whose dynasty David had replaced. After three years of famine, David learns that the land bears bloodguilt because Saul tried to destroy the Gibeonites, a people Israel had sworn to spare. David asks how to make amends. The Gibeonites demand seven of Saul’s descendants, and David agrees.

Among them are Rizpah’s sons, Armoni and Mephibosheth. David hands the seven over to the Gibeonites, who impale them and leave their bodies exposed to birds and wild animals.

Rizpah cannot undo what has happened. She has little power and no public voice. She does what she can: stays beside her sons’ bodies.

She spreads sackcloth on a rock and keeps watch, driving away birds by day and wild animals by night. The story gives her no words and records no demands. Her refusal to leave becomes her protest.

David hears what Rizpah has done. He retrieves the bones of Saul and Jonathan, David’s beloved friend, gathers the remains of the seven, and gives them all honorable burial in the family tomb. Only after the dead are buried does the story say that God heeds prayer for the land.

Rizpah cannot bring her sons back or command justice. Yet her refusal to abandon the dead changes what the king does. The dead are powerless, but they still make claims upon the living.

The story offers no easy answers. Saul wronged the Gibeonites, and Israel owed them redress. But what becomes of justice when descendants pay for an ancestor’s crimes? Does making amends to one wronged people require creating new victims? Justice that makes the innocent suffer for the guilt of the guilty resembles the violence it seeks to redress.

The story presents another discomfort. The deaths also remove seven members of the displaced royal house, an outcome that benefits the king who hands them over. Nothing in the text proves calculation. But justice becomes especially dangerous when what can be justified also serves the interests of those with power.

Rizpah gains no power. She holds power accountable by refusing to look away. When nothing can be undone, courage decides what will not be abandoned.

It is easy to identify with Rizpah. The harder truth is that we are often closer to David, accepting what has happened when its reasons also serve us—until someone makes us see what was lost.

Think of mothers searching for the disappeared, families keeping vigil after shootings, relatives looking for migrants lost along borders, and communities naming the dead after war or atrocity. Their persistence reminds us that what is over is not always finished.

Think, too, of people who keep photographs on mantels, tend forgotten graves, or keep telling the story of someone history has reduced to a number. Love refuses to let another person become unreal.

The story gives moral weight to someone the political order barely counts. David acts and commands; Rizpah can do neither. Yet the king changes course after hearing what she has done. He does not awaken Rizpah’s conscience. Rizpah awakens his. Her vigil forces him to attend not only to her sons but also to Saul and Jonathan and to give the dead the burial they had been denied.

Jesus said, “Let the dead bury their own dead.” He did not say, “Just move on.” Sometimes courage means keeping faith with what the world has already given up on.

Memory is the energy of hope. In Habits of the Heart (1985), Robert Bellah and his colleagues called a genuine community a “community of memory,” one that keeps telling the stories that formed it and thereby turns toward the future as a community of hope. Remembering is not the opposite of moving on. It makes moving forward possible.

Dylan Thomas wrote, “Death shall have no dominion . . . though lovers be lost love shall not.” Rizpah shows the courage hidden in such love: staying faithful even when the world has already moved on.

What love refuses to abandon, death cannot defeat.

Notes and reading

Biblical faith rarely separates spiritual meaning from material life. The Word becomes flesh, and again and again bodies, meals, graves, gestures, and acts of fidelity become bearers of theological meaning. Rizpah’s vigil belongs to that biblical pattern.

Requiem for a Nun — William Faulkner (1951). Faulkner’s novel is haunted by the persistence of the past and its continuing impact on the present.

The David Story: A Translation with Commentary of 1 and 2 Samuel — Robert Alter (1999). Alter’s translation and commentary bring out the literary and moral complexity of the David narratives. Rizpah’s vigil is not incidental mourning: her refusal to abandon the dead becomes the action that moves David to honor them.

Habits of the Heart — Robert Bellah et al. (1985). Bellah and his colleagues describe genuine communities as “communities of memory,” sustained by stories that keep the past present without imprisoning people in it. Such memory becomes a source of hope, binding what has been lost to what may still be made possible.

“And Death Shall Have No Dominion” — Dylan Thomas (1933). Thomas’s poem imagines love outlasting death’s claim. “Though lovers be lost love shall not” recalls Rizpah’s fidelity to those she cannot save but will not abandon.

Rizpah’s vigil — 2 Samuel 21:1–14. The story comes from a world in which bloodguilt, covenant, and proper burial carried communal as well as personal meaning. “Secondary wife” translates the Hebrew word traditionally rendered “concubine.” The term refers to a woman recognized as a wife but of lower status than a primary wife.

Before We Know Better

Bound to Be Free

About 2 + 2 = 5

Editorial note: I sometimes use AI-assisted tools for proofreading, clarification, and revision. The ideas, judgments, and final wording remain my own.

Abraham Joshua Heschel, one of the great Jewish theologians of the twentieth century, wrote in his classic God in Search of Man (1955):

“A Jew is asked to take a leap of action rather than a leap of thought. He is asked to surpass his needs, to do more than he understands to understand more than he does. Right living is the way to right thinking.”

As Heschel sees it, waiting for inspiration is as sensible as waiting until your house is on fire before looking for a fire escape—or waiting until you feel energetic before taking a walk. Much of life reverses the skeptic’s formula: not “I have to see it to believe it,” but “I have to do it to believe it.”

We often imagine thought comes first and action follows, but action can be a way of thinking. We learn patience by waiting and courage by doing the frightening thing. Generosity, too, is often learned by giving before we feel generous. Some truths can be understood only from within the life they require.

Failure to understand this lies at the heart of today’s culture wars and polarization. We increasingly demand right thinking while disregarding the experience that makes it intelligible.

Nothing is easier than forgetting that another point of view may contain something we have missed. We understand one another badly when we mistake understanding for reducing the other to our own way of seeing.

The life and thought of Hannah Arendt, one of the grande dames of twentieth-century political thought, were shaped by what she called an “enlarged mentality”: the capacity to judge by imaginatively taking other standpoints into account. It combines sensitivity to context with principled judgment. In Nazi Germany, Arendt knew political catastrophe firsthand but resisted allowing even that experience to dictate her conclusions in advance.

Her controversial account of the Eichmann trial followed the same discipline. She tried to see what was actually before her rather than what prevailing assumptions told her she ought to see. For Arendt, good judgment required learning to think from where someone else stands without surrendering one’s own ground.

We think what we do, often without much thought. The neighborhood we choose, the school we prefer, the news we read, the restaurants we frequent, the people we invite to dinner—these habits become judgments about what is normal, admirable, safe, or suspect. Soon preference hardens into social prejudice, and people whose lives differ from ours begin to look not merely unfamiliar but wrong.

Heschel’s point reaches beyond religion. Right thinking does not always precede right doing. Sometimes we must cross the street, enter the room, share the meal, keep the promise, or perform the duty before the world looks different.

The leap of action is not a substitute for thought. It is one of the ways thought learns to see. Theodore Roethke put it more simply: “I learn by going where I have to go.” An evangelical friend put it more colloquially: “God can’t steer a parked car.”

We decry the rise of authoritarians without confronting what makes them attractive: the promise of order, certainty, and escape from ambiguity. Yet we repeat the same impulse whenever we treat our own moral judgments as beyond serious challenge.

On abortion, sexuality, and other contested questions, adversaries are easily reduced to monsters, cowards, bigots, or enemies of the good. More insidious are the polished ways we sanitize our own extremism, dressing coercion in the language of piety, academic propriety, principle, decency, or moral necessity.

Heschel’s point returns with force: right thinking requires practices that enlarge judgment, not merely arguments that confirm it. The authoritarian temptation is not limited to strongmen and movements. It begins whenever conviction makes further understanding seem unnecessary.

Civility, no less than good faith, is an ordeal, not an instinct. It asks us to submit our certainties, resentments, and loyalties to the discipline of living with people we cannot dismiss. The manners of pluralism may seem superficial or hypocritical, but they keep conviction from becoming domination. The danger begins when restraint is mistaken for weakness and aggression for courage.

Civility often comes without conviction, while conviction often comes without civility. Heschel’s challenge is not to think less deeply, but to live in ways that make deeper thought possible: convictions strong enough to act on, and disciplined enough to remain open to judgment.

Notes and reading

Abraham Joshua Heschel. Polish-born Jewish theologian and rabbi whose work joined religious practice, moral responsibility, and wonder; God in Search of Man (1955) is one of his central books.

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). A foundational study of modern totalitarianism, especially ideology, terror, mass society, and the destruction of political freedom.

Heschel, Arendt, and Aristotle. All three, in different ways, treat judgment and character as formed through practice and experience. Understanding does not simply precede conduct; it is acquired and tested within the conduct of life itself.

William Desmond, Ethics and the Between (2001), chapters 5 and 16. Desmond explores the space between self and other, resisting the impulse to make what is different fit our own way of seeing things. Understanding requires openness to an otherness we cannot possess or fully understand.

Edna Ullmann-Margalit and Cass R. Sunstein, Decisions and Social Norms (2026). A study of how norms, expectations, imitation, routines, and the behavior of others shape choices.

Luke 10:25–37. Asked to define the neighbor, Jesus answers not with a definition but with a story in which a Samaritan—an outsider and traditional enemy—becomes the moral exemplar. “Go and do likewise”: some truths are understood only by living them.

Bound to Be Free

Everybody Means Everybody

About 2 + 2 = 5

Editorial note: I sometimes use AI-assisted tools for proofreading, clarification, and revision. The ideas, judgments, and final wording remain my own.

We have come to treat freedom as nearly absolute. Restraint easily becomes repression, and limits become obstacles. Janis Joplin gave this one of its most memorable popular expressions: “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”

Freedom and liberty are often used interchangeably, causing much confusion. Freedom means the ability to act without restraint. Liberty is freedom made political, lived among others and bounded by law, obligation, and their equal claims.

Freedom is not being answerable to no one, but being recognized by someone whose freedom you recognize in turn.

When liberty becomes freedom from restraint, necessary limits start to look like intrusions. Language is regulated, prejudices exposed, motives examined, even thought corrected. Limitless freedom can lead to limitless control. We remove restraints from ourselves and create new ones for everyone else.

Politics becomes morally corrupt when conscience ends argument instead of sharpening it. Algorithms reward outrage, and certainty outruns judgment. Abortion, sex and gender, affirmative action, DEI—the temptation is the same. Moral conviction hardens into political certainty. Once disagreement is proof of moral failure, argument is over.

When absolutes become weapons, the culture war is complete.

People keep lists of things others should not be allowed to say. Every liberty draws a boundary somewhere. The question is who draws it. The cage is gone, but conformity survives in the pressure to stand out. Even originality becomes an obligation.

Thomas Hobbes, whose account of political authority helped shape later liberal thought and, indirectly, the American constitutional tradition, started with a simple claim: human beings need restraint as much as freedom. Conflict is not simply the result of bad institutions. Something unruly belongs to human nature. Forbidden fruit needs no marketing.

Christianity has often been taken to make a similar claim in the language of sin. Greek myth made the point through Prometheus, punished for defying the gods. Hobbes belonged to the same older tradition in thinking that freedom without limits does not change human nature. He was also suspicious of the way people turn preferences into principles: “Their moral philosophy is but a description of their own passions.”

