Alan Jacobs

When power was out all over Waco and the temperatures were dropping into the single digits, the city set up “warming centers” for residents in danger. This got Aaron Zimmerman – the rector of my parish church, St. Alban’s – musing. A year ago St. Alban’s had completed the addition of a brand-new Parish Hall, only to have the church shut down by the coronavirus before we could even enjoy it. Since then the space had sat mostly unused. But it was spacious, and well-lit, and well-heated; it even had a kitchen and wifi. Why not offer it to the city as an additional warming center? So Aaron called the mayor, and the mayor agreed. 

It ended up being a wonderful ministry to people very much in need – including people with unaddressed chronic health issues that some of our medical-professional parishioners could help. You can and should read the full story here.

I am so proud of my church! But I’m also feeling a twinge or two of retrospective envy. Teri and I were huddling around our fireplace when we could’ve been in a big warm room eating a breakfast made by Corey MacIntyre? 

Finally: Don’t forget that we’re still doing Morning Prayer six days a week – and other services as well – on our parish YouTube channel.

Ross Douthat, in an exceptionally insightful column:

As Conservatism Inc. became more of a world unto itself, it sealed out bad news for conservative governance, contributing to debacles that doomed Republican presidents — Iraq for George W. Bush, Covid for Donald Trump. These debacles helped make conservatism less popular, closer to a 45 percent than a 55 percent proposition in presidential races, a blocking coalition but not a governing one. And this in turn made the right’s passionate core feel more culturally besieged, more desperate for “safe spaces” where liberal perfidy was taken for granted and the most important reasons for conservative defeats were never entertained.

Such a system, predictably, was terrible at generating the kind of outward-facing, evangelistic conservatives who had made the Reagan revolution possible. There are threads linking Reagan to Donald Trump or William F. Buckley Jr. to Sean Hannity, as the right’s liberal critics often note. But to go back and watch Reagan and Buckley is to see an entirely different approach to politics — missionary and confident, with a gentlemanly comportment that has altogether vanished.

In its place today is a fantasy politics, a dreampolitik, that’s fed by a deep feeling of grievance and dispossession. Part of this feeling is justified, insofar as liberalism really has consolidated cultural power everywhere outside Conservatism Inc. But the right’s infotainment complex is itself a major reason for that consolidation. Conservatives have lost real-world territory by building dream palaces, and ceded votes by talking primarily to themselves.

This is cogent, clear, and indisputably true. Who within the world of Conservatism Inc. is even making the slightest attempt at appealing to people who aren’t already on board?

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P.S. Perhaps I should say that I stand in an odd relation to all of this because, as I have often noted, my conservatism is fundamentally theological and a conservative theology – a genuine Gospel of Life – yields a set of political policies that spans the spectrum of Left to Right. (Or at least, the Left as it used to be and the Right as it used to be.) But a constant awareness of human fallibility and the typical forms that that fallibility takes – have I mentioned that I wrote a book on Original Sin? – will, I think, push one towards an Oakeshottian mode of thinking about politics, a conserving tendency, a disposition to be skeptical about utopian hopes and plans, regular appeals to Chesterton’s Fence. So perhaps it’s not surprising that for a long time conservative outlets were very hospitable to my writing. And perhaps it’s also not surprising that as Conservatism Inc. has taken hold I have had to find other homes for my work, work which at one time might have been seen as an expression of the conservative temperament but now … not so much. Because the “conservative disposition” isn’t what it used to be: now it’s primarily a “deep feeling of grievance and dispossession.”

It seems to me that human beings in general, and Americans in particular, stubbornly resist the idea that life often presents us with trade-offs — opportunity costs, as the economists say, or incompatible goods. Isaiah Berlin says something especially hateful to most of us when he asserts that "Some among the Great Goods cannot live together…. We are doomed to choose, and every choice may entail an irreparable loss.” 

I’ve reflected on this point over the past few days as silly people have insisted that the state of Texas should obviously have prepared its power-generation plants for every eventuality: Arctic cold as well as Saharan heat.

The silliness here is twofold. First, it’s practically unfeasible: the financial cost for Texas to build its infrastructure around the possibility of Chicago-like winters is just as outrageous as would be the cost for Seattle to prepare its infrastructure for Texas-like summers. 

But there’s a second and deeper point to be made: What if there are circumstances in which it’s actually not possible to prepare for every possible eventuality, because the opportunity cost of preparing for one extreme is failure to prepare for the other? 

See, for instance, this Wall Street Journal article on the design of Texas’s power plants: 

The state’s plants are designed to shed heat instead of keeping it in, which helps in hot months but can be detrimental during cold snaps, according to researchers at the Electric Power Research Institute. But on Thursday Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who criticized the performance of his state’s grid operator this week and called for changes amid a public outcry, recommended that Texas plants winterize their equipment and that the state should supply the funding to make it happen…. 

