1. To start off this week, let’s take a look at the stranger side of modern religious life. I always roll my eyes when I see articles by a “Madame Clairvoyant” appearing in the pages of literal newspapers — publications, I would add, that killed off their religion reporting a few years ago. Oh the irony. You’d think us post-Enlightenment rationalists, having disabused ourselves of religious hogwash, would have found better ways to ponder our existence than the millennia-old superstitions?
But after reading Belle Tindall-Riley’s latest (who, btw, is speaking at our NYC Conference!), perhaps my cynicism is premature. As she tells it, woo-woo religions aren’t as far-fetched as you might think:
I can say, with a heap of certainty, that if I wasn’t a Christian, I’d be very into psychics. Astrology, tarot – you name it, I’d want it. I’d search high and low for a knowing voice, for something/someone to slice through the noise and tell me something that, to borrow Elizabeth Day’s phrase, I can feel the truth of in the waters of my soul.
Personally, I don’t find it trivial at all. I think it’s a craving that we were designed to feel.
Furthermore, I consider this trend to be a direct challenge to expressive individualism, which is a philosophy that I like to think of as – you guessed it – just ourselves, talking to ourselves about ourselves. […]
We want someone else to teach us about us; we long for an external voice to silence the internal noise and tells us a truth about ourselves that we haven’t manufactured. That knowing voice we crave, it cannot be our own. We, as a species, actually want anything but expressive individualism. Why? Well, I’m going to be bold and suggest that we’re simply too spiritual for it.
The less ‘logical’ the source of information, the more trustworthy it’s deemed to be; the right hemisphere of the brain is getting hungry once more. In order to win over our hearts, the knowledge has to be cosmic, mystical and transcendent. We have a sense, it seems, that there is truth on offer – and it’s not within us waiting to be excavated, it’s beyond us. It’s simultaneously about us yet infinitely bigger than us – that’s the sweet spot.
I get it.
Like I say, if I weren’t a Christian, you’d find me knee deep in star charts. In fact, it’s precisely my Christianity that alerts me to the sincerity of such cravings. Those longings for wisdom and guidance are true and innate.
Oh. Were you expecting me to say your cravings are woo-woo? To call time on this trending foolishness? On the contrary. I don’t subscribe to intuition, I don’t believe the universe loves me, and while I think the stars say a lot – I don’t think any of it is about me. But I believe in a God who speaks and who made me to speak to. A God who has thoughts and offers them to me. A God who holds truth and invites me to ask him for it. Believe me, I understand our need for a knowing voice – or, rather, the knowing voice.
Well, dang. I (partially) retract my previous skepticism. Because in a world where the burden of its meaning falls entirely upon ourselves, it’s entirely reasonable to conclude that such a demand is too much for one to bear.
2. If it’s too much to ask someone to come up with all the answers of the universe, as they see it, what about something more mundane, like self-esteem? For anyone who grew up from the 1990s on, you’ve likely been told that self-confidence is the key to success. Certainly you’ve been told to not feel so bad about yourself. Or perhaps you’re older and have bemoaned the “younger generation’s” need for constant validation and praise. Well, it turns out us young(er) folk have one politician to blame for our fragile (snowflake?) existences: John Vasconcellos.
Now, Vasconcellos obviously didn’t come up with the term, but as a recent retrospective of the concept on Radiolab tells it (audio here, transcript here), he was responsible much of its popularity. The whole thing is worth a listen. Apparently Vasconcellos grew up in a strict Catholic family and then spent much of his political career trying to overturn a negative view of human nature. So what about self-esteem? Well, many psychologists have largely moved on. Here are some gems from one researcher, Jennifer Crocker:
For, I don’t know, 10 or 15 years, I was really interested in what people based their self-esteem on. And we found that pretty much everybody based their self-esteem on something. Intending to apply to graduate school. … And it would — for some of the students, it would actually stay down for several days until something happened to kind of shake them out of that funk. Whereas the kids who weren’t tying their self-esteem to that academic achievement, then when they didn’t get into the program, they, like, could weather the storm.
And then the other thing that was really interesting to me is that the students whose self-esteem was really based on their academic success, when we asked them what would it mean for you or about you to get into graduate school, they would write things like, “Oh, it would prove once and for all that I am brilliant, I am great. That I am successful. It would prove something about me.” […]
Yeah, it’s just that if I have earned high self-esteem today by having some success in my life, then have I earned low self-esteem tomorrow if I have a failure? […]
[A prominent psychologist says] “Self-esteem is the worst sickness known to humankind, because when you succeed you are great, but when you fail you’re shit.”
Interviewer: It is good to feel good about yourself. But then how does one find self-worth in a way that’s healthy?
JENNIFER CROCKER: I think by not worrying about it.
Interviewer: What does that look like?
