I’m finally tackling Joseph Campbell’s Hero With a Thousand Faces. (‘Tis my second attempt; it’s a tome and my first attempt didn’t get very far.) Very much, I agree with his assessment that there are common threads and story beats universal to every culture. But I can’t get over how he often uses one person’s dream to assist in this argument.

The last dream I remember was a bunch of boho hippies who could walk through walls rolling up to my house in big trucks with bright lights and insisting I take a very important, very ancient book from them. I wonder what Mr. Campbell would say about that.

Anyway, I think what we obsess over when we’re awake—what we dream of when we’re conscious—is more important.

dreaming of oases for all

Plough magazine’s got an essay of mine out now—Oases in the Urban Wasteland. It’s been two years now since I first put some of these thoughts to paper—about belonging and community and how we build a world that does not suggest that city-dwellers and non-traditional families are simply on the outs when it comes to the good life. This dream is important to me.

The past year has shown me that oases are not built through grand gestures or industrial hospitality but through ordinary consistency. It takes work. It takes not giving up on the group chat and sometimes having adult conversations while toddlers wrestle on the couch. The behaviors that push back the wasteland are undeniably mundane and arguably more accessible in the urban biome where so many are searching for life-giving fragments to shore against their ruins.

what else?

I’ve been less frequent on Substack the past few weeks, but here’s some of what I read that stood out.

Smoke Cigarettes and Die by

I praised this one earlier, but I want to do so again. Half-measures are destructive spiritually. Never committing to anything—even something small like having a drink—makes us incapable of, well, committing to anything. Every decent magician will tell you: magic has a cost. And not drinking responsibly (refusing to embrace the reality of cost) hinders our overall development. Recently, I heard BE RUTHLESS WITH YOUR TIME. Time is the great resource that we are always spending. And what we commit to directly correlates to the withdrawals from our bank account. We must commit our funds wisely.

“It’s an unsettling thing to realize you may be assembled of other’s recommendations despite your best efforts,”

writes in for who am i if not what i scroll through? Great title! And great thoughts on whether the desire for escape from the internet-permeated world is just as much a side-effect of how performance is demanded of us at every turn.

I doubt many of you are on the Sydney Sweeney beat…

but I didn’t think If Porn is Conservative, Count Me Out would be a necessary thing to say until I saw The Free Press video finding fault with those who took umbrage with Sweeney’s recent sports gambling ad—not because of the gambling, but because of the nudity. (As much as I like Bari Weiss’ outfit, it feels like TFP doesn’t have their heads screwed on as straight as I thought they did.) cautions against being taken in by those who think “traditional values” might include defending “the outright objectification of a naked woman by mostly male consumers.” If so, we’ve “totally and sincerely lost the plot.”

joy, lament and frustration of working with evangelicals

There’s a lot that goes through my feed about how off-track Christianity Today has gotten over the past several years. I don’t invest in that conversation one way or the other, but I found ’s take wise.

I recognize that many evangelical institutions create the untenable expectation for one to be a pioneering agent of reconciliation (or transformation) while upholding aspects of evangelicalism that obstruct the very change they seek. Some want growth in diversity but refuse the types of conversations that might bring it.

Super-true.

Since it’s voting season in the U.S…

As far as biting political commentary goes, has something to say:

A vote is not a sacrament. It is not a confession of faith or an expression of romantic devotion or an affidavit attesting to the moral perfection of the person receiving it. It is an instrument through which one attempts to produce more of the political outcomes one desires and fewer of those one does not. Nothing about this requires abandoning one’s broader ambitions, relinquishing the pursuit of systemic change, or developing an emotional attachment to the candidate in question. You are not marrying these people. You are attempting to exercise some measure of influence over the conditions under which you must continue living.

Politics as a strictly practical and utilitarian endeavor is something I can get behind.

Narnia (controversy), awake!

Finally, I know the debate over the Magician’s Nephew movie has completely died down. But there are a few things I’ve read that are worth considering still.

• I’ve yet to jump on the Planet Narnia bandwagon, but argues that Greta Gerwig may have read Michael Ward’s work and allowed it to shape her vision for the film.

• In quite a tone-shift from her Daily Wire piece, wrestles with the sincerity Gerwig exudes when she speaks about Narnia and about film-making in general.

• Finally, addresses all angles of the controversies in his humorous piece, Fine. I’ll Write about that Narnia trailer.

• (Close encounters of the Narnian kind — icymi, this is what I wrote post-official images release, but prior to the trailer drop.)

asides + signal boosts

📖 Reading

• Had occasion to dive into Frankenstein again, thanks to putting together an October zoom book discussion group. It’s a much thicker story than I’d remembered. (I highly recommend the Penguin Classics edition for the introductory material alone.)

🎞️ Watching

• Watched Clayface, the “horror” superhero film from DC. It was more be mindful if you’re squeamish about blood-letting than horror in my opinion, but interesting nonetheless. I’m curious to see how more independently toned films blend together in the overall DC Universe.

• Wildwood. This one’s definitely going down as one of my favorites of all-time and one of the top two movies I’ve seen this year. A magical fantasy with harsh stakes, humor, and heavenly artistry. Go see it if you haven’t!

🎧 Listening

• New albums from SAINt JHN (If Tomorrow Never Comes), Tobe Nwigwe (THE BRIDGE), and BigXthaPlug (BETTER OVER TIME) dropped this month. I’ve been enjoying those.

• Also, CHVRCHES dropped two singles from their upcoming fifth studio album, All the King’s Men—releasing next January.

Fortunate Fall! Happy Fall! Be ruthless with your time!

(This series is an adaptation of a talk I gave at Hutchmoot UK 2025. I’ve finally gotten around to posting it here, partly as prelude to a soon-coming series on bodies as iconography.) Part 1, Part 2

Here, I want to discuss the concept of our bodies as a canvas for storytelling.

Three summer ago, I attended a race day in Newmarket with some acquaintances. I was sitting with one of them on the grass near the finish line between races. She was bare-armed, in a sundress, and had a motorcycle tattoo on her shoulder. I asked, “Do you ride?”

She said, “no,” and hesitated.

I could tell that ink weighed heavily. She told me her brother was a rider and had died in a wreck a few years earlier. Her tattoo was her memorial to him.

Little did I know, a few months later, my sister would pass in a car wreck. This friend was someone I was able to talk to during that time—all because her tattoo was the gateway to a story.

Dr. Joseph Pierre, a healthcare professor and co-author of a study on skin art and psychiatric practice, says, “Tattoos are often telling an important story through art that isn’t expressed in words.”

Through tattoos, bodies bear marks of history in a permanent and visible way. Wrinkles, lines, and other physical conditions also tell the story of a life. But body marking possesses the capability to reveal that which is hidden. It is a chosen revelation about one’s past or one’s thought processes. Even the most impulsively gotten tattoo is a time capsule, a memento temporum, connected to a specific time, place, and state of mind.

speaks of the idea of a “tattoo narrative,” similar to a “conversion narrative”—an account of significant change, transformation, or development bound within a chronological framework.

In his book, How to Inhabit Time, relates the story of his daughter getting a tattoo against parental prohibition. The tattoo on her arm turned out to be the GPS coordinates of the house she had been raised in—and this was a way of inhabiting time and remembering the place and moments by which she’d been shaped.

Share very public secret society

Body markings not only commemorate history but tell stories and express important identities to the world. Tattoo artist Nick F, who also goes by Tahini and specializes in Hebrew and Jewish-themed tattoos, said:

In a world…where it is beneficial for us to try and invisiblize our Jewishness, the act of having and receiving Judaica tattoos creates radical visibility… It is a way of engaging the world and allowing ourselves to be seen by our potential peers, while also welcoming the challenge of bigotry and confronting antisemitism head-on.

The deliberate marking of our bodies is an outgrowth of a desire to provide a sense of coherence, unity, and meaning to our lives. These permanent markers, like the stela of ancient civilizations, give a sense of history, movement, and direction. Israel raised stone markers in the Promised Land to remember not only where they had come from, but where God promised to take them. In a constantly shifting world, the thing we are always left with is our bodies and the marks we have made on them—most potent reminders.

As much as we think of tattoos as expressions of a desire for permanence, technology today makes it possible to get impermanent tattoos or to remove tattoos altogether.

The founders of a company called Ephemeral pioneered a kind of ink designed to break down over time due to the body’s natural processes. Their tattoos fade in nine-to-fifteen months.

Interestingly enough, some take issue with the very idea of an impermanent tattoo. An individual with over 100 tattoos told the New York Times, “I like the fact that they are permanent because they are part of me. They represent a moment in time, and I like living with all my history.” She equated tattoos she no longer cares for to scars, a remnant of bad choices made when one was younger.

Other famous tattoo artists take issue with companies like Ephemeral for artistic reasons. Keith McCurdy, who’s been creating tattoos for almost twenty years, argues that Ephemeral “seems to move the needle backward…” He says, “A tattoo designed not to last potentially decreases the value of this art form, which historically struggled to gain the monetary value of other forms of art like painting or sculpture.”

Another artist, Sweet Sue, who inked for over two decades before losing her battle with cancer in 2025, said, “We spend our entire careers trying to figure out the mystery of how to get nice, clean, solid lines to lay in the skin perfectly and stay forever. It makes me want to cry to see all this hard work just disappear.”

Despite such hand-wringing over impermanent tattoos, some see the removal of tattoos as an important evolution in their story.

Model and socialite Angela White, better known as Blac Chyna, posted a video of her getting a tattoo of Baphomet removed two days after sharing her story of conversion and baptism. “Thank you, God, for saving me,” she wrote. “I’m sending all this energy back to the owner.” She also had other body modifications, including lip filler and posterior implants, removed as part of her journey.

However you feel about the validity of permanent vs. impermanent tattoos, one thing is clear: our bodies are a mechanism for storytelling. And storytelling does not just exist for the sake of self, but for the sake of others. We live in a society in which those outside of ourselves are always interpreting our presentation of self—from the clothes and jewelry we wear to the way we style our hair and mark our bodies.

A few years ago, a friend of mine came back from a trip to Las Vegas with a Vegas Golden Knights hoodie for me. I love that hoodie. It’s probably the most comfortable item of clothing I have. However, almost every time I wore it for the first few months, I’d get shoutouts from passersby who assumed I was a Golden Knights fan. And I’m not; I don’t really care for hockey that much. But by me wearing that hoodie, people assume something about my story, about who I am.

Hence the fascinating nexus between what we intend by a thing and what our society, our community, understands that thing to be. There is a social dimension to all of our self-expression. We are the beauty or the terror in the eyes of our beholders. The storytelling that we do with our bodies is a significant affair.

Finally… body art as a process of reclamation, incarnation, and possibly redemption.

I think it’s fairly basic to state that we ourselves, our naked forms, are an image of God—we reflect him in this world by maintaining a form that he bore when he entered this world. And like him, we image that which is important to us by what we mark and allow to be marked on our bodies.

In Isaiah (49:16), the Lord engraves the children of Israel on his palms as proof that he would never forget them and would, one day, restore them.

The resurrected Lord identifies himself by the marks left where metal tore his skin. Yes, in a perfect, renewed, restored, and presumably flawless body, he willingly retains the marks of a criminal justice and criminally unjust system. We could imagine that, if first-century criminals routinely returned from the dead following Roman crucifixion, society would tell them they should hide the accompanying marks so that they could not be identified as somehow inferior.

For Christ, the very icon of redemption, the marked body is not a flaw, not inferior, but a way of identifying history overcome by grace. The marks are a feature not a bug. Which begs the question: Will glorified bodies retain their tattoos?

I wonder if the tattoo, and its process of breaking and healing, has itself become an avenue of small iconography and incarnation, a minor representation of a process embedded in an eternal and ever-evolving story.

Robert Anthony Orsi, a scholar of American history and Catholic studies, writes:

The materialization of religious worlds includes a process that might be called the corporalization of the sacred. I mean by this the practice of rendering the invisible visible by constituting it as an experience in a body—in one’s own body or in someone else’s body—so that the experiencing body itself becomes the bearer of presence for oneself and for others.

For some, the act of tattooing might be…

• A way of conforming one’s body to Christ’s

• A way of reclaiming the historical norm of constant visible reminders of transformation in a world where much beyond our bodies is transient and shifting

• A way of “corporalizing”—that is, incarnating—an important aspect of one’s story or a larger, mythic metanarrative

Far from what its detractors might suggest, the tattoo is not cultural “gibberish.” It is an expansion of iconography, those signs which both conceal and reveal deeper realities. Some researchers have gone so far as to suggest that a lack of emphasis on iconographic and liturgical practices in modern churches have left a void that the logic of the tattoo has inevitably filled.

Matthew Lee Anderson writes:

This is the paradox, then, of the cultural ascension of tattoos: While tattoos mark a desire for significance within a destabilized world, they are a live option for most young people precisely because we [the church] have not escaped the clutches of the consumerism and the individualism that are so often criticized.

Deeper meanings and hidden stories are worth holding before our eyes and within ourselves. A friend who has as many tattoos for as many years as she’s been alive told me about a woman who gets a new flower tattoo to mark every year that she’s sober. Sometimes, her kids, the beneficiaries of her choice to abstain from alcohol, pick out the flower.

This expansion and articulation of iconography can be seen in the penultimate act of Flannery O’Connor’s “Parker’s Back.” You’ll recall: Parker is at his wits’ end with his over-zealous and judgmental wife. Becoming increasingly depressed and disillusioned, and unable to bring himself to leave her, he obsesses over the last bit of significant real estate on his body—his back, which remains untattooed.

Something that would show Sarah Ruth his commitment to the things that were important to her in the way that he best knew how to show it.

Later, he finds himself on holy ground, having crashed his tractor into an old tree, setting it on fire, and losing his shoes in the process. He is spurred to unthinking action, blindly driving to a tattoo artist fifty miles away.

“Let me see the book you got with all the pictures of God,” he demands.

He is convinced that the face of God will call to him out of the catalog. And the face that calls is “the haloed head of a flat stern Byzantine Christ with all-demanding eyes.” Parker demands that this particular face, in all its intricate detail—detail which presages an assemblance of pain—be tattooed on his back. The face is one emblematic of overwhelming commitment, the only adequate answer to Christ’s call.

Once the tattoo is complete, Parker goes through a cycle of doubt, worry, denial, and finally resignation.

The first instance of this kind of irrefusable call to some kind of obedience occurred when Parker’s spirit is raptured at the sight of the tattooed man at the fair when he was fourteen. He had, in some way, obeyed that pursuit of wonder and rapture all his life. And that pursuit finds its apex in Parker compulsively marking the face of God on his body.

Now he follows a compulsion once again. He goes home to face his wife.

Shockingly, but not surprisingly, Sarah Ruth cannot see the light. She rages against Parker’s new tattoo. She can see neither the God in him nor the God on him and accuses him of idolatry. “I can put up with lies and vanity, but I don’t want no idolator in this house!” she says.

Parker staggers away from the house and we last see him in the yard, leaning against a tree.

In the end, he becomes an image, an icon—a living picture of what he desperately sought to reflect with his body. We are left to wonder if, by that last bodily sacrifice and violent rejection—if by his messy attempt to incarnate God on and in his body—he was finally redeemed.

This, for me, is at the heart of the questions surrounding not only tattoos but marking and adorning our bodies in any way. Such acts are inherently aspirational pursuits. We are trying to pin something down, to both conceal and disclose—a history, a choice, a dream, a commitment, a story, a transformation—something that is bigger than the ink itself.

C.S. Lewis has been breathing down my neck for twenty-plus years. It’s a running observation among those who know me well that I can hardly write something without referencing the writer-philosopher-theologian extraordinaire.1 (I often give myself that challenge and routinely fail—this essay will be a landslide for the opposition.)

My imagination and interior life were set on a path of flaming transformation after reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe for the first time in 2005. Having written nigh 60,000 Narnia-related and inspired words since then, I consider myself firmly set among those who care intensely about Narnia and the world in which it exists.

However, some of the reactions I’ve witnessed to recent announcements about Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of The Magician’s Nephew have made me second-guess this belonging. It seems that some cannot extend the spirit of Narnian welcome (as exemplified in my favorite Narnia story, The Horse and his Boy) to those who dare chart a silver screen course for Charn.

Eleven days ago, the trickle of information about Greta’s adaptation became a steady stream thanks to an Empire feature story which gifted us some astonishing visuals. In one discord server I’m in, mature optimism in reaction to the logo (the first item that dropped) transformed into outrage when, a few hours later, it became clear that Meryl Streep was voicing Aslan, the cosmic lion deity and mysterious Son of the Emperor-over-the-Sea. Someone I respect as a friend and fellow writer declared the film a “deathwork” and expressed his desire for it to ‘fail utterly and spectacularly.’2

Admittedly, if one scours the corners of the web haunted by Narnia fans or religious and social conservatives, one will find that this adaptation has always been held at arm’s length for several reasons:

• General distrust of a director who identifies as a “feminist”3—because no feminist should ever be trusted with C.S. Lewis’ work obviously.

• General distrust of Netflix as a Big Corporation desiring to churn out content for profit. Ergo, the big company can’t possibly care about the story or what “real” fans want.4

• Early mention that this film would be influenced by a rock ‘n’ roll aesthetic and rock ‘n’ roll icons.

• Early rumors that Meryl Streep would voice Aslan.

• Resituating the story from early 1900s to 1955, creating downstream complications for any future adaptations in Greta’s corner of what might rapidly become the Narnia Multiverse.

Travel down this path and you just don’t have The Magician’s Nephew anymore, or so the argument goes. I can stomach that argument.

What I cannot stomach is the argument that Greta’s film erases, perverts, or destroys The Magician’s Nephew—regardless of how much one might end up not liking it—or that a heterochromatic lion voiced by an actress some consider the greatest of her generation is an assault on Christianity. You know things are bad when The Daily Wire’s initial tact is Tim Rice’s chill out, it’s just a movie takedown of conservative pearl-clutching. Rice’s scolding was so shocking to The Daily Wire’s readership that the publication subsequently hired to argue for the other side.

I understand the general outrage of this is not the story I was expecting to see—I imagine we’ve all been there more than once lately—but if Narniacore is, well, core to your faith, you may have made an idol in C.S. Lewis’ image.

