Another Week Ends

1. I’m not going to bury the lede of this column … David Zahl has a superb new article up in Christianity Today on the importance of nonperformative fun in everyday life — and especially in Christianity. Play could seem like a luxury, what someone does to fill the time between more important responsibilities. Indeed, free play appears nowhere on Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs. But Zahl argues instead that, quoting Stuart Brown, “life without play is a grinding, mechanical existence organized around doing the things necessary for survival. Play is the stick that stirs the drink. … Play is the vital essence of life.” If many Christians are (justifiably) known as killjoys, the opposite should be the case:

The blessed assurance of grace announces that the high-wire game of proving ourselves is finished. By grace, the lingering threat of judgment has been removed, establishing precisely the sort of safety that Burghardt’s definition requires for a person to play, albeit on a deeper, existential level. What this means is that, when it comes to God, the Christian is set free from the spur of necessity and can enter into a new relation of play. Nigerian theologian Nimi Wariboko connects the dots when he writes, “The logic of grace is the logic of play.”

In more gut-level terms, the key question of the Christian life becomes one of freedom: What would you do, what risk would you take, what would you say if you weren’t afraid? What would you do if you truly believed your standing with God was secure, the ultimate threat of judgment was removed, and you didn’t have to do anything? How would you spend your time and energy if you could undertake something for the sheer joy of doing it rather than any outcome it might produce? […]

Laughter and joy are not incidental. Perhaps this hints at what Augustine meant when he articulated a vision of Christian life as focused on delight rather than obligation: delight in creation, delight in others, delight in God. In other words, church may be a great place to cry, but if it doesn’t inspire a smile now and then, something may have gone awry.

To close, Zahl turns asks why play may be especially important today (in this economy?!?).

It feels as if the world is on fire, collapsing as we speak under waves of acrimony, fear, and exploitation. The doom is palpable, and not just on social media (though particularly there). Am I really saying the Christian response to the state of the world is to … play? To be like a modern-day Nero, callously batting around a pickleball as Rome burns? Isn’t the proper Christian response to suffering one of service and sacrifice and reconciliation? Absolutely it is.

Yet … work and play are not mutually exclusive categories. Adopting a playful attitude toward your work on behalf of others doesn’t make that work any less urgent; it merely ensures you won’t burn out as quickly. To serve others in a way that makes you smile, that even brings delight, means you will serve your neighbor better. Like a child in a sandbox, you will take bigger risks if you believe eternity isn’t at stake. 

So many possible directions to take with this one, but to add to Zahl’s point, I’ll note how often we overlook the humor and playful overtones of Jesus’ ministry. Admittedly, there’s no record of him ever playing the first-century equivalent of pickleball, but fun, delight, humor? Absolutely. To take just one example … I think Jesus had fun answering stupid questions. Not necessarily in a condescending way of ridiculing the questioner (though there is that occasionally) but by answering the question in a way that makes his reply seem obviously correct. “Is it right to pay taxes to Caesar?” “Who’s head is on the coins Caesar demands?” “Whose wife will she be in the resurrection, since she’s been married seven times?” “She will be like the angels.” “It is by the Prince of Demons he casks out demons.” “He who smelt it, dealt it” (my paraphrase, obviously).

2. Sticking with the playful theme for this next one, philosopher C. Thi Nguyen has a new book out on play entitled The Score, and reviews of it are making the rounds. Games, Nguyen contends, teach us “the distinction between goals and purposes.” The two are rarely the same. The goal of many games is to win, but the reasons for playing them differ. Here’s Joshua Rothman’s write up in the New Yorker:

When you’re playing charades with your family, your goal is to win, but your purpose is to be part of a group of people enjoying themselves. For this reason, as long as you have a good time, you can feel satisfied even if you lose; it would be bizarre to get mad about losing at charades. […]

In the real world, as in the game world, scores are motivating and clarifying; they can help groups of people coalesce around shared goals. But real-world scores, like game scores, are also reductive. In both cases, that’s the point, as it were, of having a score. A group of people playing charades may come to the game with different purposes — Bob wants to break the ice, Anne wants to flirt, Steve wants to show off his acting chops, Jill is competitive — but the score helps them form a “quick, artificial community” around the shared and simplified goal of winning. Similarly, the writers, editors, producers, and businesspeople who work at a magazine all can agree, for purposes of decision-making, that it’s good when a story finds lots of readers, and orient their efforts around that goal. But they must also be clear about their individual purposes, which are different, nuanced, and harder to communicate. If they focus only on the score, they’ll lose track of what counts.

