Cinemorphosis

Author: Jeffrey McMahon

  • Watch Enthusiasts and the Accumulation-Purge Cycle

    Watch Enthusiasts and the Accumulation-Purge Cycle

    A friend of mine has a wealthy father-in-law who retired to a gated community in West Palm Beach. He has cultivated an impressive talent for acquiring expensive watches, designer clothing, and high-end running shoes. His favorite purchase, apparently, is the duplicate. If one pair of premium running shoes is excellent, surely two are prudent. If one luxury watch brings satisfaction, another identical model must provide insurance against…something.

    Eventually, his closets revolt.

    Shelves bow under the weight of unopened boxes. Clothing hangs shoulder to shoulder like commuters on a Tokyo subway. The sheer abundance begins to oppress him. Faced with the consequences of his own abundance, he experiences a sudden burst of generosity.

    Or something that resembles generosity.

    My friend receives bins overflowing with expensive gifts. The contents are genuinely valuable, yet he returns home feeling less like the grateful beneficiary of extraordinary kindness than like a volunteer who has helped a neighbor haul unwanted furniture to the curb. The gifts are real, but so is the unmistakable sense that he has performed a public service by relieving his father-in-law of possessions that had become psychological clutter.

    Watching this reminded me uncomfortably of the watch hobby.

    Collectors, myself included, often suffer from what I call Acquisitive Respiration: the rhythm by which collectors inhale possessions through acquisition and exhale them through selling, gifting, or donating, each phase making the other possible.

    This rhythm belongs to a larger pathology: the Accumulation-Purge Cycle—the recurring compulsion to acquire possessions until their abundance becomes psychologically burdensome, prompting a purge that temporarily relieves anxiety while quietly preparing the ground for the next buying spree.

    The cycle is not merely behavioral. It is homeostatic.

    The system oscillates between excess and correction without ever confronting the appetite that created the excess in the first place.

    The watch collector inhales watches until opening the watch box produces mild panic instead of pleasure. The chronic dieter inhales calories until climbing a flight of stairs becomes an unwelcome cardiovascular event. Then comes the ritual of purification.

    The collector sells half the collection.

    The dieter loses thirty pounds.

    Both experience the intoxicating relief of restoration. Both congratulate themselves on their newfound discipline. Both quietly assume the problem has been solved.

    It hasn’t.

    The collector’s relationship to acquisition remains untouched. The dieter’s relationship to food remains fundamentally unchanged. The purge delivers genuine psychological relief, but it also resets the conditions for the next cycle. Empty watch slots begin whispering about future purchases. A slimmer waistline invites the dangerous thought that perhaps another slice of cheesecake won’t matter after all.

    Before long, the watch box fills again.

    Before long, so do the pants.

    This suggests a broader psychological principle.

    The purge often becomes part of the addiction rather than its cure.

    Indeed, the purge can become one of addiction’s most ingenious accomplices. It reassures us that excess carries no permanent consequences because everything can always be corrected later. Tomorrow’s diet becomes permission for today’s binge. Next month’s watch sale becomes justification for today’s impulse purchase.

    The purge feels like repentance.

    Sometimes it is merely maintenance.

    Real freedom arrives not when we become exceptionally skilled at emptying our closets or shrinking our waistlines, but when we no longer need to inhale so much in the first place.

  • Nothing Gets Better

    Nothing Gets Better

    Yesterday my piano tuner, Cecil, came by to work on my upright. He is pushing eighty, has spent a lifetime coaxing reluctant pianos back into harmony, and charges $250 for a tuning. I pay it gladly. When someone has become the best in the business, you stop thinking about the fee and start thinking about the privilege.

    After he finished, we lingered and talked about Southern California.

    I told him that whenever I return to my old stomping grounds in the Bay Area, I leave with the same impression: everything feels more crowded, more hurried, more stressful, and somehow less hospitable than I remember. The roads seem angrier. The neighborhoods seem denser. Even the air feels impatient.

    Without the slightest hesitation, Cecil smiled and delivered a sentence that landed with the force of an ancient proverb.

    “Nothing gets better.”