This, of course, is not the first time unreasonable outrage has conflated with news about a film pre-release. We did this with The Odyssey, you’ll recall. A slightly different group of people fomented the outrage, but the Venn diagram, I suspect, has many of the usual suspects. Christopher Nolan suddenly became a Western Civ iconoclast—and then the movie came out, and it was just a movie. And a far better movie than some thought it would be—one which nearly made Homer’s story the most sought-after book buy in the U.S.

The current dialogue around The Magician’s Nephew is the first time I’ve felt so deeply cut by the discourse. Partly because some of the people involved in that discourse are more than just internet acquaintances obscured by nerdy usernames and profile pics. Partly also because Narnia is my #1 fandom. I consider myself a tough cookie but I’ve never felt sadness settle in my soul for such long hours (and days) like it did last week after participating in the aforementioned discord chat.

What I’ve come away thinking is that I’m not quite sure those who despise and wish ill on a work of art they haven’t seen are quite the best ambassadors for Narnia at all. The suggestion is subliminal in these conversations: those who do not share hatred about Greta’s adaptation are not true friends of Narnia and cannot possibly love Aslan.5 I cannot imagine such individuals walking with a swing, chatting and laughing, through the streets of Tashbaan.

Aslan and the divine family

My feelings about Greta’s film in this moment are partly fueled by an ongoing journey in biblical studies.

My wife and I recently read The Unseen Realm with a couple of friends. It’s a book by late Old Testament scholar Michael Heiser whose work is all about recovering the worldview of the ancient ancient near east and the context from which emerged the record we now call the Bible.

The people who first heard from the God who would eventually reveal himself in Jesus did not have the static view of deity that we Western religious types have today. They considered their god as one of many similar divine beings, part of a “divine family,” more than just the triune godhead and a bunch of servient angels. This was a view shared by the people around them—the people we consider heathen.

Our translations and interpretations of Scripture occlude this reality. We assume there is only one god and all others are “false” or “idols.” The truth is: all those “little-g gods” are great and consequential beings who have specific roles and real cosmic responsibility. Heiser’s work explores the Hebrew language and brings forth realities which transform how we see the ancient world, our world, and the supernatural. Most importantly, his framework emphasizes the responsibility that humans have as image bearers of the divine, as divine partners, and as those designed to administer God’s world alongside the rest of his family.

Shortly after finishing that book, I stumbled across BEMA Discipleship, a podcast I’ve begun listening to alongside daily Scripture. The hosts dive into ancient language and culture to highlight things that are easy to miss when we read through our Western and English lenses.

It’s not that what you’ve always believed about the Fall or God’s covenant with Abraham is wrong. But when you realize that very similar Hebrew words are used to describe the serpent and Adam and Eve, or that God changing Abram’s and Sarai’s names was not just a cool redirection of destiny, but a deliberate diluting of ancient power structures, those stories come to life with great significance. Something real, valent, and surprisingly relevant glimmers up from the ancient source.

And that brings us back to Greta’s adaptation.

anti-glimmer glimmer society

Some folks are opposed to Greta’s choices from a purely adaptational lens. Why do the time shift? Why cast a black actor as Frank? Why have a woman voice Aslan? Etc. These things change the tenor of the story in one way or another—but they are all within the realm of adaptational license.

I am mostly concerned with those who object for reasons rooted in religious faith.

In much of the commentary I’ve read, there seems to be a resistance to anything that opens the aperture on Lewis’s tale or on our understanding of Christianity in general. No, Aslan is Jesus and therefore he must be a lion voiced by a male human. I get it. I do.

Lewis has helped to shape the spiritual bowels of so many of us through his beautiful lion and the world he sang into being so that when we go to the Bible and walk through the world, we recognize God for who he is and ourselves for the small creatures who need him, who must trust him, who ought to be grateful for the deep magic of his providence and love.

Me, too, . Me, too.6

But I am also willing to sit and look at Narnia—and, by extension, our world and my faith—through the eyes of another. (Something I wrestle with, in a Narnian context, here.) I might see something new, interesting, and beautiful. As with Scripture, I might see a glimmer of truths that are lost, obscured by my Western eyes and twenty-first century mindset.

My friend writes:

…we’ve been taught to understand our holy stories [both the Bible and Narnia apparently] not as conversations or mysteries to be understood and unpacked with thoughtful interpretation, but as simple math problems with one clear moral takeaway that can be easily systematized and placed inside a “Bible Answer Book.”

The hosts of the BEMA Discipleship project also say as much, and use a variety of examples in their introductory episode to demonstrate how the Bible “is a very Eastern conversation that we’re eavesdropping on…”

For the Westerner, faith is about creeds, doctrines, and belief statements… we love to proof-text to support our belief… It’s just how we interact with faith. Whereas for the Hebrew, faith is relational. They’re not going to try to define what that looks like because they have experiences with God… You read the story about Abraham sacrificing Isaac, and there’s no addendum at the end of the story where they try to resolve it. They’re just trying to communicate what Abraham experienced on that mountain. They’re not trying to make sense of it. They’re not giving you a blog post with three points that all start with the letter R. They’re just trying to tell the story, because somewhere in that story, Abraham found a part of who God was.7

If religiously-rooted objections to Greta’s Narnia are the hills we’re dying on, I’ll drink from the cup that says, “The earth is the LORD’s, and the fullness thereof, the world and all who dwell therein.”

If the world is the Lord’s—if Narnia and C.S. Lewis and Greta Gerwig and Meryl Streep are the Lord’s—we can find God wherever we are looking for him. But only if we’re looking. If we’ve already trotted out the “Translan” moniker, we’ve put blinders on and closed our imaginative eye to any glimmer of goodness, truth, or beauty that might be present. We refuse to see any part of who God is that may be present in the story that’s unfolding now.

Narnia, awake—and unfold infinitely!

The BEMA hosts again:8

For the Westerner, truth is static and unchanging.

For the Westerner, truth is absolute.

For the Easterner, truth is dynamic.

That does not mean truth is relative—that is a false dilemma.

For the Easterner, truth is unfolding over time.

If I could pull any Narnian parable and apply it to this debate (or to our times generally), it would be the one about the disbelieving dwarves in the imaginary stable “sitting very close together in a little circle facing one another,” refusing to believe that the sun is shining and wine and food are flowing and that the dark night is over and the good guys won.

“Their prison is only in their own minds,” says Aslan. “Yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out.”

Rampant now is the fear that we, or the world, or our children are going to be taken in by some grand deception orchestrated by Netflix and Greta Gerwig. If there is some grand deception going on, they are doing a grand job at the deception part.

Fundamentally, because we do not see what we want to see, we render ourselves incapable of seeing anything good at all.

None of this is to lift Greta to the status of saint or prophet. She’s merely a single creative among many, grappling with the stories of previous generations through the lens and sensibilities of now. She might, as Georgia says, use her “spiritual imagination”9 to “provoke and surprise” a “complacent audience.” And she definitely lucked out with the dream job of bringing Charn and the Wood Between the Worlds to life.

Obviously, Greta herself is a product of the West. The East-West distinctions raised above are (and ought to be) inherently brought to bear on Biblical interpretation. I bring this conversation to the context of Narnia not to argue that we might be West of C.S. Lewis’ East—although there is something to say for that—but to point out how looking at an established work of art from a different point of view holds value, especially when the thing one is looking at has become simulacrum that threatens to reduce our understanding of the real thing. I am embracing this consideration both as I study Scripture and as I engage with art.

In the Empire piece, Greta references William Blake:

“Part of going to Narnia,” Greta says, “is having the doors of perception cleansed—that you see things as they are, which is infinite. It’s only when you can’t see that everything feels disparate and in some sort of linear time.”

I understand dislike or disdain for creative choices in adaptations. Hardly anyone has been completely happy with a rendition of a book to film. But in the vehemence of the debate around The Magician’s Nephew, I’m reminded of cult obsessions where those who claim the light belongs solely to them are the ones who live in darkness. We’d be better off if we aspired to have more of a sense of wonder, welcome, curiosity, and openness—to live like true Narnians and not those dwarves in the self-imposed stable.

Greta’s Narnia makes us uncomfortable because it doesn’t fit neatly into any of the creedal boxes we’ve pre-set for C.S. Lewis’ work: it doesn’t have a medieval-inspired aesthetic or a classical score or easy-to-grasp Christian imagery (that we know of). It doesn’t have Liam Neeson offering his stentorian voice to bring Aslan to life. (Yes, the Liam Neeson who said Aslan symbolizes “Mohammed, Buddha and all the great spiritual leaders and prophets over the centuries.”)

Would I enjoy a cozy, “traditional” (whatever that means) adaptation of The Magician’s Nephew? Yes, I probably would. But no art is required to feed me the food I’m used to eating. The same way the Bible isn’t required to reaffirm all the notions I’m already comfortable with. I can stay home from the cinemas and re-read Mere Christianity if I just want a reminder of Christian doctrine.

My anticipation is that Greta’s Narnia will communicate some of the many-splendored aspects of Lewis’ writing that get overlooked, miscommunicated, or watered down in the handy Christian iconography that Narnia has become. I expect to find these glimmers of light because I’ll be looking for them, because I’ll hold my impression of Narnia loosely and remain willing to see this world through another lens.

The Magician’s Nephew (both book and film adaptation) is an experience—a story—not mere shorthand for my theology. It deserves the chance to unfold itself.

Anyway, Greta, welcome to Narnia! We promise it’s not always like this.

A few random thoughts related to the Empire piece.

If I loved Greta for nothing else, I love her for building The Eagle & Child (or at least its façade) into one of the sets of The Magician’s Nephew.

Emma Mackey (Jadis) has this to say about Greta…

I love this in a creative person and, if this isn’t a weird thing to say, it’s one of my favorite aspects of myself. I think creative projects and creative people are better when they are informed by aspects of our wide world that might, at first blush, seem wholly unrelated.

Recommended reads on this topic.

Inclusion of items here does not mean wholesale endorsement of the contents or arguments therein…

• If you can and if you’re curious, get the November 2026 edition of Empire Magazine! Read the story and look at the pictures. If it’s not on newsstands near you, it’s available on Amazon Kindle.

• An Open Letter to Greta Gerwig by

• Why Are Christians So Afraid of Adaptations? by

• Is The Magician’s Nephew Even an Adaptation? by

Perhaps the most frequent argument I see against Streep voicing Aslan is that it is very important that Aslan be a masculine lion because God is a father—like this unsubtly titled piece, Why Aslan Is Male, and Why God Is a Father by .

Once again, I get it. I really do. If Aslan were portrayed as a lioness, it would fundamentally change the tenor of the adaptation and make it more of an inspired by retelling with some important parts left out. But I’m not going to the theater needing to be reminded that God is a father or for a good representation of “fatherly tender strength” as James references in his piece linked above. If that’s there, great! But it’s unfair for me to require something of a creative project that I have no hand in making or to get upset if it doesn’t deliver a theme or thread that I’m personally invested in.

Maybe someone should make a list of films that depict that much-needed “fatherly tender strength”—number one on the list might be 2005’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which is a baller film and one of my favorites.

I appreciate ’s consideration that an adaptation that looks at the story through a different (maternal) lens also has value to add to our conversation around Lewis’ work.

More on fantasy and adaptations in general.

Since I end up writing about this stuff so much, I’m adding a tab to VPSS called Adventures in Adaptation. Here’s some of the stuff that will be collected there if you want to keep reading.

(This series is an adaptation of a talk I gave at Hutchmoot UK 2025. I’ve finally gotten around to posting it here, partly as prelude to a soon-coming series on bodies as iconography.) Part 1

I think Flannery O’Connor and I are very alike. I am not, unfortunately, as good of a writer as she was. But I can say that Flannery, like me, did not have any tattoos. And yet she wrote this violently insightful story—“Parker’s Back”—about a worldly Southern man who wants to have nothing to do with God or good morals and finds his only sense of enchantment, rapture, or wonder, first in the presentation of a tattooed man, and then by getting into tattoos himself. I like to think that, as she was writing this story, she did a lot of research and reading and talking to people with tattoos and a fair amount of googling as I did.

“Parker’s Back” provides a compelling framework for exploring the whys and wherefores of body art, especially for religiously interested people and people interested in the presentation of the body as a reflection of deeper truths and realities.

The titular character, O.E. Parker, first sees a man covered in tattoos at a fair when he’s 14-years-old. He is “filled with emotion, lifted up as some people are when the flag passes...” Before this time, O’Connor writes, he “had never felt the least motion of wonder in himself.” This feeling of wonder at the sight of images rippling across that man’s skin stays with Parker. He starts getting tattoos wherever he goes, beginning with an eagle perched on a cannon. He discovers that girls find his tattoos attractive, so he’s intent on getting more. He also starts getting into fights and drinking. Parker’s mother, concerned for his soul, attempts to drag him to a revival meeting, prompting him to run off and join the Navy. Within a few years, his entire body, with the exception of his back, is covered in colorful images. “Parker would be satisfied with each tattoo about a month, then something about it that had attracted him would wear off.” And he’d go get another one.

Discharged from the Navy and back home in Alabama, he meets Sarah Ruth—she is straight, strict, and stern. She hates almost everything about Parker—his lack of religion, his vanity, and especially his tattoos.

Naturally, they get married.

A few months later, Parker can’t make sense of how he let a woman like Sarah Ruth get ahold of him. He’s wild and unpoliceable; she is the police. Despite her consistent and vocal disapproval of his behavior (and of his very self), he finds himself stuck with her.

She’s pregnant. He descends deeper into disorientation and depression. He’s riding a tractor one day, pondering his life and how he can finally get Sarah Ruth to approve of him, when he crashes into a tree. The tree bursts into flames, he’s kicked out of his own shoes, and in a stupor of revelation, he realizes he needs to get the face of God tattooed on his back.

That’ll make Sarah Ruth happy. That’ll solve all his problems.

Parker’s obsession with tattoos makes for a very interesting character. We see his yearning in three forms. He yearns for a sense of wonder, a sense of connection, and a sense of order and unity.

When 14-year-old Parker sees that fully-tattooed man displaying the handiwork all over his body, he’s raptured in a way that he’d never felt before. Before then, O’Connor writes, “it had never entered his head that there was anything out of the ordinary about the fact that he existed.”

The images awakened him—the way they fit together and seemed just a tiny bit alive on their own. That man’s tattoos gave him something to be alive to.

Share very public secret society

Parker attempts to recreate this sense of awe, of wonder, in his own life. It is the sort of thing C.S. Lewis talked about—being surprised by joy and always seeking the re-creation, the re-experience of that surprise. The ink and needle are Parker’s gateway drug. But like most drugs, they lose their effectiveness after a while.

The effect of the tattoos…

…was not of one intricate arabesque of colors but of something haphazard and botched…

As the space on the front of him for tattoos decreased, his dissatisfaction grew and became general.

His dissatisfaction, from being chronic and latent, had suddenly become acute and raged in him. It was as if the panther and the lion and the serpents and the eagles and the hawks [all the animals tattooed on his body] had penetrated his skin and lived inside him in a raging warfare.

Here, we see, the outside and the inside are reflections of each other.

What’s Parker missing? When he meets Sarah Ruth, it appears that what he might be missing is connection and community. Things that hitherto he’s run from. Sarah Ruth is the first person he tells his real name to—O.E. Parker, Obadiah Elihue. She knows his secret, the identity he’s been hiding from. He pursues her and, despite their stark differences, they end up married. He temporarily gives up getting tattoos because they’re displeasing to her. Still, he’s dissatisfied.

Parker longs for some sort of order and unity, something to bring everything together and makes sense of his existence. Something that would heal the antagonism between him and Sarah Ruth. He needs to prove something to her—that he, too, can bear the image of the God she so fiercely proclaims. Perhaps, if he can show her that, she’ll fully accept him.

Some will charge the eager tattooee with vanity and selfishness. An attempt to be seen and noticed. A desire to flaunt some aspect of an individualistic story.

Some, subscribing to ‘body as temple’ instincts, will hesitate. What if getting a tattoo is a rebellious impulse, a way of saying we are our own and don’t belong to anyone? No gods, no parents, etc.?

Others might hesitate on the grounds that it’s easy to beautify and adorn the outside form. What are we accounting for on the exterior and missing about our interiors? Shouldn’t our focus be on beauty and adornment from the inside out?

Keep these objections in mind as we discuss the idea of body art as part of the original human calling to stewardship, cultivation, and beautification.

We accept this idea already in other ways. Grooming standards, hair care, fashion, necklaces, rings, bracelets, earrings. All of these are modifications and cultivations of our bodies. Granted, such modifications and cultivations exist along a spectrum. The body cultivation spectrum has, at one end, elements that are easily removable (jewelry and such) and, at the other end, modifications that are more permanent. At the extreme end, we have things like plastic surgery, silicone injections, and transhumanism.

Naturally, we are cultivating creatures. In man’s original Garden home, humanity was called to cultivate its environment, to protect and steward the world. To manipulate it for the good of one’s self and one’s family and, also, to follow the divine impulse to make things beautiful.

I wonder if the human body falls under that mandate. From ancient times, humans have painted their bodies, both for battle and for beauty. We’ve adorned ourselves. We’ve sculpted. We have this impulse to be more beautiful which, admittedly, can be expressed in unhealthy ways. But I think being a good steward, being a cultivator, being a beautifier is inclusive of working with the matter of our bodies.

One tattoo artist who goes by Mowgli told The Guardian, “When it comes down to your body, I think it’s the most sacred thing you’ve got.” I agree. It’s the God-given gift we have with us throughout our entire existence. We inhabit the gift.

Beautifying and stewarding a home or some property is easier because it’s outside of ourselves. Applying the same aesthetic intention toward our bodies, the house we walk around in—well, that’s the rub.

I tend to agree that our bodies are indeed temples, sanctuaries. And the Hebrew tabernacle (and later the Temple), the place where God dwelled, was decorated by human artists. It was presented not as it was, but as the one who dwelled within it desired it to be. They made it good.

Likewise, we have a responsibility to take care of our bodies, but might that caretaking also involve beautifying and cultivating? In the same way that we steward, beautify, and cultivate the world outside of us, should we not also beautify and cultivate the world that is us?

Sometimes, I have occasion to think about things I usually don’t think about—like whether or not Flannery O’Connor was actually racist.