Given the state’s normally warm climate, not all of Texas’ power plants are fully equipped with winterization measures — protections plants use to prevent freezing of pipes, sensors, motors and other components. In northern climates, many winterization measures are permanent and plants are housed within entire building structures for protection from the cold. But experts said that because of Texas’ summer heat, plant operators need to keep components exposed.

What if sometimes you have to choose between two goods? What if you actually can’t have both? Wow, that would really suck. Therefore it cannot be true. 

Why do Democrats want to forgive student debt but not, say, the debt that someone incurs by buying a truck that enables him to have his own home-renovation business? Because college graduates tend to vote Democratic and people who do home renovation tend not to. It’s the same principle that has Ron DeSantis vaccinating people who are likely to vote for him.

I’m sure someone else has written this, but it’s on my mind, so…

I'm waiting and hoping for some major musical artist to say, “Screw this. I'm taking my music off all of the streaming services, and instead will sell it from my website and on Bandcamp." I don't understand why this hasn't happened already.

Of course, many artists don't have the choice as long as they are under contract with a record label, but there must be some artists of stature who are between contracts and who could therefore make this move. Maybe the economics aren't what I think they are, but everything I’ve read about the minuscule payments the streaming services offer musicians suggests that artists who already have a following stand a very good chance at least of breaking even by selling rather than streaming; and moreover could set an example for others that might lead to a breaking of the streaming services' hold on music.

And I say advisedly "hold upon music" as opposed to "hold upon artists," because as has been amply documented, the way that the streaming services work has exerted enormous power on every aspect of the songmaking process, down to the details of composition. Just listen to this BBC radio documentary for the ugly, ugly details. For instance, because listeners have to stick with a song for 30 seconds on Spotify in order for the artists to get paid, some writers are putting the choruses at the beginning of songs in order to grab people's attention right away. The very idea of a song building slowly to a climax, or taking an unexpected turn partway through, has become a financial impossibility. In other words, the streaming services are Taylorizing everything about the music industry, which was headed in a Taylorized direction anyway. (Seventy-two songwriters worked on the assembly line called Beyoncé’s Lemonade.) 

And yet, with Bandcamp and, in a somewhat different way, SoundCloud, we have options to do things differently — and thereby to preserve the integrity of musical creation. Bandcamp in particular is well-positioned to do for musicians what Substack is doing for journalists: offer them a way to escape a broken system full of roadblocks and perverse incentives. I’m really hoping that a musical act with a big following takes a chance on one of these options. It will definitely be better for the quality of music and in the long run, therefore, better for listeners like me. Even if it costs me a little more money. 

  We’re spending much of the day harvesting snow so we’ll be able to flush our toilets when the inevitable comes: a period without water. When the thaw arrives, probably sometime tomorrow, frozen pipes will start to burst. As we near 32º I’ll turn off water to our property and hope for the best. The warming will be gradual, which I hope will help.

The situation itself has been difficult but obviously survivable, a condition that will continue if we lose our water for a while. I’m sure there are people in charge of various things here in Texas who could have and should have done their jobs better, but this is as close to a black-swan event as one is ever likely to see, so let’s please be reasonable in our criticisms.

But who am I kidding? The most simply annoying element of the whole situation has been the constant noise of axes grinding among the politicians and commentariat, whether the lefties gleefully mocking Texas as a “third-world nation” — their rhetoric is indistinguishable from Trump’s, with his sneers at “shithole countries” — or the right-wingers blaming everything on wind turbines and/or Joe Biden’s powers of weather manipulation. (Between Biden attacking Texas with his crack team of polar vortices and the Rothschilds wielding their cleverly targeted space lasers, these sure are hard times for solid Christian folk like me.) The greatest frustration I have with American axe-grinding is the way everyone always grinds the same axe, grinds it to absolute powder, then grabs a clone of it and starts grinding that. For partisans on both sides, every story has a moral and every story has exactly the same moral. And they never stop chanting it, transfixed as they are by their politico-verbal OCD.

Okay, time to fetch more snow.

Michael Brendan Dougherty:

[James] Poulos holds that the old mass-media mandarins are trying to “encode” their ethical dreams into the new digital-media world, before it is too late. One can see this most clearly in the moral panic about social media and which speakers get a platform on it. The New York Times doesn’t report on what is being said on new social-media networks such as Clubhouse; it reports on what shouldn’t be said there….

