1. Today in the Magpie, you can find my write up of a very colorful book by Emily Eakin, called The Frenchman.

2. Earlier this week, Mere Orthodoxy published my review of Kristen Kobes du Mez’s Live Laugh Love: The Secret HIstory of White Christian Women and the World They Made.

3. I have a bit of an obsession with maps- hopefully fodder for a future book project- and Jeremy Black writes on a new revision to the Mercator projection here.

4. I know next to nothing about economics but please order this for me, . Do you mean there are subtle messages in fiction that influence our thinking on influential topics? Big if true.

5. I’m finishing up an essay on Divine Knowledge for the Oxford Handbook of the Divine Attributes in Christian Theology. I’m truly humbled- by this I mean somewhat terrified— but what an honor. I’ve used both this and this to prepare it. What good is a high wire act if you don’t risk falling??

6. Bonus points if you can connect #s 1-5. I’ll respond to any theories about the red thread connecting my thinking in the comments.

We seek to grasp knowledge. We grab hold of it, yank it loose from its context, and make it ours. We might hoard it, or we might share it. But we have made knowledge into a “thing” that we can remove from its context, acquire, and retain. Think even of the syllabi that we compose for our theological classrooms- “students should acquire knowledge of x, demonstrate this knowledge, and show mastery of it.” Our expectation is that we might create environments where concepts are made into things. These thing-concepts can then be traded with each other as we seek to refine, analyze, and improve them.

The work of theology in this way goes on like a sort of trading-card game, as we acquire rare and valuable tokens, shine them up, and put them out into the market of ideas. We become the salesman, marketer, and dealer of these tokens. They come to belong to us- and in some circles we even use these abstracted concepts to elevate our reputation, to gain employment, or to gain status. We use, employ, and manipulate these conceptual-tokens for our own advantage.

Or we might speak of retrieving knowledge. Retrieval has been a primary mode of theological work in the last few decades, but the idea reveals a significant right-hemisphere bias. In retrieval, we are “mining” for ideas. We go back into earlier times and places to find ideas that have been most. We choose the ones that are useful to us- no one is retrieving views of hygiene, for instance- and seek to employ them for our problems. We retrieve things that we can do something with. The task, again, is to identify, manipulate, and use concepts as we see fit.

Our we might seek to construct something with concepts. Construction is building language. This metaphor seeks to take concepts and build on them in order to enlarge existing categories. It finds concepts that are usable to manipulates them to add credibility or significance to existing concepts. Construction also rips ideas from their contexts in order to serve other purposes.

This language is so common as to seem uncontested. It is difficult to imagine other language functioning. But indeed, according to Ian McGilchrist, “all understanding, whether of the world or even of ourselves, depends on choosing the right metaphor. The metaphor we choose governs what we see…(179).” He goes on:

“The paradox of philosophy is that we need to get beyond what can be grasped or explicitly stated, but the drift of philosophy is always and inevitably back towards the explicit” (179).

McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary has been widely reviewed and discussed, especially among students of religion. I read it for the first time in April and could not put it down. I remarked so often, and so loudly, to my husband about its charms that a woman came over to me at the pool and said, “I must know what you are reading!”

According to McGilchrist, the brain is divided into two hemispheres. The left hemisphere struggles with a perception of its own superiority. Because language and logic belong to it, it has power close at hand to grasp concepts. For this reason it comes to “speak for” the whole when provoked. But its tendency toward assertiveness and preference for linear logic and conceptual clarity means that it is limited when it seeks to speak of experience.

But its preference is to speak of everything in terms of information.

McGilchrist speaks of experience “happening” locates it as a right hemisphere phenomenon. It occurs like water comes to a landscape. He is worth quoting at length here:

The river is not only passing across the landscape, but entering into it and changing it too, as the landscape has ‘changed’ and yet not changed the water. The landscape cannot make the river. It does not try to put a river together. It does not even say ‘yes’ to the river. It merely says ‘no’ to the water- or does not say ‘no’ to the water, and, by its not saying ‘no’ to the water, wherever it is that it does so, it allows the river to come into being. The river does not exist before the encounter. Only water exists before the encounter, and the river actually comes into being int eh process of encountering the landscape, with its power to say ‘no’ or not say ‘no’. Similarly there is ‘whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves,’ but ‘whatever it is that exists’ only comes to be what it is as it finds out in the encounter with ourselves what it is, and we only find out and make ourselves what we are in our encounter with ‘whatever it is that exists.’ (emphasis mine)

The river does not exist before the encounter.

Belief in God is not an answer but an attitude or a disposition. It is not a deficit of “information”. It is the river that exists after the encounter.

Theology should train us for an apparition, or teach us to see. Religion’s “other languages” have always been poetry, story, and most of all song. Beware Bad Poetry, sure, just like you beware of saccharine music. But what is after in his critique of my call for stories is this sort of difference between what the object of Theology is, and how best we might reach it. Its a left brain instinct, when what I’m after is a right brain beholding.

“Reintegration” of the hemispheres is inadequate when the goal is more saints. Being a saint is more than following a set of rules or agreeing to doctrines. All this to say, I think if we can regain our taste for poetry and art, we might have a better chance of making saints. And we desperately need saints.

(This is a little snippet from a book I am writing. I’m sharing it because it is what is behind my recent engagement with story. So, what do you think?)

It was always seeking to secure its new ideas, or defend its new territory. Even the descriptive language started to feel like it was lying- because there was nothing “new” that would be allowed within the constraints of orthodoxy. Everything had already been boxed up and was now being sold under a different name. Even the heresies of the tradition had gotten stale, as they were trotted out year after year under new names. So much of it- maybe all of it?- started to feel like salesmanship, attempting to coax the last drips out of a hose that had been long turned off. There was little left to be had. When even the heresies start to bore you, you know you are in need of new ground.

There were at least two generations before us when theological answers really came to bear on real questions- questions that were shared, to some degree, by most adult humans. These questions of meaning, of necessity, and of the “why” both of evil and of existence, held a certain kind of relevance to your everyday adult. People cared about them, deeply. They mattered.

But the questions have shifted, and quickly. Where once Christianity was thought to address a meaning question, increasingly I have seen it as required to address entire systems. My students wanted to be shown how Christianity was incompatible with racism, sexism, nationalism, and colonialism. They wanted this incompaitibility proven beyond doubt before they would pledge their belief. This made me into a salesman of a kind, trying to offer at a bargain-basement price an account of Christianity’s legitimacy that could never live up to this account. It is a faith, after all, of beggars and fools, of bleeding women and demoniacs and failed religious and deeply disappointed religious men. It is the faith that comes to the brokenhearted, after they’ve suffered the defeat of their expectations. God doesn’t come to them saying “do this, in exactly this way, for great results”. He says Fear Not.

The Christian faith, to be credible, would need to take stock of every awful thing that had happened on its watch. But this is not how its logic works.

Nearly every instance of suffering now took the form of a systemic inequality that might, with the right tightening of the gears, be addressed. Economic systems might be fixed so that they failed no one; political gears might be readjusted such that everyone’s good was addressed; even issues of human health, of sickness and dying, might be prevented or thwarted or mitigated against. Christianity might- perhaps should- have an answer to all of these problems, with a policy proposal to match.

In such a world view, theology’s job is not simply to speak about ultimate things. It has to somehow give an account of everything, and what’s wrong with everything, as well as offering a solution for how to fix it.

It has to make an argument for its own relevance.

I’m living in the land of this demise, and I don’t know quite how to proceed. It is not the case that theology doesn’t speak to the problems we experience and the social ills we wish to fix. It is more that theology it is the wrong tool for the job.

When asked to give an account (and a proposal) for all of the social sciences, theologians sometimes panic.

In an effort to show that God matters, they’ll take up all of the topics under the sun- perhaps how to fix racialized social systems, or housing inequality, or capitalism. So then we have some arguing that God is for gender equality, and others arguing that God is for patriarchy, and others arguing that what we really need is a better concept of gender. And so everyone is arguing about gender and no one is talking about God. Without making myself the argument police, what can quickly happen is that we develop reams and reams of material detailing our positions on everything other than God. It has gotten so boring, so dismal, so hopeless.

A reader asked the other day why I remain fond of Anselm’s Proslogion with its plodding, somewhat ridiculous hypotheticals. It is admittedly unlikely that two men would ever need to come up with an argument for the existence of God that needed only itself for proof (nowadays we’d need, minimally, some way to cash out politically). When I read the Proslogion for the first time, I found it surprisingly moving. It brought me to tears. Here’s why.

In Chapter 3, Anselm starts to generate some heat towards his proof. The perfect being, he argues,

assuredly exists so truly, that it cannot be conceived not to exist. For, it is possible to conceive of a being which cannot be conceived not to exist; and this is greater than one which can be conceived not to exist.

Anselm is thick in the middle of his logical proof at this point. Moving from one logical gotcha to the next, he is generating clear momentum toward his goal- a proof for the existence of God:

Hence, if that, than which nothing greater can be conceived, can be conceived not to exist, it is not that, than which nothing greater can be conceived. But this is an irreconcilable contradiction. There is, then, so truly a being than which nothing greater can be conceived to exist, that it cannot even be conceived not to exist;. and this being thou art, O Lord, our God.

It was that last line- “And this being thou art, O Lord, our God”; that brought the waterworks. Hidden at the end of line upon line of dull, exhausting argumentation, Anselm changes from the third to the second person. He moves from arguing for the possibility of the existence of a (hypothetical) God, to talking directly to God. “And this is you!”; his words rang out, in my version. I’ll never forget it. Under the heavy weight of analysis and argument, doxology broke through.

Without this second-personal mode, I’m afraid we’ve lost the plot. We’ve jumped the shark. We’ve attended our own funeral, giving long expanded speeches on why, perhaps, our discipline and its historic faith ought not to exist in the first place- due to its treatment of the poor and the orphan, of women and slaves, or the immigrant and and and.

Human sin comes to stand in for theology’s intellectual coherence, and this won’t do. It’ll break under its weight.

So about four years ago, I lost confidence in my training, in my ways of knowing, in my typical ways of engaging. The failure of my training to speak a truthful word about the God who was there, who existed at the other end of the logical proofs in the world of the second personal, it broke me open. We never got to “And this is you!” We rarely even used theological language to speak to God in the second person. It felt embarrassing, perhaps beneath us. It broke my heart.

It seemed to me that the only theological account worthy of the name would need to be a story. It would need to give an account of the time period that led Anselm to desire a proof, or of the man lost on a far away voyage, or of the migrant woman who knew to speak to God only in her own voice. Instead of arguments, it would need to use the second person. This is what it would sound like-My Lord and my God!

Divine omniscience concerns “God’s Knowledge”. Already the theologian must make a few choices. It this knowledge that God has of himself, or of the world? And what is the form of this knowledge? And how does God “have” it?

The predominant modern category for “God’s knowledge” has considered this knowledge to be propositional. “Omniscience” means that God has maximal propositional knowledge. For this reason, there is a whole side-conversation among theologians and philosophers discussing whether God might have false knowledge, meaning whether he could have propositional knowledge that turns out not to be true.

This is the kind of side quest that theologians are constantly generating for themselves that is based on a category error and ends up producing more heat than light. It drives me batty.

If a person denies that God has “maximal knowledge” (meaning maximal propositional knowledge), the implication is that God therefore has limited propositional knowledge. It would seem to imply a lack in the quantity or sum of knowledge God has- a no-go for classical theologians.

But to my mind, the first error is not in denying that God has “maximal” knowledge, but in assuming that “God’s knowledge” is propositional. But propositional knowledge is not the only form knowledge must take.

I think this is what is getting at here; though I’m certain his angle on this question will be different from mine. Wood calls for a version of what he calls “intersubjective knowledge”, which he does not define. Here’s what he has to say:

The issue here is how God, as subject, can really know us as subjects. I would argue that these two opposing views are but one-sided perceptions of a greater truth: that the very logic of the God-world relation, in all its historical and subjective particularities, is the logic of intersubjective knowing, whereas theologians typically construe this relation in essentialist terms (the God-world relation is either essential or contingent). Until we find a way to “think love” rather than merely think of love in contrast to logic, we will likely never resolve the restive opposition these two views bring to the fore. This is but one example of why the question of subjectivity seems to me utterly necessary for Christian theology, not only to address the world today, but to address itself.