    The words settled over me like a truth I had always known but kept forgetting.

    Nothing gets better.

    Cecil continued. Torrance, he predicted, will eventually resemble West Los Angeles. Massive apartment complexes are already rising near our neighborhood. Del Amo Fashion Center has become a preview of the future. Try finding a parking space after eleven o’clock on a weekday. On weekends, don’t bother. The future has already begun circling the parking lot.

    Yet Cecil wasn’t complaining.

    That is the crucial distinction.

    His observation was not an invitation to pessimism but to realism.

    Most of our unhappiness comes from quietly assuming that the world ought to become more convenient, more orderly, more civilized, and less crowded as time marches on. When reality stubbornly refuses to cooperate, we conclude that something has gone terribly wrong.

    Perhaps nothing has gone wrong at all.

    Perhaps this is simply what civilizations do. They grow denser, noisier, more complicated, and more exhausting. Every technological advance solves one problem while inventing three new ones. Every improvement arrives carrying an invoice.

    I have come to think of this as the Cecil Principle: the recognition that the world rarely becomes simpler, quieter, or more civilized over time, requiring us to cultivate resilience rather than nostalgia or utopian expectation.

    The Cecil Principle reminded me of psychiatrist Phil Stutz, who reduces life to three unavoidable realities: pain, uncertainty, and constant work. According to Stutz, psychological health begins not by escaping these conditions but by accepting them. The fantasy that life should become comfortable is itself the source of much unnecessary suffering.

    Cecil, with considerably fewer words, had arrived at the same destination.

    Nothing gets better.

    Strangely, there is liberation in that sentence. Once I stop expecting history to reward me with perpetual improvement, I become less resentful when it doesn’t. I stop waiting for the perfect city, the perfect traffic pattern, the perfect political climate, or the perfect era. I become more attentive to the quiet pleasures still available: a well-tuned piano, an honest conversation, a competent craftsman who has spent decades mastering his trade.

    Nothing gets better.

    Oddly enough, accepting that fact makes life better.

    The truth, after all, has an unexpected habit of setting us free.

  • The Rise and Fall of the Influencer

    The Rise and Fall of the Influencer

    In her essay “The Extras Are Tired,” Ellen Cushing traces the astonishing rise of the influencer. Less than a decade ago, the word itself barely registered in the public vocabulary. The profession was still flapping uncertain wings. By 2023, those wings had become a full-fledged migration. Twenty-seven million Americans were earning money by producing online content, and universities were rushing to legitimize the phenomenon. Arizona State University now offers a bachelor’s degree in Content Creation, as though aspiring to become a walking selfie stick had matured into a respectable academic discipline.

    Yet the influencer economy already feels less inevitable than it did only a few years ago.

    One reason is technological. Increasingly, people seek advice from artificial intelligence rather than from smiling strangers who begin every video by announcing, “Hey, guys!” with the synthetic warmth of a flight attendant welcoming passengers aboard a delayed flight. AI may have its flaws, but at least it doesn’t interrupt your day to remind you to smash the like button.

    Another problem is more fundamental. Influencers possess a surprisingly short shelf life because their relationship with followers is built upon counterfeit intimacy. They manufacture the illusion that they are your trusted friend while simultaneously converting every friendship into a monetized sales funnel. Eventually, the performance begins to squeak. The smiles appear rehearsed. The vulnerability feels focus-group tested. The authenticity arrives with affiliate links.

    The public has noticed.

    Some clothing stores have become so weary of influencers transforming shopping aisles into film studios that they now post NO INFLUENCERS signs. The signs possess a wonderfully deadpan wit. They function almost like restaurant health inspections proudly declaring the premises free of rodents. Customers may now browse in peace, reassured that no one will suddenly begin recording a “Get Ready With Me” video between the denim racks.

    The signs are also an overdue act of cultural pushback.

    Influencers do not merely occupy public space; they annex it. They assume that coffee shops, sidewalks, airports, grocery stores, and boutiques exist as interchangeable backdrops for the ongoing production of their personal brand. Everyone else becomes unpaid production staff.