JENNIFER CROCKER: So “Am I a person of worth and value?” is just — it’s not a helpful question. It just doesn’t do anything for you to ask that question — or for other people. And a much better or more helpful question is, “How do I want to be right now? How might I support other people?” for example. But really, “What contribution, what thing that’s larger than me is important to me?” […]
So you can get this virtuous cycle going on in relationships where when people are focused not on their own needs but on being responsive to other people’s needs, other people notice it. They appreciate it. Their esteem for the other person goes up, and that ends up having — it’s not a huge impact, but nonetheless having a significant impact on the self-esteem of the person who is responsive in the first place. So — so the way to boost your self-esteem in a way that in my view is sustainable over time and good for the world is to focus on the well-being of other people or to organizations or institutions or things you really care about.
A theologian might laugh that psychologists might finally be discovering that the way beyond our inwardly curved nature isn’t by diving further into the self. Augustine and Luther have been saying as much for hundreds of years. But instead of victory laps or smug superiority, it’d be better to do as Tindall-Riley does and point people to the One person outside of themselves whose affection isn’t contingent upon their attention.
3. If you’ve been watching the latest season of Shrinking (which is off to a good start), this next one from Russell Shaw in the Atlantic seems to have been lifted from one of the show’s plotlines: Allowing kids to fail does more for them than always swooping in to save the day. For parents raised on the gospel of self-esteem — see above — it’s inevitable that they would see it as their duty to ensure their kids never feel bad about themselves. Lobbying coaches so their kid gets more playing time, writing sternly worded emails blaming teachers for poor grades, or hiring a rush consultant so their kid gets into a sorority (those apparently exist?) — what might look like “grace” becomes its opposite, sending the not-so-implicit message, “You can’t handle this.”
Ann S. Masten, a developmental psychologist, describes resilience as “ordinary magic,” the result of normal developmental processes rather than extraordinary personal qualities. But those processes require what she calls “adaptive systems,” one of the most important of which involves the capacity to learn to cope with stress. Children who are consistently shielded from everyday challenges don’t get to practice this coping. When they inevitably encounter larger disappointments — a college rejection, a romantic breakup — they might lack the psychological fortitude to handle it.
The consequences of never failing show up in children’s mental health. Many young people feel enormous pressure to be perfect, and this perfectionism can have a serious cost. When children absorb the message that failure is catastrophic, even minor mistakes can feel unbearable. I’ve seen students fall apart over a single poor test result. “That’s not me,” a tearful student recently told me. “I’m not someone who gets bad grades.” […]
Choosing not to step in doesn’t mean abandoning children to weather challenges alone. It means providing support while still allowing them to experience stress. […]
Parents can also normalize failure as part of a meaningful life. Instead of treating mistakes as shameful secrets, we can proudly claim them as integral to our stories. […]
Perhaps most important, parents would do well to examine their own relationship with failure. Many parents’ anxieties about their kid stem from a personal fear — that a bad grade means their child won’t get into a good college, that a stumble today could derail their future. But my experience tells me that the opposite is true. The kid who gets straight A’s through high school may struggle more in college than the one who foundered in ninth grade, figured out what went wrong, and then kept going. When we allow kids the satisfaction of overcoming hurdles on their own, we give them something more powerful and durable than a perfect transcript or an undefeated season: confidence in their ability to recover and come back stronger.
Now, resilience is becoming something of a buzzword these days, so much so that I’ve developed a mild skepticism of its use. Purveyors of resilience tend to assume people have some untapped strength that is only realized when people are left to their own devices. He’s right, however, that playing whack-a-mole with kids’ failures only reinforces the impossible standard of perfectionism. And if “letting kids fail” points them to an identity that doesn’t depend upon success, then perhaps there’s something to it?
4. On the subject of failure and self-worth … If you’re in Vancouver, it might be worth stopping in on the Museum of Failure before its run ends in a few days. The pop-up exhibition seems like a thing to behold. Its creator, Eyvan Collins, put up signs a few months back that read “FAILURES WANTED” and asked for people to submit their “rejection letters, attempted repairs, abandoned art projects, ruined experiments — all manner of failure artifacts are welcome.”
Among the artifacts is a dress composed of rejection letters, created by Shawna Ariel, who saw Collins’s posters seeking participants. […]
She combined all the rejection letters she’s received in her life — jobs at coffee shops, art galleries, art residencies and exhibitions to which she wasn’t accepted — and fashioned them into a dress. There are about 50 rejection letters, and Ariel painted the word “reject” on a heart at the top of the dress.
“The way the museum has worked is transforming something that people were maybe initially ashamed of or embarrassed by into something they can proudly show,” Ariel said. “It takes a lot of courage to show this kind of stuff.”
Ariel said she is appreciative of her failures, as she’s learned something from each one, and they’ve given her more drive. “Failure has made me who I am,” she said.
