The vast majority of people who have ever lived are dead. I haven’t looked up the odds on Kalshi, but it’s a safe bet that, you and me? we’ll die too. Sooner or later—try as we might to run and hide—death will find us.

When my great-grandfather died, they kept the body in the living room for a week, apparently. I’m guessing that made you recoil. Made me do the same at first. We’ve so distanced ourselves from death that even open caskets are going out of style. It’s been over a decade since I’ve last been to a funeral with one. Dead bodies? Traumatizing. No, no, can’t see those. But are they? Are they traumatizing, or are they just education?

I remember right before my grandfather’s funeral—the first funeral I can really remember—I happened to watch an episode of Drake and Josh that featured a magician named Henry Doheny (a spoof on Harry Houdini) who comes back to life at his own funeral. So, eight year-old me sat there in my little black suit staring at the casket the entire funeral, waiting for the same thing to happen to my grandfather. It didn’t. Death, I learned, isn’t quite like they show it on the TV.

I suspect we try to avoid thinking of death, at least in part, because we believe it really is the end. Lights out. What’s more to be said?

We used to have elaborate rituals surrounding death which both infused death with meaning and revealed the beliefs we truly held. Death was a sacred matter because life was sacred. Today, we dress up funerals as celebrations of life because, well, besides our memories, what’s left of the departed? Why pray for souls you don’t really believe in or commend them to the mercy of a God you don’t think is actually there?

“They’re not in pain anymore.”

“They wouldn’t want you to be sad.”

“Happy thoughts, happy thoughts.”

Sometimes, we can’t even be bothered to have a celebration of life, much less a funeral. That was the case when my other grandfather passed. Sure, we had our excuses: COVID, his wishes, the general dearth of good things people had to say about him. So, we just proceeded as though nothing happened.

And I think, for a lot of us, that’s our modus operandi for death. Out of sight, out of mind, both for ourselves and others. Yes, we know we’ll die but it’s best not to think about it. As for the dead? Maybe we cherish a happy memory or two, but for the most part, we’re too busy thinking about living to worry about the dead. Betwixt the living and the dead is a chasm uncrossable.1

Except the Christian tradition has long called BS on that.

And as a ringing disavowal of the notion that the living and the dead have nothing to do with one another, the Western tradition gives us back-to-back Holy Days, days so potent they gave rise to the spinoff we know as Halloween, which is really just the warmup act.2

An Introduction to All Saints and All Souls Day

All Saints Day

Of the two, All Saints Day has the greater pedigree, both in antiquity and importance. Considered a solemnity and holy day of obligation in the Catholic Church, a principal feast in the Anglican Church, and a major feast in the Orthodox Church, All Saints Day is an annual commemoration of the saints, held on November 1 in the Western Church and on the first Sunday after the Feast of Pentecost in the East.

It arises from the longstanding Christian practice of honoring the faithful departed, seomthing we can track all the way back to the pages of Scripture. In Hebrews 11, we’re given a list of figures who are celebrated for their faith, and then in the following chapter, we’re told that these examples are given that we might run the race of faith well. In the early church, the martyrs became saints par excellence and the centerpiece of Christian devotion to the dead, with annual commemorations held on the day of a martyr’s death at the site of his/her burial. In Late Antiquity, the blood of the martyrs ceases to be shed with much frequency (at least in the Roman Empire), and we see a shift in emphasis in the cult of the saints. The Blessed Virgin Mary rises higher and higher, and alongside her and the martyrs we get “white martyrs” joining their ranks, those who died to their self and the world in total pursuit of Christ.

As time goes on, Christian commemoration of the saints becomes more formalized, leading eventually to the establishment of a universal date for All Saints Day by Pope Gregory IV in 839.

In my mind, All Saints Day serves at least three major purposes:

1. Remembering the witness of the saints who have gone before us

2. Recognizing that, in some way, they’re still with us. This often includes requesting their prayers for us, though that’s not the case in every church.

3. Praying that we will follow in their footsteps to join them in the heavenly places.

One of the funeral prayers from the Book of Common Prayer ties these together quite nicely, and it serves as a reminder that every Christian funeral is a celebration of All Souls Day in miniature.

O God, the King of saints, we praise and glorify your holy Name for all your servants who have finished their course in your faith and fear: for the blessed Virgin Mary; for the holy patriarchs, prophets, apostles, and martyrs; and for all your other righteous servants, known to us and unknown; and we pray that, encouraged by their examples, aided by their prayers, and strengthened by their fellowship, we also may be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light; through the merits of your Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

What I love about this prayer and All Saints Day generally is that they remind us that the Communion of Saints isn’t just some vacuous idea tacked onto the end of the Apostle’s Creed. When we confess the Communion of Saints, we’re saying something astonishingly beautiful: we are never alone. In my experience growing up, we’d say we’re never alone because God is omnipresent or because we carry Jesus in our heart. All true, but also all too individualistic. The Christian faith declares that to have fellowship with God is to have fellowship with all our brothers and sisters in the faith, living on Earth and alive in Christ. Indeed, those who have died are not truly “dead.” At least not in the modern sense of lights out. Instead, we boldly declare that Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death. In other words, death has been defeated.

And it is here that I should note that the shift from “funeral” to “celebration of life” need not be all bad. Sometimes this is motivated by a modern distaste for all things related to death. A preference for happy thoughts. But not always. Sometimes, a celebration of life is a confident assertion that light perpetual really does shine on those we’ve lost, and because of that, we haven’t really lost them. That they are now more fully united to the same Lord who dwells in us, whom we receive in the bread and cup, who hears our prayers and will never leave nor forsake us. That, for those in Christ, to die really is gain.

So, in such cases, please hear me, there is nothing wrong with the movement toward “celebrations of life” so long as we understand them properly. What is All Saints Day if not a grand celebration of life? Of the lives of all those saints, known and unknown, who have found everlasting life in Christ?

All Souls Day

Unlike All Saints Day, All Souls Day is not a holy day of obligation in the Catholic Church. In the Anglican Church, it is an optional day of observance, found among the Lesser Feasts and Fasts. You will not find it on Orthodox calendars.

Some of this is due to the fact that All Souls Day comes to us at a later date, sometime around the end of the 10th or beginning of the 11th century when St. Odilo, an abbot at the Cluny Monastery in France, decided that he and his monks ought to pray for all souls on the day after celebrating All Saints. In that, there’s a certain beauty of remembering the least of these, the forgotten.

But All Souls Day is also less popular in some churches because it is closely associated with Purgatory. A major theme of All Souls Day is offering prayers for souls in purgatory, something which makes most non-Catholic Christians a bit uneasy. The fact that it’s on the Episcopal calendar at all can be cause for confusion at times. Why commemorate All Souls Day if we don’t believe in Purgatory?3

And, to be fair, Anglicans celebrating All Souls Day is still a bit new. It didn’t land on the Episcopal calendar until the advent of the 1979 prayer book. Nearly 500 years on from the Reformation, it seemed the greater danger was losing sight of the truth of the communion of the saints rather than succumbing to the medieval notions of purgatory that Richard Hooker—who happens to be commemorated on Nov. 3—would have railed against.

Also, the Anglo-Catholic wing of TEC probably just thought it was cool.4

However, history aside, I think All Souls Day offers us several important lessons about death. In addition to reinforcing the notion of the communion of saints, All Souls Day offers us an opportunity to reflect on death in a less celebratory way.

I was recently at a funeral where the pastor talked about “easy” vs. “hard” funerals. At the former, everyone in attendance tends to think the deceased is in heaven and they have nice things to say. At the latter, neither is true for at least some of the people in attendance. There can be a similar dynamic with All Saints vs. All Souls Day. On All Saints, we celebrate lives of heroic virtue. It’s not a day of mourning. Not only are we assured of the salvation of these figures, but more likely than not, we don’t know them personally. The saints, at least the famous ones, are quasi-mythical figures to many of us. But All Souls Day is often a time to remember deaths closer to home. Maybe even the difficult deaths. The people for whom we wouldn’t know what to say if asked to speak at their funeral. All Souls Day can be an exercise in Christian love for those whose memories are difficult for us. It’s not only “complicated” deaths, though, that All Souls Day remembers. Seeing as it covers, well, all souls, it can relate to those whom we never knew in this life. To those names fading on toppled tombstones, all but forgotten to the world. There’s a beautiful practice associated with All Souls Day of visiting graveyards. Even if you don’t pray for the dead, simply praying as you walk through a cemetery on this day can be a powerful act of memento mori—remembering that you too will die.

Go in Peace

I recognize that for some of you, All Saints Day and All Souls Day may be a bit strange. Just thinking of death can be uncomfortable, especially when we have so little practice with it. But to avoid the thought of death is to not allow the power of the gospel to shine in that darkest of places. As one funeral dismissal from the BCP says, The Sun of Righteousness is gloriously risen, giving light to those who sat in darkness and in the shadow of death. Death is not moving. Even if we try to avoid it, its shadow persists. The artificial light of our screens is not sufficient to drive away that shadow. Only the light of Christ. So, dear friends, let the light of Christ shine in the darkness, for when we look upon the one who died, descended to the dead, resurrected, and ascended, we find that death’s sting no longer possesses the poison, for love has driven out fear.

A Few Quick Things

1. Book Club: Speaking of death, my paid subscribers/patrons book club is currently reading On the Soul and the Resurrection by St. Gregory of Nyssa. We meet every other Monday at 8pm EST. You can join and watch past recordings by becoming a paid subscriber.

2. My Novel: I know, I know, you’re sick of hearing that pre-orders are available, but we’re now just a few weeks away, so if you haven’t pre-ordered yet, consider doing so. Pre-orders make a big difference in terms of book rankings, which are a major metric that brick-and-mortar stores use for selecting books to stock. You can pre-order here.

3. What I’m Reading:

   1. Fiction: A few months ago, a longtime patron and all-around wonderful soul gifted me Elements: The Transfiguration of Elijah by “A Priest of the Oriental Church.” And, like many books that are given to me, I had every intention of reading it but saw it steadily fall down my TBR as books piled up. Then, I was listening to ’s conversation with Fr. Anthony Mourad, and the books came up. The conversation was so beautiful that I said, “ok, ok, I’ll give the books a try.” I haven’t been able to put them down. They belong next to The Way of a Pilgrim on your shelf.

   2. Non-fiction: Similarly, during a previous book club on St. Cyril of Alexandria’s On the Unity of Christ, a work by John McGuckin came up, and I’d been wanting to read it but didn’t get around to it. Well, I’ve finally started reading Saint Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy and I’m now convinced that the drama of the Council of Ephesus could be the basis of a hit film. Riveting stuff.

4. A Recent Podcast: The first person to ever invite me on a podcast was Keith Little of “The Cordial Catholic.” That was something like seven years ago now. I feel old. In any case, he recently invited me back on to discuss why I’m not Catholic, and I found it to be a most delightful conversation. You can find it here.

I’m one of those obnoxious people who discovered the Book of Common Prayer in my adulthood and obsessively feels the need to tell everyone about how great it is. Variations of this archetype exist with Liturgy of the Hours adherents, Orthodox Prayer Book aficionados, Agpeya enthusiasts, and evangelists for Every Moment Holy. People who have spent a lifetime praying extemporaneous “Dear God, I just, like, uh …” prayers suddenly find themselves smitten by the beauty of prayers like, “Heavenly Father, in whom we live and move and have our being, we humbly pray you so to guide and govern us …”

Trust me when I say, I get it. I have found liturgical prayer to be such a gift to my life, and, naturally, I like to share with others the things I think are good, true, and beautiful. This is not a piece about dissuading you from your newfound love for more formal prayers.

However, I do want to insist that we not overlook the humble, spur of the moment movement of the mind to God which sometimes looks awfully similar to those spontaneous texts you fire off to a friend you haven’t spoken to in a while, just to say, “hey, been thinking about you, man.”1

And in case this doesn’t sound particularly deep, allow me to introduce this advice from the mouth of someone far more advanced in the spiritual life than me: St. Francis de Sales.

Our Guide in Prayer

St. Francis de Sales was a 16th/17th century Catholic priest who is perhaps best remembered for two massively influential works he left behind. First, there’s The Catholic Controversy. Think of this as the original Catholic Answers—but better.2 It’s all about why Protestants should be Catholic. We’ll leave that one to the side for now. Second, there’s Introduction to the Devout Life, which is one of the finest works in the Western canon of spiritual classics. That’s what we’ll look at today.

In this book he’s writing to a young woman who is soon to be married, and he’s giving her practical advice for growing in the spiritual life. It stands out as one of the first works of this type to be directed specifically to a lay person, and its down-to-earth wisdom is as relevant in the 21st century as it was in the 17th.

These days, it’s all the rage to talk about habits, rules of life, etc. And St. Francis de Sales has wonderful advice on developing a daily prayer rule—advice I’ve found most helpful. However, there are a million videos, articles, and books right now about that topic. I trust that many of my readers will already be thinking about the importance of habit, ritual, etc. Well and good. However, the advice from this saint I want to look at in this essay regards an essential complement to the formal structure so many people are gravitating towards today.

It involves what he calls, “Ejaculatory prayers.” I considered making that the title for this piece, but I’m a coward.

He describes these prayers as the simple, spontaneous longings of the heart directed toward God. At one point he compares this to holding out your hand to God as a child and asking him to guide you. Elsewhere it’s simply an act of admiring God’s beauty. The key is that it’s not scheduled and arises from an emotional love for God in the midst of our daily life.

And, most importantly, this is not the “beginner mode” of prayer that is then moved beyond by the mature. Much the opposite, in fact. Here’s how he puts it:

This habit of spiritual retirement and ejaculatory prayer is the keystone of devotion, and can supply the defects of all your other prayers; but nothing else can supply its place. Without it you cannot follow the contemplative life well, nor the active life without danger. Without it repose is but idleness, labor but trouble: therefore, I beseech you, cleave steadily to it, and never forsake it.3

So much spiritual wisdom is packed into the few sentences. For the remainder of this essay, I hope to simply expound upon what we find here.

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The Keystone of Devotion

As I mentioned, in the chapters preceding this, St. Francis de Sales has just given thorough instructions on how to develop a daily habit of prayer that is structured and repeatable. It’s this structure that draws so many of us to the BCP, the Liturgy of the Hours, etc. Without for one moment discounting the importance of such structured prayer, St. Francis nevertheless insists that “ejaculatory prayer” is the keystone of devotion.

Sometimes, in our love for the structures of prayer we hold dear, we forget that they are but means to the end of intimacy with God. Of course, there is much wisdom in these structures. They carry us along when the affection is not immediately felt, and in so doing, we are not reliant only upon the emotions. But we must not think that the emotions are therefore less important. Not at all. In fact, the whole goal of committing to prayer is to grow in intimacy with God, which is best expressed in the action of a lover, who is always thinking of the beloved. That is why ejaculatory prayer is the keystone of devotion. Perfect commitment to a prayer rule without love is lacking what matters most. Only love can fill in the defects because love is why we pray in the first place. And so, we must never underestimate the power of a loving thought for God in the midst of the day.

I was reminded of this recently when reading the delightful novel, Elements, by a Coptic Orthodox priest. Multiple characters are described as having simple conversations with Christ, Mary, and the Saints throughout the day. We are shown that the devout life consists not just in reciting beautiful prayers, but also conversing lovingly and spontaneously with our Lord (and, in this, case, the communion of saints).

This easy conversation is portrayed as an original innocence that often must be regained. I can relate to this. As a child, I can recall simply talking to Jesus in my head throughout the day, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. If growing up means growing beyond such intimacy, then I wish to never do so. But, as our Lord insists, much of “growing up” actually means learning to be like a child once more. As the child understands this form of prayer, so must we.

A Note on Spiritual Retreat

You may have noticed that St. Francis de Sales lists “spiritual retreat” alongside ejaculatory prayer as the keystone of the devotional life. Lest you think I overlooked that, I shall touch on it briefly.

Like the spontaneous prayer we’ve been looking at, spiritual retreat is something that can be done in the midst of daily life. In this way, it is different from the structured morning prayer routines St. Francis encourages elsewhere. In addition to such structured times, and also separate from the spontaneous prayers we’ve looked at, St. Francis encourages us with the following:

“Remember then frequently to retire into the solitude of your heart, even whilst you are externally occupied in business or society. This mental solitude need not be hindered though many persons are around you, for the do but surround your body, not your heart, which should remain alone in the presence of God.”4

The chief difference between spiritual retreat and ejaculatory prayer is that the former is silent (inwardly and outwardly) while the latter is not (at least inwardly). Both, however, share in common a spontaneous nature and movement of the mind to the presence of God.

The practice of spiritual retreat is a reminder that God is “everywhere present and fills all things” and we can never run from his presence. In a world where we take everything at a frenetic pace, it is a truly powerful thing to be able to find some inner stillness and recognize that God is with us, even if dishes need done, diapers need changed, the boss is asking about that email you already sent, etc. To grow in the spiritual life is to reduce the gaps between the times in which we recognize God is with us, until we eventually learn to live in this reality at all times.

Completing the Active and Contemplative Life

There is one final aspect of St. Francis de Sales’s claims about these forms of prayer that is worth noticing. He says that without these, the active and the contemplative life cannot be followed without danger.

Now, the former might be obvious. Many of us have a sense that the active life has the potential to “get in the way” of the spiritual life if we don’t learn to see God’s presence in the midst of all our activity. But it might be less obvious why the contemplative life is dangerous without spiritual retreat and ejaculatory prayer. I mean, how can contemplating God be dangerous?

The answer, I think, comes back to love. On the one hand, we can make the contemplative life a matter of technique. We think, “if I just learn the right devotions, stick to the plan, make some gains in my solitude, then I’ll be good.” But that is just the shell, the scaffolding. The true contemplative life is about communion with the one we behold, and communion requires love far more than technique. On the other hand, we can make the contemplative life merely a matter of knowledge. This is to confuse speculation with intimacy. To devise great theories of God without having space to simply be with God (spiritual retreat) or direct our unadorned words of love to God (ejaculatory prayers) is to court the knowledge which puffs up rather than the love which builds up. In other words, it’s to miss the point.

Where to Go from Here

To end where we began, I want to note that there is nothing wrong with loving liturgical prayer. Indeed, it’s important to recognize that we really should not pit spontaneous prayer and formal prayer against one another. I have found in my own life that spontaneous prayer often comes more easily after first spending some time in formal, structured prayer. Furthermore, I know if my prayer life was fully dependent upon me “feeling it” that day, it would be much poorer. Sometimes, groggy, memorized words are the best I can offer, and they ensure that I offer something.

The task before us is not to choose one or the other. Instead, the task is to grow more deeply in intimacy with the God who loves us. In the wisdom of the tradition, that involves both structure and improvisation. Words of others, words of our own, and no words at all.

As I preach to myself, I know that far too often, I choose to fill the quiet moments with the sound of podcasts—podcasts which could be good on their own, but make a poor substitution for taking time to notice God’s presence or simply say, “hey, Jesus, been thinking about you.” And my goal is to make more space for that, for those simple, inelegant prayers of a child that are long on love and short on rhetoric.

Well, since absolutely no one is talking about Netflix’s adaptation of The Magician’s Nephew directed by Greta Gerwig, I will begrudgingly take one for the team and opine on this matter which, to date, has been most grievously overlooked.

On Tuesday, October 13th, Netflix released its first trailer for the latest big screen take on Lewis’s world of Narnia. Now, this is high stakes stuff because, as you may know, in the mid-20th century, Clive Staples Lewis looked at his Protestant Bible which was sitting next to his pal John Ronald Ruel Tolkien’s Catholic Bible, and he noticed his Protestant one was seven books short. Never wanting to be outdone by the old philologist, he went about rectifying this deficit by writing the seven book Chronicles of Narnia series. And since that fateful day in 1956 when Lewis released The Last Battle and thereby brought the series to a close, Protestants and Catholics have been on equal footing in terms of Bible books with Narnia being firmly established as the Protestant deuterocanon.

Obviously, I kid, but, as an aside, I find it rather instructive to remember that one of the ways church historians determine which books were de facto considered canonical in the early church prior to formal lists being drawn up is by examining which books were read in the liturgy or cited in homilies as authoritative. I’d venture to say that, if we used the same methodology today, we’d find any number of Lewis’s works quoted far more often in churches than, say, Obadiah. Food for thought.

It’s this very obsession with Lewis that makes any attempt at adapting his books a fraught one. And, despite my sarcastic introduction, I understand why this is the case. For many people, the Narnia books aren’t just some random kids books. They’re formative influences on how people view the world broadly and their faith specifically. As one prominent fan of the books recently said in an interview with Stephen Colbert, “These books created me.”1 And in a real sense, we are creatures of story. Not only do we create (or subcreate) stories, but we are in turn shaped by, and in some sense, created by stories. Especially the stories that we encounter at a young age. It’s not for nothing that grown adults are willing to spend $150 on a Hogwarts cloak after embarking upon a pilgrimage to Universal Studios. As a certified Potterhead, I get it. The books we love can feel genuinely sacred2 to us, and as such, we can be defensive when we think people are not handling them with the care they deserve.

However—you knew that was coming, right?—I think the hysteria around this particular adaptation is misguided for several reasons. Let’s take a look at those now, starting with the most obvious one.

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The Movie Isn’t Out Yet, People

I am not an old man, but I am old enough to remember when another culturally significant—indeed, by any objective standard, much more culturally significant—book was set to be adapted by a big name movie director. People were skeptical from the start, but when the trailer came out, everyone was talking about how the Batman helmets were sufficient proof that the movie would be terrible. Then, the scandal increased when people caught wind that there would be a trans actor in the film. Clearly, this movie was going to be just another case of woke propaganda. Boycotts were discussed.

But then, lo and behold, when the movie came out, opinions changed! This film was not woke propaganda, it was hailed as a masterful Christian retelling of a Greek myth. The very same people who derided it began praising the film for its apparent bait and switch.

The film in question, of course, is Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey. I’ll leave questions of the merits of that film aside for the moment. For now, my main point is a simple one: you can’t always judge a film by its trailer. Or by its director. Or by its casting choices (more on that in a minute).

What if—crazy thought incoming—we saved the blazing hot takes on this being “heretical” (more on that, too, in a minute) until after the movie comes out?

But Narnia Isn’t a Rock Opera

While the news that Meryl Streep would be voicing Aslan stole the headlines in the initial round of Narnia controversy (yes, yes, I’ll get to that. Patience), there was another element of this new film that raised some eyebrows. Gerwig described her take on The Magician’s Nephew as styled after a “rock opera.”

And, well, people thought that was dumb. Quit messing with our stuff!