This last bit- finding a way to “‘think love’ rather than merely think of love in contrast to logic” is a really fruitful suggestion- one that I am intrigued by, but also really stuck on. I don’t think its a mere flick of the wrist without substance. But I haven’t gotten very far in figuring out what the substance might be. The feminist and process thinkers of the 1990s took a very similar approach, but ended up with solutions that were metaphysically flimsy, if not completely implausible. But certainly affirming that God knows everything about everything generates few constructive possibilities. At its worse, it conceives of God as a supercomputer- and we already have enough of those. It might render God uneccessary in a world where maximal information is increasingly at our fingertips

So what is at stake in a question of God’s omniscience? This is what I am working through.

By my mind, the question of God’s knowledge has four ways of going wrong;

1. Imagining God’s knowledge is propositional (as I stated above);

2. Imagining that “knowledge” derives from “mind”. This is even more tricky, because defining “mind” is impossibly complex; and ascribing “mind” to God doubly so.

3. Imagining that God having maximal knowledge by necessity has implications for human freedom. 90% of the conversation regarding omniscience ends up adjudicating questions about human freedom and providence. I don’t think this is necessary (ha!), but it is difficult to navigate through this.

4. Additionally, “mind” seems to refer to modern conceptions of the word and not the classical nous. I suspect there is a clue here.

Some of the problem is just derivative of saying that God “has” anything. The ways in which words refer to God must differ from how they refer to humans. I suspect, too, that there is quite a bit at stake in our modern conceptions of knowledge and our obsessions with acquiring it. (My own piece will take up a technological angle relative to knowledge acquisition, and what God might have to do with that.)

In addition to this handbook article, I am working on a short chapter on wonder. I revisited Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Who is Man? for this, and was reminded of Heschel when I read this fantastic piece yesterday in the New York Times about Mendel Uminer and his “too many books”. Uminer, who was evicted from his apartment for possessing 10,000 books, reflects on the role of knowledge in his traditional Jewish upbringing:

In his teens, Uminer attended rabbinical seminary, where he embraced Talmudic study. Lessons began at 7 a.m. and ended with nights of vodka-fueled argument with the rabbis.

“My days were spent studying texts in Aramaic, Hebrew and Yiddish, and I sometimes went a whole year without seeing a woman’s face, but I was also disobedient and incorrigible,” he said. “I was always reading what I wanted to read, not only what they wanted me to read. But that’s where you assert yourself. Where you form your opinions. Where you make your own sense of the world.

The role of not only reading but argumentation reminded me of this distinctive aspect of rabbinic Jewish education. But this rigorous reading and argumentation does not lead to knowledge. It leads to wonder- which leads, in turn, to praise.

For Heschel wonder is what generates the possibility of any real religious thinking; he writes that “A scientific theory, once it is announced and accepted, does not have to be repeated twice a day. The insights of wonder must be constantly kept alive.”^[1] Theories might not need to be repeated twice daily- but prayers do. Prayer for Heschel and for all religious Jews is a necessary response to those things that cannot be nailed down by scientific theories.

To think of God’s knowledge as something concrete misses this dimension of knowledge as the first step in moving our minds beyond themselves. Put another way, God is not found in too many books. He’s found beyond them. But you really can’t get to the “beyond” apart from those 10,000 books.

^[1] God in Search of Man, 49.

1. Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose. Stark, like broken glass reflecting light.

2. Michael Connelly, Nightshade and

3. Ironwood. Addictive, not serious but not cheesy. I liked my first dip into Connelly. Good for when your brain is tired.

4. Evan S. Connell, Mrs. Bridge. Quiet, and then propulsive. Not the midlife crisis novel you want, but the one you deserve.

5. Tom Perrotta, GhostTown. Candy that wasn’t worth eating in the end. I won’t get that time back.

6. Atticus Lish, Preparation for the Next Life. Devastating. I’m not ready to talk about it yet. I love you Zooey.

7. Ross Barkan, Colossus. I wanted to like it. I didn’t.

8. Kristen Kobes Du Mez, Live Laugh Love. More on this to come.

9. Cal Flynn, The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness. I am interested in the wilderness as an idea. More on this in August.

10. David Edmonds, Death in a Shallow Pond. Great, great idea for a book, but disjointed and subject to too-clever summaries of what are complex ideas. I put it down.

11. Lauren Winner, The Dangers of Christian Practice. I took this on a beach vacation, which was my mistake (it’s not a beach read!). I’ve only finished half. Intriguing, but a bit stretched thin at the seams, imo, “danger” being a bit overwrought.

It can be hard to identify why not to use AI. As writes above, the efficiency and organization that AI provides, at the speed it provides it, can make the use of AI seem like a no-brainer. Increasingly it is difficult to explain the “why not” of using AI, behind a vague sense that human work is superior. I think for theology there are some specific reasons that AI is deficient, and they are very hard to describe.

In March posted a piece of AI-optimism, entitled “How I’m Using AI”. His piece helped me identify some of the intangible reasons that Grok fails as a theological side kick. TLDR: Theology is not simply information.

Aaron outlines how he has used the tool and why he encourages others to follow suit.

Aaron Renn

How I'm Using AI

Following up on my podcast with Dean Ball on AI, I wanted to share a little bit about how I’ve been using it…

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8 months ago · 55 likes · 10 comments · Aaron M. Renn

Renn writes:

Claude and Grok are also fantastic for getting background on topics. Think of them as an interactive encyclopedia. I recently read my first book by René Girard, and thought his interpretation of the death of Christ was pretty heterodox, and probably more aligned with Eastern Orthodoxy than Western Christianity, despite Girard being Catholic. Grok gave me all kinds of information about how various people had responded to Girard, as well as a comparison between his views and Eastern Orthodoxy.

This paragraph is a perfect example of why using AI is not equivalent to earning theological chops. Renn begins his query with an instinct- “Rene Girard’s view on the death of Christ is heterodox”. It turns out that a quick use of AI proves him right, in the sense that Girard is less compatible with his understanding of Western Christianity.

But this is where AI as your theological co-pilot gets a little off-kilter. Renn is mining Girard’s writing on the death of Christ (maybe The Scapegoat? though I’m not sure) for its theory of the atonement, and then evaluating it accordingly. But this is quite a limited way to engage what Girard wrote. I can’t tell from his description if this exhausts his approach, but reading to see if a book fits with one’s theological rules and principles would be a limited strategy.

When I taught theology, one of my main goals was to help students gain some distance from their own opinions as they encountered a text. I wanted them to inhabit the ideas and world of the author in order to understand how the author perceived the problem of the human condition and whatever questions the text might raise. For this reason, I’d assign a wide variety of thinkers. I sometimes got pushback about this, especially when I assigned people who veered too far from Christian orthodoxy. But I still maintain that the skills of listening, comprehension, and even discernment that result from this practice far, far outweigh any “risk”.

Theology is a rich and layered thought-world, and when you practice inhabiting a text with curiosity, what results is not simply a better idea of which ideas about God are “correct”. What results, instead, is a better sense of who we are as humans. You can gain a better set of questions or hone your instincts so that you perceive the world and its beauty and challenges a little differently.

The best theologians work to describe this realities of God and the world and embed them in their own thought-worlds. How theologians pursue this description varies quite a bit. As a teacher, I spent a lot of energy trying to help students move beyond “right” and “wrong”; or “ours” and “theirs”; to a posture of curiosity in regard to this variety. More than just providing the “spice of life”, theological variety serves to interrupt our assumptions about what we know, and can help us bump up against things we haven’t considered. This posture of openness is really critical to the set of virtues that allow us to speak well about God. (Perhaps it is not as important in other disciplines! I’m not prepared to say).

There isn’t a generic “all views are equal” ideal going on behind my view. It’s just that there is a lot that readers will miss if they are always jumping to evaluation first. If you do this, you can miss the sort of dexterity that I aim for. Ultimately, you can miss the fruit that reading provides. You’ll never get to good thinking without this sort of dexterity.

A second paragraph from Renn:

AI is great for getting a summary of how various commentators have interpreted passages of scripture. One of my favorites things to do with it is, when I hear something from a pastor that sounds like it might be a modern innovation, to ask whether or not any major figure in Christian history taught this prior to 1900. Out comes an entire history of the idea - if there is one.

If I want to use any of this material in print, I have it spit out links to credible sources.

Renn has started with what he perceives as a “red flag”- an overly modern innovation in a sermon or teaching- and looked to back fill his instinct from commentators. He then asks AI to confirm his instincts.

What even beginning students of interpretation know is that there are thousands of commentaries, and that they vary tremendously in their rigor, approach, and ideology. You can almost always find someone to validate your opinion. But when you approach the commentaries to affirm your opinion, you are entering a sort of doom loop characterized by the validation of your own ideals.

Renn also privileges history as a sort of interpretive trump card- as if “before 1900” is evidence of anything other than age- but that is a different interpretive problem of evangelicals.

Renn then skips a step, and looks for credible sources to validate his instincts. What he doesn’t do is listen and discern with an eye toward considering someone else’s ideas. He might not listen with a posture of openness, or trust, though, again, I can’t quite say.

I can promise you that this set of tools is going to make the work of the trained theologian miserable, if not impossible. If each listener thinks my words might be a “modern innovation” and goes to backfill these instincts by asking AI to confirm their instincts, we’ve created a near perfect loop of self-reinforcement. We’ve created a system where expertise is not useless- as some people warn- but where its fruit is devalued entirely. This is something I worry about quite a bit. You cannot get this fruit without doing the work of careful reading, arguing, and engaging with people who know more than you do. You won’t get it if you are seeking primarily to have your own ideas validated, either.

I understand why Renn uses the tools in these ways, but if he encourages this use without being aware of the shortfalls, it could impede the development of some of the higher skills, like discernment, and even wisdom, that I think the work of theology can ultimately provide. For this reason, I would not suggest regular use of AI in the way that Renn describes. Imagining ourselves to be the arbiter of all theological teaching- and imagining that theology is primarily about being on the “right side”, or gaining the “right information”- is a anemic understanding of what theology is for. More, maybe, on this point later.

The novel is in three parts. The first tells the story of this student, our unnamed narrator, who has returned to Providence. He is there to interview his beloved professor who teaches something like linguistics- art and literature and music and specifically the hearing of all three. The narrator’s journey to interview Thomas, his aging professor, is also a trip to his own past. He is visiting the city where he attended college and where his beloved professor lives. He is also visiting the ghosts of his former life- his wife, Mia, her black hair “not yet streaked with silver”, his friend Arjun before he fell from a window in St. Petersburg. The whole landscape is haunted; “the light arriving from the stars was younger, too, the birds dreaming in the tree cavities were the birds of the past, growth rings had vanished from the trees in which they slept”. He is visiting the end of his childhood.

The narrator drops his phone. The phone is there even when it isn’t, provoking him to reach for it and check it, to make a quick call or check directions. The narrator struggles with his memory. He is concerned about his ability to interview Thomas without his phone. But it was without his phone that he knew Thomas the first time, and so it is fitting, in a way, that he speaks to him now without it.

But its absence has changed the nature of the conversation. Will the interview matter if it is not transcribed? The first interview, the narrator decides, will not be recorded, so it will not “count”. He will just warm Thomas up, and discern what they will talk about the next day. He sets down his phone and pretends to hit record. It is a conceit that Thomas is unaware of. The deception bestows the interview with a formality that it does not have. (Do things count if they are not recorded, documented in their original form? The question is asked for the first time).

The first part of the novel is fragmentary. There are large gaps. As I read, I wasn’t sure if it was Lerner’s peculiar style, or a reflection of Thomas’ age and diminishment. But I could not follow his recounting of the interview, and it seemed the narrator struggled to make a coherent account out of Thomas’s words as well.

In the middle section of the novel the pieces start to come together. The narrator is giving a talk to commemorate Thomas’s life. Thomas has died, but “his voice will continue to speak to us and through us”. But there is a problem. The narrator casually mentioned in his lecture that his last interview with Thomas was reconstructed and not transcribed. Was it then falsified, a woman asks?

“A section of the interview was based on memory. That’s a scandal.”

“It was conducted under false pretenses”, she says.

Thomas had been told he was being recorded, when he wasn’t. So he was operating as if there would be a written account and not simply a memory. But all of the relationship between Thomas and his students had been like this, without recordings and iphones. Do those memories comprise a real accounting? Does any of it really count?

The pieces come together in the end. The third part of the book is narrated by Max, Thomas’s son. He cannot make his daughter Emmie eat. (The narrator’s daughter will not attend school). These are things that young daughters do, summarily and without excuse. But the girls will not do these things. They instead are glued to their ipad screens, where they watch unboxing videos of plush stuffed toys being opened and proclaimed over.