I love Flannery’s stories. I like what I like and, when it comes to art, I usually don’t concern myself with debates beyond what is contained in and stems from the work itself. (There are occasions however...) I refuse to play the game that enjoyment of or participation with a work of art automatically means the embrace of whatever views, opinions, or behaviors the author possesses.

Perhaps I should be more conscious.

Largely thanks to ’s Christian Imagination course, I’ve explored more seriously O’Connor’s relationship to her African-American contemporary, James Baldwin—as well as what might be required of myself and my contemporaries (that’s you, fellow secret-keeper) in light of similar and dissimilar injustices.

I came across this piece by Carole K. Harris: “James Baldwin, Flannery O’Connor, and the Ethics of Anguish.” It’s a good read and a great discourse of what artists are called to do within their times and from their contexts: witness, depict, interrogate, expose.

O’Connor’s aversion to being “topical”—dealing head-on with cultural, social, or political matters—was downstream of her social position, couched in a milieu that did not organically challenge her, one that would have let her be had she not herself been an agitated soul. Perhaps her perspective would have differed had she not fallen ill or spent so much of her life in Milledgeville, GA.

Baldwin, on the other hand, grew from a desire to not be seen as “merely a Negro writer”1 and began explicitly exploring the afflictions of African-Americans and whites in the South. In his mind, he could not afford to not be topical. Harris writes:

Baldwin and O’Connor were keen observers of the politics and rituals of manners in everyday social encounters, but O’Connor believed that paying close attention to manners was incompatible with writing about the topical, including the directly political; Baldwin, on the other hand, who could not separate the personal from the political, was…fascinated by analyzing what Henry James called Americans’ innocence and sincerity, and critiqued the “innocence” he encountered among white Southerners.

The South’s game of innocence and ignorance is revealed in Baldwin’s interview with the white principal of a Charlotte school being forcibly integrated in 1957 (published in “A Hard Kind of Courage”) and in O’Connor’s fiction—Harris cites “Revelation,” but the same principle is exhibited in ’s exploration of “The Enduring Chill.” A veil had long been drawn between the white population and the plight of African-Americans in the South. As long as one dared not open the curtain, all was well and good and whites could pretend that they had no real responsibility in institutional racism. It was just the way things were.

But Baldwin, O’Connor, and the 15-year-old black student being integrated into that all-white school serve to tear the veil and force seemingly irreconcilable entities into the same space where no one can pretend innocence or ignorance any longer.

In 1964, O’Connor infamously complains to a friend: “About the Negroes, the kind I don’t like is the philosophizing, prophesying, pontificating kind, the James Baldwin kind… Baldwin can tell us about what it feels to be a Negro in Harlam [sic] but he tries to tell us everything else too.” It seems she felt Baldwin was infringing on her territory and directly challenging the perceptions and beliefs of southern whites.

O’Connor saw herself as a particular kind of creature who had carved out a specific voice and a specific audience and she assumed Baldwin should have done the same. It seems, she disliked him coloring outside the lines and wanted him to stay in what she perceived to be his lane. But the specific is universal, even when someone else’s specifics makes one uncomfortable. And, in truth, the specifics of black southerners were merely a different denomination in the same currency that affected white southerners.

Regardless, I feel no need to either lambast O’Connor as racist or defend her as a product of her time.

We sometimes play this game with America’s “founding fathers.” They all owned slaves and, whether or not they considered it, they were traitors to the idea that all people were created equal and have “unalienable rights” from their Creator.

But the fact is: we can’t ledger balance. There is no weight, no amount of stories (fiction or non-fiction), and no amount of good theology that outweighs sin against divine image-bearers. We can’t, as they say, make it make sense and put O’Connor, Baldwin, or any of the architects of American freedom into only a single column, good or bad, on the ledger. Perhaps we stop trying.

More on this topic…

• James Baldwin, Flannery O’Connor, and the Ethics of Anguish, by Carole K. Harris (Hunger Mountain Review)

• The Moment in Race Relations That Keeps Repeating Itself, by (Church Life Journal)

• How Flannery O’Connor Fought Racism, by (First Things)

Share your thoughts in the comments. Would love to hear thoughtful perspectives.

what else?

»» In How to feel bad and be wrong, helps us ask and answer much better questions by getting comfortable with confusion and becoming brave enough to admit that we don’t know.

»» This was super-interesting if a bit hard to parse… Is American Christianity On The Path To Hinduism?

»» , as usual, is on fire…

• Why Do They Always Look Like That? — “I’m hardly the first to observe that how people live shows up in how they look. Writers have been saying this for over a century, and they keep saying it because it keeps being true.”

• Die Mad About AI — “The people cheering about AI watermarks and detection tools have apparently never needed to use AI for anything more serious than catching cheaters in their fairy smut writing circles. Their entire frame of reference for AI-related controversy is BookTok drama and self-published romance beef, and they genuinely believe that covers the scope of what these tools are being used for.”

»» I’m still basking in the post-Odyssey glow. There has been so much good commentary that has come about as a result of the film—not to mention boosted interest in Homer’s originals—but I’m highlighting two below.

• on the Odyssey’s American accents.

• on it being ‘the political movie of the decade.’

And this is what I wrote about it, in case you missed it…

Subscribe now

»» ’s piece on why it’s okay for one’s “friend group” to not look like Friends was a balm to my soul.

»» Finally, lots of praise for . Over the past couple months, I’ve really enjoyed her fresh and deeply insightful thoughts on film. She’s written about Supergirl and The Odyssey, but I want to share this post right here…

film and fiction with gxaa

Why I Don’t Think of Myself as a Film Journalist

Last Sunday I published my 9th article: Supergirl (2026) forgot how to earn hope. Instead of feeling relieved or happy that I’d released something that I was very proud of, I found myself immediately stressing about what my next article would be. Next Sunday already felt too close, like it was looming over me because of an arbitrary posting schedule I s…

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3 months ago · 20 likes · 8 comments · goodness 🍁

asides + signal boosts

📖 Reading

• I’m still in my Percy Jackson era. Getting back to Sea of Monsters after listening to The Odyssey and watching Nolan’s film is a real trip!

• I’ve also begun The Autobiography of G.K. Chesterton, a book I didn’t know existed until about two months ago.

• Radio Free Amerika, Vol 1, by Barron Bell: Slowly, I’m trying to make my way into reading more comics and graphic novels and this was a good, quick thing to get under my belt. America is overrun by foreign invasion and a band of reluctant resistors strategize to fight back. Good stuff. Very enjoyable.

🎞️ Watching

• Spider-Man: Brand New Day was such a good film! Planning on seeing it again in a few days.

• I’ve also been re-watching the Netflix Daredevil series

🎧 Listening

• I really enjoyed The Rest is History’s episodes marking America’s 250th anniversary. This balanced (British) take on America’s Revolutionary mythos is quite educational and less propagandy when it comes to Washington, Franklin, Hamilton, and Jefferson. I think I’m going to add this one to my regular rotation.

• I don’t know yet if I’d call Charli XCX’s new album, Music, Fashion, Film—my favorite things—extremely good. But what I will say is that it could inspire several essays from yours truly.

“Nothing’s gonna save us not music, fashion, or film” — I hope you’re wrong, Charli.

(This series is an adaptation of a talk I gave at Hutchmoot UK 2025. I’ve finally gotten around to posting it here, partly as prelude to a soon-coming series on bodies as iconography.)

, in his book Earthen Vessels: Why Our Bodies Matter to Our Faith, said that tattoos “exist in that fascinating nexus between what we intend by them and what society understands them to be.” And if you know anything about me and my writing, you know I love a fascinating nexus between what a thing is and what society understands it to be.

I’m a fan of tattoos—I do not have any myself. The term fan—in its 16th century introduction to the English language as the word “fanatic”—means someone with “excessive enthusiasm” and “often intense uncritical devotion” to something. Through this exploration, I hope to unravel whatever uncriticalism exists in my own enthusiasm. Perhaps yours as well. And we’ll aim to do this in three ways.

First, we’ll briefly summarize the status of tattoos in our culture. And since I imagine many of those reading this come from or are adjacent to cultures influenced by some form of Christianity, we’ll cover some historical and theological takes on tattoos.

Second, we’re going to look at Flannery O’Connor’s short story, “Parker’s Back,” in which a man (Parker) is obsessed with getting tattoos, going so far as to see the imprint of the image of the divine on his own body as his salvation.

Finally, we’ll propose three potentially challenging considerations on body art that might frame a useful conversation:

• Body art as part of the original human calling to stewardship, cultivation, and beautification;

• Body art as part of the universal storytelling impulse;

• Body art as part of a process of reclamation, incarnation, and possibly redemption.

To those who may have doubts about the valence of this conversation, I offer this: our bodies are the most immediate of sacred forms available to our senses. In our conversations about storytelling and creativity, we often contend with end-products (yes, I’m using a disgustingly capitalist and corporate term) that are finalized outside of ourselves. Materials we’ve manipulated to produce sculptures and paintings and books and films and music. But when the end-product is the material of our own bodies, when it is something that cannot be physically detached from our very selves—that is an interesting question.

Imagine your tattoo artist is discovered to have done some Very Bad Things and now you must contend with the question: can you separate the art from the artist? But now the art is on your body. Can you separate the art from yourself?

What’s the current status of tattoos in our culture?1

• About a third of all adults in the UK and U.S. have tattoos

• In the U.S., the number edges higher when you skew for age as about 40% of folks under 40 have tattoos

• This is a bit disappointing but, according to the Academy of Management, job applicants with tattoos or piercings still tend to be hired at lower rates and are often offered lower starting salaries.

• However, there’s good news: According to the Journal of Social Psychology, tattooed individuals are perceived as physically stronger than their virgin-skinned counterparts. However, those with tattoos are still, by many, often perceived as morally inferior.

You’ve probably seen the memes.

Regardless of current status, the act of marking one’s body in some way has a long and complicated history.

The oldest definitive proof of body art comes from Ötzi (aka Ice Man), the 5,300-year-old remains of a man who was found frozen in a glacier near Bolzano, Italy. He bore 61 tattoos of geometric designs across his left wrist, lower legs, lower back, and his torso.

• Ancient body art—dating from at least 3,000 years ago—has also been found in human remains from Egypt, Russia, China, and Chile.

• In fact, the name Britain is likely derived from the Celtic word pretani, which may mean “tattooed folk” or “painted ones.”

• China’s Zhou dynasty tattooed people on their faces as punishment for crimes.

• The ancient Romans tattooed not only criminals but slaves and gladiators.

• America’s slave owners often branded the people they bought and sold.

• And Nazis used metal stamps to tattoo identification numbers on Jews during the Holocaust.

All of this was largely before the originator of what became modern tattoo machines and tattoo guns came into widespread use.

Now, when we turn to the religious side of the question of body art, things get even juicier.

If you’re of a certain age, currently a Christian or raised in the church, you’re probably familiar with those passages of Scripture used by those who wanted to discourage people from getting tattoos or piercings.

Anderson points out (rightly) that “the Bible knows nothing of tattoos for purely aesthetic purposes or of tattoos as simply an external expression of personal significance.”

In Leviticus 19:28, the newly freed Hebrews are commanded to “not make any cuts” on their bodies for the dead or “tattoo” themselves. The Hebrew kᵊṯōḇeṯ, which the ESV translates as “tattoo,” is taken to mean an incision, an imprint, or any kind of mark involving ink or otherwise. Of course, contextually, we understand that this prohibition was given largely to set apart the Children of Israel from the nations they soon would be living alongside. Judaism scholars also suggest that this would distance the Hebrews from their past in Egypt where slaves were tattooed with the names of priests or pharaohs to designate who they served.

Curiously enough, as Isaiah is prophesying during the collapse of Israel’s kingdoms, the Lord comforts his people who complain that he has abandoned them saying, “I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands…” Graven, being the Hebrew word ḥāqaq, meaning quite literally to cut or hack, to engrave or inscribe on one’s self. The Lord essentially tattoos his people on himself so as not to forget them despite them turning their back on him.

In the New Testament, 1 Corinthians 6:19 is also sometimes cited as a prohibition against tattoos. “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own.” When asking why people won’t get tattoos, I’ve heard more than once, “my body is a temple”—and that from believers and nonbelievers alike.

If we’re going to be interpretively consistent and as theologically accurate as possible, we’ll recall that that verse is part of a larger passage on sexual purity. We shouldn’t take it to concern only the outside of the body when it is most directly about the inside (or use) of the body.

This might all sound terribly familiar if you were born in the latter end of the last century and raised in a conservative religious subculture.

What do the church fathers lend to this discussion?

Constantine, Basil, and the Second Council of Nicaea all discouraged the practice of tattoos among believers despite some early Christians marking themselves with “stigmata” in order to identify with their persecuted siblings.

• Constantine banned face tattoos in 316 AD, reasoning that “man has been created in the image of God and to so defile the face is to disgrace the Divine.”

• Basil the Great, Bishop of Caesarea, only a little while later wrote: “No man shall let his hair grow long or tattoo himself as do the heathen… Do not associate with those who mark themselves with thorns and needles…”

• The Second Council of Nicaea in 787 AD banned tattoos as a “pagan practice.”

• Ironically, about the same time as that second Nicene Council, a different church council had a more nuanced read-out on tattoos. The Council of Northumberland declared, “When an individual undergoes the ordeal of tattooing for the sake of God, he is greatly praised. But one who submits himself to be tattooed for superstitious reasons in the manner of the heathens will derive no benefit therefrom.”

• In line with that, Crusaders and pilgrims sometimes sported crosses or other religious tattoos either to show their membership in a military order or to commemorate a religious pilgrimage.

Historically, Coptic Christians, Ethiopians, and Bosnian Croats often tattooed their children with crosses, so they could later be identified as Christians if kidnapped or killed by persecutors.

It also became a way for them to express their unwavering faith in Christ, since a tattoo is, by its nature, permanent.

To be continued…

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.

—Alfred Tennyson, “Ulysses”

One of the trailers for the Odyssey film culminates in what appears to be an angry Odysseus (Matt Damon) chopping off the head of a statue of a goddess. This glimpse into the story follows Odysseus’ utterance: “No one could stand between me and home. Not even the gods.”

That’s not quite how the story goes. The gods stand plenty between the Trojan War hero and his homeland. While Odysseus’ bitterness towards the deathless gods is heavily portrayed, Nolan’s film shies away from casting him in open rebellion. In fact, in the film, Odysseus is merely a witness to his comrades’ desecration of the statue of Athena in the vicious exhale of finally conquering Troy.

Numerous choices in The Odyssey reveal a curious bashfulness towards the supernatural, not least of all Zendaya’s unadorned portrayal of the wise goddess of war. Nolan, well known for grounded, realistic filmmaking, blushes before deity and magic. He admits the ancient Greeks would have seen “the evidence of the supernatural” all around them, but he securely couches that vision in “lightning, thunder, earthquakes, volcanoes…the actions of the gods.”

“Why don’t the gods speak in ways we understand?” Odysseus asks.

“Who doesn’t understand thunder?” Athena says. “Fire? A child’s smile? A good harvest? Look…who’s moving those clouds?”

In Nolan’s Grecian myth, true believers and nonbelievers exist in tandem. Odysseus himself vacillates between religious duty and a mediocre hostility towards the divine disguised as fatigue over his misfortunes. He embraces Athena’s appearances but does not extend that embrace to the rest of the pantheon. Utilitarian that he is, he believes in the gods when they are in front of him—when they, like Balaam’s donkey, refuse to go unnoticed. Otherwise, he discounts his men’s warnings of omens and sacrifice when it’s inconvenient. And he basks in Eurylochus’ (Himesh Patel) praise of him as a “lucky bastard” when his implacable schemes turn out well.

By no means though is The Odyssey metaphysically stripped. The gods are pervasively present. They judge misdeeds. They cannot be thwarted. Their words do not return void. Their existence is benign, often undersold.

The plot, in fact, turns on the recognition of the divine in the stranger. Odysseus and his crew fail to recognize the strange divinity in Polyphemus and end up angering Poseidon. By contrast, Telemachus (Tom Holland) says several times of other characters, including beggars, “You have wise eyes—Athena’s eyes.” He is cautious to follow “Zeus’ Law” and abide in the spirit of xenia, even when it’s to his disadvantage. (In the film, Zeus’ law is a universal abstract: defining hospitality to strangers, rendering grace to the less fortunate, and doing unto others as one would have done unto oneself.)

Despite all this, Nolan refuses to indulge in even the most astounding and supernatural aspects of his film. While some of this is likely due to runtime constraints and the expense of filming exclusively on IMAX 70mm cameras, most of the magic in The Odyssey is left to the imagination. Some have lamented the lack of slow motion in scenes that deserve it and how quickly the camera moves on from Odysseus, in beggar’s garb, plucking his bow, sounding the note that seals the suitors’ doom.

There is no lingering here. Blink at the wrong time and you’ll miss the open mouth of Scylla. We don’t get to see into Charybdis. Apollo’s cattle are the most ordinary of beasts. The Sirens remain distant and miniature. Even the demigods, like Circe, abide in the plainest of homes.

Throughout the film, Telemachus is all of us: looking for gods everywhere and being discouraged from finding them. Upon his final insistence that someone might be “Athena in disguise,” his yet unrevealed father tells him glibly, “Don’t look for gods in men…you’ll just be disappointed.”

In a recent interview, Nolan speaks of “productive ambiguity” as an important aspect of great film endings. He has spoken of it before when discussing Tenet and Inception—“the point of it is it’s an ambiguity”—making him a true postmodernist. He does not engage in discussions over what things mean, he says. But ambiguity, this sort of shyness, is all over The Odyssey, inviting the audience into a discussion of meaning.

Perhaps this is the challenge of remythologizing our experience of a civilizational text. We want magic and fantasy on our terms—in our faces, loud and undeniable. Nolan does not indulge in this desire. Jake Adkins writes:

Nolan is not explaining the gods away—he is asking what it felt like to inhabit a world in which they had not yet been explained away. He is saying that we have been so thoroughly conditioned to explanation that we have lost the capacity to feel what the ancients felt: a world in which the overwhelming is also the personal, in which nature does not merely cause but addresses. His method—the real ocean and a CGI-less set designed to achieve total immersion—is an attempt to return a modern audience to that felt experience.

The Odyssey cracks open the possibility that there might not be anything wrong with the world, but something wrong with our capacity to move in it, understand it, and extend that understanding within a social coherence. We want an undeniable voice from heaven, explaining our condition. But the Voice has never stopped speaking. Rather, as Jeremiah says, “I have spoken to you again and again; yet you have not listened” (35:14b).

