Another Week Ends

1. We’ve got to talk about Task. One of the pleasures of writing for this site over the years has been the opportunity to highlight — and pay witness to — works of art that foreground grace in “unexpected and compelling ways.” Believe it or not, such things come along with encouraging regularity. The fifth season of Fargo did this a couple years ago. Before that there was The Holdovers, and before that, Last Chance U, lots more besides. The steady stream contradicts the narratives of decline and decadence that swirl around our cultural discourse. I relish it.

Task is on that same level; it detonates a “grace bomb” so forceful that you can really only marvel and thank God it was made. The seven-part crime procedural just finished airing on HBO and was the brainchild of screenwriter-producer Brad Ingelsby. Task follows the template Ingelsby established in his previous series, Mare of Easttown, and basically doubles down. Baptism, adoption, addiction, forgiveness, vocation, providence, troubled-parents-with-troubled-children, it’s all there once again, wrapped in that delicious Delco accent.

Of course, when grace is done effectively onscreen, it tends to be climatic, so it’s almost impossible to write about without giving spoilers. Rest assured, when the moment arrives, you will come straight home know. The tip-off will be the tears in your eyes. Just don’t miss the bird feeder in the credits.

If that’s not enough to whet your appetite, the Los Angeles Times sat down with Ingelsby and his two leading men, Tom Pelphrey and Mark Ruffalo, and parts of their convo can be relayed without compromising anything, plotwise. The theological aspects of the story, for instance, are not incidental.

Ingelsby says his uncle, who was an Augustinian priest, helped inspire the throughline of the series. “I’ve always been very intrigued by his idea of faith in God over the years, and how it’s changed over time, and what he believed once and what he believes now,” he says. “I was intrigued by the idea of a guy who, everything he held as truth, all the pillars of his life, have come crumbling down. And Robbie has a much different faith. And it’s through the gauntlet of the story, how their lives intersect, that they both get to navigate their own journeys of faith.”

The interviewer opens up by asking a doozy of the two actors, namely, “How has your own relationship to faith and forgiveness evolved as you’ve lived more life or taken on roles that ask you to live different experiences?”

Pelphrey: My faith, to me, is when I got sober. God willing, Oct. 1, which is three days from now, it’ll be 12 years. That’s truly by the grace of God — you hear that phrase, but I genuinely, I mean that. That’s how I’ve experienced faith, through my sobriety. I was raised Catholic, but the experience I had at 31 was like in a different dimension to what I thought of religion or ideas. It’s one thing to have an idea, it’s another thing to have your heart opened. It’s definitely an important part of my life. And I think Brad did such a beautiful job conveying that. My grandma used to have one of these things when I was a kid — not a real gem, but like a glass cut thing so if you put it in the window, the sun shines through a million different ways, and the color goes everywhere. I feel like you [Brad] did that with some themes in the show where you’re like, “Let me just hold it up, and we’ll just look at it a few different ways.”

Ruffalo: My journey with faith is probably very similar to Tom’s. When you get a job or something, it can take you on a journey that you’re ripe to take. It touches your life at a very moment where you need it. I’d say, after my brother died, the whole notion of faith just went out the window for me. But oddly enough, I have a lot of addiction, alcoholism in my family. I say, either you are one or you love one. When you love somebody who’s struggling with that, it takes a lot of faith to let them go and to trust it will be OK. My friend says to me, “They got a God and you ain’t it.”

My faith has been renewed, actually, through Tom [the character] — he is an alcoholic. It’s touched my life in so many ways, even with my brother, that it’s like where I lost my faith and where I gained my faith again has been through this journey with alcoholism and drug addiction. And I waver. You look at the world and you’re like, “Where is God in this? Please show yourself. ” But the thing about faith is it requires you to believe without any evidence of its existence. I’d rather believe in that than nothing. Although, I fought him [Brad] all the time. I was like, “He’s [Tom] not really praying here. He’s trying to pray. He’s going through the actions of praying, but he can’t quite get to the opening sentence, which is “ … God …” He does pray, eventually, but it’s a journey.

Pro tip: if you decide to take the plunge, try to find the little behind-the-scenes featurettes that HBO was running after each episode. Not only do all involved drop regular nuggets of wisdom, you realize that pretty much everyone involved other than the principals was British (ha!). Go figure.