I get it. That’s a bold choice. However, sticking with our comparison to the Odyssey for a moment, it’s also true that Homer’s epic is not a post-9/11 PTSD story, nor is it a cautionary tale about the “Sea Peoples” and their role in the impending Bronze Age collapse. And yet, many of the same people who are preemptively hating Gerwig’s Narnia loved Nolan’s Odyssey.

Perhaps that’s just because the Odyssey isn’t sacred to us in the same way Narnia is. We might be ok with Christianizing a pagan myth but not paganizing a Christian myth. Fair enough.

However, it’s not clear to me that a rock opera reimagining of The Magician’s Nephew is an act of paganizing. And, to be clear, movie adaptations are re-imaginations. Even the most faithful adaptation is a new creation. Judge it as such.

I digress. Back to the Odyssey. The themes Nolan centered in his adaptation may not be at the core of Homer’s version, but at least the notion of regret is possibly subtly present. For instance, I read Odysseus weeping during Demodocus’ song about his exploits as indicative of the hero realizing his “greatness” as portrayed in song is really not greatness at all. Not everyone follows that reading, but if Nolan is taking one aspect and bringing it to the center, fair enough.3

I think Gerwig is doing something similar, albeit less dramatic. The role of music in The Magician’s Nephew is significant. It is in this book that we learn the material world was sung into existence. Taking that motif and bringing to the center is, in my opinion, actually really cool. And being the first film to get permission to use “Stairway to Heaven” is impressive.

And that leads to another point: I won’t lie, I thought the trailer was cool. I got goosebumps at the end with the creation scene. Even if the movie ends up being as contrary to Lewis’s vision as some people think it will be, it seems it will at least be visually impressive and entertaining. However, taste in movies is subjective. You might not like the technicolor vibes. Fair enough!

Ok, We Can Talk about Meryl Streep Now

First things first, any distaste people have for Gerwig choosing Meryl Streep to voice Aslan should not cross into Meryl Streep slander. She’s an icon.

I’ll admit, though, when I heard she was going to voice Aslan, I was more than a bit skeptical. Aslan is, well, male (just look at that glorious mane). Meryl Streep is female. And while re-gendering characters from old stories is far from unheard of, choosing to do so with a character meant to represent Christ is a bold choice.

Especially when, for many Christians, the line between Aslan and Christ can seem more than a bit blurry. See comments about Protestant deuterocanon above.

However—this is becoming a theme, I need a new word—I think there are reasons to maybe chill out a bit on this one. Relevant Magazine put out an article this week which included comments from someone who has seen the film in its entirety, and they said that the voice is clearly male.4 I don’t understand Hollywood’s post-production dark arts, but I’m told it isn’t very difficult to do such things.

Furthermore, in Greta Gerwig’s interview with Colbert—oh, right, it was Gerwig, you know, that crazy feminist out to destroy Narnia who was the one who said these books “created her”—she consistently used male pronouns to refer to Aslan. So, it does not seem we are getting a female Aslan per se, just a male Aslan with a male-sounding voice somehow coming from Meryl Streep, who is female.

Perhaps that’s still controversial, but it seems a great deal less so to me.

Now, some people will still object to this. And one thing that comes up consistently is that this goes against Lewis’s own views on gender. Now, it’s not actually clear to me that it does. Re-gendering Aslan very well might, but, seeing as what’s happening seems to fall short of that, it’s hard to say what Lewis would think of this. An imperfect parallel would be the use of male actors for female roles in Elizabethan era productions of Shakespeare. To my knowledge, Lewis did not object to this, though I’m happy to be shown otherwise.

As people have been indicating their disdain for Streep’s casting, I’ve seen several references to Lewis’s essay on “Priestesses in the Church.” The argument goes that, because Lewis had a gendered view of the priesthood—and indeed the sacramental economy and world—then we shouldn’t mess with gender in the movies.

Hopefully, we’ve addressed the re-gendering, but I’ll briefly touch on this essay itself, perhaps to my own peril.

Let me say: I love Lewis, but that essay is not his best work. He makes several strange claims, like no women—including the Blessed Virgin Mary—were present at Pentecost (they were), that medieval appreciation of the BVM indicates medieval respect of women (see Alone of All Her Sex as a landmark repudiation of that thesis), and that, somehow, women can represent the people to God (sounds like an OT priest at least) but not God to the people. Honestly, it’s a fairly rare instance of a dud from Lewis. Look, there are good reasons to object to female priests—we can discuss that another day—but Lewis’s essay is not one of them. I digress. Narnia and that particular essay need not be so tightly linked. The Magician’s Nephew isn’t about female ordination, and, again, these questions of gender may be irrelevant if we get to the movie and Aslan looks and sounds male, as it seems he will. For all intents and purposes then, we’ll have a male Aslan. Theology problem solved.5

Now, I will concede that I don’t think casting Streep for this role was a good idea per se (and rarely can one say that). If Aslan were made female in the movie, I think that would be a poor adaptation choice for multiple reasons, not least of which being it makes no sense to alienate your primary audience for the film. If Aslan remains male but is just voiced by a male-sounding Streep, I still think it’s kind of dumb to create all this unnecessary drama. However, perhaps they’re going for the “all press is good press?” I don’t know. It’s strange, but I think it’s an insufficient reason to boycott the movie, and it’s definitely not “heresy.” This is a movie, people—a re-imagination of a supposal which includes a talking lion who is a Christ figure. Put down thy pitchforks.

Gerwig & Netflix Want to Destroy Narnia with Wokeism

I’ll be brief here. One of the more sensationalist takes on the movie is that the woke left who run Hollywood want to destroy everything that’s sacred, so Netflix bought the movie, found the wokest director they could in Greta Gerwig, and are preparing to rejoice in the desecration of the sacred.

For those who find that line of thinking plausible, I would simply encourage you to hear Gerwig’s own words about the books. She said that the Narnia books, along with Little Women, are the most formative books in her life. She discussed with Colbert reading everything Lewis wrote, including being deeply moved by Surprised by Joy. She even talked about trying to read the books he read to understand his way of thinking.

Every fandom wants two main things out of their adaptation director: they want them to be competent, and they want them to be a fan like them, to love the material. Gerwig is both. She may have different politics than you. She may take the film in directions you disagree with, but I highly doubt she’s taking on this project to destroy it. She seems to genuinely love the books. Even the decision to do The Magician’s Nephew first—which isn’t the publication order—arose from her wanting to honor Lewis’s preference for that reading order.

“Ok, but I still think it will be awful”

Finally, we come to the end of this piece. And here, I want to address the lingering concern that, even if the people behind the movie aren’t malicious, what if they just make a really bad film?

If that happens, everything will be ok. Really. The books you love? They’ll still be there. I promise. Yes, some people will have their view of Narnia shaped by this movie. But that’s the risk of having a living tradition. Stories are passed down and re-told, and in that process, the time and place in which they’re being re-told leave fingerprints on them. It bears being said, the same is true with the original. The Narnia books are wonderful. Lewis’s depiction of Aslan is beautiful. And yet, these books were shaped by Lewis’s context. The Aslan of the books is not Jesus. Aslan is a supposal of what Jesus might look like in another world, and that supposal is shaped by Lewis’s own life. Gerwig’s supposal will be shaped by hers, no matter how faithful she tries to be to the original. That’s the price we pay for stories to be re-told, the price of living tradition.

Once again, I understand the fear and anxiety people have over seeing something beloved be re-imagined. I really do. But I must say, some of the hysteria, the heresy allegations, well, they make me wonder if we might need a terrible adaptation of Narnia. I know that will sound ridiculous, but some of us might just need to be reminded that Narnia is not, in fact, the Protestant deuterocanon. Heck, even if it were, if the Gospel survived the terrible reimaginations we call the Gnostic Gospels, then I’m pretty sure Narnia can survive Gerwig.

Really, my friends, all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.

As an Anglican of relatively high church persuasion, my Protestant credentials may be somewhat in doubt. If you walk through my house and find my icons, prayer ropes, and rosaries, those credentials may be further in doubt, if not revoked entirely. Peruse my bookshelf, and you’ll either think it points charmingly to the Anglican propensity for latitude or to someone whose theology is hopelessly confused.

I give this preamble to say that, I don’t think I’m a likely candidate to be considered an “anti-Marian” Protestant. Nevertheless, there’s one particular element of Marian piety that troubles me. Indeed, I probably care about it more than whatever doctrinal quibbles I have with Rome over its more recent choices in dogma.

I should note that, the view I’d like to critique today is hardly one that is necessitated by Catholic theology (nor Orthodox, for that matter). So, to be clear, this isn’t an argument against Catholicism. In fact, Catholics are welcome to agree with me without ceasing to be good Catholics. I hope they do! Once more, the subject of today’s essay is not really a doctrinal position so much as it is an approach to Marian piety, or better yet, a vibe.

That vibe is this: the classic good cop; bad cop—but applied to Mary and Jesus.

I’ve talked about this a bit in the past. The closest I’ve ever come to crashing out on the internet was when I reacted rather strongly to Louis de Montfort’s notion that we need a mediator with the Mediator, and Mary fills that role. I tend to be a pretty ecumenical person, but that type of language is enough to get my temperature up.

I hadn’t thought of this good cop; bad cop dynamic much lately, but three texts brought it to my attention in the past week, and so, here we are.

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La Salette

The first came from reading about the apparition at La Salette. I don’t really want to get dragged into the Substack Miracle Discourse, so I’ll leave questions of the details and veracity of the apparition to the side for now. What’s of more interest to me is the message given by Mary, which was reported to include the following: “For a long time I have suffered for you; if I do not want my son to abandon you, I am forced to pray to him myself without ceasing.”1 As we come to find out, the people had been working on the Lord’s Day and taking his name in vain. As a result, the heavy arm of Christ’s judgment is prepared to descend upon the people in the form of a great famine. However, Mary is doing her best to hold back this judgment.

This seems to be a textbook good cop/bad cop situation. Jesus is angry, Mary is merciful. There’s all types of theological nuance we could add to this—after all, is it not true that Christ is merciful and a judge whereas it is not Mary’s role to judge? Therefore, is it not fitting that, in a certain sense, Mary could stand between us and that judgment? Is this no different than Abraham? I will address the final point later, but for now, it’s worth noting how the children themselves interpreted this message.

In an early interview with a Catholic priest after the apparition, Melanie, one of the two children present to receive Mary’s message, said, “If I hadn’t seen her rise up into the air, I would have believed that it was some woman whose husband wanted to kill their children.”2 I think we can all agree that this is not the image we want our Marian piety to produce. However, when we adopt the good cop/bad cop paradigm, one of the easiest ways to exalt the goodness of the former is to accentuate the badness of the latter. Put differently, if we predicate our Marian theology upon this dynamic, we end up painting Jesus in a bad light.

Something similar happens with many variations of Penal Substitutionary Atonement, except in those cases, Jesus is the good cop and the Father is the bad cop. But both of these depictions should be resisted.

As an aside, there’s something similar with that ubiquitous but rather incorrect saying that, “the Good News isn’t good news if you don’t start with the bad news.” Nonsense. Sure, the reality of sin is part of the overall story of the Gospel—I don’t deny that—but if your preaching of the Gospel is devoid of any goodness without preliminary browbeating, then it might be time to rethink some things. I digress.

Let me now turn to the second instance of this dynamic that I came across recently.

Maria Valtorta and The Gospel as Revealed to Me

For a few months now, I’ve been reading The Gospel as Revealed to Me. You could think of it as: The Chosen, but in a 10-volume novel by an Italian mystic. A Catholic priest suggested it to me, and, overall, I’ve really enjoyed it. I find works of this nature to be helpful aids for lectio divina—sources to shape a pious imagination, if you will. However, I came across a passage this morning that set off my Protestant Spidey-senses that happens to relate to the topic at hand.

The work is divided between Valtorta’s re-telling of the Gospel stories and then her visions of Jesus and Mary who give commentary on these scenes. After a re-telling of the story of the Magi wherein Mary guides the baby Jesus’s hands into making a blessing over the Magi, Jesus offers the following commentary,

“It is always Mary who takes Jesus’ hand and guides it. Even now. Now Jesus knows how to bless. But sometimes His pierced hand falls down tired and disheartened, because He knows that it is useless to bless. You destroy My blessing. It falls also indignant, because you curse Me. It is Mary then Who removes the disdain from My hand with Her kisses. Oh! the kiss of My Mother! Who can resist that kiss? And then, with Her slender, but lovingly irresistible fingers, She takes My wrist and forces Me to bless. I cannot reject My Mother, but you must go to Her, and make Her your Advocate.”3

Credit to where it’s due, this is an improvement over La Salette. The misunderstanding here does not open one up to thinking of child abuse but rather just a weary Jesus who needs a pick-me-up. Progress.

However, I still think this pretty clearly portrays a good cop/bad cop understanding of Mary and Jesus. Mary is the tireless intercessor who wills only our good. Jesus? Well, in this picture, it seems He’s about ready to give up on us. May I repeat, we don’t need to make look bad in order to say nice things about Mary. At least, we shouldn’t have to, and to the extent we do, it’s bad Mariology. Plain and simple.

MacDonald and the Core of the Problem

This brings us to the third text that I came across this week regarding this dynamic—all without looking for things of this nature, I might add. This final text is Unspoken Sermons by George MacDonald, and in it, he speaks directly to this problem with his characteristic prophetic zeal. In “Justice” he writes:

Truth is indeed too good for men to believe; they must dilute it before they can take it; they must dilute it before they dare give it. They must make it less true before they can believe it enough to get any good of it. Unable to believe in the love of the Lord Jesus Christ, they invented a mediator in his mother, and so were able to approach a little where else they had stood away.4

Now, I’ll admit that when I read that, I felt a little defensive of my Catholic and Orthodox friends. Heck, I felt defensive for myself given my own views of Mary. Surely we shouldn’t paint with too broad of a brush, right?

And the answer to that question is, of course, yes. To reiterate: Not all Marian piety is animated by this erroneous theology.

At it’s best, Marian piety is a natural outflow of meditation upon the incarnation. We look to our incarnate Lord and can’t help but think of how he sanctified those closest to him, and we want to participate in that redemption that began in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary and has been ever-expanding outward until he is all in all. A lifetime of Marian piety can be born out of this impulse.

However, I think MacDonald is right to challenge us here. Do not some instances of Marian piety seem to explicitly or implicitly enforce the notion that Jesus is less than perfectly loving? We are ever-tempted as humans to believe that primordial lie, “did God really say?” Or in other words, “Can we really trust God is good?” And under the weight of that existential fear, we seek protection. But the message of the gospel is that God is light, and in him there is no darkness. We can trust him fully. We need not hide our nakedness. We need not shield ourselves with others. We need only to trust God and so have our communion with him restored. This news is so preposterously good we fear to believe it. But believe it we must. That is the truth MacDonald is expressing, no matter how much his language might grate against us.

Addressing the Old Testament Argument

Attentive readers of Scripture will no doubt be thinking, “but wait, how different is La Salette from Genesis 18 or Exodus 32?” Right there in Scripture we have examples human beings trying to assuage the wrath of God. If Abraham and Moses could do it, why not Mary?

I’ll grant that the literal reading of these passages inclines toward the view that human beings, at times, have to talk God out of acts of judgment. In Genesis, Abraham is shown to be essentially haggling with God to avoid the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and in Exodus, Moses is shown to be talking God out of smiting the Israelites and starting over.

Here’s the problem: the literal reading can’t be right.

Let’s start with the metaphysical problem, and for this, I’ll assume I’m speaking to Catholics here. Given a commitment to Classical Theism—including Divine Immutability—these are textbook cases of analogical language. Specifically, the notion that God is emotionally swayed by human intervention such as to produce a change of mind simply won’t work theologically.

There is also a moral dimension here. It’s not just that God doesn’t change His mind. If God is love, if He is goodness itself, then we must not imagine that God ever wills anything that is less than the best. But the literal reading of Gen. 18 and Ex. 32 implies that love, goodness, mercy, etc. do not come naturally to God. Rather, literal readings suggest that God at least sometimes inclines away from these things. But if that’s the case, then He is less than perfectly good. Banish the thought!

And there’s no escaping into, “well, maybe what’s good to God is different than how we think of good.” That doesn’t work. Whether smiting the Israelites or sparing the Israelites in Ex. 32 is the morally correct answer, the problem remains that God ends up doing the opposite of what He is initially portrayed as willing. Either God relents from a moral evil, or He’s persuaded to not do that which is good. Neither works, and thus, the literal reading just doesn’t work here. We must reach for allegory, hyperbole, literary convention—something other than the literal.

Now, there’s a sense in which we can just do the same with works of Marian piety. And at one level, fair enough. However, St. John Henry Newman once wisely wrote to his friend E. B. Pusey, “I had rather believe (which is impossible) that there is no God at all, than that Mary is greater than God. I will have nothing to do with statements, which can only be explained, by being explained away.”5 This seems to me a rather good principle. There’s no sense expressing Marian piety in ways that, at a surface level, appear to make Mary greater than God.

Why this Matters

I write none of this to denigrate the Blessed Virgin Mary. If it’s not too presumptuous to say, I would think Mary’s own holiness would make her the first to bristle at any description of her Son that depicts Him as less loving than herself. After all, is not one of the marks of sanctity to say with John the Baptist, “He must increase, I must decrease?”

I do not wish to dissuade people from having an active Marian piety. If it leads one to love God and neighbor more, then I declare it good. The problem for me arises when our path to praising Mary is paved with denigration of Christ. A world in which our view of Mary is increased but our confidence in the goodness of Jesus decreases is a world of net loss. An infinite increase in estimation of Mary with even the slightest decrease in one’s trust in Christ’s love is not worth it.

In all my work, I desire to lead people into deeper faith in the goodness of God that they might enter into the throne of grace with confidence trusting in Christ. Whether they do that while clutching rosaries or strumming an acoustic guitar to the tune of the latest worship hit doesn’t make much difference to me. But I never want prodigal sons and daughters to stop on their journey home, doubtful that the Father will receive them with open arms. Nor do I think there’s any virtue in a false humility that says I need a mediator with the mediator. We must not say to Christ, “I know you died that I might enter with confidence, trusting fully in your goodness, but I’m just not sure I can believe that. I need to put Mary between us. That way, if it turns out you’re actually angry with me, at least you’ll look on her and she’ll stay your hand.” No, no, no.

Can the saints be great examples to us? Absolutely. Can the communion of saints pray for us and help us on our pilgrim path? Yes. But should we hide behind them before the Father? No! We are his dearly beloved children. What more could he do to convince us of that? If we fail to grasp that, we fail to grasp the Gospel. And the very thought that the same Jesus who died for us needs persuaded to love us fully is a thought we should banish immediately.

You don’t have to be a history nerd to appreciate the strange feeling of walking through a once-great place now reduced to ruins. With only a slight bit of imagination, one can stand amidst fallen stone and feel that, somehow, just beyond the reach of your five senses are the sights and sounds of souls long past who once knew a place as it was meant to be, before tickets were charged for admission and when fires still warmed the hearths and halls. Often, we amble through ruins and are struck by the somber sting of so many lives lost, be it through war or natural disaster.

One shudders to traverse the streets of Oradour-sur-Glane, a French town decimated by Nazi occupation, or trod the silent fields of Gettysburg, the site of the Civil War’s deadliest battle, knowing that blood stained the soil beneath your feet and bones of unnamed men decay below. Such are the long shadows of war. But it is not war alone that produces such places plagued by unmarked graves. In Pompeii, one can almost hear the screams as ash turns the sky black and nature shows its canines.

It is not only to lives lost that ruins bear witness, but often also to ways of life now relegated to history. Ascend the heights of Machu Picchu and be struck by the precipitous fall of the Incas. Or, as I did just recently, walk the grassy ruins of Lindisfarne Priory, once the heartbeat of Christianity in the British Isles, later turned to a storage facility for munitions and left to rot in the elements of an island whose holiness feels slightly less with its pride and joy now in ruins, and feel the pain of loss not your own because this way of life in that place was cut short before your time.

It’s hard enough to accept that time’s march leaves no stone unturned, that the places we love and the things we build do not yet hold for eternity. Harder still when it comes to the people we love. But in all this, we are catechized each day by impermanence, and whether kicking and screaming, or, more likely without so much as a whimper, we accept that things do not last forever in this vale of tears.

However, the sting is sharpened when it seems plain things didn’t have to be this way, when the culprit is not weather and many weeks of years but instead the folly of man. And such is the case at Lindisfarne.

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Lindisfarne, Cradle of English Christianity

Lindisfarne—or Holy Island as it would come to be known—is a small tidal island of the coast of Britain. In 635, King Oswald gave the island to a monk from Iona, who we know today as St. Aidan. Holy Island would serve as the basecamp for Aidan’s extensive missionary work which was at the center of his new role as bishop. But evangelizing Oswald’s kingdom was not a one man job. It would require the help of many monks, who would make Holy Island their new home in the rugged priory Aidan established there.

Aidan would be succeeded by Cuthbert, a man whose sanctity is perhaps best described as an English Saint Francis of Assisi. See below this great saint praying with his befriended otters at his feet.

It was Cuthbert who would enshrine the island’s fame. His cult grew rapidly after his death, and Holy Island became a popular pilgrimage site.

In 793, Vikings raided Lindisfarne, an event so jarring that it could only be interpreted apocalyptically. What, besides the judgment of God, could explain such a holy place being desecrated. This was the first time the prior would be destroyed, but it was not the last.

In the following century, the community dispersed, heading inland and taking the relics of St. Cuthbert with them. However, by the mid-11th century, monks were ready to return to Holy Island, and there they rebuilt the priory as a smaller version of Durham Cathedral by the 12th century. It is that 12th century priory that today stands in ruins on Holy Island.

It’s demise, however, was not from Viking raids. It fell not to the battle axe of a foreign enemy but a knife in the back from those who should’ve been their friends. King Henry VIII, once hailed a defender of the faith by the pope would in short order be the man responsible for the dissolution of the monasteries in England. Lindisfarne Priory faired better than many, but as with most, the 16th century marked its end. Stripped of its valuables, it would be repurposed for military use which can only be described as sacrilege of the highest order. By the 18th century, it was in ruins which would only crumble further in the centuries to follow. Today, like so many once holy British sites, it has a museum and gift shop.

Wrestling with the Legacy of the Reformation

Such is the story that brings us to the present. Using words like “sacrilege” certainly reveal my hand a bit—I never have been any good at poker. And yet, my own feelings about this are perhaps more complicated than this brief summary has betrayed thus far. You see, I am an Anglican which commits me, at least in some way, to siding with Henry VIII over against the pope. And despite my rhetoric, I’m not really a reluctant Anglican. I’m quite fond of the Anglican tradition, and not only the parts that came prior to the 16th century.