We want Nolan’s camera to linger longer on the details, but he challenges us to remember what we already know, to fill in the blanks with an imagination tuned by the ancients.

One place Nolan leaves little ambiguity is in his treatment of guilt and consequences. “When your men die, do you see consequence or chance?” Athena asks Odysseus after he discovers his men defied his orders not to eat Apollo’s cattle.

“I see consequence,” Odysseus says. “And responsibility.”

That line is Odysseus’ lesson learned. The moral of his journey, if you will. The irony is that Odysseus himself pretends to defy the gods—in his pragmatic refusal to bury the dead when it’s inconvenient to do so and in his insistence that he can save his men and bring them home despite the prophecy that he cannot.

This lesson of consequence is told effectively in miniature in Agamemnon’s (Benny Safdie) story. The commander of the Achaeans seeds his own death by sacrificing his daughter for favorable winds enroute to Troy.

“The power of the sacrifice is in the cost to the person making it,” Odysseus says when recounting the event to Penelope.

“That’s monstrous,” Penelope replies.

“And committed.”

When Odysseus goes to Hades, Agamemnon is there. The slain king tells him of how his wife, grown bitter over the decade he’d been gone, kills him in bed and then wonders if one of his other children avenged him.

At every turn in this story, there is consequence. And at every turn, Odysseus is made subject to divine power. It is in his submission—in the fulfillment of the prophecy that he will return home alone—that he realizes that life is not a game of chance, that his cleverness cannot forever out thwart the strange divine council.

The war at Troy was more than a squabble over a kidnapped queen. Odysseus’ “trick,” the trick by which the war was won, was more than a pragmatist’s endgame. In Nolan’s telling, it was the monumental betrayal of a fundamental principle: the necessity of recognizing the divine (or the potential for the divine) in the stranger and in the enemy, everywhere in the world. This point is unambiguous.

“We violated all that’s ever sacred between people,” Odysseus laments. “To burn the walls of Troy was to burn the world entire… One man’s idea, one man’s trick, to break Zeus’ Law forever.”

Odysseus’ realization of consequence is what makes Nolan’s Odyssey a civilizational epic and a worthy expansion of the mythic canon. In this adaptation, the overwhelming is also the personal both for Odysseus and for us. We are spent on cocksure heroes. We are spent on incessantly traumatized protagonists. Nolan recognizes the need to make his hero’s actions, and his repentance, matter beyond his own person.

The ambiguity in this film has a purpose. The shy glances at the divine, the quick camera cut away from the mouth of Scylla, are a kind of admission of guilt. Guilt that we do not have the experience of the world that we desire—that our demythologized vision is unsatisfactory—and, further, that it is our own breaking of divine law that keeps us from a long gaze into that gleaming, untraveled world with ever-fading margins.

Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is generating a thrilling conversation about myth, meaning, adaptation, and current cultural artifacts. I’ve gotten so invested that I’ve begun retreading Odysseus’ tale, this time via audiobook—Robert Fagles’ translation, read (amazingly) by Ian McKellen. Apparently, which translation one has read—and which translation Nolan is adapting from—is the hottest of topics.

Over on YouTube, Lady of the Library (, here on Substack) and Metatron have gone back and forth over what we know about Nolan’s adaptation so far and the cues he may or may not be taking from Emily Wilson’s translation of Homer’s epic. Metatron, judging by his thumbnails, seems to think the upcoming film is the worst thing since Pandora opened her cursed jar, and Cinzia had several notes of criticism from the first trailer—like why don’t these Mediterranean-area seafarers have even the hint of a tan—(in a now unavailable video). also jumped into the fray with a video titled, “What’s at stake with The Odyssey.” The examples are endless.

Clearly, there are Big Feelings surrounding this adaptation.

I’m withholding a lot of judgment personally, because I want to see how it all comes together. Particularly, I’m excited about Ludwig Göransson’s film score, Travis Scott’s role as the blind bard Demodocus, and Nolan’s interpretation of the monsters Odysseus meets on the journey—the Sirens, Scylla, Circe, and Calypso. (We’ve seen a bit of Cyclops and perhaps the Laestrygonians in May’s trailer already. I hope the monsters feel organic to the world Nolan is depicting. The Dune films do a really good job of this—making fantastic elements feel organic. I’ll be comparing the cohesion and aesthetic of Nolan’s Odyssey-world to Denis Villeneuve’s stunning rendition of the Duneiverse.)

Around the time the May trailer released, reports emerged that Lupita Nyong’o had been cast as Helen of Troy. You’ve been on the internet long enough to know exactly what happened: people opened their windows and threw flowers in the street, shouting “Lupita! Lupita!” in adoration.

Of course not. What happened was Elon Musk, lord and savior of Twitter/X, decreed: “Chris Nolan desecrated the Odyssey so that he would be eligible for an Academy Award.”1 After stirring the typical stable of right-wing commentators into claiming that a director who has cast white actors in the leading role of 11 of his 12 films is now practicing racism against white people, Musk attacked those who developed the Academy’s representation and inclusion standards as ‘assholes’ and ‘fucking douchebags’ and kept at it for about a week. (Now you know why the discourse sucks.)

That mini internet culture explosion raised a question I like to think about when it comes to adaptations and generated a theory that might apply to adaptations in general.

First, the question: What is the point of adapting a mythic story like The Odyssey for a modern crowd?

Ordinarily, I’d say we adapt stories like The Odyssey for the same reason we alter the way we tell a personal story depending on our audience. Think of how comedians relate a mundane encounter so that it appears funny to those listening. We want to retell what we’ve experienced (whether in actuality or in fiction) so those who are new to the story can experience and understand it in a way that holds value for them.

This, I think, is the basic, non-controversial impulse of adapting a source text2 into a different medium. Sometimes, the mere presence of a different medium (and an audience that matches that medium) is a call for adaptation. Hence, the newspaper is now a website or a mobile app. The way an audience interacts with the newspaper’s website or app is, of necessity, different from the way it interacts with newsprint.

This transfer of a source text to a different medium is often fraught with resistance. “So often film’s relation to literature has been characterized as a tampering, a deformation, a desecration, an infidelity, a betrayal, a perversion,” literary theorist Linda Hutcheon writes in “On the Art of Adaptation.” Hence the persistence of big (negative) feelings towards even the idea of some books being adapted as films and “the book was better” mantra. (In actuality, the book and the film are different and should be judged on their own merits. Amazon’s Wheel of Time adaptation is bad because it’s a bad TV show3 regardless of how it stands in relation to the source text. Same goes for Rings of Power: there are elements of it that are just plain bad storytelling independently of its relation to Tolkien’s work.)

, an Ohio bookstore owner, thinks post-literacy has led to our current reality where every attempt at a book-to-film adaptation is seen as a tight-rope walk over the lake of fire. This was not always the case. In the old days, “Producers weren’t selling faithful literary adaptations,” Kuhner writes. “They were selling the magic of Hollywood.”

That’s why, as Kuhner points out, no one complained when, among other examples, Denzel Washington played Don Pedro in Much Ado About Nothing (1993) or the titular character in The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021)—a fantastic film—despite Washington being neither Spanish nor Scottish.

Now it seems the knee-jerk, negative reactions to every departure (or perceived departure) from a source text are rooted in (or at least masked by) the desire to deliver a source-accurate product to an audience that may not have encountered the source text partially due to their preference for a medium other than that of the source.

Which makes sense. Critic and video-essayist, Patrick Willems (who introduced me to Hutcheon’s work quoted throughout this piece), says, “The greatest pleasure of adaptations comes simply from recognition—seeing the thing we like given new life on screen.” Ergo, folks want to see The Odyssey of their mind in IMAX.

But what about those whose first real encounter with The Odyssey is in IMAX? Kuhner describes selling copies of Lord of the Rings to “huge Tolkien fans” whose only prior experience with Tolkien’s work is Peter Jackson’s movies. The source text is then seen as a nice add-on to their already sacrosanct LOTR experience.

Thus, those who care about accurate adaptations really, seemingly, care about ensuring that those who experience Nolan’s Odyssey get as close as possible to experiencing Homer’s text. It’s both a possessive and educational impulse. I want you to see what I’ve seen the way I’ve seen it. At least, that is the best-case scenario and me giving folks the benefit of the doubt.

Hutcheon continues, “The deeply moralistic rhetoric of such characterizations”—film adaptations of literature as “perversion”—“belies the fact that what is at stake here is really a question of cultural capital.” Who owns the source text? More importantly, whose interpretation of the source text becomes writ large? And is it possible for a sub-sub-creator’s take on a source text to supersede the original?

This is where the present-day conversation about Nolan’s Odyssey finds its teeth. The broadest swathe of criticism emerges from the fact that nary a single Greek or Greek diaspora actor is present in the named cast. (And there is a legitimate conversation to be had about the absence of involvement by anyone with notable Greek heritage as the essay linked in that sentence points out.) But the loudest critics see this Grecian absence as a door thru which to rush to get to the really important thing: that, as Nolan’s Odyssey comes to life, the West^TM is being robbed of a key aspect of its civilizational inheritance and underpinning.

What is Nolan *doing* with a key element of the Western canon? is a legitimate question when we consider that many of those early (now sold-out) pre-release tickets might have been bought by folks who haven’t read Homer’s Odyssey. For them, whatever Nolan puts on screen will be the Odyssey.

But those crying the loudest about it don’t seem to be inspired by intellectual, educational, or literary fidelity. Rather, they appear more infuriated that a Kenyan-Mexican actress is playing the demigod, Helen of Troy. That dismay, often masked by careful measured arguments, has led to silly, desperate remarks like one in Pageau’s video: that because the Hellenes derived their moniker from Helen of Troy, Nolan casting a black woman in this role is him “trying to go to the very core, the very home, the very seed, the very beginning [of Western civilization] and... replace it with something else.” I would have likely taken the nomenclature declaration at face value if it were not so easily debunkable with a Google search. (Multiple viewers and Pageau himself highlighted the error afterwards in the comments.)

The fact is: we’d have heard nary a peep from these pro-Western Civ furiosas if a white European or American actress were cast as Helen.4

The civilizational “accuracy” dialogue masques the real struggle over cultural capital and ownership of a grand narrative—a source text so embedded in our collective subconscious that we don’t think about it until someone decides to translate it into a different medium. The real suspicion is that someone who doesn’t believe the same way, ideologically, politically, religiously, etc., might improperly handle something we deem near-sacred.

But The Odyssey wasn’t written yesterday. The idea that one group of people can own a story that originated in oral tradition somewhere around the eighth century before Christ, a story that has transcended its originating time and place many times over, is ludicrous.

We don’t own these stories. These stories own us.

I want an accurate adaptation as much as the next guy. But a good adaptation, unique to its medium, should not be sacrificed on the altar of accuracy. The drive to tell and retell, reshape and reframe, adapt for now—with the people and language of now—is critical to the adaptative impulse.

Our favorite stories cannot be so precious that we treat them as though they have no life outside the classroom, the museum, or beyond our private nostalgia.

The why of adaptation is to extend the audience, the conversation, the experience of the source text. And there will be “faithful” adaptations. But the natural shift of mediums opens the aperture of a great work, allowing for new participants, new emphases, and new light to be let inside.

Now, for the theory: an adaptation should function like a broken mirror or the mirrors in a funhouse.

In the shards of a broken mirror, we still see the original, but from a new angle, a narrower, or sometimes broader view. And with different lighting. Sometimes the shard is so small that it serves to focus on a specific element of the source text allowing us to examine it in detail. Often, the mirror is mostly intact but new threads, new cracks run through it, illuminating various intellectual, moral, or spiritual themes.

In a funhouse, the original stretches, compresses, shifts our perspective. We only recognize the adaptation because we know the original. Whatever new elements there are to see, we see them because we or the author of the adaptation is dealing with something familiar.

To Willems’ thought above, I’ll add that the writer or filmmaker doing the adapting does not cast their spell alone. This sub-sub-creator embodies aspects of the spirit of their time, making their take on the originating work relevant to broader audiences. (What is Homer saying? What is Emily Wilson saying about Homer? What is Nolan saying about Wilson and Homer and us?) That is not a flaw in the system. That is the habit of translation.

Homer (or the class of homers) made choices when putting the oral retellings down to papyrus—which words to use or not use, which specific variation of the tale to record for posterity. Translation into a different medium changed the story in irretrievable ways. In a sense, the original Odyssey is forever lost, and Homer’s work is an adaptation—a product of choice, preference, and translation. Our civilizational ancestors were not blank slates or unprogrammed androids, devoid of bias or process—they were part and parcel of the same bloodthirsty, opinionated, dominating, selectionist impulses that mark today’s creators and adaptors. They were, as we are, editors and critics of their priors.

The adaptation, whether we mean it to be or not, is a refraction of some current perception of both the world and the originating work. (Although not usually adaptations, comic books do this well by constantly depositing their superhero characters into current or near-current times.) Looking at an adaptation is supposed to allow us to see the source text and the society in which it appeared alongside aspects of one’s own society and oneself.

This, according to Cinzia Dubois (Lady of the Library), is the defense for “Wuthering Heights” (2026), which was broadly panned as a bad adaptation and a gross, oversexual veil of the novel. Dubois argues that Emerald Fennell’s film was never meant to be a realistic adaptation of Emily Brontë’s work. Instead, its highly symbolic and visually rich reinterpretation were crafted to provoke the same emotional discomfort and moral unease as the original text. The work is unambiguously layered and, in Dubois’ assessment, preserves the audience’s distaste for Cathy and Heathcliff. “It was far more interesting than a bog-standard tit-for-tat adaptation,” she says.

You can accuse Emerald Fennel of missing the point of the book. I argue that all these critics have missed the point of the film. It wasn’t the book. There’s something way more that’s happening here. A lot of choices were made, and it feels completely intellectually dishonest to reduce it to merely a slutty version of Wuthering Heights. A lot more happened than that and it was not titillating in the slightest and I think that’s the point.

As natural critics, it is easy to grasp the low-hanging fruit of it doesn’t suit my preferences or fall into my long-standing heuristics so therefore it’s bad.

To include another example, when talking about the live-action adaptation of Ghost in the Shell (2017), Mamoru Oshii, director of the 1995 anime on which it is based, said:

If this is to be a remake of the anime, I don’t think it’s necessary to remain faithful to the way things were expressed in the anime. The director should exercise his directorial freedom as much as possible. If he doesn’t do so, there would be no point in remaking it.

(Oshii, who adapted from the 1989/1999 manga, also defended Scarlett Johansson’s casting in the 2017 film against critics who claimed the role of a cyborg with an “entirely assumed” physical form should have been given to an Asian actress. “I can only sense a political motive from the people opposing it,” he said. Again, these conversations have become more about cultural capital than any real sense of loyalty to a text.)

I agree. Like Cinzia, I get excited by how people play with a source text. If I wanted the old story, I’d just go get it. And I still think it’s fun to compare the similarities and differences between mediums. But we must admit any adaptation is a different animal than the source text.5

The truth is: we want our perception of a story reflected to us constantly and comfortably. This is the easy path. Perhaps it’s wiser to not try and make every adaptation our new favorite thing or simply a “parade of iconography,” as Willems terms it, a la Deadpool & Wolverine (2024) or The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023). The potential of a familiar text rehandled should be valued, not discarded.

The themes of The Odyssey remain relevant and, in Nolan’s adaptation, those themes will achieve not only renewed significance but conversation with an audience privileged to receive the story in a manner not so distant as oral tradition or epic poetry. That is the reason we keep adapting—because the source text remains relevant, not because it needs to be erased.

Sometimes, life imitates art. Other times, art imitates theories of literary criticism.

This is what happened with the third and final “season” of Good Omens, the BBC/Amazon-produced follow-on to Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s hilarious, irreverent speculative fiction (1990) about an angel and a demon trying their darndest to preserve the world for the sake of its creature comforts.

After the widely-praised and “exceptionally book accurate” TV adaptation of the novel (2019), Gaiman pioneered a completely original second season (2023) intended to serve as connective tissue between the novel and its sequel which he and Pratchett started brainstorming in 1989. Says Gaiman:

[we] plotted more of it in New York in 2006…and then talked more about it from time to time until Terry’s death... So I know what happens, sometimes in detail, sometimes in broad strokes, and I know the last ten minutes of it to the beat.

The planned six-episode third season (2026) would have been based on that brainstorming. But production halted in September 2024 after several women accused Gaiman of sexual assault and gross misbehavior. (Production also stopped on an adaptation of The Graveyard Book.) A month later, Gaiman offered to end his involvement with production of the final season—as if that would make things better for either himself or the show. Shortly thereafter, not only were Gaiman and his company cut from the production effort, but it was announced that the six-episode season would be reduced to a single 90-minute finale episode, out last month.

We won’t get into a whole can we enjoy art from misbehaving artists thing here. (I’ve written about that already.)

Likewise, I have not done a personal deep dive into the allegations or conducted a large-scale analysis of my current feeling towards Gaiman, one of my favorite writers. There is this immovable constraint—time—which makes such a pursuit unappealing. (Also, I am trending towards holding all immensely talented people in a category of indifference based solely on the history of the past two decades.1) Gaiman’s alleged behavior—of which I’d wager at least some is true—is abhorrent and reprehensible, especially as perpetrated against fans and those on the low end of inequal power dynamics. If you wish, you may find the popular (salacious) interpretation of the allegations with a quick internet search.

Gaiman, for his part, remained silent publicly until February of this year when he posted a message on Instagram, thanking his supporters, declaring that the allegations are “completely and simply untrue,” and linking to the investigative journalism of one who goes by here on Substack.

Here, I intend to spoil the 90-minute finale and discuss parallels between the Good Omens storyworld, what happened with Gaiman during the production of the finale, and the whole “death of the author” question. The parallels and opportunity for conversation are curious to me, and I’d be remiss if they continued unobserved.

the problem of everything

The finale opens with the angel Aziraphale (Michael Sheen) in a high management position in Heaven. He pulls together a small team and announces that it’s time to begin Operation Second Coming—but not as another attempt at “Armageddon.” Instead, he wants to set things up as “a second chance to get things right… to make things better. To inspire the humans, to be…you know, nicer.” He’s even reawakened Jesus—humorously and beautifully played by Bilal Hasna in one of the better parts of the episode.