We blame leaders for polarization, though they can only exploit divisions ordinary people help deepen.

The larger temptation is older than our politics. Nietzsche thought the West had begun transferring its old religious hopes to reason, science, and humanity itself—the hope that knowledge might finally master suffering, disorder, even tragedy. But knowledge can increase power without increasing wisdom. Sometimes it only gives madness better equipment.

His contrast between Apollo, the god of order and measure, and Dionysus, the god of ecstasy and disorder, sharpens the point. Human life needs both form and force, reason and appetite. Civilization requires both. The mistake is believing that order can finally defeat chaos, or that Apollo can do away with Dionysus.

For Nietzsche, modern optimism concealed a revolt against mortality and limits. Yet the Übermensch risks repeating the same ambition, enlarging humanity to fill the space left by God.

Hobbes, oddly enough, looks more modest. Leviathan is not salvation. Government is an artifact, and politics a necessary craft. The insistence that one form of life must fit everyone can itself become tyrannical. At best, peace is a truce the human animal negotiates with itself.

And that animal is the real Leviathan. Hobbes thought it chiefly wanted to survive. He underestimated our strange capacity to risk life for abstractions, gods, nations, ideologies, and words. Knowing that we die, we invent things for which we are willing to die.

But the same strange freedom can turn toward life. Human beings can spend themselves for fantasies, or for one another. We go on because life itself keeps making claims upon us.

When Nina Simone sang “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free,” freedom meant something more concrete: not escape from every limit, but release from domination, humiliation, and fear.

In her voice, longing becomes resolve.

Freedom is not the absence of bonds. It is learning which bonds make life possible, and which must be broken.

Listen: Nina Simone, “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free” — 3:10

Notes and reading

Liberty or Equality? Liberty and equality are often treated as natural allies, but the alliance is uneasy. Liberty permits unequal outcomes; equality can require limits on liberty. The problem is keeping either from destroying the conditions that make the other possible.

Übermensch. Often translated as “Superman,” Nietzsche’s term is better rendered “Overman” or “Beyond-Man”: not a biologically superior race, but a figure of self-overcoming who creates values after the collapse of inherited moral and religious certainties. The Nazis later appropriated Nietzsche selectively, assisted by the nationalist and antisemitic sympathies of his sister Elisabeth. They turned themes of strength and overcoming toward a racial mythology the Übermensch did not originally mean.

Thomas Hobbes. In Leviathan (1651), Hobbes defines liberty as the absence of external impediments and argues that liberty and necessity can coexist. Law restricts what subjects may do, but also makes civil peace possible. What remains unregulated matters greatly: Hobbes locates “the greatest liberty of subjects” in “the silence of the law.”

John Gray, The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism (2023). Gray returns to Hobbes to challenge the modern hope that liberal institutions, reason, and progress can finally overcome the unruly parts of human nature. His “new Leviathans” promise not merely security but meaning, belonging, and relief from the burdens of freedom.

Further reading: Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder (2021). Žižek has long argued that liberalism can translate conflicts over power and inequality into problems of tolerance, leaving us with the safely distanced, “decaffeinated” Other—difference shorn of too much disturbance.

Everybody Means Everybody

Against Resolution

About 2 + 2 = 5

Editorial note: I sometimes use AI-assisted tools for proofreading, clarification, and revision. The ideas, judgments, and final wording remain my own.

God is not somewhere above us, like a landlord in the attic. Salvation is not help arriving late from a hero buried in history. Christ comes not to rescue us from danger, but to invade the ordinary and make us more alive than we knew we could be.

The good news is for everyone—especially those who think they do not need it.

To some, Jesus is meek and mild; to others, harsh and judgmental. He can be difficult to hear and harder to hear about. Add the claim that Jesus is God, and many have headed for the exit.

Many object to the claim that everyone will finally be “saved.” Hell is part of what makes justice feel like justice. Some evils seem to demand more than punishment; they demand eternal perdition. If hell is temporary and heaven is creation’s final destiny, then even the deplorables and despicables are not finally beyond redemption.

And that includes us. The scandal is not that heaven contains the wrong people, but that we are among them.

Universal salvation is not the comforting thought that nothing matters. It is the alarming claim that no one can be dismissed. God’s refusal to abandon the wicked is not indulgence toward evil. Evil does not get to define anyone forever.

No one is required to feel equally concerned about everyone, and compassion can be exhausted. But no one becomes disposable because we are too tired to care. The world as we find it is evidence, not verdict. Reality is not the conclusion but the question, and the persistence of evil does not make it eternal.

Duration is not destiny.

Death can look final, violence victorious, sin capable of possessing a person. The Christian story turns on the conviction that none of these appearances is ultimate.

This sounds like a sermon has broken out. Not quite.

Jesus tells us to “be perfect,” but the word does not mean flawless. It means complete, no longer divided against ourselves. Wholeness, not moral fussiness. God sends rain on the just and the unjust without checking credentials. To become perfect is to become less divided, less selective in love, more fully what we were made to be.

We know we should be better. The harder claim is that God does not wait for us to become worthy before giving us what we need. Grace is the name for that unearned giving. It begins as gift. Even our ability to receive it comes by grace. It does not merely repair what has gone wrong. Grace reveals what was already given.

My prayer is simpler: not “O God, make me stronger, more loving, more trusting,” but “Thank you for what you have given. Help me receive it and do justice to it.”

This good news is not Christianity’s to keep. “Faith in Jesus” is more than accepting propositions about him or making him an object of devotion. It means entrusting ourselves to the life he shows and the God made known through him. This love comes before our worthiness and sustains us before we know to ask. Faith is trust that his life tells us something true about who we are becoming.

Such faith is tested by the life it produces. A faith that needs enemies, cannot risk doubt, or guards grace as its own possession is defending itself rather than trusting God. Better evidence is a life less anxious, less hostile, more capable of welcome.

Raised in a pastor’s household, Nietzsche put it with irony: Christians would have to sing better songs, he wrote, and look more redeemed before he could believe in their Redeemer. The taunt remains.

The philosopher Iris Murdoch, who called herself “not quite a believer,” made attention central. We fail to see what is already there, then search for it everywhere else. In Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” the missing letter lies in plain sight. More colloquially, the lost key is where you left it.

Jesus was not a theologian. That could be our job. He told stories about farming and money, weddings and debts, difficult children and troublesome neighbors. Somewhere in the story, the expected order gives way.

What matters is what is last, little, least, and lost. Jesus turns toward those who fail by the world’s measures. Their weakness leaves room for another kind of strength. The despised Samaritan becomes the neighbor. The wounded stranger in the ditch becomes Christ.

This is no celebration of weakness, and suffering does not make anyone better. But strength that depends on superiority or the defeat of others is more fragile than it appears.

Jesus shows another kind of strength. It does not need to dominate or prove itself. It gives itself away, receives what the world overlooks, and finds life where wisdom expects failure. God’s power is love willing to enter suffering without surrendering to it—love that can lose everything and still give.

Strength is knowing what keeps us standing. The weak know they need help; the strong are in trouble when they forget it. Grace does not arrive when self-reliance fails. We discover it was there all along.

Salvation is creation fulfilled—and no one left out.

Notes and reading

[*] Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Procession to Calvary (1564). Christ is nearly lost in the crowd as ordinary life continues around him. Redemption enters without forcing notice: Christ is already among the human multitude, not only among those who recognize him.

Athanasius of Alexandria (c. 296–373), early Church Father, On the Incarnation. Athanasius understood salvation not merely as rescue or pardon but as participation in divine life: God became human so that humanity might become divine.

Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), Summa Theologiae. The stakes are nothing less than what salvation means. Are we created for salvation, or is salvation a destiny added to what we are by nature? A longstanding dispute asks whether later traditions sharpened Aquinas’s distinction between nature and grace too far, making salvation sound like an external addition rather than creation brought to its intended fulfillment.

David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation (2019). Hart argues that the Christian story remains coherent only if the God who creates all also finally restores all. Evil is real, judgment matters, but love is ultimate, and no creature is abandoned forever.

Aidan Kimel, “When God Becomes Jack Bauer: Torture, Hell, and the Greater Good” (2022; republished August 8, 2026). Drawing on Hart, Kimel argues that evil may be permitted only if it is finally overcome. An eternal hell would make irredeemable suffering part of creation’s final order—and therefore part of what creation reveals about God. “Love could not bear that.”

Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (1970). Murdoch locates moral transformation less in will than in attention: learning to see beyond ego, fantasy, fear, and self-interest. Goodness begins in seeing reality more truthfully.

Against Resolution

The Singularity, Apparently

About 2 + 2 = 5

Editorial note: I sometimes use AI-assisted tools for proofreading, clarification, and revision. The ideas, judgments, and final wording remain my own.

E. B. White said, “I arise in the morning torn between a desire to save the world and a desire to savor the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”

A war has widened overnight. A scandal breaks and instantly becomes a verdict. Markets rise on bad news and fall on good. A video of suffering appears between an ad for skin cream and a clip of someone dancing in an airport.

The weather is ominous. Technology astonishes. Politics is deranged. The day has barely begun.

Then someone sends a joke.

I laugh, then wonder whether I should have. Grief and absurdity share the same screen. Hope and despair appear side by side. As Alice said in Wonderland, “It would be so nice if something would make sense for a change.”

Events overlap, interrupt, contradict, and refuse to resolve before the next arrives. “Organized incoherence” sounds like an accusation but describes the condition well. What has changed is how fast these contradictions reach us.

Satire is the new sincerity.

A concert by Phish, the celebrated improvisational rock band, offers a benign version. A song begins, wanders into improvisation, and seems to lose track of where it came from. The through line disappears. Not ideal for readers who insist that 2 + 2 = 4.

Yet the musicians listen. Beneath the wandering lies attention. A phrase returns altered. A rhythm gathers. What sounded like disintegration becomes exploration.

Incoherence rhymes.

The jazz great Thelonious Monk is often credited with saying that a wrong note depends on what comes after it. A mistake does not end the performance. The next note exposes the error or folds it into a pattern no one intended.

Current politics offers a harsher version. The same act becomes tyranny when the other side commits it and necessity when one’s own side does. Incoherence is not a mistake in the performance. It is often the performance.

Technology promises to remove friction, but much of that friction comes from other people, with their delays, awkwardness, needs, and unpredictability. Screens and algorithms spare us this organized incoherence, then weaken some of the capacities it forms: reading a face, tolerating uncertainty, finding our way, and making judgments no device can make for us.

Convenience, n. The removal of every difficulty except those it creates.

Yet incoherence does not always lead to collapse. Conflict can give a system staying power as opposing forces check and sustain one another. A suspension bridge stands because its tensions are held in balance; remove them, and the structure fails.

And so with a household. The differences that cause friction may also distribute burdens no one person could carry alone. Fragmentation and integration occur together. The pressures that divide people may also bind them into new forms of dependence.

Thucydides, the great historian of war and power, saw that even justice arrives entangled in incoherence. The strong call domination necessity. The weak assume righteousness guarantees rescue. Both mistake fear and pride, self-interest and desire, for clear judgment.

Justice remains real, but its claims are never free of interest. We are quickest to demand justice when it requires someone else to yield.

Coherence is a discipline of thought, not the discovery of a perfectly ordered world. Experience need not fit together neatly for contradiction to remain contradiction rather than depth.