Wrong as I think Henry was to shutter the monasteries in 1537, it must be said that the dynamics at play here are not so simple as bad, greedy king vs. good, saintly monks. The English Reformation was not merely a matter of theology, nor was it solely a matter of politics, but rather a complicated mixture of the two. And, of course, separating the two as we’re prone to do without a second thought today might strike our 16th century forebears as more than a little odd.

Monasteries were, of course, centers of prayer and formation. However, they were also sites of great wealth and vast landholdings, all of which were not subject to the English crown. Perhaps an analogy would help.

Growing up near DC, I’ve walked many times down Embassy Row, where you’ll find—you guessed it—countless foreign embassies, each of which act as little diplomatic outposts on U.S. soil, entitled to act according to their own rules and regulations. Now, imagine that these embassies were not confined to essentially nice houses in a DC neighborhood but rather were spread across the U.S. on sprawling estates with economies of their own. Then, imagine a war breaks out—even just a cold war—between the United States and one of these nations. It doesn’t take a lot of political acumen to guess that you might feel uneasy about these places.

It’s an imperfect analogy, but it might help you see how King Henry saw the monasteries of his time. This is not an exoneration of old Henry. You’re not going to find a feast day for him on the Anglican calendar, and I think that’s certainly for the best. The Christian tradition as a whole might’ve been better off not being too quick to canonize emperors, but that’s an essay for another day.

Suffice to say, I can understand why Henry was ill at ease with the presence of so many monasteries in Britain. And of course, we shouldn’t ignore the material motivations. This wasn’t merely a defensive move. It also swelled his coffers and gave him plenty of gifts to hand out to those loyal to him. Again, no saint was Henry.

Maybe there was no good answer to this problem once Henry had broken with Rome, but it seems to me the world is worse off when monasteries become munitions houses and monks are replaced with mercenaries. The greatest merit of the English Reformation was bringing monastic spirituality into the homes of lay men and women with the Book of Common Prayer. A merit made all the more ironic given the greatest sin of the English Reformation may well have been the treatment of the very monks from whom it drew inspiration.

It would be centuries before Anglicanism found a place for monasticism in its life once more. By the time of the 19th century Oxford Movement, Lindisfarne Priory and countless other monasteries were beyond repair. Whether Lindisfarne will ever be home to monks again—whether a third time can be the charm—remains unseen. But at the very least, I pray that the communion lines will be longer than the gift shop lines on Holy Island and so many venerable sites of the Christian past beside. For a Christian, there must always be hope, not despair, even as we stand amidst ruins.

Odds and Ends

I hope you all enjoyed this piece. As I mentioned, Holy Island is the setting of my book, The Long Road to Holy Island, which tells the story of a young man’s pilgrimage and his encounter with the same faith that made Cuthbert, Aidan, and so many others saints. It releases on Nov. 17, but is available for pre-order now on Amazon and wherever books are sold.

Also, my Church Fathers book club starts back up this Monday, Oct. 5. We’ll be reading On the Soul and the Resurrection by St. Gregory of Nyssa with a bonus week covering The Life of Saint Macrina at the end. We’ll meet every other Monday at 8pm EST. Meetings are recorded for those who can’t make it. To join, become a paid subscriber or Patron at any tier.

The other day, I got a phone call from my uncle. He’s a salt of the earth, construction worker who, after being diagnosed with cancer a few years ago, decided to start attending mass with his wife for the first time and eventually joined the Catholic Church.1 His faith isn’t built on books or ideas, and, if I had to guess, he reflects the majority of American Catholics—and indeed, all religious groups—insofar as he takes the bits he likes and leaves the bits he doesn’t. I give this preamble to help you better understand the question he asked me out of the blue: “So, Austin, I’ve got a theology question for you. Did Mary have other kids besides Jesus?”

For those of us who spend too much time online, we might think that’s an audacious question for a Catholic to be asking—and to be asking a Protestant no less!—but I think it’s probably on par with the average American Catholic for whom questioning church teaching isn’t a particularly dramatic affair.

He coaches at the local high school, and one of the parents had apparently challenged him about this theological point, saying the Catholics must be wrong because the Bible obviously teaches that Jesus had brothers and sisters. As he relayed this story to me, my uncle explained that he wasn’t quite sure about the whole thing, but he figured I’d know since I’m into theology and all that.

In answering, I found myself saying lines that were all too familiar: “well, you see, there are a variety of views on this …”

If you’ve studied theology—or likely any discipline, for that matter—you can probably relate to this odd dynamic in which more study often yields less confidence about debated topics. Perhaps you’ve heard people say, “I know just enough about X to be dangerous.” The basic ideas is that there’s a sort of goldilocks zone—or the opposite of that—wherein you know enough about a subject to know the arguments in favor of your position but not enough to know the strong arguments against your position or in favor of opposing positions. There might as well be an opposite quip that goes something like, “I’ve learned just enough to be impotent.” In these cases, reading widely has shown you that very smart people have formed very cogent arguments both for and against your position. Progressing through your academic programs provides you with some skill in summarizing the various views, but it may well diminish your ability to plant a flag in the ground, puff out your chest and say, “this is the right view.”

Of course, this doesn’t happen to everyone. Perhaps it’s a dispositional thing, but I do think there is a general sense that dogmatism or rigidity are not intellectual virtues. To a large extent, I agree with this. It can be quite frustrating to converse with people whose convictions about an issue vastly outweigh their understanding of an issue. Conversations like these can quickly become heated, and it’s this mismatch of conviction and understanding that makes politics and religion conversations to avoid at Thanksgiving Dinner. People wrap their identities around these topics to such an extent that any challenge can feel like a personal attack, and absent sufficient understanding of the topics, people seem to go into fight, flight, or freeze mode—none of which pair well with dinner rolls.

For a time, I prided myself on being somewhat detached from such rigidity in the name of nuance. Everyone else? They were too narrow-minded. Didn’t see the big picture. I could qualify each of their full stop “yes’s” with a “, but you must also consider …”

To be clear, there is a time for this. And that’s what makes it so difficult. Nuance isn’t bad. Most of the time, it’s precisely what we need. At it’s best, it’s a form of intellectual humility, a recognition that we lack a God’s-eye-view of things and instead see through a glass darkly. But, like all good things, it can be twisted such as to become a vice. Then do we reach something like the title of this piece, the tyranny of nuance. We can become so adept at playing the Devil’s Advocate that we forget the difference between light and dark.

Nuance can be humility, but it can also be cowardice. There’s a certain safety in not taking sides. When you say with Luther, “here I stand,” you must then defend that ground. How much easier it is to not stand but hover above the fray like a bird watching the toils of men from afar, finding refuge in the safety of the sky.

Again, this is a matter of discernment. Many people die on hills not worth bloodshed. That is a different vice. But some of us must be reminded that standing nowhere and for nothing is not a virtue. Some of us must learn once more what it is to say “here I stand.”

As with all my essays, I am primarily preaching here to myself.

I’ll begin by exploring one area where I’ve learned a bit about conviction.

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Finding the Right Hills to Die On

Even as I write this, I recognize that there are still very few theological hills I’d die on, few points where I really dig my heels in and stand unmoving. I tend to lean into the notion that our theological language is analogical. I’ve compared it in the past to impressionist painting. I hold many things loosely. But not all things. And it’s learning to distinguish between those categories that I’m working on these days.

I often ask myself, “at the end of all this study, what do I really know about God?” Not about theories of God, not about theological systems, but something more basic and far more essential.

The list is, in many ways, shorter than I’d like to admit. Sure, I can rattle off lots of terms and take you through various views. I can pontificate about various historical movements and their relative merits. And it’s not as though I don’t have opinions about these. I do. I have my preferences and my positions but far too often I find I lack that good old conviction.

Newman makes a handy distinction here. On the one hand, we have inference—the stuff of probabilistic judgments based upon and proportioned to the available evidence. On the other hand, there’s assent—this is unconditional, and while it’s not detached from evidence, it doesn’t rise and fall with it.

Perhaps an example will help. One area where I’ve found that I will simply stick a flag in the ground and give unconditional assent is the idea that God is good. Sounds basic, I know, but it’s actually utterly essential to my theology. You see, I could try to nuance this. Say something like, “well, our idea of goodness is conditioned by sin, and what it means for God to be ‘good’ might actually be highly unintuitive such that God, by human standards, actually doesn’t seem good and the Good News may actually not be that good of news in one sense.”

Rubbish.

I simply won’t budge on this point. I don’t care to. Oh yes, I know the arguments. I can see the logic, but, forgive the candor, I just don’t care. I’m not having it. God is good. Better, in fact, than we could ever imagine and I refuse to believe that such goodness is so foreign that humans can’t recognize it in a normal sense. I give my absolute, unconditional assent to the goodness of God. Same with the idea that God is love. I recently wrote an entire article about the utter centrality of this notion. Won’t budge on it. Call it rigid dogmatism if you must. Here I stand.

Many other things I believe about God are inferences. Things that make sense to me given what information I have but I could imagine changing my mind. Still, even with some of these things, we must be willing to have conviction without utter certitude. And that brings me to another case study.

The Church

I’ve probably spent more time than is healthy thinking about ecclesiology and wondering what church to call home. When I first began asking questions of this nature, I hoped that I would achieve the crystal clarity so many people seemed to have about which church was the One True Church™. That didn’t happen.2

However, life is such that we have to act absent certainty all the time, and I’ve come to appreciate that certainty and conviction need not be the same. Sometimes, conviction is something that’s more about how we live concretely than what we think abstractly. Whether you’re certain the church you’re in is the right one or not, one must still live in the church (or outside it, I suppose). The point is, being 70% sure about a denomination doesn’t mean you go to church 70% of the time. We can make commitments even when we have doubts. In fact, that’s almost all of life.

I think many of us have commitment issues, not just in relationships but in decisions across the whole of our lives. Increasingly, this seems to be showing up in the church. For many years, I’ve acted essentially as an ecclesial tour guide to people passing through, letting them know what they can expect in the various places while feeling ecclesially homeless myself, afraid to put down roots. It’s like walking people through a bustling city and then choosing to pitch a tent outside the city gates. It may be lonely out there, but at least you’re not so foolish as to blindly choose the wrong group! After all, where’s the nuance in that?

But the life is within the gates. And a messy life is better than no life at all. Intellectually speaking, am I positive I’ve made the right choice in being in The Episcopal Church? No, not really. But there’s far more life in the rhythms of morning and evening prayer according to the BCP, sorting for the flea market on Wednesday evenings, and worshipping faithfully on Sundays than there is fretting obsessively on the sidelines about a million theological questions. The Christian life is meant to be lived, not just thought. And living requires commitment, which is itself a form of conviction.

Lewis spoke of something similar in Mere Christianity where he says that the Church is like a big, big house, with lots and lots of rooms.3 Connecting all these rooms—which roughly translate to denominations—is a hallway. That hallway is “mere Christianity” the stuff that unites orthodox Christians across the centuries. The existence of the hallway is a joyous thing as it reminds us that all of these rooms really are connected. The Church, even in its divided visible state, is still one. However, Lewis is adamant that the hallway is not a place to live. We should not sample the rooms indefinitely and decide that none of them are for us. Even the worst room is better than the hallway.

Final Thoughts

These are only brief thoughts on a complicated subject (is that my penchant for nuance coming out by hedging?). Many challenges remain. As I said earlier, this approach to conviction requires discernment. But even more so, it requires love. And perhaps that’s what is missing between the false dichotomy of rigid dogmatism and enlightened nuance. Either divorced from love are hellish. A dogmatism that seeks only to assert itself in a zero sum quest for power in the rhetorical sphere is but a clanging gong. Nuance that immobilizes is knowledge that puffs up. Both are redeemed—as all things are—by Love. What we need in the church isn’t necessarily more or less dogmatism in a vacuum. What we need is theology animated by love. Love makes space and holds firm. Love, as Paul tells us, never fails.

Last week, my wife and I finished watching season three of Silo. For those who aren’t familiar, it’s a documentary set in the future, a genre previously known as science-fiction. I hear the ancients called this prophecy.

Following the best-selling trilogy by Hugh Howey, the show begins with a civilization of people living in a massive underground silo. As they repeat often: we do not know why we are here; we do not know who built the silo; we do not know why everything outside the silo is as it is; we do not know when it will be safe to go outside, we just know that day is not this day.

Well, at least that’s the case in seasons one and two (spoilers incoming). In season three, we get a bit of the backstory (though this is still just barely future tense for those of us in the year of our Lord 2026). As will surprise none of you reading this, it turns out that the catastrophe that caused the destruction of civilization as we know it was the result of runaway technology. You might be thinking, “that’s hardly an impressive prophecy, my six year old could tell you AI will destroy humanity soon.” Recall, though, that Howey wrote the first book in the series back in 2011, so it’s a bit more impressive.

This morning, as I scrolled through Substack, looking for my daily dose of Berry’s bucolic prose or catchy quotes from patron saint of Substack, Clive, I was instead greeted by numerous headlines about the dire warnings from leading AI researchers about the highly non-negligible probability that AI brings about civilizational collapse in the near future. To translate this into Gen Z: we’re cooked, chat.

Having been enlightened by this recent documentary of the future, the thing that struck me most was the convergence not of technological catastrophe, but of the fact that, in both cases, the people building these technologies were the ones who were stuck in the strange position of being the loudest people in the room regarding the impending danger while simultaneously continuing full-steam ahead.

And it got me thinking about good old fashioned mortal sins.1 My well-catechized Catholic friends will tell you that those involve three things:

1. Grave Matter (bad stuff)

2. Deliberate Consent (choosing to do bad stuff)

3. Full Knowledge (knowing the bad stuff you’re choosing to do is bad)

Now, it seems to me that destroying the human race is bad. So that’s a checkmark for Grave Matter. Best as I can tell, no one is forcing Altman and Co. to continue the pursuit of AGI. Score one for deliberate consent, then. But the real kicker is the last one. You see, if AI developers were simply ignorant of the potential dangers of unchecked, exponential development, then perhaps they’d get a pass. Annihilating the human race would then be an “oopsie.” A venial sin quickly remedied with an Our Father. But knowing that what you’re doing may well kill us all and doing it anyway? Oof. That gets us into mortal sin—which requires at least two Our Fathers according to canon law.2 Probably a solid Hail Mary as well. I mean, we are talking about killing everyone here. Can’t go too light on the penance.

It’s all a bit mind-boggling. Who would willingly do something so obviously wrong? Well, sin you know, the stuff already destroying us all, that we return to like dogs to our own vomit.

But no. No, no, no. I don’t want to pursue that line of thinking. I’m enjoying my moral superiority too much for the moment. Scratch the last sentences from the record. Their sins are much greater than mine. Like Paul said, Of sinners, I am the best—obviously.

Anathema sit.

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Hi, there. Slightly more sane version of Austin, here.

I try to stay away from the AI doom and gloom headlines, probably less out of any great virtue and more because ignorance really is bliss. “Not my problem.” Yet.

Reading some of these accounts though is genuinely harrowing. Look, I don’t know what will come of all this. The fact that the people working most closely with the technology are this concerned though? Not great.

I want to pretend as though if I opt out of using AI, then AI doesn’t exist. But it does. I want to think that all these eulogies of Wendell Berry, all of these pieces on the importance of embodied living, all of these proclamations about the power of beauty—I want to think they mean the tides are turning. But then you look at the market forces, the structural incentives, the all too real Powers and Principalities at play, and you think … well you think the equivalent of scribbled lines on crumpled paper. Of trees falling among the mute. Of shouting at tsunamis and hurling expletives at myriad inanimate objects.

And you wonder, “what can we do, really?”

Naturally, the first things to come to mind are the things everyone else should be doing. Why is the government sitting on its hands? How can Altman and Co. keep doing this? Is an encyclical the best the church can do?

To be fair, those are all decent enough questions. But I think a good test of our faith is how high on the list “pray and fast” are. How long do we spiral in despair before that remedy comes to mind?

And I know, oh believe me I know, that such advice can feel trite. Let me get this straight: the world is about to be destroyed by rogue AI and you want me to pray and skip a meal? THAT’S your grand plan?

Yes. Or, more precisely, that’s what I want myself to do because, as best as I can tell, it’s what Christ would have us do. Which isn’t to say people shouldn’t march, organize, lobby, petition, flip all the god-forsaken tables in Silicon Valley etc. All good things when done with true prayer. All empty without it.

And yes, that will sound like foolishness to the world. I can tell I’ve got too much world in me because it sounds awfully close to foolishness to me sometimes too. But, dear Christians, what else are we to do? Is this not the one thing that is needful? Have we the faith of a mustard seed in the God who, last I checked, is still smarter than Claude?

Keep the faith, shame the Devil, my friends.

It’s only in prayer that I can keep faith, hope, and love in a dark world. Prayer is the school of our hearts. The same saint who taught me that it is in prayer that we are most like God is the one who taught me that all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.3

I’m trying my best to believe that. I hope you can too. And when it’s hardest to do so, know that we need the school of prayer even more.

Maranatha.

There’s a brilliant scene in C.S. Lewis’s book, The Great Divorce, in which a theology professor is one of several figures who take a bus from hell to heaven for a visit that can become permanent, if they so decide. In so deciding, the hell they’d been residing in would be no hell at all, we find, but in fact a sort of purgatory. When the theology professor meets an old friend, who unlike him is a resident of heaven, this friend implores him to venture into the mountains with him, leaving hell/purgatory behind once and for all.

After a brief back and forth designed to show the vacuity of the theologian’s liberalism, the theologian finally declares he won’t be able to stay in heaven: “Bless my soul, I’d nearly forgotten. Of course I can’t come with you. I have to be back next Friday to read a paper. We have a little Theological Society down there. Oh yes! There is plenty of intellectual life.”1

The idea of a theologian choosing to live in hell so that he can present his papers rather than live in heaven where his theologizing is not needed ought to strike us as patently absurd. How could someone who devotes their life to the study of God fail to see that being with God is far more important than talking about God?

Unfortunately, I suspect this strikes none of us as absurd because we’ve seen it play out far too often, and, if we have but a shred of self-awareness, we probably recognize that we have made this choice ourselves at times. We become so infatuated with our own theorizing that we, like Narcissus staring at his reflection, fall hopelessly in love with something that can never satisfy us. Brilliant as our systems may be, we must not prefer them to Christ Himself, lest we, quite literally, go to hell with our theological systems.

What Scripture Teaches Us

It is yet another cruel irony that, while few teachings could be more plain in Scripture than the notion that what we do is more important than what we say, it is often the very people tasked with studying Scripture who are most inclined to cling to systems over actions. In other words, we become blind to what’s right in front of us, so drunk are we on Theology 401 that we forget Theology 101.

Take for instance, James 2:14: “What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can faith save him?” The resounding answers are
”no good at all” and “no.”

How many times must Christ say, “if you love me, keep my commandments” (John 14:15) for us to understand? John, who records that particular saying in his gospel, clearly worries that once might not be enough for us. Perhaps as a condescension to those with thick skulls like myself, he reiterates this teaching in his first epistle:

“And by this we know that we have come to know him, if we keep his commandments. Whoever says, ‘I know him’ but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him, but whoever keeps his word, in him truly the love of God is perfected. By this we may know that we are in him: whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked.” - 1 John 2:3-6 (ESV)

This, of course, mirrors another Johannine teaching of Jesus, in which Jesus says that “by this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35). That is, the distinguishing mark of followers of Jesus is their love. Not their ideas. Not their systems. Not the facility with which they speak the language of metaphysics. Their love—that is the marker.

And how could it be otherwise? As we saw last week, God is love. To follow the God who is love, to abide in that love and be united to and transformed by it in an ever-deepening process of becoming that love, is, of course, only possible by loving. There is no other way. If salvation is about becoming one with God (and it is, for He is our salvation), then there is no oneness with the God who is love without loving. This is both a command of Jesus—a new command I give you, love one another as I have love you, so you are to love one another—and a blunt statement of metaphysical fact.

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George MacDonald on True Faith

And lest we ask, “but what about faith?” we should know that these two ought never be opposed. As George MacDonald writes, “It is the one terrible heresy of the church, that it has always been presenting something else than obedience as faith in Christ.”2 This obedience is not that of a slave but that of a son trusting fully in the goodness of his Father whose love is always more than he could ask, think, or imagine. I get the sense that, if MacDonald could only tell us one thing about God, it’s that He’s better than we could ever hope. And on account of this, how could we not do as he says? What could be better than that for us and for the world?

It is this full trust in the goodness of God and the accompanying willingness to do as he commands that simply is faith for MacDonald. In his words: “To do what he wishes is to put forth faith in him. For this the teaching of men has substituted this or that belief about him, faith in this or that supposed design of his manifestation in the flesh. It was himself, and God in him that he manifested.”3

Throughout Unspoken Sermons, MacDonald insists that Christ himself must be the object of our faith and the desire of our hearts, not our ideas about Christ and the rewards he might offer. When we make ideas the object of our faith, they demand nothing from us, and when rewards are the desires of our heart, we seek to do only the bare minimum required to achieve them. But this is antithetical to the logic of love. The whole dynamic of the Christian life is summarized well by St. John when he says, “we love because Christ first loved us.” This is not a matter of conforming our actions to a theory or attempting to meet an arbitrary quota of goodness. It is the ecstatic love of the beloved that leads St. John to pour forth the words, “What great love the Father has lavished on us that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!” (1 John 3:1).

It is from this logic of love that we can understand what it means to do the commandments of God—all of which can be summarized by loving God and neighbor.

Obedience to these commandments constitutes a movement away from the self—though in a deeper sense a return to the true self in union with God and fellowship with all mankind—that allows us to break free from the navel-gazing so often induced by theology done apart from love. Such theology is a world of abstraction that all too easily leads to anxiety. Do I believe this rightly? Do I believe it enough? What if I’m wrong?

A theology rooted in love is a theology of encounter with the real. It is in this embodied faith that we can progress in the love that builds up rather than the knowledge that puffs up. One does not need an advanced degree to love their neighbor and yet this tangible love will advance them further in the pursuit of Christlikeness than a degree divorced from love ever could. As MacDonald says of the spiritual life, “The whole secret of progress is the doing of the thing we know. There is no other way of progress in the spiritual life, no other way of progress in the understanding of that life; only as we do, can we know.”4

But Wait, Is this Just Anti-Intellectualism?