Of course, this not so ineffable plan doesn’t go accordingly. It soon becomes apparent that Jesus, the Book of Life, and the Metatron (the highest being in angelic management) have gone missing.

Attempting to avert a cosmic crisis, Aziraphale descends to Earth in search of his old demon friend Crowley (David Tennant), whom he hasn’t spoken to in a long time. The two had a falling out at the end of Season 2 after Aziraphale took up the management position in Heaven instead of eloping with Crowley and living on Earth.

To make (what should have been) a long story short, Aziraphale and Crowley figure out that Michael has stolen the Book of Life and is now using it to destroy the world. They rescue one sliver of the universe—Aziraphale’s old bookshop in London—and take shelter there. Satan shows up, naturally. And eventually, Aziraphale summons God so he and Crowley can ask some questions, as one does at the end of time.

God (played primly by Tanya Moodie) is seemingly unmoved by the destruction of almost all her universe. (Perhaps it is an ineffable plan after all!) She humors the last three remaining creatures, fielding their queries about what Crowley terms “the problem of everything”: Why was it a good idea to make fallible humans, deposit them in a world geared for hostility and spite, and punish them for their inevitable wrongdoing? Why create an infinite universe, run it for 6,000 years, and then decide to end it?

Most importantly: what to do about it now?

God surprises Aziraphale and Crowley (and Satan) by offering the angels the chance to determine what happens next to the world as they know it.

“We want you to create another universe,” says Aziraphale.

“One without angels. Or demons. No god. No satan,” Crowley continues. “A universe without a heaven and without a hell.”

“No great plan, nothing ineffable. It just starts with a big bang and ends billions of years later, with the heat death of the universe.”

God is bemused. “You’re asking God to create a godless universe?”

the death of the author

This concept of a god-created universe without god made me ponder the irony of a Gaiman/Pratchett-created universe without either of them. The real cross-nail is Amazon/BBC cutting Gaiman & Co. from a production so dependent on Gaiman for its very existence in the first place.

Back of all that lurks Roland Barthes’ idea of the death of the author and the liberation of texts from the identity of their writers. (Which, now that I think of it, is a neat solution to the question: what do we do about the art of artists who behave badly? But this is not that essay.)

“The image of literature to be found in contemporary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his history, his tastes, his passions,” the French critic-philosopher Barthes wrote in 1967. Despite his displeasure, it appears we have maintained, both as readers and as critics, the perspective he so despised. In fact, in our oversaturated, social media-suffused society, the importance of the author-creator’s identity has achieved hyperstatus. The author-creator cannot escape the tyrannical audience hell-bent on holding the creator at risk for every social or political opinion, every ethnic or economic affiliation, every indiscretion or vice. Look at J.K. Rowling. Look at Amélie Wen Zhao. Look at films and filmmakers as points of political arbitration. Look at everything, everywhere, apparently.

Contrary to Barthes’ desire—and contrary to those who vehemently dislike the “death of the author” discourse—the importance of the author’s identity has increased exponentially. Attempts to erase an author from their work incur the work becoming further shadowed by the author. And so, Neil Gaiman is removed from Good Omens Season 3, but we cannot think about it without thinking about him. The god-made world is without a god and we wonder where he might be and how the world might have proceeded differently if he had been around to rule it.

I am not sure if the ending we have for GOS3 is anything like the “last ten minutes” Gaiman would have delivered should things have gone according to plan. (Even Satan is like, “You aren’t going to indulge them in this nonsense, are you?”)

In the ending we do have, God allows Aziraphale and Crowley’s request.

“I’ll make it. I’ll make the universe your way. I’ll even let an Earth happen. Eventually, there’ll be humans and life, in all of its mundane glory. Something that both of you will neither know or experience, though.”

According to TV-making rules, it was so.

Presumably, there was no god to declare that it was good.

who calls it good?

For Barthes, this idea—that “the explanation of the work [must always be] sought in the man who has produced it”—had exceeded its expiration date. Nor did the role of explaining the work belong to the critic. It belonged to the reader.

…the reader is the very space in which are inscribed, without any being lost, all the citations a writing consists of; the unity of a text is not in its origin, it is in its destination…

In his later writing, Barthes’ insistence on a “multi-dimensional space” for the interpretation of a text makes sense. But that space, in my opinion, exists between the creator and the audience. It is not a weight carried solely by the audience over against an impoverished and diluted creator.

Here I, a reader, exercise my right to disentangle Barthes’ work. He claims:

…the reader is a man without history, without biography, without psychology; he is only that someone who holds gathered into a single field all the paths of which the text is constituted.

But can that really be true? Without the author-creator, we have none of the above. No history, biography, psychology, sociology, religion, economics. Any of it. Without the author, the reader’s place as interpreter and disentangler is meaningless. Without a past—without a voice telling us the story of ourselves—we have no future that matters and no criticism that is anything other than absurd.

Cracks show quickly in those systems which value the reader’s interpretation of a text over all other interpretive frameworks. Recently, Selen Ozturk opined on the expansive BookTok trend in which “verklempt” readers ventilate over how much a book matched their own feelings, identity, and mental state as a means of citing that book’s value to other readers. Often, points are given for mere representation, by which is meant an accurate and unchallenging portrayal of one’s pet population subset. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of books have achieved bestseller status thanks to these fecund reels. Such reels are not criticism by any stretch of the word—they do not even count as reviews; but they are the logical end for a world in which audience self-perception is pedestalized.

Ozturk writes:

This critical foundation [that the reader’s identification with the text is all-important], personal though it seems, presupposes a reader equally knowable across anyone who can read at all…

The author becomes the provider of a service (the book) serving the emotional needs of the reader (who the protagonist reflects if the book is good). The stronger the reader’s therapeutic identification with the protagonist, the more recommendable the book. The wider the distance between the reader’s and protagonist’s desires or sense of what is deserved, the less recommendable the book.

Clearly, one reader or a segment of readers cannot dominate the interpretive and applicable perspective of all other readers. This type of environment, in which the audience reflects itself back to itself—pointlessly, ceaselessly—impoverishes and depletes the multi-dimensional interpretive space. It is also most at odds with the author-creator’s contribution to that interpretive space. It is like trying to excuse a chef from her kitchen.

The author is always either attempting, like God, to express an infinite self or to make sense of an infinite world. He is casting the net into an inchoate sea and offering his catch up to an audience. The audience’s role is to eat, and then offer a range of responses from digesting to vomiting.

Barthes’ claim that the author “no longer contains within himself passions, humors, sentiments, [or] impressions” is a false dream. If the author had none of these, the reader would have nothing to contend with. A text “eternally written here and now” is a fallacy.

There is no point, as Ozturk writes, in “denying the reader the consolation of being ‘written’ by the author.” Art shapes because it has been shaped. And “art which leaves a person’s inwardness completely secure” (to borrow Kierkegaard’s words) is false.

There is no reader, no audience, without a creator. No world without an author. And like the ultimate Creation narrative, the story is neither God’s nor man’s alone. Granted, the author is simultaneously, uncontrollably, “written” by his audience. This fact has discovered Neil Gaiman.

The author may be hidden, but he is never dead. Even the new, supposedly godless world at the end of Good Omens contains “13-billion-year-old” traces of providence. Aziraphale and Crowley, reunited, gaze at the stars and see through a glass darkly. One day, they will stand like men and see face-to-face.

As will Gaiman. His stories, whether they all make their way out of his head, are his own but his story is not. His is reliant on his readers and fans. To them he writes: “Thank you…for your belief in my innocence and your support for my work.”

And he concludes: “It has meant the world to me.”

OF INTEREST

AI and Copyright

Reading Roland Barthes in the Robot Apocalypse

In an influential 1968 essay the French critic Roland Barthes famously called for us to unseat the author from our considerations of her text. It has been fifty-five years in coming, but now Large Language Models have arrived on the scene to do the deed. We have our first victim of the robot apocalypse: AI has finally shown us the Death of the Author…

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4 years ago · Peter Schoppert

Last week, my wife and I were chatting with a friend—we were passing thru a market across from a display selling Catholic Coffee (“grounded by faith”) and LOTR coffee (“the Baggins blend”)—and something our friend said really struck me. Something along the lines of: maybe some people need ritual, liturgy, and deep religious tradition. What my mind conjured was that: maybe some people don’t need it (as much).

Think about it. According to , data (and excitable anecdotes) suggest that Eastern Orthodox traditions are drawing interest and significant conversions from Protestants and the non-religious, especially among young men. Gen Z is widely reported as experiencing a “revival” that finds them seeking out traditional and liturgical forms of worship. Meanwhile, some—and I know a few personally—have traveled religious roads in Protestantism and/or American Evangelicalism and found their home in Catholic or Orthodox congregations. Likewise (according to data in Wax’s report linked above), Orthodox folks are converting to Evangelicalism at a higher rate than the other way around.

What if all of this seeking is driven by temporal need, restless dissatisfaction with the status quo, and the simple idea that one is unfulfilled where they’re at? I have wondered myself if I should not make the leap into a different mode of Christianity.

But none of these flavors—Orthodoxy, Catholicism, Protestantism—are the solo way to Jesus. Perhaps fighting over which way is more correct makes us miss the point which is whether these competing paths bring us closer to God and further into communities attempting to model heaven. Perhaps we should recognize that what works for one might not work for all, and rightfully so, as our emotional, psychological, social, and mental dispositions—and let’s face it: music preferences—all play a role in which traditions suit us and which traditions we are drawn to.

Also, the Holy Spirit. If we are all being guided, wouldn’t more of us be guided to the same place?

I read a lot this month that touched on these issues of religious homing.

Any religious person who assumes that a conversion will solve all their problems must contend with the (probable) eventual collapse of novelty and settling in of mundanity. does so in his post-conversion to Orthodoxy report, linked below. (I’d wager that satisfaction with intellectualism has a diminishing return-on-investment in any case and what we do with our bodies, in our bodies, among other bodies has the primary potential for sustained fulfillment.)

Ghost Drive America

I've been Orthodox for over five years. Now I'm totally burned out.

It’s been over six years since I jumped into Orthodox Christianity. In spring of 2020, Orthodoxy caught my interest, my spiritual sensitivities heightened in the midst of Covid mania and the Evangelical congregation I attended at the time being shut down. I read lots of books, studied, prayed, and started attending a local Orthodox parish. I was baptize…

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5 months ago · 529 likes · 321 comments · Edwin Robinson

For more specifically Orthodox takes, has a piece on how “convert-apologist media”—partly the aforementioned intellectualism obsession—actually divorces people from the “organic, liturgical reality of the local Church.”

Over on The Speak Life Podcast, Naomi Brehm and Thomas Thorogood discuss reasons why liturgy is making a comeback. Naomi, especially, asks some thought-provoking questions about liturgy’s proper place and whether it’s really okay to make liturgical activities so accessible that they can be conducted outside corporate church gatherings.

Speaking of casual accessiblity, has an excellent complaint on The Commodification of Christianity—because religious practices should be hard and require discipline and be different than everything else the world offers.

Get used to playing a game and reality becomes boring. How on earth am I going to get through the Book of Psalms when I’m used to iBible?

…But if you are new to faith, you haven’t developed real habits. This is a huge hurdle, trying to stick to a routine, show up every Sunday, even remember that it’s Sunday and that this is something you do now.

To close this section—and to return to my opening point that attraction to conversion may be due just as much to disposition and perceived personal need as anything else—this quote from an article I haven’t read (and this note by ) sums up my general thoughts.

the devil wears prada 2

Shifting gears wildly. I intended to write a whole essay on The Devil Wears Prada 2. Five paragraphs are done—sorry, . Time runs and I really need to strike this one from my plate in order to keep up with other things.

I loved the movie. It made my little writer heart happy: seeing Andy’s dreams of being a serious journalist who writes about things that matter—not fashion!—actually pan out. And then she gets called in to manage a PR crisis at her old employer, levying the acknowledgment that crisis management is all about storytelling, after all.

More importantly, Prada 2 didn’t feel heavy despite taking on some serious issues like the changing media/publishing landscape and journalism as a dying rapidly changing career form. It is a film that does the magic movies are supposed to do. Recently, plenty of media has been indulging in what is and how things are now for the sake of realism or whatever. But TDWP2 is flashy, glamorous, rich—and about people who are flashy, glamorous, and rich (and flawed in entertaining ways). It is not necessarily aspirational, but it does allow the viewer to indulge in a fantasy that lasts as long as the runtime. And that is the point of this stuff (art, movies): to make us escape, to make us want and aspire. (Not necessarily to make us want to dress like we’re going to the Met Gala every day.) That’s what’s really great about it. It’s a good escape to a fantasy world that’s still our world. It’s believable but just out of reach. We bask in the if only.

In the film, there’s a dinner that takes place under Da Vinci’s Last Supper. I planned on discussing those scenes to make some other points about art that I don’t have space for here. But I do want to share ’ piece which I would have quoted from in relation. She writes:

What makes this scene so compelling, especially for an art lover like me, is how seamlessly it collapses the boundaries of time. Only in a movie could a 15th-century fresco become the interpretive lens for a 21st-century character. A Renaissance meditation on betrayal can become a commentary on human nature and professional ambition in the workplace.

The Curatorial Collector

The Devil Knows Art History a.k.a. The Masterpiece Memo #4: Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper

Some films define an era, and then there’s The Devil Wears Prada…

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6 months ago · 4 likes · Haydin Davis

what else?

»» Mere Orthodoxy launched a new member interface, and offered up this excellent articulation—the best I’ve read in recent memory—of the current media and cultural landscape and what Christian creative outfits should be aiming for within it.

»» sustaining creative aliveness while working a full time job — This was a good reminder that one’s “day job” is not necessarily the enemy of the creative life. I appreciated what terms the “profound, gorgeous, emptiness” of some of the places where I’ve done my best writing—“plane rides and hotel bars,” liminal spaces where time can be stolen back from the daily routine. Read thru the end for some fun and helpful tips on keeping a creative practice.

»» This essay is not for people sensitive about language. But ’s satirical take on what some deem a controversial slang term is actually a brilliant demonstration of the elasticity of our vocabulary.

»» writes about scrupulosity, biblicism, nouthetic counseling, and St. Paul in the Areopagus. She demonstrates the common, bright lines between ancient philosophers and Biblical personalities. (We simply must stop pretending that anything beyond a plain text reading of our favorite translation is anti-God.) She also discusses a helpful framework for dealing with anxiety.

»» I loved ’ homily, you don’t need a miracle, you need a job, because sometimes you do just have to get up and do the thing.

»» The Monotony of a Childless Marriage — Being wed now for less than a year, marriage is the furthest thing from monotonous. Still, I appreciated ’s experienced and sober take on the parts of life that become routine and how to find the “magic” anyway.

»» These days, no movie can be made without controversy it seems and explains why some recent conversations around Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey seem weightier than usual — Post-Literacy Raised the Stakes of the Odyssey Debate

»» Prof. Brenton Dickieson’s book, The Spiritual Imagination of C.S. Lewis, is out in a month. The nerves might be getting to him as his latest essay is on social media trolls, the state of book criticism, and how Lewis can help us think about “the problem of judging a book by its author instead of its argument.”

asides + signal boosts

📖 Reading

• Undaunted Joy: The Revolutionary Act of Cultivating Delight by . This book is instructional by example, a collection of short essays rooted in life experiences that make it easy to see how joy can be found in the ups and downs. (Fun fact: I don’t know how I first started following Shemaiah’s work, but we had the pleasure of meeting in London back in 2023 when, if I remember correctly, she was writing this book.)

🎞️ Watching

• We’ve been watching House of David (8/10 despite bizarre plot choices) and started Spider Noir (fun, at least the parts I’ve seen before falling asleep).

🎧 Listening

• The Dune 2 soundtrack has become a late favorite go-to for writing.

• Stumbled across The New Yorker’s Critics at Large podcast this month and have listened to several episodes on the Met Gala, romantasy, earnestness, and our modern glut of choice.

Enjoy summer!

Daredevil: Born Again Season 2 was not the hell I suspected it would be at the conclusion of Season 1. At least not until the final episode.

The finale, “The Southern Cross,” was something far different. Let’s catch up.

Season 1 concluded with Daredevil (blind lawyer-vigilante Matthew Murdock, played by Charlie Cox) realizing that Kingpin-turned-NYC Mayor Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) couldn’t be taken down by just another back-alley brawl and a couple of twists of legal luck. Daredevil needed an “army” and wanted to wage “war.”

My fear for Season 2 was that the show would devolve into an ever-intensifying series of fisticuffs between Daredevil’s allies and Fisk’s brutal and lawless Anti-Vigilante Task Force. Fortunately (for my sanity), that didn’t happen. Season 2 threaded a few plotlines that kept me attuned, if not, at times, completely intrigued.

Daniel Blake, Fisk’s young and fortunate communications strategist, learns there’s more to politics than posh parties and high living. He’s caught between Buck Cashman, Fisk’s grim reaper who attempts to draw him deeper into the conscience-searing sea of darkness and BB Urich, a sly, fashionable, justice-minded independent journalist who is manipulating Daniel for the greater good. Fortunately, love weakens Daniel’s boyish heart. He meets his end after allowing BB to slip away from Buck’s clutches.

Heather Glenn, a therapist (turned “criminal psychologist”), keeps close counsel with Fisk’s inner circle, supporting the mayor’s pursuit of “justice” against alleged vigilantes by (dishonestly) portraying them as psychologically unwell in court. Meanwhile, she privately struggles with traumatic memories of assault by the serial killer Muse. And the series ends with her putting on Muse’s mask. (Heather, I think you need therapy.)

Meanwhile, Fisk is doing Fisk things. Smuggling weapons to arm his task force. Plotting the governor’s assassination. Blowing up a ship in New York’s harbor and blaming it on Daredevil. Being enraged. Being weak—and then further enraged—when Bullseye kills his wife Vanessa as a weird get-back for her manipulating him into killing Daredevil’s friend Foggy Nelson.

Daredevil is in hiding—lawyer Matt Murdock has been declared “missing”—with Karen Page. They continue their standard underdog scheming to take down antagonists who outnumber them, outgun them, and have near-total control of the justice system through which the duo seeks to destroy them.

