Resume vs Eulogy Virtues

We are redesigning some of the curriculum for our junior level English class at my school. One component that we are going to add next year is an independent reading book that the students will work through mostly outside of class time and then write about and present to the class on. As such, I have been working through some popular-level nonfiction choices that I thought might be enriching for the students. One such book is David Brooks's The Road to Character. Brooks is the right-leaning pundit who writes a bi-weekly column for The New York Times. I have benefited a lot from his work as an editorialist over the years, but this is the first time I have actually read one of his books.

The premise of this book is that there is a notable dearth of character in contemporary America. We are selfish, morally lazy, and egotistical. Part of the reason for this is the distinction between what can be called the resume virtues and the eulogy virtues. Our culture accommodates the resume virtues--the things that stand out while we apply for jobs--while it has seemingly little time (or notion of what to say, I would argue) about the deeper eulogy virtues. Brooks is not arguing that we should cast aside resume virtues entirely and withdraw from the world, but that we need to put these two competing poles of virtue back in tension with one another. The goal of the book, then, is to emphasize people throughout history who have excelled in the eulogy virtues to act as a counterweight to our near constant glorification of the resume set. 

Brooks's introduction fleshes out what the distinction between these two ideas of virtue looks like: in large part it seems to boil down to humility. One statistic is worth noting here. In 1950, responding to a Gallup poll that asked high school seniors "if they considered themselves to be a very important person," 12 percent of the survey population responded in the affirmative. In 2005, that number was 80 percent. This lack of humility manifests itself in the utter narcissism of our culture. Brooks notes that out individual greatness is hammered home into young people through every medium available: television, movies, teachers, parents, broader cultural authorities. 

Brooks argues that this turn toward narcissism has prevented us from cultivating the eulogy virtues that our culture so desperately lacks. It prevents this cultivation by convincing us that there is really nothing wrong with us in the first place that requires cultivation to fix. In order to put ourselves on the path of eulogy virtue development, we need to willingly engage in moral struggle and often harsh self-reflection. Brooks quotes the British writer Henry Carlie on the subject: "If we acknowledge that our inclination to sin is part of our natures, and that we will never wholly eradicate it, there is at least something for us to do in our lives that will not in the end seem just futile and absurd." There is a definite paradox lurking in that comment. Our futile and absurd battle over ineradicable sin prevents our lives from being futile and absurd. 

Resume virtues can be accomplished; eulogy virtues cannot be accomplished in the same way. We can grow in humility, self-sacrifice, love, obedience, etc. but our grasp of such things is always tenuous, always subject to change and deterioration if we slacken our pursuit. Resume virtues are easier, in a very real sense. Eulogy virtues demand our whole self. I think it is fairly evident at this point which path conforms most to the Christian faith. As an educator, it is my prayer that I train students to desire, pursue, and fix their eyes upon the resume virtues. In our credentialing culture, we need people who cultivate the inner self. 

Benedict Option, 2: A Domestic Monastery

Chapter 6 of Dreher's book is called "The Idea of a Christian Village." Here Dreher mostly looks beyond the walls of the church to the type of Christian community necessary to foster the type of spiritual formation we long both for our lives and the lives of our children. 

He begins in an interesting, and perhaps counterintuitive, place: the family. One of the faults of conservative evangelicalism, at least as I've seen it, is the often insular view of the family we are tempted to hold. I've known parents who won't let their kids play a sport because they are concerned about allowing any other influencer into their children's lives. And while a myopic view of formation as family alone is wrong, it is undeniable that the family is of monumental importance for shaping the life of everyone in what Edmund Burke called the "little platoons." Therefore, it is an ultimately appropriate place to begin the chapter. Our greater life in the broader Christian community will emanate out from the life we live in our homes.

Here is how the section of the chapter on family, "Turn Your Home into a Domestic Monastery," begins: 

Just as the monastery's life is oriented toward God, so must the family home be. Every Christian family likes to think they put God first, but this is not always how we live. (I plead guilty.) If we are the abbot and abbess of our domestic monastery, we will see to it that our family's life is structured in such a way as to make the mission of knowing and serving God clear to all its members.

The negation at the beginning is important. Most Christian families would say that "God comes first in this family," but when this claim is weighed in the scales it is often found wanting. We just need to acknowledge this. Such a claim is not something confirmed verbally but something borne out in our practices in the world and within our home. Are we bearing this out in the way we orient our home life? 

But the affirmation is even more important: we are the abbots and abbesses of our houses. This is an ultimately positive view of what goes on within the home. In this role it is incumbent upon us to structure the lives of our families in a way that makes our familial mission clear. This instantly reminded me of Martin Luther's famous "priesthood of all believers" claim. As parents we are not merely passive vehicles in the formation of our children, but clergymen and women within our homes. How differently such a vision would shape our lives together. The practical applications abound. I will end with the one given by Dreher.  

Dreher's concluding paragraph for this short section keeps the metaphor of the home-as-monastery intact. He advises: 

A monastery keeps outside its walls people and things that are inimical to its purpose, which is to form its members in Christ. For families, this means strictly limiting media, especially television and online media, both to keep unsuitable content out and to prevent dependence on electronic media. (emphasis mine)

I love the double edge of Dreher's reasoning: we don't limit media consumption simply because there is unsuitable content involved. This as a sole standard lets parents off the hook. And I often hear modest content used as justification. "Well, they're not watching Game of Thrones so it's fine. This show is about pirates, and stuff. It's a cartoon, chill out. Daddy needs some me-time." However, according to Dreher we don't merely limit for considerations of content; we also limit our media consumption because we want to prevent dependence on electronic media. This is every bit as important to the actual content of what we watch or allow our children to watch.