The new digital media has its own biases. It also has elements of fantasy. But its currency and legitimacy — its value as a business — comes not from ethical dreams, but the secure database management of events, which it interprets as truths. Many Silicon Valley founders and thinkers have intuited this and tried to make themselves fall in love with the idea of hard and unpleasant truths — the things that cannot be uttered ethically at places like the New York Times.

The conflict between one clerisy and another is just beginning.

Freddie deBoer: 

I try to avoid looking at Media Twitter as much as I can; spending more than a few minutes in that space leaves one needing to decontaminate as if recently exposed to radiation. So I don’t know for sure if this is true. But I’m going to make the easiest bet in the world and say that media Twitter loves [Cade] Metz’s [hit] piece [on Scott Alexander]. And they loved it because, again, Alexander is not one of them. He’s not in the New York media social rat race, so he’s not a part of their culture. He’s not on Slack. He doesn’t tell the same tired, shitty jokes that journalists make on Twitter literally from the minute they get up to the minute they go to bed. He’s not performatively filling his feed with only women writers and artists, because he’s just not that interested in cishet men anymore, man. He doesn’t make references to whatever shithouse bar in Nolita media people used to go to after work to snort coke. He doesn’t use Twitter as an outlet to scream his dedication to BIPOC to the world, knowing this will look good on his resume. He’s not a thirty-three year old white person who speaks like a Black teenager, like half the journalists on Twitter. And most importantly, he jumped the line. He didn’t get paid $250 a week by Refinery79 for 60 hours of work for two years to climb the latter. He had the audacity to think that he could circumvent the system and challenge the official narratives…. 

Again: Alexander is an outsider. His readers don’t pay the Times for access to their shitty recipes. He’s probably never heard of Clubhouse. Unlike everyone on Media Twitter, he’s got a real job. He’s a lost cause. They will always hate him because he’s indifferent to climbing their rancid social hierarchy, the thing they care about the most in the whole world.

Some years ago, when I read Kim Stanley Robinson’s outstanding Science in the Capital trilogy — later condensed into a single volume called Green Earth — I thought that Robinson deftly executed a bold move in setting the second volume in a Washington D.C. beset by unprecedented cold. After all, might that not confirm the suspicions of certain skeptics that climate change is just a hoax, that “global warming” isn’t happening at all? But Robinson wanted to make the point that while climate change certainly will mean a gradual warming of the entire earth, it will also make the weather all over the earth considerably less predictable and often more extreme. 

Over the past couple of days, something else unprecedented has happened: Each of the 254 counties of Texas — yeah, Texas has 254 counties — has been under a winter storm warning, all the way down to the Rio Grande. My house was without electricity — and therefore without heat — for two days, as the temperature dropped yesterday morning to 5º F. My wife and I closed off the one room where we have a fireplace and sheltered there, with our long-haired dog who was delighted by the cooler temp. The cellular phone network (though not the data network) stayed up, so we were able talk to friends and get some extra firewood, which required some driving on slushy roads and through one intersection slicked with ice from a broken water main. We stayed warm enough, though the rest of our house was literally freezing.

We have a small battery-powered generator that’s useful primarily for charging phones and running lights, and we have some battery-powered lanterns, so we could see where we were going and stay in touch with family on the phone. We were told by Fox News-watching family members that Texas suffered from a failure of wind turbines, but that was the least of our worries, as Joshua D. Rhodes has explained. A few turbines may have frozen up, but the overwhelming cause of the power shortage was the failure of natural-gas-fueled power plants, some of which were under maintenance when the storm hit and some of which failed because their gas wells froze. Texas already generates more wind power than any other state — a quarter of the nation’s total — but we’d have been better off if we had invested more heavily in wind, not less.

(UPDATE: More on this from the Texas Tribune. A noteworthy item there: It’s standard practice for power plants in Texas to undergo maintenance in the winter, because the demand for power is so much less in our mild winters than in our torrid summers.) 

I’ll be very interested in the coming investigations of the failure points here, but I don’t expect anything from the ones pursued by legislators because they will simply be exercises in blaming and posturing. (Nothing and nobody in America could possibly be more completely useless than our elected representatives.) The explorations pursued by the energy industry will be of infinitely more value. They will probably suggest some changes in policy and procedure, but I think we all need to be adult enough to realize that it’s impossible for the energy sector — or any other organizations, institutions, and businesses — to prepare for every weather-based eventuality. What to Expect When You’re Expecting Anything and Everything would have to be, paradoxically enough, a very short book. 

Our power is back for now, but maybe not for long — we’ve been warned to expect “rolling outages” for a while — so I think I’d better hit the “Publish” button. 