Incoherence blurs the lines between serious and trivial, public and personal, tragedy and comedy. It entangles justice with interest and principle with self-deception. Everything must be judged at once, and then the day goes on.

The result is numbness or frenzy. Despair sometimes passes for lucidity because exhaustion has begun to feel like insight. Declaring the world meaningless reduces its mystery to our disappointment.

Meaning changes as our relation to the world changes. The desire for permanent resolution can become a refusal to deal with what is still taking shape. When familiar meanings fade, the emptiness they leave can become an opening.

Gustav Klimt’s Death and Life gathers human incoherence into a single image. Lovers, a mother and child, an old woman, and a crowd of bodies form a bright mosaic of attachment and vulnerability. Death waits at the edge, grinning beneath a cloak patterned with crosses and graves.

I have never seen death as the last word in the painting. Each birth brings someone into the world who has never appeared before, capable of interrupting what seemed inevitable and beginning what no pattern could predict. Mortality sets a limit but does not exhaust the meaning of a life. People fail and recover, break and mend, and die while life continues in beginnings they will never see.

Ruin does not have the last word. Cruelty can destroy, but even cruelty depends on powers it did not create: intelligence, freedom, desire, and life.

Coherence never existed in the form nostalgia assigns it. It is the story the past tells after editing out confusion. Things were not better then, simply farther away.

Life is closer to improvisation, with ideas introduced and abandoned, mistakes repeated, old patterns returning in new forms. I am not who I was. What matters is attention within the confusion: knowing noise from warning, spectacle from suffering, novelty from change, despair from honesty, hope from denial.

The next note will not redeem the last, but it can change what comes next—not a clean ending, but a new beginning.

Notes and reading

Alice in Wonderland—The line is spoken by Alice in Walt Disney’s animated film Alice in Wonderland (1951), rather than in Lewis Carroll’s original books.

Phish—An American rock band known for treating songs as open forms. Concerts vary from night to night, with long improvisations in which repetition, detour, and return become the structure rather than departures from it.

Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original—Robin D. G. Kelley (2010). Kelley’s biography presents Monk as a rigorous composer whose silences, dissonances, and angular rhythms reflect a highly deliberate musical intelligence.

Thucydides—“Thucydides the Perspicacious,” Aeon (August 3, 2026). The great historian’s realism lies in exposing self-deception. Far from believing that might makes right, Thucydides shows how the strong call force wisdom and the weak call justice rescue. Both mistake desire for judgment.

Mary Catherine Bateson—Composing a Life (1989). The cultural anthropologist sees identity as an improvisational achievement. People become who they are by making creative use of discontinuity and change.

August 5, 2026—On the eve of the Hiroshima anniversary, Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains,” published seventy-six years ago in 1950, reaches the date on which it ends. An automated house continues serving a family reduced to silhouettes on an outside wall. A falling branch starts a fire, and its intricate order collapses into “maniac confusion, yet unity.” Even a settled ending can be unsettled:

Dawn showed faintly in the east. Among the ruins, one wall stood alone. Within the wall, a last voice repeated: “Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is . . .”

A lighter note

Company in Confusion—After receiving a brilliant student’s paper, a prominent professor said, “I can’t grade this. It’s too difficult, too obscure.” He gave it to a colleague of comparable renown. “Well,” the colleague said, “it’s either an F or an A+.” The New Yorker (August 3, 2026), 57.

The Singularity, Apparently

Careless Responsibility

About 2 + 2 = 5

Editorial note: I sometimes use AI-assisted tools for proofreading, clarification, and revision. The ideas, judgments, and final wording remain my own.

With an endnote by Jonathan Green, my son and a manager on Roku’s Platform team.

“The meteor has hit, and the dinosaurs don’t know it yet,” a movie producer was overheard saying of AI. Perhaps. Epochal claims flatter those who make them.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declared that AI has reached the Singularity. “I’ve been waiting for this my whole life,” he said, calling the prospect “incredible, hugely positive, awesome for the world.”

Others argue that the essential condition of a singularity—AI capable of continuously improving itself without human direction—has not yet been met.

Until recently, the idea belonged largely to science fiction. The Matrix trilogy (1999–2003) imagines machines ruling humanity, while Singularity (2017) depicts a supercomputer designed to end war that decides human beings are the true threat and attempts to destroy them.

Such scenarios can make present concerns seem minor, but they are substantial. Massive data centers are proliferating nationwide, consuming vast quantities of electricity and water. Educators, workers, writers, and the public are asking what AI may mean for learning, employment, privacy, creativity, and human judgment.

AI-detection systems embody the paradox. Companies have developed one form of AI to identify the products of another. These systems answer demand among schools, publishers, and employers seeking to distinguish human work from machine-generated material. Yet an algorithmic probability can quickly become an accusation.

Substack’s adoption of the AI detector Pangram has exposed the danger. Pangram claims greater accuracy and fewer false positives. No detector can determine who conceived an argument, selected its sources, revised its language, corrected its errors, or accepted responsibility for publishing it. Nor can it reliably distinguish among AI used as ghostwriter, research assistant, translator, editor, or proofreader.

Romaric Jannel, a philosopher and AI ethicist who uses AI to improve his writing, is less troubled by detection itself than by the culture of distrust surrounding it. His writing habits may cause some of his work to be classified as AI-generated, but his deeper concern is the impulse to police other people’s prose—and Substack’s decision to encourage it.

The detector supplies a statistical estimate. Readers supply the verdict. Once suspicion becomes the premise, denial is a lie. Vigilance becomes a search for confirmation, and ambiguous evidence begins to look conclusive. A tool intended to strengthen trust may instead institutionalize distrust and corrode the confidence it was meant to protect.

“The essence of technology is by no means anything technological,” wrote Martin Heidegger, the German philosopher and major critic of technology. Technology, he argued, is not merely the devices we use. It also shapes how the world—and we ourselves—appear to us.

In The Question Concerning Technology (1954), Heidegger sought neither blind acceptance nor helpless rebellion, but a “free relationship” to technology. Its deepest danger lies not in machines themselves but in a way of seeing that makes nature, knowledge, and human beings appear chiefly as resources to be measured, organized, and used.

Rebellion alone is insufficient. An effort to master or defeat technology can repeat the very logic of control under criticism.

In his 1955 “Memorial Address,” Heidegger called this freer relationship “releasement toward things”: using technological devices without allowing them to dominate our inner lives. It means saying both yes and no—recognizing what technology makes possible while remembering that efficiency, calculation, and control are not the only ways of understanding the world. Integrity lies in using what surrounds us without becoming subject to its demands.

“Releasement” can feel like a rhetorical wand waved over the forces that hold us. AI systems can be extraordinarily persuasive, capture attention, and encourage dependency. Autonomous agents also raise legitimate fears that work, decision-making, and judgment may be displaced by automation.

This tension offers little comfort to either side of the AI debate. Enthusiasm can become credulity, while alarm can become its own form of captivity. A low fence separates the two: both can allow technology to dictate the terms on which it is judged, though they do not possess equal power to shape its development.

There is no return to a world without AI. Even its fiercest critics use computers amid algorithms embedded in news, finance, transportation, medicine, and commerce. AI agents are also generating more browser activity, further blurring the distinction between human and automated action.

As it is, we are already half bots. The problem with the internet is not so much that it distorts life as that it reflects it: banal, ugly, beautiful. If only the slop could be filtered out. We may flee the algorithm, yet never so far as to leave its shadow behind.

Collaboration is not capitulation. To work with AI is not to suspend judgment about its uses, costs, or consequences.

The answer is neither condemnation nor surrender, but awareness, restraint, democratic oversight, and limits proportionate to the dangers involved. Regulation can produce unintended consequences, and sweeping prohibitions may drive harmful practices beyond effective oversight. That possibility argues for carefully designed rules, not regulatory hesitation.

Despite its record to date, the AI industry has a clear interest in accepting responsible public standards, including limits on the exploitation of land, water, energy, creative work, and personal data. Regulation should address demonstrated harms, credible risks, and reasonable precaution—not speculative panic. Unchecked development serves no one. Neither does unchecked alarmism.

We are all implicated in what is easiest to deplore. As Heidegger wrote, “We can affirm the unavoidable use of technical devices, and also deny them the right to dominate us.”

Endnote

Jonathan Green, my son, is a manager on Roku’s Platform team. Roku operates a television-streaming platform through which viewers access services such as Netflix and Hulu.

“I have had a hard time wrapping my head around AI lately, even though my work lies squarely within technology and entertainment. As an idea, and still more as a promise, it feels at best awe-inspiring and at worst existentially unsettling. Only those of us old enough to remember the arrival of the internet have lived through a comparable shift, and human beings are notoriously poor at grasping the scale of such moments while still inside them.

“I do not know whether artificial general intelligence or the Singularity will ever arrive. But even in its present form, AI gives anyone with a keyboard or microphone powers once reserved for specialists. Consider computer programming. Its walled garden is already disappearing. The laundromat on the corner can now build its own app without taking a computer science course or opening a coding book. The barrier to that once-esoteric world is no longer training or credentials. It is having an idea.”

Notes and reading

Heidegger’s “Releasement”—his Gelassenheit — draws on Meister Eckhart and the German mystical tradition, where it meant relinquishing self-will and possessiveness to become receptive to God. Heidegger secularized the idea but retained its discipline of non-possession. Religious practices such as prayer, Sabbath, fasting, meditation, and almsgiving can still cultivate the critical balance Gelassenheit (releasement) requires: neither rejecting technology or anything else outright nor surrendering ourselves to it.

“Pangram and Substack’s Collaboration Is Worse Than Video Surveillance”—Romaric Jannel, Philosophy and Beyond (July 27, 2026). A philosopher and AI ethicist at Paris’s Collège International de Philosophie, Jannel concludes: “Let’s be careful about ruining lives.”

Privileging Suspicion—“Why is critique so frequently feted as the most serious and scrupulous form of thought? What imaginative alternatives does it obscure or overrule?”—Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (2015). Felski questions the prestige accorded to suspicion as an intellectual reflex and asks what other forms of attention it may crowd out.

Octavia Butler and Change. In Parable of the Sower, the visionary American science-fiction writer presents adaptation not as submission but as meeting change consciously, building communities able to survive it, and helping shape what follows.

A Lighter Note

“The Amish Are Falling in Love With AI”—Erik German, New York–Intelligencer (May 20, 2026). Cars and televisions may remain prohibited, but some Amish communities have adopted uses of ChatGPT for business and personal correspondence. One Amish husband asked it to write his wife a birthday card.

“Daniel, that’s beautiful. It doesn’t sound like you.”

Careless Responsibility

Liberalism and Odysseus

About 2 + 2 = 5

Editorial note: I sometimes use AI-assisted tools for proofreading, clarification, and revision. The ideas, judgments, and final wording remain my own.

The last posts considered death and “immortality projects,” then Odysseus as a conservative hero of restoration. This one turns to the Prodigal Son—and to the claims of morality.

We’ve lost all sense of right and wrong in a culture without God.

So goes the complaint.

Liberals get blamed for moral drift. Conservatives get called self-righteous. Once God enters the argument, everyone agrees that God opposes bad people. Jesus turns the other cheek but stays on our side against those we dislike.

The truth helps no one. Every culture has been corrupt, even when it produced good. Greek writers complained that the young lacked discipline. Plato described rulers devoted to wealth and ease.