Sometimes I feel like I bash on media and technology too often. I know my students get tired of hearing it from me. But then I think about how deeply addictive and worldview shaping my average student's consumption of media is and I just stop caring. The media we consume shapes us. The media we implicitly or explicitly endorse within our homes shapes our children. That's the content angle. But the way we lean on media to provide a break or quiet the kids down for a few minutes shows our dependence on a very capricious god. Which might in the end be an even bigger problem. Every time we lazy out and hand over the iPad or let Netflix cycle through episodes while we do our own thing we are willfully abdicating our influence over our children. We are training them to go to the glowing screen for relief and joy. We are selling out the job we've been given for 22 minutes of free time (that, using myself as a case study, most of us squander). 

If we want our homes to be different, we need to conceive of our task in a different way.

Benedict Option, 1

In the debate swirling around Rod Dreher's new book, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation, one of the persistent claims has been that Dreher is advocating some sort of broad withdrawal from American culture. I'm about 100 pages in and so far I simply cannot see how such a conclusion could be drawn apart from the willful desire to read such a conclusion into the text.

Not being one to prooftext, allow me to prooftext. From page 82 in the chapter "A New Kind of Christian Politics": "To be sure, Christians cannot afford to vacate the public square entirely." I don't know what sort of brokedown Google translator renders this back as "Grab your guns and head for the hills," but that is what some critics seem to see in such admonitions. It makes one wonder--and this is the cynic in me--if they actually read the book. Reading is so tedious. Throwing shade is considerably more fun.

Dreher's central point, and I'll stick with this chapter on politics for now, is that our whole system is screwed up and political salvation doesn't exist. Christians can't wait for the Republican on the white horse to ride in and restore the abandoned moral order. We need to be doing work, building institutions parallel to secular institutions that sustain and nourish our people in a dark time. Dreher marshals the examples of Czech dissidents Vaclav Havel and Vaclav Bendel to show an historical example of just such a counterculture. Frankly, I don't know how such a claim is in any way outlandish for a Christian. Indeed, one of the things that has struck me in my reading on the Benedict Option is how obvious much of it seems. Anyone who has read or even heard of Augustine's City of God ought to recognize just such a distinction in Christian history. St. Paul might have had a thing or two to say on the matter as well. We are always off base when we conflate a worldly kingdom with the eternal kingdom. Yet the temptation is ever-flourishing.

I'll end this mini-post (I'm sure this is the first of many on this important book) by letting Dreher talk for a minute. Here are two block quotes from the end of the chapter on politics:

"Here's how to get started with the antipolitical politics of the Benedict Option. Secede culturally from the mainstream. Turn off the television. Put the smartphones away. Read books. Play games. Make music. Feast with your neighbors. It is not enough to avoid what is bad; you must also embrace what is good. Start a church, or join a group within your church. Open a classical Christian school, or join and strengthen one that exists. Plant a garden, and participate in a local farmer's market. Teach kids how to play music, and start a band. Join the volunteer fire department."

Let's juxtapose that with the caricature of the critics: Buy a huge plot of land and put a bomb shelter on it. Make your daughters wear head coverings that they make on your home loom. Pray for the return of 1950s gender norms. Judge your neighbors... who are probably gay. Prevent your kids from having a life. Make sure they turn out as weird as possible. 

I'd love to read an honest critique of that paragraph. Making music is hegemonic! Smartphones are making us smarter! More like, feast with your (white) neighbors! Seriously, what are people actually taking issue with? That paragraph is a beautiful vision of Christian engagement with the world.

More Dreher:

"But it can't be repeated often enough: believers must avoid the usual trap of thinking that politics can solve cultural and religious problems. Trusting Republican politicians and the judges they appoint to do the work that only cultural change and religious conversion can do is a big reason Christians find ourselves so enfeebled. The deep cultural forces that have been separating the West from God for centuries will not be halted or reversed by a single election, or any election at all."

I understand having quibbles here if you're a secularist who lauds the demise of belief in the West. I don't understand how you can have a problem with this if you claim Christ. And here I don't care if you're a liberal or conservative Christian. What's to dispute? We find ourselves enfeebled because we have enfeebled ourselves. We have refused to do the hard work of culture building, trusting instead to a Moral Majority mindset that uses the cudgel of the state to enact our morality. Well, we lost that fight. Conservative Christians should acknowledge this and restructure. Liberal Christians should acknowledge that the new moral order is not all sunshine and roses. However, conservative Christians seem more eager to get the club back in our hands than to actually making sure our own house is clean. Liberal Christians deny that there is any problem at all. 

But if we can see through the lies on both sides we can see that the path forward for the church is increased faithfulness to the call to take up our crosses and die. That, ultimately, seems to be Dreher's primary interest: building up the church so that we can be of use to the world. I'll keep reading, but I have a hard time seeing how I'll end up disagreeing.

Three Vignettes from an Accidental St. Patrick's Day Celebration

The school that I teach at won our first state championship in boys' basketball this year. After the game, a friend and I went our for a beer in an area of Denver that 10 years ago you would have just avoided to celebrate and chat. Apparently, there was a big St. Patrick's Day celebration going on in this area. Everyone was wearing green, shirts proclaiming dubious Irish heritage, shamrock necklaces, and the glazed over eyes of the daytime drunk.

