1. Vox is running a series on America’s Struggle for Forgiveness that has yielded several worthwhile entries thus far. I especially commend to you the story of Delores and Jamesha White, which brought me to tears in its harrowing depiction of the interplay between justice, love, trauma, faith, and forgiveness, especially among Black women (a demographic that one friend recently referred to as “the true ninjas of forgiveness” in the modern world–an observation both trenchant and tragic). Shades of substitutionary atonement in there as well. One line that hit particularly hard was “Forgiveness is not the primary purpose of the law — justice is; but the US legal system is a distinctively unforgiving one.”

2. Elsewhere in the same series Aja Romano wrote that “Everyone wants forgiveness, but no one is being forgiven” which begins as a rumination on cancel culture (or, if you will, the ever- and increasingly fraught relationship between public shaming and public apologizing) before taking a beautiful and unexpected turn in the conclusion. A long excerpt but, well, trust me:

Social media rewards pithy, angry takes rather than nuanced, balanced discussions, then boosts those takes so they attract more angry, non-nuanced takes. It can feel good to be part of that collective anger, especially when you feel righteous. It’s often extremely difficult to let that anger go, to forgive, adjust, and move on.

Most moral and spiritual authorities teach us that the cycle of repentance usually involves grace. Grace, the act of allowing people room to be human and make mistakes while still loving them and valuing them, might be the holiest, most precious concept of all in this conversation about right and wrong, penance and reform — but it’s the one that almost never gets discussed.

[Grace] forces us to contend not only with other people’s human frailty but with our own: to remember how good it feels when someone, out of the blue, treats us with respect, empathy, and kindness in the middle of an angry conversation where we expect nothing but hostility. To be shown the kindness of strangers when we expect cruelty, and then bestow that gift in turn — that’s the remarkable quality of grace.

3. Shame is clearly in the air at the moment. Writing in the New Yorker Becca Rothfeld profiled two new books exploring what she calls The Shaming-Industrial Complex, noting at the outset while shaming is a national pastime, shameless conduct persists. Een-ter-esting. To be honest, I found Rothfeld’s observations on emotional agency considerably more astute than the voices she engages with, at least to the extent that they’re seeking to rehabilitate or harness shame as something positive #gagmewithaspoon:

Shame, canonically, is the sinking sentiment that attends deviation from widely endorsed mores, whatever they happen to be. You can be sad or elated for any reason or for no reason, but shame requires a shared social context. The emotion in question arises not because you violated a standard that you set for yourself but because you violated a standard that your milieu (perhaps policed by Twitter) imposes on you.

[Author and professor Owen] Flanagan instructs us to begin by acknowledging the cultural contingency of our emotional outlook and to proceed by modifying our unruly inner lives, eliminating vengeful impulses and instilling a propensity for shame in the face of moral transgression. Yet we may wonder how many people are capable of exercising so much control over their feelings. It is usually rash to conflate our espoused ideals with our actual practice; Seneca’s vaunted Stoicism didn’t prevent him from bellyaching when he was exiled. Few will defend vindictiveness for its own sake — but many of us fall prey to it, out of spite.

It seems unlikely that shaming the shamers will yield anything approaching justice. Even when shame is employed in the service of virtuous norms, it’s bound to spawn excessive cruelties when it is unleashed on a national, or even a global, scale.

Shame, as she points out, is a closed circle (spiral!) that begs for interruption. The dynamics here are not unlike the ones Stephen Colbert referenced the other day in his interview with Dua Lipa, via American poet Robert Hayden: “We must not be frightened or cajoled into accepting evil as our deliverance from evil.” The Batman himself even concedes the same.

Anyways, Wired ran a portion of the second (and more sympathetic sounding) book Rothfeld reviews, Cathy O’Neill’s The Shame Machine, which points the finger–rightly in my opinion–not so much at censorious factions on either side of the political divide but at the “digital titans, led by Facebook and Google, [who] not only profit from shame events but are engineered to exploit and diffuse them.”

4. Speaking of Silicon Valley, the Atlantic ran a portion of Carolyn Chen’s new book Work Pray Code under the title “What the Anti-work Discourse Gets Wrong“, and to say that it mines a vein akin to Seculosity would be an understatement.