Faith can give this habit divine force. Each age mistakes its anxieties for God’s judgment. Religion gives us a God who shares our enemies.

Jesus’ parables refuse to cooperate. They place God on the wrong side of our moral accounts. Few do so more than the story of the Prodigal Son.

The story is familiar. A younger son takes his inheritance, leaves home, and wastes it. When hunger drives him back, his father runs to meet him and orders a feast. The older son, who stayed and worked, refuses to join the celebration.

But this is not merely a touching story about a wayward son who comes to his senses. It is a scandal about grace.

The usual lesson is true, but it lets us off too soon. We identify with the son who needs forgiveness and ignore the son with a claim. We admire the father without asking whether he is fair. Reconciliation becomes a feeling instead of a change in how people live together.

The parable is more demanding than that.

The father hears the younger son’s confession but will not let repentance become a bargain. He restores him in public and orders a feast that may draw the village. The older son sees this. He obeyed while his brother wasted what he had been given. Now the household celebrates the one who harmed it.

The father sees the pain of the son who returned. The brother sees the damage he caused. Each sees something true, but neither sees enough. The father takes responsibility for a family neither son can repair.

That responsibility looks careless because it ignores what people deserve. The father risks shame by running. He forgives before change has been proved. He celebrates before the damage has been faced. Yet he is careless only about the accounting that has made life together impossible.

The younger son says he is no longer worthy to be called a son. The older says, “All these years I have been working like a slave for you.” One leaves through rebellion. The other leaves through obedience hardened into entitlement. Both think belonging must be earned.

The father will not let either earn or lose his place. He restores the younger son and tells the older, “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.” He denies neither failure nor faithfulness, but he lets neither have the last word.

The parable leaves the conflict unresolved.

The younger son enters the feast. The older stays outside, armed with virtue and wounded by mercy. The father goes to each, but he forces neither across the door. Reconciliation can look like irresponsibility. The line between the deserving and the undeserving may have to break before healing can begin.

That is not moral indifference. Celebration is not acquittal. The embrace does not erase the past. It keeps the past from owning the future.

Perhaps this is the carelessness of God: not carelessness toward injury, but refusal to treat any division as final. God does not wait for the guilty to become lovable or the resentful to become gracious. God does not wait for agreement on where everyone should sit.

The father tells the older son that he belongs. He rejoices because the younger has come home. God refuses the sides the brothers have drawn.

Jesus leaves us at the door with the older brother. Can we accept mercy for someone else before our own grievance has been settled?

The older brother thinks the scandal is that the undeserving have been welcomed. The greater scandal is that he must enter with them. Grace offends him because it includes those he would exclude.

The door stays open. The joke, if we can bear it, is that the one outside is home already.

It is easier to assign guilt or admit it because guilt can be managed. Responsibility remains after everyone has made a case for innocence.

Conservatives fail when they mistake punishment for seriousness and exclusion for faithfulness. Liberals fail when they treat compassion as enough and assume that understanding an injury repairs it. Each sees what the other avoids.

The father enjoys no such innocence. He goes out to both sons and bears the cost of keeping the family open. The God in this parable is harder to use. God will not stay on our side of the door. The father stands outside, pleading with the son who believes himself right. Inside, the feast has begun.

Reconciliation is offered whether we want it or not. Some have said, if that is heaven, give me hell. Anger offers an exit. Despair does too. The task is to enter a joy we did not authorize with people we did not choose.

Notes and reading

Parable—Luke 15:11–32. Some Christian interpreters allegorized the two sons as Gentiles and Jews, an identification that could reduce the elder brother to a supersessionist, anti-Jewish type. More careful readings preserve the sharper point: both sons are estranged, one by rebellion and the other by obedience hardened into entitlement.

Morality in the flesh. The father does not answer the family’s crisis with a principle. He runs, embraces, clothes, feeds, and goes out again to plead with the elder son. The moral meaning of the parable resides in these acts: responsibility becomes bodily presence, and reconciliation becomes a table at which estranged people must learn to live together. Grace is not an exception to morality but morality restored to its human purpose.

The Ox-Herder and the Good Shepherd: Finding Christ on the Buddha’s Path—Addison Hodges Hart, 2013. Hart brings the Zen ox-herding tradition into conversation with Christ the Good Shepherd. Both, he argues, portray spiritual life as a recovery of the self from estrangement, an inward transformation that issues in a more natural and loving life. Read beside the Prodigal Son, this illuminates “coming to himself” as the beginning of return rather than regret alone.

The Uni-Context: One World, One Moral Room—Agnes Callard. “The world is flat,” McDonaldization, homogenization, and unipolarity describe economic, cultural, or political convergence. Callard’s more radical claim concerns norms: once-distinct contexts—home, church, friendship, public life—collapse into one moral arena governed by standards meant to apply everywhere.

The elder brother already inhabits the uni-context. He turns the household into a ledger: obedience merits reward, betrayal its cost. The father does not deny the difference. He refuses to let a universal ranking determine his responsibility to either son. His response resembles Aristotelian phronesis: the fitting good discerned within a particular relationship. Callard’s novelty lies less in the remedy than in naming the conditions now eroding it.

Callard develops the idea in “A Philosopher’s One-Word Theory to Explain Why the World Feels So Weird,” her July 14, 2026, conversation with Derek Thompson on Plain English. A philosopher of ancient thought and ethics, she is the author of Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life.

• Editorial note: I sometimes use AI-assisted tools for proofreading, clarification, and revision. The ideas, judgments, and final wording remain my own. More on that distinction in my next post, “The Singularity, Apparently,” coming shortly.

Liberalism and Odysseus

Death-Cleaning

About 2 + 2 = 5

The last post considered death and “immortality projects.” Today follows that idea into politics, where Odysseus has become an icon of conservative restoration—and a challenge to liberalism. Next Wednesday turns to the Prodigal Son and the moral judgments it overturns.

Conservatives have had John Wayne and Walt Disney, Clint Eastwood and Dirty Harry, Norman Rockwell and Thanksgiving dinner, Jimmy Stewart and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Charlton Heston and Ben-Hur, Andrew Wyeth and Thomas Kinkade. Columns and symmetry; pastels and neon; cowboy hats, country music, the American flag.

Liberals have had Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. Alan Alda and Hawkeye Pierce, Sidney Poitier and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Jane Fonda and Coming Home. James Baldwin, Georgia O’Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol. Glass and steel, asymmetry; earth tones and rainbow stripes; folk songs, protest marches, the peace sign.

These are caricatures, and many figures refuse their assigned camps. Still, conservatives have been better at turning politics into stories of belonging—a recognizable world that can be lost and reclaimed.

Now, with Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, they have Odysseus.

The backlash against Lupita Nyong’o’s casting as Helen of Troy shows how much symbolic territory is at stake. Elon Musk, Matt Walsh, and others see a Black Helen not as an artistic choice but as another surrender to “woke” decline. For part of the right, Odysseus has become an icon of civilizational restoration, returning to reclaim the household from a godless culture run amok.

Nolan’s film hands the right a monumental hero, while conservative political theorist Patrick Deneen’s American Odyssey frames Homer’s epic as an American story: a nation divided between restless wandering and the desire for home.

In the more reactionary version of that reading, the emphasis falls on return. Odysseus finds usurpers draining his estate, flouting custom, courting his queen, and mocking his heir. He tests loyalties, strings the unbendable bow, and restores order by force. Homer’s hero does not just come home. He reclaims his country.

Politics becomes repossession: a lost country restored to those who believe it was theirs all along.

Conservatism has refined this story of dispossession—institutions captured, inheritances squandered, old loyalties mocked. The diagnosis calls less for policy than for a man on horseback to take back the country. Those who revolt against an effete elite often surrender to a coarser one.

Deneen’s reading is richer than that. The wanderer discovers that freedom detached from home becomes exile. Yet even this account can lend Homer to reactionary restoration. Ithaca is reclaimed; the old order returns.

But the romance of restored household order can obscure who must leave the room when “the power in this household” is reclaimed. Women are silenced while sexual coercion and the treatment of women as property remain embedded in the heroic world.

Liberals have causes, programs, and policy papers. They defend equal citizenship and the rule of law. But none arrives carrying a hero’s bow. None walks into the mess and makes the world recognizable again.

This is an aesthetic crisis. At a Harvard forum, Becca Rothfeld, Jon Baskin, Cass Sunstein, and James Wood debated whether liberalism can offer a vision of the good life or only the freedom to choose one.

Its newer emblems are less heroic: Sweetgreen, HR jargon, Equinox classes, Parks and Recreation, and glass apartments above retail. They suggest a smooth, well-managed society offering choices but little worth returning to.

Sunstein’s defense captures liberalism’s moral strength and imaginative weakness: government should not dictate which life is beautiful, only protect citizens’ right to decide. That restraint matters. Imposed visions of the good have a dark history.

Yet liberty is not self-explanatory. An order allowing many ways of life must still explain why it deserves attachment. Choice opens the door but gives no one a reason to stay.

What liberalism lacks is not another strongman promising to drive out the intruders but a story of return it can claim. Home cannot be reduced to ancestral property guarded against outsiders or treated as a place with no lasting claim on us.

A liberal Ithaca would be enlarged by the journey, worth recovering because it had learned whom it once excluded. Belonging would no longer depend on who arrived first.

But Homer’s Odysseus does not recover home through triumph. He returns disguised as a beggar. He lies, tests, and waits. Recognition comes through his dog and nurse, then Telemachus, and finally Penelope. Homecoming depends not only on his return but on others recognizing who he is.

Nor does the climax offer a simple resolution. Odysseus has the doors secured and turns his home into a slaughterhouse. The maids are hanged; Melanthius is mutilated. When the suitors’ families gather for revenge, the epic ends near civil war. Odysseus cannot secure peace by force alone; Athena must halt the vengeance.

Homer leaves a warning inside the homecoming. Restoration hardens into purity. Injury becomes a license for cruelty. Reclaiming a nation turns into hunting intruders and punishing betrayal until anything unsettling the old household looks disposable.

Liberalism has been wary of “home.” But politics without attachment leaves the field to those who define belonging through blood and obedience. The question is whether a country can feel like home without needing enemies to make it whole.

“For from Zeus are all strangers and beggars.”

A liberal Odysseus would return to defend what deserves preservation and repair what has been broken. He would know that no household is innocent and no peace is secured by vengeance. Homecoming would not mean fortifying the walls.

That tension runs through our politics. Conservatives face the difference between repair and revenge, between loving a nation and purifying it of those who question its past.

Liberals face another difficulty: whether resistance is enough, whether institutions can command loyalty without offering belonging, and whether patriotism can be spoken without embarrassment.

Amid polarization and disorder, two consoling fantasies are collapsing: that order will return when the enemy is defeated, or that justice will follow when the rules are restored.

A country cannot be saved by expulsion, and a world cannot survive on rules no one will enforce.

A democracy becomes a home only when defeat does not become exile.

Notes and reading

“I wish and long day by day to reach my home, and to see the day of my return.”
—Homer, Odyssey 5.219–220, trans. A. T. Murray.

“For from Zeus are all strangers and beggars.”
—Homer, Odyssey 6.207–208, trans. A. T. Murray.

Christopher Nolan’s achievement as writer-director, the film’s IMAX scale, and its extraordinary reception deserve recognition. The questions raised here concern not its cinematic accomplishment but the political and cultural meanings gathered around it.

