1. Cards on the table: Not much of an Advent guy. I enjoyed opening those little windows on the countdown when I was a kid, but that was long ago. Today I have an increasingly hard time not rolling my eyes when I hear people wax poetic about the season. Its rediscovery no doubt tracks with other trends in American Christianity — namely, the exodus of folks bred in capital-E Evangelicalism who have found a rich way forward in the ancient rhythms of the church year. My local body is filled with such folks and they’re wonderful. I’m genuinely glad that traditions like Advent or Lent have allowed people to retain their faith in an honest way.
All I’d say is that having grown up in liturgical calendar-land, I’m not sure the grass is all that greener. The forms we embrace often mask a certain hollowness. They may not lend themselves to toxicity as readily as the make-it-up-as-you-go approach, but an emphasis on the rhythms of the year hasn’t exactly prevented decay. So when Sarah quipped on the recent Mockingcast that Jesus never said anything about Advent, I couldn’t help but nod in agreement. Gimme Christmas.
But then I read “Letters from Prison” by Ben Spencer in Comment and all that contrarianism goes out the window! One of the great themes of Advent, as Ali Holcomb drew out so beautifully this week, is Waiting, and Spencer’s article provides about as powerful a testimony to faithful waiting as I’ve ever read. Because there’s waiting for four weeks and then there’s waiting for forty years while imprisoned for a crime you didn’t commit. Lord have mercy.
The article compiles letters that Spencer sent his wife-then-ex-wife-then-wife-again Debra during his incarceration, a story told in full in Barbara Bradley Hagerty’s new book, Bringing Ben Home. The letters are a rare lesson in love, grace, faith, and even sanctification. They reek of the Holy Spirit and what another incarcerated epistolarian termed “the aroma of Christ.” Excerpts don’t do it justice but here are a few to entice you to click through. You’ll want tissues at hand, especially when you see the photos:
[July 2005] In the event that anything should happen to me, I don’t want you or [my son] B.J. to be consumed with hate or bitterness. I don’t want either of you to demand that justice be served. Bitterness and hatred are like a cancer. They will eat away at you until they destroy.
It’s just like my accusers, I don’t hold any ill feelings toward any of them. I hate the fact that they lied on me, but I don’t hate any of them. “Vengeance is mine, and I will repay, says the Lord.” Oftentimes we want to put ourselves in the place of God and take matters into our own hands; what a shame because we’ll have to give an account for our sins one day. What I want you to do for me is simple: Be at peace because it is far more rewarding […]
[May 2009] Sweetheart, it’s been a long road, and I’m still trying to get there. I thank God for giving me the patience because I could not have done it without the Lord. I oftentimes sit back and consider my life and the various trials that I have been through, the obstacles I’ve encountered. When I look over my life, I don’t know the whys. All I know is that God has never let me down, and I know that he never will. […]
[Dec 2021] It’s so amazing what God can bring you through. There were many days that I did not know if I could ever be free again, nor whether we would ever reconnect, but look at me now! I am free and we’re about to be remarried. So amazing! I thank God for His many blessings and for His guidance and strength that He gives. Thank you, Lord, for all that you’ve done so far in my life and will continue to do. I love you, Sweetheart.
While we’re on the epistolary trip, why not take in one more husband-to-wife grace bomb of a letter, this time written from the front lines of WWI detailing a bonafide Christmas miracle, read 110 years later by Peter Capaldi:
2. A friend who works doing ministry with maximum security inmates like Ben Spencer told me something interesting this week. She said that one of the strange privileges of her work, in recent years, involves interacting with a set of persons who haven’t been formed by the Internet. Or at least, minimally formed by the Internet. They pay a different kind of attention, apparently, which feels more, well, human. While I’m sure those benefits are cold comfort to those on the inside, Jessica Grose observes how such luddite experiences are becoming increasingly sought-after by those on the outside. A mark of prestige even! “Human Interaction Is Now a Luxury Good” she writes in the NY Times. I suspect the opening anecdote about hospital chaplaincy and the premium placed on “connective labor” will strike readers as particularly relevant:
We’re increasingly becoming a society in which very wealthy people get obsequious, leisurely human care, like concierge medicine paid out of pocket, apothecaries with personal shoppers and private schools with tiny class sizes and dead-tree books. Everybody else might receive long waits for 15-minute appointments with harried doctors, a public school system with overworked teachers who are supplemented by unproven apps to “personalize” learning and a pharmacy with self-checkout. Or, as [author Allison] Pugh puts it, “being able to have a human attend to your needs has become a luxury good.”