That last line is absolutely critical: “only as we do, can we know.” There might be a fear that an essay such as this one could lead people to a faith that is “anti-intellectual.” A faith that is nothing but blind obedience and cares not for the precision and rigor of thinking worthy of God. But that is not the case. Instead, it is a re-ordering of our epistemology. In the life of faith, we do not know by abstraction first. Rather, we know by first being loved, then, in love, we abide in him by doing as he commands, and in so doing, we come to know God more and more. This is why Evagrius can say that the theologian is one who prays because to do as God commanded us is good theology and leads to good theological thinking. If I could be so bold as to try to amend Evagrius’s words, we might say, “The one who loves is a theologian, and the theologian is one who loves.”

To turn to our Scottish saint one final time, we can see him articulate this concept quite well. The sermon I’ve been quoting from begins with a scathing critique of a certain brand of Calvinism.5 But he insists time and again that the problem is not so much the conclusions—abhorrent as he finds them—but the insistence upon the system more so than the person of Christ. By the end he says, “I do not attempt to change your opinion; if they are wrong, the obedience alone on which I insist can enable you to set them right; I only pray you to obey, and assert that thus only can you fit yourselves for understanding the mind of Christ.”6 In other words, obedience is our greatest teacher. We may well, in pursuing Christ, articulate our understanding of him in detailed systems. But it is not the systems which are our salvation, and that is the key.

Today, there is a great emphasis placed upon debating our systems of theology. If you get good enough at it, you can make a living from this. Please hear me, I’m not opposed to having systems. Indeed, our theological thinking should be marked by intellectual seriousness at every level. But none of that matters apart from love. Our theological systems can quite literally go straight to hell, and if we’re not careful, take us with them, if we have not love. It’s all too easy to allow speculation to become a distraction from asking the simple question of, “Lord, what would you have me do today? What is the next right thing? Where does your love lead me in this moment?”

We won’t build platforms by being obedient to Christ. Loving our neighbors won’t land us the next book deal, and done truly—such that our left hand doesn’t know what our right hand is doing—it is likely to go unnoticed by the people whose affirmation we so crave. But it is the one thing needful. It is that which will bring us into communion with the Father for whom our hearts cry without ceasing.

“Beloved ones, let us love one another, because love is from God, and everyone who loves has been born out of God and knows God. Whoever does not love has not known God, because God is love. By this, the love of God was made manifest in us, because God has sent his only Son into the cosmos so that we might live through him. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but rather that he loved us and sent his Son as atonement for our sins. Beloved ones, if God loved us so, we ought also to love one another.” - 1 John 4:7-11 (trans. David Bentley Hart)

There’s this line that gets thrown out a great deal—you’ve probably heard it: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them.” I believe it comes from Maya Angelou originally, but that’s mostly immaterial as it has taken on a life of its own. In my experience, it usually carries a cynical undertone with a sentiment that’s something like, “hey, you know those red flags you’re noticing? Don’t ignore them.” And look, as far as modern proverbs go, this one is actually pretty good. In many ways, it’s a close relative to that other, even more common cliché, “actions speak louder than words,” albeit the latter may be more neutral in connotation.

I know that many of my sophisticated, theologically-deep readers may feel that such street wisdom is a bit passé, but there is something in these sayings that cuts to the very heart of Christian theology.

One of the great challenges of theology is the fact that our words are always inadequate to fully describe God. Even inspired words, unique as they may be, can but grasp at the wonder of God, limited as they are by the nature of language. And thus it is quite consequential that we speak of Jesus himself, not a book, as the Word of God. You see, for Christian theology, the revelation of God is not first and foremost a matter of words about God but the Word himself, Jesus. As the great Scottish saint, George MacDonald wrote, “The one use of the Bible is to make us look at Jesus, that through him, we might know his Father and our Father, his God and our God.”1

To man’s greatest question, “what is God like?” the answer is given in the God-man, Jesus Christ, “the image of the invisible God.”2 And it is in his incarnate life, death, resurrection, and ascension that man comes to find the only word that approaches adequacy in describing what God is: love.

Something I find myself saying quite frequently to others and even to myself is this, “when you’re going through a period of uncertainty and you’re confronted by all the things you don’t know, cling to what you do know.” Generally speaking, the context in which I say this is when people are wrestling with theological questions. So much remains a mystery to me and many others. However, as the late Pope Benedict XVI said:

“Even in their bewilderment and failure to understand the world around them, Christians continue to believe in the “goodness and loving kindness of God” (Tit 3:4). Immersed like everyone else in the dramatic complexity of historical events, they remain unshakably certain that God is our Father and loves us, even when his silence remains incomprehensible.”3

Amidst vast incomprehensibility, this little do I know, and it is more than enough: God is love. Never have more profound words been written than these from the First Epistle of St. John. What more can be said of a God who takes on flesh, heals our brokenness from the inside, bears the weight of sin, drinking the cup of its poison to the final dregs, walks not just through the valley of the shadow of death but plunges all the way to Hades and delivers captives past, present, and future—all to restore us to communion with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? Love. No other word can quite capture the potency of this great drama because there is no experience more transcendent than to love and to be loved. Far from being a mere idea, love is something known in the depths of our being because it uniquely harmonizes with what it means to be human. We know this truth not by letter but by spirit. Once again, MacDonald can help us: “All high things can be spoken only in figures: these figures, having to do with matters too high for them, cannot fit intellectually; they can be interpreted truly, understood aright, only by such as have the spiritual fact in themselves.”4 In Christ we find not just an exemplary display of this idea called love, but we find the very wellspring of it, indeed its essence in the face of Jesus: God is love. The connection could not be made more intimately.

In this majestic epistle, John says to us that God has made himself known to us in Jesus. And when God shows you who he is, believe him.

Sometimes, we tie our theology into knots, believing ourselves to be deep because we read widely we try to amass more and more knowledge, but the moment we lose sight of this message, that God, as revealed in the person of Jesus, is love—that moment, we have gone astray. Our theology ought not branch away from this with long chains of logic but rather ought to always revolve around it in orbit. All our theology is ultimately just footnotes on this great reality. It is the tone we must tune our instruments to at all times. The Christian life begins and ends in real-izing this love. Real-izing it in our hearts, our minds, our souls, and in our actions with all our strength. It is the commandment that is old and new, to love as God has loved us.

In many ways, this is not a groundbreaking idea. Doubtless, you’ve heard it before from pulpits and you’ve read in the sacred page that God is love. And yet, no sentence could be more earth-shattering.

I suspect this is not the essay you expected this week. I’m sure next week I’ll be back to pontificating on some theologian or another, or perhaps commenting on the latest trend in online theology. All those things are well and good. In fact, I tried unsuccessfully to write several essays along those lines this week. They wouldn’t come. I have no new ideas for you today. But I can offer you only the one that I cling to with all of who I am, that God is love. And that is very, very good news.

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The other day I was on a Zoom call with a young man who wanted to talk about his struggles in choosing a denomination. This is a pretty familiar situation for me. For years, I’ve made videos about church history, interviewed scholars from across the Christian tradition, and been pretty public with my own wrestlings about which church to join.1 And as time has gone on, this has resulted in a lot of people reaching out and sharing their own struggles about feeling ecclesially homeless. Getting to hear people’s stories and try to, at the very least, reassure them that God is with them in the midst of these big and often frightening questions is something I feel incredibly blessed to be able to do. It’s not something I take lightly.

In the early part of this conversation, the young man shared that he’s felt drawn toward Catholicism for some time, but he still wasn’t sure. He said he had concerns similar to ones I had raised in various videos, but nevertheless, he still felt a pull toward the Catholic tradition. Eventually he got to the real core of the question, the thing I sense he was most keen to ask: “How much more research do I have to do before I join OCIA?”

And at that moment, I felt a familiar, sinking feeling that much of my work has hindered, rather than helped people.

Here’s what I mean.

I love theology. I find it endlessly fascinating, and it’s been a true joy for me to be able to make videos for the better part of the last decade sharing my own explorations and talking to some of the smartest people I can find about the questions that press on my mind.

However, when I get questions like this, I worry that things have gone wrong somewhere. My goal has been to provide people with high-quality information to help them on their journey, wherever God leads them. I believe that studying historical theology can lead people to experience a sense of wonder at the beauty, truth, and goodness that suffuses the Christian tradition and that this can be an impetus for growing in love of God and neighbor. I’m convinced those things and God’s active work can be found across the lines that divide us. It’s for that reason that I never try to talk people out of joining traditions different than mine if they’ve prayerfully discerned the Spirit is leading them in that direction.2 I’m genuinely happy for people when they take a step of faith into the unknown spurred on by a desire to trust God.

The problem is, all of this “content,” all this pontificating about the faith, can make people think that if they haven’t answered all the questions I’ve raised, then maybe they shouldn’t make a decision. Maybe there’s this giant intellectual mountain to climb before they can look out with clarity on the ecclesial landscape and finally select a course of action.

But that was never the goal. Or at least, it certainly isn’t now. Maybe at one point, without realizing it, I thought it would be good if more people shared the intellectual struggles I had or the sense of feeling stuck that I had for many years as I wondered whether to become Catholic, Orthodox, or something else. To the best of my self-knowledge, I don’t think that’s the case, but we’re often mysteries, even to ourselves.

What I can say for sure though now is that, having gone through much of that myself and heard from countless people over the years about their own struggles, I genuinely do not wish this type of paralysis on anyone. In fact, more than ever, my advice is to take a leap. “We live forward and understand backward,” Kierkegaard once said.3 In most of our life, we’re forced to make decisions when we don’t have as much data as we’d like, when things aren’t entirely clear, and when part of us whispers, “what if this is a terrible decision?”

It’s in the midst of that uncertainty that I desire more than anything to offer people the words of St. Julian of Norwich, “all shall be well and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”4 This isn’t to downplay the importance of these questions or make light of the differences that exist between Christian traditions. It’s to emphasize something much more fundamental: God’s love for mankind is far greater than we could ever ask, think, or imagine.

So much of the back and forth about “should I be Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant?” has the knock-on effect of shrinking our view of God until He is no more than a professor with His hands tied behind His back, regretting to inform us that, much as He’d like to let us pass the class, the Scantron results of our theology test indicate that He must do otherwise. Unfortunately, we made a wrong turn in our theological reasoning somewhere around the year 451 or 1054 or 1517.

And I suppose these days I just want to remind them that God is far bigger than our questions. That theology matters, it matters greatly, but it ought to be done from a place of pursuing Christ and being assured of His love for us rather than from a white-knuckled, frantic sense of fear over getting things wrong. Seek Christ, take a leap, and know that all shall be well. That’s my constant refrain.

And so, when this young man asked me how much more research he had to do before joining OCIA, something he really felt God was leading him toward doing, my answer was what it almost always is to people in this situation: “you don’t have to do anymore research before taking the next step.” There’s not some list of books one has to read, number of hours spent, or series of debate opponents one must knock down before taking the next step. In fact, living out our faith in the midst of uncertainty, taking that step when we’re a bit afraid, that’s some of the best “research” we can do.

Now, hear me, I’m not saying that hitting the books is bad. I’m not saying we should abandon reason and just go off our feelings. Nor am I saying that we should rush into every decision. Prudence is indeed a virtue. But in my experience, most people are struggling with indecision more than rashness. They’re inundated with information. They’ve already read or learned more about church history and the disputed questions than 99% of Christians throughout history. Plenty of saints have been made without ever watching a single debate on the filioque. Many people, at least in my experience, need to simply take the next small step, whatever that is, rather than standing still. That step might be a step deeper into their own tradition, choosing to set down roots. It could be a step away from their tradition. Perhaps they email that priest, register for that class, or have that conversation. Maybe they find it’s the wrong step. That’s ok. Life is long, decisions are made with the information we have available, and sometimes we get stuff wrong. But faith is meant to be lived in motion, not a ceaseless, anxious motion, but a steady pursuit of God.

It’s also meant to be lived with other people and in the context of the church, not just by processing information online. If someone feels God is leading them toward the Catholic Church, I’d rather them join OCIA than spend a few more hours watching YouTube videos. Go forth into the world and live the faith in your local context.

If people have concrete questions about church history or theology, I hope the videos I make are helpful. I wouldn’t make them if I thought they couldn’t be useful. Sometimes, we really do just need a bit of information to help us sort through things. But more information can also be a hindrance at times. And when it is, I hope people know that they’re free to take a leap with what they’ve got.

And here’s the thing, it’s not as though theology is just for helping you choose a church. I think we’ve become so catechized by polemics that we’ve forgotten that theology isn’t really just about settling the “who’s right?” questions. It should be a joyous exploration into the God who has revealed Himself in the person of Jesus in such a way that we can truly know His character while simultaneously never exhausting the fullness of who He is, and by studying theology, we can be led into a deeper and deeper sense of wonder before the God who is far better than we could ever know.

Right now, the internet is full of people giving you their opinions on theology and trying to convince you to join their team. Unfortunately, many of them are smarter than you, have read more than you, and, worst of all, they disagree with one another. You may feel that, until you can disprove those on every side save the correct one, you can’t move forward. But if you take this route, you will likely never move forward. Or, when you do, you’ll realize that your unassailable foundation of 100% theological correctness may, in fact, have some cracks in it. And if your faith is built on being the smartest person in the room, it is prone to crumble.

But the life of faith is not about defeating every counterargument. “Blessed are the winners of debates” is not found in the Sermon on the Mount. “Be ready to give an account of the hope you have”? Absolutely. But that account need not be perfect. It need not be the argument to end all arguments. It may be faith like a mustard seed, it might be a “Lord I believe, help my unbelief!” but I hope it’s a faith you can embrace with all of who you are, that rests not on your amazing research skills but instead on a sure sense of God’s goodness.

If you’re struggling with indecision regarding the church, you don’t need my permission to take the next step. You don’t need to be able to convince the never-ending chorus of people on the internet that you’re right. Take some of this weight off your shoulders and accept the easy yoke and light burden of Christ. Keep your eyes upon Him, look full in His wonderful face, and the opinions of man will grow strangely dim in the light of His glory and grace.

Seek Christ, take that step, and know that all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.

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Despite being a creature whose natural habitat is a library, I did not read my way into the Anglican Communion. It all started a bit more organically than that. A stumbling into an Episcopal Church in Lancaster, PA, while on vacation. A realization that the beautiful stone church we drove past constantly was, in fact, also Episcopalian. Popping into that congregation on a Sunday we weren’t serving at our old church to see if the liturgy from vacation was just a one-off fluke, diamond in the rough. Being delighted that wasn’t the case. Progressively falling in love with it. The people. The liturgy. The preaching. The elderly couple whose faces break out in ear-to-ear grins every time we sit in the pew behind them. The coffee hour stories. even the ones you’ve heard before. Maybe especially those. Eventually the BCP takes up permanent residence on the kitchen table. Before you know it, you’re on the vestry. That type of thing.

Overall, I’m quite grateful that this was the path we took into the Church. I pretty much talk about books for a living, and it’s a constant temptation to live the entirety of my life between my ears. But this caught our hearts and bodies before our head. When it did catch my head, it was more so a realization that I had inadvertently adopted a way of thinking about theology that was amenable to a stream of Anglicanism than any sort of intentional catechesis at the hands of Anglicans.

Most of my theological reading is spent with the Fathers, Russian Silver Age thinkers, and 20th century Catholic Ressourcement theologians. Perhaps in a Rowan Williams-esque fashion, these seem to me to be perfectly good teachers for an Anglican.

Nevertheless, I’ve recently been trying to fill in the lacuna of explicitly Anglican influences in my theological study. So, in today’s post, I thought I’d continue my Notes from an Armchair Theologian series in which I give a brief rundown of some books that I’ve been reading. My goal with this is really two-fold. First, I hope it’s helpful for others who are seeking good books to read by Anglican writers. Second, and much more selfishly, I hope some Anglicans further along the Canterbury Trail might chime in with recommendations on where to go next.

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Anglican Identities by Rowan Williams

This small book is a collection of essays from the former Archbishop of Canterbury on various influential Anglicans throughout history. It is not the first book I’ve read by Williams, but it is the one most geared toward this particular project of Anglicanization. And, honestly, it’s a pretty perfect fit. Because it surveys such a wide variety of theologians, ranging from Tyndale (whom Williams cheekily includes as an Anglican) up to John A. T. Robinson, it is a difficult book to summarize. However, what I’ll briefly note is that Williams does a remarkable job of not highlighting one stream of Anglican thought as the only true one and considering any departures from that a fall from grace. While he doesn’t flatten them all into a false equality of value, he does show the promises and pitfall that each holds within their systems of thought and constantly strives toward creative synthesis and further improvement.

Frequent readers will know I hold Williams in the highest esteem, and getting to see his perspective on some of the major characters in the Anglican story has been a perfect launchpad for further study. In fact, it was this book which prompted me to read the next book on this list:

The Christian Priest Today by Michael Ramsey

From one former Archbishop of Canterbury to another, this list is also going from strength to strength. While Williams’s book is more academic, Ramsey’s is profoundly pastoral. Though it is directed toward ordinands, the wisdom found herein is profoundly applicable to people of all vocations. It is a book so rich that I’ve had to force myself to read it slowly and savor it, otherwise I’ll simply have to immediately begin to re-read it. Honestly, it’s that good.

I have so many passages underlined in this book that it’s hard to pick one or two to give you a taste of what one finds in this short work. For instance:

The glory of Christianity is its claim that small things really matter and that the small company, the very few, the one man, the one woman, the one child are of infinite worth to God. … For the infinite worth of the one is the key to the Christian understanding of the many.1

It’s not all soaring rhetoric though about the glory of the Gospel. You’ll also get down-to-earth wisdom like this, on the role of humor in humility:

Use your sense of humour. Laugh about things, laugh at the absurdities of life, laugh about yourself, and about your own absurdity. We are all of us infinitesimally small and ludicrous creatures within God’s universe. You have to be serious, but never be solemn, because if you are solemn about anything there is a risk of becoming solemn about yourself.2

The Purple Headed Mountain by Martin Thornton

Not too long ago, I had the pleasure of interview about the Anglican spiritual tradition, and he not only introduced me to the work of Martin Thornton, but he was kind enough to send me a few of his books. Unlike our last two authors, Thornton was not an Archbishop of Canterbury (though, admittedly, the genealogy continues insofar as Ramsey wrote the original forward for this book). He was a 20th century farmer and priest in the Church of England who had a remarkable knack for combining orthodox, historical theology with the practical spiritual needs of everyday people.

Something I’ve learned along the way from people wiser than me, is that the path to excellence in most spheres of life is actually fairly simple. It may not be easy, but it is often simple. For instance, I recall once asking a man who was remarkably strong and fit well into his 70’s what his secret was. His answer? “I just keep walking through the doors of the gym.” Thornton teaches us that, in many ways, the spiritual life is like this. We want the secret to spiritual growth to be complicated because then our lack of growth is due to us not figuring out the magic formula. If we just find that one new devotion, then things will change. Kind of like how we’ll spend hours, weeks, or even months, looking at different exercise plans from the comfort of our couch when, in reality, the most basic of plans consistently applied will yield results in time.

For Thornton, that basic plan is the reception of the Eucharist, praying the Office, and private devotion according to personal needs and abilities. No need to complicate things. Just do it. Very Long Obedience in the Same Direction type of feel for those familiar with Eugene Peterson. As someone who has jumped between devotional practices and dumped many after a month seeking something better, I can attest that the stability of simply praying the Office for the past two years has been much preferable.

King Oswald’s Heirs by Thomas Plant

“Re-enchantment” has been a bit of a buzzword for the last decade or so, and this past year has been something of a high water mark between Martin Shaw’s Liturgies of the Wild and Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine. The basic impulse seems to be a sense that modernity/post-modernity has lost something of the God-filled, meaning-saturated view of the world that our ancestors had, and this is showing up in a wide variety of ways, most of which have some connection to our discontentment and despair. As is often the case, diagnosis and is easier than prescription. One source of re-enchantment that probably isn’t high on most people’s list—indeed, I would be surprised if it was anywhere on the list—is the catechism of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer.

But that’s exactly where looks for inspiration in his eminently readable book, King Oswald’s Heirs. Like Fr. Dallman, I met Fr. Thomas through the work I do online. Initially, I was interested in his work on Ps. Dionysius and Christian Platonism, but soon after our first conversation, he announced his next book, and I was immediately drawn in by the notion of a Reformation-era catechism being a source of re-enchantment. Plant connects things as simple as the catechism’s question of “what is your name?” with the struggles the modern world has with identity, and he argues for a sense of rootedness in place and tradition that is a challenge to our default ways of looking at things. As I mentioned earlier, I’m a big fan of the ressourcement theologians, and this book offers a picture of what it’s like to do a sort of creative Anglican ressourcement project, mining the tradition for answers to the present.

The Complete Poetry by George Herbert

Truthfully, I started reading this long before I even became Anglican, but I’ve tried to incorporate a poem a day of late. If I tried to adequately express my appreciation for Herbert, I would fill an entire post and still have only sullied his poetry with my lackluster prose. Suffice it to say, he’s great. Read him. You won’t regret it.

Walk in Love by Melody Wilson Shobe and Scott Gunn

I’ll end this list where my Anglican—or in this case, specifically Episcopalian—reading began: Walk in Love. This book comes from Forward Movement, an Episcopalian organization dedicated to inspiring discipleship and growth within TEC. It’s very much a “Beginner’s Guide to the Episcopal Church” type of book, and my wife and I took to reading it together at dinner over Lent. It’s eminently accessible, and its frequent connection to the Prayer Book is a particularly welcome feature.

Though it is certainly theological in nature, it is more of a survey than a deep dive as it covers a vast range of topics. Its chief merit is its accessibility. The chapters are short in pages and even shorter on jargon. It’s the kind of book I wouldn’t hesitate to give to someone who said, “I’m brand new to all of this, can you tell me what Episcopalians are about?” And for a church that is sometimes, to a fault, a church for people who already like church, this is a great accomplishment.

Honorable Mention:

On the point of accessibility, I really ought to add the podcast, “The Average Episcopalian.” It is no small delight that my wife is constantly telling me what she’s learned from this podcast and how much she adores it. The two sisters who host the podcast have a genuine and infectious love for the church, and I suspect this enthusiasm feeds into Eliza’s almost daily statements of “I just love the Episcopal Church!”

So enjoyable is that to see and hear that I even count it a joy when she tells me that this podcast makes a lot more sense and is generally just more enjoyable than my nerdy YouTube videos.3

Honestly, I get it.

Where to Next?

So much for the books I’ve been reading specifically for this project of Anglicanization. I have, of course, read other books by Anglican authors over the course of time, but those haven’t been for this specific purpose. From here, I have a few books on the horizon, but I would love to hear recommendations from my Anglican friends out there. Here are a few I have on my list:

1. Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity by Richard Hooker: If for no other reason than being able to feel like a real Anglican for having read it (or parts of it, let’s not get too ambitious).

