Cinemorphosis

Author: Jeffrey McMahon

  • The Telos Test

    The Telos Test

    Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange contains a recurring refrain: “What’s it going to be then, eh?” The words linger because they refuse to let the reader remain a spectator. They demand a decision. They ask not merely what one believes, but what one intends to become.

    The question came back to me while reflecting on the Greek word telos—the ultimate purpose toward which every action aims. What, then, is the telos of my fascination with the early Christian church? Why do I keep returning to the conflict between James and Paul, to the expectation shared by Jesus and Paul that the end of history would arrive within their own generation, and to the ways later editors softened those failed expectations by rendering the prophecies more elastic? What is the purpose of exposing cracks in Christian doctrine?

    Suppose, for the sake of argument, that Emmanuel Carrère, Elaine Pagels, or Bart Ehrman successfully chip away at the church’s claim to doctrinal certainty. What then? Burgess’s refrain becomes a philosophical audit. It asks whether my scholarship has a destination beyond demolition. It is another way of asking the question posed by R.E.M.: after losing my religion, what remains?

    In truth, I doubt I could ever lose my religion entirely.

    Whatever label I eventually assign myself—Christian, agnostic, or something in between—I cannot silence the conviction that I will one day answer for the life I have lived. My conscience refuses to dismiss the possibility of judgment. I imagine my thoughts and deeds passing before me in merciless clarity. I see myself shrinking beneath their weight, my knees buckling, my confidence evaporating, reduced to asking not for vindication but for mercy. I do not regard this as a uniquely religious neurosis. It seems to me a universal human intuition. Religion did not invent our moral sense; it gave language, symbols, and stories to an accountability that most of us already feel lurking beneath the surface of consciousness.

    That is why my ambivalence toward Paul is never merely historical. It immediately becomes personal.

    “What’s it going to be then, eh?”

    Am I dismantling Paul’s authority because I seek the truth, or because I seek permission?

    If there is no final judgment, no resurrection, and no afterlife, do I thereby acquire a license to indulge every selfish appetite? If organized religion collapses under historical scrutiny, am I morally obligated to replace it with another vision capable of disciplining my desires?

    Martin Hägglund attempts precisely this in This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom. He argues that meaning arises from our finite existence and our obligations to one another rather than from eternity. It is an intellectually serious project. Yet I wonder whether I possess Hägglund’s confidence in human nature. Do we really possess the moral resources to repair ourselves? Or is Paul correct that something within us is too deeply fractured to heal itself?

    Steven Pressfield offers another alternative in The War of Art. For him, humanity’s fallen nature appears under a different name: Resistance. Salvation comes not through grace but through disciplined creative labor. The Muse replaces the Holy Spirit; artistic practice replaces spiritual formation. I admire Pressfield immensely. Yet I hesitate before turning art into a universal religion. Is artistic transcendence truly available to everyone? Is disciplined creativity sufficient to tame the darker regions of the human heart?

    Then there are Elaine Pagels and Bart Ehrman. Both drank deeply from the well of Christianity before becoming two of its most influential historical critics. Both retain profound respect for Jesus while rejecting much of traditional Christian doctrine. In their hands, Christianity often becomes less a supernatural drama than a humanitarian ethic. Hell recedes into metaphor. Divine wrath becomes a cautionary tale about human cruelty. The central question shifts from salvation to compassion.

    As much as I admire their scholarship, I sometimes wonder whether they perform what I have come to call Therapeutic Transfiguration: the transformation of a demanding religious tradition into the language of emotional wellness, affirmation, and psychological flourishing.

    Stephen Prothero voices a similar concern in his review of Karen King and Elaine Pagels’ Reading Judas. He writes:

    I prefer to take my religious history free from demands for contemporary relevance, so whenever someone in the historical-Jesus fraternity makes Jesus mutter moral maxims that might as easily have been uttered by President Bush or Oprah Winfrey, my anachronism antenna goes up. In this case, Pagels and King massage the multicultural sensibilities of their readers by opining that the Gospel of Judas represents a “sharp, dissenting voice” against the “single, static universal system of beliefs” of official Christianity. Preaching to the “spiritual but not religious” choir, they tell us that, like other noncanonical texts they have championed elsewhere, this gospel aims to “encourage believers to seek God within themselves, with no mention of churches, much less clergy.”

