1. “Tackiness is not a sin.” Thus declared CT editor Bonnie Kristian this week. After sharing that observation on a podcast in the context of evangelical church culture, and watching the comments roll in to challenge her assumption, Kristian takes time on her Substack to explain her declaration.
You see, I say “tackiness is not a sin” to me.
And I say that tackiness is not a sin because, while sometimes it is right to link aesthetics and ethics, beauty and truth, it is also possible to link them too tightly. The Bible speaks of this about Jesus — “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him” — while declaring him truth itself. This is the rightful warning in many of our folktales too: The girl becomes a princess because of her kindness to a disgusting toad; the ugly old beggar is revealed to be a powerful king.
And I say that tackiness is not a sin because I do look at lots of median American evangelical culture and think it tacky. I’m not just being self-deprecating calling myself a snob. I am that beholder having those class-coded thoughts.
And yet: In my better — more gracious, kindlier, more Christ-like — moments, I want to say, because I know it to be true, that having good taste does not reliably correspond to the imitation of Christ, and that having bad taste is never a justification for looking down on someone. There are many deeply tacky old church ladies who have done more in love of God and neighbor than I can ever hope to do. And I can make a firm defense of good aesthetics, including urging my fellow evangelicals to write better music and make better art, without plunging into an attitude of Can anything good come out of Nazareth? […]
When I say that tackiness is not a sin, I am not excusing bad art or approving of shallowness or breaking with the most sober and significant parts of our faith. I am saying, simply, that tackiness is not a sin — because it’s not.
And I am also saying that it is wrong if I (or, yes, evangelicalism’s less gracious critics) sally past charitable and constructive calls for beauty and excellence in the church to offer instead aesthetic disdain presented as something more substantive than it is.
As one whose aesthetic disdain is often uncharitable, I am guilty as charged. Her reflection brings to mind W. H. Auden’s Good Friday reflection, where he imagines himself present at Jesus’ crucifixion. Seeing the rowdy and bloodthirsty crowd, he watches the three grotesque executions from a distance with disdain. Why can’t they just give them hemlock like Socrates, he wonders aloud. “Then,” he writes, “averting my eyes from the disagreeable spectacle, I resume our fascinating discussion about the True, the Good and the Beautiful.” Auden, like Kristian, was well aware of how our aesthetic assumptions can keep us from seeing the kingdom of God.
See also Mbird editor Todd Brewer’s “A Church of Cringe” earlier this year. It’s a good lesson for everyone, including me, working to overcome Bluey’s transition to 3D for the movie release coming out next summer.
2. I was prepared to hate the New Yorker’s “The Doulas Who Help Us Die.” I had the chance to write about “Celebrations of Life” for our print magazine recently, and in that reflection, I mentioned how bespoke funerals were becoming expressions of individual authenticity instead of avenues of comfort. Knowing how birth doulas are hired to help mothers achieve their “authentic” birth plans against the seemingly uncaring institution of American healthcare, the idea of a death doula helping the aged have their preferred death seemed like another occasion for an authenticity eye roll. What Alexandra Schwartz reports, instead, is a profile of caregivers who are genuinely helping the dying and their families cope with the ignored inevitable. It’s a beautiful read altogether, but here is a snippet that stood out:
Chang, who has a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Stanford, began her career in new-drug design, then worked as a chemical-contamination expert in the cleanup of the Pelham Bay Landfill, in the Bronx. She stopped working in her thirties to raise her children. Now she was an empty nester, with time on her hands. She decided to devise an experiment. She would spend a year volunteering at V.N.S. Health, a hospice in New York, and apply the doula methodology to the patients there, to see if the skills she had acquired actually worked. She practiced active listening — a kind of deep, compassionate attention meant to facilitate openness and connection — and “unconditional positive regard,” a technique, developed by the psychologist Carl Rogers, that entails demonstrating total acceptance of another person. She mirrored; she validated; she figured out how to ask exploratory, nonjudgmental questions, and how to hear the responses without adding her own two cents. If she was tempted to interrupt, she reminded herself to WAIT, an acronym she had learned in her training which stood for “Why am I talking?”
“Guess what?” Chang said. “It works.” She opened her private practice, Till the Last, in 2019. (She continues to volunteer with V.N.S.) As Chang sees it, her role is “not about telling you that you can have a good death — it’s not about trying to make it beautiful or sacred or reverent.” She prefers to think of it as a reframing. “You’re creating environments where a person is telling you things that they haven’t said to anybody else,” she explained. “Once you’ve established that trust, you can go anywhere in the future with them. You can get them to look at difficult emotions. You can have hard conversations. You can take them to places of dreaming big.” Death may be the end of life, but dying is still a part of living.