2. A History of the Episcopal Church by Robert Pritchard: Confession: I began this book but didn’t finish it. I really should. I’ll try.

3. Absolutely anything by Rowan Williams that I haven’t yet read.

4. The Gospel and the Catholic Church by Michael Ramsey: I so thoroughly enjoyed The Christian Priest Today and this seems the best book by him to read next.

5. Tracts for Our Times: I’ve read a good deal of Newman and some of Pusey in other works, but I’m too fond of the Anglo-Catholic stream to have not read the Tracts. Shameful, I know.

6. Christian Dogma by Darwell Stone: Fr. Thomas Plant recommended this but I just haven’t gotten to it yet.

7. Christ, The Christian, and The Church by E. L. Mascall: See my comments on Anglo-Catholic shame.

8. The Spiritual Life by Evelyn Underhill: I hope by now you all are realizing that I’m not a real Anglican and you should never invite me to your parties.

9. Praying Shapes Believing by Leonel L. Mitchell: Okay, this one I just got in the mail so can I get a pass on not having read it yet?

That is, admittedly, quite a long reading list already, and I have no idea how long it will take me to get through those as most of my reading time is taken up with reading for YouTube videos and I’m currently in the midst of a long series on the history of Marian devotion. Although, I suppose I could turn any number of these into future videos outside that series. You know, kill feed two birds, with one stone scone.

Anyway, Anglican friends, if I haven’t spurned all your goodwill by revealing how shamefully under-read I am, I would appreciate your recommendations.

The word “liberal” gets bandied about in theological contexts in such varied ways that it appears all but meaningless besides vaguely expressing some amount of consternation for a person or view one deems to be less-than-optimally Christian.1 It is to many Christians what the expression “boo” is to an ethical emotivist: a gut-level response displaying distaste but lacking any rational import.

When “liberal” is applied, well, liberally, to figures ranging from John Shelby Spong to Gavin Ortlund, it appears to take on a semantic range within which we could fit the state of Texas 12 times over. And if the function of a word is to pick out identifiable concepts with regularity, then “liberal” fails to live up to its task.

One of the reasons for this vicious malleability is that the word is not properly native to theological discourse. It is an import from politics—and a most unwelcome import at that. Unfortunately, it seems to be rather difficult to return to its rightful owners. Perhaps we’ve exceeded the 30-day window for such things. Alas. As I’ll argue, the very foreignness of the word and the ideological battle lines it implies, are itself a symptom of the problem of one form of theological liberalism which has lost its ability—or simply refuses—to speak the language of Christian theology.

The distinction I will put forward in this essay between two quite different forms of “theological liberalism” is not original to me. Instead, it comes from Rowan Williams, and in particular, his reflection upon the “liberal” 19th century Anglican bishop, B. F. Westcott in Williams’s book, Anglican Identities.

Methodology vs. Conclusions

Before we get to his acute analysis, I want to make a preliminary distinction, that, while faithful to Williams’s vision, is one further step back. That is, a distinction between liberalism as a methodology and a set of conclusions. While Williams will aid us in delineating two divergent liberal methodologies, it strikes me that, today, there is a deeper confusion between theological liberalism as method vs. doctrine.

Naturally, there is a relationship between a theologians’s methods and their conclusions, but they are nonetheless distinct. That two theologians come to the same conclusion does not mean they are doing theology in the same way, anymore than someone taking the train to DC from Baltimore is the same as someone flying to Reagan National from London Heathrow. In other words, in theology, the ends and the means matter.

Unfortunately, this is lost on many people. At least at a popular level, one of the leading candidates for a definition of theological liberalism is simply the affirmation of Women’s Ordination and LGBTQ+ relationships. However, these are only the latest controversial issues that serve as a litmus test for liberalism. In the past, slavery, evolution, inerrancy, and other issues have been the lightning rods around which the cacophonous roar of “liberal!” could be incessantly heard.

Please do not take my slightly pretentious prose as a sign of being flippant. It’s just self-indulgence. Truly, each of these issues matters. And to avoid straw-manning those who find the appellation “liberal” quite useful for these positions and the holders there of, it is true that there’s a positive correlation between those who hold to, say, LGBTQ+ affirmation, and methodological liberalism. Some might even say the correlation is so strong that there is no need to worry about tiresome distinctions between methods and conclusions. Rotten fruit (i.e., conclusions) must mean rotten trees (i.e., methods).

However, even if this is the case, I do think it’s much preferable to look at methodology rather than solely conclusions, if for no other reason than a liberalism tied to the hot-button issues of the day proves to be a moving target. Furthermore, it risks being slightly arbitrary. If it is not tied to a robust sense of a hierarchy of truths, then “liberal” is indexed to little more than whatever is getting attention at the moment, whether its structurally important to Christian belief or not.

For instance, imagine that in the next decade, the hot-button issue is whether women ought to wear gold jewelry. Is one’s position on that really a good indicator of someone being theologically “conservative” or “liberal?” It seems just as likely that an affirmative answer could be a rallying cry for conservatives as it could be for liberals (though never both at once). Do we not risk these terms being nothing more than indicators of whether one sides with the prevailing opinion of the time, be it ecclesial or cultural? Indeed, “liberal” in the Christian space often is accompanied by a sense of “siding with the the spirit of the age” but what do we do when the spirit of the age vacillates? Are yesterday’s liberals today’s conservatives, and is tomorrow a coin-flip?

Finally, if we only wanted to talk about conclusions, then we have better, ready-made terms for that. We really ought to use the language of orthodox and heterodox for conclusions, not “conservative” and “liberal.”

Suffice it to say, if we are going to try to turn “liberalism” into a sensible term in theological discourse, we can’t make it a shibboleth for the theo-cultural war of the day. Instead, we’d do much better to focus on method. And this is where the inestimable Rowan Williams can help us.

Liberalism as Theological Method

Rather than giving labels to for the two kinds of liberalism he sees in the church, Williams offers representative samples, such as B. F. Westcott vs. Benjamin Hoadly. Helpful as that may be for people neck deep in Anglican lore, my guess is that such examples are not all that meaningful to most of you, even though you lot are remarkably well-read. So, I will venture to provide some haphazard labels for these two approaches that are based upon Williams’s observations, but whatever faults in the labels should not be attributed to him. For now, we’ll speak of the difference between Internal and External Liberalism.2

What both groups of “liberals” share is an openness to change. The only foil Williams offers to liberalism generally is fundamentalism. That is an approach that says, “what has been is what must be, ever and anon.” Williams warns that such theology can end up being little more than a self-justification, a long task of reiterating what has already been said. Over against such ossification, both internal and external liberals say, “not so fast. Are we certain that we’ve said the final word?”

The principle difference between internal and external liberals has to do with the source of their motivation. And as my rather unimaginative titles suggest, one finds impetus for change from within the tradition, the other, from without.

I mentioned at the beginning of this essay that the foreignness of the word “liberalism” to theological discourse is symptomatic of liberalism itself. Though Williams doesn’t make that particular point, it aligns very closely with what he identifies as a key characteristic that distinguishes between two forms of liberalism. That is, some “liberal” theologians—what I’ve called Internal Liberals—are content to work within the context of Scripture and Tradition, taking them as given and then proceed to speak the language of the Tradition as a native speaker exploring the boundaries of possibility that deep familiarity with a language affords. On the other hand, other “liberal” theologians—what I’ve called External Liberals—disdain the very language of Scripture and Tradition, using it only as much as necessary but speaking more properly as natives of some other language. In this way, it is those whose first language is politics that have foisted upon theologians the language of “liberal” and “conservative.”3

One example Williams gives in this regard is the language of “rights” within theology. Without in any way arguing against the existence of human rights or their importance for flourishing society, Williams suggests that a theologian who forms their arguments upon the basis of an abstract notion of rights is showing themselves to be a theological liberal of the second type, one who is not speaking the language of Scripture and Tradition but instead is forming their thinking on some other basis.

Women’s ordination is one area where we can see both forms of “liberalism” showing up, albeit in meaningful distinct ways. For instance, you might see some theologians arguing that women’s ordination is fundamentally a women’s rights issue. All else being equal, women have the right to pursue the same employment opportunities as men, and therefore should be able to pursue a career as an ordained minister. This would be theological liberalism of the second kind. Others, however, argue for the same conclusion but in a quite different manner. Gary Macy and Beth Allison Barr argue for women’s ordination as a retrieval of the past. Sarah Coakley does so from a systematic theology perspective exploring what it means to be in persona Christi. N.T. Wright does so from a biblical theology perspective. The list could go on.

While I’m not sure all—or perhaps any—of these theologians would describe themselves as “liberal theologians,” they would broadly fit Williams definition insofar as they’re saying, “the status quo of not ordaining women is not one that needs to be maintained forever.” However, they are—to varying degrees—doing so from within the tradition.

Approaches to Scripture

One helpful distinction Williams makes between the two types of liberalism has to do with their approach to Scripture. External Liberals tend to think the Bible says less than meets the eye. Internal Liberals tend to think it says more than meets the eye. For instance, sticking with Women’s Ordination, an External Liberal may be inclined to say that Paul’s statements about women are really nothing more than patriarchal cultural assumptions wrapped up in the garb of Scripture. Internal Liberals, however, are often marked by a deep probing of the biblical text, assuming it always has more to tell us, and as such, we should be cautious to pronounce definitive judgments. Moreover, at least within Protestantism, there’s a deep theological tradition which points toward sin’s ongoing effects in man such that we shouldn’t be overconfident in the clarity of our vision.

As Williams notes, this latter approach actually implies a quite high view of Scripture. Westcott, his exemplar of this kind of “liberal,” sought to emulate Origen, who said that every syllable of Scripture was inspired and spent a lifetime meditating on the text, always believing it had more to give, and constantly shuttling between a microscopic view and a birds-eye-view, trusting that meaning was found in the parts and the whole.

Finally, we could further describe the divergences of these two types of liberals vis-a-vis Scripture as follows. The Internal Liberal takes Scripture and Tradition as given but the meaning as open. The External Liberal takes Scripture and Tradition as negotiable but the meaning as fixed. Allow me to quote Williams at length:

“In this context [Westcott’s “Internal Liberalism”], to be cautious about hermeneutical or dogmatic closure is not to discard or relativise sanctioned words; you occupy the territory marked out by those words, but you will not know where the boundaries are, because the search for definite boundaries suggests that you might be ‘in possession’ of the territory, not yourself included in (possessed by?) it. And this contrasts with a scepticism more obviously generated by Enlightenment suspicion of authority [what I’ve called ‘External Liberalism], in which the target of the questioning is the formulae as such and the processes by which they were shaped.”4

There is much to be said about these two sentences, but I’ll highlight for now the final line about the “processes by which they were shaped.” This is in line with my claim that the External Liberals takes the meaning of Scripture and Tradition to be fixed. As Williams goes on to argue, such liberals are often quite confident that they can get “behind” the text such that they can reduce the meaning of the text to the time/culture that produced it. Once again, this is to say Scripture means less than it appears to say. Not to beat a dead horse, but if Paul’s language about women is just patriarchy, then, having discarded patriarchy, we can discard Paul. Without denying that patriarchy might inform Paul, the Internal Liberal insists that God is speaking to us in this text and we have not yet exhausted its meaning.

Conclusion

Hopefully, that’s enough said about what distinguishes these two types of liberalism. Thus far, I’ve intentionally tried to avoid attaching value judgments to these, and Williams himself notes that there can be something to be learned from both. In my own estimation, Williams quite clearly falls into the Internal rather than External Liberal category, so it’s commendable that he is able to see some weaknesses of his “side” and some strengths of his “opponents.”

I should note that one of the difficulties with the clean dichotomy presented here is that it’s not always evident that, just because someone uses the language of Scripture and Tradition that they are truly attempting to think in and with the tradition. I take it that one of the prominent concerns people have even about would-be “Internal Liberals” is that they’re really just using Christian language as a disguise for non-Christian ideas. This is, of course, entirely possible. But I do wish to propose nevertheless that it’s not always the case. And Williams may be the best example of this, at least in my mind.

If we apply the current, conclusions-based criteria for theological liberalism, then Williams fits the bill as he is LGBTQ+ affirming and in favor of Women’s Ordination. For many, that’s case closed. But I suppose part of my inspiration for writing this piece is that reading Williams feels completely different from reading “External Liberals.” In Williams, I find a theologian deeply versed in the tradition whose thinking begins with the classical doctrines of Trinity and Incarnation then extends far from there without leaving that behind while showing a great deal of openness as far as the location of the boundaries of Christian confession. It’s not that Williams would say there are no boundaries and anything goes. However, policing the boundaries or declaring precisely where they are once and for all is not his main work. Instead, he shows a willingness to till the soil he’s been given for a lifetime, ceaselessly striving to see the world through Christ. And that includes seeing the questions the world poses in our time. As much as he loves the tradition, he is not an antiquarian, merely dusting off the relics of a bygone era. Instead, he takes up the task of our forefathers in the faith and continues to apply the heart of Christianity in new and trying times. This isn’t to say he gets everything write—though I can’t hide my admiration for him as a theologian. But, I suppose this essay is, in some sense, a long exercise in trying to express why “liberal” being applied to Rowan Williams in the same way we might apply it to say, John Dominic Crossan, just feels wrong.

In the end, I’d much prefer we exchanged the term “liberal” for something more native to the tradition. But if we insist on using it, might we use it a bit more judiciously?

I hope that’s not too much to ask.

I’m feeling two parts grateful, one part nostalgic, and a touch sad as I prepare for my final class at St. John’s College today where I’ve been studying for my Master of Arts in Liberal Arts. When I began the program, I was working in Public Relations and spending more time than I’d like to admit on LinkedIn, a site which forced me to add the “skills gained” underneath this educational experience in my profile. I remember pausing, wondering what marketable skills I would acquire from studying old books for the next few years. I landed on just one: thinking. That wasn’t one of the auto-fill responses, so I had to manually enter it. Apparently, it’s a niche skill.

I’d been working with B2B Tech companies at a Public Relations agency, the kind of place where people are always networking, looking for the next gig, and, like me, spending too much time on LinkedIn, so before long, I had clients and co-workers making quips about seeing this expensive book club in the form of a degree I’d signed up for. In self-deprecating fashion, I’d simply say, “After getting one economically useless degree (Theology), I decided, why not get another?” That usually did the trick. “At least he knows this is silly,” I imagine was the reassuring thought in their head.

At this point, I’m sure St. John’s administrators would want me to insist that it’s not an economically useless degree, that their alumni go on to lead successful careers in diverse sectors, blah, blah, blah. I don’t dispute that as a factual statement, but, frankly, most people don’t study the Great Books to get a pay raise. Forgive me if I sound hopelessly privileged in saying this, but measuring education in terms of ROI (at least monetarily) is a trend I wouldn’t mind falling by the wayside. Call me crazy, but sometimes we “just” get an education to learn.

And, man, what a joy it’s been to learn over these past few years. For those who don’t know St. John’s, it’s perhaps the most Substack-coded institution on the planet. All students study the same texts, ranging from Homer to Hegel (I’ll include reading lists below), you are graded only on your contribution to discussions, essays, and oral exams. There are no laptops in class, nor are there lectures (except the ones which are optional and well-attended on Friday nights because, you know, what else would you do on a Friday night?). You read classic texts from Mathematics & Natural Science, Theology & Philosophy, Politics & Society, History, and Literature. Then, you sit in a circle and discuss the text. You write about the text—but not research papers littered with citations of secondary sources. Simply extended engagements with the text and a question that you propose about it. A tutor (i.e., professor), reads this, marks it up, then extends the evaluation of the paper to include a 30-minute, one-on-one discussion about the paper which is every bit as important as what’s written on the page. Finally, there are oral exams. You propose a question, then you must discuss it with the tutor, one-on-one for 30-minutes. There are grades, but you’re encouraged not to check them (nor is it easy to do so). If there is a problem, your tutor will discuss it with you during a conference. It’s the closest thing to an AI-proof curriculum I know of.

A Few Things I’ve Learned Along the Way

After a few years of this, I’m convinced that the lone skill I put down on LinkedIn at the start of the program was indeed the correct one: thinking. And if we’re forced to speak of education as an investment (and there is indeed a financial cost to this that brings such language close to hand), I can scarcely think of a better investment to make in oneself than in your ability to think. It is a sort of meta-skill that you carry with you all your days. Not to turn this into a gloom and doom piece on AI—the Lord, quite literally, knows there are more than enough of those already—but it does concern me that so many are willing to outsource and atrophy their thinking to machines. Strip reason from man, and what have you left? Perhaps now, more than ever, we need to remind ourselves that reason is the excellence proper to man.

It is this domain, the exercise of reason, the growth of our ability to think clearly and deeply through sustained engagement with texts and peers, that is the element of Great Books education I hold most dear. I count it as something of a shame that the value of Great Books curricula has been subsumed into polarized political discourse. In that arena, studying the Great Books is a fight to save Western Civilization from those who seek to destroy it. Perhaps it helps in that fight. In fact, it probably does. Aristotle might be right about the centrality of politics (he’s usually right), and if by politics here we just mean the common good, then count me in. In fact, we could highlight that liberal learning promotes the common good.

However, I think we’d be wrong to reduce the study of the Great Books to a culture war. Winning culture wars and promoting the common good are not always the same. The latter is far more important. Without being flippant—for I do think Western Civilization has given us much for which to be thankful and seek to preserve—culture war debates don’t really get me out of bed. I don’t read Aeschylus to “own the libs.” I do it because it’s fun. I do it because it challenges me. I do it to enter into conversations that began long before me and will end long after me. I do it to learn. I do it to think. I do it to exercise my own humanity. Lord help us if these aren’t good enough reasons to do something. We must recognize that learning is a good to be pursued in its own right.

Of course, these things have knock-on effects. What I did at St. John’s has not stayed confined to the classroom. I’ve written previously on how St. John’s has shaped my approach to theology, which you can read about below.

I’ve become increasingly more interested in asking good questions than giving definitive answers. Not that the latter has no place—it does—but the mode of inquiry exemplified in the humanistic approach of St. John’s has lodged itself in me in such a way that may be irreversible. In other words, learning to think well is about learning to ask the right questions and explore them with curiosity, sit in the unknown, and not be satisfied by partial answers.

The wide-ranging curriculum has also broadened my interests. I’ve gone from swearing off mathematics as something, at worst, inherently opposed to my preference for the liberal arts, or, at best, irrelevant, to now seeing it as occupying a vital seat at the humanities table (for this, I must thank who wisely told me that my plan to skip the Math & Natural Science segment—you only do four of the five segments—was, in fact, a remarkably terrible idea … or something slightly politer but essentially the same). Perhaps more predictably, I’ve discovered a love for Greek tragedies and a fascination with Plato. But it’s not just the ancients. I’ve benefitted deeply from Hegel and Schopenhauer. I was dazzled by a semester studying Camus’s entire corpus, and the semester I spent with the Republic will go down as a highlight. With all of these, I sense my acquaintance has only just begun, and I look forward to developing the relationship further. Studying the Great Books ought to teach you that the books worth reading are worth re-reading.

Aside from the academics, I find I approach conversations differently. I like to think I’ve learned to listen more carefully. If you leave St. John’s—or any Great Books program—having learned only from books, you’ve failed immensely. Seminars ought to teach you the value in having more voices at the table. Further, they ought to teach you how to comport oneself properly in a group aimed at something as important and nebulous as wisdom. One tutor told us that becoming adept at participating in a seminar is akin to playing in a jazz band. Sometimes, you must put the solo aside in order to play the rhythm. You must attune yourself to the ebbs and flows of the conversation and draw out the best in your bandmates. That is, to learn well, we need to both speak and listen, contributing not only to our growth, but that of the whole.

Most of all, I hope all these books and discussions have taught me something about the good life and prepared me to pursue it more vigorously. That is an elusive thing to measure in yourself, but I do sense I value things differently, and St. Augustine insists that our desires shape who we become. Put differently, the most important lesson of the Great Books is learning to recognize the Good and pursue it beyond the pages of the texts.

I could wax lyrical (or at least attempt to do so) about these past few years ad infinitum, but perhaps it would be most fitting to honor a final lesson from St. John’s: that the discussions worth having don’t really end. What starts with you and the text extends to you and the seminar, then the seminar spills over into discussions on the lawn. It compresses back to you and yourself on the ride home before seeping into dinner discussions or musings on walks. It trickles into essays and books. Most importantly, they lodge in our souls and shape who we become. Today, I leave St. John’s, but the experience stays with me, and for that, I’m exceedingly grateful. Long may St. John’s, the study of these books, and the conversations they spark continue.

I say the gods deal very unrightly with us. For they will neither (which would be best of all) go away and leave us to live our own short days to ourselves, nor will they show themselves openly and tell us what they would have us to do. For that too would be endurable. But to hint and hover, to draw near us in dreams and oracles, or in a waking vision that vanishes as soon as seen, to be dead silent when we question them and then glide back and whisper (words we cannot understand) in our ears when we most wish to be free of them, and to show to one what they hide from another; what is all this but cat-and-mouse play, blindman’s bluff, and mere jugglery? Why must holy places be dark places?1

Saying Lewis was a rare talent may be the least controversial statement to make on a platform that has an entire cottage industry of notes featuring quotes from Lewis (or, as is often the case, quotes that sound like Lewis but are falsely attributed to him). It may be slightly more controversial to say that the closing paragraphs of Part 1 of Till We Have Faces, from which the lengthy quote above has been pulled, is one of his finest pieces of writing.

If there is any cudgel with which to beat Lewis over his writing, it is the one that Tolkien famously used: he can be too preachy in his fiction and more than a little on the nose in his allegory.

There is none of that here. Here, an aging and mature Lewis allows a character to lash out against the gods in a way that is not immediately rebutted. True, Part 2 goes a long way toward answering this question, and I intend to examine that in a future essay, Lord willing, but for now I want to look at where Lewis leaves us at the end of Part 1, with Orual asking a perennial question that has no easy answer: if God exists, why doesn’t He make it more apparent?

A touch of background

In case it’s been a minute since you’ve read TWHF, let me briefly say what has led us to this point. If you’ve got the story fresh in your head, feel free to skip ahead. If you don’t want spoilers, you may leave, but only after liking this article. Sorry, I don’t make the rules, but I hear the consequences for breaking them are severe. Why risk it?

The beginning of Part 1 deals primarily with the relationship between Orual (the main character who voices the lines above) and Psyche, her sister who is sacrificed to the gods. Except, the sacrifice doesn’t go according to plan. Rather than being eaten by the angry god of the mountain, Psyche is whisked off to a palace only she can see by a chivalrous god who saves her from death by exposure. Huzzah! But wait—to complicate matters, the god insists that she must not look at him, a demand to which she obliges.