The other day I posted what I thought was a rather witty little aside in which I said that the New York Times might have more interesting material than Fox News but might also have lower journalistic standards. It was meant as a joke, because, of course, Fox News doesn’t have any journalistic standards. But now that I’ve read the Times’s smear of Scott Alexander and Slate Star Codex, I’m not sure that I see my post as a joke any more. The profile, which I don’t even want to link to, is astonishingly dishonest from beginning to end. What’s not an outright lie is a wild distortion; what isn’t a wild distortion is an undisguised attempt to mislead. It is a festival of mendacity.

If you want more details, Scott Aaronson has them. (And Aaronson doesn’t think as badly of the hit job as I do.) Aaronson’s key point:

The trouble with the NYT piece is not that it makes any false statements [ED: I think it does], but just that it constantly insinuates nefarious beliefs and motives, via strategic word choices and omission of relevant facts that change the emotional coloration of the facts that it does present. I repeatedly muttered to myself, as I read: “dude, you could make anything sound shady with this exact same rhetorical toolkit!”

Jesse Singal has more on the piece’s straightforward dishonesty. And here’s Scott Alexander’s own response.

Alasdair MacIntyre once called the New York Times “the parish magazine of self-congratulatory liberal Enlightenment.” Now, despite having some of the best columnists in America, the paper’s reporting side is just the Fox News of the semi-literate left.

Is it just because I was teaching Kafka last week that I keep having these Kafkaesque experiences? Or is it the state of our civilization?

Example A: I needed to make an appointment with my primary care doctor, so I went to the website to make an appointment online. I received the message that I am not "certified" for booking online, though I have done so before. So I tried to find the hours during which I can call to make an appointment, and saw this information: "Call our office to find our current opening hours." I did, and got a recorded message: "We are currently closed. Please call back when the office is open." Click. I felt like Joseph K.

Example B — and this one's a doozy: At Baylor we're all doing weekly covid tests, which is a very good thing, and we've been sent emails that link to a webpage where we are told "Go to this page and fill out the form to sign up for a time." So I went to the page and discovered that all of the times, forever, are "not available." Hmmm. I tried the page in different browsers, on different devices: same result everywhere. I wrote to our HR department to tell them what happened and ask how I am supposed to book a test. Five days later I got an email message asking me to log into our new "portal" to find my answer. The answer, as it turned out, was just an email, but an email that they make you go to the portal to read. So let's recap: They send me an email telling me that I have am email that I cannot read in my email client but must log into a "portal" to read.

Okay then. I read the reply, and it said, "Go to this page and fill out the form to sign up for a time." That is, whoever replied to me copy-pasted from the webpage whose inaccurate information had led me to write in the first place.

So I made a phone call. Wait, hold, transfer, etc. Explained the situation to a new person. She said, "The message you received gave you inaccurate advice, I'm really sorry."

... Okay. So it's not just me, nobody can book a covid test on that page?

"That's right."

So maybe you all should delete that page and correct the website, don't you think?

"I'll make a note of that. Can I do anything else to help you?"

Yes, you can tell me how to book my weekly covid test.

"Oh, you don't have to book it, you can just walk in."

I have never watched Fox News, but I used to read the New York Times. I therefore view both from a distance. But based on what I’ve seen, it seems pretty clear that I would find more to interest me in the Times, but Fox News has slightly higher standards of journalistic ethics. 

Accessed right now. I know which one I hope is correct. 

 

(Reply to an email from a friend who engaged with my recent posts on this subject)

Thanks so much for this excellent and gracious pushback! It helps me to think more clearly.

Let me start with this: “Truth-telling, in various senses, is a precondition for forgiveness.” I can’t be sure without more specificity, but I am inclined to say that, in Christian and biblical terms, that is not an accurate statement.

Now, to be sure, there is a sense in which truth-telling is coterminous with forgiveness. When someone says to me “I forgive you,” that is a kind of performative utterance which also states, implicitly but inescapably, that I have done something that requires forgiveness. (It is of course possible for someone to announce that she has forgiven another person when in fact that other person has done her no wrong, in which case there would be no truth-telling involved, but we’ll set that aside for now.)

But the truth-telling need not precede the forgiveness. When Jesus asked his Father to forgive those who were killing him, he did not first confront them with a list of their offenses and demand a response. When he tells us that we must forgive our offending brother seventy times seven times, he does not add an instruction about truth-telling exercises. He just says to forgive.

But then he also adds, in other places, instructions for achieving reconciliation, as does Paul. So when you put those passages together, here’s the picture that I think you get: Reconciliation is a process that begins with forgiveness and proceeds to truth-telling.

Am I wrong?