As we left to drive back to our suburban homes I saw each of the following:

1) A man eating a piece of pizza. Not so much a notable event, right? All I can say is you haven't seen this guy try to eat a piece of pizza. He was so drunk he couldn't quite bring the pizza to his mouth in the conventional way. His solution: bring his mouth to the pizza. Except that didn't work either. The pizza drooped away. By the time he actually made contact, let's just say he had expunged a good deal of his innate human dignity. 

2) A guy wearing a kilt running through an intersection tripped, fell, and ate pavement. I don't mean to be pedantic here, but the guy wasn't even wearing an Irish kilt; it was clearly the Scottish variety. Come to think of it, I doubt the guy was actually Scottish either. It's almost like he was just in this for the booze and not to celebrate his heritage! Anyway, he tried to make it through the orange flashing-hand signal and promptly tripped. Legs akimbo, Scottish kilt riding higher than anyone wanted.

3) As we drove down 20th street past Coors Field on our way to I-25 and the safety of our conventional homes, we were stopped at a stoplight next to a car full of returning revelers. They all looked rather worse for the wear, but the award for most dismal drunk face went to the girl in the back driver's side seat. She was slumped against the window, her face cradled in her hand, her eyes vacant. Such a great time. Can't wait till next year. St. Patty's Day!!!

I do not say all of this to make fun of drunk people on a Saturday afternoon (thought it must be pointed out that we saw all of this before the traditional 5 o'clock hour, and I am making fun of them). While my friend and I nursed our beer and talked life, I asked him if he ever missed his pre-child existence. We talked about that for awhile and decided that while parenting young kids doesn't always stack up well against a friend's trip to southeast Asia in the social media battles we are both actually as happy as we've ever been. We have wives who love us and who we get to see naked and sleep with every night; we have children who adore us and just want to hang out and read and play; we have jobs that provide satisfaction and we have enough on the line to work hard and try to make a living at what we do. All in all, a pretty satisfying existence. 

And then we left to drive home and saw three case studies of people "living it up." The shockingly decorum-free pizza eating, the embarrassing trips in the middle of a crosswalk, and the drive of death on the way home from a drunken binge never quite show up on social media. We only see the moment three hours before, a drink or two in, when people feel liberated and happy and like this is all going to be so great, you guys, let's take a picture to remember it forever.

But I went home, sober and happy, kissed my wife and babies, read some books, did some cuddling, said prayers and sang a hymn, got more kisses, bid the children goodnight and sat with my wife in awe of the life we've been given. None of it made it onto Facebook, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen.

Christianity, Generational Difference, and DJT

I wrote a few weeks ago about the dubious reliability of headlines. In our clickbait culture, the more incendiary the headline, the more clicks. And, while the examples I catalogued there were more egregious than the one I'll be looking at here, the principle still holds. So here it is, from The Atlantic (Part of what is depressing to me in all of this is the Buzzfeedification of the entire news landscape. The Atlantic, for goodness sake's! Melville, Whitman, Emerson, Longfellow, Dickinson, Twain, and virtually every other American genius of the past 150 years was published there.)

This is the headline from a recent Emma Green article:

These Conservative Christians Are Opposed to Trump—and Suffering the Consequences

I started reading this because I've felt some of the pressure implicit in this headline. Not from the Christian school I teach at; our administration has been careful to acknowledge and validate the fact that there are a multitude of potential Christian beliefs on political issues and, therefore, the school will not try to adjudicate what its employees believe. Do we tend conservative as an institution? Absolutely. Is it mandated? Not at all; in fact, there are a good number of more liberal Christians on staff.

The pressure I have felt has come from social media, specifically anything I have posted that has been in the slightest bit critical of Trump. One "friend" went so far as to question my Christianity when I observed that Hillary Clinton's concession speech was more gracious than anything we could have hoped for had the shoe been on the other foot. Seriously. "Do you still claim Christianity?" was the exact wording of his measured response. Another got into an extended argument with me under that post before unfriending me altogether. Again, I've never posted anything that would suggest I voted for Hillary Clinton (which I didn't) or am anything other than a politically conservative Christian (I most decidedly am), but the biggest pushback I get isn't from my liberal "snowflake" friends when I post something pro-life but conservative ones who cannot brook any dissent against our Glorious Leader.

The actual article is far more interesting than the title would cause one to believe. The first two anecdotes are from a woman named Joy Beth Smith whose position at Focus on the Family was rescinded (she chose to be fired over accepting a severance) and Shannon Dingle, a woman who chose to leave Key Ministry, a Christian disability-advocacy group after being asked to refrain from incendiary, by their standards, social media posting. I don't necessarily like the fact that these women are no longer employed by these organizations, but it must be said that part of tethering yourself to an organization is accepting that, whether or not you want to be all of the time, you are a representative of that organization. 

Dingle's and Smith's social media posting seem pretty tame to me and not worthy of censure, but I can understand an organization with a conservative donor base not wanting their organization associated with content in any way antithetical to the organization. Moreover, it is not as if someone going to work at Focus on the Family can be surprised by the organization's conservative politics. I mean, come on. They were started by this guy. Green helpfully notes this pressure after giving the women's stories. I'll quote a pertinent bit at length:

Dingle’s story, along with Smith’s, represents a tension all non-profits face: How should they handle political issues that arguably aren’t directly related their mission? Social-media policies, including the official policy at Focus and the implicit standard at Key, are not uncommon. Organizations may have a reasonable desire to control their image and message on sensitive issues, including the statements made by their employees. HR matters are also complicated: Many factors go into discussions about employee departures, which can sometimes be invisible from the outside.  (italics added)

I've had to think through this even on this dumpy little personal blog that relatively very few people actually read. I often go out of my way to not mention the organization that I work for as I don't want what I write here to be reflective of that organization, but it is something I persistently think about. If I were to write something that were to somehow go viral, would I want the entirety of the content on this site to be fair game for judging my school? I can't say that I would be absolutely comfortable with that; in truth, I cannot even remember everything that I have written in this space over the past six years. For this reason, I control much of what I post on social media. I have a public Twitter account, but my Facebook I restrict to students (and coworkers) I know would not be offended by a hastily scribed opinion.