Initially seeking only to bury her sister’s body, Orual travels to the site where Psyche was left to die, only to discover that Psyche hasn’t been killed at all. In fact, she’s perfectly healthy—at least in body. But when Psyche insists that Orual is standing with her in a castle, Orual realizes—or so she thinks—her sister has gone mad. The story of this unseen lover does not help. Eventually, Orual coerces Psyche into taking a lamp in the night to see her lover’s face, which leads to Psyche’s banishment and the god yelling at Orual for such foolishness. This direct confrontation with the god is important for today’s purposes.

But one other detail is absolutely essential to understanding the text we’re looking at in this essay: After Orual’s first argument with Psyche about the existence of the palace in which Psyche lives, she returns to her camp not far off. When kneeling for a drink of water—and surely this kneeling posture isn’t incidental—Orual catches a fleeting glimpse of the castle. It’s exactly as her sister described, and for a brief moment, Orual repents of her blasphemies against the gods and her disbelief of her sister. However, as quickly as the vision came, it vanishes when Orual rises to her feet, and she then asks the reader this: “That moment when I either saw or thought I saw the House—does it tell against the gods or against me?”2 This, of course, is the very question asked in the opening quotation. Is it better or worse that the gods give us fleeting glimpses?

Our Fleeting Visions

Most Christians, and I suspect most people of any faith they sustain for a lifetime, have moments they cling to in which the veil seems to have torn, the gap between the here and hereafter thinned, or the fog lifted on the really real such that the faith that is assured of things unseen becomes something more like a flash of the unseen that has been briefly but truly seen.

In the moment, such experiences are more valuable than words. Some are enough to sustain you for a lifetime. George MacDonald speaks about this in his Unspoken Sermons, saying, “He believes in the God of former vision, lives by that word therefore, when all is dark and there is no vision.”3 But for many, in time we can doubt what we have seen. We wonder, “if what I saw/experienced really were real, why was the vision so short, the experience so fleeting?” From there, we ask with Orual, “does this count for or against God?” Why would God play these cat-and-mouse games?

These are, in essence, the question of Divine Hiddenness. If the most important thing in life were knowing God, why doesn’t God make His existence, His presence more obvious? It is a question armchair and academic philosopher alike have wrestled with for centuries. Even within the pages of Scripture, we find Job, David, and others asking these same questions. They are not questions that I think have easy answers, and they’re further complicated by the fact that, for some, God is easily seen everywhere, while others search unsuccessfully for years.

Again, Lewis will try to answer this in Part 2 of the book, and it’s a brilliant and beautiful answer, but answers are for another day. This essay is for the tension in which we live absent answers. And especially, I want to look at that last line,

why must holy places be dark places?

As I wrote in a previous essay, one of the defining features of TWHF is its exploration of two approaches to religion. On the one hand, there is the Fox, who is representative of a rational approach exemplified in the classical Greek philosophers. On the other hand, we have the Priest of Ungit. His religion is one of blood and guts, of mystery and sacrifice. It is the latter which is marked by darkness. But it’s a paradoxical darkness, the darkness of holiness.

The Christian tradition tends to speak of God in terms of light. God dwells in unapproachable light, Christ is the Light of Life and His followers are the light of the world. If Lewis wanted this book to be a sermon, it would be about light versus darkness. In place of the Fox we’d have a good Christian against the bad pagan priest. Instead, he gives us two opposites that cry out for synthesis, not easy victory. What’s most fascinating to me about the book is that it’s not simply a story of the Fox being right and the pagan priest being wrong. The holy darkness of the Priest taps into the “thick religion” that the human soul needs.

You see, while it is true that, in the end, light shall triumph over darkness, on this side of glory, our experience of life is marked by the dark. That much may be obvious, but what is less obvious, what may even sound scandalous to some, is that our experience of God, of holy places, will often be marked by darkness as well. I do not mean the darkness that is moral depravity. I mean the darkness that conceals. The dark nights in which we cry out to a seemingly deaf heaven. The dark but holy places where we celebrate mysteries we do not fully understand. Where bread that looks and tastes like bread is said to be a sacrificial body. Where water is said to save. Where words are read that challenge and provoke and confound.

Just the other week, I found myself reading at our church, and the passage was Genesis 22, wherein God calls Abraham to sacrifice his son. With Kierkegaard I must declare I don’t understand it even if I try to admire it. And even more so, I know, like Kierkegaard again, there is a gap between my faith and the faith on display here.

It is this same darkness in the lives of saints I don’t understand. The stories were tempted to sanitize because how else can we understand young women starving themselves or men sitting on top of poles for a lifetime?

It is in relationship to this holy darkness that I can understand my friends who love the Latin Mass despite not knowing what is said. For all the disagreements we might have, I understand the pull of the holy darkness. So too with Orthodox liturgies in foreign languages that mystify and draw you in.

And yet, we must not fetishize this darkness. The darkness is not meant to stay forever. We worship a God of light. The darkness seems to me more an accident of our fallen state that an essential part of God. In God there is no darkness. On our earthly pilgrimage, however, there is in abundance. And strange as it is, often the only path toward the Light of Life is to journey through the darkness, into that cloud of unknowing or up the arduous hills that are the dark nights of the soul.

With Orual, I don’t always understand why this is. Why doesn’t God make Himself more easily known? Why are holy places so often dark places?

Perhaps, as Lewis insists, it has more to do with us than God. Perhaps, God cannot speak to us face to face until we have faces. But more on that later.

Thomas: Sorry to bother you old friend, but I need to talk to you about the papacy again.

Johannes: Again? I don’t believe we’ve discussed it before.

Thomas: No? I suppose I must have been talking to myself about it then. That guy simply won’t shut up about it!

Johannes: Who?

Thomas: Me! Or, I don’t know. That part of me that asks too many questions. He’s really rather annoying.

Johannes: Hmmm

Thomas: So, here’s the deal, I keep thinking I’ve settled the question of the papacy in my mind, and then—BAM! Back it comes, uninvited. That’s why I need your help. Give it to me straight. Is it true?

Johannes: Forgive me, but what would that mean?

Thomas: What do you mean? I’m just asking if it’s true. Is the papacy true?

Johannes: You’re going to need to be more specific than that.

Thomas: I guess what I mean is, is papal infallibility, as articulated at Vatican 1, true?

Johannes: Well—

Thomas: —Wait, no. Wrong question. Was the papacy as an institution founded by Christ?

Johannes: Ok—

Thomas: —Wait, honestly, that might not even be the question. Can we—the Church, that is—can we live without it? Is there any hope for unity without it?

Johannes: You do realize those are three very different questions, right?

Thomas: I know, I know. I’m sorry. My brain always has all three of those tabs open at once. It’s like a god-forsaken game of whack-a-mole.

Johannes: Why do you care so much?

Thomas: What do you mean? I care about truth! It’s truth I’m after!

Johannes: Why this truth? You’re not keeping yourself up at night asking if Joseph Smith really found those plates or if Neem Karoli Baba really stopped that train with his will.

Thomas: Should I be?

Johannes: If you ask me, it seems you need more sleep, not less.

Thomas: Fair point. I guess the reason this question—or really, set of questions—bothers me so much is that it puts me at odds with myself.

Johannes: Say more, please.

Thomas: Well, when I ask, “did Christ establish the papacy?” The skeptical historian in me says, “Christ promised a kingdom, we got a church. The papacy is a product of that shift.” When I ask, “is papal infallibility, as articulated by Vatican 1, true?” The dogmatist in me says, “If dogma is unchanging—which the same council said—then the pope has affirmed teachings that sure look like he meant to be binding—see Unam Sanctam—that no longer are held. At least, not in the same way. And that sounds like change. Not to mention “councils against councils, popes against popes.” Von Hefele was right. So that doesn’t work. But when I ask, “Is the papacy necessary?” I get stumped. The churchman in me says, “Well, I can’t think of another principle of unity that actually works. Councils, consensus, semper reformanda—they all sound nice. But they’ve been a mess. So is it pragmatically true? But I can’t say that. The papacy won’t let me. I’m not even allowed in with doubts. What nonsense! Or, at least, the old ones wouldn’t allow that. The new ones? I don’t know. Balthasar put “papal infallibility” in air quotes all the time. I like him.

Johannes: So, you’re saying you think it’s necessary, but you think the way it’s been articulated is false?

Thomas: If only it were that simple! The real difficulty is more complicated. Let me show you.

Johannes: Please do.

Thomas: So, I went from skeptical historian to dogmatist to churchman, right?

Johannes: It sure seemed that way. Are they not one and the same?

Thomas: Far from it! I like the skeptical historian on the papacy, but the churchman in me gets uncomfortable when he starts talking about Nicaea. That’s set in stone. The churchman won’t budge.

Johannes: I see.

Thomas: And then the dogmatist? Well, he’s convenient when holding others to their doctrinal standards, telling the Catholics they’ve changed too much, but I need to keep him firmly looking in the other direction. If I’m being honest, he’s a bit of a bore. He puts a straightjacket on development. Don’t tell the Catholics, but I’m not sure Newman went far enough, much less too far!

Johannes: Rules for thee but not for me?

Thomas: But they made the rules!

Johannes: I see. And the churchman?

Thomas: Yes, yes, the churchman, he’s a complicated one. He looks out at the papacy and sees hope for bringing these broken pieces, these wayward children back together. At least, that’s how he sees it today. But get him looking back over history and his blood will boil over what pontiffs have done to put into disarray the very thing that the churchman now thinks needs put back together. The churchman’s enemies and friends wear the same tiara!

Johannes: A bit gaudy, don’t you think?

Thomas: What’s that now?

Johannes: Oh, nothing, just the tiara.

Thomas: Yes! Oh you’re right. There’s another war within me if you really want to know.

Johannes: Apologies, I didn’t mean to further complicate things.

Thomas: No, no, not at all. But you see, there’s the aesthete in me who loves the pomp and circumstance, the smells and bells. The aura as the kids say. But then, oh then, there’s the wily prophet in me, the one who says “woe to you!” The one who says melt it all down and give it to the poor.

Johannes: Any others?

Thomas: And then there’s just the part that’s tired. That just wants to sit under a tree, read MacDonald and never be bothered by it all ever again.

Johannes: I’m quite fond of trees personally.

Thomas: Yes, yes. Me too.

Johannes: So, what shall you do next?

Thomas: I don’t know! I just don’t know. I feel stuck.

Johannes: May I give a suggestion?

Thomas: By all means!

Johannes: Perhaps before settling this question, you need to sit the skeptical historian, the dogmatist, the churchman, the aesthete, the prophet, and the tired, tree-loving, MacDonald-reading part down for a good long chat.

Thomas: That sounds as difficult as getting the Church to unite!

Johannes: Perhaps even more so.

Thomas: I’d need a pope of my own to do that.

Johannes: Perhaps that’s you.

Thomas: What, you’re saying I have to be my own pope? Wait till the apologists hear that one!

Johannes: It might not hurt to care a little less about the apologists every now and again.

Thomas: That’s fair. Can we chat again soon?

Johannes: Anytime, my friend. Anytime.

Before walking home, Thomas sat under a tree and pulled out some MacDonald, the best remedy he knew for a weary soul and the medicine that had kept him sane up till now. Just before he flipped open the book, his phone buzzed. BREAKING NEWS: THE POPE EXCOMMUNICATES THE SSPX. The churchman in him cried. So much for that unity. The dogmatist felt conflicted. The historian laughed. And Thomas himself? He closed his phone and opened his book.

Postscript

Thank you for indulging my foray back into the dialogue format. This is far from a polished piece, but I suppose that’s partially the point. I wanted to give voice to the inner wrestling I’ve experienced when it comes to the papacy. In my own life, I find that questions about the pope come and go. Most days, I’m pretty happily Episcopalian. I used to say, “I wish I could be Catholic, but my mind holds me back.” If I’m being honest, I don’t think that’s quite the case anymore. I love our local Episcopal Church. I love the BCP. I’m increasingly concerned about certain aspects of the trad movement, at least as it exists online. Yes, the Episcopal Church has its many flaws and many, many quirks. I wouldn’t cosign everything that happens within it—far from it. But when I focus less on the abstract and more on the lived reality of parish life, I feel content. In many ways, I feel more settled than I have been in years, probably because for the first time, my devotional and liturgical life match. No more going to a megachurch on Sunday and praying the rosary at daily mass on Monday. That goes a long way toward the integration that, I think, Johannes is getting at in this piece.

And yet, there are still days when I feel that draw toward Rome. Most of the time, it doesn’t have to do with the historical arguments getting any better. It’s just pragmatic. I long for greater unity in the church. I’ve yet to see a better model than the Roman one. That alone isn’t enough for me, but, annoyingly, it’s enough to keep those tabs in my mind open. And then there are the very real questions of double standards. I’ve yet to reconcile the historical-critical part of me with the tradition-loving part of me. I’m sure there are a million other contradictions within me as well, and intellectual exercises like this are a painful, but hopefully purifying, process. We are often mysteries to ourselves, and digging more deeply doesn’t always make things clearer. A large part of me wants the Vatican 2, all-embracing, theory-of-everything type of Catholicism to be the answer. But I wonder how much of that is wanting a simple answer to questions that defy such simplicity. Perhaps, as Johannes says, we must reconcile the parts within us before looking for an answer to do that. Or perhaps that’s a bunch of pop-psychology nonsense. Who knows?

Perhaps you have heard the phrase, “smells and bells.” In the context of debates between “low” and “high” church adherents, the conversation is often, “don’t just convert for the smells and bells. Focus on truth.” The implication here is that people are allowing the aesthetics of liturgical traditions to overwhelm their reasoning faculties. Underneath this is a belief that our religious lives should be led with the mind, not the nose or ears.

I do not wish to disparage the intellect, nor would I even object in principle to the idea that, all things being equal, the mind is better positioned to ascertain truth than the nose. However, I equally wish to avoid assuming that there’s nothing to these smells and bells. If our religion is going to call to the entirety of man and offer true transformation, it cannot be something suited only to brains on sticks or disembodied spirits. In many ways, the draw of liturgical traditions is that they rebel against such stunted anthropologies and offer something more fitted to the whole of man. They offer food for thought and for the stomach. Their arguments pass the sniff test but the experience itself also has a holy smell. Such faiths enter the ear not only through syllogisms but also in the sound of bells. Ideas are grasped, yes, but also are sacred objects with our trembling hands.

Till We Have Faces

Such thoughts, especially those related to the smell of religion, have been top of mind for me since I began re-reading Till We Have Faces, which is perhaps the most mature, and most misunderstood, work of C. S. Lewis. He himself considered it his masterpiece as well as the one work he managed to write without preaching. It was also his biggest commercial flop, which goes to show that quality and sales do not always coincide.

If you haven’t read it, TWHF is a retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche through the lens of Psyche’s half-sister, Orual. It is a work with many layers, and, as a shameless plug, I’ll note that I’m currently reading it with my Substack/Patreon book club, which you can join and access previous recordings by becoming a paid subscriber.

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The smell of holiness is a recurring idea in the book. For instance, when the priest of Ungit (Aphrodite) visits the castle of Orual’s father, the narrator records the following: “The smell of old age, and the smell of the oils and essences they put on those girls, and the Ungit smell, filled the room. It became very holy.”1 As the book unfolds, you learn that the word “holiness” has a different meaning than you may initially think. We’re prone to think of holiness as the domain of prim and proper saints with gilded halos, paragons of a certain Victorian vision of virtue. That is not the holiness of TWHF. In this work, we’re confronted with a more raw, ancient, and pagan notion of holiness. This is a holiness that smells of blood and burnt flesh. Later on, Orual is flummoxed by Psyche’s affinity for the gods and lashes out:

“Oh you ought to have been one of Ungit’s girls,’ said I savagely. ‘You ought to have lived in there—in the dark—all blood and incense and muttering and the reek of burnt fat. To like it—living among things you can’t see—dark and holy and horrible.’”2

Clearly, this holiness is not clean and pristine, nor is it even seen as a moral good by Orual. This wrestling with holiness and its hateful smell forms a vital part of a theme woven throughout the work: the conflict between rival visions of religion.

These views are juxtaposed in the figures of two main characters: the Fox and the Priest of Ungit.

The Fox is a Greek slave brought to the Castle of Glome to tutor the king’s longed for son. However, as that son is still wanting, he is left to tutor the king’s daughters: Orual and Redival initially, and later Psyche. His Greek background is not incidental. It reaches beyond the story’s world into our own, and it provides him with a set of views on religion marked by the predominance of philosophy. Much like Socrates, the Fox derides the anthropomorphized gods as the lies of poets, preferring instead a simple Divine Nature. Most of what is deemed supernatural he argues is rationally explicable. If holiness had a smell for the Fox—and I’m not convinced it would have any smell—it would likely be that of old books or perhaps fresh air.

The Priest of Ungit is an altogether different figure. He lives in the world of mystery and blood. A world of sacred rites and slaughter. His is a religion of the senses, and holiness most certainly has a smell.

These two come into conflict in the first half of the book in a disagreement over the value, or superfluity, of a human sacrifice. When the Fox derides the arguments put forward as hopelessly contradictory and lacking sense, the Priest responds by saying this is a feature, not a bug. He criticizes rationalists, saying:

“They demand to see such things clearly, as if the gods were no more than letters written in a book. I king have dealt with the gods for three generations of men, and I know that they dazzle our eyes and flow in and out of one another like eddies on a river, and nothing that is said clearly can be said truly about them. Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear like water, but thick and dark like blood.”3

In my life as a reader, both inside and outside academic environments, I have found it is almost universally the case that great books—and this is a great book—are best read with others. This was proved true in our first book club discussion about TWHF when a member of the group brought to our attention the way in which this passage directly draws out themes Lewis had explored in other settings, specifically this notion of “thick” vs. “clear” religions.

In a 1946 address on Christian apologetics, Lewis said that religions are a bit like soups, some being thick some being clear. He goes on to explain, “By ‘thick’ I mean those which have orgies and ecstasies and mysteries and local attachments: Africa is full of thick religions.”4 In contrast, “By ‘clear’ I mean those which are philosophical, ethical, and universalizing: Stoicism, Buddhism, and the Ethical Church are clear religions.”5 For Lewis, both are essential. And it’s that striving after synthesis that makes the dialectic in TWHF so interesting.

On the one hand, the thick religion of the Priest of Ungit gives him an unshakeable confidence in the face of danger that the Fox lacks. When the Priest has a knife held to his chest, he doesn’t flinch, but the Fox is only where he is because he allowed himself to be captured in war. It seems evident that Lewis thinks philosophy on its own is not enough to carry deep convictions. Furthermore, Orual, for all her revulsion toward thick religion, cannot deny that the sacrifice appeared to work. The proof is in the pudding, right?

And yet, it’s not quite that simple. Remember, Lewis is striving for synthesis. TWHF is not offering an unqualified endorsement of thick religion. The Priest of Ungit is not the hero here. He recognizes something the Fox lacks, but so too does the Fox see things to which the Priest is blind. Orual finds solace and truth in the Fox’s notion of the Divine Nature. In a thinly veiled reference to Greek philosophy, Psyche even notes that some other Greeks recognized an afterlife, which appears to indicate that the Fox wasn’t so much wrong for being Greek but in not adhering to the best of Greek thought.

Insofar as this is correct, perhaps it’s not entirely accurate to say Lewis isn’t preaching in this book. Perhaps he is still turning his non-fiction into fiction, albeit more subtely. Some would view this as less artistically meritorious. An unwelcome infringement into the supposedly pure world of art. I don’t think this is the case. The beautiful and the true do not exist in isolation. They converge, and here, they do so exquisitely.

Thick and Clear Religion Today

If TWHF is meant to teach us something about the nature of religion, then we must return to the opening of this essay, to that notion of the smells and bells. It would seem that Lewis is saying that we need both the clarity of good teaching and the smells of incense and wine. We need rigorous argument and cherubic hymns. If the Fox and the Priest need each other, so too do the doctrinaires and aesthetes.

However, it’s worth pausing to ask if burning incense—or whatever other smells we associate with “high church”—is the only smell of holiness. Several years ago, Pope Francis urged priests to be shepherds who smelled like their sheep. This was a vision of holiness not so much wrapped in mystery and marked by separation, but rather a holiness found in the mire of human existence, a holiness that doesn’t stand far off but invades the mess of the world unafraid of its stain.

Without creating overly stringent dichotomies between the testaments, we can see something here of Old and New Testament holiness. In many ways, holiness in the OT means “to be set apart.” It is the holiness of the religious cult, a holiness that creates sacred spaces, a holiness that smells of blood and guts and reminds you that some places are unlike others because God dwells there. In the NT, we find the diffusion of holiness. The smell of holiness is that of oil poured on the feet of a messiah by a sinful woman. The smell of holiness reached beyond sacred places and mingled with that of donkeys, lepers, and the least of these. In time, that OT smell would go from burnt flesh to burnt incense. What passes for thick religion today is often much clearer and less wild than that of its pre-Christian predecessors. The Priest of Ungit, at least to me, represents less the respectable high church than something altogether absent today.

Still though, we wrestle in our own ways with what holinss ought to smell like. Is it closer to that of Narcan or church naves? Soup kitchens or incense? Sheep or shimmering marble? Perhaps, however, we must reach for the both/and rather than the either/or. Just as we must not neglect the Fox for the Priest of Ungit, we must recognize that the smell of holiness is not singular but plural.

For my own part, I’ve caught wafts of holiness in churches high and low, in sermons and song, on street corners and cathedrals. In many ways, maybe the task for some of us isn’t to determine which smell is that of holiness, but to start by recognizing that it does in fact extend beyond the mind and reach the olfactory. That we can not only know that God is good but taste and see and touch and hear and, yes, smell that God is good.

Odds and Ends

What I’m Reading: This summer features an odd combination of books. I decided to do a Bulgakov tandem read of The Master and Margarita (Mikhail) and The Sophiology of Death (Sergei). I can’t yet decide if there’s a deeper connection than they share the same last name and country of origin, but it’s a fun combo nevertheless. I’ve also embarked on a somewhat extended study of the history of Marian doctrine and devotion. Right now I’m reading Mother of God by Miri Rubin and Mary in Early Christian Faith and Devotion by Stephen Shoemaker. Both are excellent. For audiobooks, I’ve been inspired by TWHF to return to Lewis, so I’ve listened to The Great Divorce and I’m now trying The Pilgrim’s Regress for the first time. The former I’d read before and was delighted to re-read. The latter is new, and I’ll admit that I’m not fully sold yet. Time will tell.