Lerner’s writing about the captivation of the screen lacks the shock-jock pyrotechnics of someone like Patricia Lockwood, who has made a name for herself writing novels of the internet age. Lerner’s narrator observes this fascination at a distance. He is stoic and deliberate about the girl’s fascination with their screens. The girls, he says, are satisfied.

“I would never have described anything as satisfying at that age”, Max explains. “And she seemed to mean the satisfaction of a kind of physical need: while she was watching a flattened image on a screen, all those mouth sounds and little taps and crinkles provoked a low-level somatic response, scratched a kind of itch. It’s like the device takes you out of the real world, shields you from all the pressures and information, but then it administers this series of subtle sensory inputs and muffled shocks, these mild effects, as compensation for the unmanageable reality it’s made disappear. Which really is like pornography, maybe just is pornography, reducing all the complexity and messiness of an intimate encounter and offering a safer, addictive, milder, repeatable version of satisfaction in its stead.”

Emmie, Max’s daughter, finally begins to eat when she watches these addictive videos. The opening of her stomach was thrilling but also somehow terrible. She eats Oreos and watches Youtube and her refusal to eat- which once seemed to be a defiant rebellion against the world’s losses- now is lost to a sugar-rush and internet binge. She eats Oreos and watches unboxing videos. The real sorrow and grief of the world are exchanged for sugared cereal and “satisfactions”.

The cheap satisfactions of Emmie’s you-tube videos are twinned with a story Max tells just a few pages later.

Thomas is on a call with Emmie when Max hears him coughing. Thomas is hospitalized a few days later, after Max is able to call 911 across the country and be patched into Providence- it is all so remote.

A nurse calls. Max will be allowed “a brief virtual visit”; she doesn’t say that it is to say good-bye, but Max knows. A Zoom link will be sent by text. He can log in and go to a virtual waiting room, and then will be connected to say goodbye to his father.

Do you see it, the scandal, the false and cheap satisfaction- to eat only with a youtube vide of cheap polyester toys being ripped open, to die and offer absolution over zoom? It is all done at a remove, loving and eating and dying.

Max fixes his hair. He finds a suit coat. He waits for the host to start the meeting.

There is commotion in the room. The nurses are wearing masks. Thomas is intubated, he cannot speak. Papa, Max says, in German, the language of his childhood. The screen keeps freezing. He is disconnected.

The nurse calls, on her private phone. They forego facetime. Max tries to say goodbye.

“I could hear him listening. I could somehow sense the shape of his attention. I can’t do this, I was thinking, maybe I even said that out loud, I can’t do this, but then I just was doing it, a rush of German and tears…. Things I never would have said if his image or his body were before me, or if anyone could see my face…

“I know you did your best, I know you love me, I know you loved her, I do not blame you. No one is to blame… I forgive you, I love you, you can go, you can be at peace now, goodbye”.

All of the things that he could not say he has now said, and the nurse hangs up her private cell phone.

Thomas does not die. Max still has the call in his call history, the call where he “said the things I couldn’t say again, things that he had no memory of hearing”. He checks his iphone for evidence that this conversation happened.

He told him he loved him. He told him he blamed him. He said he was sorry. These confessions remain, in the air (but not written down)- does Thomas remember? Did he hear them?

Max goes to visit Thomas in Providence. He wants to know if his dad heard him, heard him saying things he cannot say again. He cannot ask. They speak of other things.

The things that happen to us, the things that are recorded in memory alone? Do they count? If they are not recorded or meticulously transcribed or remembered by the hearer, are they understood? What happens to the things we did when they are over and only fragmentary memories?

What happens to those days spent sheltered at home? What do we make of the things said in covid-tide, to the things done that we might now regret? What of the things we believed were true, the things we subjected others to because of them? Do we speak of them and revisit them, or just move past them like Max, wondering if Thomas heard, and if he remembers the things he might never have said if circumstances were different? How was all of this made possible only through the false promise of transcription- a substitute for presence, for error, for intimacy?

Can you forgive things that you do not ever speak of, or that you cannot bring yourself to ever say?

The narrator suspects that Thomas would have loved that his last published statement was “unstable”. It was pieced together from the fragmentary memories of Thomas and the narrator. Max’s apology and absolution is unstable, too. So is the narrator’s account of his memory, and Thomas’s account of his own life. It is all a recounting of variable weight. Our attempts to record a life make it in to something else, something that presents itself as more durable than the life itself. But the mediation of screens dulls a life. Perfect mechanical transcriptions can satisfy without error and flesh in the frame. But a transcript, “something objective… to test my experience against”, turns out to be differently unstable.

The experience of the body, and the memories we hold, proves both less accurate, and more true.

Thomas has died by euthanasia. His home is stuffed with art, with paintings and photographs. His words and the interview have been lost to time and memory.

Emmie will inherit Thomas’ art. That at least has weight to it.

Many conversations, it seems to me, that suggest an alternative to Roman Catholic positions on matters of life or doctrine set up a pair of straw men. It is often the Roman Catholic view that claims priority in origin and truthfulness, with the Protestant view a johnny-come-lately. Protestantism, alternately, is blamed for “rampant individualism”, “consumer capitalism”, and the abuse of technology. I once even heard a lecture where Brad Gregory blamed Protestantism for the… surveillance wing of the CIA, which was both interesting and a little rich.

One of the traits of much current ideas-type writing is that it seeks a target on which to place the ills of the “modern world”. (A note, here- my aim is to no longer use “the modern world” in my writing, because I do not know what it means). Protestantism makes an easy target. But making a straw man out of a tradition that is as varied geographically, historically, and theologically as Protestantism is means that such a target is both easy and useless. Because Protestantism does not have a teaching office, literally anything can be attributed to its failures of teaching. If you know one Baptist who harms his wife, Protestantism can be said to allow it, insofar as it does not have the official, centralized authority to restrain it. (Church discipline exists, in theory, but also it exists largely in theory).

Because Protestantism is such an easy target, placing the blame on it for secular individualism would place a very heavy burden of proof on the person making the argument. How would a person prove such a statement? They can’t. Lacking such proof, we often end up operating largely on vibes.

If a person lacked good teaching about the body, or conception, or menstruation, it is easy for them to react to difficulties in these areas and look for a place to blame. “The Church” is an easy target. But I am not so sure that “the Church” is the place for teaching about contraception, simply because I am not sure that there is a one-size-fits-all teaching on the matter.

In a well written piece out today entitled Protestants and the Pill, Kate Shelton writes about a trend she observes of lessening use of hormonal contraception among Protestants. She echoed observations in this really thoughtful piece at Christianity Today. As the piece at CT observed, women’s fertility is varied and complex, and we should absolutely support more research into ways to alleviate the burden of infertility. If we believe children are a gift, Christians should support prudent ways to support couples with fertility challenges pursuing this good.

But there are a few threads in some of the conversations swirling about fertility that I think we might pull on. For one, marriage, and not sex, is the metaphor for union between God and humans. This matters quite a bit!

See this bit, from Shelton’s piece:

She compared the marital act to participation in Eucharistic union with Christ: “We are to take and eat and to be united with him, and whether we believe that’s symbolic or literal or somewhere in between, there’s a very real sense in which he has given himself to us on the marriage bed of the cross.”

Ben Jefferies, like ­many Protestants I’ve talked to, found his way into thinking about contraception through the writings of Pope John Paul II, which he praises for expressing a poetic and poignant view of marriage, despite “being written by a chaste man who was never married.”

What is interesting to me from these observations is that the writings of Pope John Paul II are praised as poetic and poignant, but the “poetic” view they take- of Christ “giving himself to us on the marriage bed of the cross” makes sex, and not marriage, the place where Christ’s union with the world is imaged. Now, sex certainly does have a place within marriage, but collapsing the site of this union in this way makes sex total. Do you see how this collapse enlarges sexual union, and not marriage itself, as the site of God’s union with the world? That is a theological decision that I wouldn’t share.

Absent an allegorical reading of the Song of Songs (which I think there are good reasons to avoid), much of the nuptial imagery comes much later in the history of interpretation, flourishing with the mystical writings on union with Christ. Sexual renunciation among the earlier virgin martyrs was more about renouncing one’s female sex than inhabiting it. Therefore, to my mind reading sex as an allegory for Christ’s relationship with the Church is a) a theological choice b) made on historical more than biblical grounds, and c) one I don’t personally find to be the best way to think about sex.

Why am I so confident disagreeing with JPII on this (besides the fact that I am not a Catholic)?

For one, because I do think the Bible talks about sex and conception and every thing else related, not as an allegory, but as a real, lived reality that the people of Israel had to mediate.

If you are looking for a discussion of menstruation, you’ll find it in the book of Leviticus. I’d hazard a guess that most churches do not consider these discussions at all in their common life. Alongside teaching about contraception, Shelton’s piece argues that knowledge about menstruation should be taught at the level of the local church. In her words:

It may seem implausible that something as private and, well, human as a menstrual cycle could draw a woman into a deeper relationship with God, with her husband, with her own body.

But the “embodied faith” of Israel did not consider menstruation a means to a deeper relationship with God. (This is what I meant here, by the “pagan” instinct of much modern women’s spirituality.) The idea that menstrual cycles grant us knowledge of God that helps us live in deeper relation to him, and to our own bodies, is not the way the discussion of menstrual cycles worked in ancient Israel. (This is actually a question of how natural theology works, which is a current interest of mine).

In fact, menstruation was a sign, first and foremost, of death. For Israel, the “life was in the blood” (Lev 17:14). What this meant was that when blood was present- either in the slaughtering of an animal, or a corpse, or in childbirth or menstruation- certain cleansing rituals needed to be undertaken in order that this passing of life could be honored.

Leviticus is about marking God’s presence in time. Bodies are miniature microcosms, not symbols as much as they are actual, concrete instantiations of the time-fulness of life. Bodies get old. They age and die. As they do this, they are marked, in time, by the rituals that God proscribed that Israel adhere to.

The cleansing rituals that followed menstruation marked the exit of life from the body. These were not moral rituals- the “uncleanness” that is spoken of is ceremonial, and not ethical. Menstruation as a recurring cycle that women’s bodies participate in is a miniature calendar marking the passing of life from the body. It is not a means to get closer to God, any more than observing aging or death would be. Knowledge of the body, here, is reduced to knowledge of one’s own mortality.

What I object to, most strongly, is a view of God and his workings in the world that relies on a “hidden” order or structure that it is our job to discover. God is present in the world without hiding behind every tree or bush. In saying that sex is a gift, we are saying all that we need to say about it. Making it sacred, for me, actually impedes the kind of divisions being made in Leviticus between the holy and the profane. The profane is simply that which is good, but not good for use in the order of revealed knowledge of God. It is good for its own sake. For it, we can return thanks, joyfully, relishing its gifts- of communion and hospitality, of sexuality and its nourishments, of children if they are granted to us. None of these need to be made holy to be good. That is how we receive the world as gift.

There was a golden age of nonfiction book publishing, between the years of 1990-2010(ish). We are no longer in it!

What constitutes “golden age” for me are the following:

1. Serious non-fiction that is not academic.

   1. Academic writing is notoriously plodding and unimaginative. This is not the case in all disciplines- historians have managed to write seriously and with style. But even those books that have mastered this- I’m thinking of Peter Brown and Elizabeth Clark, as examples- have petered out in favor of historical books with very presentist concerns. An example would be Candida Moss, whose work on early Christian martyrdom (2012, 2013) was suggestive and though controversial, managed to take account of its historical questions without losing sight of them entirely. By 2018, she had co-written a book about Hobby Lobby, the Museum of the Bible, and Christian nationalism. The latter might be an interesting historical question in the right hands. But this version has all the marks of a conspiracy theory- hidden influence, covert political operations and allegations that project motivation. Minimally, such marks make it difficult for historical work to keep its objectivity.

2. These books had a clear focus and tight organization.

Right now I’m reading Toby Lester’s The Fourth Part of the World. He tells the story of the Waldsmuller map (1507), which sold for the highest price ever paid for a historical document in 2003. the map contains the first reference to “America”, and also depicts the New World as surrounded by water, which was not known at the time. Here is how Lester introduces the idea:

Before long I realized that the map offers a window on something far vaster, stranger, and more interesting than jsut the story of how America got its name. It provides a novel way of understanding how, over the course of several centuries, Europeans gradually shook off long-held ideas about the world, rapidly expanded their geographical and intellectual horizons, and eventually- in a collective enterprise that culminated in the making of the map- managed to arrive at a new understanding of the world as a whole” (x).