Two other points:

First, I don’t think I’m conflating personal and corporate forgiveness. In the kinds of situations I’m envisioning, people like me are asked to acknowledge our complicity in systemic racism. I am not asked to confess to and be absolved of the systemic racism itself — which is appropriate, because there’s no meaningful way in which I could do that — but to my complicity in it. So it remains a personal exchange.

Second, you were exactly right to point to my slippage in invoking the life appropriate to the ekklesia in this non-ecclesial context. I need to be more clear about my views there, which are: Christian colleges and institutions are not the church and should not try to do the things that churches do, for instance, administer the sacraments or promulgate doctrine. Their character and authority are always in a sense derivative of the prior authority of Scripture and/or some body of believers. However, insofar as they claim to be Christian in character they are obliged to behave, insofar as they are able, in ways consistent with the commandments Jesus Christ and his apostles give to the Church.To take an extreme example, it would be absurd to say, “Yes, in our churches we are supposed to forgive one another as God in Christ has forgiven us, but in non-ecclesial contexts we are free to bear grudges forever.”

People often say things like, “Well, you can’t expect him to forgive her after what she did to him.” And in many situations I don’t expect it. Forgiveness is hard, and gets exponentially harder in proportion to the seriousness of the offenses. Sometimes I see people forgiving others and think “If I were in their shoes I don’t think I could do that.” Sometimes people might take decades to get to the point of forgiving someone, if they get there at all.

And you know what would make that process infinitely easier? If the offenders were to come to those they offended and say, “I hurt you. Will you please forgive me? Can I do anything to make it up to you?” That is, in an ideal situation the process of reconciliation will be initiated by the offender asking forgiveness, not the offended offering it. But as far as I can tell, even when that kind of confessing and penitent initiation is not forthcoming, Christians are commanded to forgive. I don’t expect them to, especially when they have been badly hurt, but I don’t see how to avoid admitting that the commandment is what it is.

Of course, the circuit of forgiveness, as it were, cannot be completed unless that forgiveness is both offered and accepted. In a really important sense Hell is the refusal to be forgiven. Lewis’s The Great Divorce is piercing on this topic.

I go on and on about all this because I think it’s really easy for us to carve out exceptions — to say that the rules are different in ecclesial and non-ecclesial contexts, that the rules are different in corporate as opposed to personal contexts, that the rules are different when people have been really badly hurt — and that’s how you end up in a situation in which nobody forgives anybody.

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UPDATE: My correspondent here is my friend Nathan Cartagena, whose pushback on my posts has been both charitable and firm. Here are some points from a subsequent message of his that I want to take on board — or rather: read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest:

• Is reconciliation “a process that begins with forgiveness and proceeds to truth-telling”? Perhaps not always. Yes, Jesus does this as he hangs on the cross; on the other hand, this does not seem to be the practice of the Hebrew prophets.
• Forgiveness gets entangled with several other actions, including restoration as well as reconciliation. “Paul didn’t tell the Corinthians to forgive the guy sleeping with his mother-in law. Perhaps he assumed they knew to. But he does say to excommunicate him; and eventually Paul commands the Corinthians to restore him. Seems the restoring involves righting individual and communal injustices." (Yep.)
• When Paul rebuked Peter (Galatians 2:11) was forgiveness involved? (An interesting question! Paul told Peter he was wrong, but one can be wrong without sinning. We should certainly say that Peter needed to accept correction, but it’s not clear from the text that he needed to be forgiven.)
• When we’re looking at Jesus’s own behavior, to what extent do we need to consider his unique triple role as prophet, priest, and king. Do things look different to those of us who are none of those things?
• Ditto with Paul, who is an apostle. Does he by virtue of that divinely-appointed role handle things differently than we should?
• Perhaps we should consider forgiveness as an act and a process. (Yes indeed. When Jesus tells his followers to forgive those who sin against them “seventy times seven” times, it’s not at all clear that every time they do so it’s in response to some new sin. Perhaps we have to get up every morning and forgive those who have sinned against us all over again. And if so, we shouldn’t complain if those we have offended must pursue a long process of forgiving us.)
• In terms of the larger social issues, in this country the debates are perhaps unhelpfully focused on two groups, black and white Americans, leaving everyone else out of the discussion.

I will reflect prayerfully on all of these points. Thanks, Nathan!

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“615”] (The inside front flap of my old and much-used copy of Barth’s commentary on Romans.)[/caption]

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This is a story well known to many, but it’s worth recalling.

