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 Jonathan R. McCallum
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 Kylee 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.) Rachael Killackey 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 Sho Baraka’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, Mycal Latravious Dédé III 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 Kip Henderson 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, Bethel McGrew wrestles with the sincerity Gerwig exudes when she speaks about Narnia and about film-making in general.
Finally, Austin Suggs 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.)
as you may know, in the mid-20th century, Clive Staples Lewis looked at his Protestant Bible which was sitting next to his pal John Ronald Ruel Tolkien’s Catholic Bible, and he noticed his Protestant one was seven books short. Never wanting to be outdone by the old philologist, he went about rectifying this deficit by writing the seven book Chronicles of Narnia series. And since that fateful day in 1956 when Lewis released The Last Battle and thereby brought the series to a close, Protestants and Catholics have been on equal footing in terms of Bible books with Narnia being firmly established as the Protestant deuterocanon. —Austin Suggs
asides + signal boosts
📖 Reading
Had occasion to dive into Frankenstein again, thanks to Shemaiah Gonzalez 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!