Green's acknowledgment that "organizations may have a reasonable desire to control their image on sensitive issues" is incredibly apt. Part of our intense individualism can cause us to forget that we are members of communities to which, at times, we must defer. It is only fitting that an employee of an organization consider how her organization is implicated by what she puts online. We try to teach our high school students this very thing: whether it is fair for them or not, they represent our school to the community and this is most true outside of the hours they spend inside our building. Green probably deals with the same thing, given her position at The Atlantic. In one way it is simply a feature of growing up. 

That being said, there were other parts of the article that were more disturbing. Audrey Assad, a Catholic musician and Syrian refugee, has been asked to, in her words, "shut up and sing" and leave political concerns, like caring for refugees, to the side and focus more on explicitly Christian issues. The problem here is that these are just her words. She hasn't quoted anyone saying any such thing; just noted that she has felt it implied. I am not saying that nothing of the sort has happened to her—it certainly strikes me as plausible. However, at this point Assad's accusations are merely hearsay. The story of Meghan Liddy, a missionary working with orphans in Ghana, is sadder. After writing in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, Liddy had multiple funding sources pulled from her ministry. There's some irony there—her donors believed presumably that the black Ghanian lives they were sending money to support mattered; the ones closer to home less so. 

It is a fraught time, politically, for the church. Many in my generation of conservative Christians have soured on the ultra-capitalist, the-church-as-Republican-Party-at-prayer ethos that dominated our parent's generation. Our concerns have broadened away, not from pro-life and pro-family causes which we still vigorously support (perhaps to an even greater degree than our parent's generation), but from the mindset that produced voter's guides on Jesus's preferred tax policy. This puts young Christians working at organizations comprised of leadership from the previous generation in a tenuous position. What looks like theological waffling to older believers is merely a change in emphasis. But all too often any dissent—no matter how mild—calls all of a believer's orthodoxy into question. "You don't support tax breaks for the wealthy? Do you even believe in the resurrection?"

Snark aside, I am sympathetic to voices on both sides. I wish these women—and the article seemed to quite intentionally focus only on women feeling the sting of the pro-Trump backlash—had more opportunities to voice the broad range of possible Christian opinions on controversial issues than they are currently being given. That being said, I also understand the reluctance of an organization to alienate their donor base needlessly, especially on issues outside of the scope of their organizational focus. I pray for the church as we figure this out. I pray for understanding on both sides. I pray, most fervently, that we stop airing this out on the internet and take care of these disputes in a manner more becoming of brothers and sisters as well as in a manner consistent with the Scriptures we treasure. I pray finally that mutual recrimination is replaced by mutual understanding, even if and when we disagree. How we handle the generational transition will be vitally important for the witness of the church in America. It behooves us to get it right.

The Dubious Reliability of Headlines

I used to be something of a news junkie. Let's just say that at previous jobs I had a lot of time on my hands but had to look like I was still being productive. I couldn't just pull out a book and start annotating so I read a ton of internet content. This was in a simpler time for the web (roughly 2007-2010, which feels like an eternity ago in internet time), but I still spent a good chunk of my time seething over the actions of others as reported to the various sources I consumed.

I don't read a lot of news today. Mostly I think it is garbage, even the stuff that isn't clearly fake. Here are two example from my reading in the past 24 hours.

The first comes from the sports site Deadspin which published the following article about Kansas coach Bill Self's response to the rape allegations in the players' dorm. Here is the article's title:

Bill Self Discusses "Distraction" Of "Very Serious Alleged Allegation" Of Rape At Men's Basketball Dorm

"Distraction" is in scare quotes. These players are "distracted" by the rape of a 16 year old girl. Boohoo for them. SMH, Self, I can't even with this.

Is this what the article states, though? Here is the Self quote in response, it is worth noting, to a journalist who asked if the accusation was a distraction.

It’s not a distraction, it’s a major distraction. Certainly, most importantly, in general, when you talk about distraction, you talk about how it affects us. But more importantly, there’s an obviously very serious alleged allegation that has been made. So that trumps figuring how to guard Monk or Fox to be real candid with you. It’s been a distraction and one that we’ll deal with and our players will deal with. It’s not what we want to do but it’s what’s required at this time.

Nowhere in that quote does he claim "distraction" with nefarious intent as the title so clearly implies. In fact, Self says the very opposite--finding out the truth is monumentally more important than figuring out who guards which Kentucky player. The headline makes Self look like a rape apologist, a single-minded basketball only automaton. But he's not. And I say this as anything but a Jayhawk enthusiast.

Here's another example that is perhaps more pernicious. This was a New York Times headline that blew up on my Twitter feed yesterday.

Trump Strategist Stephen Bannon Says Media Should ‘Keep Its Mouth Shut’

That's bad, right? Leave the press alone, you alt-right d-bag! Surely, though, the New York Times would never mislead its readers with a shoddy headline. Let's check, just to make sure.