Do you see how he makes his project both modest and expansive? He is not trying to tell a theory of everything, or to project a conspiracy or grand political theory as the hidden hand behind the story. He has an artifact (concrete), that he uses to unspool a series of stories that together enlarge our understanding of something that is less concrete- in his case, how premodern people conceptualized the “new world”. With this artifact, he can get at some of the more juicy bits, about Eurocentric worldviews, for instance. But crucially, this is not projection- of course people had a Eurocentric worldview- the rest of the world had not been discovered yet! In this way, Lester can point out an intellectual deficiency that is not also a moral indictment. This is a lost art.

Significantly, the stories these books to tell are greater than the sum of their parts. From one small artifact, we can tell a larger story that provokes curiosity and interest. In many recent books, the artifacts are used to the opposite good- to foreclose an idea or set of political opinions, or to prove a “theory of everything” that actually shuts down curiosity. I’ll write more about these in Part II.

3. They mastered using an artifact, story, or historical event to tie in a larger question.

Another book I’ve enjoyed lately is David Rooney’s About Time. This reflects my “golden age” traits, though it was published in 2021. Rooney’s subtitle, “A history of civilization in twelve clocks”, might suggest the kind of grandiosity I usually dislike. There are so many ways “civilization”, as a trope, can go wrong in a writer’s hand. But in this case, he stays grounded because he is focused on artifacts- twelve unusual clocks- that he uses to describe changes not only in time-keeping, but in the perception of time. It’s nicely done, and fun to listen to or read in small chunks because of its organization. Rooney is also from a family of horologists, so he has the kind of intimate familiarity with the artifact he has chosen to allow him to really understand the significance of each clock. Full disclosure- I haven’t finished this one yet, so it still might go wrong! But so far so good.

The focus on artifacts to tell stories certainly corresponded with the rise of what is called “social history” in the humanities, which is usually dated around the 1960s in the historical disciplines. Social history allowed historians to engage artifacts, like cooking pots and garments, to tell the histories, crucially, of women and families in their daily life. They could use this new knowledge of daily life to tell a richer, more textured story about civilizations that did not rely only on traditional materials, like military conquests or political archives. This new interest in “everyday life” allowed for ordinary people- those outside the halls of power, but critically also women and children- to have their stories told.

It is no surprise that social history brought with it a significant new set of resources for writers of non fiction books. All of these overlooked artifacts brought with them overlooked stories. By and large, they are stories that have great interest to readers.

Sadly, a lot of these traits- what I’d describe as tightly focused books with a concrete question that invites (but does not demand) the reader’s reconsideration of previously held ideas- don’t exist any longer in commercial nonfiction.

Here is my quick diagnosis of why I think we are no longer in the “Golden Age” of Non fiction, which I’ll write about more in Part II:

1. Many non fiction books are too presentist.

2. Many books and arguments lack a sense of history beyond the “present moment”.

3. These books rely on the same set of anecdotes, or the same current research or cultural touch points, to make their argument.

4. They appeal to the same audience who is anxious, unsettled, or in other ways beholden to “the modern era”. Crucially, they assume everyone in their audience feels the same way about “the modern era”! In this way, these authors show themselves to be incurious about their readers, and frankly about the world itself.

Slogan 1- The arc of history bends toward justice. This one has been treated a few places of late- I wish I had taken note of where. The phrase was popularized by Martin Luther King Jr. but comes from an earlier abolitionist. The quote really took off with Barack Obama, whose considerable rhetorical skill papered over the fact that much of what he spoke about was stronger rhetorically than it was possible politically. (His administration also grew my familiarity with a slogan I think is true, which is that hope is not a strategy).

If the “arc of history bends toward justice” , a few things would need to be true. If we are reading it theologically, the “arc of history” would need to be consistent with providence- the language that theologians use to speak about God’s work in the world. If this were true, than God’s providential working in the world moves toward the pursuit of justice in the world. God’s providence would be inevitable and continuous with what it is we think should happen in the world.

This raises a few issues. First, our desires for the world are often discontinuous with providence! Providence is nothing if not mysterious. Figures through the Christian Scriptures are warned not to assume they know God’s ways, which are “higher” (and different from) our own desires.

Our current moment is preoccupied with justice. It has become almost synonymous with “good”. To deny someone “justice” is to wish harm on them.

But “justice” is not an easy topic! Adjudicating what it means, and how to portion it out, takes a stunningly complex judicial system which is often in error in its best attempts.

But the bigger problem for me is with the “bending” language. The slogan frames progress as inevitable. It identifies “history” as “that which moves in a progressively positive direction”. But “progress” is anything but inevitable! In fact, many of the attempts we have made at progress make things worse!

Additionally, if the future is just, the past is unjust. This is chronological snobbery, for sure. It is easy to become “educated” and find things wrong with your forbears. But what we forget is the very real historical conditions that people found themselves in before us, including their own limitations.

When I taught theology, I held close the fear of over-educating my students. Sometimes what happens in theological education is that students get so confident of the error of more “simple” forms of faith that they lose touch with God. They look down on uneducated belief or naieve constructs. But my own private goal was to never make it so that someone despised their Grandmother’s prayers. Holding together the good of what we have inherited and making small adjustments is harder than it might seem. At the end of the day, I hope I always side with your grandmother’s prayers. Believing that the arc of history bends towards justice almost inevitably alienates us from what might be a really rich inheritance. It’s too brittle a worldview to do good work.

Additionally, the language of progress sometimes appeals to us because it allows us to hide our sin. When we imagine that our action in the world is making the world better, we can obfuscate the ways our attempts to “improve” the world might be perpetuating other, worse conditions. Progress seeks the good of “improvement” without thinking too much about what is lost. It also idealizes its current condition, only slightly better, as the future we ought to aspire to. In this way it can only be an imagined future.

But improvement- self-improvement, world-improvement, what have you, is not a Christian good. I do mean that. Believing that “the arc of history bends toward justice” can sound awfully like believing that our desired policies and belief systems will be achieved. But God’s providence runs crooked.

Slogan 2- The future has arrived. No, it hasn’t. What has happened is your priors were temporarily confirmed by the circumstances you find yourselves in today. Perhaps you predicted just this event, or perhaps you hoped for it. But seeing that it has arrived, it is no longer future, but present. This is just another way to say “I was right”.

The future remains always beyond us, just out of sight. It is, by definition, not present.

Part of the trick of Christian eschatology is that it doesn’t just confirm our priors. Life with God is not the assurance that we were right, all along. Rather, God draws us toward himself and yet remains, always just slightly out of the frame. He is always other. The life with God, when we are made like him as he is, will be no longer future- it will be now. We will all be surprised.

The future remains always outside of our grasp. It is like God in this way. When we try to master it or identify it, we just project what we recognize in it with what we are currently experiencing. Our own desires for “progress” often reflect our desire to have more of what we find comfortable, satisfying, or exciting. But these things might not be an improvement, in the end.

This is more than my being pedantic. Much of Christian writing seems to think that its job is to predict the future. We have a generation of spiritual referees, hoping to usher in whatever is next by identifying where we are. We are strategists, developing taxonomies, refereeing a game many of us don’t even seem to want to play. But triumphalism is always a refusal of trust. We have too few people describing what it feels like to need God or be in search of him, or what it feels like when we’ve found him.

Belief in God is, by definition, offering up the future to God’s own hands. Living in the present for this reason is an act of trust. Our persistent desire to figure out “what’s next” or “where we go from here” can be a refusal of trust. It’s just anxiety!! I am tired of reading endless diagnostics of “what’s wrong with American Christianity” that read like they were written by anxious people. There is something deeply un-Christian about our current, persistent need to always figure things out.

Regardless of what has happened, or where we are, the rules haven’t changed. The Christian life is a slow plod sometimes. Manna for today, “consider the lilies”, even the sparrows is more like it. When we are so focused on building and preparing for whatever is next, we can forget that God is with us today. We don’t need to always be strategizing, like used car salesmen. It is a very bad look on religious men. It makes us look like we don’t even believe in God.

Slogan 3- There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in. This line from Leonard Cohen was the epigraph for at least four books I read last year. It seemed a fitting opening to so many, I think, because the world felt as if it were collapsing around them. Pandemics, wars and threat of wars, and the many insistent sorrows that pepper our lives can seem to form the “cracks” that mark our exteriors. But imagining that we live in the “worst of times” just demonstrates that we have no historical memory.

A few things I’m at odds with here, but one is the ideal of an even exterior as the ideal.

I’ve gotten into interior design. Not the glossy new stuff. My aesthetic is more “my rich aunt died and left all this here, after she worked for the Embassy in the ‘50s.” My ideal house is lived in, with a patina that is rich with history and stories and a few mistakes. I pay extra for handmade tile that is uneven with a crackled finish. I carefully dust around oil paintings that depict even older urns and vases of flowers. I collect old furniture that I hope to someday recover. Everything good shows its age.

Somehow we have come to believe that human perfection is possible. We say we don’t believe this, but our frustration with the actual limits of human lives reflects it. The reality of finitude has not crept close enough to make us understand what we are. But no one gets out of this life alive, and for that reason we all bear the marks of age and decay. We spent a few years of our lives recently kept indoors to avoid a virus that would kill some of us. Some of us did this seemingly without an awareness that death is part of the rich tapestry of a life that includes fellowship and hospitality and joy. I don’t mean to bring up a very tender conversation for many, but what I observed during the covid pandemic were some people who more afraid of dying than they were of living small lives. This slow movement toward the grave should be a grace, a reminder that the time we have has to be lived. Death is a curse, but so is living small.

We can both deny and memorialize our suffering. We can put people on a pedestal who have been through hard things, and ask them to suffer in exemplary ways. But suffering can crush you. It can make people mean and angry, hardened to this life. It is no promise of beauty, that’s for sure.

Living life with an awareness of death treats suffering as part of this world, not an outlier or an ornament or something to be celebrated. It is just the world. Perhaps it sets it alight in certain ways, but I don’t think we need to gild it. It is awful and crushing. Resurrection is not a making-beautiful of something ugly; it is making something out of what was not. It’s not a home renovation or a new makeover. It is not a new set of glasses that you can see in a new way out of. It is the thing you thought was lost, restored. It is coming to the end of your rope and then, a hand. It is falling asleep in the dark and waking up in a room bathed in glorious light.

When we imagine that heaven is just this world, with the bad things taken out, I think we misunderstand how much suffering is already written in to this world as we know it. Cohen’s slogan is beautiful, and rings true to a lot of people. This is because suffering is for many an invitation to see the world in a new way. But there are those whose suffering goes on and on, without a kintsugi gilded edge. For them, eternity is a relief. A discontinuity between this life and the next brings with it the promise of something different, something new, for those who have suffered. Promising that the life to come is simply an extension of this world is a promise for privileged people. When you talk about heaven, remember that people need to be delivered. God is beyond, drawing us out of our suffering. Only a God who is other can do this. What he gives us is not more, but something altogether different.

• The first is the idea that excellence equals success.

• The second is the view that you can program excellence.

• The third is the view that excellence is an external good to the factors that set out to program it.

We know and often hear repeated that people are not machines, and that, as Wendell Berry has said, “the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.” All of this seems obvious (of course we want to be people!), but it also assumes that it is easy to sort yourself into the category you desire. But we can actually work machine-like in our efforts to form persons, and for this reason we often don’t reach our goals.

When we attempt to form people in human ways with a mechanical imaginary, we can operate with a set of mechanical instincts preloaded into our imaginations. I have three particular instincts in mind.

The first is the idea that people can be programmed.

The second is the view that this undertaking is “from above”- that it can be created and then imparted into individuals without a wholesale renovation of their existing environments. But formation is not a hat that you put on. It involves the whole person.

And the last is the view that any of this can be done speedily or efficiently.

People cannot be programmed. Even the language should reveal that we are off to the wrong course. Computer programming, as I understand it, is undertaken with a set of prompts that are designed to produce predictable outcomes. This combination of things- set prompts, design, and predictable outcomes- work well for machines. But for humans, we have to be much more creative and intuitive to reach our desired goal. The language of “goal” is preferred here over “outcomes”; because forming people is not a one size fits all endeavor. If our goal is individual flourishing, we might get there any number of ways. Some people might need more structure, some would benefit from less. Some should focus on music, others on art. If the goal is flourishing, the program is a bit messy and haphazard, because flourishing will look different for each child.

Formation is not a hat you put on. There are desired effects that we can adopt in order to achieve certain goals. Perhaps you want to cook dinner every night and so you schedule your grocery delivery to arrive at a routine, predictable time. Maybe you want to get more exercise, and so you take your daily work call while you go for a walk. Both of these examples are external outputs that you can enter into the “program” of your life to achieve desired goals.

Formation, however, is not like this.