“Do Liberals Want a Beautiful World?” Harvard University, March 23, 2026. Becca Rothfeld, Jon Baskin, and Cass Sunstein, moderated by James Wood, considered whether liberalism can offer a rich vision of life or only protect freedom of choice. The event’s own description invoked salad chains, consultant-speak, and Parks and Recreation as emblems of liberalism’s perceived aesthetic thinness.

Patrick J. Deneen, American Odyssey: What an Ancient Story Reveals about Our Divided Souls (2026). As mentioned in my last post, Deneen reads the Odyssey as an American story of restless wandering and desired homecoming. His postliberal conservatism gives the reading much of its richness, though his larger defense of rootedness and local community may romanticize “home” and understate its exclusions.

“Aesthetic Politics and Political Aesthetics: A Crucial Distinction”—Katya Mandoki, August 8, 2023. Mandoki, a philosopher, author, and experimental artist, distinguishes the political use of aesthetics to legitimize, persuade, or intimidate from the use of political power to impose a preferred aesthetic order. The distinction helps explain how cultural symbols can become instruments of belonging, exclusion, and rule.

Death-Cleaning

The Fire, This Time

About 2 + 2 = 5

I’m old—or, as I prefer to say, older—but I keep forgetting that I’m going to die. Seriously. Yet not seriously enough to act on it. I would rather just write about it.

Not to worry, say advocates of “longevity escape velocity”—the point at which medical advances extend life expectancy faster than time passes. Mortality, apparently, may yet be outrun.

Memento mori means “Remember that you must die.”

Marcus Aurelius writes in Meditations, “You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.” The Stoics returned to mortality because remembering life’s limit might free them to live more deliberately. Mortality shapes life.

History is crowded with thinkers contemplating skulls. Caravaggio had something less orderly in mind in the painting above. He knew violence firsthand: brawls, arrests, flight, a death sentence, and the killing of Ranuccio Tomassoni. His biography reads more like baroque true crime than an artist’s life.

Yet here he paints Saint Francis collapsing into an angel’s arms after receiving the stigmata. The saint looks less transported than overcome: wounded, exhausted, almost relieved. In Caravaggio, ecstasy arrives as surrender after turmoil.

His chiaroscuro does more than set light against darkness; each discloses the other. His life joined beauty and brutality, privilege and disgrace, devotion and rascality. Wealthy patrons prized his paintings while he outran the law. Moralists should proceed with caution.

Tolstoy approaches mortality mercilessly in The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Ivan has accumulated the furnishings of a successful life only to discover, as death approaches, that he may have mistaken arrangement for meaning.

His house is in order. His life is not.

That is mortality in its grander form. The mundane version begins with a closet.

Feng shui, the Chinese practice of arranging surroundings for harmony, recommends discarding what is broken. The Swedish practice of döstädning, or death-cleaning, goes further: clear away what others must sort after you die.

Unlike Marie Kondo—the Clutter Queen—who asks whether an object “sparks joy,” Margareta Magnusson asks whether you use it, need it, or would buy it again. In a country seized by decluttering while storage space remains at a premium, the question is less aesthetic than moral. Leave memories, not a mess.

The cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker joins mortality’s depths to death-cleaning’s mundanity. Clutter—more seriously, hoarding—can be read through his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Denial of Death.

Possessions accumulate not only because they are useful or cherished but because they offer continuity to a self that knows it will disappear.

Becker raises the stakes beyond crowded closets. Careers, nations, causes, ideals, and religious convictions can become “immortality projects,” ways of attaching ourselves to what will outlast us.

The danger begins when we forget they are human constructions and demand that others live or die inside them.

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has made the homeward journey a national spectacle. The story raises a question beyond the film itself: whether home and family, among America’s most cherished ideals, can become immortality projects—places where continuity seems assured and innocence preserved.

Nostalgia edits ruthlessly, smoothing what was painful or unresolved into belonging. The danger lies not in loving home, but in asking it to provide a permanence no home—or family—can bear.

That our ideals contain illusion does not make them false, any more than self-interest makes a good act worthless. Knowing this may save us from mistaking our need for an ideal as proof of its claims on others.

Becker’s grimmer point is that death cannot be sanitized by giving it a higher purpose. When ideal promises escape from mortality, devotion can harden into perfectionism and coercion.

Religion is not exempt. Christians can speak of the Crucifixion as though Easter made Good Friday less terrible—as though Christ did not fully die because he rose again.

“No cross, no crown” may name costly hope, but it can also turn agony into spiritual achievement and suffering into proof of election. Death, denied at the door, returns wearing a halo.

The cross resists that evasion. Resurrection does not cancel death but passes through it. “All things work together for good” locates the good not in suffering itself but in what God may yet bring out of it. Redemption does not justify suffering but refuses to abandon what suffering has broken.

What does any of this ask of an ordinary Tuesday? Refuse to demand permanence from things that cannot provide it. Clear the closet and spare someone else the burden of sorting what you refused to relinquish.

Letting go does not lessen the meaning of what we had. What we cannot keep is not necessarily lost.

Loosen, too, the grip of causes, possessions, grievances, and self-images through which we try to outlast ourselves—and the versions we impose on others.

Remembering death does not make every choice profound or turn tidiness into wisdom. It may expose the difference between what helps us avoid life’s limits and what sustains us.

Rabbi Simcha Bunim of Peshischa advised carrying two sayings, one in each pocket: “For my sake was the world created” and “I am but dust and ashes.” Mortality requires both truths: one guards against despair, the other against self-importance.

We do not merely live by illusions. We resist the full truth of life and resent the ambiguity of being human.

Accepting that ambiguity may mean judging others with less certainty. Criticism remains necessary, but every life contains something hidden from us, perhaps even from the person living it.

To live with that knowledge is to stop demanding that life become something it never promised to be—and to remember, as a poet put it, that “Nobody’s lantern can be held entirely responsible for sight.”

Notes and reading

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (1973). Darwin explains the development of life through natural selection, and Nietzsche interprets human striving through the will to power. Becker gives the denial of death a similarly far-reaching place in human behavior and culture. Even worthy convictions, he argues, can serve our desire to outlast death. Recognizing that motive need not diminish conviction but may help us hold it with less self-righteousness.

The Desire to Be—Maximus the Confessor offers a counterpoint to Becker: every creature possesses a “natural will,” an innate desire “to be and to live” and attain its proper fulfillment. The longing to continue may become illusion, but it may also express life’s elemental appetite for more life.

Can Anything Become Nothing?—Emanuele Severino, The Essence of Nihilism (1972; English translation, 2016). In its foundational essay, “Returning to Parmenides,” Severino argues that Western thought becomes nihilistic when it treats beings as emerging from and returning to nothing. Nothing that is, he maintains, can finally become nothing; appearing and disappearing are not the same as entering and leaving existence. The claim is powerful, though it comes at a price: if everything is eternal, genuine becoming, loss, freedom, and renewal become difficult to account for.

Disillusion, the Last Illusion—In “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” Wallace Stevens writes of “disillusion as the last illusion.” Recognizing our “immortality projects” may not free us from illusion but only give it a more sophisticated name. Illusion can become endlessly recursive; where one ends and another begins, no one quite knows.

The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning—Margareta Magnusson (2017; English edition, 2018). Practical, unsentimental, and funny, Magnusson treats decluttering not as a cult of tidiness but as consideration for those who survive us—and as a way of deciding what has truly belonged to a life.

The Trouble with Home—Patrick J. Deneen, American Odyssey: What an Ancient Story Reveals About Our Divided Souls (2026). Deneen reads Homer’s violent, intricate epic through concerns familiar from his broader critique of liberalism, finding in it the American tension between restless movement and attachment to home. His interpretation is richer than a simple opposition between mobility and rooted order, but it can still press Homer’s ambiguities toward an ideal of civic recovery centered on homecoming. That emphasis risks romanticizing “home” and softening the brutality and hierarchy of the world Odysseus reclaims. The book gives Deneen’s political thought a more mythic form, while leaving open questions about the exclusions of localism and the plural forces that shaped the American republic.

The Value of the Irretrievable—In “The Immortal,” Jorge Luis Borges writes, “Death (or its allusion) makes men precious and pathetic.… Everything has the value of the irretrievable and the perilous.” Death may inspire fantasies of permanence, but it also gives weight to what happens only once. Rainer Maria Rilke makes a related claim in the Ninth Duino Elegy (1923): “But this having been once, although only once, to have been of the earth, seems irrevocable.”

The Value of What Does Not Last—John Carney’s Once (2007; 86 minutes) gives the idea human form. A brief encounter between two musicians becomes a relationship the audience longs to see endure, yet permanence is not its measure. What they create together remains meaningful without becoming theirs to keep. A heartbreaker. Its stars, Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, later became a couple; after their romance ended, they remained friends and musical collaborators.

Rabbinic Saying—joins Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5—“For my sake the world was created”—to Abraham’s confession in Genesis 18:27: “I am but dust and ashes.” Retold by Martin Buber, Later Masters.

“Nobody’s lantern is entirely responsible for sight.”—Alina Stefanescu, “Self-Portrait with Shadows and Turgenev,” Cable Street, forthcoming.

The Fire, This Time

Backing Forward

About 2 + 2 = 5

For most of history, fire was a mainstay of daily life, providing warmth, food, and protection. Industrial societies changed this, hiding combustion inside engines, furnaces, and power plants. Fire became less visible even as we depended on it more completely, trading the open flame for controlled progress.

This confidence shaped land management. For decades, governments aggressively suppressed fires across forests and grasslands. They interrupted natural cycles, allowing undergrowth to accumulate in ecosystems long adapted to burning. Fire did not disappear; the fuel gathered.

It is returning, intensified by heat and drought. Thousands of wildfires cross Canada, sending plumes of smoke into the jet stream. The damage extends far beyond the fire line. Fine particulate matter clogs lungs, worsens respiratory illness, and spikes heart risks.

When a forest burns in one country, people in another are warned to stay indoors. Climate change arrives no longer as a statistical projection, but as a visceral reality borne out in an apocalyptic sky and the sharp smell of smoke. Many treat air quality warnings as background noise until breathing makes it personal.

No single cause explains a wildfire. Lightning and human sparks matter, but so do drought, land use, and a century of total fire suppression. Climate change parches vegetation and extends fire seasons, increasing the odds that a single spark will morph into a regional disaster.

George Saunders, the American novelist and short-story writer, brings this crisis into devastating focus. His fiction combines grotesque comedy with tenderness, refusing the easy choice between judging people and recognizing their humanity. Art is always about more than itself.

His new novel Vigil places K. J. Boone, a fictional oil executive dying of cancer, under the care of Jill “Doll” Blaine, a spirit assigned to comfort him. Boone helped suppress climate science and defend an industry whose benefits he invokes to justify its damage. Victims, animals, former associates, and other spirits gather around his bed, demanding something closer to judgment.

The novel turns combustion into moral consequence. Heat, drought, smoke, and burning landscapes appear as the accumulated result of decisions made in offices, laboratories, legislatures, markets, and ordinary lives. Fire becomes the visible afterlife of choices once kept distant and abstract.

Saunders does not make accusation simple. The executive is culpable, but not a cardboard monster; he genuinely believed society demanded the comforts fossil fuels provided. Vigil asks whether compassion can face grim truths without surrendering judgment or mercy, even when repentance never comes.