WASHINGTON — Just days after President Trump spoke of a “running war’’ with the media, his chief White House strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, ratcheted up the attacks, arguing that news organizations had been “humiliated” by the election outcome and repeatedly describing the media as “the opposition party” of the current administration.

“The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while,” Mr. Bannon said in an interview on Wednesday.

Oh, so he didn't say anything like what the headline implied? That's strange. Bannon is only saying what the media should have figured out in early November: they do not have their finger on the pulse of America. Which, given the fact that no one saw a Trump election coming, ought to be pretty obvious.

But here's the thing. Very few people actually read past the headlines. NPR proved this a couple of years ago with their April Fools headline that literally said "Why Doesn't America Read Anymore?" The copy of the article openly admitted that this was an April Fool's joke but the Facebook comments people posted remained blissfully unaware of this fact. Many were the laments about the sad state of reading in America. I blame this in part on The Onion. I have a head stuffed full of headline titles from The Onion but I can't tell whether the article itself was any good.

The net effect is that we are all deceived as to what is true. Everything is spun. Everything is molded, curated, and crafted to fit the confirmation bias of whoever the target audience might be. There is no room for nuance, for difficult truth, for self-reflection. Those things don't yield clicks like the hyperbolic headlines do. 

The fact that the media doesn't get this strikes me as sad, until I realize that this is not what people demand from the media anymore. Those qualities above are just the ones we seem to have jettisoned in this age. The media reflects us, who we are today, and that is sad for all parties implicated.

Out of the Mouth of Babes

Our third child is due in just under three weeks. It is getting very real for us at the Coffman household. We have a bigger gap between our second and third child than we did between the first and second. Our kids now are older, more put together. Potty-trained. Sleeping through the night. Slowly growing out of that subrational state of toddlerhood and infancy. Well, to hell with all that! Back to square one for us.

We've been trying to treasure these last few weeks where it's just the four of us. I want my kids to remember this as a special time of anticipation but also joy at being together. The other night we did two things we almost never do: we ordered pizza and watched a movie. Pepperoni and Cheese. Hot wings. Swiss Family Robinson. Caramel corn. Regular popcorn. It was a banner night for the Coffmans.

As we tucked in the kids after the movie I prayed and thanked God for the time that we have had as "just the four of us." Owen stopped me during my prayer. "Dad, there are already five of us. Beckett is right there in Mom's tummy." He then went over to hug his brother, such as he can, and kissed the belly cradling his life.

Apart from being touching and cute and all of that it was also remarkably wise. I wrote last week about being moved by the 9/11 Memorial and the addendum "and her unborn child" added to the remembrance of pregnant mothers who died in the attack. This was another and profound pro-life statement in my week. Even my five year old son knows that it's a baby in there, that it has always been a baby in there. His brother. My son.

Again, drop justification, philosophizing, the talking points of Planned Parenthood and NARAL and this is what you have: a five year old dropping truth bombs as the obvious statements of fact that they are. Plain enough for children; obscured only by adults.

And Her Unborn Child

I spent the past weekend in New York, gallivanting around with a good friend and enjoying what the city has to offer. I love being in that city--the energy, the masses of people, the lights, the smells, the claustrophobia-inducing quality of a series of 50 story buildings. I have been to the city recently but had not taken the time to go the 9/11 memorial.

We had some time to kill on Saturday morning so we went by. I don't know what I was expecting, and I think to some degree it was helpful to come at it with no expectations. It was perfect, I thought. Just the right combination of sober and sombre without descending to the macabre or the kitchsy. For those of you who have not been, the main feature is two square monuments, erected over the site of the original towers with cascading waterfalls leading down to concentrically smaller terraces. Around the outside of each monument is a granite slab with the names of the deceased in each tower inscribed in the rock. Visitors are encouraged to run their hands along the etchings and trace the names of the dead. It was an entirely sobering experiencing.

One of the main things that struck me as I was there was the ethnicities of so many of the names: Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Italian, Greek, Arabic. The international nature of both that city and this particular tragedy was well-conveyed with no overt mention required. 

The names are sobering, too, in their very quantity. As you walk the circumference the plenitude can be overwhelming. And then both my friend and I were stopped in our tracks. Next to just shy of a dozen names in the dual monuments are the names of a woman followed by "and her unborn child." Tears instantly came to both of our eyes. My friend is a new father; I have two children and a pregnant wife. It was not hard to imagine the depth of despair at that phone call or that realization that your loss is twofold. Though in another sense I can hardly imagine it at all.

I told my students at the beginning of the week about this anecdote. I told the story well with the appropriate pauses at the appropriate junctures. And it was a fresh punch in the gut at each telling.

And I think I know why. It's this and it's simple, really: we all know and recognize that it is not simply the death of one person being remembered in that cut stone but the death of two. We know in that moment, whether the mother was on her last day of work before maternity leave--like one of the mothers--or she and her husband had discovered the pregnancy only that morning--as was the case with another--that what was forming in each woman's body was not a simple cluster of cells with the potential of life but a person in the making. We know that whatever the death toll of the adult bodies in the towers on that sacred day that the names of a dozen more are rightfully added.

Too often right to life issues can become abstracted from what is actually being discussed. This simple monument broke through the pretensions. Those four simple words--and her unborn child--contain a world of meaning. A world of meaning that many of us in our perverse and broken culture are willfully denying. Those plain words, etched in stone, cry out the truth.

Resolved in 2017, to Fail More

OK, I'll admit at the outset that this is a gimmicky post title. I am not actually actively looking to fail in 2017. But I want to be bold enough to leave open the door for failure.

