Another Week Ends: Singing Beauty Amid Darkness, Therapy Culture and Parenting, Merciful Restraint, and Haunted by the Cross

1. Michal Leibowitz offers a hot potato take in the New York Times, with the provocative title: “There’s a Link Between Therapy Culture and Childlessness.” Leibowitz, a Gen-Z writer from an Orthodox Jewish background, is expecting her first child, and memories of her own difficult teenage years have started to bubble to the surface.

When you are young and suffering and unsure of the cause of your pain and when you are presented over and over with a reason for it, it is actually very easy to believe that poor parenting is the taproot from which your romantic, social, psychological or professional issues grew. Especially since, in many cases, there’s an element of truth in it: Our parents hurt us, even when they love us.

Leibowitz goes on to describe how therapy culture plays a part in this narrative: So much of therapy culture blames life’s suffering from inherited beliefs and traumas. It’s not that this narrative is necessarily wrong, says Leibowitz, but it is incomplete. Now expecting her own child, Leibowitz reflects on a season in her teenage years when she was working through an eating disorder:

It was like peering under the tabs of one of those lift-a-flap picture books. There is my mother sitting at the kitchen table, recording my plum in her notebook. The cup of minestrone soup. And then under the flap is her own lunch, only half-eaten, her appetite shrunken by chronic worry and fear. (She will force herself to finish it, to set a good example.) There is my mother spending her days driving me to and from the doctor and the therapist and the hospital while I sit like a rock in the back seat. And then, under the flap, is her nearly falling asleep from tiredness, from the nights she lay awake in bed, reading and researching and praying.

I thought of the love I felt for the unborn little thing within me — just then, just beginning to make its presence known with a kick and flutter and a flip — and I felt bowled over by all that I had not understood. The love my parents had felt, do feel, that I had recognized in the abstract, I had so often overlooked.

There’s something perverse about the fact that one barrier to having children for members of my generation is a fear that we’ll fail them in the same ways that our parents failed us or perhaps in different ways. Yet having a child is what can help you look at the narratives you’ve been wearing all these years, bundled around you like an old winter coat, and realize that it no longer fits. That this story you’ve been telling yourself about the childhood hurts that made you who you are — well, that story may be true, but it is not the only story you could tell.

It’s a heartbreaking irony that the antidote to so many of our parenting resentments is simply becoming a parent. While there is certainly a widespread amount of very real abuse and trauma that is worth our grief and attention, extending empathy to our parents (or to use Bible language, “honoring” them) is not only about moral correctness, but a perspective shift that drains the poison of resentment from the relationship. (It also, it seems, can contribute to the hand-wringing and consternation around the dropping birth rate.)

2. Not every Malcom Gladwell story is as big a “gotcha” as he likes to think, but his New Yorker review of the book Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence by Jens Ludwig has insights worth consideration. Gladwell has some experience with the topic: His Revisionist History podcast touched on the issues of Chicago gun violence back in 2023. Jens Ludwig, by comparison, moved to the South Side of Chicago in 2007, and has been studying the question of gun violence in one of America’s most violent neighborhoods ever since. Ludwig argues that we’ve been thinking about violent crime wrong, and that the issue is fundamentally one of anthropology, not necessarily criminology.

Ludwig is the director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab, and he uses as a heuristic the psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s version of the distinction between System 1 and System 2 thinking. According to Kahneman, these are the two cognitive modes that all human beings toggle between. The first is fast, automatic, and intuitive. The second is slow, effortful, and analytical. Ludwig’s innovation is to apply the dichotomy to criminal acts. A System 2 crime might be a carefully planned robbery, in which the assailant stalks and assesses his victims before attacking them. This is what criminologists call instrumental violence: acts, Ludwig writes, “committed in order to achieve some tangible or ‘instrumental’ goal (getting someone’s cash or phone or watch or drug turf), where violence is a means to some other, larger end.” A System 1 crime, by contrast, is an act of what Ludwig calls “expressive violence” — aimed not at gaining something tangible but at hurting someone, often in a sudden burst of frustration or anger.

The central argument of “Unforgiving Places” is that Americans, in their attempts to curb crime, have made a fundamental conceptual error. We’ve assumed that the problem is instrumental violence — and have fashioned our criminal-justice system around that assumption. But the real problem is expressive violence. […]

The Chicago Police Department estimates that arguments lie behind seventy to eighty per cent of homicides. The numbers for Philadelphia and Milwaukee are similar. And that proportion has held remarkably steady over time. Drawing on data from Houston in 1969, the sociologist Donald Black concluded that barely more than a tenth of homicides occurred during predatory crimes like burglary or robbery. The rest, he found, arose from emotionally charged disputes — over infidelity, household finances, drinking, child custody. Not calculated acts of gain, in other words, but eruptions rooted in contested ideas of right and wrong.