But “focus[ing] only on the score,” Nguyen observes, is precisely what many today do. In a world dominated by metrics, chasing a winning score kills the fun: writers who only measure success by click rates or word counts, weightlifters who chart their progress, parents concerned with grades over well-being, or pastors anxious over church attendance. Instead, “Purposes exist in players, not games, and yet the games have come to dominate the players.”

The theological resonances of Nguyen’s argument are almost a little too obvious. As Jesus himself said, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” In this way, prioritizing the score over the purpose is akin to trading the play of the gospel for the metrics of the law. There’s nothing that kills the fun more than always being told how badly you’re losing.

3. One writer who seems to be having a lot of fun these days is Freya India, and my gosh her latest “Therapists Are Not Parents” is another zinger. The observation may seem surprising to many (therapists included!), but at least in the online space, the therapist-as-substitute-parent is a major selling point:

“We’re proud of you,” Talkspace tells us, “You are loved.” BetterHelp sees you and hears you because “You deserve all the love and care in the world”. Funny how we worry so much about the rise of therapy-speak in our relationships, but never worry about this weird family-speak with our therapists.

Now, I’m moderately skeptical as to whether the TikTok therapists she cites are representative of a vast and diverse medical practice. Surely “boundaries” and “transference” are still in the mix when it comes to the question of establishing patient-therapist trust? But her insight into the expectations of therapists and the ongoing function they have for patients is a salient one. Some (many?) people need therapists because their own parents failed them. In the process, the role of parents has shifted. Back to India:

After the weakening of the family came the rise of state and professional substitutes, and with them, the assumption that only the advice of educated experts can be trusted. And so therapists today help with everything. They guide children through coming-of-age, get them through girlhood. They are here to teach them how to date, how to cope with new schools, how to accept their changing bodies, how to handle rejection from a crush. Young adults go to therapy for career advice, for dating advice, for “big life changes” like “adulting” and “heartbreak”. Our parents can’t possibly help with these things anymore; they aren’t professionals. […]

We lowered expectations for parents and raised expectations for professionals. The assumption today is that it’s healthy to rely on experts, unfair to rely on family. Which is why we have a constant cry for more mental health funding and better access to resources, but barely anything for defending families, for expecting parents to stay together or spend more time with their children; that would be backward. Children deserve dependable therapists, apparently, but not dependable families. Children have a natural need for mental health resources, but not for the most natural thing in the world, two attentive parents. And how ironic, painfully ironic, that we have all these therapists telling young people not to be too close to friends and family, never to be codependent, to put up boundaries, to keep a healthy distance from those who love them, to distrust people who are human and disappointing and sometimes hard to understand, but rely completely on someone who needs their card details, who is emailing over invoices, who has to sign out after fifty minutes. We are warned against codependent families while we are encouraged to call and text therapists and trust everything they say.

Now, it’s entirely possible to read some of this and believe it to be a good thing. A surrogate parent for a teenager (loosely defined) in the form of a coach, teacher, youth minister, and (yes) therapist is a godsend. They can be a word of grace when it’s become impossible for parents to do so. See also Friday Night Lights. It’s also difficult, however, to read the above outside of the recent rise in child estrangement from parents (as India notes) and the ongoing loneliness epidemic. Any relationship, for better or worse, is never without its complications. Love is always a risk worth taking, most especially if you’re not being sent an invoice for it.

4. Worth its own subheading, Simeon Zahl’s talk on “The Grammar of Christian Hope”  at the Radvo Conference a few months back was brilliant:

5. For some laughs this week we turn to Points in Case’s “Attention Passengers: The Captain Has Turned on the Applause Sign.” On the mildly edgier side, there’s Belladonna Comedy’s “Woman or ChatGPT?” But the thing that I laughed the hardest at came from the UK’s Daily Mash: “Microplastics, and Five Other Middle-Class Health Scares Everyone Else Ignored.”

Ultra-processed food

The latest one. Food sold in shops has all kinds of preservatives, sweeteners and emulsifiers in it to make it last a while. All these things could – maybe, it’s not really proven or anything and in fact there’s a lot of evidence against it – be bad for you. So why not make fresh middle-class foods in a nice kitchen with an island and feel superior instead?

Chemicals

At a certain level of moneyed vagueness, ‘chemicals’ is all you need. You’re sensitive to them in a way that others aren’t. You can feel their malevolent presence hovering and consequently must move to the country even if your husband now has a four-hour commute. ‘There are no chemicals in nature,’ you say, with the confidence of an arts graduate.