Here's what I mean. Over the past week or so I've been listening to Jessica Lahey's book The Gift of Failure while I exercise or drive around completing my various Christmas break projects. While in some ways it strikes me as having that one great transgression of most popular sociological/cultural books--taking a good idea for a long article and wringing a book out of it--I've thoroughly enjoyed the book as a balm from our accomplishment-oriented, failure-averse, credentialing culture. 

Lahey is only another in a growing chorus of disillusionment with contemporary childrearing and educational practices. Books such as William Deresiewicz's Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of America's Elite and the more scholarly Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses by Richard Arum take aim at the narcissism and lack of curiosity bred in contemporary academia. Paul Tough's How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character and Angela Duckworth's extraordinarily buzzy Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance extend the analysis to early education and childrearing practices. Each argues that children in our system are shaped to be nothing but academic box checkers, beings honed to superficially placate and defer to the adults in their lives in order to attain to the next level of accomplishment. Kind of like playing a video game. 

Though I first heard this truism in connection with someone striving for partner in a legal firm, this cycle of accomplishment for the sake of attaining what's next in order to seek accomplishment in order to attain what's next, is like a pie-eating contest where the prize for winning is more pie. Such is our current dispensation. And what's missing is the willingness and the passion and the drive that opens the door to great and lasting success but, of necessity, leaves the door for failure open as well.

Though all of these broader cultural implications are of great interest to me, I want to make the focus more internal here. It is easy to recognize these broad trends and bemoan them (and I do), but this basic--and I don't know what else to call it--conservatism when it comes to ambition is primarily fear-based. We are scared to death of failure, which is why most of the time we do what is known and comfortable. Fear is basically how Chili's exists. And I don't want to live my life governed by fear, which is, as Marilynne Robinson points out, "not a Christian habit of mind."

Hence the gimmicky goal.

Again, my goal is not failure, but to be willing to extend myself enough that failure becomes an option. To, in other words, be ambitious. This means not watching much TV (even sports) and using that time productively to read and write and having crazy ambitions for that writing (more on this to come shortly). Whatever else it might mean remains to be seen. 

Partially this is to show my kids--who are being raised in the teeth of this risk averse culture--that there are worse things than failure. There's the refusal to try.

Endnote: I want to expand on the idea of ambition a bit more in a few subsequent posts. I am starting Macbeth with my sophomore honors kids this week so it's a pertinent philosophical issue. I want to think about ambition a bit from a Christian worldview--what it should or might look like

Last Chance U

I don't watch much TV these days. Between kids, work, and reading I don't have a lot of spare time. I still enjoy the periodic pleasure of falling under the spell of a show, though. And that happened last week, with the multi-part documentary on Netflix called Last Chance U. I knew virtually nothing about the show as I started watching, only that it came highly recommended from someone in my Twitter feed. 

The show follows a national champion junior college football time from East Mississippi Community College as they try to win back to back titles and their fourth championship in six years. Most juco players are Division I washouts or kids unable to land scholarships at a more prestigious school or kids whose grades or encounters with the justice system have kept them out of football's upper echelons. They come to EMCC in tiny Scooba, Mississippi for one last chance at making "the league" and thus fulfilling all of their hopes and dreams.

This show is unbelievably sad. One thing that becomes quickly apparent is that the players give absolutely zero shits about being students. The governing body stipulates that the players must maintain a 2.5 GPA. While it never outright reveals that these numbers are massaged by the athletic department and willing instructors, the implication is clear. One of the main characters of the show is the academic compliance officer for the school. She is frequently seen in the show rushing through the halls of the academic buildings escorting players to class, making sure they have pencils and notebooks, making sure they at least appear to pay attention.

Meanwhile the players are entirely uninterested in their scholarly pursuits. They often congregate in the compliance officer's office and sit, faces glued to the glowing screens of their smartphones, while she drones on (from their perspective) about the importance of attending class and receiving an education. They glance up from time to time and grumble a reply. School is clearly an annoyance to them, an obstacle to be overcome. They are football mercenaries, not students.

Race, too, is an undeniable feature of the show. Most of the prominent players on the team are black. Most are from bad backgrounds. Most don't have a fallback plan. Most are at the end of their line. And football seems to offer salvation. What's the point in going to class? They're not going to go on to run a bank or teach high school after they leave here. They repeatedly worry about having to return home and into a way of life they know is futureless. But football seems to them, despite the long odds, their only way out.

The coach is a petty tyrant, lording his small world and authority over a group of desperate man-children. One scene juxtaposes his daughters calling him a sweetheart and a teddy bear with him cursing vociferously at an 18 year-old for a minor infraction on the practice field. In another scene he is swearing at and arguing with an official to an embarrassing extent over a forward progress call in a game his team wins 69-20. In a later game he so provokes an official that the official responds to a shove from the coach by punching the coach (by this time in the show I expect most viewers are likewise lining up for their chance to take a swing). It is embarrassing to watch. This man's entire world is juco football. One of the culminating events of the show is a bench-clearing brawl in the final regular season game of the year. In response the coach lectures his players--in language dripping with racism--for being thugs and responding as if they were on the street (this as they are mostly defending one of their teammates who is literally being beat with helmets).  

After the brawl the team is disqualified from participation in the postseason and therefore unable to defend their national title. The last clip of the show is the coach recruiting next year's batch of hopeful athletes, promising the chance to attract D-I eyes and stressing the school's firm commitment to academics. While there is something slightly admirable in the coach's pluck, it made me want to throw up.