If this sounds good to you, you should know that this is just what every pastor does when they sit beside you when you die. Seriously — this is seminary 101. This is where the New Yorker’s profile loses me, because people who go to church don’t have to pay elite east coast metro pricing for someone to sit with you and help you process the end of your life. I’m glad secular death chaplains like this exist, and I think this is a great opportunity for Christian ministry as well. But also, despite the beauty of the death doula’s work, it’s worth noting that the secular world has pulled apart families and communities that provided this emotional care in the past and then returned this emotional care to us as a paid service. Remember: if money is involved, it doesn’t count.
3a. Higher ed has been taking it on the chin this summer. AI is making it hard to teach. Prominent scholars have had their work scrutinized for plagiarism and falsehood. Tenured professors are leaving solid gigs over campus political disagreements and publishing tell-alls as they walk out the door. It was nice to read something positive happening on campus for a change from Matt Dinan via the New York Times: “I Let My Students Watch Me Struggle With a Masterpiece. It Changed Everything.” Though he was a literature professor, Dinan had never read Dostoyevsky’s The Brother’s Karamazov before, and his joy from encountering the novel proved infectious to his class.
That my students — regular 20-somethings at a public college in one of Canada’s poorest provinces — fell in love with Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s strange little town might look like a miracle from the outside, but as the narrator of “The Brothers Karamazov” puts it: “Miracles never bother a realist.” To be a realist about higher education is to acknowledge that the challenge of our moment is not primarily intellectual but sentimental. Spiritual, if you will. In the algorithmic age, effective teaching is affective teaching.
Today’s educational problems are often attributed to a deficit of focus or attention, but attention is an anemic way to understand what allows education to transform people. We’re really talking about passion, inconvenient and unfashionable as that is to acknowledge. Passion creates a unity of purpose and urgency that is the antidote to the feckless, superficial distraction of the algorithmic age. Lots of us pay very close attention to our phones, but what we lack is the sustaining passion that endures difficulty and shapes a life. […]
As far back as Plato’s irascible character Meno, would-be teachers have been confronting the problem that students must want to learn before learning is possible. For many decades, higher education has relied on a workaround to this problem: tying access to good jobs to success in school. In some cases, a desire for money and prestige leads to real, if incidental, learning. But large language models have broken this arrangement by making it possible for students to skip straight to an effortless A without doing any meaningful learning. Technology has exposed the limits of our mercenary approach to education.
Dinan teaches in a Great Books program, so his classroom is self-selected, of course. But his insight that education is more than attention, and it requires passion, is an insight as old as St. Augustine and his thoughts on properly ordered affections. We are motivated, primarily, by what we love, and any Christian attempt at faith education has to begin from that starting point. And for what it’s worth, I get it: reading Brothers Karamazov for the first time was a transformative experience for me too.
3b. At the risk of over-Karamazov-ing your timeline, this reflection from Sybil Sender at Plough finds that the relationship between Ivan and Alyosha remains as potent a spiritual catalyst as ever. For those of you who wrestle with matters of theodicy, you’re not alone.
4. Freud would not enjoy modern therapy culture, argues Anna Ballan over at the Hedgehog Review. Psychology has been more popular than ever, but as Ballan states, Freud is often co-opted into blessing a modern framework of talk therapy that he himself would find untenable. The whole article is worth your read, but the aspect most worth highlighting is Ballan’s suspicion that pop-psychology is actually a smokescreen for people who want to avoid changing.
Freud, read against the assumptions of our own therapeutic times, becomes uncooperative. The psychological culture popularized on screens often assumes several things: that you actually want to get better; that insight leads frictionlessly to change; that naming an issue defuses it; that the self is a project to be perfected. Freud assumes that a part of you — perhaps the most salient part — does not want to get better; that apparent insight can deepen the problem and naming an issue can intensify its grip; that the self is a kind of battlefield. If the therapy of today’s screen culture holds a mirror up to a curated self-image, actual therapy, Freud would insist, is more like a light held up over a swamp. […]
From a psychoanalytic perspective, the assumption that self-articulation liberates is only half true. The more articulate we are, the more elaborate and agile our evasions may become. Pathological symptoms are not random errors, after all: they are solutions the psyche has devised, protective compromises that maintain a precarious psychic equilibrium — a panic symptom that holds in abeyance a deeper grief, a chronic independence that protects against the anxiety of dependency, a rigid scruple that helps fend off an inconvenient desire. To unravel these is to tamper with a system that may, however painfully, be functioning. And naming a feeling — far from resolving it — can make it more dangerous, like a virus mutating under pressure. Freud noticed that his patients did something interesting. They claimed that they wanted to change, but they evolved intricate psychological ecosystems to ensure precisely that they didn’t, and they enlisted Freud as an accomplice in their stasis.
