Another Week Ends

1. So we have to begin this week with James Kimmel, who said some very bold things. I’m referring of course to the Yale revenge and forgiveness expert and author of The Science of Revenge. (Is there something going on with another James Kimmel?) His research was cited a few columns ago and subsequently covered on the M-cast, but it’s worth revisiting in the context of what one BBC broadcaster this week called “that noisiest of democracies,” America. Today everyone has a[n often legitimate] grievance, and politics seems deadly. Cue Kimmel, who argues that revenge is the root cause of the majority of the world’s violence.

We experience real or imagined grievances — perceptions of mistreatment, injustice, humiliation, shame, betrayal, victimization. We experience this throughout our lives, day to day, almost hour by hour in some instances. Those experiences are very painful, and they register inside the brain’s pain network … It’s the surge and the subsequent loss of dopamine that creates this experience of craving or desire to hurt the person who hurt us — because when we first experience this dopamine rush, it’s very pleasurable. When you take it away, you want it again.

Even serial killers and people who seem truly sociopathic or psychopathic, they eventually will disclose that they feel they are victims and were wronged first and are doing what they’re entitled to do, which is get the justice they want, justice in the form of revenge.

As for solutions, Kimmel suggests treating revenge (“the deadliest addiction”) the way we treat any other addiction — as a public health issue. He also reiterates that “forgiveness is a kind of wonder drug”:

There was a time when we used to punish drug and alcohol users — criminally punish them — and we would describe their behaviors as moral failures. When scientists discovered the biological underpinnings of substance use disorders, we moved toward a public health approach, trying to prevent, treat, and ultimately maybe cure addiction rather than just continue to punish people for their own illnesses… [Incarceration] is a revenge-based approach. It says: You violated the law, we’re going to punish you now. It just fuels people’s revenge addiction and makes them feel more pain and more desire to retaliate. […]

When you even imagine forgiveness — so you’re not even deciding to fully forgive someone, you just imagine it — we see inside the brain that you’re deactivating the pain network, that anterior insula that was lit up by the original grievance. That’s the first thing that happens. The second thing that happens is that you deactivate the pleasure and reward circuitry of addiction, the “go” circuitry, so you stop feeling these incessant, nagging, and often dangerous desires to retaliate and punish other people for your own gratification. And then the third thing that happens is that forgiveness activates the “stop” circuitry inside your brain.

2. At the Christian Century, Michael Woolf also discussed possible escape routes for a society trapped in cycles of vengeance. The minister and author was surprised to find present-day America reflected in the 2025 remake of How to Train Your Dragon, where for generations Vikings and dragons have fought and killed one another because for generations Vikings and dragons have fought and killed one another.

As a theologian, I view it as an empirical fact that human beings have been rather bad at achieving peace through their own efforts alone, and that the only path to a new existence must be grounded in God’s redemption. That’s why I turned to René Girard’s work—in particular his mimetic theory of atonement—to get a sense of just how we could make God’s peaceable kingdom a reality.

Girard was a 20th-century philosopher [who] argued that human desire was mimetic — that is, we desire what others have, and this creates rivalry and violence between human beings. At its foundation, mimesis is imitative, and this imitation takes place not only interpersonally but over generations, as we repeat the cycles of violence and purported resolution of previous generations. […]

In [How to Train Your Dragon] the cycle of vengeance has reached an apex. Dragon and Viking alike terrorize each other’s communities, selecting innocent victims for destruction and uniting their respective groups through acts of terrifying violence. It is only through Hiccup’s perception that both groups are victims of each other that true peace becomes possible.

The stakes of this perspective shift are clear. Time and time again we, are reminded with Hiccup that dragons killed his mother. That is, Hiccup himself has a claim to vengeance and victimhood—but he lays aside that logic and instead chooses to embrace a new way of being. This is nothing short of miraculous.

3. These are complex, urgent, and potentially objectionable moral ideas. For the same reason they can be very hard to discuss, unless, of course, your interlocutor is a nonsentient chatbot, in which case it turns out to be almost too easy to rattle off your biggest and otherwise halting questions (though whether your answer will be truly satisfactory is yet another question). For her latest entry in her New York Times “Believing” series, Lauren Jackson reports on the growing popularity of “digital chaplaincy” aka spiritual chatbots. “People are bringing their headiest concerns to chatbots,” she says. From death, the future, the nature of time, and depression, AI chatbots have become bottomless receptacles for our biggest concerns.

The companies train the chatbots on religious texts and consult with theologians about their guardrails. Still, the chatbots are based on foundation models, like ChatGPT and Gemini, that are designed to validate users.