However, a single villain risks letting the reader off the hook. A clear villain clarifies guilt but can conceal how widely the blame is shared. Some profited from deception; others merely benefited from the system or felt powerless.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, the Russian novelist, once wrote that the fire is not on the roofs of houses, but in the minds of men. Today, our predicament cannot be so easily divided. The fire is simultaneously in the forests, our lungs, our policies, and our habits. The task is to name responsibility without letting complexity become an alibi—or failure seem inevitable.

Fatalism claims the future is fixed. Pessimism expects decline but leaves room for action. The philosopher Mara van der Lugt describes “hopeful pessimism” as a refusal to believe progress is a given. It asks us to act without assurance of success, to lessen the worst because the worst is not yet set in stone.

Van der Lugt focuses on climate activists, and she considers the pessimist who approaches her activism with this attitude: “Our efforts are likely to fail—and we will do what we can nonetheless.” You act, not because you think you can keep the rising temperature of global warming to one and a half degrees, but because anything you do to mitigate the worst, which is not inevitable, has value.

Many are withdrawing from public life—abandoning fractured institutions, hyper-partisan cities, and conventional careers. Exhausted by an overheated culture and planet, they look for an escape hatch, a migration captured by the film Nomadland and the ethos of what the intellectual media platform Big Think calls “The Opt-Out Nation.”

But we cannot opt out of breathing.

When the smoke clears, and we breathe easily again, the very conditions that fed the fire are still accepted as normal. Hope begins by refusing both evasion and surrender. We can’t live together, or live at all, as nomads fleeing under a burning sky.

Václav Havel, the Czech dissident, playwright, and later president, called hope not a “prognostication,” but “an orientation of the spirit,” an internal force that allows you “to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.”

Hopeful pessimists can lessen the worst, and make room to breathe.

Notes and reading

[*] Nero and the Fire—Hubert Robert’s The Fire of Rome, July 18, 64 AD (1785) imagines the catastrophe through the grand architecture and theatrical light of eighteenth-century history painting. Nero did not fiddle while Rome burned—the fiddle did not yet exist—and he was probably outside Rome when the fire began. Ancient sources disagree about his conduct and possible responsibility, though the story proved too useful to disappear.

Art and morality—A brief link to my last post on Ursula K. Le Guin. Much in the spirit of George Saunders, she wrote: “I do not feel a real difference in kind—or even of importance—between the ethical and the aesthetic inquiry. But to pursue that statement further would require some understanding of philosophy, and I have none.”

Stephen J. Pyne, The Pyrocene: How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next (2021). Pyne places today’s fires within humanity’s long, uneasy history of burning. By consuming fossil fuels on a planetary scale, he argues, we have not merely warmed the climate but remade Earth into a fire age of our own making.

Luke T. Kelly and others, “Fire and Biodiversity in the Anthropocene,” Science (2020). Why fire is not simply destructive and why healthy landscapes require better fire management rather than universal suppression.

Mara van der Lugt, Hopeful Pessimism (2025). Van der Lugt rejects the demand for optimism in a world coming apart. Pessimism, she argues, need not mean despair or surrender. Refusing to assume that progress is inevitable can make hope more honest and moral action less dependent on the promise of success.

Climate Fiction, timely now—Notable examples include David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, linking environmental destruction to exploitation across generations; Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, set amid fire, displacement, and social collapse; Claire Vaye Watkins’s Gold Fame Citrus, about a drought-ravaged California; Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, imagining a flooded but still unequal city; and Richard Powers’s The Overstory, exploring the bond between human and arboreal life. Together, they address ecological breakdown, inequality, survival, adaptation, and renewal.

Backing Forward

The Human Still Coming

About 2 + 2 = 5

Not long ago, I reached for my phone during a few unoccupied minutes. I expected no news, message, or amusement. Silence had appeared, and almost before noticing it, I moved to fill it.

How much of life is spent avoiding the pause that makes our assumptions visible? We inherit loyalties, fears, ambitions, and ways of seeing. Then distraction saves us the trouble of asking whether they are true. Besides, distraction now has a gig economy behind it—digital fakery just a click away—something else to get upset about.

Unexpected help came from Ursula K. Le Guin, whom Harold Bloom credited, more than Tolkien, with raising fantasy into high literature. Her speculative fiction did not so much predict the future as estrange the present. She invented unfamiliar worlds to expose assumptions too familiar to see.

Nietzsche approached the problem differently. He called the passive, comfort-seeking person who abandoned meaning “the last man.” The danger was surrender without drama: the loss of curiosity, judgment, risk, and inward independence.

When inherited meanings weaken, freedom does not necessarily follow. Responsibility shifts to leaders, movements, institutions, nations, or the crowd. Distraction replaces attention. Summaries replace books. Artificial intelligence can produce the evidence of thought while allowing thought itself to go missing. Productivity displaces reflection.

Freedom shrinks to choosing among ready-made options rather than questioning the values behind them.

The culture wars persist because certitude keeps them going. The quarrel is not over belief or unbelief—God, reason, science, religion, right and wrong. It begins when we mistake our understanding for reality, our convictions for truth itself, and the limits of our vision for the limits of what is true.

Soon civility is cowardice, compromise is treason, and everyone is a knight of righteousness riding out to destroy somebody else’s heresy.

Ralph Waldo Emerson saw hope in what certitude resists. In “Circles” (1841), he wrote: “People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.”

Emerson was not praising confusion. A settled mind can become closed. New thought begins when conviction admits surprise, correction, and unseen possibilities. Unsettlement reminds us that neither world nor self is finished.

An old Greek image placed the past before us and the future approaching from behind. We backed into what came next with memory, not foresight.

Memory is not nostalgia. Nostalgia reshapes the past to meet present needs; memory recovers possibilities the present has forgotten. Yet history gives no map, only warnings, and memory can become blindness when we recognize only familiar dangers.

Meeting what comes next requires imagination: seeing forms of life and truth our inherited categories conceal.

Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness makes that work of imagination more than science fiction. Published in 1969 and winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards, the novel sends a human envoy into an unfamiliar world—and makes his assumptions the strangest things there.

The novel follows Genly Ai, a human from Terra sent to Gethen as an envoy of the Ekumen, a confederation of worlds. Believing himself open-minded, he invites Gethen into a larger human community. Yet he carries assumptions he cannot see.

The people of Gethen are neither permanently male nor female. Their societies developed without the fixed gender divisions Genly considers natural. He repeatedly misreads his ally Estraven because Estraven does not fit his ideas of strength, loyalty, honesty, or trust.

Genly thinks he is judging Estraven. Instead, Estraven is exposing the limits of his imagination.

Politics makes that blindness more dangerous. Karhide, the kingdom where he first arrives, is shaped by nationalism, fear of outsiders, and suspicion at court. Neighboring Orgoreyn is bureaucratic and totalitarian, presenting itself as rational and efficient while concealing surveillance, coercion, and repression. The two states differ, yet both narrow loyalty until concern for humanity appears as betrayal.

Estraven sees farther. Condemned as a traitor, Estraven understands that loyalty to one’s country may require refusing to be governed by its fears. Nations matter, but no nation is the whole of humanity. Order that loses sight of truth becomes another kind of blindness.

During their long journey, Genly begins to understand. Stripped of political theater and familiar categories, they must depend upon one another. Trust grows not out of sameness, but out of attention.

Le Guin moves beyond both Nietzsche and Emerson. Freedom is not merely the strength to create values, nor does openness require abandoning conviction. It requires the humility to discover that some of our deepest assumptions may be provincial.

Genly changes because, at last, he can meet another person without forcing that person into familiar categories.

The future still approaches from behind. We will not meet it by repeating inherited answers or congratulating ourselves on independence. We will need memory without nostalgia, conviction without certitude, and loyalties large enough to survive correction.

Perhaps that is why those empty minutes matter. The reflex to fill silence may be more than impatience. It may be reluctance to face what has not yet been decided—including ourselves.

The danger is not only that power may command us to stop thinking. It is that we may mistake the limits of our vision for the limits of reality. The impulse to escape uncertainty becomes, paradoxically, an escape from life itself.

Le Guin gives uncertainty the final word:

“The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”

Notes and reading

Paul Gauguin, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897–98). Gauguin conceived the painting as a meditation on human existence. Its figures move through stages of life without resolving the questions named in its title.

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) was a major American writer of speculative fiction and a longtime student of philosophical Taoism. Its themes of balance, interdependence, restraint, and action without domination shaped much of her work, along with a suspicion of mastery and attentiveness to apparent opposites.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Circles” (1841). Emerson’s remark that “People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them” belongs to a larger vision of thought and life as continual expansion. Readers committed to linear, progressive, or Christian apocalyptic accounts of time may resist its recurrent imagery. The quotation is used here not to deny enduring truth, but to defend openness to correction, surprise, and truths not yet fully seen.

Taylor Dotson, The Divide: How Fanatical Certitude Is Destroying Democracy (2021). Political polarization grows not only from indifference to truth, but from the conviction that one’s own facts or values should make disagreement unnecessary.

Fact, fiction, and imagination—For Le Guin, fiction is invention but not falsehood. Wishful thinking escapes reality; imagination begins with reality and returns to enlarge it. Through imagination, we may come closer to knowing the minds and hearts of others. See Ursula K. Le Guin, “Making Up Stories,” Words Are My Matter (2016).

The Human Still Coming

Against the Arrangement

About 2 + 2 = 5

We are born members of the human species. Whether we are born fully human is another matter. A child arrives unfinished—not only helpless, but still becoming a self through language, memory, love, responsibility, and others.

We did not choose birth, and we could die at any moment. Biology gives us life. It does not settle what life is for.

The latest answer comes from Silicon Valley. Artificial intelligence will enlarge the mind, genetic engineering correct the body, longevity science perhaps conquer death. Transhumanism says it plainly: the human being is only a draft. Humanity will arrive when nature yields to engineering.

Yet the question returns whenever we ask what kind of person to become, what we owe one another, or why a longer life would be better. Ignoring it—“I’m too busy to be bothered”—leaves human meaning to appetite, circumstance, or whoever has the power to define it.

An older answer may come closer. We are born human, but also born to become human. “Become who you are,” the old command says—but who is that? Is the self something we discover within, create for ourselves, receive as a gift, or become through our relationships with others?

Hannah Arendt began with what she called natality. She wrote:

“It is this faith in and hope for the world that found perhaps its most glorious and most succinct expression in the few words with which the Gospels announced their ‘glad tidings’: ‘A child has been born unto us.’” *

Every child enters a world already underway as someone new. To be born is to bring the possibility of beginning.

Humanity is never a done deal. Technology cannot manufacture it, nor can the solitary will achieve it. The human is still coming—not only ahead of us, but among us and in someone whose life reveals what ours may become.

Artificial intelligence makes another old question harder to avoid: What—or who—is truly original? A machine can produce fluency without experience, confession without memory, argument without conviction. Yet we inherit language before choosing our words; we become ourselves through others.

If human dignity rests on more than our abilities, even astonishing simulations of human expression need not threaten it. Our worth lies deeper than capacities technology already reproduces.

Reality is more textured and mysterious than technological fear allows, and more open to meaning than any measure of performance can explain. Science can describe much of what we are without exhausting the meaning of who we are—or closing the question of transcendence.