When Karl Barth was a young pastor in Switzerland and the Great War had recently begun, he read the “Manifesto of 93,” in which a large number of German scholars in the arts and sciences loudly denounced the claims made in the Allied nations that Germany had in any way been an aggressor in the current war, and pledged themselves to the service of German nationalism. Barth was appalled. And he was especially appalled when he saw how many of the signatories were his former teachers, in theology and biblical studies. He had already distanced himself to some degree from the easy comforts of 19th-century liberal Protestant theology, in which Christianity was a pleasant and useful addendum to a confident humanism. But at this point Barth began to ask whether there might be a substantive — a causal — relation between these professors’ theology and their embrace of German nationalism.

As he was reflecting on these matters, he found himself faced with the task of preaching some sermons on Paul’s letter to the Romans. And in preparing to deliver those sermons, he gradually came to see that the most powerful imaginable explanation for the behavior of his former teachers was to be found in the letters of Paul, and especially this one, the longest and greatest of Paul’s letters.

It was suddenly quite clear to Barth what had happened to his teachers: they had domesticated and trivialized the God of Scripture, they had made him no more than an appendage to a humanistic project that was going to go on whether God supported it or not. And this domesticated God quickly and easily gave way to another God who made greater demands upon its adherents: German nationalism. Having made the Christian God so much smaller, these theologians and biblical scholars prostrated themselves before the demands of the powerful god of German military might and cultural superiority.

It was at this point that Barth returned to his reading of Paul with increased urgency. In his preface to the commentary that eventually emerged, just as the war had ended, Barth said that historical scholarship could certainly show the ways in which Paul was a figure of his own time. But what historical scholarship could not show, and what was absolutely necessary to be seen, was that Paul is our contemporary: he speaks to us from the heart of our experience. And in so speaking, he crushes our idols. To hear Paul as a contemporary became Barth’s great project and challenge — and when he had done so, he had a direction for his theology, a direction he would pursue for the rest of his life.

I cannot imagine anything more salutary for American Christians today, on the left and on the right, politically and theologically, than a genuine and unguarded encounter with this terrifying figure we call Paul the apostle.

Much-used books are beautiful books.

I want to knot some strands of rope here. 

Some folks have responded to my recent posts on Christian obedience — one and two — by noting that I critique conservative Christians but say nothing about progressive or leftist Christians, who are, I am told, just as bad or worse. In those posts I focused on conservative Christians because they often define themselves by their high regard for Scripture and I wanted to point to certain commandments that I believe they would find in their Bibles if they looked. Progressive Christians tend not to cite Scripture as often — but if they did, they would be in the same boat, because as far as I can tell they’re no more forgiving than their right-wing counterparts. 

Case in point: Last year I wrote a post about racial relations at Baylor University, where I teach, and made this comment:  

Any quibbles I have about what’s included in Baylor’s statements are insignificant in comparison to my concern about what’s not in them. There is quite a lot about repentance, but I have yet to find one single word about forgiveness, or reconciliation, or hope.

Christianity has a lot to say about sin, repentance, and forgiveness. It tells us that we all sin. It tells us that when we sin against a sister or brother, in thought, word, or deed, we must seek to make it right, and to ask that person’s forgiveness. And if we feel that someone has sinned against us, we are to tell that person so, to give them the opportunity to repent. The New Testament authors go on and on about these matters. 1 John 1: “If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness”; but also we should take care to “Bear fruit worthy of repentance” (Matthew 3) — we must do more than speak words of penitence, but also pay our debt to our neighbor, the debt of love (Romans 13). And our overall daily approach to one another is prescribed by St. Paul in Ephesians 4: “So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another…. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.” Also in Colossians 3: “Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body. And be thankful.”

If you’re not a Christian, this stuff probably looks like a way to let people off easy. And in one sense it is. As Hamlet says, “Treat every man according to his desert, and who should ’scape whipping?” Christianity is all about people not getting what they deserve.  

In more recent statements from the University, I have seen the occasional reference to reconciliation, but mainly in order to say how long a road it will be to get there, if we get there at all. But still: as far as I can tell, not one word about grace, or mercy, or forgiveness — not one word of Christian hope. 

And I get it, or think I do. If you start talking about grace people will seize it, cheaply; hell, they might not only accept forgiveness but demand it. They will abuse the gift — but that’s because that’s what we sinners do, we abuse gifts. Our God hands them out anyway. Again: Jesus asked the Father to forgive those who were hanging him on a cross. Had they asked for it? Did they even want it? Had they undergone a lengthy process of truth and reconciliation in order to deserve it? Everything about the demand for earned forgiveness makes total human sense. But it’s not the Gospel of Jesus Christ. “Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.” It’s not an ambiguous statement. 

I think most of our projects of reconciliation, when they exist at all, have it backwards. They want a long penitence at the end of which the offended parties may or may not forgive. I think the Christian account says that forgiveness given and accepted is where reconciliation begins. So if we say we are Christians and want reconciliation but do not put grace, mercy, and forgiveness front and center in our public statements, then we’re operating as the world operates, not as the ekklesia is commanded to. 