Freud’s diagnosis of modern therapy culture, writes Ballan, might be something like this: look how we’ve created a pop-psychology ecosystem that relies on the smartphone to manage our psychosis when the smartphone itself is the catalyst for our psychosis! “If Freud teaches us anything,” Ballan suggests, “it is that human beings express themselves through grand ironies.” I don’t agree with everything Freud published, but we write off his insights of at our own peril. The will is bound, the heart is deceitful, and the mind is futile: on this much, the original therapist and the apostle Paul can agree.
5. In humor this week, “Things I Hope People Would Say At My Funeral” from McSweeneys pairs nicely with the above reflection on death doulas:
“How sure are we that she’s dead? Should we double-check just to be safe? I know for a fact that she would not want to be buried alive.”
“I’m a pastor, and I can safely say I’ve never seen a sadder funeral than this one. She was objectively the most loved person ever to live.”
“If there aren’t any more seats available, just stand in the back. And if the back fills up, just spill out the door of the church into the street.”
See also: “Imagined Conversations Between My Parents While On a Family Vacation” and, from the Onion, “Crying Baby Has No Idea How Much Worse It Gets.”
6. Ok, hear me out. What if … what if … what if that whole dustup about the Australian woman breakdancer from the 2024 Olympic Games is a mix of the Mandela Effect and false memory and mob mindset? What if our society’s mutual confusion about her less-than-impressive dance showcase was rooted in misunderstanding? What if, like the woman who spilled hot coffee on her lap at McDonalds or the woman who restored the Spanish Jesus painting, we’ve all come to understand only half of the story? When the internet finds an unlucky individual to dump their collective spite upon, the scapegoat usually tends to be more righteous than we give her credit for. Perhaps that will be the case with Raygun the breakdancer?
This, of course, and the fact that they’re turning the book of Jonah into a movie. (A joke re: the above trailer for Whalefall)
7. We’ll leave the last word this week to Steven P. Millies at Commonweal, who helped me understand the August 9 mitre promotion at that evening’s White Sox game. You might have seen photos from the promotion: every one of the 38,000+ fans at the game received a free promotional bishop’s mitre, styled in White Sox colors, in honor of the team’s most famous fan, Pope Leo XIV. I, for one, thought the promotion was tacky (yet again, see point one above), a pearls-before-swine-style cash grab to fill the ballpark’s seats. Millies, however, offers a boots-on-the-ground Chicago South Side take on the night that shifted my perspective. You probably still won’t catch me wearing a Sox mitre, but then again, I also haven’t gotten an entire sports arena to pass the peace with one another either.
The close-knit neighborhoods in this part of the world are defined by their Catholic high schools and parishes. It doesn’t really matter if you’re Catholic — many at the ballpark were not. Everybody is included. The only thing that equals Catholicism’s grip on the local imagination is the White Sox. Little surprise, then, we gathered at the great shrine to celebrate one of our own with the rituals we all know.
Any doubts on that point were settled between the fifth and sixth innings when a south-side pastor, Fr. Tom Hurley (whom I would guess half of the people in the ballpark knew or had met), was interviewed on the Jumbotron. He said it would probably make Pope Leo very happy if everyone in the ballpark were to offer one another a sign of peace, which he invited us to do. And so, there in the stands, that’s what we did, just like it was a Sunday Mass. Except in my free hand I held a beer.
Strays:
- “What’s the Value of an Hour?” A helpful exploration of how and why the concept of “opportunity cost” has its limits. Includes a shoutout to Mockingbird fave Oliver Burkeman.
- On the topic of snobbery from our first point, I appreciated this apology for poet Mary Oliver.
- “Status Defines Friendship for too Many Americans,” so says former conference speaker Christine Emba in the Times.
- “The Legacy of Martin Luther’s Father, Hans Luther”: via Amy Mantravadi at 1517.