Ludwig’s point is that the criminal-justice system, as we’ve built it, fails to reckon with this reality. We’ve focused on the signaling function of punishment — on getting the deterrents right, offering the proper mixture of carrots and sticks to influence rational actors. Mass incarceration, which swept the country in the late twentieth century, rested on the assumption that a person spoiling for a fight with another person was weighing costs: that the difference between ten years and twenty-five would matter. But was Jeremy Brown calculating odds when he punched Carlishia Hood? Was her son performing a Bayesian analysis as he ran from the restaurant, gun in hand?

This misapprehension, he argues, is why the American experience of crime so often seems baffling. Murders are volatile — a city really can go from dangerous to safe overnight — because the behavior driving most homicides is volatile.

This is a very Christian insight because it suggests that rational behavior modification is not the solution. Instead, public safety officials need affective solutions that speak to the heart, to rein in strong negative emotions and the need to self-justify. Ludwig points to some successes that have made big changes in the community: things like turning vacant lots into public parks and emotional regulation workshops for teens. The wider insight, that there are limits to what the law can deter, is not just a legal insight, but a spiritual one as well.

3. There’s not much more that can be said of Brian Wilson’s passing this week that our own David Zahl didn’t write in A Mess of Help or explain in the final passages of The Big Relief. The musical brain behind The Beach Boys remains a case study in the pressures of achievement and fame and the condemnation of the law, a fragile spirit who composed the California vibe but never actually embodied it. Music writer Rob Tannenbaum offers a short primer in Wilson’s New York Times obituary.

While Wilson was flying high as a successful (and envied) songwriter and performer, he suffered from depression and anxiety that led him to stop traveling by plane and touring; he made it worse by using cocaine and speed. “I was sinking,” he wrote.

He was shy and sensitive (music, he said, “was my only friend”), and mental illness pushed him deeper into solitude and contemplation. As much as his voyeuristic songs were fun fun fun, his personal songs about anxiety and rejection were gorgeous and troubled, with beautiful melodies and surprising vaults from major to minor keys.

He’d started by hitching his wagon to a trend, which showed a gift for marketing, then shifted his themes and creative ambitions once he had a foothold. The band toured without him, playing the hits and perpetuating the idea of the Beach Boys as a rock ’n’ roll clambake, even as Wilson struggled to contain his illness and wrote songs that transcended the group’s stature as the quintessential Los Angeles band.

Amid the palm trees, California has a darkness to match its brightness, as John Steinbeck, Nathanael West and James Ellroy have well documented. With his array of joyful, voyeuristic songs and pained, anxious ones, Wilson understood the two sides of the state, and human nature.

The decisive evidence of Wilson’s genius is his melancholy work: “In My Room,” “Don’t Worry Baby,” “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times,” “’Til I Die” (written, Wilson said, while he was “depressed and preoccupied with death”), “Caroline, No,” “The Warmth of the Sun” (written the night John F. Kennedy was killed), the celestial “God Only Knows,” sung perfectly by Carl, and plenty more.

See also this playlist from DZ below for the best of Brian Wilson from the last 20 years or so. (My favs: “Isn’t It Time” and his cover of “Colors of the Wind” (?) from the Disney animated Pocahontas movie).

4. Big news out of Middle Earth, via McSweeney’s: “I, Saruman, Have Ended My Alliance with the Dark Lord Sauron.” McSweeney’s “Fortune 500 Cookies” is also worth a chuckle. Elsewhere in humor, the Bee offers its tongue and cheek pope headline “Pope Leo Pronounces Another 100 Year Curse On the Chicago Cubs,” as well as the Father’s Day observation “Dad Physically Unable To Drive By Cows Without Saying ‘Hey, Kids, Look — Cows’”

“The kids need to know when there are cows,” Brennan said. “I can’t even help it. It’s just a reaction. How else will the kids have their attention drawn to the cows if I don’t point them out? I tried once to contain it, but it was no use. I just blurted it out. I don’t know why, but… I just had to.”

And finally, from the New Yorker, “Day-Care Parent Small Talk, Translated.”

Oh, is Trevor back already?
I do not believe for one second that your child is actually over his cold, and, as soon as you leave, I will instruct the teacher to do whatever it takes to keep my child away from Trevor for the rest of the day.

Say hi to your friends again, Will!
No, but my child really is over his cold, though.