Almost four years ago I wrote: 

When a society rejects the Christian account of who we are, it doesn’t become less moralistic but far more so, because it retains an inchoate sense of justice but has no means of offering and receiving forgiveness. The great moral crisis of our time is not, as many of my fellow Christians believe, sexual licentiousness, but rather vindictiveness. Social media serve as crack for moralists: there’s no high like the high you get from punishing malefactors. But like every addiction, this one suffers from the inexorable law of diminishing returns. The mania for punishment will therefore get worse before it gets better. 

I think it’s fair to say that that prophecy turned out to be true. And when it comes to dealing with malefactors … I look from Christian to unbeliever, and unbeliever to Christian, and as far as I can tell there ain’t a dime’s worth of difference between them. 

[Re: the writers of Job, the Psalms, Isaiah:] Their theme — and it is the proper theme of history — is not concerned with denying or affirming what men are IN THEMSELVES; it is concerned with the perception of the uncertainty of men in relation to what they are not, that is to say, in their relation to God who is their eternal Origin. Thence comes their radical attack! It has nothing to do with that relative criticism which must, of course, be exercised upon all religion, ethics, and civilization. For the same reason, it cannot remain satisfied with that relative approval which must be awarded to every human achievement when placed in its own context. The disturbance lies far deeper and is infinitely more than mere unrest, for it reaches out to a peace which is beyond the experience of normal human life. Its negation is all-embracing, since it proceeds from an all-embracing affirmation. Those who lead this attack are moved neither by pessimism, nor by the desire of tormenting themselves, nor by any pleasure in mere negation; they are moved by a grim horror of illusion; by a determination to bow before no empty tabernacle; by a single-minded and earnest striving after what is real and essential; by a firm rejection of every attempt to escape from the veritable relation between God and man; by a genuine refusal to be deceived by those penultimate and antepenultimate truths with which human research has to be content both at the beginning and at the end of its investigation. They allow full right to the materialistic, secular, “sceptical” view of the world; and then, assuming this final scepticism, they set forth upon the road which leads to the knowledge of God and thereby to the knowledge of the eternal significance of the world and of history. No road to the eternal meaning of the created world has ever existed, save the road of negation. This is the lesson of history. 

— Karl Barth, commentary on Romans 3

One of the major themes of my book Breaking Bread with the Dead is the danger of presentism. But what do I mean by that? Presentism is an unspoken and often unconscious allegiance to the conventional wisdom of our own era. Presentism assumes that the past is rarely if ever a source of instruction or insight — indeed is more typically something to fear and loathe — and can only be of interest in so far as it pleasingly anticipates something that we already (thanks to our contemporaries) know to be true or aggravatingly fails to affirm something we know to be true.

But there is another sense in which the present, for Christians especially, has a signal value. That value is explained to us by Screwtape in his fifteenth letter to Wormwood:

The humans live in time but our Enemy destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience analogous to the experience which our Enemy has of reality as a whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered them. He would therefore have them continually concerned either with Eternity (which means being concerned with Him) or with the Present — either meditating on their eternal union with, or separation from, Himself, or else obeying the present voice of conscience, bearing the present cross, receiving the present grace, giving thanks for the present pleasure.

You can see that presentism as I describe it means something altogether different than Screwtape’s description of the Present. Presentism limits our intellectual and moral equipment and thereby constrains our development; for Screwtape, or rather for the Enemy whose views he is describing, attention to the Present is absolutely essential for faithful Christian practice.

Screwtape makes a related point earlier in his series of letters when he comments that human beings have a curious ability to worry about many different possibilities at once, even though only one of them will happen. We radically multiply our anxieties by trying to prepare ourselves, all at once, for a series of eventualities that will never come to pass. It is as an antidote to this anxiety (among other things, of course) that attention to the present is counseled.

I think of Screwtape’s point often these days because for the last few years conservative Christianity in America has been completely inattentive to the requirements of the moment — in ways I recently commented on — but has been obsessively focused on a series of terrible futures which they believe are sure to come.

This kind of noise is ceaseless, and characteristic of non-religious as well as Christian populism. I commented a few years ago on the idea of the “Flight 93 Election,” when we were told to “charge the cockpit or die.” What does that mean? I asked over and over again, and no one would ever tell me. Die how? Rounded up and shot on the day of Hillary Clinton’s inauguration? Gradually shipped to concentration camps? Presumably not; presumably it wasn’t meant literally — but what was even the figurative meaning? I could guess, but not with any confidence.