And finally, all of this takes a lot more time than you’d expect.

Things take so much more time than we are accustomed to. Machines produce outputs quickly and predictably. and are often updated in order to be even quicker and more efficient. This is why it is particularly important to remember that persons are embodied, because our bodies do tell the story of how long things take. Gestation is 9 months, and childhood is 18 years- it even takes a week or two to recover from a common cold! Our bodies do not grow muscle or gain weight instantly, or even in six weeks like the internet influencers will promise. It can take years of daily effort to see results. This is true also of traits like patience, generosity, respect, and kindness. What starts with simple table manners can end with attentiveness and loving concern, but I can tell you from experience that it takes years.

When I lead workshops on Person Formation, there are a few realities I hope to re-embed in participants that are connected to these three anti-mechanical imaginaries.

The first is the soul’s rootedness in the body.

Person-formation cannot be abstracted from bodily health (defined loosely). But it cannot also be reduced to it. We can all think of examples of stunningly muscled individuals who lack charity or hope. We can also think of those among us who suffer in the body, and whose frailty has developed in them a deeper form of forbearance that is to admired.

Because souls are embodied, forming persons is a holistic endeavor. It must provoke us toward disciplines that engage our souls as bodies. This means that it takes time, attention, and unhurried patience. But it also must allow for the unpredictability that accompanies bodies- for illness, fatigue, and injury, for intellectual and neuropsychological differences and injury. Any view of person formation that excludes those with injured or impaired brains or bodies is not an accurate view of formation.

But how can this be? Can you really come to a view of formation that is irrespective of what we often call “excellence”?

I think you can, and its connected to these next two points.

First, there is a difference between hope and progress.

Person formation begins, I think, with a deep understanding of hope. This means that the project is rooted in the expectation of the possibility of good things to come. Because I am a gardener, for me this means working on modifying my garden with the hope of what I will harvest. I actually love all the stages of gardening, from amending the soil to doing fall clean up. But none of it makes sense without a vision of what I hope to grow.

The same, I think, is true with families. If you don’t start with the end in mind, you are more likely to add things haphazardly, and more likely to be reactive, responding only to what everyone else is doing and not carefully considering what is right for your particular situation. How to plan a garden (or craft a family) is a much longer conversation, but minimally it begins with a vision of what you hope to grow. If you don’t have a vision for this, I can give you some suggestions for where to start.

And second, we need a deep knowledge of time. I think I’d like to consider this last point in a much longer form at some point, but recognizing the timeliness of our humanity- that we are finite and limited, that we have a beginning and an end, that our lives happen so fast, and that the Christian imaginary promises an end in God that surpasses our time-bound humanity- all of this is radically countercultural and deeply, beautifully Christian.

The impetus for these reflections was a particular concern I have about…. youth sports. I am entirely serious about this. More about that soon.

What do you think? Is there a “mechanical imaginary” at hand when we think about person formation? Do we confuse excellence and formation? Do we expect formation to be fast, when it is really very very slow? Have you seen this in your own life? I always love to hear from you.

I think I gave you three sets of points in just a few paragraphs? which suggests that maybe this should be a longer project.

Cheers
KHS

Here are a few indie publishers that I love to buy from, or have recently discovered:

Persephone Press: to me, the gold standard of indie publishers. Based in the UK, Persephone publishes beautiful editions of forgotten or out of print female writers, mostly from the mid-twentieth century. By narrowing their focus and designing beautiful books, Persephone has filled a hole in the market and drawn their own enthusiastic following. They also offer subscriptions and will “recommend” a book for you based on your interests; just delightful.

Fitzcarraldo editions: Fitzcarraldo publishes both fiction and non-fiction and also offers a subscription model. Their line is more literary, contemporary and self-consciously serious than Persephone’s, but I go to them when I want to read something new or generative that I might not find elsewhere. They’ve chosen to publish their books in uniform design- fiction in blue, non-fiction in white, and poetry in blue-and-white, which grants their catalog a visual coherence that I think is critical for an indie press. Contemporary fiction can be a stretch for me, but this publisher has taste, which can be hard to find.

Tilted Axis: I learned of this press from this write-up in the New York Times. I don’t have much of a taste for anything that considers itself “experimental”, but I’m game to keep trying. The design is really good. I do like to read a few things in translation each year.

Tivoli Books: founded in 2024, this press has a few new books on my to-read list; including this “art world” novel (I’m a sucker for those). The publisher’s stated goals, identified here:

too many good books have been unjustly forgotten, and too much of today’s talent is overlooked by mainstream publishers for commercial, political and other reasons. Combining old and new, we hope to publish five or six really good titles every year. We have a particular interest in books that appeal to men.

Again, catnip.

Bellevue: I found this press because they published one of my favorite novels of last year, Paul Harding’s The Tinkers (I liked it so much I wrote Paul some fan mail- write me back, Paul!) They publish literary fiction and nonfiction at the intersection of the arts and sciences, “because we believe that science and the humanities are natural companions for understanding the human experience”, what a goal! needs to request a half dozen titles for me so I can better survey their catalog, but these are catnip. (I have a side interest in clocks! And maps. Send me books about either!)

Thornbush Press: Founded by my friend Sarah Hinlicky Wilson, Thornbush publishes a small catalog of theological titles, many by Sarah herself. I reviewed this book last month.

Who else should I add?

Carol Christ, a scholar of religion whose work focused on rehabilitating the “goddess” motif, saw the symbol system of Christianity as thickly settled with male dominance. Women simply could not escape the cultivation of their minds and imaginations with such symbols. In her words:

Religions centered on the worship of a male God create “moods” and “motivations” that keep women in a state of psychological dependence on men and male authority, while at the same legitimating the political and social authority of fathers and sons in the institutions of society. Religious symbol systems focused around exclusively male images of divinity create the impression that female power can never be fully legitimate or wholly beneficent. This message need never be explicitly stated (as, for example, it is in the story of Eve) for its effect to be felt. A woman completely ignorant of the myths of female evil in biblical religion nonetheless acknowledges the anomaly of female power when she prays exclusively to a male God.

Christ (what a name for her!) and other feminist thinkers argued that what we needed was a much earlier form of feminism, one seen in the goddess worship of the ancient fertility cults. In these practices, the most original symbol was not “God the Father” but the Goddess, the Universal Mother, or even “Mother Earth”.

The religious landscape of the 1970s was rife with goddess worship. Ask anyone who visited even a few natural food co-ops at the time and they’ll tell you that the books aisle was stuffed with literature on invoking the goddess within, and the cork bulletin boards were packed with invitations to feminist consciousness raising meetings, scheduled around the next full moon. What these movements saw was a historical opportunity to elevate the female by identifying her with nature. If the female was the original symbol, this is minimally because all life proceeds from a female womb. Elevating the female, then, grants women a priority of status and an easy identification with nature. It unseats “God the Father” as the original symbol and replaces him with Mother Earth. It identifies Nature with the female.

This might seem like a beneficial move. For one, the natural world has seen violent degradation, and our very human lives depend on caring for the earth. For another reason, there is a long history of denying the value of the more earthy, feminine practices of things like pregnancy, childbearing, and even the daily work of care and feeding of families. All of these things are “natural”, “female”, and deeply significant.

But there is a great danger with an easy identification of “the natural” with women.

Minimally, nature is not our friend. I wrote about this recently in an article I wrote for Christianity Today, where I reflected that I spent a lot of time with my own young children striving to cultivate in them a love for nature.

But there were bugs. And heat, and dreadful humidity. We sweat endlessly while we scratched our mosquito bites. There was occasional rain, and sometimes gentle but sometimes driving thunderstorms. We encountered mosquitoes and leeches and a dreadful swimming snake. For every awe-inspiring vista and swooping bird, there was a sunburn and a sprained ankle to match. Daily we trudged through the forest, sometimes enamored but sometimes praying to be delivered.

When I was pregnant with our first child, I was enamored with the idea of “natural birth”. I even went so far as to meet a prospective doula at a local coffee shop. I cannot now remember how I found her, but I do remember that she had a same sex partner and went on to birth her first child under a full moon on a Florida beach (?). I’ve often wondered about sharks.

Anyway. My husband, a medical doctor, used to gently (and sometimes not-so-gently) remind me that there is nothing necessarily “good” about what’s “natural”. Arsenic is natural, he’d say. So is lye, and plutonium, and fevers and dying in childbirth. Prioritizing the “natural” requires a kind of pristination of nature that is only possible for people who are poorly-acquainted with it.

In the Christian theological tradition there is a funny little tangle around the question of “nature”. The first tangle exists around the goodness of nature itself. One lens affirms that nature is good because it is given. This tradition, drawing in later years on the thought of Thomas Aquinas, affirms that because all life is given from God, all life is necessarily good. This means that nature itself is a gift, because God is its origin.

How to call nature good presents the second tangle- because nature is undeniably not always experienced as good. You’d need to have either an extraordinarily blessed existence, or a sort of Pollyannaish disposition, to see only good in the “red in tooth and claw” natural world. Some traditions attribute any shadow in nature to the historical Fall. Before this event, these traditions argue, everything was indeed “good”- by which they mean perfect, uncorrupted, and without death or decay. Lions were vegetarians, and there were no mosquitoes.

I’ll admit I think this view of nature’s goodness is also a little naieve. Creation, after all, has built into it certain forms of predation. And though the Christian tradition does affirm that death is the “great enemy”, I find it hard to maintain that natural death is an “enemy” of the form of finite life that God granted us. The Scriptures themselves call the death of the saints “precious” to the Lord (Psalm 116:15).

Admittedly, the tangle that I have exposed here is a delicate one. How is it that Christians- and here I mean Catholics, Orthodox and Protestants alike- can affirm creation as good, without granting God’s original world a kind of remote perfection? How can we think about ourselves as created without referring to such a remote perfection to order our own lives?

Some of the clue to this tangle comes with untangling the question of Nature.

I’ve gone on long enough for this dispatch (this idea came to me while I was unloading the dishwasher, which I’ve left halfway done).

But some of the dangers I see in the female-wellness space are downstream of an unrealistic and even naieve view of “the natural”.

Take, for one random example (ha!), the question of contraception.

I have hinted before that I think Humanae Vitae is a stunningly naieve document as regards sexuality and its intent. Indeed, Josh Butler’s scandalous (and somewhat hilarious) missteps came from reading Humanae Vitae and applying it literally.

But one of the seldom-noted difficulties downstream of the Catholic church’s teaching on contraception is that it equates “the natural” with the the un-technologically mediated. The body’s reproductive processes grant it a certain kind of order, such that sexual intercourse leads to reproduction. But it might in fact be more accurate to read that equation backwards- meaning that the point here is not that sexual intercourse yields reproduction, but that reproduction ought to only be derived from intercourse. For in fact it is notoriously not the case that all acts of sexual intercourse lead to conception- ask any infertile couple. Even the Biblical text separates the two, if the Song of Songs can be taken to be a book about sex, which contains within it no discussion of conception.

What I am saying here, minimally, is that a rejection of contraception requires a form of pristination of nature-as-an-unmediated-good that does not square with any observation of reality, or with most theological accounts of Creation. To adhere to such a rule requires that “reality” is read onto a pristinized account of the world that is rooted in forms- Ideal forms which, though they have a large place in the history of Christian thought, fit unevenly with the world as we receive it.

The upshot for the feminist influencers is that such a prstinization of “nature” allows for a form of modern goddess worship. It is a form of “the natural” that valorizes the Female body as original, as pristine, and as an Ideal. It makes a “norm” out of what is in fact a very uneven experience. Additionally, this valorization of Nature can function as a power grab, as women can claim for themselves a front-row seat to the the most original of life-forces- fertility. This knowledge, in turn, is something that men cannot have. So while the new feminism claims to be a return to older, more traditional forms that value traditional female roles, it can in fact be inverted such that Women are the only true observers of what’s real. It can function as a form of goddess religion, where women’s bodies are the ones who tell time and perpetuate the human race. By repristinating nature, we not only run the risk of reinforcing the gender wars that we are always waging. We also fail to tell the truth about the world as we’ve received it. We can risk living our lives according to a form of Nature that never existed, instead of living with courage with the lives we have.

[1] See Carol P. Christ, “Why Women Need the Goddess”,found at https://www.goddessariadne.org/why-women-need-the-goddess-part-1.

My work circles around a few big questions. The first is the technological mindset that dominates American religion, a mindset enhanced by Protestant preoccupations with certainty.

The second concerns issues of gender and the church. I’m concerned that overly reductive concerns with power have led us to miss a richer story and more interesting story about humankind.