If none of us creates ourselves, authenticity is not self-creation. Becoming human may depend less upon independence than upon answering for what has been given.

Religion enters here—not because reason has failed, but because religious language names what precedes our choosing and exceeds our making. “Grace” is one such word: life, love, language, belonging—the deepest things are given before they are earned.

What is given must be received, cared for, and shared. Grace does not abolish human agency. It gives agency somewhere to begin.

Christianity makes a further claim: humanity’s meaning is not finally an idea or a better version of ourselves. It appears in a person. That claim is particular, but the question it answers belongs to everyone: What kind of life reveals what humanity is for?

Yet Christians have often understood Jesus too narrowly: as repairing humanity and restoring what Adam lost. The Orthodox theologian John Behr tells the story differently. Humanity, he argues, was not completed at the beginning. Adam was humanity in its infancy.

Christ does more than repair what went wrong. He reveals what humanity was meant to become. Humanity does not lie behind us in lost innocence. It lies ahead.

For Christians, Behr locates fully human life in the crucified and risen Christ. Yet the human meaning of that claim is not confined to believers: humanity reaches fulfillment not through mastery, invulnerability, or escape from death, but through a life freely given in love.

Here Christianity parts company with Silicon Valley’s dream of transcendence. Both imagine transformation. But one looks toward greater power over nature; the other toward love no longer governed by self-preservation.

Medicine heals. Technology enlarges possibility. Longer lives may mean more time to love and repair. Yet immortality would not answer what a limitless life is for. It might only give us more time to remain unfinished.

Grace is neither divine coercion nor escape from the work of becoming. It is the life already given drawing us toward the freedom for which we were made.

Where, when, in whom?

Not beyond the human condition. Not in an ideal realm removed from daily life. Not when biology finally submits to engineering. Not in the isolated self answerable only to itself.

The human is still coming wherever life is received as gift and returned as love. Christians make the more particular claim that this life has already appeared—in one whose humanity was revealed not by holding on to life, but by giving it away.

That claim need not close the circle around believers. Jesus did ask people to believe in him; the Gospels say so. But belief is more than agreement. It is trust in the God he reveals and participation in the life he lives.

Christians, Jews, Muslims, doubters, and those with no religion may answer differently, but the question remains:

What kind of life is worthy of our trust?

“I came,” Jesus said, “that they may have life and have it abundantly.”

He said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” Not a formula to master, but a way to follow; not an answer that ends every question, but truth embodied; not escape from mortality, but life given and shared.

Matthew’s Gospel ends not with an explanation but a promise:

“And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

Notes and reading

• Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958). Arendt attributes the words “A child has been born unto us” to the Gospels. The Gospels do, of course, announce the birth of Jesus as good news, but the phrase itself comes more directly from Isaiah 9:6: “For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given.” Her imprecision may be revealing. Arendt gathers the promise of the Hebrew Scriptures and the Gospel announcement into a single image of natality: every birth introduces someone new into the world and, with that person, the possibility of a new beginning.

Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. First published in 1973; 2nd ed., 1997. Bloom argued that originality does not mean freedom from influence. Writers become themselves through inheritance, resistance, and revision. Artificial intelligence makes that old anxiety newly visible: no machine generates without prior language, but neither does any human voice begin alone.

Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity. 1972. Trilling distinguished sincerity—truthfulness in what we present to others—from authenticity, fidelity to a supposedly deeper self. AI complicates both by imitating conviction without experience and reminding us how much human expression depends upon inherited language and borrowed forms.

John Behr, In Accordance with the Scriptures: The Shape of Christian Theology. 2025. Behr argues that humanity was not completed at the beginning and merely restored after the Fall. Christ reveals the mature human being toward whom creation has always been moving. The fully human life appears not in mastery or escape from mortality, but in the crucified and risen Christ—a life freely given in love.

Romans 12:6–8. Paul describes grace not as private possession but as gifts made fruitful in service: teaching, encouragement, generosity, leadership, mercy. What is given becomes fully ours in being offered to others.

Biblical references. “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” is John 10:10; “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” is John 14:6; and “I am with you always, to the end of the age” is Matthew 28:20. Quotations follow the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition.

“No one comes to the Father except through me.” John 14:6 is often read as Christianity’s final word of exclusion. Yet it immediately follows Jesus’ declaration, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” The claim is not that a religious label or correct formula saves us, but that the way to God is revealed in the life Jesus embodies: truth lived, love given, mercy practiced. “Through me” need not mean explicit membership in the right religious group.

Nor is this an invitation to “Jesus-olatry”—admiration of Jesus detached from the God he reveals and the life he teaches. Jesus himself says, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father” (Matthew 7:21).

The Christian claim remains particular: Christ reveals the way to God. But particularity need not become exclusion. The question is not merely who names Jesus correctly, but who is learning to live the life he calls the Way.

Against the Arrangement

The Stubborn Other

About 2 + 2 = 5

I began by looking for women in the Bible beyond the usual names. That search led elsewhere: to the broader neglect of women thinkers in the history of human thought.

Lately I have been writing about belief and belonging, and how both bear on courage and chaos in our own time. But those questions cannot be separated from another: Who has been allowed to think in public, and who has been told that thought itself was not their proper work?

That drew me to Hipparchia of Maroneia, whom I discovered almost by accident. Not because she left a great system. Not because we possess her writings. For nearly the opposite reason: so little remains, and yet the shape of her life still comes through with startling force.

Hipparchia left weaving and made the life prescribed for her look like poor thinking.

Some forgotten thinkers matter because of what they wrote. Hipparchia matters because of what she refused.

The exclusion of women was not only social. It was philosophical. Canonical figures helped give intellectual form to women’s subordination. Aristotle treated women as inferior in reason and authority. Later thinkers, including Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, repeated versions of the same assumption, lending inherited prejudice the appearance of theory.

Prejudice does its best work when it has become respectable.

Such arguments did not merely describe a patriarchal world. They helped defend it. Women’s bodies and minds were treated as unsuited for objective, abstract, or public thought. The result was a closed circle: women were denied education and authority, then their absence from learned life was cited as proof that they did not belong there.

Despite that exclusion, women taught, argued, wrote, advised, and appeared in the margins of traditions that often tried to erase them, though the evidence is frequently fragmentary or contested. The record is not thin because women were absent, but because cultures decide whose minds are worth recording.

Hipparchia interests me because she is not merely one more neglected name. She exposes the arrangement itself.

A woman of her class was expected to marry respectably, guard her reputation, manage the household, and remain largely outside public argument. Hipparchia did not simply ask whether the arrangement was fair. She walked out of it, centuries before the world knew how to call that freedom.

She broke the circle not by writing a treatise, at least none that survives, but by appearing where she was not supposed to appear, thinking where she was not supposed to think, and living as though philosophy belonged to her too.

Her argument had legs, sandals, nerve, and bad manners.

Born in the fourth century BCE in Maroneia, Hipparchia rejected the future laid out for her and chose the austere, public, scandalous life of Cynic philosophy. In a culture where education and public argument were treated largely as men’s work, her decision was not merely unconventional. Her presence itself became an argument.

She married Crates of Thebes, a penniless Cynic philosopher. Crates reportedly warned her that marriage to him meant sharing his poverty, rough clothing, public exposure, and contempt for status. Hipparchia chose that life anyway.

She did not simply marry a philosopher. She became one.

Cynicism did not originally mean sneering disbelief or weary distrust. It was an early enemy of sanctimony: a philosophy that tested virtue against the temptations of wealth, comfort, reputation, and approval. Cynics believed that freedom required self-command and a life stripped of social pretense.

Many philosophers praised courage and contempt for convention. Hipparchia had to live those virtues under conditions that made her very presence in public philosophy an offense.

Ancient accounts remember her not merely as Crates’ wife, but as a philosopher and public disputant. Later tradition also attributes writings to her, though none survive.

The best-known story places her in an argument with Theodorus the Atheist. Hipparchia reasoned that if an act was not wrong when Theodorus did it to himself, the same act could not become wrong merely because she did it to him. Theodorus had no answer. Instead, he tried to pull away her cloak, apparently hoping to shame her.

Hipparchia did not flinch. Public nudity was no threat to her.

When he mocked her for abandoning the loom, she replied: “Do you suppose that I have been ill-advised about myself if, instead of wasting further time upon the loom, I spent it in education?”

She refused the choice society had made for her: domestic obedience or public disgrace. She would be neither silenced nor ashamed.

Her relevance today is not only for women. She also speaks to men. In an age of branding, careerism, ideological display, and anxious self-presentation, Hipparchia asks whether our freedom is real, or merely obedience to a different audience.

Good thinking is the discipline of becoming less governed by fear, vanity, appetite, and applause.

Sometimes its first act is simply to appear where you have been told you do not belong.

Notes and reading

Hipparchia’s “left the loom” comes from an anecdote preserved by Diogenes Laërtius. The phrase is my own, but it follows the point of her reply: Hipparchia’s scandal was not merely that she thought, but that she refused the place assigned to her.—Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, early third century CE, 6.96–98. (Kindle edition, 2026).

• Diogenes Laërtius was part biographer, part compiler of philosophical teachings, and part collector of memorable sayings, disputes, and human oddities. He was not a critical historian in the modern sense, and some of his stories are difficult to verify. Yet his work preserves traditions and fragments that might otherwise have disappeared. Without his appetite for both philosophy and personality, we would know far less about many ancient thinkers, including Hipparchia.

• R. Bracht Branham, Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé (editors)—The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and Its Legacy (edition consulted, 2023).

• Virginia Grigoriadou—“Female Greek Philosophers of Classical Antiquity”—Istraživanja: Journal of Historical Researches 35 (2024), 7–33.

• Sara Brill & Catherine McKeen (editors)—The Routledge Handbook of Women and Ancient Greek Philosophy (2024).

The Stubborn Other

A Difficult Glory

About 2 + 2 = 5

I’m tired of politics. It feels like one damned thing after another: spectacle chasing spectacle, the law falling further behind, the next election arriving like another threat. The answer just keeps blowing in the wind.

But that grief only goes so far, because I am also tired of myself. Easy to blame the culprits, harder to admit we are among them. We do not enter politics after becoming ourselves. Politics is part of how we become ourselves.

Each of us is a committee of selves: parent, partner, friend, worker, believer, doubter. We are pulled between duty and desire, work and leisure, autonomy and dependence. Diversity is easier when it’s not our own.

Politics does not begin with parties or governments. It begins in this daily tension of keeping the peace among our different sides, then reappears in families, communities, and states.

Aristotle’s “political animal” was no reduction to statecraft. It belongs to who we are, not merely what we do—our nature, not just our behavior.

We are born from others, sustained by others, formed with others, selves in a world we did not make alone. Politics is what happens when we reckon with this shared life. It is the hard human work of building a world out of differences, heavy memories, open conflict, and stubborn hope.

Hannah Arendt called this natality. Every birth brings a newcomer, but natality becomes political only when the newcomer acts and begins. Politics exists because we are alike enough to share a world, and different enough for something new to happen. It is how we make room for the future.

Arendt heard this truth in the Gospel announcement, “A child has been born unto us,” treating it not as dogma, but as radical faith in the world’s capacity to begin again. For her, we are not born to die, but to start anew—a human defiance of the odds that she called an “infinite improbability which occurs regularly.”