The same rhetoric re-emerged last fall. “I’d be happy to die in this fight,” Eric Metaxas told Donald Trump. “This is a fight for everything.” Obviously not “everything” — it’s not a fight for the continued existence of cronuts or for the political leadership of Zambia — so what does “everything” mean, for Metaxas? Also, how exactly does he think he would die? (I mean, Biden is President and Eric is still alive …) In this case I can’t guess what he means.

(Though maybe some of these people really and literally do mean that everything hangs in the balance: the MyPillow guy says that if his movie about election fraud doesn’t convince everyone in America that the election was stolen from Donald Trump, then “We pray and we go to heaven, it’s over.” He can’t mean what he’s saying … can he?)

All the “prepare for great tribulation” shouting, in its milder and more severe forms, has certain common traits.

The first is what I’ve called an “absolutizing of fright.”

The second is that this absolute fright has no content. What, specifically, do they think will actually happen to American Christians over the next few years? What do they think are the next steps even? It’s usually impossible to tell, and it’s impossible to tell because they don’t know, they don’t have any actual ideas, they just have overwhelming forebodings.

Which leads me to the third point: They have been completely consumed by their forebodings. I think of the character in Dostoyevsky’s Demons who says to one of the revolutionaries, “I only know that you did not eat the idea — the idea ate you.” These people have been eaten by their fears.

And that’s why they can’t pay any attention to the demands God makes on them in the moment. That’s why — referring back to my post from the other day — they don’t bless those who curse them or pray for those who persecute them or turn the other cheek or seek to live in peace with their neighbors or any of the other things that their faith clearly commands them to do. They don’t obey in the moment because they can’t see the moment — their eyes are fixed on the distance, where they perceive a great and terrible cloud of … something. Something coming to destroy them. Somehow.

And they don’t, therefore, remember that even if their worse fears come true, it won’t abrogate or even lessen a single one of those commandments. Jesus Christ asked forgiveness for those who were nailing him to a cross. Do we think we have it tougher than that? Or will? If we were to give a seriously biblical and genuinely Christian answer to the question of how we might prepare for some future disaster, we would have to say: By doing what Christians always do. In good times or bad, Christians proclaim that Jesus is Lord and seek to love Him and love our neighbors as ourselves. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away; Blessed be the name of the Lord.

I think peace often arises from clarity. So let’s be clear about a few things:

1. Arsenal are a mid-table side. For the foreseeable future, they won’t be relegated but they won’t be in the Champions League either. The absolute height of their ambition will be to make the Europa League every now and then.
2. Arsenal are a mid-table side because they have mid-table quality players.
3. Arsenal have mid-table quality players in part because they have made some massively stupid purchases, but in larger part because their ownership is not willing to invest the money needed to compete with Champions League-level clubs.
4. It is possible that that will change, that some plutocrat or collective of plutocrats will see a London club with a distinguished history as an attractive investment and will convince the Kroenkes to sell, but unless and until that happens none of the above points will change.

Therefore, fellow Arsenal supporters: Be pleased when your team makes the top half of the table. Be ecstatic when they make the Europa League. And don’t expect, or even hope, for anything more.

On the one hand, it’s good to stretch yourself intellectually; on the other hand, when you do so you might pull a muscle. In my recent essay on Cosmotechnics, I got in over my head — delightfully so, for me, but it led to at least one embarrassing error.

In my first footnote I talk about Yuk Hui’s use of the word qi and I get it wrong. I received a very kind email from a Sinologist named Nils Wieland explaining my mistake:

qi 氣 is the Qi non-Chinese speakers have heard of as some sort of energy or spirit, which Yuk Hui romanizes as Ch’i.

qi 器 doesn’t have the same popularity, it’s a standard Chinese word meaning container, vessel or instrument, and it’s the Qi from Yuk Hui’s Dao-Qi-duality.

(Both qi’s sound exactly the same, so I guess differentiating them by romanization is a good approach; what’s odd is that he chose the nowadays standard Pinyin spelling for the less famous qi – throwing people off ;) )

Dammit! I knew something like this had to be the case; you wouldn’t believe how long and fruitlessly I googled the question. Again, this is what happens when your reach exceeds your grasp — and (trying to be meaningfully self-reflective here) I think on some level I was afraid that if I contacted a Sinologist I’d get the information but would also be told that my whole essay was nonsense. And I really wanted to write that essay.

I also have received a very kind message from Tongdong Bai, whom I quote in my essay, pointing to other work of his on the political implications (or lack thereof) of Daoism. Nils Wieland suggested some further reading too. So while I am embarrassed at my rookie error I have some interesting next steps to take in this project.