As I was reading [Pugh’s book The Last Human Job], I had a minor revelation about the growing lack of trust in various American institutions. Overall trust in institutions is at historic lows, according to Gallup, and the picture is one of declining faith over the past 40 years. That’s roughly the same period in which technology has accelerated and replaced or bowdlerized a lot of low-stakes human interaction, otherwise known as weak ties, like the ones you have with a grocery store clerk you see regularly or even the primary care physician you see once a year.
3. Elsewhere in the same publication, I read that 84% of millennials distrust traditional marketing. Which explains, presumably, the explosion of review-baiting in which even the smallest commercial transaction now yields persistent requests for ratings and reviews. American consumers trust the hordes of Amazon users and Redditors far more than any experts or journalists. Yet instead of being an example of renewed give-and-take between consumers and vendors, Eric Taub suggests that the review harvesting is actually an accelerated expression of the quantification of all things, albeit one which leverages our tireless instinct toward validation #lowanthropology. In other words, all these reviews may not be evidence of discernment so much as the crisis of mattering:
The simple act of delivering a parked car now becomes an “experience” that needs to be rated. The quest for reviews “is the ultimate fetishization of capitalism,” said Robert Thompson, founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture. “For centuries, our buy/sell relationship was akin to a one-night stand. Now every transaction is the beginning of a relationship.”
Despite its intrusiveness and time suck, many people tend to engage with feedback — often happily. We love to be asked our opinions. We’ve gone from a world where people kept their diaries locked, to one where we have private conversations out in public on our iPhones as we walk down the street, and share our secrets on social media.
“The attraction of slobbering attention is deep in our soul,” Mr. Thompson said. “It’s not a question of everyone getting our 15 minutes of fame. It’s me getting it and not you.”… Some believe we may soon reach peak reviewing.
Before we get there, however, it seems fitting to ask for your help in pushing the Amazon tally for Low Anthropology over 200? Or Seculosity over 400? Pretty please? I need to matter, you guys.
4. Humor break time! Alas, fairly slim pickings this week unless you count our tongue-mostly-in-cheek Gift Guide (which I do). Thankfully, Reductress made me chuckle with “Woman Checks Her 2024 New Years’ Resolutions Because She Loves to Hurt Her Own Feelings” and “‘The Harvest!’ Shrieks Forgetful Amish Guy” over on the Onion elicited a grin.
What made me laugh hardest, though, was Meditations for the Anxious Mind’s LinkedIn Warriors profile. The rest of the channel is pretty rich too:
5. On to a few about parenting. “Are You a Cycle Breaker — or Just a Grown-Up?” asks Kathryn Jezer-Morton at the Cut, which is the second time this concept of enshittification has crossed my screen in recent months. It’s one of those things that, once you see, is hard to unsee. Basically, enshittification is the process by which any legitimate concept gets co-opted by influencer culture (and self-justification), watered down and over-applied until it means basically the opposite.
Lately, there is a lot of talk in the parenting Zeitgeist about being a “cycle breaker” — making different choices than one’s parents did, thereby breaking cycles of harm that had been passed down through many generations. A lot of the cycle-breaking talk has to do with intergenerational trauma: physical and emotional abuse, neglect, abandonment, and emotional volatility… The concept of cycles of emotional inheritance has caught on; cycle breakers is a huge ongoing topic on TikTok in particular, with endless lists of “signs you’re a cycle breaker” and therapy role-plays about coming to terms with being a cycle breaker.
