1. Robert Lynch has been writing on downward social mobility. After getting a PhD under titan of evolutionary biology Robert Trivers, he applied to several tenure-track positions — unsuccessfully — and wound up teaching high school. When his teaching certificate expired, he became a substitute. Over at his Substack, he reflects on what he’s learned from his eighth-graders, one of whom drew an unfortunate but predictable anatomical shape on a 510-million-year-old fossil he pried out of the Nevada desert:
I’d spent a week in 110-degree heat with a pry bar and a rock hammer. When it comes apart and there’s something inside, it’s a religious experience. I spent two decades studying evolution and most of it was theory. This was the imprint of the animal in my hand. Eighteen months ago I was a scientist; now I was the guy whose stuff you drew on.
Lynch then muses on status, which he calls a “zero-sum game” but something that we all chase, some of us in flashy ways, others in ways more externally subtle but just as intentional:
It’s easy to spot the asshole with the Ferrari or Rolex but harder to acknowledge the NPR tote bag, the pronouns in your email signature, the dog you rescued, or the copy of Anna Karenina on your coffee table … Me wearing a Dartmouth sweatshirt at the airport because it’s comfortable, while secretly hoping I get asked who went there. […]
But playing the status game isn’t even the worst part. It’s handing my worth over to people and circumstances I don’t control. […]
Comparing yourself to others doesn’t just surrender your happiness to strangers, it locks you into a contest you can never win and makes other people’s wins feel like your losses. Whatever you measure yourself by will be the thing that eventually breaks you. Chase money and you’ll never have enough; bank on being smart and you’ll spend your life afraid of when you’re not; trade on your looks and you will lose, because everyone gets old. […]
We all end up where my father did [dying]. You can wait for it all to be taken, or you can begin handing it over now. Let go or be dragged — or, as the Buddhists put it, die before you die. The self you’ve been defending — the identity, the position, the proof that you matter — was always going to be taken from you. It’s the joke that takes a lifetime to get: none of it was ever as serious as it felt.
How do I feel about my own status decline? It depends on the day, sometimes the hour. Sometimes it’s simmering resentment and another fight with a principal who’s trying to tell me how to run my class. Other times I reframe it as just another of life’s challenges. Bitter or better, my sponsor used to say. I’m learning the same lesson alcohol taught me: the thing you’re most afraid to lose is the thing keeping you in prison. And sometimes the loss does something I never expected: it loosens the knot between who I am and what I do, and frees me up to be the other things I might have forgotten — father, neighbor, son, brother, friend.
Perhaps it’s for the best we can’t meet the measures we set for ourselves — if we could, we would just keep doubling down on finding our identity in our performance, until our final breath. Thus the reality that the people who best satisfy the Law of Personal Appearance or of Career Success wind up being most wrapped up in those things up until, as Lynch suggests, it is taken at the moment of death.
In his Antinomian Disputations, Luther suggests that a function of the law is giving us a chance to face our moral shortcomings and the terrors of conscience before the moment of death, so that we have time to reckon with the crisis and find the gospel. In Lynch’s terms, the law forces us to “begin handing it over now.” Our setbacks and reversals in pursuing “success,” however defined, loosen that knot between who we are and what we do and, counterintuitively, free us up to be something beyond our striving and performance.
2. Speaking of grace in suffering, the New York Times interviewed poet Christian Wiman this past week. The interview is suffused with Wiman’s usual depth, attentiveness to reality, and startling insight. Worth a full post, but can’t help quoting some of the best bits here.
Wiman, who grew up fundamentalist Baptist, read Nietzsche in college, and quit going to church for 20 years, recounts how his love for his wife led him back:
I was moved to come back to religion because of love. I was 37, and I had not experienced that level of love before, of wanting such good for the other person that your own self isn’t as paramount as it was. We found ourselves saying little prayers at night before dinner even before we were married. They started as jokes, but then they became more serious. We got married very quickly, and then I got diagnosed with cancer very quickly. The doctors told me I had five years to live. So there was love, and then there was suffering, hard on the heels of the love. The love led me to turn to God; the suffering led me to find a form for it.