    This is a distinctly twenty-first-century form of vanity, one I call Protagonist Inflation: the progressive belief that one’s own life constitutes the central narrative while strangers exist primarily as background characters, audience members, or supporting cast.

    Cushing captures the phenomenon with characteristic precision:

    “Influencers today are a bit like plastic surgeons, or plumbers: On a societal level, many people sure seem to like what they do—they just don’t necessarily want to be right next to them while they’re doing it.”

    Exactly.

    Society may consume influencer content by the billions of views, but that does not mean it wishes to sit beside someone filming six takes of a cappuccino before allowing the coffee to become cold enough to qualify as archaeology.

    Much has been written about the jobs artificial intelligence will eliminate. We are warned that AI will replace writers, teachers, programmers, accountants, lawyers, and artists. Perhaps it will replace many of them.

    When it comes to influencers, however, I find it difficult to summon much grief.

    If artificial intelligence succeeds in removing one profession built upon convincing the rest of us that we are merely extras wandering through someone else’s movie, then AI will have performed at least one genuine public service.

  • The Attention Vultures Descend

    The Attention Vultures Descend

    I watched Netflix’s three-part documentary Idaho Murders: College Nightmare, expecting another true-crime chronicle. Instead, I found a cautionary tale about the moral corrosion of the social media age.

    The murders shattered the illusion of an idyllic college town where doors, friendships, and assumptions of decency had long remained open. Into that atmosphere of trust stepped a doctoral teaching assistant in criminology whose crimes seemed almost grotesquely theatrical: an aspiring expert in criminal behavior who became the very monster he purported to study. The documentary is unsettling not merely because it chronicles an act of staggering brutality, but because it reveals how quickly evil can erupt into places that imagine themselves immune from it.

    Yet the documentary’s most instructive chapter unfolds after the killings, during the long months when investigators had no public suspect. That vacuum of knowledge became oxygen for the internet. Social media influencers rushed to fill the silence, speaking with the confidence of detectives while possessing none of the evidence. Their videos, podcasts, and livestreams transformed ignorance into certainty. Innocent college students—already traumatized by the murders—were publicly identified as suspects, dissected as if they were characters in a murder mystery rather than human beings whose lives could be permanently scarred by reckless speculation.

    These people were not engaged in an earnest search for truth. They were engaged in a hunt for attention. Every accusation, every dramatic thumbnail, every emphatic declaration became another bid for clicks, subscribers, and algorithmic favor. Tragedy had become raw material for personal branding.

    Years ago, Jaron Lanier warned that social media rewards the most primitive parts of our psychology. The platforms appeal less to our reflective minds than to our craving for recognition, outrage, and status. They encourage us to chase attention as if it were oxygen. Watching the documentary, I felt as though Lanier’s warning had escaped the pages of his book and materialized on the screen. The influencers were not simply exploiting a tragedy; they had become creatures shaped by an economy in which visibility matters more than truth and confidence is valued above evidence.

    The documentary left me thinking less about the murderer than about myself. Over the last fifteen years, I have spent enough time on social media to recognize the same impulse in miniature—the subtle desire to post, comment, and share simply because an audience is there. The temptation is rarely malicious, but it springs from the same psychological soil: the hope of being noticed.

    The film made me want to cultivate a new habit. Before posting, I want to pause and ask a simple question: Am I adding light, or am I merely asking strangers to look at me? That brief moment of hesitation may be the smallest possible act of resistance against an attention economy that profits from our worst instincts.

    The documentary’s greatest lesson, then, has little to do with criminology. It is about character. It asks whether we will become citizens who value truth enough to remain silent when we do not know—or whether we will join the growing flock of attention vultures circling every human tragedy, mistaking spectatorship for significance. I know which path I hope to avoid. If that requires changing my relationship with social media, it is a price well worth paying.