At a time when religious-affiliation rates are at the lowest they’ve been in the past 73 years, we worship work — meaning we sacrifice for and surrender to it—because it gives us identity, belonging, and meaning, not to mention that it puts food on our tables.

According to a recent McKinsey survey, 70 percent of professionals said that their sense of purpose is defined by their work. Most Americans say that they’ve made close friends on the job. And many professionals describe a good job with words such as calling, mission, and purpose — terms that were once reserved for religion. The majority of companies aren’t offering consultations with Buddhist monks, but even traditional corporations such as Aetna and General Mills have brought spiritual practices like meditation and mindfulness into the office. Businesses are gradually positioning themselves as our new houses of worship, feeding people a gospel of divine purpose within the workplace. Silicon Valley is not an outlier but a harbinger for American professionals.

5. On a more upbeat note, my spirits were buoyed by Renee Diresta’s piece in the Atlantic last week, which I saw play out in my own context, namely that “he Ukraine Crisis Briefly Put America’s Culture War in Perspective.”

On February 24, the invasion began. On American social networks, where the culture war normally rages ceaselessly, the fights that tend to dominate online debate—such as the ones over COVID policies, school curriculums, and trans athletes—suddenly went quiet. This wasn’t for lack of effort; many hyperpartisan influencers tried to keep up their shtick. But the public’s attention appeared to be turning elsewhere. Data from CrowdTangle, a tool that tracks user engagement with Facebook content, suggested that many of the top posts among American users focused on the horrors and heroism of the conflict—families splitting up, Ukrainians volunteering to defend their country, a young soldier sacrificing himself to blow up a bridge. Although an imperfect metric, a top-10 list derived from CrowdTangle data—a ranking typically dominated by the most successful political rage content of the moment—suggested that, at least for a couple of days following the invasion, users were more engrossed in coverage of the breaking war.

Those first few days after Russia’s invasion revealed something important about the United States: Much of what looks like unbridgeable polarization online may be the product of boredom, distraction, and jadedness; when something real happens, people pay attention to that instead.

While I wouldn’t want to suggest that the incursion is somehow good, I think she’s right about what the response revealed about our cultural solipsism. Makes a person wonder if you could produce the same unifying effect with other life-threatening headlines, such as the one reported by the Beaverton earlier this week. I’ve heard tell of churches that break similar stories every single Sunday, sometimes on a Wednesday too.

6. In humor, the Hard Times made me laugh with “Arch Nemesis Decides to Wait One More Song Before Telling You Band You’re Enjoying is Christian”. Then Reductress hit the bullseye with the brilliant How to Have a Spiritual Awakening Without Freaking People Out and then with the scathing “‘All Are Welcome Here,’ Says Sign in Neighborhood Where Average Home Costs $2 Million”.

7. Finally, our friend Chad Bird did what he does best in his new column “When the Prodigal Son Relapses“:

Prodigals have a way of finding themselves right back in the pigsty. I remember when I did.

The music has faded into the night, the fair-weather friends have all ditched you, and the temporary euphoria of so-called freedom has been replaced by the iron shackles of shame.

In that moment, on the plains of your heart, two armies line up in verbal array. Heaven and hell contend within you.

Hell shouts, “Now you’ve gone and done it. You stupid piece of garbage. Listen! Can you hear your older brother scoffing as he tells all his friends that he knew, he just knew, you’d go and do it again. Can you hear the servants making you the butt of their jokes? Can you hear the congregation whispering, ‘Oh, I suspected he wasn’t truly and sincerely repentant the first time’? You’re a lost, lonely, hopeless cause. You’re not even human. You’re a pig. And that’s all you’ll ever be.”

So hell spits. So hell accuses.

But there is another voice, not shouting but whispering, on the plains of your heart. It’s the voice of heaven, the familiar lilt of a Dad’s voice, echoing down the long hallways of hope, through your ears and down to the deepest, darkest caverns of your pain.

He doesn’t accuse. He doesn’t berate. He only mouths two simple words in which are compressed the full expanse of heaven’s redemptive love: Come Home.

Strays:

• Not sure how I’m the last to hear about Terence Malick’s The Way of the Wind. Mark Rylance as Satan! This week’s featured image is apparently a still from the film.

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