“They’re generally affirming. They are generally ‘yes men,’” said Ryan Beck, the chief technology officer at Pray.com. He doesn’t see that as a problem. Mr. Beck was once imprisoned after being involved with gangs and illegal drugs in Los Angeles. After he found faith, he made it his mission to make worship accessible to others. “Who doesn’t need a little affirmation in their life?” […]

This is tricky theological territory because chatbots “tell us what we want to hear,” said Ms. Campbell, the technology and religion professor. “It’s not using spiritual discernment, it is using data and patterns.”

But the chatbots’ affirming nature may be the reason many people like them. Ms. Collins said she had found more support on the Bible Chat app than she had at her church. She said she faced judgment when she once shared her health struggles with her congregation. “People stopped talking to me,” she said. “It was horrible.” […]

He hopes the app will inspire people to seek out religious communities. Many apps, including Hallow, explicitly help people find local congregations to attend.

In the United States, where around 40 million people have left churches in the past few decades, the apps may lower the barrier to re-enter spiritual life. They allow people to express their existential and theological curiosities without the discomfort or shame of an in-person meeting.

“They aren’t going to church like they used to,” Mr. Beck said. “But it’s not that they’re less inclined to find spiritual nourishment. It’s just that they do it through different modes.”

The preaching of good news, affirmation and relief, is surely a good thing, especially against the backdrop of an endlessly judgmental, anxious church. Even if too much affirmation was inherently troubling theologically, one can imagine a bot being tailored to whatever theological specifications needed — trained, say, in law & gospel theology — bringing the hammer of the law to your vulnerable confessions only to lift you up with a final word of grace. I don’t know if such a thing exists yet, but would it be less creepy or, even, genuine ministry?

One wonders if every question about technology isn’t really about anthropology. What effect does it have on us mortals? The gospel tends to turn us outward, to face and love the world, but the bots are designed to keep us coming back to them, to our heads, to our questions, to our screens.

4. Editor in chief of Mere Orthodoxy Jake Meador also addressed this phenomenon, first listing the great accomplishments of our species (the moon landing, disease eradication, and, of course, AI), then asking: “But why are so many of us so unhappy?”

Why do I see signs for suicide hotlines when I park on the roof of the parking garage that I use when I take my kids to the children’s museum? Why are there billboards on my street encouraging everyone to carry Narcan so they can save the life of someone who is ODing? Why is there a growing genre of reported features documenting the increasingly heavy relational loads that people now ask technology to bear for them as they turn to AI bots for everything from ordinary daily encouragement to persevere in life to relationship advice to help with financial planning? Why have we made it so easy to engage in activities that give a surge of dopamine in the short-term but destroy us in the long-term? I am thinking of things like consuming pornography or gambling on sports.

His answer relates to the loss of stories which gave our lives meaning; that meaning is scarce even as knowledge is abundant. When chaos is so evident, it can be a little too hard to hold onto any given thread. Ultimately, his conclusion is beautifully stated:

When we experience the world as a threat to ourselves or as an alienating thing, perhaps the deficiency is not in the world, or not only within the world, but also within us. Chesterton remarked once that children delight to see the same thing done over and over and perhaps God causes the sun to rise each day because he is like a child and it is his joy to say to the sun “again!” Perhaps, Chesterton said, in our sin we have become older than our creator … The therapeutic asserts itself as a means of helping us reckon with what it is to live in a world of chaos lacking purpose or belonging.

I think, to borrow once more from [Wendell] Berry, this is an exercise in thinking up the wrong world. And what is needed is a turn back toward what Marilynne Robinson has called “the givenness of things.” But there is a wrinkle here we must recognize, or else we will end up sounding like mere sentimentalists or romantics, encouraging people who feel radically alienated from the world to look at the world and find joy and beauty in it. That alone will not be enough, I fear …

What I want to suggest is that we must become someone else’s given, we must become a forgotten or neglected place’s given. We can, ourselves, in some sense become that givenness in our relationship to our neighbors and our homes. … To the extent that we can speak of receiving good given things in our own lives that is often only because our elders preserved them and gave them to us. It may be the case that in an age of spiritual orphanhood it is our calling to retrieve and repair those given creaturely goods so that they can become a home or anchor of sorts for those who come after us.

5. In humor, first up, the New Yorker: “How Other Things End,” “with apologies to T. S. Eliot,” who penned the famous lines “This is the way the world ends / not with a bang but a whimper.” By Reuven Perlman:

This is how doing laundry ends.
Not with crisp, clean bedding but with your sheet coming out of the dryer balled up in your duvet cover, still soaking wet.