Wehner: A lot of people fall in love and don’t find faith. What was it about falling in love that led you to faith?
Wiman: I had been in love before. But I had never experienced a love that wanted to be other, that wanted to be more. And that was the experience I had. It didn’t stop at the other person. It went through Danielle Chapman, my wife, and needed to be more. And it just baffled me for the longest time. I had no idea what it meant. But I did know enough, or she knew enough, to know it meant prayer. That seemed to be the only gesture that we could make that was beyond us. We hardly even knew what we were praying to.
On poetry as an act of devotion:
I do believe that the “word,” lowercase, can express the “Word,” uppercase, that the two are bound together, that the lowercase word can be sacred because the uppercase Word exists. So I do take the act of poetic creation quite seriously. And I do think that when I’ve written the poems that are most mine, I’m getting a communication from God. Now, it may not do you any good, but it was genuine for me. I think it can be genuine for an awful lot of people with their own poems or reading poems. And it’s not necessarily a claim that one is a prophet or something. That is, I think that capacity exists in a lot of people.
And on the suffering of God:
I take the fact that God suffered — just as we suffer — in the form of Jesus to be not just a consolation but a great key to understanding what existence is. Pain is woven throughout creation. And it’s not just human creation; it’s woven throughout all of creation. So suffering seems to be a part of existence. And God entered that suffering. I take the God that Jesus cried out to on the cross — “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” — to be exactly the same God that we cry out to. I don’t see them split. God is Jesus, and so Jesus is crying out to the same unknowingness, with the same unknowingness, the same passion, the same pain, that we do. And I do find that not just comforting, I find it true, that it accords with the truth. When I feel the world, when I feel my experience in the world, it feels true. […]
Wehner: Can you expand on what you were trying to say in the poem and why “Every Riven Thing” is meaningful to you? […]
Wiman: I think it goes back to the idea that we were discussing earlier about God being in the pain of creation, the pain of creation somehow being in God. That God is in these places where the break is, where the rift is, the riven thing. That’s what I was experiencing at the time. It looked like I was going to die, after this great rapture of love. And yet I was experiencing an awful lot of joy in the midst of that. The poem was autobiographical without saying a word about me.
Nothing to add — but if Wiman strikes the same chord in you that he does in me, check out our interviews with him on the site in 2013 and the Home issue of the magazine. A gift that keeps on giving.
3. In education, low-hanging fruit from the Atlantic: the exquisite AI learning-support tools developed over the last couple of years, it turns out, haven’t meaningfully improved education outcomes. Entrepreneurs like the founder of Khan Academy have revolutionized access to learning tools, but the bigger limiting factor, it turns out, was motivation.
But by this spring, Khan had admitted that the release of Khanmigo was “a non- event” for many kids. Although access exploded, from reaching 40,000 students in 2023 to nearly 1 million this year, actual uptake — whether students use it — has stagnated. […]
Khanmigo, like so many other ed-tech tools, has floundered because it hasn’t solved the challenge at the center of education: How do you motivate students to experience the discomfort of learning something new? An AI tutor may be able to deliver math problems that are perfectly calibrated to a student’s level. But it can’t make the student actually do the problems. […]
Ed-tech experiments have driven home what educators have long intuited: Learning is a largely social and relational enterprise, and bots have yet to replicate the value of a human touch. Teachers are still our best source of motivation for students, not only because strong ones know how to push kids to learn new things, but also because education works best when it happens in a group.
In the race to improve our capabilities ad infinitum, it’s tempting to simply ignore, or refuse to acknowledge, the constraints of our human nature. Unlike machines, we can’t just plug in and download information. Our intellectual activity, like all our other activities, takes place within an affective frame — unless our affections (or desires) are somehow engaged, we simply won’t do it. For better and for worse, our desires aren’t easily shaped by shallow motivational tools or impersonal apps but rather in the context of lived relationships with other human beings. Among other things, kids come alive in the classroom when they have a teacher who cares about them and cares about the subject — when they can be drawn into a world where they discover truth in community with others. Stripped of those affective and communal contexts, algorithmic educational “content delivery” will usually fail to connect.