Camino Pilgrimage 2027: I’ll be leading a pilgrimage along the Camino de Santiago July 8-18, 2027. It’ll be an intentionally ecumenical affair in which Christians from diverse traditions will have the opportunity to walk side by side and in the footsteps of the saints who went before us. Learn more: here.

My Novel: In case you weren’t aware, my novel, The Long Road to Holy Island, is now available for pre-order. I’m delighted that the first endorsement has come in. Here’s what Matthew Levering had to say: "What a delight to read this novel! The characters come alive, and the book is a quest -- following St. Cuthbert's Way, guided by Br. Aidan -- a quest that turns out to be not only a recovery from loss ... but also a passionate search for the wellsprings of Christian unity. Christian unity, grounded in the heritage of the faith and in self-sacrificial acts of love, is the very center of this story."

Few things are more quintessential to an evangelical upbringing than youth group. If you’ve been a part of one, you know there’s nothing quite like these mystifying gatherings of hormonal teenagers.

I mean, where else can you find kids crying with hands held high in worship, making out behind couches, trading Pokemon cards, and playing games that you hardly ever see outside that subculture (I’m looking at you, gaga ball) all in the same room?

And in the midst of all of that, someone has to teach these kids about Jesus.

It’s a tall order, and I want to say from the beginning, God bless all the saints that volunteer to put up with sweaty and stand-offish high school students. You all deserve far more thanks than you get.

We shouldn’t be too harsh then if youth groups aren’t parsing the faith with the precision of St. Thomas Aquinas.

Still, in my experience, most people walk away from youth group with a theology consisting in three main ideas: Jesus loves you, don’t have sex before you get married, and be careful going to college because your professors are going to try to make you an atheist.

It’s certainly a truncated view of the gospel, but, hey, high schoolers don’t exactly have great attention spans and you’ve got to leave time for pizza and dodge ball. Plus, the first of those three ideas is basically the deepest idea there is. Seriously. If you get that through to people, you’re doing the Lord’s work.

While it would probably be more popular on Substack to simply bash evangelical subculture, that’s not what today’s piece is about.

This piece is about dangerous ideas.

College and Dangerous Ideas

My upbringing occurred at the intersection of suburbia and evangelicalism. The former told us that getting into a good school to land a high-paying job was essential. The latter told us that college was a breeding ground for atheism.

The natural compromise was to go to a respectable Christian college. This, at least in theory, would lead to the white picket fence while also helping you achieve tenets two and three of the youth group gospel. It’s not foolproof, of course. Many of us graduated to find the economy in shambles so studio apartments replaced white picket fences, but on the faith side, the promise of a Christian college was that with some good campus rules and biblical teaching in class kids would manage to not have sex and keep the faith.

Tempting as it is to wade into the economy or evangelical purity culture, for the moment I’m more interested in the concern so many people had over us encountering dangerous ideas at college.

What’s particularly intriguing about this is that it strikes at a tension in the evangelical world. On the one hand, evangelicals are often derided for being “anti-intellectual.” From popular conceptions of evangelicals as uneducated bigots behind the times to more sophisticated critiques of the dearth of evangelicals in the upper echelons of our elite schools, there seems to be a general sense that evangelicals—whether individually or collectively—aren’t at the top of our culture’s intellectual food chain.

On the other hand, within the Christian world, I often hear evangelicals being criticized for being too intellectual. By this, Christian critics don’t usually mean that evangelicals are too smart, but rather that evangelicalism with its hour long sermons spent parsing the Greek and Hebrew can treat humans like brains on a stick when what is really needed is a faith that’s more sacramental, embodied, and liturgical to embrace the fullness of the human person.

Whether evangelicals are not intellectual enough or too intellectual, they’re certainly concerned about the power of bad ideas. Time and again we heard growing up that college was a place of dangerous ideas. A place where smug professors smuggled marxism into the hands of good kids in the form of overpriced textbooks. Before you know it, your kid who was in youth group six months ago comes home for winter break calling you a capitalist pig and deriding faith as the opium of the masses.

In reality, I think most kids who drift from the faith in college do so in much less dramatic fashion. Nevertheless, there’s a real fear that encountering new ideas in college will be destabilizing. And this fear isn’t entirely fictitious.

For many kids, college is the first place they come across people who see the world differently than them. Not only that, they come to find out that these viewpoints have depth to them. It’s only natural that they might wonder if these ideas are better than the ones they’ve grown up with.

So what are we to do? Should we keep kids from coming across dissenting ideas? Should we throw them into the deep end and see what happens?

My Experience with Dangerous Ideas

As I write this piece, it’s my final day of a semester spent studying Arthur Schopenhauer for my master’s program.1 Before that, I was studying Friedrich Nietzsche, and prior to Nietzsche it was Albert Camus. If you’re a bit rusty on philosophy, none of these men are too fond of Christianity.

And yet, I’ve found it has been one of the most rewarding experiences studying these famous enemies of the faith.

Why is that?

Could it be that ideas aren’t that dangerous after all and we’ve been getting worked up over nothing?

I don’t think it’s quite that simple.

You see, this isn’t my first brush with dangerous ideas. When I was in high school, I went through a really tough period in which my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer, my sister lost her ability to walk, and my view of the church was rocked by scandals all in the course of a few short months. It was in the middle of that perfect storm that one of my teachers introduced me to Christopher Hitchens, one of the famous “New Atheists.”

It didn’t happen all at once, but I went from nodding along politely when he showed me one of his viral videos to seeking them out on my own. Before I knew it, I was agreeing with Hitchens more than I disagreed with him. Maybe all this faith stuff was nonsense after all.

Up to that point, I wasn’t just a casual church attender. I had gone through 8 years of private Christian school, was actively engaged in my church, and could crush anyone at a good sword drill (remember those?). More than that though, faith had been the center of my life, and like so many young evangelicals, I wanted to be a missionary because that seemed like the pinnacle of radical discipleship.

So how could simple ideas wrapped in clever rhetoric begin to unravel my faith?

For me, it wasn’t necessarily intellectual. I began to doubt God was good before I doubted that he existed, and I’m not sure I was ever that good at the latter if I’m being honest. That didn’t matter though, because when we cease to view God as good and beautiful, the question of whether he exists quickly becomes irrelevant. In my case, at least, I just didn’t care anymore.

I don’t think my story is all that unique. For every person who leaves the faith due to arguments against Christian metaphysics, I’m pretty sure a whole lot more leave because they’re not sure if God is good or beautiful.

My road back to faith was made possible because, despite my apathy toward God, I still found the person of Jesus compelling. And over time, as I tried to follow in the footsteps of this person I found so compelling, I realized that I needed to love the things he loved, including the messiness of the church.

It wasn’t only that Jesus was compelling, though. As I ran away from faith, I found I was running toward nothing. Luckily for me, I realized this pretty quickly before doing any real damage to my life. Not everyone is that fortunate.

My journey back to faith led me to getting an undergraduate degree in theology where I found that the beauty that drew me to Christ was matched by a rich and satisfying truth. It was there that I developed a love for the Christian tradition and delved into the Church Fathers. Along the way, I wasn’t blind to the fact that there was much ugliness in the history of the church, and yet even still, I found that here was something to build a life on. Here was a truth that captured my mind, a beauty that drew in my soul, and a goodness that I could give my life in service to.

During my undergraduate years, I didn’t spend too much time reading opponents of the faith. I was drinking too deeply from the depths of the tradition to give much time to that. Afterwards, though, I decided to expand my studies a bit in my master’s degree to focus more on philosophy. To do that, I’d have to come face to face with the enemies of the faith.

When I did, I found it much less unsettling than I thought it would be. It’s not that Marx or Nietzsche have nothing to say. They’re brilliant, and we’re still reading them for a reason. But as I read them, I couldn’t help but feel like something was missing. I wasn’t drawn into them. Perhaps I could get outraged over similar things, but I never found an impetus for life in the same way. When Camus told me to imagine Sisyphus happy, I couldn’t, despite the fact that I resonated with so much of his articulation of the absurd. I saw the problems but the solution was lacking. Not only did the intellectual foundations of my faith not crack, but far more importantly, I didn’t find beauty in these thinkers in the way I did in the Christian tradition. I imagine if an Atheist is reading this, it might sound like mere sentimentality. I get that. I really do. But we love what we love, don’t we?

I still get excited picking up these writers, as I hope previous essays have made clear. I’ve learned so much from all of them. My faith seems to have more than enough room for the good in these thinkers, while their philosophies are too narrow to fit the best of the faith.

So, what do we do with these dangerous ideas?

All of this brings us back to dangerous ideas. On the one hand, ideas really do have consequences, and they can undermine people’s faith. On the other hand, there’s a great deal of subjectivity here. What undermines one person might strengthen another.

Some of this will have to do with age. Hitchens felt impressive at 16 in a way that I’m not sure he would at 26 or 66. Other parts of this has to do with formation. My faith formation was heavy on personal devotion but pretty lacking in intellectual depth. I think we often think depth has to do with apologetic arguments, and maybe it does for some, but for me, depth was more to do with encountering a capacious theological imagination than arguing about the Kalam Cosmological Argument. Furthermore, some of this had to do with returning to what I found beautiful: Jesus. So much of faith starts with beauty before proceeding to truth. Finally, sometimes you just have to taste and see. I can’t imagine how scary it is for parents to watch their kids wrestle with faith. But so often, that’s part of the process. Sometimes you have to see what life is like on the other side of the fence before appreciating what you left behind.

So, were the youth group leaders wrong? Is there nothing to fear in these “dangerous ideas?” Not necessarily. We shouldn’t be naive to think that ideas are neutral. But as I look back on the fear people had about “secular” colleges and scary philosophers, I’m struck by the lack of confidence it betrays. Perhaps if your faith rises and falls on the dating of the Earth, the geographical expanse of the flood, or a peculiarly modern notion of what inerrancy is, then there’s reason to believe that we must avoid direct engagement at all costs for fear of a house of cards toppling. But as I reflect these days, I think we’d do better to focus less on instilling in kids fear of dangerous ideas and more on showing them the full beauty and capacity of the Christian faith. It is much deeper and wider than I was led to believe. I don’t mean we need to trade dodge ball and pizza for Latin lessons and seminars on the Summa (but if your high schoolers are interested in that, by all means). Rather, I think we need to demonstrate what it looks like to have a faith that’s open, curious, and big enough to withstand questions. A faith that looks out at the world not in fear, anxiously assuming a defensive posture, but a faith that looks out at the world and says, “all that is good, we have space for, and all that is evil we can withstand.” A faith that is confident is sings in harmony with the deepest desires of the human soul that was created for God and only finds rest in him. And, importantly, a faith that reminds kids that no matter how far the prodigal roams, God races off the porch to greet him with open arms should he have the slightest interest in coming home.

I want to end by reiterating that the people who are volunteering to walk alongside high school students who are often apathetic toward faith are the everyday saints of our times. This article is not meant in anyway to bash youth groups or those who run them. If you’re out there doing the work, thank you. Genuinely, thank you. If anything, I hope this encourages you and provides you food for thought. But keep telling those kids Jesus loves them. He loves you, too, you good and faithful servants.

Odds and Ends

1. Exciting news! I’ll be leading a pilgrimage along the Camino de Santiago July 8-18, 2027. We’ll be doing a shortened, easier version of the walk with luggage carried and transportation shuttling us between some of the most scenic stretches. But don’t worry, there will still be plenty of walking involved. Learn more: here.

2. In case you weren’t aware, my novel, The Long Road to Holy Island, is now available for pre-order. It’s a story about a grieving young man who embarks on the pilgrimage his mother always dreamed of—St. Cuthbert’s Way—despite not sharing her faith. Along the way, he meets a monk who becomes his traveling companion, and through their conversations and other people he meets, the protagonist is forced to wrestle with questions of faith in a world that so rarely makes sense. Pre-ordering is a huge help, especially for debut authors like me. So, if you’re so inclined, it would mean a lot to me if you grabbed a copy early.

3. If you’re looking for ways to start studying church history, I recently put together a Church History in a Year reading guide which takes you through 2,000 years of primary sources in just 52 weeks. It’s available for $15 individually or freely to all my Patrons.

4. Finally, paid subscribers receive access to my book club, in which we’ll be reading C.S. Lewis’s masterpiece, Till We Have Faces over the summer. We’ll meet June 22, July 20, and August 17 at 8pm EST on Zoom. Recordings are provided for those that can’t make it.

When St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press began its Popular Patristics series nearly 50 years ago, the title might have been a touch aspirational. True, the currents in academia had decidedly swung toward patristics with the ressourcement theologians in the Catholic Church and the neo-patristic synthesis types in the East, but “popular,” at least at a lay level, was probably a stretch.

As is often the case, what was popular in the halls of major universities decades ago has now made its way into the pews, and the study of the Church Fathers is beginning to become “popular” indeed. Granted, this popularity is still niche—I don’t recommend starting small-talk on the train with, “so, what do you think of the logoi in St. Maximus?”—but there does seem to be a genuine rise in the popularity of patristics. Would people have predicted 50 years ago that YouTube and TikTok would be full of young men opining on the relevance of St. Cyprian to contemporary debates between Catholics and Orthodox? Probably not.

Whether this is simply a passing fad or a genuine shift in Christian consciousness is hard to predict. Nevertheless, for now at least, it’s here, and in my experience, it’s creating lots of new questions. Pastors who went to seminary two decades ago were probably not anticipating having young parishioners ask them whether the filioque is theologically accurate or not. In all likelihood, such debates were probably little more than a footnote in an assigned reading for a Church History class that has been long since forgotten.

To be clear, I don’t fault pastors or seminaries for this. The niche interests of people who consume hours of historical theology content online a day may not, in fact, be as important as the nerds among us may like to think (I say this with love and affection, knowing I most certainly fit that description of “nerd”). And yet, these are the times we’re in, and I think one of the questions that we must ask is, “how should we think about the Church Fathers?”

The Status Quo with the Fathers

In my experience, there’s often an implicit sense among people interested in historical theology that the Fathers de facto are authorities and should settle our interpretive debates. As the internet makes clear the extent of our disagreements about Scripture and thus highlights just how much interpretation is happening when we encounter a text, the Fathers offer, seemingly, a way out. It goes something like this:

Person A: Scripture says X.

Person B: No, it says Y.

Person A: No! It clearly says X.

Person B: That’s just your interpretation.

Person A: …

Person B: Look, the Fathers all say Y, so the Bible must mean Y.

That, of course, is a bit of an oversimplification, but hopefully an illustrative one nonetheless. The main idea is that the Fathers act as something akin to interpretive arbiters. This is not bad in and of itself. In fact, I think checking one’s interpretive conclusions against the Fathers can be a rather fruitful practice and can foster a certain intellectual humility when done well. I often compare the task of theology to sitting around a large table filled with theologians of the past, all looking at the same text and discussing it together. At this table in which conversations began long before we arrived, we’re invited to speak. We, too, can engage the task of theology and speak our minds. And yet, it’s both good table manners and wise theological practice to listen more than you speak. If everyone at the table reads differently than you do, it doesn’t automatically mean you’re wrong, but it should be enough to give you pause.

That being said, I think there’s a bit of a danger when we engage the Fathers as nothing but arbiters for our disagreements. Rather than listening carefully to the conversation and trying to understand how it has gotten to the point it has, we merely search for snippets of speech that confirm our hypothesis and then run from the table to go relay our findings. In such cases, we basically move the proof-texting wars back a layer. Whereas we once might have debated predestination by volleying verses from Romans and Philippians back and forth, we now try to play a trump card in the form of quotations from the Fathers.

This isn’t new, of course. When representatives from the East and West met for reunion councils in the late middle ages, it was common to produce florilegium—essentially long list of quotations from the Fathers in your favor, often divorced from context.

And it’s this idea of context that should give us pause. Most Protestants have had it drilled into them that context is essential for understanding the Bible. For this reason, study Bibles fly off the shelves as people seek to understand the times and places in which texts were written. These study Bibles may only scratch the surface, but they’re helpful tools considering the immensity of the task of trying to understand everything from the Philistines to Caesarea Philippi. When enlisting the Church Fathers as debate-deciders, we often fail to recognize that we’re adding yet another layer of context to understand which may or may not make things simpler.

I say this not to gate-keep patristics nor make people despair. Much of my work online is dedicated to trying to engage the Fathers in a way that’s accessible for those interested in such things. For now, I flag this merely to make us stop for a second and think not whether we should engage patristics but how we can do it well because, for all the ink shed about good vs. bad biblical interpretations, I think we often forget those ideas when we put our Bibles down and pick up the latest from SVS press. Thus, we end up reading the Fathers a bit naively. Oddly, we assume that the Fathers are more perspicuous than Scripture when, most of the time, that’s simply because we’re not aware that the hermeneutical difficulties that riddle Scripture are present in the Fathers as well. We just haven’t sat at the table long enough to hear the debates.

This naivety can create a blissful honeymoon period with the Fathers, and much of me does not want to ruin that for people, but I do want to warn against thinking that reading a couple books on the Fathers means one now has all the trump cards for proper theology. I’ve made the analogy before, but reading a couple chapters of Calvin’s Institutes didn’t settle debates on soteriology back during the height of the young, restless, and reformed days. Swapping Calvin for Chrysostom won’t either.

Ok, all that being said, let’s look at a few ideas for reading the Fathers well.

1. Secondary Sources Are Good, Actually

This one might surprise some people. In a lot of ways, I’m a primary source guy. I’ve been deeply shaped by my time at St. John’s College, which is famous for its exclusive use of primary sources in the curriculum. There aren’t even lectures, just conversations about influential texts ranging from Homer to Hegel. To be clear, if you want to read the Fathers, you absolutely need to read the primary sources. At its best, a call to focus on primary sources is a vote of confidence in our ability to understand difficult texts and an encouragement to form opinions of our own rather than just parroting back what others have said. I’m onboard with all of that.

However, we shouldn’t neglect the secondary sources. We’re not the first people to read the Fathers, and engaging secondary sources opens us up to the fact that, just as with Scripture, there are a range of interpretations of the Fathers. It’s not as simple as, “St. Augustine said it and that settles it.” In engaging secondary sources, the goal isn’t to become passive. Instead, it’s to avoid isolated reading. Learning should always be a communal task. Think of secondary sources as conversation partners and members of your learning community who have a bit more experience than you do. Feel free to disagree with them, but also be willing to learn from them. Most people today have an aversion to narrow, fundamentalist approaches to Scripture that fail to recognize there are many ways of reading the Bible. For those getting into patristics, don’t fall into the trap of swapping one fundamentalism for another.

2. Don’t Throw Hermeneutics Out the Window

On a similar note, if you’ve spent time learning about how to read the Bible well, don’t throw those lessons out when you read the Fathers. Remember that stuff about reading according to the genre and the historical-cultural context? That applies to St. Ephrem’s hymns and St. Cyprian’s sermons.

Our category of “Fathers” can be a bit reductionistic. It can make us flatten this diverse corpus of writing into one genre as though it were all the same. It’s not. These writers, like the biblical writers (indeed, more so depending on your theory of inspiration) are people whose thinking is bound up with the time and places in which they lived as well as the mediums in which they chose to communicate. That doesn’t make their writing less valuable, it just means you need to read it according to the rules of good interpretation and not as though it were all undifferentiated divine oracles with self-evident meanings.

3. Your Debates Are (probably) Not Their Debates

In many ways this is a sub-point of the previous one, but good hermeneutics dictates that we read texts on their terms, not our terms. The online historical theology space is dominated by debates. Unfortunately, trying to win arguments incentivizes shortcuts. Rhetoric can trump rigor in such cases, and careful readings give way to mic-drop quotations. One of the things that I often see happening within this context is that we assume the Fathers are speaking directly to whatever our contemporary debate might be. So, if we’re having an argument about Protestantism vs. Catholicism, we ask whether St. Augustine would’ve been a Protestant without seeing the anachronism staring us in the face.

Part of being a good reader is trying to first understand what the author is trying to communicate. When we do that, we must ask, “what questions are they addressing?” not “what answers do I want them to give me for my questions?”

Of course, this does not mean that the Fathers cannot speak to contemporary questions. They most certainly can. By no means do I wish to relegate patristics to a merely academic exercise of something akin to philosophical archeological excavation. Instead, I merely want to caution that, prior to leveraging the Fathers for whatever debates we find ourselves in today, we should first try to patiently understand what they were saying in their times and places. Then, we can do the difficult work, one that’s often more art than science, of translating those ideas into our times, recognizing that much can be lost—and gained—in such acts of translation.

4. Go Slow

“Patiently” was the key word in that last section, and it’s deserving of a brief section all of its own. St. John Henry Newman’s infamous quote, “to be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant” has created in many people a sort of call to arms, a challenge, if you will. Basically, people rush to fulfill this undefined criteria of being “deep in history.” But rushing rarely leads to depth.

The fact is, most of us are not “deep in history.” Many of us never will be. We didn’t start learning Latin and Greek at 10, nor did we master five or six research langauges by the time we graduated high school. We have jobs to do and dishes to clean. Not to mention we really like that new show on Netflix. Despite all this, we want to be seen as “deep in history” (know that I’m preaching to myself here).

Whether we attain that elusive description or not, we would do well to go slow. You’re not going to be an expert in church history in a year, so you might as well pace yourself. You’ll learn more that way in any case. It’s better to really understand one book than speed-read 10 that you forget instantly.

Fr. John Behr recently said in an interview with the guys at that you can really only get to know a handful of thinkers in your life. Bear in mind, Fr. John probably fits that description of person we’re not (found two paragraphs above) better than most. So, if one of the greatest living scholars of patristics says that he can only know a few thinkers in his life, well, shoot, I’d love to even know one then.

In the vein of going slow, I recommend trying to find that person whose thought you’d like to get to know and spend a year with their writing. For me, this year is St. Augustine. Outside of my reading for videos and class, most of my research reading is dedicated just to him, and primarily just his early works at that. Will I know Augustine come December? No. Will I know more than I did previously? Absolutely.

A Concluding Thought

I leave you with less of a fifth and final tip and more of a question to ponder: what is the shape of theological history? I’ve explored this a bit in my essay, “The (Protestant) Problem of History” found below:

In that piece, I survey a few different ways of thinking about how we’ve gotten where we are. One way I try to get people thinking about this is by asking, “does theology get better or worse with age?” Newman talks about this in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, wherein he states that, though many people assume theology is like a river that is clearest at its source, that is not in fact the case. Barth, somewhat similarly, talks about theology as a science that improves over time. Others disagree. Some say theology peaked in the first century, the fourth century, the 12th century, etc. That’s a hard question to answer if you’ve read deeply and widely. It’s even more difficult if you haven’t.