But we live in a time bristling with perverse incentives for exaggeration and self-aggrandizement, and there are no boundaries to where and how people will do this. I see it everywhere, and increasingly in conversations about parenting.
Every time we break away from how we were raised, it is an act of bravery? Are we always healing aching wounds when we don’t follow tradition? Or are we simply becoming our own people, exercising a bit of hard-won agency? Isn’t all this just part of the mundane and vaguely humiliating shuffle through adulthood? […]
The author and technologist Cory Doctorow’s theory of enshittification — how profit-driven online services inevitably deteriorate in quality over time — also applies to ideas once they’ve picked up a whiff of viral potential. What starts as a useful concept for those who need a term to describe their experiences is inevitably appropriated and misused by people who mostly just want to attract and keep people’s attention on social platforms. Ultimately, enshittified ideas are pressed into the service of selling garbage: MLMs, fake courses, snake-oil wellness programs. Cycle breaking becomes a cash cow. Emotional labor has been enshittified, likewise narcissist. Now, cycle breaker, meant to describe an arduous process of extricating oneself from patterns of behavior that threaten you with their dangerous undertow, is being used to describe the decision to no longer say “I don’t care who started it” to your kids, or force them to eat every morsel on their plate.
Believe me, I sympathize with the desire to valorize every moment of the day. Life is really hard, even for those who weren’t raised within oppressive cycles that need breaking. But when it comes to contemporary parenting, I wonder if the need to imbue every act with bravery speaks less to the little heroisms of everyday existence and, again, more to a desperation to feel like we matter — and the suspicion that we don’t. Makes a guy want to sing a carol about the God who interrupts our cycles of reactivity and revenge with compassion and emancipation — not as a parent but as a child!
On that note, I’m very excited to announce that Sandra McCracken (above) will be joining us at the NYC Conference this year! She’ll be leading worship and giving a concert. Only a few more weeks ’til discounted early bird pre-registration expires. Do yourself a favor.
6. Two more parenting quick hits, the first being a report from Wired that “Designer Babies Are Teenagers Now—and Some of Them Need Therapy Because of It.” A West Coast psychologist reports on the fallout she’s been fielding from well-to-do families who opted to ‘engineer’ their babies when the technology first became available about fifteen years ago. While I imagine the success stories tend not to seek out her help, still, the whole thing is a sad lesson in the unavoidable antipathy between love and control:
I’ve counseled a number of those families in the past 10 to 15 years. People who have children this way often place too much importance on genes while ignoring the environment. It’s like, “This is what our family is going to look like. We’re going to pick a kid, and this is how we’re going to put it together. Mom’s going to be in charge of the whole thing.” It’s like a project or building a company. People don’t always realize they are creating a human being and not a piece of furniture … So when their kid shows up and isn’t the way that they want, what happens? Usually, it’s a disaster […]
In these homes, a high value gets placed on achievement. I think the way these kids are created sends the message: “You’re not good enough. You need to achieve. You’re not accepted.”
When the kids struggle, it’s especially devastating. The child grows up feeling very different, knowing they were an experiment but not getting the proper support or acceptance they need to thrive. Because there’s not a caregiver who’s like, “I get you.” There’s none of that.
Trying to control your child is a recipe for disaster. The kid is going to rebel. If you have a preconceived notion of how they’re going to be, either you’re going to be severely disappointed or you’re going to shove them into a mold and it’s not going to work.