And for those readers who are capable of reading political satire without taking it seriously, Freddie deBoer’s 2026 Predictions are hilarious:

I predict that in 2026 conservatives will discover therapy language and weaponize it against their enemies. Liberals will discover stoicism and misuse it to justify not trying, not that they ever needed much justification in the past. Actual therapists will up their hourly rates by 15%. […]

I predict that in 2026 a final, definitive death blow against free speech will be announced. Several more will immediately follow. Speech will be less free, and yet paradoxically, in the quiet of the background, free speech will keep winning. I will not be able to explain any of this to all of you.

6. A bit of a quick hitter, but only because I don’t know the first thing about cricket. I don’t know what “the Ashes” are, and “Bazball” sounds like a knockoff anime TV series. This is a personal failure, I’m sure, but alas. Even still, some of Jonny Torrance’s reflection for Seen and Unseen manages to bridge the cultural divide:

Jesus tells lots of stories about people not getting their just deserts; about the failures getting the same reward as the winners. About losers getting chosen.

At the heart of Christianity is the ludicrous claim that you get picked for the team regardless of how good you are. In fact, if Jesus is anything to go by (and he is everything to go by), the worse you are the more likely you are to get picked.

And the crazy thing is, it doesn’t stop there. The grace goes on.

One of the interesting things about Bazball is we all loved it when it worked: when all that positivity produced incredible results. We all got the psychology then – be nice to people and they produce their best work. It was when the results stopped happening that the press really put the boot in.

The scandal of Christianity is that the radical grace of Jesus is so radical it foregoes even this logic of expediency. Jesus isn’t just gracious because of a psychological belief that this is the best way to get us to be better.

If he worked that way, then he would finally drop us when we kept underperforming.

No. Jesus is gracious because he loves us, and he never gives up. No matter how many stupid shots we play. No matter how bad our batting average gets. No matter how mediocre we turn out to be.

Even if we don’t get better.

We’re picked, and he doesn’t drop players.

7. To close, let’s drop in on the psychologist-theologian Richard Beck and his brilliant reflection on how cultural shifts have changed how we understand faith. Simply put, if faith was assumed as a given 500 years ago, then today it is understood as a choice. Rather than a shift from Christianity to secularism, we’ve moved from Christianity to pluralism so that faith exists today among an ever-expanding marketplace of possibilities:

Given that faith is now a choice we observe faith increasingly becoming an individual lifestyle decision, a form of personal expression. This creates the explosion of the Nova Effect, the ramifying diversity of faith in the modern world where everyone follows their own path. When faith was a cultural given, a part of the taken-for-granted background, it created homogeneous conformity. You were born into a tradition and learned it like your native language. Unbelief just wasn’t an option. Faith wasn’t a choice, it was given. Today, however, with faith in the foreground of individual choice, there is no way to keep everyone on the same page. Homogeneity and conformity gives way to heterogeneous diversity. A unified tradition becomes a pluralistic marketplace.

Beyond the Nova Effect, faith has also become more fragile and unstable. Just like everything in my life that sits in the foreground as the object of choice and decision. No longer taken for granted, faith-as-choice is always exposed and re-exposed to reflection and revisitation. More, as a choice faith must be reasserted, like all our other choices, over and over again. Like waking up every morning and deciding what to wear. Instead of a givenness where I can find rest within, faith has become a perpetual effort of will.

All this has implications for how we respond to the modern call for intentionality. Intentionality assumes a framework of choice: We choose to be intentional. And while that choice can foster a sense of purpose and self-ownership, it also makes faith provisional and effortful. For if faith depends upon our decisions, then we can just as easily decide otherwise. And decision, by its nature, is work. We grow weary rather than finding rest.

And beyond this weariness and fragility there is also the drift into pluralistic self-expression.

I hope you can see the concern here. Simply put, the call to intentionality is often presented as the cure for modernity’s ailments. But it may be part of the illness itself. In a world where everything is determined by individual choice, being “intentional” about those choices is the only kind of advice we can offer. Yet such advice never touches the deeper sickness. 

Beck gets at, I think, why some people find the question of faith to be so serious and almost mystically fleeting — and why, on the flip side, others believe faith to be more like a daily workout regimen. Both are two sides of the same coin: One suffers the need to continually find faith while the other confuses the modern “perpetual effort of will” for sanctification. Because both understand faith as a daily choice, they completely misunderstand the New Testament and its emphasis on personal conversion. There, faith isn’t what you decide about yourself and God but a reflexive response to news of what God has already done.

Strays: 

• Reading Is a Vice
• The Church of David Bowie
• Burnt Offerings
• Ben Sasse’s Greatest Lesson