  • The Seduction of Narrative Tidiness

    The Seduction of Narrative Tidiness

    Emmanuel Carrère finds Hyam Maccoby’s The Mythmaker intellectually stimulating but ultimately unpersuasive. Maccoby argues that Christianity is little more than history rewritten by its victors. In his telling, Paul is not merely mistaken but fraudulent. He is not even authentically Jewish. He hijacks Judaism, invents a new religion, and legitimizes it by claiming direct revelations from the risen Jesus, thereby elevating himself above the apostles who actually knew Christ.

    Carrère cannot resist responding with dry irony. “Then, finally, after two thousand years of darkness, Professor Maccoby appeared.”

    The joke exposes what Carrère sees as the weakness of Maccoby’s thesis. In attempting to strip Christianity of its myths, Maccoby constructs a myth of his own. Carrère writes, “Passing off two thousand years of Church history as complete revisionism strikes me as the height of revisionism.”

    This does not mean Carrère dismisses Maccoby outright. He readily acknowledges that portions of the New Testament contributed to centuries of Christian antisemitism. But he rejects Maccoby’s insistence that Jewish authorities bore no responsibility for Jesus’ persecution. The historical record, however fragmentary and contested, still points to genuine conflict between Jesus and segments of the Jewish religious leadership. Likewise, Maccoby’s portrait of Paul as little more than a calculating “goy informer” strikes Carrère as psychologically implausible. The Paul who emerges from his own letters is conflicted, tormented, contradictory, and profoundly self-aware—a figure possessing, as Carrère puts it, a distinctly Dostoyevskian complexity. Such a man cannot be reduced to a cardboard villain.

    Carrère’s disagreement with Maccoby reveals a broader truth about conspiracy theories and overly ambitious historical revisionism. They are almost always too tidy.

    Reality is untidy. Human beings harbor mixed motives. Historical events emerge from tangled webs of personality, accident, conviction, fear, and unintended consequences. Conspiracy theories sweep away that complexity in favor of elegant explanations populated by unmistakable heroes, obvious villains, and a single hidden key that unlocks everything. They offer certainty at a discount.

    The appeal is understandable. Complexity exhausts us. Ambiguity frustrates us. We long for stories that snap together with the satisfying precision of puzzle pieces. Yet the cleaner the explanation becomes, the more likely it is that reality has been shaved down to fit it. Tidiness often comes at the expense of truth.

    As Carrère wrestles with Christianity—a religion that has fascinated, converted, disillusioned, and continued to haunt him over decades—he refuses to surrender to what I call Narrative Tidiness: the impulse to compress complicated history into emotionally satisfying stories with unmistakable heroes, villains, and motives. He is willing to question Christian orthodoxy. He is equally willing to question the critics who promise to explain Christianity away with a single master theory.

    For Carrère, intellectual honesty requires resisting myths on both sides. The moment history becomes too neat, it has probably ceased to be history.

  • Carlsbad’s Shadow, Oceanside’s Soul

    Carlsbad’s Shadow, Oceanside’s Soul

    We spent a few days in Carlsbad at the Hotel Solea. Aside from the sublime crepes at The French Corner and the infectious energy of surfers drifting through town with boards tucked under their arms, the place left me strangely cold. Carlsbad struck me as polished to the point of sterility, a resort town forever orbiting the gravitational pull of Legoland. Everywhere you looked, there were souvenir shops, family vacation logistics, and the unmistakable soundtrack of overtired toddlers conducting negotiations at full volume. The town seemed suspended in a permanent state of cheerful tourism.

    Then, on the drive home, we traveled fifteen minutes north on Interstate 5 and discovered Oceanside.

    The difference was immediate.

    Instead of curated resort charm, Oceanside possessed the rough confidence of a town that exists for the people who actually live there. We wandered into The Beach Break Cafe, tucked beside a residential neighborhood, where every table seemed occupied by people who looked genuinely happy to be exactly where they were. Nothing about the place felt manufactured. There was no Instagram choreography, no designer rusticity, no desperate attempt to convince diners they were enjoying an “authentic experience.” It simply was authentic.

    More importantly, they don’t phone in breakfast.

    They treat eggs, pancakes, and French toast with the seriousness of a Michelin chef preparing foie gras. The omelets were generously stuffed without collapsing into greasy excess. The French toast achieved that elusive balance of crisp edges and custardy center. The whole-grain banana pancakes possessed a nutty richness that made them taste less like indulgence than craftsmanship.