I’ll pause here to make the standard complaint that people of my disposition are wont to make: this Disney+ continuation of Netflix’s Daredevil adaptation (2015-2018) is not as religious as its forbear. Sure, Matt Murdock, on occasion, turns to the church for sanctuary, has a priest acquaintance who basically lies for him, and recites prayers for/to/from the saints. Notwithstanding the awesome reel below, this Matt Murdock variant doesn’t feel as catholic in his bones.

Missing from the past two seasons are lengthy (for a TV episode) discussions on the nature of the devil and the form in which he does (or doesn’t) exist, on the good that might come from guilt, or on souls’ damnation, or scenes where the antagonist calmly, frighteningly exegetes one of Jesus’ parables.

Even Daredevil’s debates with Frank Castle over whether it’s okay to kill objectively bad guys hit harder than any of his new conversations with Karen Page about the same thing, despite neither sets of dialogue being specifically religious in nature. The long shadow of the cross cast over the environment of the previous series makes even the fictional world feel different. But I digress.

One place Daredevil: Born Again insists on maintaining some connection to religious conversation is when it comes to justice, mercy, and forgiveness.

In the episode “Requiem,” Karen, frustrated by Daredevil’s rescue of Bullseye after Vanessa’s assassination, argues that maybe Daredevil ought to kill Wilson Fisk, comparing the situation to a Daredevil Season 1 event where she kills Fisk’s then-right-hand man, James Wesley, in self-defense.

“It is not up to us to take a life,” Daredevil insists.

“I pay every day for what I did to Wesley,” Karen replies. “I still have fսcking nightmares! But the difference is I don’t regret it. It was him or me. And what if that’s what it’s like with you and Fisk? Him or you? What if this doesn’t end until one of you goes down?”

“I can’t think about it that way,” Daredevil says.

Well, I can. I can stomach Karen’s desire for retributive justice stemming from frustration and righteous anger. After all, we are five seasons into Fisk’s violence and terror. The enemy is always the same. And when Daredevil is faced with ending it all, he always chooses the high road. Last season, he took a bullet for the man for crying out loud.

Truly, Fisk deserves death. (God forbid these words come back to haunt me.) It seems, to remain sane, we (the audience) cling to a poor sanitized notion of capital punishment and keep it at arm’s length. Our hands must remain clean. And Daredevil thinks his must too.

Another notion the Man Without Fear wrestles with is that of forgiveness, most shown in his conflicted feelings over Bullseye. He can’t bring himself to let Bullseye die; in fact, he intervenes to actively prevent that outcome. In this way, Daredevil is a fool for grace.

Murdock feels guilt over the blind rage that led him to throw Bullseye off a building right after the crack-shot assassin killed Foggy. Completely excusable behavior, in my opinion.

We end up with one person attempting to right past wrongs on behalf of another person who is also attempting to right past wrongs. As Daredevil points out, this is futile: nothing will bring Foggy back. But neither Daredevil nor Bullseye can bring themselves to stop trying to make amends and justify themselves in the sight of each other.

Bullseye’s concept of “good” is balancing the scales by carrying out “one good deed.” Shooting Vanessa was his attempt to erase the wrong that Vanessa had done by hiring him to kill Foggy. But it isn’t enough. Hurt people hurt people. And is one good deed all it takes to stop that cycle?

No, something else is needed. Enter: mercy.

To his credit, Daredevil remains true to his convictions to the very end. And, as much as it sounds like I’m complaining, I really enjoyed this season and love this show and its characters.

As Born Again: Season 2 draws to a close, Daredevil and his allies, including a large contingent of civilians fed-up with Fisk’s regime of terror, are trapped in a courthouse. In this hall of justice, Daredevil persists in showing mercy to Fisk.

But his persistence seems cheap. When Fisk, the white devil, emerges like a modern-day Herod, awash in the blood of innocents—he tore through dozens of citizens, cracking skulls, breaking arms, crushing bodies in his rage—one wonders if, finally, Daredevil might break his one rule.

Alas, he does not. When NYC’s civilians, decked out in horned masks and Daredevil-red clothing, rush Fisk to make an end of him, the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen intervenes. “We’re better than this!” he insists. Once again, he puts his body between Fisk and those seeking to deliver reasonable eye-for-an-eye justice.

Daredevil pleads with Fisk to surrender. “What about grace?” he says.

“You are not allowed to offer that to me!” Fisk cries.

Daredevil even appeals to whatever’s left of Fisk’s better angels. “I believe you love this city. Same as me. We have the opportunity to give it peace. Even if we have none. That’s grace.”

But is it really? Is it really grace to allow a bad man who has proven himself to be a bad man to continue to be a bad man. Are all the lives to which Fisk laid waste over five seasons of television worth it for his final surrender? (Which, according to the laws of superhero television, can’t really be his final surrender.)

I’m a Christian and I’m supposed to say yes. After all, where sin increases, grace ought all the more to increase. And grace can only reign where sin has once reigned (Romans 5:20).

But why, even at this point, can’t we stomach Daredevil killing Fisk or allowing him to be killed? Is it so important to us that we remain unlike the “ill intent who set upon the traveler”? Are our clean hands so important? God forbid we follow in the footsteps of Pilate.

I think what these stories need—more than the “good guys don’t kill” trope—is for the weight of taking a life, regardless of whether that life belongs to a good man or a bad man, to be communicated without being justified or excused. I think a world might exist in which a hero like Daredevil takes guilt on himself that others need not do so—like Batman in The Dark Knight—becoming the necessary evil that others might find evil unnecessary altogether.

This might actually be the most Christian storytelling frame. He who had no sin became sin for us. The innocent took on guilt—not only punishment!—that the would-be (and already) guilty might go free.

“…there is nothing more certain to inculcate the sins of scrupulosity and sanctimony than the suggestion that virtue is easier than it really is.”

This month, I’ve been thinking a lot about thinking about life. Existing vs. talking about existing. Experiencing vs. sharing experiences. Being in the moment vs. constantly pulling oneself outside the moment to examine it or collect visual proof to present to an audience later.

It sucks to think about experiencing a thing while experiencing it. It’s a weird, exhausting, semi-conscious bifurcation of presence. The more I notice myself doing it, the more I hate it: thinking about being at dinner with friends while being at dinner with friends.

I firmly believe we were made to live inside. But our ability to live (and think) outside is what separates us from animals. Perhaps when we have gone further in, we will lose the ability to think about our own existence.

I wonder: does God meditate on himself?

privacy and pretension

A few things I read this month watered the thoughts above—chief among them ’s essay, the thrill of living privately, and almost finishing ’s Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians.

Says Kylee:

The thrill of living a private life is the excitement of knowing something deeply and innately, so that it rests in your bones and settles in your mind, before it becomes something you have to explain. It’s the happiness of experiencing something fully without needing it to extend beyond itself.

Experiencing something fully without needing it to extend beyond oneself. This capability is what’s missing thanks to the panoply of social media and the pervasiveness of technologically-mediated ways of communicating with each other.

Undeniably, the human is built to extend experiences beyond himself. We love to share. (Hot coffee and hot gossip are two of my favorite things.) But what’s happening now is that, increasingly, we are sharing mere slices of life and not whole lives with each other. (Understanding, of course, that no whole life can ever truly be shared—but, perhaps, the aim is to get there.) Right now, though, the shared life is chopped into TikTok-length videos or curated episodes aimed at selling something probably harmful (as talks about here).

The pretension, that anyone anywhere in the vast forest of the world would actually care about the story we make of our lives, is older than Da Vinci. And it seems we are all subject to it more than we’d like—thanks, perhaps, to our divine parentage.

Our economic, cultural, and personal lives are suffused with the notion that we can and should transform ourselves into modern-day deities, simultaneously living works of art to be admired by others and ingeniously productive economic machines.

Burton writes. Her recounting of self-made men, dandies, inventors, and fashionistas from centuries past rings true today. Some are obsessed with making something of themselves. But most are obsessed with appearing as though they’ve made something of themselves. Whether that something is praiseworthy or abominable is no matter. The intent is to be seen and to be shared. To hold up one’s life and examine in the eyes of a public of some kind. I think we need less of that.

for the love of the city

Sometimes, if I wait long enough, some brilliant soul will express my feelings about something perfectly and better than I ever could. So, I was thrilled to discover ’s essay, Can Christians Live in Cities? Against Agrarian Idolatry. Bugh argues this simple (and obvious) point: if Christians have a call to ‘constructively subvert’ less-than-godly systems while fulfilling the Great Commission, then we have a responsibility—even a requirement—to live in and love our cities. He rebukes the wave of anti-city sentiment that seems to go along with the Kingsnorthian impulse to fight the “machine,” turn sectarian, and retreat to ruralism. Frankly, this impulse frightens me because it reads like an endorsement of abandonment—abandonment of the 70% of the human population who will, by 2050, live in cities and towns. Abandonment of the vulnerable who cannot afford to sustain life outside of a city.

I would quote so much from Bugh. But you’d better read his essay.

J.B. Foster

Can Christians Live in Cities?

I love cities. When I was deciding where I would go to college, I didn’t know what to major in, what credentials to seek, or what I wanted to do when I grew up. The one thing I knew is that I wanted to go to college in a city with a skyline. I at least got pretty close. Then, when my wife and I got married, we did our honeymoon in San Francisco. That ci…

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7 months ago · 79 likes · 37 comments · Jeremy Bugh

Also, if you missed it, here’s my ode to London, the city of cities.

asides + signal boosts

More writings I enjoyed reading this month…

»» God, on the verge of creating: ponders what it must have been like in the mind of the uncaused Cause just before it caused anything.

»» After Repeat Box-Office Crashes, New Films Make Space for Optimism and Hope (Lorehaven): My friend (and incredible graphic designer) Jenneth Leed offers an explanation for why Project Hail Mary, Barbie, The Chosen, and Promised Land feel like a breath of fresh air from the film/tv industry. (The common denominator may be Ryan Gosling?)

»» The Problem with Clean Fiction: This guy () gets it!

“We all have our triggers, our ghosts, and our bad memories. But we cannot purge every book of every scene that might upset any possible reader. There would be nothing left.”

He makes the case for why stories seeking to promote virtue must deal honestly with vice and why strict rating systems cannot accomplish what their proponents typically want them to accomplish. (His words in the quote at the top of this post.)

»» What Pullman gets wrong about Narnia (The Critic): There’s nothing and I like more than dunking on Philip Pullman. (Kidding!) But I love when debates about Narnia get attention from people outside our circle of nerddom. In Caleb’s essay, adapted from the paper he delivered at the C.S. Lewis International Interdisciplinary Conference in Romania this year (jealous!), he talks about the places where Lewis and Pullman might be unwittingly aligned.

• For another brief aside about Lewis-Pullman similarities, check out my essay on the BBC/HBO adaptation of His Dark Materials (seasons 1 + 2) here.

»» Let the Girls be Evil: Just an argument by for more truly awful female fictional characters.

»» Some Things Shouldn’t Be Made Into a a Joke: warns against the casually permissive blasphemy taking root at the highest level of America’s government.

• And writes about the people consistently making excuses for blasphemous behavior. (Honestly, I applaud the work she’s doing over at Unholy Alliances.)

📖 Reading

• Finished reading ’s Wicked Fox—a Korean mythological fantasy novel I bought fiveish years ago because it was on sale at Barnes & Noble and looked pretty interesting. It was amazing! and a window into a brand new world. (Guys, there’s so much gorgeous mythology outside the Western canon.) I finished it over a bottle of bokbunja-ju (black raspberry wine), and towards the end, I had to take a break and scroll silly memes on my phone because I am a very manly man and cannot be seen crying over a novel in public.

  • Cho’s latest work, Gods & Comics, is out now and I plan on getting my hands on it pretty soon. Gods. And comics? What more can I ask for?

🎞️ Watching

• The Devil Wears Prada. It was long overdue for me to see this and, boy, did I love it. It’s funny and simple and contained real human relational wrestling. (Although, I do believe, Andy has some making up to do with Nate. It’ll be interesting to see what they do with that in the upcoming Prada 2.)

  • For the purposes of this substack, one scene stood out—Miranda Priestley’s cerulean monologue. Her speech, prompted by Andy’s snooty, fashion-doesn’t-matter attitude, emphasizes that disengagement in something so essential to life, like the clothes we wear, is not a real choice. What we have in our hands is either deliberately chosen or the result of dozens of individual choices by other people.
    
    “That blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs, and it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you…”
    
    I could dissect this more, but who am I preaching to? You know this already.

• Ponies. A fun, fish-out-of-water series about the widows of two CIA agents during the Cold War being thrown into the state-and-spycraft affairs of their late husbands.

🎧 Listening

• I met at an artist gathering in London some time ago. She was working on some music which is now out in the world!

  NAVINA's Notes

  An anti anxiety indie folk anthem: OUT NOW

  The freedom of learning to dance in the rain, with the sun still on our faces…

  Read more

  7 months ago · 1 like · NAVINA

• Would You Love Me If You Really Knew Me? x Fletcher. Started listening to this one in the midst of all the thoughts about privacy that opened this essay. There are some lyrics that jump out: Hi, everyone, leave please // I need a moment to myself

• The Altar x BANKS

internet wit + wisdom

Time itself is moving faster.

The other day, I had this particular random thought about why it feels as though so much happens so fast and we’re hardly able to keep pace. (Insert caveat about not needing to keep pace with literally everything, but that’s another train.)

The idea: that time itself might just be accelerating and we humans are just laggy comprehending and meaning-making machines running the original software. It’s like downloading the latest version of an app or program that’s snazzier and faster than everything that came before it but you’ve still got your 2010 laptop that’s just not able to keep up.

Those are the vibes the past few weeks have given me. To-do lists grow longer but time itself seems to be getting shorter.

Man, however—as much as I try—cannot live by vibes alone. And I’ve lately had reason to reconsider time now vs. time “back then.”

all the new Christian things are old

This month, I finished listening to The Story of Christianity, Volume 1, by Justo L. González. It’s a fascinating narrative assemblage of early church history up to the beginning of the Reformation and I’m eager to begin volume two. But, as I read, I was strangely comforted by the realization that so many of today’s church squabbles, disagreements, and departures from the Gospel of Christ are just old problems reskinned.

Everything—from “celebrity” religious leaders caring more about political and civic power than they do about the flock of God to organizations growing from honest, humble origins into institutions concerned only with self-preservation—has happened before. There is nothing new under the sun—least of all political leaders who cavalierly slap the name of God on their crusades as discusses here and discusses here.

The fact that Christianity has been wrapped up in all of this before has been oddly comforting to me leading up to Easter.

why no conservative art?

I’ve also been invested in a different conversation about a segment of the Western culture/art debate where conservatives complain about what’s presented by “Hollywood.” The vibes are bad and there’s not much we can do about it is no way to address a perceived problem. Nor is, well, if only someone would come and save us.

All the source material is below so you can explore at will. I agree, generally, with ’s summary of how conservatives (or extremely politically-minded people) treat and think about art, but I am not quite so sure all the weight for her solution to the alleged problem can really be placed on the singular shoulder on which she places it.

But, yes, building something yourself is more beneficial than complaining about what’s already built.

The State of the Arts.

This is Your Fault.

Dear Conservatives…

Read more

9 months ago · 204 likes · 138 comments · Clifton Duncan

Fictional Influence

Nobody Is Coming to Save Conservative Art (And What to Do About It)

Every year conservatives complain that Hollywood hates them, point to a handful of companies as proof that right wing art is thriving, then wait for a billionaire to fund the revolution. Every year nothing changes. This episode is the reality check that conversation never gets…

Listen now

7 months ago · 30 likes · 5 comments · Trenton

Anvil & Ink

No One is Coming to Save Us—So Keep Going

I am not what you would call a respecter of persons. Big names are wasted on me, as are awards, band names, and publishers. There are, however, people I respect. One of them is a YouTuber and fellow Substacker…

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7 months ago · 11 likes · Vince Mancuso

asides + signal boosts

’s conversation with : The Myth of the Neutral Human made my day last week. There’s an abundance of food for thought about philosophy, virtue, moral reasoning, conversion, and, of course, family and feminism. Leah’s framework for thinking about those with whom she finds herself on opposite sides of a debate is soul-altering. But I won’t spoil it for you.

📖 Reading

• Currently reading ’s Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians.

• Also, with working my way through one C.S. Lewis essay a day for Lent, I’ve been through Mere Christianity (again), The Weight of Glory (again), Of Other Worlds (partially), and God in the Dock (partially andfor the first time).

🎞️ Watching

• + I enjoyed seeing Project Hail Mary. It’s a really good movie—a great movie even. Is it generationally significant as I’ve heard people claim? I doubt it, but that remains to be seen.

• Excited for the new Daredevil: Born Again season! First two episodes were pretty good. And I’m looking forward to the rest.

🎧 Listening

• Sharing an indie pop playlist Spotify ginned up for me because I really, really enjoyed it.

“…I could wander away, wander forever, see strange and beautiful things, one after the other to the world’s end.”

In our previous discussions about whether beauty will save the world, we’ve considered: (a) that beauty is hard and difficult and must be earned, not claimed, and (b) whether we’ve lost the ability to see beauty and be drawn into it.

Here, I want to discuss what beauty is, essentially.

beauty is (mostly) truth

Recently, I read a complaint about Christians who communicate about their faith to nonbelievers with truth but not with beauty. In short, the writer claimed a crisis of individuals being self-proclaimed Jesus People while also being pricks.1

What does it mean when we say Christianity has been presented with truth, but not beauty? It means that the message has not been delivered in a manner that is consistent with itself. And that—internal consistency—is the root of beauty.2

I’ve said this before about movie adaptations of books (or any adaptation of a work of art from one medium into another): the trick is to make a thing more like itself. There is an element of the transcendental of Truth wrapped up in the transcendental of Beauty. Beauty is not beauty if it is not itself—that is, if it is not true. This is why aesthetics or following the “rules” of art cannot be the sole (or primary) measure of beauty.

That which is truly beautiful is true to itself. It is not, of necessity, wrapped up in awe or wonder or feelings of celebration, peace, joy, or any other manner of goodness. Beauty is big enough to embrace ugliness.3 We must not cuff her artificially.

A few years back, I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau, the former Nazi concentration and extermination camp. The day was cold and bleary. Snow on the ground cradled the soul-crippling, red brick buildings. Even before entering, one could feel the imprisonment.