The last is about some bigger, more foundational questions about Christian doctrine; what is religion for, what sorts of projects is God about, and how might we confuse the two. I’m interested in hope versus progress; in grace versus control; in tending versus legislating; in the realities of the body versus the body as a symbol, and in time as a creature, and not something to be managed.

I hope to pick some of these up in longer form in 2026.

Here is my own personal “Best of 2025”. Everything should be unlocked as a gift to my readers!

Theological Essays

Forsaking all others, at Mere Orthodoxy

To have at the end of your life one single story, a promise that was kept, would gesture to all the things you did not choose. It might leave their shadow in its wake. But it might reveal as well the One who in fire and blood made himself known as Covenant-keeper, as a promise-making God. In forsaking all others, you’d be choosing this one thing, marriage as the shadow of the oath made in smoke and fire.

God is your Father, Not your dad, in Christianity Today

You do certain things before such a God. You might kneel in reverence. You might lay prostrate and cover your head in fear. You might raise your hands toward heaven. Sometimes, when angered, you might attempt a wrestling match. But you’d be left changed. You’d forever limp.

Reviews

Religion's own worst enemy, at Mere Orthodoxy’s print journal

Christian Smith. Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America. Oxford University Press, 2025. $34.99. 440 pp.

Obsolescence also answers questions that Smith might not even have anticipated. For instance, one challenge with obsolete technologies is that they become difficult to use because replacement parts or technicians who know how to fix them cannot be easily found. There are now many denominations that cannot find qualified pastors to staff their obsolete churches. Meanwhile, schools of counseling are glutted with practitioners aspiring to this new, more desirable trade—one that is surpassing religion in its popularity. Everyone, it seems, goes to counseling. Far fewer go to church when their souls feel restless or distressed.

Biblicist Means for Egalitarian Ends, at Mere Orthodoxy

It is surprising that Barr shares so many of Betty Friedan’s concerns, sixty years later. Her argument, for this reason, reads as quite dated. What, then, is her real issue? Any woman now can be both a working woman, a mother, and a pastor. She just cannot do so and remain a Southern Baptist. Personally, I have not found this difficult; my whole life I have been a Christian, a woman, and never once a Southern Baptist.

Hope Without God, at First Things

“Hopeful pessimism” is a confusing lexical cul de sac. It makes “hope” near equivalent to “optimism”, rejects it, and then tries to salvage whatever-it-is that serves as a prophylactic against despair. Part of the confusion is that hope is functioning here as an utterly, imminent secular term. This is an authorial choice and a conceivable one; however, choosing to deploy a commonly religious word like “hope” without invoking God, or indeed anything beyond this-worldly realm, in the end misappropriates “hope” as something entirely human. Without any transcendent referent, “hope” becomes a slogan. Without any eschatology, it really is simply wishful optimism. Action can be sustained on that alone, but it will be left to the unusually heroic or courageous to do so. Without God, “losing the future” is indeed losing all that we have.

My new books column, which I hope will be a mix of theological essay and review

The Magpie, No.1, at Mere Orthodoxy

I was standing in a store at the mall, shopping for a homecoming dress with my daughter, when I invented purity culture for the second time.

(Just trust me).

And a few favorite pieces on Substack:

I have been granted the great privilege by my editor at Mere Orthodoxy, of “writing whatever you want but please be yourself.” Paired with the request that “if you are going to request all of these books to review perhaps we should make a column out of it,” and that “I think you are the only mean holding all of these odd books together”; perhaps the column might be as eclectic, as odd, even as curious as I myself can be. So today I present to you my new books column: The Magpie.

A few words about the column’s title. I considered another option: “The Overcaffeinated Theologian” had the advantage of being accurate, the disadvantage of being too-on-the nose. I am, indeed, quite caffeinated, but I think my curiosity runs deeper than caffeine. The second, “The Magpie”, had the advantage of being not the first, and also the only other title I came up with.

Magpies are the rascals of the avian world. They gather shiny things they find beautiful and potentially useful. Such behavior is derided by intellectuals under the category of curiositas, a vice of the classical world. I do understand the preference for sustained, careful critique over flitting-about from one thing to the next. But perhaps a thoughtful-enough magpie might herself be the center around which such wild and interesting curiosities might cohere. Perhaps such a dismissive critique of the magpie has more than a bit of anti-feminine about it—gathering beautiful things might be a good in itself. And perhaps such a creature herself may be the center that grants these curiosities a form. Perhaps. Time will tell.

Go give it a read and let me know what you think.

KHS

She opens with a well known story of Harvard President Larry Summers, who was fired after some remarks he gave that negatively reflected on women’s intellectual capacity. As Andrews notes:

In it, he said that female underrepresentation in hard sciences was partly due to “different availability of aptitude at the high end” as well as taste differences between men and women “not attributable to socialization.”

For a president of Harvard, you’d think Summers would have known better than to make such an off-hand statement. To credit intellectual aptitude in any way to gender is an incredibly incendiary claim. It does not matter that it seems to be true. Studies do bear out that there is a higher standard deviation of male intellect, meaning there is a greater distribution of males at both the higher end and the lower end of the IQ range.

As someone who was once in the dating pool, and then in higher education, and then in the “real world” in whatever form I’ve found it, this seems to be true.

If this is true— if there is a higher standard of deviation for male intellect than female- it would account for two of the phenomena that the online-types write about; first, it might be the reason women outnumber men in college. There are just more of them who could fulfill the basic requirements to complete the requirements- while some of the male population has been lost to the low-IQ quadrant. Second, it might explain some of the reason for the dating crisis that women regularly report. In order for men and women to be matched 1:1, at least some of women with median intelligence will need to date men with low intelligence. The case of the mega-pop star excepting (and I am actually on team Travis, I think he’s a smart guy), most women will not accept this trade.

But there’s a second, more interesting claim that Andrews makes. It is not simply that Summers made the observations he did regarding the standard deviation of intellect; it is that it was women who “did the cancelling”. Andrews argument as I read it goes as follows:

1. Cancel culture is a significant issue in culture- including in academia, the law, and other highly educated professions.

2. Cancel culture has become more prevalent.

3. Women are also becoming more prevalent in these highly educated, “white collar” professions.

4. Therefore, women are the reason for cancel culture.

It’s an interesting argument, though as you’ll see, it rests on a few logical inferences that may not be solid. For one, I do not know that cancel culture is more prevalent in my own field of theological studies than it was previously- the men have long enjoyed a good cancellation under the guise of “orthodoxy”.

But for Andrews’ argument to work, drawing on the “great feminization thesis”, “Everything you think of as “wokeness” is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.”

Whether or not Andrews is right about the relationship between the “great feminization” and cancel culture, here is the part of her argument that caught my eye. Andrews writes the following about how groups of women operate:

Female group dynamics favor consensus and cooperation. Men order each other around, but women can only suggest and persuade. Any criticism or negative sentiment, if it absolutely must be expressed, needs to be buried in layers of compliments. The outcome of a discussion is less important than the fact that a discussion was held and everyone participated in it. The most important sex difference in group dynamics is attitude to conflict. In short, men wage conflict openly while women covertly undermine or ostracize their enemies.

What Andrews is describing is a kind of group-think that values collaboration and social codes more than truth-telling, productive conflict, or trail-blazing.

The problem, Andrews writes, “is that female modes of interaction are not well suited to accomplishing the goals of many major institutions.” In my opinion, they are not well suited to theological clarity, either.

Now connect Andrews’s concerns, however overstated they may be, with Anne Trubek’s observations from August of this year, which she titled “Women Write About Themselves; Men Write About Other Things”. Anne is not ideologically aligned with Helen Andrews, but it is notable that the phenomenon Andrews describes- women are more concerned with alliances and allegiances to the group, as well as personal feelings and their violation- aligns with Trubek’s observation that women are disproportionately drawn to memoir writing. According to Trubek, it is increasingly difficult to publish female writers who are not writing memoir. That seems to be all women want to write!

If it is the case that female writers have a preference for first person narration, this almost certainly reflects in their academic scholarship, even when it is not memoir. In my opinion, the prevalence of identity-based books- primarily those on gender- can be explained by this preference. If it is the case that women prefer reading books about other women’s experience, than women will keep producing such books- especially in a market dominated as ours is by sales.

But what does this mean for the “field” as a whole, and for theological integrity in general?
What it means, I think, is that the silo-ization of my discipline of theology will continue, and the production of theological writing might degrade with this silo-ization.

I wrote a little bit about my own theory of women’s increasing participation in my discipline of theology here. And though I think Andrews’s case is overstated and more than a little misogynist, I do think it is the case, as I wrote earlier, that

Women of my age were told that they were just as good as men, and that the odds were in our favor- everyone wanted more women in their programs. But now that the women have arrived, having been told that they were “just as good as men”, the affordances have not stopped coming. Being female is still considered a benefit in admissions and for many religious jobs. The playing field is not just level, it is now slanted toward female talent. Them’s fighting words, I know, but the data bears this out.

And yet I find myself still needing to think and talk about women’s issues. How can this be? What sort of issues can we possibly still have?

Don’t get me wrong- I do think there are still issues for women, especially inside religious spaces. Some religious spaces still expect women to behave in more traditionally feminine ways- ways that can make it difficult to figure out how to be a leader (much less a trailblazer or a truth-teller). But for my money’s worth, the bigger problem is the silo-ization that leads women to write and think about “women’s issues”, and then swaddles us from critique due to norms that prefer collaboration and soft-pedaled compliments over hard-driving argument and critique. In a word, we used to be up to something- and now we largely talk about ourselves.

What do you think?

So imagine now, in September, that I bring you a small bouquet. They are exquisite showstoppers. There is just nothing like these plants for their variety and drama. They invite jealousy. Every year people ask how they can grow their own- which I welcome. Some, though, demand their own. They sometimes ask me to sell them, or come to their homes and plant them for them. Something this beautiful certainly draws attention, but what is hidden is how long it took to grow just one flower, and all that it cost, in energy, in effort and sweat, and in the thrice-daily checks I do of my own plants. But this just is what it takes, because this is the world in which such flowers bloom. It has these particular constraints.

Families are like this, I think. Beautiful ones draw envious glances, but much of the labor is hidden. Invisible, too, are the costs that such attention demands. Some of the most demanding children can become the most exquisite. Only the mothers and fathers, and sometimes the grandmothers, know what they cost their parents.

This is important, I think, because the world we live in has its own constraints, and parenting can conceal and reveal them.

and are a bit younger than I- the better part of a decade, perhaps- which means they are still comfortably in their childbearing years. (I am 42). They have both received the gift of several young children, close together- and they, as I did, are enjoying the loud, messy, humid and muggy years of early childhood.

They know that young children are good gifts. But they are also heavy ones. They are ones received with joy but also, sometimes, with a bit of trepidation. This is why the Church is so needed to support young families- because an unexpected pregnancy, or one after another after another, can indeed be too much for one person alone to hold.

But the Christian Church (and here I am speaking of the “universal Church”) exists not so much to offer sound teaching and moral instruction on the matters that pertain to young families. If you enter any church on a normal Sunday, there might be some young couples seeking guidance on contraception. There will be many, many more who have used it for years without thought, who have used IVF to receive their children, who have struggled with infidelity or infertility or sexual practices that violate their partners, who bring into marriage sexual histories that make them chase laws when they actually need grace. There will be many, many more who know what families cost.

And this, here, is my main concern. We cannot advise regarding contraception as if such issues derive directly from “nature” and its laws. There is a current resurgence in looking to natural law to cut the gnarly cords of gender and sexuality, but “natural law”, whatever it is, is not a command. It is a fittingness, an orderliness, or a set of ends. Like my flowers, it sets certain kinds of rules- 120 days from planting to digging- but it says little more than this. Due to bad weather, you may have to break this rule, or extend it. Nothing might bloom one year, or everything might be late, even though nature’s rule says you should always have flowers in August. Prudent observers know that nature does not abide its own rules.

This is why I’ve encouraged a minimal view on sexuality, “in accordance with Scripture”. What we need for conversations about such things is a firm sense of the world we live in, including its constraints. Even if “Scripture” seemed to say one thing about contraception, we’d need to pair it with our knowledge of our own, fallen nature. But Scripture does not say anything about contraception, not in any way. The one reference- to Onan- is concerned with breaking the laws about Levirate marriage, and not a parallel to modern contraception. Indeed the one book that seems to be about sex, the Song of Songs, is not at all about reproduction!

