Another Week Ends

1. The voting has closed, my friends. No more ballots will be accepted. I know it’s only September but the Grace-in-Practice Documentary of the year has been decided. The trophy this year goes to The Saint of Second Chances, which debuted on Netflix a few weeks ago. At the urging of my wife, I turned it on last night, thinking it would be a fun slice of baseball-themed Americana. While the description fits — sort of — that’s the equivalent of saying Friday Night Lights is about high school football in a small town.

The Saint of Second Chances tells the story of Mike Veeck (rhymes with “wreck”), son of legendary Chicago White Sox owner Bill Veeck. Mike grew up in his delightful dad’s shadow, jockeying for approval before eventually derailing the entire franchise with the Disco Sucks promotion in 1978 (which turned into a riot). Thus begins an account of redemption and grace and “fourth second-chances” that has to be seen to be believed. I’ll try not to spoil it too much except to say Veeck ends up hatching — by accident? — the kingdom of God at a rundown ballpark in St Paul. The spirit of play runs wild among a group of true outcasts, and the result is redemption, hilarity, and, well, joy.

You may ask: Does Veeck hire a blind commentator to call the games? A nun to give massages in the outfield? Does Jesus make the key phone call? Does a blackballed Darryl Strawberry find healing through a friendship with a legless outfielder? You’ll have to watch to find out.

All I’ll say is that the ending had me weeping, and the whole shebang could not have made me more excited to be heading to Minnesota next week for our first ever event there! Sept 29-30 in Bloomington, “Grace Under Pressure” is our theme, and it’s shaping up marvelously. Not too late to register!

2. Speaking of grace on the big screen, Ethan Hawke has directed a Flannery O’Connor biopic called Wildcat, which just debuted at the Toronto Film Festival. In conjunction with the release, he and his daughter Maya sat down with Bishop Robert Barron(!) to talk about grace in a fallen world. A few of the soundbites have gone justifiably viral. So cool:

3. On the Mockingcast last week I forced my co-hosts to talk about sanitation. Not because of a burgeoning Costanza-like fixation on toilets — well, not chiefly — but because of the jaw-dropping obituary that the Economist ran for Bindeshwar Pathak, who died on August 15th at age 80. More than a few shades of Jesus Christ in this man, who devoted his life to serving India’s so-called Untouchables, AKA the Valmiki ‘scavenger’ caste. The Valmiki traditionally made their living cleaning the nation’s toilets and disposing of ‘night soil,’ often with their bare hands, a task for which they were shunned and treated as sub-human. Deeply distressed by their predicament, in 1969 Pathak invented a cheap pour-flush toilet, which he spent the rest of his life distributing wherever he could. As you might imagine, there’s a refreshing absence of metaphor or spiritualization required to connect this man’s work to Christ’s ministry. Lepers in particular spring to mind. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Pathak’s work came at what sounds like a serious cost, both financial and relational. Wow:

Shortly after university he spent three months among scavengers in the town of Bettiah, enduring with them the stench, the humiliation and the filth that leaked into his hair. One day he saw a small boy killed by a bull because, since he was untouchable, no one would help him. This redoubled his determination to make his mission national, though few listened. His family were appalled by his peculiar, shameful obsession; his father-in-law disowned him. He ran out of funds to build the toilets, and had to sell his wife’s ornaments to keep going.

As his inventions spread, however, so the scavengers began to rise. He established centres for the women where, in identical pale-blue saris, they could learn to read, write and open bank accounts, and could train as embroiderers and candlemakers. He also took them on trips to the Nathdwara temple, which banned such women, and the 5-star Maurya Sheraton restaurant in Delhi. At both places, those in charge begged him to take the women away; in his gentlest Gandhian mode, he refused. By this year, by his estimate, some 200,000 women had been liberated.

4. Another feel-good story we highlighted on the Mockingcast would be The Restaurant of Mistaken Orders in Japan. Forbes piggybacked on an NPR report about the pop-up eatery last month, contracting Peter Georgescu to provide more color. As the name suggests, diners at this restaurant cannot bank on receiving the food they ask for. This is because the place is staffed by people with dementia. Yet instead of sowing chaos, the novelty sows joy, and the result is a beautiful picture not only of outreach to a genuinely marginalized group, but of receptivity (and acceptance) as a conduit of grace, of expectation and entitlement being supplanted by surprise and gratitude. Sign me up:

A Japanese television director, Shiro Oguni, created this business to change perceptions about aging and progressive cognitive impairment … The idea for his project occurred to him when he was served a dumpling instead of a burger while visiting a nursing home. At first, he was going to send the dumpling back, but then he realized he was in a different world, with varying levels of functionality, including mistakes that didn’t really harm him. Why not just accept what he received as a way of respecting the difficulties the people around him faced, as an act of kindness and humility?

During one of the first pop-ups, 37 percent of the orders were mistaken, but afterward, 99 percent of the customers said they were happy with their meal. At one event, one of the servers absent-mindedly sat with her customers. Another asked one diner to take orders from the others around the table. None of this fazed anyone who came to eat. They know they are coming for something like compassionate and improvisational cabaret comedy. Oguni has said that his project isn’t simply about being more understanding and embracing of those who have dementia; he’s trying to show how people can be kind to one another, regardless of shortcomings.