    What Prothero objects to might be called Oprahfication: translating historically specific and often unsettling religious claims into therapeutic affirmations about inner peace, self-discovery, and personal fulfillment. The apocalyptic prophet becomes a motivational speaker. The call to repentance becomes an invitation to embrace one’s authentic self.

    I confess that Oprahfication unsettles me as well. Whenever I hear sweeping assurances about “the divine within,” I picture an Oprah Winfrey interview with Deepak Chopra dissolving into a warm bath of inspirational platitudes. Even if there is some truth in the claim that God may be encountered within, it remains a perilous proposition. For every soul who genuinely discovers humility, I fear thousands more will disappear into the funhouse mirrors of narcissism, mistaking self-absorption for enlightenment.

    Of course, the opposite error is no better. Certain Puritans became so intoxicated by the doctrine of human depravity that they all but erased the possibility of salvation, imagining a universe in which nearly everyone was damned. Such despair borders on the demonic. Yet the opposite doctrine—that humanity is innately divine and naturally good—contains its own danger. If everyone already possesses effortless sanctity, then no one requires transformation. Without an exemplar who calls us beyond ourselves, goodness becomes whatever we happen to prefer, and heaven gradually dissolves into a congratulatory mirror.

    Which brings me back to Burgess.

    “What’s it going to be then, eh?”

    That question is no longer about Paul. It is about me.

    Am I searching for historical truth, or am I constructing an elegant rationale for living exactly as I please? Is my criticism an act of intellectual honesty, or an application for moral exemption?

    I hope it is neither cynicism nor rebellion that drives this inquiry. I hope my quest is animated by the desire to see reality more clearly while remaining accountable to whatever goodness ultimately governs it. If I dismantle inherited beliefs, I pray it is not to clear space for selfishness but to discover a foundation sturdy enough to support a life worthy of judgment.

  • The Startup That Defeated Headquarters

    The Startup That Defeated Headquarters

    Religion has never existed without branding. Every enduring faith possesses a recognizable identity, a coherent vision, and, above all, a commanding personality capable of persuading others that his interpretation is the authentic one. 

    Early Christianity was no exception.

    James, the brother of Jesus, envisioned a movement rooted firmly in the Law of Moses. The Messiah had indeed come, but the covenant remained intact. Followers of Jesus still belonged within Judaism and still observed its commandments. It was a closed ecosystem. Think of James as Mac OS: elegant, coherent, tightly controlled, and suspicious of unauthorized modifications.

    Paul had a radically different vision. Christ’s death and resurrection had liberated believers from the Mosaic Law. Circumcision, dietary regulations, and ritual obligations no longer defined God’s people. The system was now open. Paul was Windows. He discarded the old operating restrictions and invited the entire Gentile world to install the software. Even more audaciously, he translated Jewish ideas into categories that Greeks could understand, blending Hebrew theology with Hellenistic thought. What struck James as scandalous improvisation appeared to Paul as inspired innovation.

    The dispute was not merely theological. It was a fight over ownership of the brand.

    James, Peter, and John operated from corporate headquarters in Jerusalem. Paul functioned like an ambitious regional manager who suddenly decided headquarters had become obsolete. In The Kingdom, Emmanuel Carrère imagines the conflict unfolding as a modern corporate dispute. Jerusalem’s leadership views Paul as a rogue executive who is “fraudulently usurping” the Christian name, misrepresenting the company’s message, and franchising unauthorized branches across the Mediterranean. Paul had never accompanied the historical Jesus. He knew only the Christ revealed through visions. To Jerusalem, this was not merely eccentric; it was grounds for termination.

    Carrère summarizes the problem with delicious corporate sarcasm:

    Paul has always presented himself as an independent master, preaching what he calls ‘my Gospel,’ and only evoking in a very vague way the existence of a parent enterprise whose representative he is.