7. Control doesn’t just have deleterious effects when it comes to the “nature” side of parenting but the “nurture” side as well. Over at Slate, Clare Haber-Harris writes, “I’m Starting to Think You Guys Don’t Really Want a ‘Village,’” and I would be lying if I didn’t co-sign on her conclusions. Bougie parents love the “idea” of community but not so much the reality, especially if it involves much inconvenience or too many variables beyond our control. That is, wanting a “village” for our kids is mainly lip service, albeit sincere lip service (if there’s such a thing). We want a village, but we want security and status and relief even more. The pace of modern life is simply too fast to accommodate all of the above. Churches, this is your cue:
It’s impossible to read about modern parenting, especially material intended for the highly educated, middle-class contingent, without coming to one conclusion: Parenting has become needlessly hard, and it would be easier (and better) if we had a “village.” … I’m going to say something that might sound a bit mean, but bear with me: I don’t think modern parents really want the village, because most parents don’t behave in a village-y way.
If you want a village, and your parents don’t live close, you need to socialize with neighbors and friends. And when it comes to this, people repeatedly reveal their preferences: They are “too busy” to meet people. Things are “crazy over here” and they’re “going out of town.” Community is not a priority […]
In real life, the “village” includes your aunt who has what you think are bad politics, your mother-in-law who calls your 2-month-old son a “ladies’ man,” your father-in-law who always has the TV on, your sister who asks too many personal questions, and … like, honestly, your 14-year-old neighbor who wants to get babysitting experience. It’s fine to decide you don’t want help from these people, but the village has traditionally meant “the people around us,” not a bespoke neighborhood you might curate in The Sims.
8. What better way to close, then, than with the reminder that when the wheels come off the bus and our efforts at control fail, the story may be only just beginning. That’s when God does his best work. This one comes to use via Michael Silver in the Athletic, “How Jared Goff hitting rock bottom became his and the Detroit Lions’ salvation.”
Summoned to Detroit Lions coach Dan Campbell’s office on a late-October Tuesday in 2022, Goff feared the worst, and with good reason. Two days earlier, in an ugly road defeat to the Dallas Cowboys, he’d been responsible for almost as many turnovers (four) as points (six). The Lions were 1-5, and 4-18-1 since Campbell had taken over as a rookie head coach and Goff had become the starting quarterback. It felt like the whole world wanted him benched, and that Campbell, if only out of self-preservation, would imminently grant that wish.
As Goff entered Campbell’s office, he braced himself for bad news. “I know how this thing goes,” he told himself. “I’m not naïve. Is this it for me?” Yet Campbell, an outside-the-box hire with an unflinching nature, told his struggling starter he was sticking with him. And as Goff began to exhale, he had an epiphany.
“Man, I’ve got to stop trying to do too much,” Goff told Campbell. “I’ve been trying to overcome certain things throughout the game, constantly thinking that this is the moment we’re gonna turn it around. I’m squeezing so hard trying to help us win, because we all want it so badly. I have to release that a little bit and just do my job, one play at a time. I’m just gonna do my job and not worry about the rest of it.”
Campbell stared back at his quarterback and smiled. “Jared,” he said, “that’s all I’ve wanted you to do this whole time.”
The conversation fortified his bond with Campbell and laid the groundwork for a connection with a famished fan base that would come to view his redemption story as its own. “It’s like you squeeze so hard, and the actual answer is to release,” Goff explained last week … “It’s ironic that when you try to do less, more happens.” […]
Most of the football world viewed [Goff] as a declining quarterback who’d be a stopgap starter — at best — for the Lions, but Holmes and Campbell saw things differently. “Everybody created that monster and that was never the case with us,” said Holmes, who called it a “lazy narrative.” Goff, who’d gone 1-11 as a true freshman starter for Cal in 2013, viewed it as a chance to do something epic.
“The opportunity that I have to be at the ground floor of something is something that most guys don’t get in their career,” he recalled thinking. “You can either see it as something that’s happened to you or something that’s happening for you.”
Strays:
- Bible sales are up 22% in the U.S. through the end of October, compared with the same period last year, according to BookScan. By contrast, total U.S. print book sales were up less than 1% in that period.
- Great review of what sounds like a fantastic new book about Handel’s “Messiah.”
- “The Reformation Moment Is Our Moment” by Amy Mantravadi
- In need of some yuletide listening?! Look no further than The Brothers Zahl Christmas episode!