    The manager—a fit man in his thirties with a neatly trimmed beard and a weathered gray baseball cap—told me he had taken over the restaurant from his father. Born and raised in Oceanside, he spoke about the community with the quiet pride of someone who had no desire to escape it. He mentioned that elite fighters from Camp Pendleton regularly come in for breakfast. After one bite, I understood why. If your profession involves throwing another human being across a room, this is precisely where you’d replenish your glycogen stores.

    That conversation crystallized the difference between the two towns.

    Carlsbad feels like milquetoast chic: affluent, immaculate, and carefully curated for visitors. Oceanside has working-class muscle. It doesn’t seem interested in impressing you. It simply gets on with the business of living. There is an honesty to that kind of place, a confidence that doesn’t require branding consultants or lifestyle influencers to validate it.

    Fifteen minutes separate Carlsbad from Oceanside.

    Culturally, they feel like different countries.

    I’ll take Oceanside.

  • Chronological Humility

    Chronological Humility

    Emmanuel Carrère once believed wholeheartedly in the Resurrection. During his years of Christian conversion, it was not merely a theological proposition but the organizing principle of his life. Today he sees it differently. He describes it as a bereavement fantasy born among a few dozen grieving followers that somehow spread across continents, converted nearly a quarter of humanity, and remains a phenomenon that still “intrigues, fascinates, troubles, and moves” him.

    Notice what he does not say. He does not dismiss believers as fools. He does not congratulate himself for escaping religion. Nor does he portray his conversion as an embarrassing lapse in judgment from which his enlightened self has thankfully recovered.

    That restraint lies at the heart of The Kingdom.

    Carrère explains that he wrote the book to prevent his present, nonreligious self from assuming moral or intellectual superiority over his former believing self. He is suspicious of certainty itself. Rather than explaining conversion and de-conversion with neat psychological formulas, he treats them as mysterious human “mutations” whose causes and meanings remain partly hidden. He refuses to simplify either transformation into triumph or pathology. As he puts it, “I’m writing this book to avoid coming down too firmly in my favor.”

    The book is animated by what I would call Chronological Humility: the refusal to assume that the latest version of oneself is necessarily the wisest simply because it arrives later in time. Today’s certainty may become tomorrow’s embarrassment. The present self has no automatic claim to superior vision merely because it occupies the newest chapter of the autobiography.

    In that sense, The Kingdom is not merely an investigation of early Christianity. It is Carrère’s ongoing apprenticeship in humility, perhaps one of the lingering gifts of his years as a Christian. Humility keeps the mind porous. It reminds us that growth often requires surrendering convictions we once defended with absolute confidence. Every fundamentalism, whether religious or secular, begins with the comforting illusion that the journey has ended and certainty has finally been achieved.

    My maternal grandfather, Richard Meyers, understood that illusion better than he realized.

    Born in 1915 and dying in 2001, he devoted much of his life to Marxism. In his younger years, his politics possessed the unmistakable rigidity of religious fundamentalism. Competing ideologies were not merely mistaken; they were inferior. Religion was a collection of fairy tales, and those who believed in it were captives of childish superstition.

    When I converted to Christianity as a teenager, he was deeply troubled. Eventually he resigned himself to what he considered my intellectual captivity. He once told a fellow Marxist, with genuine sadness, “It’s too late for him.” He believed he could see Christianity’s claws buried deep inside my brain.

    His loyalty to the movement was so uncompromising that even Stalin, despite overwhelming evidence of his atrocities, could not be criticized because doing so, he insisted, “hurt the movement.” The cause demanded silence where conscience demanded speech.

    Time, however, has a way of softening even the hardest certainties.

    Of all the changes my grandfather made, one remains especially dear to me.

    In 1990, while waiting for a play to begin in Hollywood, we wandered the streets looking for a place to eat. Along the way we met a homeless Vietnam veteran who said he was hungry. I bought him a meal at a nearby burger restaurant.