I’m not suggesting you should solve this question, but I do think it’s one to wrestle with as you consider how to engage with the Church Fathers. We’ve given them that title, and it bears weight for many. But it’s worth asking, “are you allowed to disagree?” I think this is especially important for Protestants who find that their theology is at odds with the Fathers in significant ways in certain areas. That might just mean you’re wrong. It might mean the Fathers were wrong. Maybe you’re both wrong. I have thoughts on that matter, but those are for another day. For now, I want you to be thinking about the long journey of history that has brought us to the present in which you hold the views that you do. What’s the shape of that journey?

Odds and Ends

1. Exciting news! I’ll be leading a pilgrimage along the Camino de Santiago July 8-18, 2027. We’ll be doing a shortened, easier version of the walk with luggage carried and transportation shuttling us between some of the most scenic stretches. But don’t worry, there will still be plenty of walking involved. Learn more: here.

2. In case you weren’t aware, my novel, The Long Road to Holy Island, is now available for pre-order. It’s a story about a grieving young man who embarks on the pilgrimage his mother always dreamed of—St. Cuthbert’s Way—despite not sharing her faith. Along the way, he meets a monk who becomes his traveling companion, and through their conversations and other people he meets, the protagonist is forced to wrestle with questions of faith in a world that so rarely makes sense. Pre-ordering is a huge help, especially for debut authors like me. So, if you’re so inclined, it would mean a lot to me if you grabbed a copy early.

3. If you’re looking for ways to start studying church history, I recently put together a Church History in a Year reading guide which takes you through 2,000 years of primary sources in just 52 weeks. It’s available for $15 individually or freely to all my Patrons.

4. Finally, paid subscribers receive access to my book club, in which we’ll be reading C.S. Lewis’s masterpiece, Till We Have Faces over the summer. We’ll meet June 22, July 20, and August 17 at 8pm EST on Zoom. Recordings are provided for those that can’t make it.

I have the strange job of talking about God for a living. To be clear, I love what I do. I find theology to be a deeply life-giving, wonder-inducing task that fills my soul. But in a world drowning in content about God, it’s easy to forget that talking about God is a rather odd thing. Not odd in the sense of some middle school fashion choices we wish we could take back. Odd in the sense of birds trying to swim or dolphins trying to fly. Sure, a seagull can break the surface of the waves to grab a fish, and yes, dolphins delight us when they crest the waves and glint in the sun, but we wouldn’t call birds great swimmers or dolphins great aviators. Yet, in many ways, we creatures of the dust who dare to pontificate about the Divine are more like these animals than we’d like.

Wade into the Christian tradition and you’ll soon find a chorus of voices singing the same song telling us that our words about God are always incomplete. God is, in the final estimate, beyond our words. Spilling so much ink on such a God, then, is odd.

If you’re looking for a word to describe what we do in the face of the beyond-wordness of God—no, the irony isn’t lost—apophaticism would be the one for you. It’s an approach to theology that recognizes our predications about God ultimately fall short, and thus, the safer road is to say what God is not. Even this, though, is incomplete. As Pseudo-Dionysius taught, our negations fail much like our affirmations. We can say “God is wise,” for instance, and that’s true to a point, but our word “wisdom” doesn’t fully describe God. It’s too small a thing. So we try saying, “God is not foolish.” That too is true, but only to a point. “Not foolish” can’t quite grab hold of God. So, affirmations and negations fall short of the target.

We typically associate such ideas of apophaticism with the more “mystical” theology of the Eastern Church. This is not without reason. The East is home to great treasures in this domain. It would be wrong, however, to think this is an exclusively Eastern phenomenon. Our neat categories of “mystical” East and “scholastic” West obscure the fact that the latter is no stranger to apophaticism and the former has much acquaintance with precision as well.

The West is, after all, home to the likes of St. Bonaventure, St. John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa, the writer of The Cloud of Unknowing, and many other apophatically-inclined thinkers. The scholastic theologian par excellence, St. Thoams Aquinas, made Pseudo-Dionysius one of his primary conversation partners in the Summa, and while not a full-blown apophatic theologian, Thomas insisted we remember that our language about God is analogical, which is to say, human words might express what God is like but not what God is. St. Augustine insisted that even calling God inexpressible is, in a sense, a step too far because it expresses something about that which is inexpressible!1

When you first begin acquainting yourself with the idea of apophaticism, it can be a bit discouraging. “If God is beyond words, what’s the point in saying anything at all?” At times, apophaticism leads to a sort of quietism, a reluctance to speak about God and a resignation to the utter unknowability of God. Though such an attitude is by no means absent from the Christian tradition, it fits awkwardly alongside a few core convictions of Christian theology. To abandon words is interesting when we worship one whom we call The Word of God.2 Furthermore, Christianity is a religion of revelation. We believe that God has made Himself known in the person of Christ first and foremost, as well as believing that the Scriptures are, in some sense or another, God’s revelation to us.

So, we have two pieces of the puzzle to put together. On the one hand, we have the idea that God, by His very nature, is beyond words in the sense that all our words fall short of fully describing Him. He is and ever remains, a mystery to us. On the other hand, we believe that He is a God who reveals Himself, chiefly in Christ, though also in other ways, most notably in Scripture which is, well, full of words. While some would dissolve this tension by saying the first part is just an imposition of Greek philosophy into Christianity, a malicious hellenization of the simple gospel, I would caution against that reading for at least two reasons. First, good metaphysics is just good metaphysics, regardless of origin. A recognition of the inherent mismatch between the finitude of language and the infinity of God seems to me nothing more than sound reflection. Second, Scripture itself points us in this direction. St. Paul says we see through a glass darkly, Isaiah speaks of God’s thoughts being above our thoughts, and Job offers us a startling picture of just how incomprehensible God can be to the human mind.

With these ideas in place, I’d argue that this is a tension we should learn to live with, rather than trying to avoid. But how do we do that?

Here, I’d like to propose that the limitations of our language to describe God should lead us to say more, not less.

An Apophaticism of Excess

We can think of our approach to the transcendence of God in negative and positive ways. By that, I don’t mean “sad” and “happy” ways. Rather, transcendence can lead to us stripping away all description until we find the God that simply is. I’ll call this negative transcendence. Get rid of everything until you find God in the nothingness that is everything. This isn’t altogether bad, but, once again, Christianity has a penchant for description. The other option, positive transcendence, is more like saying God is greater than our words. When coupled with the idea that we know in part and not in full, this can lead to a sense in which we can direct our words and worship toward a God who will never be fully understood by us or exhausted by our descriptions. Think less of a stripping away and more of a roaring waterfall whose bottom we cannot see and that never fills despite the ceaseless flow of water.

That’s a bit more like how I think of the task of theology. Not only does this allow us to make sense of an incomprehensible God who nevertheless reveals Himself, but it also makes sense of human experience.

For instance, we often say that an experience is “difficult to put into words.” But what do we do in such situations? We turn to the best words we can find. We form them into poetry that only ever approximates the feeling that defies description. We aim our arrows at the moon knowing they’ll never reach that pockmarked surface but yet we know that they’re headed in the right direction. We are, after all, children babbling on about a God beyond our wildest imaginations who yet delights in us as His children much as our hearts beam when our babies make even the first sounds resembling speech. Such is our theology, and it is a joyous task.

Two Inspirations for this Piece

This past week, I was spurred on to think about such things through ’s recent article in The New Ressourcement titled, “A Metaphysic of Love.” In it, I was introduced to two ideas that are particularly instructive for this “problem” of theology.3 The first was this phrase, “an apophaticism of excess.” Here’s what he had to say:

Christian mysticism is grounded in an apophaticism of excess. That is to say, although the beyond-being God—the divine essence—is not captured in any way by human language, not even that of goodness or love, we dare not let go of the positive language of revelation (the Trinitarian and Christological discourse and everything it entails), not even with regard to the God beyond being.4

If at first sight this is confusing, let me pair it with a second, related idea from Boersma: hyperphaticism. Here are his own words, once again: “when we speak of God as Love, we do speak of God himself—hyperphatically naming the unnameable from his theophanic appearance.”5 Basically, our words grasp at the ineffable one who reveals Himself as love in creation. Or, as Boersma goes on to say, “God is always more than words can express; but he is always self-diffusing Love,” and it is that self-diffusing love that Trinity and incarnation express.6

As it just so happened, I was reading George MacDonald on the same day as Boersma, and there was a wonderful convergence of ideas. In his unpsoken sermon on, of all things, the unforgivable sin, MacDonald touches on the limitations of language. He wriets:

“Whatever belonging to the region of thought and feeling is uttered in words, is of necessity uttered imperfectly. For thought and feeling are infinite, and human speech, although far-reaching in scope, and marvellous in delicacy, can embody them after all but approximately and suggestively.”7

While Boersma’s piece was an academic article diving deeply into debates surrounding Christian (Neo-)Platonism vs Aristotelianism and more, MacDonald’s piece is purposefully pastoral, written in a much different register. Nevertheless, they both recognize that our words are deeply limited and that God is a mystery to us. MacDonald takes this into an interesting place. For him, there is a priority of experience and feeling. That we can’t put feelings or thoughts into words seems to suggest that, while God can communicate with us through words, he communicates best at an even more intimate level, the level that, even in ourselves, is beyond expression, that of inner life. For instance, MacDonald writes, “No amount of discovery in his words can tell us more than we have discovered, more than we have seen and known to be true.”8 This is the language of “taste and see that the Lord is good.” It speaks to us of the God who is “known in the breaking of the bread.” A knowledge that can be approximated, but never fully contained, in propositions. And here, I think there is some overlap between MacDonald and Boersma. Boersma insists that our metaphysics be grounded in the self-diffusing love of God, and MacDonald is saying that our knowledge of God is first and foremost that of his love. Both, however, insist that this is not license to abandon the letter in favor of the spirit, if you will. Which brings us full circle to the title of this piece. The God who is beyond words is also present to us within words. Sublime as the words of Scripture are, they do not exhaust all that God is. Feeble as our words about God may be, God is not absent from them.

Odds and Ends

1. Exciting news! I’ll be leading a pilgrimage along the Camino de Santiago July 8-18, 2027. We’ll be doing a shortened, easier version of the walk with luggage carried and transportation shuttling us between some of the most scenic stretches. But don’t worry, there will still be plenty of walking involved. Learn more: here.

2. In case you weren’t aware, my novel, The Long Road to Holy Island, is now available for pre-order. It’s a story about a grieving young man who embarks on the pilgrimage his mother always dreamed of—St. Cuthbert’s Way—despite not sharing her faith. Along the way, he meets a monk who becomes his traveling companion, and through their conversations and other people he meets, the protagonist is forced to wrestle with questions of faith in a world that so rarely makes sense. Pre-ordering is a huge help, especially for debut authors like me. So, if you’re so inclined, it would mean a lot to me if you grabbed a copy early.

3. If you’re looking for ways to start studying church history, I recently put together a Church History in a Year reading guide which takes you through 2,000 years of primary sources in just 52 weeks. It’s available for $15 individually or freely to all my Patrons.

4. Finally, paid subscribers receive access to my book club, in which we’ll be reading C.S. Lewis’s masterpiece, Till We Have Faces over the summer. We’ll meet June 22, July 20, and August 17 at 8pm EST on Zoom. Recordings are provided for those that can’t make it.

3

You can find that article here:

Fr. Hans Boersma

A Metaphysic of Love

Creation is theophany—divine appearing. And theophany is the love of God. This article—published in The New Ressourcement, 3, no. 1 (2026): 316–40—addresses how and why the world is the theophanizing of God’s love, arguing that creation is simply God appearing in a different (creaturely) mode. Since transcendence does not imply separation between creato…

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8 months ago · 52 likes · 9 comments · Fr. Hans Boersma

I’m an Anglican (Episcopalian if we’re being specific), but like many of you, when I found out Pope Leo was writing an encyclical on AI, I couldn’t wait. From day one of his pontificate when he took the name Leo XIV, he signaled that Catholic Social Teaching would be a major focus of his, building on the legacy of Pope Leo XIII who published the foundational work of Catholic Social Teaching, Rerum Novarum in 1891. What was implicit in the pope’s choice of that name has been made explicit in Magnifica Humanitas. On the surface, this is an encyclical about AI, but it goes much deeper than that. Pope Leo has taken the opportunity presented to him by cultural interest in AI to introduce the world to Catholic Social Teaching.

I, for one, think that’s great.

I’ve said in the past that it mystifies me that Catholic apologists don’t spend more time talking about Catholic Social Teaching. Sure, the New Eliakim argument for the papacy is cool, but Gaudium et Spes? Now we’re talking. Pitching Catholicism without talking about Catholic Social Teaching is like telling people they should check out San Diego and not mentioning the beaches or the fact that it’s sunny and 75 everyday. Anyway, Pope Leo seems to agree. In fact, to help the cause, he spent the first 89 paragraphs explaining the history and theology behind Catholic Social Teaching.

Now, if you were just looking for his thoughts on AI, this can feel like quite a lot of throat clearing before getting to the point, and I’ve seen a lot of people complaining that the document is longer than it needs to be. Such a view isn’t without merit, but I think it misses what the pope is trying to do. AI is merely the occasion for the encyclical. AI forces us to ask questions about human dignity and the common good, and I get the sense that it’s those things, the central aspects of Catholic Social Teaching, that Pope Leo wanted to talk about more so than just AI.

And when you pause to think about this, it makes sense, right? The pope isn’t an expert on large language models or machine learning. And as he insists in the document, if he focused on the technology itself, the encyclical would be obsolete as soon as it hit the press because the technology is developing so quickly. The fundamental principles of Catholic Social Teaching, however, have a much longer shelf life because they’re rooted in the unchanging truths of the gospel.

In this article, I want to briefly unpack the main theme of the document before exploring some of the fascinating and unexpected areas that the Pope also covered in this landmark encyclical.

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The Main Idea

In terms of how we ought to approach AI, Pope Leo’s writing shows his Augustinian roots. He places us at a fork in the road: will we build a new Babel or a New Jerusalem? This is the guiding metaphor throughout the encyclical, and it echoes St. Augustine’s notion of two cities in his magnum opus, The City of God.

It’s important to realize that this isn’t a choice between loving or hating technology. If you’re thinking of a fork in the road between embracing AI or swearing an oath to never touch it, you’re missing the mark. The difference is more subtle. Here’s how Pope Leo puts it, “Therefore, the primary choice is not between a “yes” or “no” to technology, but rather between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem; between a power that claims to dominate the heavens and a people who work together in the presence of God to rebuild the walls of fraternal coexistence” (9).

Throughout the document, building Babel represents modes of engaging with technology that arise from a desire to transcend the limits of humanity, degrade human dignity, usurp the place of God, and benefit the strong at the expense of the weak.

In contrast, rebuilding Jerusalem is a collaborative effort done for the common good in alignment with the truths of human nature as it is in relationship to God.

That might all sound a bit abstract. And some of that is the point. This isn’t a policy brief on AI. It’s an attempt to apply the principles of Catholic Social Teaching to AI generally. This can be seen clearly in paragraph 109, where Pope Leo offers a condensed picture of how this works. It’s worth quoting at length here. He says:

To speak of the universal destination of goods means finding ways of ensuring universal access to both technologies and the education needed to use them. To speak of subsidiarity calls for protecting the ability of communities to make choices and corrections, rather than confining their role to mere oversight after the standards have been set elsewhere. To speak of solidarity obliges us to recognize the hidden, often exploited workers, who sustain algorithmic systems. To speak of justice requires questioning the global distribution of power that decides who in fact can train these models and who is merely subjected to them. Likewise, it means acknowledging that social justice is not only a goal to be safeguarded after technologies are deployed, but a condition that must shape their very design from the outset.

If you came into this looking for advice on whether to use Claude, ChatGPT, or none of them, you’ll be disappointed. That’s not what’s offered. Nor does Pope Leo give explicit instructions around what kind of tasks AI can and can’t be used for. Instead, he asks higher level questions, and the fundamental one is expressed in paragraph 129, where he states, “Ultimately, the key question remains the one posed by Saint John Paul II: does AI “make human life on earth ‘more human’ in every aspect of that life? Does it make it more worthy of man?” This is the ultimate question because at its core, Catholic Social Teaching is about safeguarding human dignity, which in turn is grounded in the fact that humans are made in the image of God. So, does AI make us more or less truly human?

Answering that question takes wisdom and discernment, which can be aided by the rich principles found in Catholic Social Teaching. Principles like the universal destination of goods, subsidiarity, solidarity, and social justice. Even with them, though, difficult questions remain. And in such cases, prudence calls for patience. Perhaps one of the more underappreciated yet vitally important parts of this document is a call to move slowly. To not get caught up in the zeitgeist. To that end, Pope Leo calls for “slowing things down when everything is accelerating, and of protecting the opportunities for communities still to be able to participate and ask questions” (107).

Rebuilding Jerusalem is a slower, more arduous task than constructing a new Babel, but shortcuts here are destined to meet the same end as Babel. In a time of rapid change, the Christian is called not to knee-jerk rejection or uncritical acceptance, but to wise and patient discernment guided by the light of revelation and the resources of our tradition.

The Side Quests

Alright, so that’s the main gist of Magnifica Humanitas, but to change gears a bit, I want to touch on some surprising but fascinating parts of the document that you might not hear as many people talking about because, as I said, this encyclical is about so much more than AI.

Women’s Rights

First on my list of surprising inclusions are a few gems about the importance of women’s rights. In a time of reactive takes on gender relations within more traditionalist Christian spaces, I really enjoyed reading Pope Leo’s strong affirmations of women’s rights. Here’s how he put it: “It is, therefore, not enough to state simply that men and women have equal dignity and rights; it is necessary that this be reflected in concrete decisions, such as in laws, access to employment, education, social and political responsibilities, and the way society listens to and values women’s contributions. As long as this gap persists, we cannot say that society truly and fully recognizes that women have the same dignity as men” (57). For more on this topic, I suggest checking out this article by Claire the Catholic Feminist.

Disarmament

Next up we have the idea of disarmament. Pope Leo describes the phrase “to disarm” as close to his heart (110), and he sees this connecting to everything from war to mental health to the environment. In essence, we need to create technology that is peaceful in the full sense of that word. By the end of the encyclical though, he moves disarmament away from discussion of AI to focus on modern geopolitics. He warns against a rising support of realpolitik in which might makes right and wars are fought not for justice but for selfish pursuits. Given his criticisms of the war in Iran and war generally, this was par for the course in many ways, but I wasn’t expecting it in an encyclical about AI. Nevertheless, I’m totally here for it.

Slavery and Doctrinal Development

The next one is for my doctrine nerds. Given what we’ve seen so far in how the encyclical touches on a range of topics related to Catholic Social Teaching, the fact that Pope Leo talks about slavery in Magnifica Humanitas shouldn’t be that surprising. However, two things in his discussion of slavery were surprising. First, there’s the fact that he apologized for the Catholic Church’s role in legitimizing slavery. He says the fact that it took the church 18 centuries to recognize the full incompatibility of slavery with the Church’s commitment to human dignity is a wound in the Christian memory and sincerely asks for pardon in the name of the Church. This isn’t the first papal apology, but they are still a relatively new phenomenon which we didn’t see much before the pontificate of Pope John Paul II. It’s a trend I deeply respect, and while not contradicting papal infallibility, papal apologies do guard against thinking the church or the pope can do no wrong.

That’s not the only interesting thing about the document’s discussion of slavery though from a doctrinal perspective. Something that really jumped out to me was the way in which the church’s relationship with slavery is marked out as a clear example of how the church’s growth in understanding–what’s broadly called doctrinal development–works. Here’s how Pope Leo puts it: “This development offers a clear example of the Church’s growth in understanding the perennial truths of Revelation that she safeguards. Although there was not always consistency in practice — given that slavery was long tolerated before being unequivocally condemned — there has been a continuous affirmation throughout history of the dignity of every human being, created in the image of God, even if it took eighteen centuries for its full incompatibility with slavery to be explicitly recognized (176).” Now, this is quite remarkable as it paints a picture of doctrinal development that is quite malleable. The basic idea is that development is occurring within a context of both continuity and discontinuity. The continuity is the Church’s affirmation of human dignity. However, there is discontinuity between legitimizing slavery and then classing it as something intrinsically evil, as Pope John Paul II did and popes since him have done. This means that doctrinal development can involve long precedents in the opposite direction as long as there’s a more fundamental continuity. Something similar happens with the church’s teaching on religious liberty. Examples like these suggest that Catholic practice–and I would argue, non-infallible teaching as well–is more subject to change than people might think.

Francis and Synodality

The final thing I want to highlight in this document is admittedly a bit less of a surprise but nevertheless still interesting. That is the document’s reaffirmation of synodality as vital to the church’s life. This reflects a broader trend of Pope Leo carrying the torch for some of Pope Francis’s trademark projects. Pope Leo goes as far to say that, “In the ecclesial context, the common good takes the form of a synodal approach for mission at the service of the Kingdom” (86). In total, Pope Francis is referenced more than 50 times in the document. Pope Francis was a figure that divided opinion, and one of the central questions when Pope Leo was elected was whether he would continue in his predecessor’s footsteps or not. Judging from this encyclical, the answer to that question seems to decisively be “yes.” That is not to say he’s a carbon copy. In terms of personality, they’re pretty different figures. In time, Pope Leo may reveal more areas where he disagrees with Pope Francis. But for now, he seems to be continuing his project and walking in line with his vision for a synodal church. And to me, that’s quite good news.

Odds and Ends

1. Exciting news! I’ll be leading a pilgrimage along the Camino de Santiago July 8-18, 2027. We’ll be doing a shortened, easier version of the walk with luggage carried and transportation shuttling us between some of the most scenic stretches. But don’t worry, there will still be plenty of walking involved. Learn more: here.

2. In case you weren’t aware, my novel, The Long Road to Holy Island, is now available for pre-order. It’s a story about a grieving young man who embarks on the pilgrimage his mother always dreamed of—St. Cuthbert’s Way—despite not sharing her faith. Along the way, he meets a monk who becomes his traveling companion, and through their conversations and other people he meets, the protagonist is forced to wrestle with questions of faith in a world that so rarely makes sense. Pre-ordering is a huge help, especially for debut authors like me. So, if you’re so inclined, it would mean a lot to me if you grabbed a copy early.

3. If you’re looking for ways to start studying church history, I recently put together a Church History in a Year reading guide which takes you through 2,000 years of primary sources in just 52 weeks. It’s available for $15 individually or freely to all my Patrons.

4. Finally, paid subscribers receive access to my book club, in which we’ll be reading C.S. Lewis’s masterpiece, Till We Have Faces over the summer. We’ll meet June 22, July 20, and August 17 at 8pm EST on Zoom. Recordings are provided for those that can’t make it.