Now that it’s over, though, I need something else in the same vein to look forward to. So God bless Vince Gilligan (Better Call Saul, Breaking Bad) and Rhea Seehorn’s amazing timing:

2. One more bit of genuine must-watch/listen media this week and that’s “The Alabama Murders” series Malcolm Gladwell just started on his Revisionist History podcast. The show tackles a grisly murder committed by a Church of Christ preacher in the titular state, but before they dive into the details, Gladwell and guest Lee Camp dig into the particulars of God’s grace — and what a Christian denomination risks when they suppress it. Shocking as the context may be, I’ve been encouraged by the number of Gladwell devotees who’ve gotten in touch to alert me of the deep Mocking-resonance. Skip to the 21:30 mark if you’d like to go straight to the relevant part:

3. “When Did Everything Become So ‘Intentional’?” asks Marie Solis in the New York Times, surveying the trend of intentional dating-shopping-cooking-scrolling-drinking-etc. that’s blossomed on social media as a way to combat brain rot and the growing sense that our attention and time are being commandeered by algorithms, often without us being (fully) aware of it. She notes how marketers have picked up on the appeal, e.g., “Hailey Bieber’s billion-dollar beauty brand Rhode has advertised itself as a line of ‘intentional skin care and beauty essentials.'”

The most amusing part of the article, however, has to be the widespread bafflement among mental health professionals about where the word came from, since it’s largely absent from contemporary research and methodology. All they had to do was ask a few Christians (or do a quick Amazon search), and we would’ve happily informed them that the evangelical and post-evangelical world has been enamored with “intentionality” for at least two decades as a preferred euphemism for law.

ANYWAYS, I commend Solis’ piece, especially for the clear yet compassionate way it spells out the high anthropology implications at the end:

Living intentionally suggests being present and self-aware. Your words and actions are in near-perfect alignment. Being “intentional” also implies a series of deliberate choices.

Those can feel hard to come by these days, when even mundane, everyday decisions appear more readily shaped by faceless algorithms than by any sort of individual volition. One can’t help but feel that the word expresses a wider feeling of being disempowered and adrift.

The word is an assertion of free will, as well as a cushion against all of the unpredictable facets of life. How infinitely understandable then — if occasionally irritating — to be hearing this word so often. More annoying is that the word can’t bring about all it seems to promise.

“I understand why people want that sense of safety and control,” said [Dr. Yuxin] Sun, the Seattle-based therapist. “I would also say that, essentially as human beings, we don’t have the ability to set intentions so good, to make decisions so good, that we’re immune from heartbreak, pain, sickness and all the difficulties in life.”

4. If the Cult of Intention relies on a flattering understanding of human willpower, this next item explores the constructive possibilities of embracing the inverse. “Needing Help Is Normal” asserts Agnes Howard in a review of Leah Libresco Sargeant’s new book, The Dignity of Dependence, which sounds like a worthy, female-focused addition to the canon of #lowanthropology:

The normal condition for humans is dependence — we start and finish there, and by gradations we depend on others throughout our lives. A system presupposing independence has a “false anthropology,” Sargeant writes. … Though humans are fundamentally dependent creatures, another fundamental trait—fallenness, sin, plain selfishness — motivates us to pretend otherwise.

Builders of the world Sargeant moves through today knew about the female physical capacity to nurture dependence. They realized that women have periods and feed babies. But they treated that capacity as debility. Priority given to autonomy codes dependence as negative, subordinating and submerging a great source of flourishing.

Seeing help as unusual takes a trick of the mind that recasts it as entitlement or commercial transaction. A faulty definition of help minimizes and monetizes; it devalues care work and excuses some from caring on the grounds that “I don’t need help and therefore you shouldn’t either.” But humans need and take help all the time … [Moreover,] dependence stimulates growth. Those who serve expand their capacities. Those who are served fill out the truth of our creatureliness. The body of all together, as community or church, grows through mutual aid.

5. Laughter-wise, it’s basically it’s all Alan Partridge all the time for me these days, but a few other things have peeked through, especially the Onion’s 2014 article, “Man’s Heart Stops As Speaker Asks Audience To Turn To Person Next To Them,” McSweeney’s “Your Local Hiking Trail Has Had It with You People,” and this hilarious mock trailer SNL put together:

6. A pair of literary-themed articles to spotlight, the first being Karl Ove Knausgaard’s longish read in the New Yorker, “The Light of ‘The Brothers Karamazov,’” which serves as a devastating confirmation of Libresco Sargeant’s thesis above:

On May 16, 1878, just months before Dostoyevsky began writing “The Brothers Karamazov” in earnest, his son Alyosha died following an epileptic fit that lasted for hours. He would have turned three that summer … When his son stopped breathing, Dostoyevsky “kissed him, made the sign of the cross over him three times,” and broke down in tears. He was crushed with grief, [wife] Anna wrote, and with guilt — his son had inherited epilepsy from him. Outwardly, however, he was soon calm and collected; she was the one who wept and wept. Gradually, she grew worried that his suppression of grief would have a negative impact on his already fragile health, and she suggested that he visit the Optina Pustyn monastery. There [he] met the elder of the monastery — the starets — Ambrose. “Weep and be not consoled, but weep,” he said to Dostoyevsky.