Charlie Materi’s rusty scissors are also on display, representing Materi’s “failed” career as a barber.
“I never got to the point where I was confident enough, and, eventually, I just gave up,” said Materi, 40, who trained as a barber in 2021 and quit about a year later. “Every time I did it, I would struggle with so much anxiety, and I felt like there were some gaps in my training, and I didn’t have anyone to help me.”
Submitting the scissors helped Materi rethink quitting barbering. In fact, Materi recently returned to cutting hair.
5. The best humor to be found this week comes from the Muppet Show special that aired on Wednesday (see the videos above). It was everything you’d want from the Muppets. I’d venture to say it’s exactly the kind of pointless frivolity we all need. Here’s hoping it gets greenlit for a full season.
Elsewhere, while I find our current desire to bet on everything possible to be pretty sad, this screengrab from Polymarket is truly hilarious:
If you bet “yes” to Jesus’ return, how exactly will you get your payout? And will money even matter then?
Outside of the above, the other item worth mentioning comes from the New Yorker’s clever low-anthropology pun “Discovering Where Your Interests Lie“:
Your interest in television is true. Your interest in reality television is true. Your interest in true-crime television is true. However, your interest in gritty prestige crime dramas that expose the socioeconomic complexities and ethical ambiguities within the justice system? That’s where your interest lies. […]
Your interest in seeming well read is true. Your interest in being able to toss an Alexander Pope quotation or an offhand fact about the history of saffron into a conversation is true. But your interest in reading is a lie. […]
As a general rule, your interests lie in the same places where your strengths lie. If, for example, you tell yourself that you have an interest in gardening, you will discover that that’s an area in which your strengths are lying — you cannot keep plants alive. Where strengths are lying, interests can’t help but lie, too.
That’s why your interests lie so much at the gym. Yes, your interest in being fit and living to a ripe old age is true. Even your interest in wearing soft, stretchy clothes every day, as if you might, at any given moment, pop over to the gym, is true. But your interest in actually working out lies. Because, when faced with literal weights and the expectation that you might actually lift them, it quickly becomes clear that, at the gym, your will power lies.
6. To wrap up, we turn to a whistle-stop tour of theologians on grace from Justin Holcomb in the Living Church. Grace is not merely a doorway into Christianity or a nice theological idea among many but the heartbeat of the Christian life.
Augustine’s theology centers on one breathtaking truth: the Great Exchange. That is, Christ has taken our sin and given us righteousness in return. He writes in The City of God: “For as by the sin of one man we have fallen into a misery so deplorable, so by the righteousness of one Man, who also is God, shall we come to a blessedness inconceivably exalted.”
Grace, for Augustine, is not just a kind sentiment. It is power. Divine initiative. God acting when we cannot. It is rescue, not assistance. It is not a supplement to our efforts; it is the very foundation of salvation. […]
This is the logic of the cross. Grace is not earned, summoned or managed. It is given.
Augustine elaborates on this by contrasting the law and grace in his work On the Grace of Christ:
“The law and grace are so different that the law is not only useless but actually an obstacle in many ways unless grace assists. The function of the law is to make people guilty of transgression and force them to take refuge in grace in order to be liberated and helped to overcome evil desires. It commands more than liberates; it diagnoses illness but does not cure. Indeed, far from healing the infirmity, the law actually makes it worse in order to move a person to seek the medicine of grace more anxiously and insistently, because “the letter kills but the spirit gives life” [2 Cor. 3:6].”
The law diagnoses but cannot heal. Grace, then, is the medicine that God freely gives to the spiritually sick. It is not just pardon; it is transformation, delivered through the Spirit who gives life.
Holcomb closes with a look at Charles Spurgeon, whose gift for analogies about grace has supplied so many in the centuries since with dynamic sermon illustrations:
A 19th-century London Baptist known as the “Prince of Preachers,” Charles Spurgeon (1834-1892) announced grace with poetic fire and doctrinal depth. For Spurgeon, grace was both the beginning and the end of the Christian life: “It is not your hold on Christ that saves you – it is Christ. It is not your joy in Christ that saves you – it is Christ.” He saw grace as the unchanging heartbeat of God’s love for undeserving people.
He often illustrated grace with vivid imagery. He once preached: “The bridge of grace will bear your weight. Thousands of big sinners have gone across that bridge … never a stone has sprung in that mighty bridge … It will bear me over as it has for them.”
This was not rhetorical flourish. It was a robust theology of assurance. For Spurgeon, grace wasn’t fragile, conditional or theoretical. It was the strong and reliable bridge built by God. He said, “It is not the strength of your faith that saves you, but the strength of Him upon whom you rely.”
Strays:
- Searching for a Narrative to Fit Our Restless Age
- How Ideology Limits Love
- And from Freya India: “You Have to be Human”