    My grandfather disapproved.

    Feeding one homeless man, he argued, did nothing to solve the structural causes of poverty. Charity was sentimental. Systems, not sandwiches, changed history.

    “I don’t care about solving the future right now,” I replied. “I care about relieving his hunger today.”

    The conversation ended there.

    Or so I thought.

    Two years later, while we were eating together at an Italian restaurant in San Pedro, he unexpectedly returned to the incident.

    “I was wrong,” he said quietly. “You did the right thing.”

    It was a simple sentence. No fanfare. No dramatic confession. Just an elderly man acknowledging that his younger self had been mistaken.

    That moment warmed my heart far more than if I had won the original argument. I wasn’t moved because he admitted defeat. I was moved because he had demonstrated the rarest of human virtues: the willingness to become a different person without pretending he had always been one.

    I suspect that is precisely what Carrère hopes to preserve in himself through The Kingdom. The book is less an argument for or against Christianity than a safeguard against the arrogance of believing that the latest version of Emmanuel Carrère has finally escaped the mistakes of all the previous ones. It is an act of Chronological Humility—a refusal to declare victory over his former self because he knows that someday even his present convictions may become another chapter in the long story of a mind still learning how to change.

  • The Gospel According to Common Sense

    The Gospel According to Common Sense

    I have feared eternity for as long as I can remember. My life has felt less like a spiritual journey than a protracted campaign in a war for my own soul. Much of that campaign has been chronicled in my collection of essays, The Theology of Biceps, where barbells, vanity, faith, mortality, and salvation wrestle each other beneath fluorescent gym lights. Lately the battle has intensified. I am approaching sixty-five, that age when abstractions begin presenting themselves as appointments rather than ideas, and I have reread, for the fifth time, Emmanuel Carrère’s The Kingdom, his brilliant, maddening meditation on Christianity. Between Carrère’s relentless fascination with the Apostle Paul and my own inability to leave theological questions alone, I have spent months drowning in what I call Theological Vertigo: that state in which every answer generates three new questions until the mind becomes exhausted by its own seriousness.

    Our family vacation to Carlsbad interrupted the cycle. I read less. I wrote less. For the first time in months, my mind had room to breathe.

    One morning we ate breakfast at the French Corner. I ordered a savory crepe and drank coffee softened with milk, cinnamon, and honey. It was, without exaggeration, one of the most satisfying meals of my life. I left the table neither hungry nor bloated but suspended in that miraculous middle ground where appetite and satisfaction shake hands. For several fleeting minutes I experienced something approaching perfection. The meal did not merely fill my stomach; it seemed to quiet some hidden chamber of the soul that usually refuses to stop talking.

    Then we wandered into downtown Carlsbad. My family disappeared into a used record store while I remained outside. I have never liked the smell of old books or aging paper. To many people it evokes nostalgia. To me it smells like mildew wearing a tweed jacket.

    As I waited, I found myself contemplating the familiar inventory of deficiencies: the thirty extra pounds I continue to carry, my inconsistent discipline, and my growing realization that I need more daily companionship than I once admitted.

    Then I noticed two men walking toward me.

    They appeared to be in their early seventies. Both wore safari hats, T-shirts, shorts, and tennis shoes. Their phones rested casually in their back pockets rather than monopolizing their attention. Their conversation flowed with the easy rhythm of men who had probably taken the same walk together hundreds of times. They laughed. They listened. Neither seemed in a hurry to dominate the conversation or perform for an invisible audience. Their calves were sculpted from years of walking rather than months of gym heroics. They looked younger than many men twenty years their junior because their bodies had quietly become advertisements for moderation.

    I envied them immediately.

    Not simply because they were lean, although I certainly noticed that. I envied the life their bodies implied. These were men who had discovered that exercise and friendship need not compete for time. They had fused physical fitness with social fitness into a single daily ritual.

    I doubted they spent evenings rereading Emmanuel Carrère or wondering whether Paul was history’s greatest religious genius or its most successful narcissist. I doubted they classified themselves as “religious,” “spiritual,” “agnostic,” or “secular.” They probably possessed something rarer than an ideology.