Images of the camp, nestled in snow, are justly described as beautiful—I brought home postcards—because beauty is big enough to swallow the horrors that took place there. It must swallow the horrors. But beauty has transparent intestines. It does not dissolve the horrors that it swallows; it preserves them.

Typically, beauty is spoken of as that which deserves or provokes awe and wonder. But real beauty also provokes awe in the old Norse and Germanic senses of the word: fright, terror, anguish. In our current Western Christian contextual conversation about beauty, this gets overshadowed by the wonder, reverence, and good, proper feelings we are supposed to have when gazing at a stained-glass window or a Rembrandt or whatever.

But beauty also (sometimes) engenders terror. And it should.

Like C.S. Lewis’s description of Joy—it was always “shot through with grief.”

i am myself

In his belated Nobel Prize acceptance speech, the Russian novelist and World War II-era atheist dissident-turned-Eastern Orthodox philosopher, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, declared that the transcendental of Beauty might be able to do the work of both the transcendentals of Truth and Goodness. I think he was on to something—but we haven’t spoken much about goodness, and we won’t start now.

Beauty must, of necessity, encapsulate truth. It must be its own mirror, almost incapable of description without self-reference. This, says Solzhenitsyn, is “a particular feature in the very essence of beauty.” It is “completely irrefutable,” only because almost no argument outside of itself can be brought to bear on itself.

Beauty, which is itself, will survive trial.

In The Horse and His Boy, the runaway slave Shasta is traversing a treacherous mountain pass, tired and alone. It is dark. He is cold. And suddenly he realizes that someone—a Thing, a ghost—is treading alongside him. There’s nothing worse than realizing that you are not alone when you’d previously thought you were, in fact, alone.

Shasta, hesitant and afraid, dares to ask the Thing what it is.

“One who has waited long for you to speak,” says a large, deep voice.

The conversation with the invisible giant continues until the Voice reveals that it is, in fact, the Lion whom Shasta had crossed paths with numerous times on his adventures leading up to this moment. The Lion had comforted him. The Lion had saved him from fiends. The Lion had wounded his friend.

“Who are you?” asked Shasta.

“Myself,” said the Voice, very deep and low so that the earth shook: and again “Myself,” loud and clear and gay: and then the third time “Myself,” whispered so softly you could hardly hear it, and yet it seemed to come from all round you as if the leaves rustled with it.

Shasta was no longer afraid that the Voice belonged to something that would eat him, nor that it was the voice of a ghost. But a new and different sort of trembling came over him. Yet he felt glad too.

That is Beauty. A thing that is truly, undeniably itself. A person who is themself and no one else. That is also Truth—that which can hardly be explained without self-reference.4 And here I will say my only bit about Goodness: it is a chaos that is internally ordered and internally consistent. It is why the Lion in Shasta’s story physically wounds Shasta’s friend for a harm that she had perpetrated on her servant. And that goodness, that justice, is beautiful.

Solzhenitsyn again:

Beauty will force its way through and soar up to that very spot, thereby fulfilling the task of all three.

You get it? But that’s entirely beside my point, which is: beauty is a thing that is fully itself.

In ’s interview with Ben Quash, professor of Christianity and the Arts at King’s College London, he discusses how Old Testament law called for a lamb “without blemish” to be brought for sacrifice.

Sometimes we think about beauty as something that is absolutely out of the ordinary. But, actually, in Old Testament terms, this kind of beauty is precisely being what you’re meant to be well. So, a lamb without blemish is just a really lamby lamb; not some kind of exceptional lamb different from all the other lambs, but a lamb with all the right bits in all the right places.

Beauty, as dull as it sounds, is serviceable. It fulfills the purpose for which it is made. It is a thing most like itself.

Beauty is without blemish, not because it has no errors or no areas in which it can be improved. It is without blemish because it possesses no irrelevant or substandard elements. Beauty is in the right place and rightly ordered in association with other things.

“I AM MYSELF,” the Lion says.

And he is. Nothing added. Nothing subtracted. Nothing manufactured or pretended. Nothing left to be desired.

Both the measure and the thing being measured.

Beauty is not required to stand out. Beauty is normal, not extreme, unexceptional.

All the natural things we point to as examples of high beauty—stars, flowers, mountain vistas, hummingbirds—are plentiful and unremarkable. Every time one appears, it does nothing more than any other star or flower or mountain or hummingbird. The star is very much a star, the hummingbird very much a hummingbird.

And so—they are beautiful.

This is beauty which saves the world—the ordinary lamb called to the altar for sacrifice—not because it is exceptional, but because it is perfect—perfectly itself.

Beauty is a thing as true as possible to its own nature. And a thing which is unapologetically self-referential is something to believe in.

“The Matrix was also staged but you watched it like wow.”1

With a twelve-hour flight under my belt and an espresso martini in my hand, I’m feeling emboldened and this rant has been brewing for months. I’m getting tired of everyone blaming everything that’s majorly wrong with our society on postmodernism.

Yes, postmodernism, like any intellectual movement (say the Enlightenment or Romanticism), has a complicated history and flawed effects. But a lot of commentary about the ills of Western society today leans heavily on the crutch of pointing to postmodernism as the singular and primary fault.

We are lonely because postmodernism. We are disconnected from a unified societal story and have suffered the disappearance of shared culture because postmodernism. Nothing has meaning anymore because postmodernism.

I suspect perennial critics of postmodernism suffer from laziness. Arguing is easy when everyone believes the same underlying principles about the world, shares a more or less common understanding of history, and accepts traditional structures of power and authority as just the way things are. Now, however, one actually has to work to convince the skeptic (or the completely non-hostile non-committed believer) that their worldview is correct and worthy of adoption. And that makes things hard for those not used to defending historically unquestioned ways of seeing the world. Those guys now have to go to the gym.

The effects of postmodernism are, in fact, a blessing in disguise. Instead of assuming, belief systems must now prove their validity and coherence. You cannot tell me you love Jesus and then abuse and demean in his name or support those who do. (This is just an example!) Today’s zeitgeist will not allow those narratives to be combined without question. That is a good thing.

We complain about historically conservative, traditional, or Christian values no longer being assumed as foundational societal pillars in the West. Well, you can be bitter and take your marbles and run. Or you can recognize that the bedrock of postmodernism—the rejection of unquestioned grand narratives and the deconstruction of assumed structures of power—are what make it possible for your worldview to have a serious seat at the table in the marketplace of ideas right now. It’s a feature of the system, not a bug.

Postmodernism is what makes Taylor Tomlinson’s new Netflix special, Prodigal Daughter, possible—and funny—and doesn’t require her being burned at the stake for blasphemy. We’re welcome.

Okay, I must admit it isn’t only the espresso martini that has me emboldened. It’s also ’s response to ’s criticism of the Enlightenment and call for more Romantic values in today’s world—which I read and recommended to you last month. Romantic that I am, definitely read this if you have the time.

Fashionably Late Takes

Romanticism Can’t Save Us

Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that the hype around artificial intelligence is justified. How should a humanist — someone who cherishes human dignity and potential — react to this technological revolution…

Read more

9 months ago · 15 likes · 3 comments · Megan Gafford

otherwise, beauty remains all the rage

I wrote a bit more about beauty this month while discovering more conversation surrounding whether beauty will save the world…

• has this piece on why suffering makes you beautiful

• Plough has ’s piece on discovering beauty through betrayal, business studies, and his mother’s mental illness.

• has hosted four episodes on beauty-adjacent topics on the Another Life podcast.

• I really enjoyed Christopher West’s piece in The Imaginative Conservative on Art & the New Evangelization: How Beauty Will Save the World 🩵🤍💙

asides + signal boosts

• While reading the first third of ’s article on The Small Group Industrial Complex, I found myself screaming internally, finally someone is saying it aloud! It’s something my siblings and I have discussed at least twice a year for the past few years: the difficulty of finding a church home where we feel like we are actually challenged in our faith. I haven’t talked much about this with folks outside my family out of fear of appearing snooty. But,

  A lot of Christians haven’t fallen away.

  They’ve outgrown American churchianity.

  • Although there’s something lacking in Meek’s criticism of the small group in particular—specifically, how to fix it—but his article is a good starting point for conversations about what contemporary Christian church culture has to offer Americans and whether it’s meeting that need.

• In Liberties, Elena Kagan (not the Supreme Court justice) takes issue with Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein for philosophical reasons: Monster of the Enlightenment.

• You have to be human!, cries — and everyone feels it.

• Another from and something I’m afraid most people don’t want to face up to: Does Might Make Right? Answer: I mean, kinda.

• laments the loss of the middle. And as much as I want to sympathize—he makes some good points!—the reason we don’t all eat at Applebee’s and flock to romcoms starring Julia Roberts is because we choose not to. No one banned us from mid-tier eateries; we also started getting more options at the box office. We chose what we wanted—voted with our pocketbooks as they say—and it’s time we take responsibility and stop blaming ambiguous “elites” and “theys” for the current state of things culturally. If your local restaurant strip is filled with arch millennial-aesthetic eateries serving avocado slices on your smash burger, it means people are paying for it (or at least posting about it on social media). That’s show business—I mean, capitalism—for ya.

  • Speaking of the middle, maybe it seems like it’s disappeared only because people aren’t writing essays about it. My friend wrote this poem about the Oxford that (probably) gets glossed over by the people who write essays.2

  • And speaking of people writing essays, I appreciate putting words to yet another of my feelings surrounding the irritating sameness of pockets of dialogue on substack. “I’m just tired of seeing essay after essay regurgitating why phones are bad and we need to start connecting more,” she says. “Girl, if your cottagecore village fantasy was actualized, there wouldn’t be any Substack writers. Do you know how to use a farming scythe?” Yeah, let’s see your farming scythe credentials before you get to write about how cancelling the internet is cool. It needed to be said.

  • In the vein of things that needed to be said, talks about Christian hospitality and how the “Norman Rockwell” version of it usually leaves neurodivergent families and folks with disabilities out of the picture.

• sent me this from and I love, love, love it. We all can fight the darkness by simple, everyday acts—like putting some thought into what we wear.

  Tanner’s Substack

  Style Slop & Growth Gluttony

  “Slop” is a term that’s been around for a while but really seems to be picking up momentum in certain spaces recently…

  Read more

  a year ago · 13 likes · Tanner Guzy

• Finally (saving the best for last), writes about Olympic figure skater, Alysa Liu the Magnificent, and how doing something for the joy of it is like heaven on earth.

Everything's Made In Georgia

The Radical Cosmic Apocalypse of Alysa Liu

Have you ever heard a musical composition that made you think, “I’m pretty sure this is what I’ll hear at the gates of heaven”? Some people have said that about Gustav Holst’s The Planets. Others say it about Nicolas Britell’s score for If Beale Street Could Talk…

Read more

8 months ago · 16 likes · 4 comments · Georgia Coley

Okay, it’s time for another espresso martini. (Shoutout to Tina in Detroit who makes one that’s mean and unorthodox — you have to bring your own espresso though.)

(more) asides + signal boosts

📖 Reading

• Finished C.S. Lewis’ Till We Have Faces, hailed by the NY Times Review of Books as his “most mature novel.” I agree it’s mature, and it’s interesting to read in the context of post-modernism (ha!) and a culture proud enough to say what it thinks of how gods should behave. I suppose it’s not really a new phenomenon.

🎞️ Watching

• Followed through on a long-standing recommendation and watched Pluribus, Season 1. I have some thoughts which might emerge in an essay elsewhere, but it’s an interesting story to experience in a society that may one day choose artificial intelligence for convenience and companionship over the difficulties of being human.

• Taylor Tomlinson’s latest Netflix comedy special, Prodigal Daughter (spoken for above)!

🎧 Listening

• It’s extremely trippy watching ROSALÍA’s music video for “Sauvignon Blanc” while in the middle of reading of Till We Have Faces.

• “What’s death to a risen king?” Trip Lee’s BRAG WORSHIP project is bringing new flavor to the sphere of “worship music.” I like it. (But what does my opinion of music intended for worship matter?)

• I haven’t watched the Netflix hit series Tell Me Lies, but I love CHVRCHES’ songs associated with the new season — “Addicted to Love” and “Such Great Heights”

• Lecrae’s Reconstruction: Second Story has seven new songs added to what I think is his last album.

• BLACKPINK’s new EP Deadline, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

The funny thing about looking for something is that you very often find it. The funny thing about looking at something for too long is that you very often become incapable of seeing it.

Look for beauty and we find it discoverable.

Look constantly at beauty and we miss the point.

In this next segment of our discussion surrounding beauty and whether it can save the world, I must ask: Do we have eyes to see it anymore? Do we know what beauty looks like? Can we recognize her in the crowd?

Last year, I met up with a friend in Washington D.C. during graduation season. After visiting the Museum of the Bible and grabbing lunch together, we parted ways and I eventually found my way to the Library of Congress. The Great Hall in America’s national library is gilded in gold and royal blue, adorned majestically with Corinthian columns, inscribed all over with names and quotes from luminous wordsmiths and educators of the past. It is one of the most beautiful interiors I’ve ever seen.

Also inside the Great Hall were scores of just-graduated students. Young men in those simple, non-descript black suits that seem to be the only thing available to young men looking for a suit. Young women, as well, in gowns so flamboyant they made one wonder whether the girls wearing them had earned the right to do so. They were everywhere—up and down the stairs, across the compass rose, on every balcony and by every window.

And what were they doing?

Taking pictures. Posing. With parents. With friends. With boyfriends. Group shots. Solos. Selfies. All of it. Incessantly. Completely ignoring the splendor around them.

But that isn’t entirely true.

See. They sensed the obvious beauty of their surroundings, how the afternoon sun filtering through the stained-glass skylights sacralized the aura in that hall.

But, in the context of this conversation, I still wonder if they really recognized beauty.

To speak of recognizing beauty is not to say that everyone must be a history buff to enjoy a historic structure. Or that only those who understand the ancient and intricate act of Persian tapestry-making just so can appreciate a beautiful Arabian rug.

I am questioning whether we, as a society, have the capacity to apprehend real beauty when we see it. To really take it in at a sub-intellectual level. Because, if we don’t, we are more lost than we think, and beauty as a construct is useless to save us.

Let’s relate this to the issue of second screen writing, a topic in the zeitgeist following Matt Damon and Ben Affleck openly speaking about Netflix requesting that movies and streaming series be written in a way that mollifies viewers’ short attention spans and scrolling-while-watching habits. Content made now must:

• be fast paced and have a big action sequence closer to the beginning

• have characters repeat the plot often (in case the viewer forgot)

• have mild, easily understandable dialogue

• also be able to exist as background noise without causing viewers to feel lost when they mentally tune back in

This scheme by Netflix (and other streamers?) caters to our current state of brainlessness, intellectual rot, and inability to focus on anything for longer than twelve seconds. As with AI (and learning music by TikTok), we are at the knife’s edge of entire generations being unable to watch, say, The Godfather because it’s too long, has a diverse plot, and uses words that might send one to a dictionary.

There may come a time when entire segments of cultural phenomena are neglected simply because we’ve become incapable of apprehending them.

Beauty, like a complicated Christopher Nolan film, may become gibberish.

It’s a good thing, then, that beauty conquers reason.

we cannot reason our way out

Beauty—the idea with which we are here concerned—is a magnet with a door. We are drawn to and into that which is beautiful—people, art, buildings, stories. We need no explainer or precursor. We are, often, unaware that it is happening.

Thus C.S. Lewis describes Psyche in Till We Have Faces:

[Hers] was beauty that did not astonish you till afterwards when you had gone out of sight of her and reflected on it. While she was with you, you were not astonished. It seemed the most natural thing in the world.

Unfortunately, we live in an excessively navel-gazey era. We can’t receive an experience without also receiving some kind of dialogue surrounding that experience or some conversation about what it means that we have had the experience that we’ve had. (And here we are talking about beauty.)

But real beauty, the door-and-magnet kind, draws one in without argument, without conversation. There is no negotiation with real beauty. Its un-negotiability is what makes it a transcendental and is also what puts us at a loss to comprehend it.

We don’t need to know what beauty means; we need to know the thing itself. And to know the thing itself, we must receive its answer without question. Beauty rebuffs questions. Or, better said, it ignores them, steps aside and lets them pass.

, who has recently written on the matter, brings this out in the example of characters from The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot. Alyosha, the protagonist of Brothers Karamazov, is very much like Prince Myshkin whom we discussed in my last post. Readers “are drawn to Alyosha and the kind of life that is lived out by his philosophy. He doesn’t have all the logical answers, but he lives oriented toward something that transcends the need for logical arguments in the first place.”

Further:

Beauty, like the characters of Alyosha and Myshkin, is living proof of a kind of truth that exists beyond the reach of logic. Beauty is something that you cannot be reasoned into or out of, and it simply grabs you.

None of this is to say that reason, logic, or intellectualism are bad. They are simply secondary when it comes to the question of whether we can perceive beauty and whether beauty can truly save us or our world.

two conversations

Let’s go back to the Great Hall of the Library of Congress. When we talk about beauty, we seem to have two different conversations going on. One conversation is about the impulse, desire, or even general mandate to make things visually appealing. (An impulse I fully support.) The other conversation is about the pillars that uphold beauty as transcendental and whether these pillars can be distilled by particular forms—like the forms which influenced the architecture of America’s capital.

I know enough to know that a Corinthian column is prettier than a concrete slab, but I struggle to explain why that matters. And when I attempt to do so, the column begins to feel like something foreign, ancient, and unbelonging to me. Something plucked from its timeline and thrust into our own. I become a foreigner to beauty, putting a blindfold on because I am trying to wrestle beauty into an intellectual frame that is not my own.

One of my chief irritations about the ‘beauty will save the world’ conversation is that it falls into modernity-hatred far too much for my liking. I am in this time and I want to appreciate what is beautiful about it. As an artist, I want to bring beautiful forms out of the matter of today—beauty that sings truly to ears here and now and for eternal tomorrows.

I do not raise The Library of Congress as an example because it is old, but because it is beautiful—and of a beauty that transcends age. A beauty that draws you to itself and into itself. That is what all those D.C.-area college graduates understood without knowing.

Again, The Culturist says it better than I could:

When you encounter something truly beautiful in life, you don’t stop to question its beauty or ask whether it’s meaningful or not. It has already impressed meaning upon you.