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The whole show made me sick to my stomach. I have felt estranged from sports lately. In our culture we don't let sports be sport. Everything is zealously managed and supervised and utilitarian. The goal is a college scholarship or acceptance to a good club team or the long shot professional hope. No one plays just because it's fun anymore. I've heard people complain about trophies for every player and the refusal of municipal leagues to keep score as hearkening some sort of death of competition in our culture. That's bullcrap, though. Competition is alive and well. Too alive and too well. What we need is a bit more relaxation and joy in our sports. They are games after all. 

Watching a grown man yell and curse at another grown man over the placement of a football in a game is a good reminder of how ephemeral sports actually are. And, to me, ephemerality is what makes sports glorious. They don't last. Every game is different. But our culture tempts us into thinking--with the myth making machine of ESPN and other sports media as zealous accomplices--that the glory of the football field (and the soccer pitch and the basketball court and the baseball diamond) is eternal. After my beloved Royals won the World Series last year, I realized that it wasn't actually that big of a deal. I woke up the next morning and went to work, much the same man as I was the previous day. In talking with my son about sports I have tried to communicate this to him. He learned the word ephemeral in The Wind and the Willows and has since been trying to think of things that are ephemeral compared with things that are more lasting. One night at dinner I told him sports fit into the ephemeral category. They are great and beautiful but very temporary. I told him that something sad in our world is how many people forget this. The cursing and the angst and the elation that fill my Facebook feed on a Sunday afternoon are inordinate to the importance of the event. They put more weight on sport than sport can possible hold. They blind us to the things that matter and last.

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One of the repeated lines from the school's compliance officer in Last Chance U--often used when a student can't bear the thought of attending class--is, "What's 'plan B'?" And no one has an answer for her. There's only Plan A: the League. But that is patently unrealistic for most of the athletes documented. There just are not enough roster spots in the NFL to accommodate the vast amount of athletic talent pumped through our system. But these kids are all trapped in this dream, thinking that it's just around the corner. This might be the saddest part of this series for me. There is actually very little hope for these kids.

The biggest hope, and sorry to sound all square and teacherly here, is the education they are spurning. But the program, as much as the coach might sweet talk parents with the idea of academics, ultimately doesn't care about anything academically apart from the players' GPAs. They are not being crafted into men--the goal of any sport worth its salt--but being used as tools in the quest for more banners in the stadium and gaudy rings on the fat fingers of a conceited man-child coach. And, like even the best tools, their utility at some point expires. Then they are thrown away.

Nothing New Under the Sun

Let's see if this sounds familiar:

Thus, in the society of Cato's great-grandson, the last shreds of traditional restraint had been contemptuously flung aside, and the dominant note was one of individual freedom and self-assertion. Inflamed by an insatiable thirst for novel forms of experience, members of the aristocracy let themselves go in a protracted orgy of extravagance and debauchery. The world was ransacked to provide the rarest and most exotic means for the satisfaction of the senses, and the last refinements of luxury and vice were introduced to titillate appetites already jaded by pleasure in its cruder forms. . . history and satire, developing about the same time, adopted a somewhat peevish and moralizing tone which, as it presently became conventional, was to be imitated by writers who, generations later, lashed at social evils which by their day were largely obsolete.

--Charles Norris Cochrane,  Christianity and Classical Culture

File this under: Evidences We Are Rome.

Mark Helprin is a Genius, or Why Courtly Love Still Matters

This post is tangentially related to the news out of the Pentagon a few weeks back that women are now able to kill and be killed in combat just like men. This makes sense in our brave new world of gender obfuscation, but is a tragedy from a certain, classical point of view (a view that I happen to find myself sympathetic with). 

I say tangential because mostly what I want to do is put this beautiful passage from Mark Helprin's novel In Sunlight and In Shadow in front of as many people as possible and let it do the arguing for me. 

To set the stage ever so briefly, the main character, Harry Copeland, a recent World War II veteran has fallen madly, wildly, and intoxicatingly in love with the socialite Catherine Hale. In a fit of mutual love and youthful zeal, she has abandoned her well-connected fiance on the night of their engagement and fled the Hamptons with Harry in tow. Over a pre-dawn dinner on the return ride to the city, Harry tells Catherine--who has previously been misused by men--that he wants to court her: dress up in his best suit, meet her parents, get her back before curfew, etc. She begins to protest and this is where I turn it over to Helprin:

"We were told," she began, "that courtly love. . . ."
"Told by whom?"
"By our professors. . . that courtly love is twisted."
"How so?"
"Demeaning. Controlling."
He straightened in his seat, lifting himself up until he seemed taller, unconsciously positioning his upper body as if for a fight--not with Catherine, but with an idea. His eyes narrowed a bit as they seemed to flood with energy. "I don't know who told you, but I do know that whoever said this was a fucking idiot who must never have seen anything, or risked anything, who thinks too much about what other people think, so much so that he'll exterminate his real emotions and live in a world so safe it's dead. People like that always want to show you that they're wise and worldly, having been disillusioned, and they mock things that humanity has come to love, things that people like me--who have spent years watching soldiers blown apart and incinerated, cities razed, and women and children wailing--have learned to love like nothing else: tenderness, ceremony, courtesy, sacrifice, love, form, regard. . . The deeper I fell, the more I suffered, and the more I saw. . . the more I knew that women are the embodiment of love and the hope of all time. And to say that they neither need nor deserve protection, and that it is merely a strategy of domination, would be to misjudge the highest qualities of man while at the same time misreading the savage qualities of the world. This is what I learned and what I managed to bring out with me from hell. How shall I treat it? Love of God, love of a woman, love of a child--what else is there? Everything pales, and I'll stake what I know against what your professors imagine, to the death, as I have. They don't have the courage to embrace or even to recognize the real, the consequential, the beautiful, because in the end those are the things that lacerate and wound, and make you suffer incomparably, because, in the end, you lose them."