    They possessed common sense.

    You take care of your body.

    You walk every day.

    You eat reasonably.

    You cultivate friendships.

    You show up.

    You repeat the process tomorrow.

    None of these habits requires a bestselling self-help book or a sophisticated theology. They emerge from the accumulated evidence of ordinary life. They are conclusions reached not by speculation but by observation.

    Standing outside that record store, I began to wonder whether I had spent years practicing Existential Overfishing—casting my line ever deeper into the waters of ultimate meaning until I had forgotten the fish swimming near the surface. Had I mistaken depth for wisdom? Had I become so absorbed in metaphysical puzzles that I had overlooked the plain truths available to anyone willing to pay attention?

    Questions flooded in.

    Is common sense enough?

    Is common sense superior to profound religious contemplation?

    Have I submerged myself beneath a sea of fascinating but largely irrelevant abstractions?

    Have I mistaken intellectual complexity for spiritual maturity?

    Have I, after all these years, simply lost the plot?

    Perhaps the life of the Common Sensalist is the wiser path.

    A Common Sensalist believes that flourishing depends less upon elaborate theological systems or fashionable self-improvement programs than upon the quiet authority of ordinary experience: daily exercise, enduring friendships, moderation, meaningful work, simple pleasures, and habits repeated until they become character. Such a philosophy does not reject transcendence. It merely insists that the road toward it may begin with putting on walking shoes instead of opening another theological treatise.

    As I stood there waiting for my family to emerge from the record store, I felt strangely melancholy. I had spent decades wrestling angels while two elderly men had apparently settled for walking with friends.

    I still wasn’t sure who had chosen the better path.

    But I knew exactly where I wanted to eat breakfast the next morning.

  • The Inversion Gospel

    The Inversion Gospel

    Largely because of Paul, Christianity leaves no room for self-help.

    There is no Stoic program of disciplined self-mastery. No Epicurean search for tranquil pleasure. No rationalist confidence that reason can perfect the soul. No wisdom tradition promising that enough insight, meditation, or self-examination will unlock your hidden potential. Paul sweeps every human technology of self-improvement into a single heap and sets it ablaze.

    Discipline.

    Reason.

    Philosophy.

    Human flourishing.

    All of it belongs, in Paul’s estimation, on the rubbish pile.

    There is no meditation to anchor you in your inner self. No koan to awaken your latent divinity. No carefully engineered life-hack to elevate your consciousness. Instead, Paul reaches back to Isaiah and delivers a stunning declaration of war against human wisdom itself: “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the intelligence of the intelligent I will reject.”

    Yet Paul does not stop at dismantling humanity’s ladders to self-perfection.

    He demands something even more astonishing.

    You must embrace what the world calls foolishness.

    The crucified Messiah is not merely an inconvenient truth. He is a scandal to the Jews and utter absurdity to the Greeks. The path to salvation does not ascend through brilliance, eloquence, status, or virtue. It descends into humiliation, weakness, dependence, and apparent defeat. Those whom society considers lowly and contemptible are nearest the Kingdom, while the celebrated, accomplished, and admired stand in greatest danger.

    Paul thus proclaims what might be called the Anti-Flourishing Doctrine: the startling Christian paradox that human excellence, self-improvement, wisdom, and personal achievement can become obstacles rather than pathways to salvation. The more impressive you become in your own eyes, the less likely you are to recognize your need for grace.

    Emmanuel Carrère, however, wonders whether theology is the whole story.

    He suspects Paul was also engaged in a struggle for authority.

    Hovering in the background is the gifted preacher Apollos, renowned for his eloquence and learning. Paul never launches a direct attack on him. Instead, he accomplishes something far more ingenious. By portraying eloquence, rhetorical brilliance, and worldly wisdom as spiritually suspect, while elevating weakness, humility, and apparent foolishness, Paul quietly transforms his greatest rival into an example of precisely what Christians ought to distrust.

    It is a rhetorical masterstroke.

    Without naming Apollos, Paul changes the rules of the contest.