“The Brothers Karamazov” is written in defiance of this loss of meaning — that is, the abyss it stares into, the night it seeks to fill with light.

One of the insights of “The Brothers Karamazov” is that identity is a social construct, and part of what the novel rebels against is the notion that man is sufficient unto himself. Hell is isolation; heaven is fellowship.

Not to worry, the bestselling Norwegian author does not ignore the Christological dimension of Dostoyevsky’s masterpiece. He closes the essay by meditating on the meaning of the kiss that the returned Christ gives the Grand Inquisitor after the latter’s infamous atheistic diatribe:

In a way, it is as if all the novel’s various themes, attitudes, and events come together here, in that kiss. It is entirely in keeping with the spirit of the novel that Jesus responds not with arguments, not with words, dogma, or abstraction, but rather through something physical and concrete: an act. It occurs there and then, and it concerns the two of them. It is interpersonal. And its significance cannot be fixed. Is it a refutation? Is it an act of forgiveness? Is it an example? At least as important is the fact that the kiss appears in Ivan’s story, that it is he who has conceived of it: the ambivalence is his. And, as we read it, it becomes ours.

7. Second, former conference speaker Tara Isabella Burton reflects on the enduring power of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets in a short piece entitled “The Truth Eludes Even Old Men” on the Free Press. This paragraph in particular grabbed me:

Four Quartets asks us, perhaps more than any other poetry that I’ve read, what can be salvaged from life and our knowledge of it, when we know that we know nothing. “For us,” he writes, “there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.” The trying is worth it, for its own sake, even if it is doomed to fail; there is something to be gleaned from the attempt to put things down into words, or to make sense of our lives. Other people will try to make sense of our lives, too, and fail, and fail to make sense of their own, and still, despite the insufficiency of philosophy and history and yes, even poetry, to capture the totality of it, Eliot suggests, echoing the English anchoress Julian of Norwich’s famous line, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”

Speaking of old men, my favorite such specimen was firing on all cylinders on Late Night with Seth Meyers this week. It’s all top-drawer LD but if I had to pick a single portion, it’d be the stuff about the heist that starts around 12:30.

8. Finally, this was a big deal for yours truly. Roughly six months after it came out, I was pleasantly surprised to see Christianity Today run a glowing review of The Big Relief, courtesy of Sara Billups:

Grace — the unconditional love God showers upon undeserving sinners — is a core biblical tenet that every Christian knows and that few take time to carefully consider. And I may be projecting here, but even if some of us understand grace theologically, few consider its power to help untie the knots that bind us to our disordered desire and captivity.

Zahl is not trying to put on an air of over-intellectualism in these pages — the writing style in The Big Relief is as approachable and practical as its ideas. Zahl is also pastoral. I wrote in the margins of my copy, complete with all-caps emphasis, “I feel MINISTERED to as I read.”

Zahl leaves us with a warning to be careful, cautioning that “grace can become a new test of purity.” We can waste time running after a specific act of God’s grace instead of discovering it in life’s more mundane expressions.

Zahl reminds us that grace, like so many good gifts, is usually delivered in boring circumstances — in other words, in real life. Remember Zahl’s central question here: not “if we are captives, but how we approach our captivity.” As a captive to my own internal and external desires, I appreciate Zahl’s timely reminder that I, and others burdened like me, have never been freer.

Strays:

• Still finalizing the theme, but we’ve opened up early-bird registration to the 2026 NYC Conference, which happens April 23–25. I’m super excited to announce the slate, hopefully in the next couple weeks, but rest assured it’s going to be rad rad rad.
• No new Mcast next week to accommodate travel schedules — look for it on Monday 11/3.
• Our own Ian Olson writes about “The Luxury and Necessity of Pessimism” over on Mere Orthodoxy.
• On the Atlantic, Stephanie Murray explores what she calls “The Parental-Happiness Fallacy,” aka the counterintuitive Pew finding from a couple years ago, that “lower-income parents were more likely than middle- or higher-income parents to say that they found parenting enjoyable and rewarding ‘all or most of the time.'”