[Silence.]
My child actually started playing with the other kids instead of sobbing when I put her down, and my fear of her having a meltdown if she realizes that I am leaving is currently stronger than my fear of seeming rude if I leave without talking to any of you.

5. Some years ago, the writer Elizabeth Bruenig began to focus her writing on the death penalty across America. We’ve profiled a number of her reflections on the site before, but her latest in the Atlantic offers more insight into her research. She’s been in the room when her interviewees were executed, she’s been at the autopsy table reporting on botched executions, she’s sat alongside grieving family members and victims. When she writes about mercy and forgiveness, it’s well earned and worth our attention. Here are her thoughts on forgiveness and mercy, from both the Christian and secular Stoic perspective.

Families of murder victims routinely perform exceptional feats of mercy, if not forgiveness. “We’re pretty forgiving people, but I haven’t forgiven him,” Marty told me. Forgiveness is an emotional process that involves coming to see a wrongdoer as a moral equal again, and inviting them back into the place reserved in your heart for the rest of the world. To forgive someone who has harmed you is to forswear bitter feelings, which is to surrender a certain righteous power — the permission granted by society for retaliation. It is also therefore a kind of sacrifice. Only divinity can demand that of someone; no human being can demand it of another. And the Christian directive is especially exacting, requiring forgiveness for others in order to be forgiven oneself.

But mercy — to refrain from punishing a person to the maximum extent that a transgression might deserve — doesn’t demand half as much. It is hard to imagine forgiveness without mercy, but easy to imagine mercy without forgiveness. In his treatise On Clemency, addressed to the emperor he served, the philosopher Seneca describes mercy as “a restraining of the mind from vengeance when it is in its power to avenge itself” — in other words, a “gentleness shown by a powerful man in fixing the punishment of a weaker one.” The ruler who shows mercy is “sparing of the blood” of even the lowest of subjects simply because “he is a man.” Socially, mercy registers the value of human life. For the benefactor, it is a forge of moral character. For the recipient, it is a godsend […]

Seneca’s reasons for advising clemency are Stoic: It is better to restrain one’s impulses than to indulge them, especially when they involve destructive tendencies, such as wrath and cruelty. Self-control is a virtue, and it is possible to educate one’s desires so that they gradually change. To default to mercy is to impose limitations on one’s own power to retaliate, and to acknowledge our flawed nature. To a Christian, mercy derives from charity. And in the liminal space where families of murder victims are recruited into the judicial process — to either bless or condemn a prosecutor’s intentions — showing mercy is an especially heroic decision. To think this way is to understand that the moral dimension of capital punishment is not just about what we do to others. It’s also about what we do to ourselves.

6. Rowan Williams, theologian and previous Archbishop of Canterbury, is the third subject of Peter Wehner’s faith-inspired interview series at the New York Times. Their conversation touches on the New Atheists, whom Williams knows and has debated, Dostoyevsky, who provides for Williams a philosophical anchor of theodicy and apologetic, and the power of Jesus’ suffering. The whole conversation is worth your time, but this excerpt about the power of the cross is remarkable. We’ll give the ABC emeritus the final word this week:

So the first thing that strikes me is that the compelling distinctiveness of Jesus has a great deal to do with the stream of powerful, disturbing stories which put you on the spot, which make you ask: So who am I? Where am I? And do I know who I am yet?

The second thing is — it’s an odd thing to say about the figure of Jesus in the Gospels, but I’ve always been struck by it — from time to time there’s a deep impatience in Jesus: How can I make this clear to you? You’re an unfaithful generation. He bursts out in exasperation at the disciples. Do you understand nothing? Even in exasperation of the crowds. Jesus said: You’re all looking for miracles.

In a strange way, I feel that’s a rather compelling aspect of the story of Jesus. There’s more going on in him than he can express, and sometimes it kind of bursts out. And when I think of what the divinity of Jesus means in that context, one of the signs of it is that feeling he’s got more to say than human language can carry. As he says in St. John’s Gospel, “I have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.”

And it’s almost as if Jesus goes to the cross saying: The only way of telling you what the love of God is like is to absorb this monumental violent injustice and show you that God is not crushed by it.

Not words but the act of redemptive self-giving. The image I’ve sometimes used, especially with St. Mark’s Gospel, is it’s almost as if you’re looking at a Jesus who stands at the mouth of an enormous dark cave. Behind is a mystery you can’t get at and express. He’s trying to tell you something about it, and it doesn’t always come through. But it comes through finally in the act and the suffering rather than in the words. And that I’m completely compelled and haunted by.

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