    The polished speaker suddenly appears spiritually compromised. The awkward, unimpressive apostle becomes the authentic messenger of God. Those standing high are brought low; those lying in the dust are lifted up.

    Carrère is astonished by the originality of this move. Whether Paul’s motives were entirely pure is almost beside the point. He had written something the ancient world had never encountered. Like Jesus himself—whom Carrère describes as a hapax legomenon, a phenomenon without precedent—Paul seemed to create an intellectual and spiritual category all his own.

    He proclaimed what might be called the Inversion Gospel: the revolutionary conviction that every conventional measure of greatness—wisdom, eloquence, status, strength, success, even virtue—is overturned by the logic of the Cross, where weakness becomes power, defeat becomes victory, and what appears to be foolishness becomes the deepest truth of all.

  • Pauline Mirror Syndrome

    Pauline Mirror Syndrome

    There is no escaping Paul. To become a Christian is, in some measure, to place your trust in him. You must accept that the man who never met the historical Jesus became, through his Damascus conversion and subsequent revelations, an apostle every bit as legitimate as those who had walked beside Christ in Galilee. More than that, you must believe that Paul’s visions conferred an authority so profound that he became Christianity’s most influential interpreter, the man whose voice would ultimately drown out nearly all the others.

    For many believers, this poses no difficulty. Paul is the heroic convert, the fearless missionary, the brilliant theologian who carried Christianity into the Gentile world.

    For others, he is a problem.

    His letters often pulse with an unnerving competitiveness. He dismisses rivals with astonishing confidence, defends his authority with relentless vigor, and repeatedly reminds his readers that his gospel came not from human teachers but by direct revelation from Christ. To admirers, this is prophetic certainty. To skeptics, it can sound perilously close to grandiosity. His confidence is so complete that it occasionally borders on solipsism, as though the final court of appeal were not the testimony of others but the private theater of his own mind.

    In The Kingdom, Emmanuel Carrère imagines Paul regarding the Jerusalem apostles with something approaching contempt. Their understanding of Jesus, rooted in firsthand acquaintance, strikes Paul as merely “Christ according to the flesh.” Carrère compares him to “those critics who prefer not to read the books or see the films they review to be sure that their judgment won’t be swayed by the work in question.” 

    It is a devastating image. Paul becomes the supreme authority precisely because he refuses to be constrained by eyewitnesses.

    Some readers find this exhilarating.

    Others experience what I call apostolic recoil: the instinctive revulsion one feels toward a revered religious figure whose personality seems morally or psychologically suspect despite his canonical status.

    I belonged to that second camp almost from the beginning.

    I remember sitting in church when I was seventeen as a member of the choir introduced a hymn. His face glowed with affection as he announced that Paul was his favorite apostle. The warmth in his voice startled me because it exposed the opposite reaction within myself. I disliked Paul with remarkable intensity. He struck me as arrogant, combative, ambitious, and intoxicated by his own authority.

    The realization filled me with shame.

    I was a new Christian, yet I harbored deep hostility toward the man who had done more than anyone else to shape Christianity. Surely this could not bode well for my faith. I was suffering from canonical dissonance: the unsettling psychological conflict that arises when one reveres a religious tradition while distrusting one of its indispensable architects.

    What did this say about the authenticity of my conversion? Had I embraced Christianity while instinctively rejecting its chief interpreter?

    Decades later, my opinion of Paul has become more nuanced but no less conflicted. Emmanuel Carrère has supplied historical and psychological reasons to question Paul’s extraordinary self-confidence, yet I have gradually come to suspect that my resistance originates somewhere far less flattering.

    Perhaps the problem is not Paul.

    Perhaps the problem is me.

    I recognize too much of myself in him.

    His ambition.

    His vanity.

    His hunger to be right.

    His tendency to trust the authority of his own mind.

    When I recoil from Paul, I may simply be recoiling from my own reflection.

    I call this Pauline Mirror Syndrome: the unsettling experience of rejecting the Apostle Paul because one recognizes in him the very flaws one struggles to forgive in oneself.

    The mirror is often more difficult to face than the man standing inside it.