Sex Without Consequences

If a dystopian author from the past 100 years—take your pick, but I like to picture Huxley somehow having this keen vision—had imagined a scenario in which several hundred thousand infant children were murdered each year in utero with a black market developing for the sale of their parts to Frankenstein-like medical adventurers and wrote such a scene into his book I cannot imagine anyone believing it. Impossible, people would say.

Then, if rather than a black market existing for such “tissue,” the author upped the ante and placed this transaction in clean and sterile labs funded by tax dollars under the (rather broad) banner of women’s health, staffed this fantastic clinic with educated doctors who swore to the Hippocratic oath, and, perhaps most unbelievably, made such a system legal under the current political regime, well, then, the literary critics would have argued that—allowances for the genre aside—this was just too otherworldly, transgressing even satire. Swift might have recommended eating Irish babies, but that is a more straightforward, Maslow’s hierarchy type need, and besides it was just the Irish. But pilfering baby parts to aid medical research so that a fattening, lazy population could use medical science to buttress their sagging frames—come on.

I do not want to talk only about the videos that have been released in the past few weeks. I will say that what disturbs me about their content is not so much whether or not Planned Parenthood profited from the sale of baby parts (for me killing the babies in the first place is the most egregious crime), but the blasé nature in which all of the functionaries of the organization speak about heinous acts. It makes my skin crawl to hear someone talk about a murdered baby’s organs as if they are spare parts from a broken down Dodge.

I will also say that we are seeing here is the flowering of an ideology that has sought to divorce sex from children. I cannot overstate the degree to which this is true of our culture. We want sex without consequences. This cuts across race, ethnicity, social class, and even religious beliefs. The true god of most Americans is self-actualization and that process has been known to be severely hampered by babies taking up all of your time and money. Indeed, children can actually make self-actualization look like a bad thing, a selfish thing. They are an 18-year long self-emptying. I can think of nothing more anathema to our culture than that. How can we go to Prague and find ourselves if we are bogged down with children? Asia beckons, but here we are knee-deep in diapers. And I have witnessed Christian friends buy into this as well. Christian couples who have no intention of having children and if they do they push off the date into the mystical future when, self firmly discovered, they will be able to accommodate the interests of another.

What follows is merely an anecdote and therefore subject to the limits of all anecdotes, but one I believe to be telling. It is fully true, as I remember it. Several years ago Clara and I attended the Austin City Limits music festival. A roommate from college lived in that fine Texas town and we stayed with him during the festivities. The night we arrived we walked around the famous downtown district before ending up back at his apartment complex with a bottle of wine (maybe two). We sat outside in the courtyard area where another group had already established itself.

It was an election year—2008—and we spoke about the hysteria surrounding then candidate Obama and I gave Tim good-natured hell for campaigning for Bush in 2004 (even planting a peck on Jenna Bush’s cheek at a rally; true story). I made some offhand comment about never being able to support a party that allowed (some might even argue, celebrated) the killing of babies under the ghastly Orwellian phrase “reproductive rights.”

Little did I know—and I wonder if, had I known, I would have said anything at all—that I was sharing a bottle of wine with a girl who worked for Planned Parenthood. She, obviously, spoke up. I remember at one point she made the absolutely insane claim that more women had died in botched abortions than babies had been aborted since Roe. Given that the number of abortions carried out under Roe by 2008 was somewhere just shy of 50,000,000 (I write out the zeroes to be instructive), I find this claim a bit tough to take seriously.

She also made the comment at one point that she was not in favor of late term abortion. I asked her why and she didn’t have much of a reason. I pointed out that the only difference—in substance—between a late term and an early term abortion is that a late term abortion is grosser. The gore might repulse us, but if the baby is not a baby at six weeks then why is it one at 26 weeks? What sort of alchemy takes place in the womb at that point? Anyways, I don’t bring this up to point out the logical tete-a-tete that we engaged in. Logic would never win an argument like this anyway.

As the conversation progressed it became more personal as things tend to do aided by the a.m. hours and wine. Eventually we got onto the subject of this girl’s current relationship situation. She was 30 or 31 at the time and in an “open relationship” with her boyfriend. Her translation of this was clear: he had sex with other women while she stayed faithful and committed to him. She then got emotional and made a startling admission. She told us that whenever she had sex with a man she wanted to have his babies. She told us that though her education taught her that the desire for motherhood is a mere vestige of the patriarchy, as worthless as that appendix taking up space in your innards, she could not resist the desire. She told us she simply had to deny it.

What I see in Planned Parenthood and our culture at large is the fruition of a system that teaches people the twin lies that 1) babies are a problem and 2) babies have nothing to do with sex. As much as I hope for political change and the end of the murderous regime of Roe, unless this broader mentality changes we will lapse right back into a similar system. We are a nation of addicts; a nation dogmatic in our fealty to the god of self. What we need is repentance.

I have thought a lot about that conversation in Austin these past seven years and I have often prayed for that girl. I hope she found peace and broke up with that douchebag. I hope she stopped believing the lies. I hope she finally listened to herself. I hope she’s a mom.