4. In music, the Guardian interviews up-and-coming Irish rock band Bleech 9:3. The singer, Barry Quinlan, recounts his addiction. After two unsuccessful stints in rehab, Quinlan recalls:
On 22 February 2019, “I went into my last place – please God – and thought: how have I ended up in a place like this again? In that questioning, it all hit me. I was so far away from myself, from everything, and I knew that was all coming for me again, like the bullet had left the gun.”
He let his mind wander, “into the darkness of the room and beyond, into the ether, out into the night: there has to be something. ‘All right, God, you better be real because I’m f*d if you’re not.’ And in that moment, I felt something touch my heart and the obsession to use was taken away.” […]
[Later,] Barry had already passed 1,000 days sober, but it hadn’t been smooth. “When you get rid of the alcohol, you’ve still got the -ism, you know?” he says. “I was carrying this sickening feeling all the time.” Trying to understand it, he visited a Buddhist centre near Cork, which had a room with a statue of Buddha on one side and Christ on the other. His earlier spiritual awakening crystallised. “I sat in the middle, not looking at anyone. And then I heard Jesus speak, as clear as day: ‘Come and speak to me.’ I can’t ignore that; I’m not foolish enough to put that down to psychosis. So I did, and since then I’ve felt a presence in my life that I can’t ignore. For me, recovery is proof that there is a God, and addiction is proof that there is a devil. You see the destruction that happens in an addict’s life, to them, to their family: nothing but carnage and evil.”
The guitarist, Sam, was also in AA, and he wound up with Barry as his sponsor.
The AA sponsorship brought an incredible closeness: Barry and Sam started making music together … All they’d been through fed into the songwriting, and for all the noise in their self-titled EP, it’s suffused with clarity; Luke likens the sound they make to “lightning and thunder, a big explosion. There was communal feeling that there was something different about this group – we were smiling more when we left the room.”
5. In humor, the Onion reports, “Study: Crying Not Linked to What You Said But the Way You Said It;” Reductress chimes in with the hopeful “Woman Somehow Navigates Existential Crisis Without Researching Grad Schools,” and the New Yorker advises on “How to Be a Mysterious Woman Who Is Also in Bed by 9:30 P.M.” But the winner has to be the Onion’s “Study Contends Free Will Disproven By Fact That Humans Repeatedly Eat At Jimmy John’s”:
CHAMPAIGN, IL — Shedding new light on the concept of voluntary behavior, researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign contend in a study published this week that the existence of free will can be disproven by the fact that people repeatedly eat at chain sandwich restaurant Jimmy John’s. “Our exhaustive survey of over 12,000 regular Jimmy John’s customers revealed patterns of behavior utterly inconsistent with the idea of human autonomy,” said lead researcher Gina Smith, emphasizing that no person with functioning taste buds would continually subject themselves to a dry, flavorless J.J.B.L.T. or a cold, inadequate Jimmy Cubano unless their behavior was predetermined by a chain of causal events behind their control.
6. An uncommon bounty of quality podcasts this week: First up, former Florida Senator and UF president Ben Sasse, after receiving a terminal diagnosis, started his Not Dead Yet podcast, which has been excellent. Guests this month included Adm. McRaven, John and Jack Harbaugh, and — this past week — our own David Zahl. It was the best 66 minutes I spent on the net this week. Second, DZ was on Theocast talking about the recently released Tenth Anniversary Edition of Law and Gospel (available in our store (on sale) and on Amazon). Finally, The Way UK podcast interviewed Belle Tindall-Riley, recently announced editor of The Mockingbird. It’s a great conversation.
Strays:
- A little lighter in a week when the internet has seemingly been taken over by Alan Greenspan takes and think pieces on reflecting pools, but at Plough, David Bentley Hart takes a startlingly deep dive into baseball’s philosophical and theological dimensions.
- At the New Yorker, Sarah Miller writes about her experience of drinking and getting sober, with plenty of AA wisdom.
- And the AV Club wrote a promising review of Toy Story 5.
- Oh, and tonight is the premiere of Larry David’s new HBO show, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Unhappiness. Premise looks prett-eee good.