The question I ask (and fail to answer) is: will we be capable of apprehending the meaning beauty impresses upon us much longer?

Share very public secret society

This year, I’m trying to be a bit more streamlined with these end-of-month braindumps. Less verbosity from me overall. Less rabbit-holing. These aren’t supposed to be essay-length deals. It’s fitting that some of what I recommend below gets after that.

enough already!

We live in a commentary-obsessed culture—and I’m getting tired of it. I don’t want to talk about things anymore. I genuinely get exhausted when the analysis conversations and theo-philosophical debates extend past 45 minutes. Get it over with, my guy. (Maybe this is just a phase.)

From news to entertainment, the story is often not the story, but what people are saying about the story. We’ve normalized skipping to the comments. “I wonder what so-and-so says about x.” Not me! I don’t wanna know.

angles in on this in his essay, we talk ABOUT stories instead of LIVING them. We’ve traded in the “secret work, the indirect revelation of a story” for “forced, extracted messaging.” We’ve lost the ability to live an “unexplained life.”

I want to read all the books and watch all the movies and go to all the plays and listen to all the albums. And if I hate a few along the way, that’s okay. At least, I fully experienced them without the framework of dozens of analysis videos and hundreds of comments on whether or not a thing is good before I’ve even participated in the art itself.

You will probably catch me being hypocritical on this front. At times, I will indeed talk about things or analyze a story to death—even on this very substack. But that’s because I’m human and messy, inscrutable and inconsistent. Which is the whole point of experiencing and living life as a story instead of feeling the need to form an opinion about it or participate in an aesthetic or play a role. Sometimes I just need to rant about a thing I loved or hated, figure out why I loved or hated it, or convince you to love or hate it as well.

And speaking of opinions, I think we’d be a better people overall if we just shut up a little more often than we do. This is what says in her essay, Not everyone is everything—but in much nicer terms.

People don’t seem to trust the media, the government, government agencies, or social media. Everyone needs to see and make a judgement themselves. Everyone is an expert…

Now, I don’t mean to imply that people can’t have views or profound reactions to what seems to be a sort of lightning bolt moment in American society. But there’s something odd to me in the way that people suddenly take on the office of forensics investigator, judge, jury, and even executioner…

I’m not sure the solution to loss of trust in society is for everyone to become self-appointed ministers, police officers, economists, doctors, judges and executors. It’s not effective and I’m not sure it’s good for us.

We can’t be everything, and if we could, it would not be good for us.

The loss of trust in society (and in institutions) seems to have given us an outsize sense of trust in our own ability to form accurate judgments based on whatever data is available to us. Information saturation has tricked us into thinking that because we can see everything, find any tidbit of information, and essentially have become omniscient, that we also have the wisdom to be the arbiters of right and wrong about everything from in vitro fertilization to space exploration. And that’s just not true. It’s critical that we understand that and stress that to our peers.

My rule of thumb: if I haven’t lived through it, have no experience in it, or have some adjacence to it, it’s probably best for me to listen and learn from those with actual experience or education. I think there’s something to the idea of earning the right to an opinion. Maybe we should all be a lot more humble about our ideas.

But I’m getting long-winded again. Here are some other high notes.

• I enjoyed ’s video, How Pride Ruined the Cinephile Community. It is somewhat related to the above discussion but specifically aimed at the snobby, insular movie critic. She makes the point that stories are not about you. The receiver’s reaction or level of identification with the story (or characters in the story) should not supersede one’s ability to experience and learn from the world presented in the story. In my own consumption of stories, I am trying, deliberately, to interact with more things that I am not sure I would like. The aim is to avoid making my personal level of comfort the measure by which I decide the stories with which I engage.

• It’s the end of the first month of the new year, but there’s never a wrong time to read ’s essay, The devil’s in the distractions » overcome the “dizziness of freedom” » lock in » and choose action over ‘a thousand visions of perfect success.’

• I want to see the new romanticism that talks about take root — and I think this is a stronger anchoring movement than the mere pursuit of beauty as avenue to restoration.

  • Which, if you haven’t read my earlier piece on whether beauty will save the world, you should. The pursuit of beauty alone is not strong enough to fight AI and the evils of technocracy and industrialism.

• Not quite sure how I feel about ’s article, Prestige TV Is Built By Liars. I have always been of the opinion that you can tell a TV series that met with early success but didn’t know where to end because they kind of ramble their way into incoherence and can’t figure out quite how to close things out. But maybe not? Maybe having no plan for one’s TV series is better.

• Finally, the analog trend. I am not quite sure I can agree with Mr. on this…

  • On a more serious note, I’m recommending two pieces that sum up some of my unsettlement around the idea that we all ought to return to 1960s tech.

    • the tension between an analog lifestyle and consumerism x

    • The Case For, and Against, Analog January x

(more) asides + signal boosts

📖 Reading

• My big, big read right now is The Story of Christianity, Volume 1, by Justo L. Gonzalez!

• One of my goals for this year is to read all of C.S. Lewis’ essays. As such, this post by my friend who runs the Pilgrim in Narnia site has been helpful — How to Read All of C.S. Lewis’ Essays.

• Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman continues to entertain.

🎞️ Watching

• Watchmen + Lovecraft Country — both limited series and super-cool additions to my superhero + scifi taste palette.

• Also enjoyed finishing Firefly with my wife.

🎧 Listening

• Found myself enjoying F1 The Movie album between shuffling my extensive Liked Songs list.

Here’s to a February without distractions?

In The Idiot, Dostoevsky uses the word beauty, or some variation thereof, 98 times.1 Over half those occurrences are, naturally, in reference to the story’s women. The next most-frequent uses of beauty (or beautiful) in reference to other things are noted below.

Actions — 9
Objects — 7
Animals and nature — 8
Ideas — 4
Places — 4
Men — 4

I counted occurrences of beauty in The Idiot because a line from the novel has taken on a life of its own. You’ve heard it in artsy Christian circles, in think pieces on better evangelism, or in conversations about restoring the enchanted quality of existence that either the Enlightenment or post-modernism ripped from us.

This line, typically attributed to the story’s tragic hero, Prince Myshkin, does not come directly from him in the novel. Rather, it’s reported as Hippolyte, the novel’s dramatic and suicidal nihilist, questions the prince.

“Is it true, prince, that you once declared that ‘beauty would save the world’? Great Heaven! The prince says that beauty saves the world! And I declare that he only has such playful ideas because he’s in love!”

Despite the incredible verbosity of the nearly 500-page novel, Dostoevsky never has Prince Myshkin articulate what he could have meant by that statement. In the scene quoted above, the prince remains silent in the face of Hippolyte’s accusation that not only did he say, “beauty saves the world,” but that he might have said it only because he was a Christian.

It certainly sounds like something the prince would say regardless of whether his own story bears it out. Prince Myshkin, a good-hearted, even Christ-like epileptic, is thrown into the middle of aristocratic Saint Petersburg. He falls madly in love with the problematic Nastasya even as a more suitable woman, Aglaya, takes a liking to him. On the day Myshkin and Nastasya are supposed to wed, Nastasya runs off to marry Myshkin’s frenemy, Rogozhin, who murders her. After Nastasya’s body is revealed to him, the prince comforts his betrothed’s murderer and falls catatonic. Meanwhile, Aglaya elopes with a fraudster who abandons her.

It’s funny that this tragedy is the context out of which arises the sublime slogan.

beauty is a riddle

There are a few other aspects to which Dostoevsky applies the term beauty that I didn’t mention above. The first is epilepsy.

Dostoevsky afflicts the prince with his own real-life condition: an irregularly occurring intense, brief sensation of clarity and awareness followed by convulsion and collapse. The prince experiences confusion and memory loss when he awakes from these episodes. Epilepsy is not something we would typically describe as beautiful. Still, the prince speaks of his condition with a certain awe.

“What matter though it be only disease…when I recall and analyze the moment, it seems to have been one of harmony and beauty in the highest degree—an instant of deepest sensation, overflowing with unbounded joy and rapture, ecstatic devotion, and completest life?”

…That there was, indeed, beauty and harmony in those abnormal moments, that they really contained the highest synthesis of life, he could not doubt, nor even admit the possibility of doubt.

This intriguing juxtaposition of beauty with disease and disorder brings us to another element to which Dostoevsky applies the riddle of beauty—Jesus. Later in the story, the prince is describing art depicting the Passion in one of Rogozhin’s rooms. (Please forgive the long passage.)

“There was nothing artistic about it, but the picture made me feel strangely uncomfortable. It represented Christ just taken down from the cross. It seems to me that painters, as a rule, represent the Saviour, both on the cross and taken down from it, with great beauty still upon His face. This marvellous beauty they strive to preserve even in His moments of deepest agony and passion.

“But there was no such beauty in Rogozhin’s picture. This was the presentment of a poor mangled body which had evidently suffered unbearable anguish even before its crucifixion, full of wounds and bruises, marks of the violence of soldiers and people, and of the bitterness of the moment when He had fallen with the cross—all this combined with the anguish of the actual crucifixion.

“The face was depicted as though still suffering; as though the body, only just dead, was still almost quivering with agony. The picture was one of pure nature, for the face was not beautified by the artist, but was left as it would naturally be, whosoever the sufferer, after such anguish.”

Take a step back from the sublime slogan and we get the fuller picture of beauty embattled—of beauty as riddle instead of beauty as uncomplicated answer. The prince’s story does not bear out a beauty that saves the world—his world is not saved—the proof is not, as they say, in the pudding—but it does bear out a worthy struggle in a complicated universe. A struggle whose measure does not depend on the outcome.

As the prince continues the dialogue quoted above, he bypasses the resurrection, and sits in the mouth of death—the “enormous mechanical engine of modern days which has seized and crushed and swallowed up a great and invaluable Being…”

Myshkin himself is destroyed by the same “implacable, eternal, unreasoning force” that wreaks havoc on the Savior and strips beauty from deity. His sanity shatters when his bride is murdered, after which he is returned to a sanatorium. Beauty, in this context, does not apply to a saved world. Beauty applies to the struggle—dare I say, the passion—that leads one to fight to save it.

wrestle with demons

While pondering whether beauty could actually save the world, ’s recent essay—No, “beauty” will not “save the world”—arrived in my inbox. Much of the time, the “beauty will save the world” argument upholds a conversation around particular styles of artistic expression in architecture, painting, and other visual modes and even some literary ones.

Typically, the conversation goes like this: this [insert modern style of art or expression] is bad; we need to bring back [insert favorite classical or medieval style of art] which is obviously more beautiful. Between church architecture, federal architecture, and corporate logos, this conversation has taken place everywhere over the last few years. Perhaps the U.S. government mandating that new federal buildings be constructed in the “traditional and classical” styles of Greek and Roman antiquity is the apex of this dialogue.

I have nothing against the styles of antiquity or medievalism. I prefer them in many cases. But we cannot act as though those beautiful styles burst fully formed, like Athena, from Zeus’ head. These styles were borne of battle, blood, sweat, and ancient anguish. That is what Hilary says our current call for beauty is missing.

In the same chapter where Prince Myshkin’s epileptic fits are described as having “beauty and harmony,” they are also described as a “demon” being “upon him.” During one of his spells, he roams about the city and has to “repudiate” a devil whispering “awful suspicions” into his ear. In the chapter previous to that, Myshkin exchanges cross necklaces with the man who would murder his beloved.

Prince Myshkin earns his beautiful characterization from his actions, from his wrestling, from his struggle. For the same reasons, The Idiot is a beautiful novel. Its world is not set right, but Myshkin’s flame burns until the very end when the implacable, unreasoning force that conquers Jesus in Rogozhin’s picture puts it out.

In his autobiography, Nikos Kazantzakis tells a story that’s burned into my mind. He interviews an old monk with a reputation for holiness. “Do you still struggle with the devil?” he asks.

“No,” the monk says. “I used to struggle with him when I was young, but now I’ve grown old and tired, and the devil has grown old and tired with me.”

“So, it’s easy for you now?” asks Kazantzakis.

“It’s worse—far worse,” says the monk. “Now I wrestle with God.”

I love that story because it reminds me that the struggle is worthy. Myshkin’s struggle is beautiful in a way that beauty itself cannot bring about. During the five silent minutes that followed Rogozhin confessing to murdering the prince’s beloved, I wonder if the prince thought to himself as he thought about his epileptic episodes: “I would give my whole life for this one instant.” Knowing the outcome of his story, would he walk that path again? Something tells me he would.

Beauty, in the context of saving the world, is not placid and pure. Beauty is not art even. Beauty is not merely the depiction of Jacob wrestling with the Lord. Beauty is the wrestling match itself.

Beauty is born of wrestling. And we are at the part where we have to wrestle with our demons.

More to follow.

Happy new year, secret keepers!

Looking back over my writing in 2025, one word comes to mind: random. Good random! But still random. I wrote about movies and Narnia, a little bit of fantasy, paganism, and death. I want to change that this year.

At least for the first half of 2026, you can look for a series of posts around the following themes…

beauty

I am going to jump on a bandwagon and talk about the idea that beauty “will save the world.” There will be one post. There may be three.

bodies

As a precursor to the theme that follows, I am going to adapt the presentation on tattoos that I gave at Hutchmoot UK 2025 into a series of essays here. The body is the most sacred thing available to us and what we do with and through our bodies matters immensely. Our flesh as canvas—on which and through which we expand and express Beauty—fascinates me.

being

Bridging beauty and bodies, I want to talk about the representational nature of being. Ourselves as simulacrum of something more. Ourselves as icons of a greater reality and how we can bear that weight responsibly.

With one post every mid-month, I expect this thread of discourse to last until July. I anticipate a few posts about other things that strike my fancy in between. Y’know, movies, fantasy, paganism, death.

what else am i enjoying at the turn of the year?

📖 Reading: I’ve breached my 2026 goal of completing 20 audiobooks by listening to Art & the Bible, by Francis Schaeffer. It was a nice reset for someone who is frequently thinking about art and creativity thru the lens of faith and arguing conversing about popular art and culture with my fellow Christians. I own the book, but have never read it. Schaeffer’s reasoning added breadth to some of my instincts, while challenging my thoughts on how much a medium affects a message.

🎞️ Watching: I’m watching Watchmen, HBO’s 2019 limited series based on the DC comics. For someone who’s not a huge Watchmen nerd, it’s one of the best laid-out combinations of several storylines I’ve seen recently. The seventh episode, “A God Walks Into Abar,” is *chef’s kiss* elite on this front.

🎧 Listening: I’ve been going back and relistening to some of the music I really enjoyed over the last year—Kendrick Lamar’s gnx, numerous Fox Sailor albums, and of course Hans Zimmer. On the podcast front, I enjoyed a couple of year-end episodes from Honestly and the Reason Roundtable—fun stuff.

As for artsy things to look forward to, I have a small contribution to a Lorehaven piece on why I’m looking forward to The Odyssey, The Magician’s Nephew, and Avengers: Doomsday. Will share when it’s out.

What are you looking forward to in 2026?

Earlier this month, I wrote a piece for Lorehaven about what’s presumedly the biggest difference between Greta Gerwig’s upcoming adaptation of The Magician’s Nephew and C.S. Lewis’ original story. The plan—as yet, unconfirmed, but deduced from numerous indicators—is to push the entirety of Digory and Polly’s adventure in Charn, London, and the budding world of Narnia from 1900 to 1950 or thereabouts.

Shifting a story fifty years from its original timeframe is no small undertaking, and is fraught with all manner of possible fallout in potential future adaptations of the Narniad.

In my Lorehaven piece, I used Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein film to make the case that time-shifting an adaptation of a story can be a good thing. Frankenstein (2025) is set roughly sixty years after Mary Shelley’s novel and turned out fantastic.

The same day my piece was published, Narnia Web dropped some comments from IMAX CEO Rich Gelfond that sent eyebrows as high as Fledge can fly. According to transcribed remarks on an investors call, Gelfond said:

This is not your mother’s or your grandmother’s Narnia.

The music in it is unbelievably contemporary music, which IMAX fans like. I’m not gonna say specifically, but things like Pink Floyd and The Doors. You know that kind of music which people go to see in IMAX.

(You can go other places on the internet to hear the weeping and gnashing of teeth about how Greta Gerwig is “ruining” Narnia—despite the fact that we’ve heard nary a substantial peep from Gerwig, her team, or any of the actors involved in the production. Much less a trailer or any official imagery.)

Gelfond also claims that this Narnia film is “going to change the world” and is “going to create a cultural event.”

While it’d be wonderful for both of those latter inferences to end up true, it’s more likely Gelfond is speaking as a salesman aiming to boost confidence in his company at a time when lots of people are losing faith in the theatre model. I take his words to investors with a huge grain of salt. And I take the worst possible interpretations of the idea that Gerwig’s Narnia won’t be my grandmother’s and will also include “unbelievably contemporary music” with a similar grain of salt.

Let’s go back to comments Scott Stuber, then-Netflix Film chief, made about Gerwig’s production back in 2023: “…that’s what she’s working on now with [producer] Amy Pascal and Mark Gordon and they’re trying to figure out how they can break the whole arc of all of it.”

Scary words, for sure. But two years on from those comments, do we know anything more about what “breaking the arc” of Narnia really means? Even taking a fifty-year time-shift, some contemporary/rock music influences, and a guarantee that it’s not a film made for grandmas into account, I don’t think we’re any clearer on the final form Gerwig’s Magician’s Nephew will take or what future Narnia adaptations will look like under Netflix’s banner.

And maybe it’s not important that we know.

My cousins have been encouraging me to watch Rings of Power Season 2, the Amazon-backed adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings appendices and parts of The Silmarillion. Over Thanksgiving weekend, the topic came up again. Is it good? Does season two really improve on season one? How true is it to The Silmarillion and Peter Jackson’s beloved film adaptation?

During the conversation, someone said: You already know how the story ends. Plus, you have the books. So just watch it and enjoy it.

Essentially, it’s not that deep.

This view on questionable adaptations came to mind as debates about The Magician’s Nephew film—less than a year away now!—raged in other group chats over the past couple of weeks.

And I think we will also have a great movie come November 2026. Whether it lives up to the adaptation in my head, or the one in yours, remains to be seen. We should probably get comfortable with the idea that Gerwig’s Magician’s Nephew will be an adaptation for children who haven’t yet had a reason to learn that it’s foolish to shut oneself into a wardrobe.