Yet no beginning is innocent. Genesis places the first city east of Eden, founded by Cain, the first murderer. Politics begins with the need to live together after innocence is lost. Every political order inherits the damage.

Scripture gives beginning another form in Abraham. God’s command to leave his country and his father’s house is a summons to begin without knowing where it leads, prizing promise over possession.

It is hard to trust that much. The easier alternative is retreat: into the self, the tribe, or walls that shrink the world until fewer count.

Political thinkers call the work of democracy “agonism”: turning enemies into opponents and conflict into debate. Agonism does not end disagreement. It transforms antagonism and keeps a fight from becoming a war, dissent from being a crime.

Nietzsche understood how moral struggle hardens into resentment, taking its purpose from the power it condemns, turning revenge into virtue. Resentment does not defeat the enemy. It lets the enemy decide who we become.

Soccer and baseball outclass football because players must play both ways: offense and defense. They let the game dictate the clock, not the clock the game—a match cannot be run out by holding the ball to kill time.

Football breeds the one-way specialist—and with that specialization, resentment. Democracy demands citizens who can both score and field, speak and listen. It requires a playing field, not a battlefield—contest, not conquest.

The end of polarization is not always a victory—sometimes it is just an eviction. Whether the hand closing the door belongs to a strongman or a righteous reformer, the result is the same: both are turning the key.

Enemies must be defeated, but opponents preserved—because power does not merely tempt; it transforms. Those who grasp it in God’s name must first secure it, making the god they invoked unrecognizable, a deity who always happens to agree.

Saul began as the Lord’s anointed; he ended consulting a witch. Left unchecked, power turns the highest ideals into a bargain with the devil, stepping over bodies to keep moving.

This delusion of absolute control extends to our private lives. We flatter ourselves that independence is the truth and dependence the illusion. But the self-made person is a myth. No one builds their own roads, purifies their water, or buries themselves. Worshipping self-sufficiency breeds the loneliness it promises to cure.

Reflecting pools turn stagnant, and the monuments we build to our own independence eventually crumble.

The test of a political community is how it treats those not yet members: the stranger, the refugee, the child too young to speak. A community drawing its circle too tightly hides behind safety and calls it justice.

Membership is the first political good, and inclusion means power, not mere permission to participate. At its best, politics gives common life form: our second birth into speech, action, and responsibility.

Yet that second birth can be refused. We can run from our differences as though to return to the womb, where we never shared space. But political life begins only after that illusion breaks.

We don’t just fear the stranger; we fear the neighbor—close enough to matter, different enough to disturb. Good neighbors build boundaries together. A boundary becomes a wall when only one side sets it, just as tolerance becomes a trap when only one side practices it.

D. H. Lawrence saw the danger in Walt Whitman’s totalizing embrace of humanity: it swallows difference rather than meeting it. “The universe, in short, adds up to ONE. ONE. 1. Which is Walt.” That is not communion. It is “an empty Allness. An addled egg.”

Real difference is harder. Other people do not exist to meet my needs; my need is to meet them. They are not here to complete our unity, but to interrupt it—and, sometimes, enlarge it.

That is the invitation: not to agree, not even to like one another, but to stay. To remain in the argument, in a shared, difficult world. To act without certainty, knowing a single deed or word can alter the order; we cannot speak into a void; a world begins when another answers.

Notes and reading

Wendell Berry on Interdependence—“A Native Hill,” in The Long-Legged House (1969), 196. Berry’s reversal of priorities serves as the ethical backbone for moving past political exhaustion. To shift from asking what is good for us to what is good for the world requires abandoning the myth of self-sufficiency. It demands a rigorous, localized attention to the shared environment and the neighbors we did not choose but must live alongside.

Aristotle, Politics, I.2, 1253a1–18.

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (1998), Part V, “Action.”

The Second Birth: On the Political Beginnings of Human Existence—Tilo Schabert (2015). Writing in the philosophical tradition of Eric Voegelin, Schabert builds a political anthropology around the concept of human beginnings and cosmic order.

The Beginning of Politics: Power in the Biblical Book of Samuel—Moshe Halbertal and Stephen Holmes (2017). The authors analyze sovereign power through the stories of Saul, David, Uriah, Tamar, and Absalom.

D.H. Lawrence on Walt Whitman—Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), Chapter XII, “Whitman.” Lawrence critiques Whitman’s democratic expansionism as the ego consuming the other under the guise of loving them. For Lawrence, true communion demands radical separateness; it is possible only when both sides remain stubbornly themselves, maintaining “the powerful resistance and cohesiveness of our individuality.” (Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine).

A Difficult Glory

The Politics of Jesus

About 2 + 2 = 5

“I, too, sing America.” — Langston Hughes, 1901–1967

Poet, novelist, playwright, and chronicler of Black life in America, Hughes held America to its promise. Who has been allowed to inherit that promise, and who has been left outside it?

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
That great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart.
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land.
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

For all the dreams we’ve dreamed,
And all the songs we’ve sung,
And all the hopes we’ve held,
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions have nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.

O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be.

The land that’s mine—
The poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

O, yes,
I say it plain:
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin,
The graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers,
The mountains and the endless plain—
And make America again.

• “Deep River” — Paul Robeson (1898–1976), from the original recording (2:17).

Robeson—singer, actor, athlete, lawyer, and political dissenter—sang from the gap between America’s praise of freedom and its denial of it. The spiritual expresses the longing for a promised land.

Notes

Langston Hughes, “Let America Be America Again,” Esquire, July 1936; later collected in A New Song (1938). Excerpted and abridged here.

Paul Robeson recorded “Deep River” in 1927. See Wayne D. Shirley, “The Coming of ‘Deep River,’” American Music 15, no. 4 (Winter 1997).

On the American Founding, see Joseph J. Ellis, The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding, and Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution. Ellis stresses the moral contradiction at the heart of the Founding, while Wood stresses the genuinely radical release of egalitarian and democratic energies. Read together, they suggest that 1776 was a beginning that opened democratic possibilities and left grave injustices unresolved.

The Politics of Jesus

Shrewdly Honest

About 2 + 2 = 5

The politics of Jesus begins by proclaiming the kingdom of God. No other kingdom, nation, market, empire, or institution is ultimate. Such power is real. Sometimes it prevents worse things from happening. But it is not sacred. The gospel is distorted when it gives moral cover to power.

The kingdom of God is personal but not private. It judges every order that runs on fear and exclusion. Jesus announced a world in which the poor are blessed, enemies are forgiven, and the last are received without anyone pretending to do them a favor. When he said he came “not to bring peace, but a sword,” he was not blessing violence. He was naming the division that comes when truth disturbs a false peace.

Conscience is easy until it has something to lose. It is harder when truth costs safety, status, or belonging. Doing good is not always nice. Jesus overthrew the tables because some peace is only fraud with good manners.

The cross shows what worldly power does when mercy becomes dangerous. The resurrection says that such power does not have the last word. Christian politics, at its deepest, is not about using the state to secure religious ends. It is loyalty to a kingdom no state can contain, and the refusal to call anything just when it survives by making the weak pay.

Jesus’ politics confronts power without worshiping power. It builds a community that lives from a kingdom already here and still on the way. It turns the other cheek and goes the extra mile because refusing to imitate power is not the same as surrendering to it.

His kingdom, he said, was not of this world. He did not say God’s kingdom was not for this earth. By “the world,” he meant the world as presently arranged. He also taught his followers to pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” That prayer is a promise. So Augustine could say, “Alleluia is our name.”

Jesus did not say he was the answer, but the way. Not the way to succeed, but how to be faithful. Not paradise tomorrow, but the presence of his Spirit, come what may. He did not make his life a doctrine about status, but a disclosure of God’s own life: “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” We are called not just to believe in Jesus, but to live from the courage of his faith.

If Jesus were only a teacher of heavenly truths, however memorably told, the cross makes little sense. Crucifixion was public degradation, meant to expose and terrorize. Jerusalem elites, collaborating with Roman power, saw Jesus as a threat to the religious, economic, and political arrangements that sustained them.

Flannery O’Connor once heard Mary McCarthy praise the Eucharist, the Christian meal of bread and wine, as a fine symbol. O’Connor’s reply was blunt: if it was only a symbol, “to hell with it.” The point applies here too. Jesus was not merely a great example. An example can show the way. It cannot break the power of what holds us.

What made Jesus different was the life he disclosed as God’s own: mercy without calculation, authority without domination, faithfulness without self-protection, and a kingdom whose king was enthroned on a cross.

There was no Easter without Good Friday. There is no Christianity without resurrection. Unless Jesus was raised from the dead, Paul says, Christian preaching and faith are empty.

As a believer myself, I have no idea how to explain “resurrection,” especially since the claim does not stop with Jesus. Even if I saw the empty tomb, I would not understand. Calling resurrection a metaphor is a modern way out, a fine symbol with the scandal removed.

All I know for sure is that something happened, and that it changed the course of history.

Hannah Arendt, the great Jewish philosopher, did not try to explain Easter, but she understood the force of beginning again. Human beings, she wrote in The Human Condition, are “not born in order to die but in order to begin.” That is as close as philosophy may get to the edge of resurrection: not an explanation, but a refusal to let death have the last word.

The truth is not a policy. Resurrection is not a program. It is a way of life. The school of faith is still in session, and we are a long way from graduation.

We live in a Good Friday world. Death and destruction abound. But to make that the measure of our attention is to praise what we deplore. Refusing happiness does not honor the suffering. It only makes suffering the one thing we agree to honor. Joy is not denial. It is defiance.

An anonymous prayer could speak for us all, whether we say God or prefer honesty:

“From the cowardice that dares not face new truth
From the laziness that is contented with half-truth
From the arrogance that thinks it knows all truth,
Good Lord, deliver me.”

Notes and reading

The politics of Jesus cannot be understood chiefly in terms of resistance to Rome. Jesus was not to the left or right of Caesar. His refusal of violence was not passivity, and his kingdom was not another sovereignty competing on Caesar’s field. It was the judgment of every sovereignty that lives by violence, possession, and death, and the promise of a world where mercy, abundance, and life have the final word. Christian faith means living true to the promise of what shall be.

Fyodor Dostoevsky is easy to overuse, but hard to avoid when religious power protects itself from Christ. The Brothers Karamazov (1880), especially “The Grand Inquisitor.” Christ returns, says almost nothing, and religious power finds him unbearable.

Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery” (1948). Dostoevsky shows power enthroned in religion. Jackson shows it dispersed through ordinary people. No tyrant appears. No monster arrives. The crowd can do the work all by itself: communal, orderly, traditional. That is the terror of the story: how easily a people can call cruelty custom and call themselves innocent because everyone joined in.

Terrence Malick, A Hidden Life (2019). Malick rarely interprets his films in public, but this one asks with unusual clarity what faithfulness to Christ costs when the state, the village, and even religious caution call compromise responsibility. Franz Jägerstätter’s refusal is not useful, successful, or admired. It is simply true.

Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory (1940). Greene’s novel is gloomy only if holiness requires clean hands and steady nerves. Its “whisky priest” is weak, frightened, compromised, and still somehow a bearer of grace. Mercy is not a reward for worthiness. It can move through people who are not even respectable.

Shrewdly Honest

Freedom as Argument

About 2 + 2 = 5