This is how dinner in your thirties ends.
Not with a satisfying dessert but with a single square of dark chocolate snapped off a seventy-five-per-cent-cacao bar from Whole Foods. O.K., maybe two squares . . . What the heck — it’s Friday.

This is how the smartphone era ends.
Not with a cultural rethink of the role that technology plays in our lives but with scrolling past a video of Jonathan Haidt musing about the harm of narrative-free content to watch a clip of a broccoli-haired teen-ager punching his grandpa in the back while Hozier sings, “I take my whiskey neat.”

This is how the “couch to 5K” ends.
Not with a 5K but with shin splints.

And from McSweeney’s: “After Ten Minutes at the Open House, I Am Comfortable Committing to Living in This House Forever.” From Reductress: “How to Stop People Pleasing Unless Someone Seems Like They Want You to Start Again.”

Oh, and don’t sleep on this Billy Corgan clip. Wait for the line about conditional love!

6. Also in the New Yorker, Joshua Rothman muses on the nature of time — and, by extension, our strategies for managing it.

The flow of time often feels irregular. At painful moments, time can drag with excruciating slowness; when the pressure rises, it accelerates. I find that the end of summer is a period in which time seems to go faster. Days get shorter, the holidays loom, and the months begin to blur. … Time trips over itself. In place of steady waves, there’s just a churning sea…

Over the past few years, I’ve discovered that my preferred solution is to live one day at a time. In some recovery programs, “one day at a time” is a mantra, expressing the idea that a daunting lifelong commitment to sobriety is best approached in daily steps. This is a little like what E. L. Doctorow said about being a novelist: Writing a novel “is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” … That’s obvious, isn’t it? But it isn’t always easy to do.

Rothman introduces a concept by Zen monk Paul Loomans called “time surfing,” from Loomans’ book of the same name.

Harried and exhausted, [Loomans] constantly consulted and updated a series of task lists on his computer. Despite this, he was always “terrified” of falling behind. He felt that his life was like a game of Tetris, with new tasks appearing as soon as old ones were cleared. “I was a Zen monk,” he remembers thinking. “Where was my sense of calm, my tranquility?”

Time surfing, Loomans’s life-management method, emerged after he put away his lists. It reverses the advice offered in most time-management manuals. Such books tend to guide us through the creation and maintenance of cleverly designed productivity systems, which we can use to more effectively impose our will upon ourselves. But Loomans argues that, instead of trying to “manage our tasks with our heads,” we should decide what to do next in an intuitive, ad-hoc way.

Loomans promises that “a sense of calm arises when you hand over the controls completely to your intuition and trust it won’t forget anything.” During the periods when I’ve successfully time surfed — I’ve done it for several extended but ultimately limited stretches — I’ve found this to be true. As a kind of bonus, I’ve also begun and ended each day with more self-awareness.

Color me suspicious about relying on my own “intuitions” for time management. YET MAYBE there is an element of faith here — “handing over the controls” and letting the day come on its own terms.

7. A similar kind of surrender seems exhibited by none other than the great preacher/theologian Fleming Rutledge in her recent interview with Plough. She offers practical, profoundly faithful tips for preachers. Those interested, read the whole thing! Lots of great (and funny) parts, but here are a few lines cherry-picked. They largely come back to getting out of one’s own way:

The preacher has been chosen, called by God, to the service of God’s Word. The preacher has not been called to exhibit his or her personal opinions or personal experiences or personal beliefs or personal philosophy. … God is the active agent. It is not the preacher whose experiences are important. It is what God might be saying through the preacher. And saying this takes a certain amount of audacity, because our entire culture focuses on self-sufficiency, self-development, self-finding, and self-making. […]

This kind of urgency doesn’t require a raised voice. It doesn’t require shouting. It doesn’t require gestures. Some speakers gesture, but I never do. The energy is not coming from my energetic gestures or my ability to act out something. If it’s a scriptural message, it’s coming to you from the Holy Spirit. The preacher also should not show unnecessary emotion, in my opinion, because it’s not about the preacher’s emotion. It distracts. If the preacher gets too emotional, people start worrying about the preacher and not thinking about what the preacher is saying. That’s the point: try to serve the Word by disappearing yourself.

Strays:

• Another one for preachers, on par with the above Rutledge link: Aaron Zimmerman’s guide for preaching a law/gospel sermon.
• David Zahl’s The Big Relief was featured on the Russell Moore show: books about “digital resistance.”
• And some familiar names in The Living Church: Duo Dickinson also reviews TBR: “pithy, funny, direct.”
• Can empathy be taught in medicine?