The “pressure” of the biblical text toward the doctrines about Christ and the Trinity accumulates throughout the whole text. The storylines and narratives of both Old and New build to the point that teaching about the God-man, or about the Trinity, are conclusions more than novel formulations. This is at least one reason that I think the analogy with speaking about sex, and speaking about God, is mistaken. There simply is not the same kind of biblical pressure to speak about the former, simply because the Bible is not a book about sex, but a book about God.

For the same reason, I don’t think that “sexual libertinism” is a heresy. It is a sin. But sins do not need to be corrected theologically. They need to be confessed and forgiven. Heresies require theological formulations, but sins require pastoral care.

I certainly don’t think “we shouldn’t talk about these issues”. My intention here is not to be “hip and cool”; it is more that I do think that we risk binding consciences in ways that Scripture does not. This is, to me, quite a big problem- and the one that is more likely to lead us to sin against one another.

In this case, I fear we are looking to the Church for something that only God can provide- namely, discernment, solace, and absolution.

The Book of Acts is forever reminding us that the tendency to make law what are matters of conscience is a perennial concern of the Christian. In the early church, it was dietary laws that were of gravest concern.

In Acts 10, Peter has a vision. It’s worth reading in full:

⁹ About noon the following day as they were on their journey and approaching the city, Peter went up on the roof to pray. ¹⁰ He became hungry and wanted something to eat, and while the meal was being prepared, he fell into a trance. ¹¹ He saw heaven opened and something like a large sheet being let down to earth by its four corners. ¹² It contained all kinds of four-footed animals, as well as reptiles and birds. ¹³ Then a voice told him, “Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.”

¹⁴ “Surely not, Lord!” Peter replied. “I have never eaten anything impure or unclean.”

¹⁵ The voice spoke to him a second time, “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.”

¹⁶ This happened three times, and immediately the sheet was taken back to heaven.

The old religious tradition, which had prohibited eating such animals, was being supplemented by new teaching, which instead taught that such animals were no longer impure.

I suppose Peter was being taught several things in that great vision in Acts 10, but the most important was that God was the one who named things clean or unclean. It was not a Law or a simple observation of nature that allowed or disallowed certain foods. It was God himself. In Romans 14, Paul reminds us of the very same concern-

Quoting, again, at length because its important:

⁵ One person considers one day more sacred than another; another considers every day alike. Each of them should be fully convinced in their own mind. ⁶ Whoever regards one day as special does so to the Lord. Whoever eats meat does so to the Lord, for they give thanks to God; and whoever abstains does so to the Lord and gives thanks to God. ⁷ For none of us lives for ourselves alone, and none of us dies for ourselves alone. ⁸ If we live, we live for the Lord; and if we die, we die for the Lord. So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord. ⁹ For this very reason, Christ died and returned to life so that he might be the Lord of both the dead and the living.

¹⁰ You, then, why do you judge your brother or sister^[a]? Or why do you treat them with contempt? For we will all stand before God’s judgment seat. ¹¹ It is written:

“‘As surely as I live,’ says the Lord,
‘every knee will bow before me;
every tongue will acknowledge God.’”^[b]

¹² So then, each of us will give an account of ourselves to God.

¹³ Therefore let us stop passing judgment on one another. Instead, make up your mind not to put any stumbling block or obstacle in the way of a brother or sister. ¹⁴ I am convinced, being fully persuaded in the Lord Jesus, that nothing is unclean in itself. But if anyone regards something as unclean, then for that person it is unclean.

The Romans 14 passage strongly suggests that it is the individual conscience, before God, that is “binding”- and that we ought to honor those convictions before the Lord without holding others to them. The “strong” and the “weak” will very well choose differently on these matters, but neither is forbidden. God himself might allow certain ones to choose one way, and others another. The accountability due is before God, who alone knows how heavy are some of the things we carry.

I am, for one, unpersuaded on the meaningfulness of the “historic Christian prohibition against contraception”. That Luther abhorred contraceptive sex is a matter of personal biography and not doctrine. Augustine, whose teaching on the will remains quite important for theology, also felt that nocturnal emissions were a sign of a divided will. His reflections on conjugal love remain, to my mind, matters of personal biography and not doctrine. To write that “we 21st century Christians are liberal on the issue of contraception with respect to the great cloud of witnesses who have come before us!” treats theology like a time machine, and not a complicated set of judgments that engage church, community, and culture. There is much advice from that great cloud that I have dispensed with, and unless you hold to a quite restrictive view of doctrine and its development, you have done so, too. Repristination is not itself a theological good.

Whether the “great cloud of witnesses” should be used as “the strong” to bind the consciences of modern Christians seems, to me, a flawed strategy. Before Lambeth Christians also did not use computers or cell phones, or cook the same recipes as we do today. This seems to me a matter of historical interest and not doctrinal relevance.

In matters of reproduction, Protestants often want to use sexuality as a cipher that will unlock other teaching about marriage, homosexuality, contraception, and gender. But I think it does not work that way. I think, on some of these issues, what we are doing in the interim is binding consciences in a way that prevents individuals from discerning, before God, the shape of their own lives. Now certainly sexual practices outside of Christian marriage, and those that harm each other, are “sin”. But one gift of Christian marriage is the gift of one’s whole self to the other. This means that we are bound to discern, together, how to be faithful in regard to procreation. We are bound, too, to confess our sins to one another, and to forgive. I think we can trust Christians to do this, and to seek forgiveness when they’ve failed to.

Each of us is granted our own garden. What it demands, and what it takes to tend it, is hidden from most everyone else. You can no more demand that I share my fruit with you, than you can demand I come tend your garden. To bear with such planting and to grant it the long, tedious attention it demands is its own spiritual practice. It requires observing reality, as it is. It requires that we are not blinded by our ideals. It requires becoming acquainted with hard work- but also learning that there isn’t a direct relationship between this hard work and any yield the results. It requires, too, learning to delight in whatever it is you receive. But most of all, it demands that you tend your own garden, and not that of your neighbor. Take of that what you will.

But as usual I have different fish to fry. My concern- why I thought that piece was worth the risk- is that I think “complementarianism” is an artificial and historically-located system of male headship that was responding more to social and cultural concerns than to biblical teaching about the relationship between men and women. (Aaron Renn, with whom I share many disagreements, actually sees this the same way). I do not, actually, resist all gender difference, and I do think there is a form of metaphysical “headship” built in to creation (this will need to wait for the book). But I do *not* think this yields any difference in roles, offices, or leadership in the world or the church. Whereas Renn wants to retrieve a form of “biblical patriarchy”, I’m after a view of gender that takes sin more seriously.

I see the same features surrounding this conversation as I do around the conversations about contraception that I’ve dipped my toe in the last few days.

Let me explain.

When we think of “theology” as a received tradition of settled thought on a matter, we easily forget the role of culture in forming our instincts and thinking. The most obvious example here is conversation about whether “women should work outside the home”; as Mary Harrington helpfully discusses in Feminism against Progress, a lot of this conversation resulted from social changes that resulted from the industrial revolution, where most work moved from the home to outside of it. In a culture where domestic economies *are* the sum total of “work”, the question of whether women should “work”, or “work outside the home”, is incoherent.

So when we move to think theologically on the question of women’s roles inside or outside of the home, as Grudem et al started to do in the 1970s, we inevitably think theologically about matters of society that are in no way given or settled. They are changeable with new forms of technology and changes in culture. The anti-evangelical feminism movement, by my read, actually had real, concrete goods at hand- namely that women should remain committed to families before economic work outside the home. When possible, I think this is also a good- its what I have chosen for my own family, though I can imagine doing otherwise were my circumstances different. I think, too, that there are a lot (a lot, a lot!) of features of the relationship between men and women that are under-theorized because they are not socially acceptable- even some features of what makes a “man” or a “woman” that might alienate me from my female readers and certainly from my female academic peers.

For instance, I think if there are “sins” of masculinity- which culturally we are nearly unanimous about- there most also be “sins” of femininity- which you rarely hear spoken. Otherwise, are we willing to say that “maleness” has been impaired by in in ways that “femaleness” hasn’t been? What would be the logic supporting this view? I cannot think of any possible way to make this argument, though I am sure there have been attempts.

The problem we have, I think, is assuming that “women’s roles” and “men’s roles” are timeless theological truths that we must protect. In truth, the question of how families should be ordered belongs more properly to ethics than to theology. Ethicists are more suited, hopefully, to examining the way culture and society inflect our theological teaching. But what has happened in this conversation is that complementarian theologians have used Scripture as a power move and tried to rewrite male headship into doctrine, as a timeless, unchangeable truth. Even a lot of the theologians who want to preserve male headship (hi, guys! hope you’re well!) see the mistakes here and are working to unlink doctrinal theology from ethical concerns

But the damage has been done. We are now having theological arguments about social and cultural preferences, bastardizing the role of theology in the process.

Additionally, those who want to preserve complementarian roles feel quite strongly that to do otherwise is to “disobey Scripture” or divine law. They think these conversations themselves are transgressive; “obedience to right theology” is a clear, overriding concern. This is what I’d call Lindbeck’s cognitive-propositional view of theology, and it is not the only way to think about how doctrine “works”.

There are a few ways forward.

What I hope we can do is chart a different vision of what theology is and what it is for. A lot of this I attempted in my writing on Lindbeck, (maybe start with this piece on Tim Keller and cognitive-propositionalism). As I’ve written, doctrine is not merely a way to secure cognitive propositions. Rather, it should arise out of and reflect a form of life. The form of life itself is changeable, but it reveals a larger set of commitments that speak of a timeless reality, to which this form of life is ordered.

Languages change. The English I speak is not the Queen’s English. But it shares enough in common that the changes of culture have not changed the core of the language; we can identify the two types of English as the same language. I’d suggest we would have more success if, when thinking about contraception and gender, we asked how our views on these concerns reflect the culture of “Church”; more than how these views reflect a timeless, eternal Form. Are we speaking a coherent language that remains itself, like “English”, or are we trying to mimic an accent that is time bound and not ours to retain?

If the realities that we hope to retain do not reflect timeless “Truths”, what we might have is a culture problem, not a theological problem. Do we need to institute practices in our own churches that would seek to revive domestic habits or ways of inter-sex relating that we think are valuable? We might! But this a question of culture and not doctrine.

I can anticipate some nerves here- particularly the question of whether I am denying the existence of an eternal, timeless form of Truth- but do you see how that question reveals, in itself, a set of cognitive-propositionalist assumptions? Do you see how we might think differently about the relationship of God’s truth to our lives and so ask a better set of questions?

If you are wondering “what I am after”, it’s actually very little. I suspect the dimensions of my own life and practices would satisfy Grudem himself, if he were curious to interrogate them. I suppose if I am after anything its a form of intellectual consistency that allows theology to speak of God, and to accept on some of these matters that they are not, themselves, theological questions.

Gender is not a theological question, not directly. But that we can’t discern this difference suggests to me that we are trying to strong arm our social concerns- both on the left and the right- into doctrine, in order to have our way. This is the bigger fish I’m out to fry.

Once I took some coursework in feminist philosophy. I like philosophy as a discipline, but the seminar rooms can get a bit rancorous. On this particular day we were discussing, again, ad nauseam, what constituted a “feminist”. It is true that the inability of the discipline to define this term has been both generative and destructive to the discipline. But on this day, our emotional professor threw up her hands and nearly-shouted “but who will police the boundaries???” and I slowly raised my hand, to offer my services. It wasn’t my best moment, but my heirs will identify it as “something she would do”.

I’d had about enough of the righteous preening in those seminar rooms, and I have a knee-jerk tendency to want to poke people when they are being too pious about their intellectual commitments. But nevertheless, this concern to fence off appropriate behavior is both a concern for intellectual consistency and a means of control. What should we do about the masses clamoring at the gate??

In the comments on my last post, the instinct to concern ourselves with the behavior of unruly others cropped up. This is a common instinct, but I think we might do without it.

Here it is nicely and clearly summed up:

1. How do you (and I mean both the royal you and you specifically) avoid the trap of having the "irreducible tragic and particular" become merely a theological blank check to do whatever you want?

2. "The point of discernment is that no one can tell you how this maps onto your own life. You must live it for yourself. Discernment is sisters to accountability- it is your life that you are taking account of, and not someone else’s"

I was under the impression that the point of discernment was to attempt to love God's will for your life. And more to the point, is it your life's, or God.

In summation, I see very little difference between your position and a mere liberal-individualistic framework within some Christian trappings.