5. Enough with this grace stuff. Time for some little-l law! No? Tough noogies. Writing in the Atlantic, Devorah Heitner reveals “The Very Common, Very Harmful Thing Well-Meaning Parents Do.” In short: tracking your kids via smartphone apps can only backfire. I’ve seen it happen before my very eyes. Surveillance conveys distrust, which yields rebellion and hiding. In a similar vein, professional climber Francis Sanzaro reflected a bit on the counterintuitive nature of performance pressure (the edict Thou Shalt Succeed At All Costs) in his column “When I Stopped Trying to Self-Optimize, I Got Better.”

The desire to climb [a difficult, uncharted] route had kept me from doing it. My self worth was bound at that moment to my success or failure, and that set off a chain reaction: unnatural desire, pressure, performance anxiety, anticipation, a mind enamored with the top but a body struggling below, bad decision-making, irregular movement, distraction, frustration. All in that order, too.

When I added (determination, grit, self-confidence, desire), I failed. When I took away (the desire for success), my body moved with greater fluidity and naturalness. I improved. I enjoyed it more as well, which, as an athlete of 30 years, I didn’t think was possible.

The tactic of subtraction goes against the grain of the so-called mind-set revolution, in which it seems everyone is adding this or that quality to their mental approach. The growth mind-set. The abundance mind-set. The gratitude mind-set. Adding comes naturally in life, from the simple act of living; habits form, mental patterns become fixed. Jealousies, insecurities and phobias take root with disturbing ease. We may try to fix ourselves, but often by slapping on more strips of duct tape. But, against what feels like common sense, daily labor is required to return to nakedness.

6. In humor, Reductress cracked me up with “Why I Don’t Believe in Astrology Unless It Reaffirms Something I Already Thought” and the New Yorker gave us “Apple’s Updated Options for Ignoring Your Screen-Time Limit: (e.g., “Snooze until I’ve confirmed that everyone I follow on Instagram is in Italy by coincidence and didn’t intentionally exclude me from some group trip” or “Snooze until I’ve confirmed whether the woman on the bus is my ex’s friend’s friend’s ex-girlfriend’s stepsister, the one who was banned from her yoga studio for pushing people during downward-facing dog.) I wish there were more.

7. Fortunately, it’s been a phenomenal week for music, with a gorgeous new album by Lowland Hum (From Self, With Love), a new one from Teenage Fanclub, a phenomenal boxed set from The Replacements, and a very cool new Nile Rodgers-assisted track from Duran Duran (“Black Moonlight”). I was super excited to hear the long-awaited new single from once-and-future Mbird conference chaplain Andy Squyres, “Death Defying Joy” and Sanctuary Songs by The Porters Gate is not to be missed. A cycle of songs specifically dealing with Christianity and mental health, featuring some of our favorites (Jon Guerra, Molly Parden, Paul Zach, Lauren Goans).

8. “I failed two captcha tests this week. Am I still human?” inquires a reader over at Wired, voicing an anxiety that I suspect will only proliferate in years to come. Oddly enough (in true #lowanthropology fashion), that very anxiety may be the main thing that separates us from the machines. Or so contends Meaghan O’Gieblyn in her, er, probing response. Oh, and I for one had no idea that captcha stands for “Complete Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”:

It was not so long ago that automation experts assured everyone AI was going to make us “more human.” As machine-learning systems took over the mindless tasks that made so much modern labor feel mechanical—the argument went—we’d more fully lean into our creativity, intuition, and capacity for empathy. In reality, generative AI has made it harder to believe there’s anything uniquely human about creativity (which is just a stochastic process) or empathy (which is little more than a predictive model based on expressive data).

In the end, I’d argue that the persistence of your anxiety is the most salient evidence against its own source. One of the most famous iterations of the Turing test, the Loebner Prize, gives out an ancillary award each year called “The Most Human Human” to the contestant who convinces the judges that they are not one of the AI systems. The author Brian Christian won in 2009. When asked in an interview to complete the sentence “The human being is the only animal who ___,” a riddle worthy of the Sphinx, Christian turned the question on itself: “Humans appear to be the only things anxious about what makes them unique.”

Even the most advanced AI is not prone to that brand of despair. It’s not lying awake at night mulling over the tests it failed, or wondering what it means to be made of wood, or silicon, or flesh. Each time you fear that you’re losing ground to machines, you are enacting the very concerns and trepidations that make you distinctly human.

What say we let Andy close us out as only he can, taking our trepidations straight to the foot of the cross? Amen:

Strays:

• Excited to be speaking at the “All in on Grace” conference in a couple weeks! October 9-11 in Baltimore, MD — would love to see you.
• “The Stations of the Meritocrat Cross,” in which Freddie de Boer covers most of the usual bases with characteristic bite. Might be the first time I’ve seen someone put their finger on one of the undeniable rungs on the coastal status ladder, though. Namely, once “people have gone through the college admissions hunger games … they immediately adopt a derisive, world-weary, smirking disdain for the meritocratic systems they so recently and desperately clung to.” To which I’d add: that same disdain can be adopted on religious grounds as well. Hopefully leavened by compassion, but still.
• Law/Gospel aficionados will find much of interest in Amy Mantravadi’s “Johannes Agricola and the Distinction between Law and Gospel” over on 1517.
• Teer Hardy published a great follow-up to his recent Mbird post about Ghostbusters over on his substack.
• What a privilege to guest on Kim and Nick Bogardus’s terrific new podcast Lead Together and reflect a bit on what we did wrong (and right) in the founding and first fifteen years of Mbird.