In regard to a “theological blank check”, it seems to me both that this is a common concern (St. Paul had it) and an unavoidable one. Yes, there will be those who avoid responsibility, act with ill intent and disobey the commandments. Limiting their number seems to be not my responsibility.
What my responsibility is is to point the way to Christ, in whom sins are reconciled. The life of the Christian concerns itself, I think, with weeding our own gardens and welcoming others to enjoy their shade and their fruit. They might, then, want to join us in the messy, sweaty, dirty work that is gardening. But I bear no concern, as a theologian, to insist that everyone do this. I can’t make you weed your own garden. My job is only to speak of the God who makes things grow, and to return thanks when they do.

Does my emphasis on discernment put the onus of responsibility on the individual, and not the community? Well, yes, I believe it does. This is because this is how discernment works.

I’m not saying that it is “every man for himself” when it comes to discernment, but I am saying that “being discerning” is the work that an individual must do for himself. This seems to be to be the full thrust of Proverbs and the Psalms that tell us that “blessed is the man” who loves the law. The point, of course, is not that the man has “chosen for himself” which law to love, or written the law for himself, but it is indeed this man who loves it. Be that man.

8. Be Wise. Yes, you.

Here’s another question, the second part of the one quoted above:

Which brings me to Protestants not having a Magisterium - that's true. But we have our churches (and, depending on denomination, other courts), which, ideally, would be bastions not only of worship but critical reflection, conversation, and formation. I suspect some churches do this better than others in medium-size venues (i.e., not the whole congregation usually, but not relegating it to individuals or individual families, but somewhere in between). The Church needs to be the Church, but it can't be if we're going to elevate the individual to the arbiter of wisdom. Which I'm not sure is what you're saying, but is my concern.

I’m not sure we are “elevating the individual to the arbiter of wisdom”. As far as I can tell, the individual is the arbiter of wisdom, in the sense in which I am talking about “wisdom”.

At base, the concern of the writer is to help others avoid sin. I get these kinds of questions a lot, and they are puzzling to me. Do I think that other people might sin? Well, yes of course I do-that’s why I’m a Christian. I think sin is perennial and built in to the world as we know it. This is not license (St. Paul covered this pretty well, I think), it is just how I understand what creatures do. But behaving as if my job was to limit the quantity of sin among my community seems both poorly considered and bound to fail. Christianity, after all, is not a sin-management program.

I suspect that some of what attracts Protestants to Catholicism is a deep fear of doing the wrong thing. This is because they have internalized the belief that “being Christian” is doing the right things- living morally or according to Scripture. But without a Magisterium, if it is not clear what to do, you can be left feeling rootless and without guidance. Protestants who feel deeply that they must do the “right thing” can find a safe harbor in Catholicism.1

But what if “being Christian” is not about doing the right things, at all? Wisdom tells a different story, not of license, but of grace. As my friend Matt likes to say, Christ came for sinners only. The rest can fend for themselves, but I know which boat I am on. My job is just to hand out the life jackets.

9. Don’t divinize nature.

   I do not intend to get into the weeds of Humanae Vitae, or the weeds of “nature” versus “grace”, but I do think there is an interesting question regarding the function of “nature” as it regards contraception, especially for Protestants. Seeing as one of my eagle-eyed readers quoted exactly the section that includes this question, I’ll give it a shot.

II. From Humane Vitae, 16.

Neither the Church nor her doctrine is inconsistent when she considers it lawful for married people to take advantage of the infertile period but condemns as always unlawful the use of means which directly prevent conception, even when the reasons given for the later practice may appear to be upright and serious. In reality, these two cases are completely different. In the former the married couple rightly use a faculty provided them by nature. In the later they obstruct the natural development of the generative process. It cannot be denied that in each case the married couple, for acceptable reasons, are both perfectly clear in their intention to avoid children and wish to make sure that none will result. But it is equally true that it is exclusively in the former case that husband and wife are ready to abstain from intercourse during the fertile period as often as for reasonable motives the birth of another child is not desirable. And when the infertile period recurs, they use their married intimacy to express their mutual love and safeguard their fidelity toward one another. In doing this they certainly give proof of a true and authentic love.

If the aim of sex is conception, than nature might function such that all sex might lead to conception. But this is true only for men, not for women. It seems to me that if sex is primarily intended for reproduction, than it’s a design error that this is not how nature works. Insofar as bodies are created such that there is such a thing as a “non-fertile window”, it seems to me that non-contraceptive sex is… created. People who oppose contraception might instead seek to only have sex when it includes the possibility of pregnancy, but they don’t. The recognition that non-fertile sex is a good seems written in to even anti-contraceptive takes.

HV indeed agrees and says that sex has other purposes, such as mutual love and fidelity, and non-fertile sex is allowed by such means as tracking fertility and the like, so that Catholics can (prudently) space their families by having sex only when not-fertile.

But I see no difference between the intentional non-contraceptive sex of the non-fertile window and the use of means of contraception. Can we be prudent about which means? Sure. But I think we risk elevating “nature” to be the arbiter of fertility in a way that seems to divinize nature, considering it as without sin and its effects. But what is “nature”, but created, and so subject to sin?2 I do not think we need to deny all forms of natural theology to call this a potential overreach. 3

The ethicist rejoinder is that no!, nature has ends of which artificial means cannot mimic- what of artificial wombs? what of surrogacy and the like? Ethicists have the benefit of end-runs around what seem to me more common sense instincts. There, I’ve said it. If your only rejoinder to this concern is “but what about artificial wombs!”, you are being lazy. Extending the potential overreaches of a point of logic can be a way of avoiding the question.

10. Theology is not ethics.

"I try to speak of sex in accordance with Scripture, which is to say not very often and with little clarity."

Wondering if you say this as a theologian specifically or a Christian.

Because I wonder how much our Christian ethics (bio-ethics or otherwise) stem from this "not in the Bible" approach. If we need a whole list of things in Scripture in order to say something is moral or immoral, well, that's part of our whole debacle!

Curious how you distinguish helpful vs. unhelpful strict Biblicism here.

This is a line I usually use when I talk about hell, and I think its a better fit for that doctrine than it is for discussions of sex. There are a lot of theological conversations that we can have that are not “read off of the Bible”. What I am concerned about here is the way we prioritize our concerns. Why have we decided that contraception is the matter we ought to concern ourselves with?

It is usually, I think, because we have other fish to fry.

For some Protestants, it is because they have other concerns about sexuality and they suspect that securing the foundations might allow them to hedge off other behaviors- and usually other people’s behaviors. But if this is the case, they ought to address the behaviors of concern to them- is it about someone else’s sexual practices? Is it pornography?- and not look for preemptive fencing in contraception.

The reasons for this are two fold, I think.

First, it makes us think that theology is a means of control. If I get this one, foundational teaching right, I can prevent malpractice later down the road. But theology is not a system of levers and pulleys, not at all. The questions that arise, though they are overlapping, should not be used as a lever for the other questions that we are really worried about.

and second, proceeding this way theologically usually doesn’t work! If you are worried about domestic violence in your church, you should talk to your people about not being violent, instead of trying to create a theological scaffolding by using “She” for God instead of “He”. If your people are not valuing women’s contributions, you should have a conversation about your systems and policy instead of starting a sermon series about Mary. Don’t do a series on the Trinity as a dancing community to get people to join a Bible study. Theology is not for social change- not primarily.4

I may take a few more later, as time allows. Thanks.

did the world a service when she ventured into the conversation around permanent contraception and wrote a provocative piece about vasectomies. Her piece comes on the heels of several years of musings about these topics, from the Josh Butler debacle at the low end to Aristotelian and Catholic reflections on the ordered ends of the human person at the high end.

What is missing has been a distinctively Protestant voice about reproduction and sexuality. , a Protestant, writes regularly, and also provocatively, about these topics- but without picking a fight, I’m not sure there is anything distinctively *Protestant* about his writing on these matters.1

I would not propose myself for this constructive project, both because I have other things ahead in line and because it is outside of my own expertise- but also because I try to speak of sex in accordance with Scripture, which is to say not very often and with little clarity.

But I think there are, in fact, distinctively Protestant ways to approach the question of sexuality and reproduction- and I suspect some of the dearth of conversation about these topics reflects a certain Protestant sensibility. It also reflects the boundaries of what might be possible with a Protestant view. So here are a few “desiderata”- a fancy way of saying “things we ought to consider”, in order to build a Protestant theology of the body.

1. Protestants do not have a magisterium. We should not envy one.

The question of who speaks for Protestantism is a perennial one, because of course the answer is no one, and everyone. What results is often more like the “clambering cymbal” of the loveless life, than it is a prudent, well-lived conversation.

It is true that a teaching office centralizes, and standardizes, theological reflection on a topic. For many Catholics (and especially for Protestant converts to Catholicism), such standardization is highly welcome- in fact, it can be difficult for some Roman Catholics to conceive of “theology” without centralization and standardization.

Welcome, ye hearty ones, to the wild west of Protestantism. I love it here.

Of course, some denominations may have a teaching-office-lite (TM), but they are as likely to rely on other denominational resources to craft an amalgam, as they are to vest a theological statement with one person, in one voice.

Because of my own opinions about what theology is and what it is for, I think this is a benefit of Protestantism. But minimally, you ought to recognize that Protestants simply cannot have doctrinal statements in the same form that Catholics receive them.

2. For this reason, you need a high view of discernment. “Discernment” is another word for what the Old Testament calls “wisdom”. In the book of Proverbs, wisdom is the shape of life that avoids wickedness- but also temptation. Wisdom does not just narrowly miss the trainwreck- it crosses the street long before that dangerous intersection. Wisdom shapes a life that sets it up to have a certain kind of character. It does not set up its chair among the wicked. Rather, it chooses good company in order to better its chances to live a good kind of life. This is not all that discernment is. But minimally, it is a skill that requires attention and care. It is much, much more important than decision-making, because it encompasses your whole life . To have an orderly view of reproduction and sexuality, you need this kind of whole-life crafting well before the questions of family planning arise.

3. Discernment must take seriously both the tragic and the irreducibly particular nature of our lives.

   Too often the question of children and family is rose colored. Children are adorable, for the most part, and making family life beautiful has become a major- I’d say the major- occupation of women in my own demographic. Here we might indulge a rabbit trail about “beauty”- what it is, and what it is for- but for now I’d simply say that beauty and attractiveness are not identical. Beauty, indeed, can contain the tragic. And thats what it has to do with family life.

   In order to discern what shape family takes in our own lives, we have to consider the particular lives we have- both the constraints and particular aptitudes, gifts, or temperaments at hand. This gets in to tricky territory- is a bad temper a reason not to have more children, or is it a place where grace might over time have its way? Is financial precarity a reason? Much ink has been spilled on such things. The point of discernment is that no one can tell you how this maps onto your own life. You must live it for yourself. Discernment is sisters to accountability- it is your life that you are taking account of, and not someone else’s. Your life might have veins of the tragic all throughout it. Your bringing children into the world might invite the tragic to your doorstep. This is why its doubly important to live among the wise.

4. Privacy and prudence should be closer friends. I would be fine to never hear about someone’s religious feelings in regard to their lovemaking, ever again. The same goes for cervical fluid. Being a person means owning your own choices, not talking about them on the internet.

5. We need to think better about what it means to “act”, or refrain from acting. I see rhetoric around “choice” being interrogated by those who embrace Catholic teaching on reproduction. But choice functions quite curiously, in these circles. It is often heard that those who practice NFP or Catholic family planning are “letting God choose the size of their family”. But no one would say they are “letting God fertilize their tomatoes”, or “letting God decide if I get in shape.” In all three of these cases, the point is to order your actions such that a desired end results. If you desire children, you might engage in certain activities. If you don’t, you might not. It is not that God has nothing to do with it, of course. In all cases, God brings the yield in season. God has designed bodies such that certain activities yield certain results, intermittently and irregularly but with enough regularity that we can say “x leads to y”. But deferring our agency to some “divine plan” is a very, very odd way to speak about being a human.

6. Sexuality need not be sacramental to be meaningful. Making things a “sacrament” is one way we misunderstand what it means to be created. This, of course, deserves its own book. But the idea that the created world is a dim veil through which we view the sacred is a very unChristian way of viewing creation, I think. Sex is part of the natural order, but whether it is more precious than, say, gardening or cooking likely results from our experience of it. I suspect that speaking of “sacred romance” and the like results from an attempt to find a theological category for something that feels so meaningful, and something that our culture idolizes. We in fact have such a category- it’s called a gift. It seems to me that this is adequate. Otherwise, we end up almost inevitably speaking in terms of both Humane Vitae and Josh Butler- the two share much in common- that tend toward making the human divine (a heresy). Maybe Math is erotic, maybe it is not- but what does “erotic” contribute, semantically, that gift would lack?

What else would you add?