    There lies the heart of the conflict. Paul repeatedly refers to “my gospel.” Imagine a vice president introducing himself by saying, “Welcome to my Apple” or “Let me tell you about my Coca-Cola.” Such language would send corporate attorneys into cardiac arrest. Yet Paul speaks with precisely that confidence. His authority does not derive from Jerusalem. It derives from God.

    Carrère pushes the metaphor further:

    And now there are these people from Jerusalem, who first of all introduce themselves as Paul’s superiors, and secondly say that he’s no longer part of the business. They had to let him go, they say, because this isn’t his first transgression. He’s already opened up shop here and there under their prestigious logo, even though they’ve forbidden him from using it. He’s been uncovered several times, but he always goes farther and finds new dupes.

    One can almost picture the cease-and-desist letters arriving by camel.

    The conflict became a theological arm wrestle. Paul would establish a congregation, depart for another city, and soon afterward representatives from Jerusalem would arrive to inform the new converts that Paul was a fraud. His gospel lacked authorization. The authentic Christianity remained the Jerusalem version.

    Paul answered with astonishing audacity, nowhere more vividly than in Galatians. He insists that his gospel was not taught to him by any human being but revealed directly by Jesus Christ. His opponents are not simply mistaken; they are preaching a counterfeit gospel. Even if an angel from heaven proclaims another message, Paul declares, let him be accursed. To establish his credentials, Paul presents his autobiography as evidence: his education in Jerusalem, his fierce persecution of the church, his dramatic encounter on the road to Damascus, and his continuing revelations from Christ. Possessing a direct line to heaven, he has little patience for organizational charts drafted in Jerusalem.

    History suggests that Paul won.

    Despite the Jerusalem apostles’ determination to preserve their prestigious logo, Paul effectively appropriated it, redesigned it, and launched it globally. The movement that conquered the Roman Empire bore Paul’s theological fingerprints far more than James’s. The Christianity that eventually reached Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas was not simply the faith of Jerusalem. It was Jerusalem translated, expanded, and fundamentally reimagined by Paul.

    Perhaps there is a broader lesson here. Closed systems often preserve purity, but open systems spread. James built a fortress. Paul built a network. One protected the brand. The other made it impossible to contain.

  • Breakfast at the Edge of Another World

    Breakfast at the Edge of Another World

    One morning I sat at the piano while my wife prepared her breakfast—a pot of rolled oats simmering quietly on the stovetop. As the warm, earthy aroma drifted through the house, I was four years old again, carried backward in time to the winter of 1966.

    My brother had not yet been born. It was just my mother, my father, and me driving toward Lake Tahoe. Before we reached our destination, a snowstorm descended with more fury than anyone expected. My father had no tire chains, so we abandoned the journey and took refuge in a small roadside motel, where we remained snowbound for several days while the Sierra disappeared beneath an endless blanket of white.

    My parents bought provisions from a nearby market. Every morning we ate bowls of Quaker Oats sweetened with brown sugar and cooled with milk. To my four-year-old self, it was paradise. Even today, no gourmet breakfast can rival the comfort contained in those humble bowls of oatmeal.

    Yet the smell of those oats carried an unexpected paradox. They meant warmth, safety, and home, but they also became permanently entwined with something altogether stranger. We were isolated in a tiny motel, surrounded by a landscape so white and silent that it seemed the world itself had vanished. We were a single glowing window in an infinite universe of snow.

    The motel television only deepened the feeling that we had crossed into another reality. Alongside familiar cartoons appeared programs I had never imagined could exist. There was Sinbad Jr. and His Magic Belt. Stranger still was a British science-fiction serial called Fireball XL5, whose cast consisted entirely of marionettes speaking with impeccable British accents.

    To my four-year-old mind, Fireball XL5 felt less like a television show than a fever dream accidentally transmitted from another galaxy. Nothing obeyed the ordinary rules of childhood. The marionettes smiled with unsettling serenity, their painted faces suspended somewhere between fearless astronauts and department-store mannequins that had wandered off after closing time. Their rocket streaked through glittering constellations that looked as though someone had punched tiny holes into black velvet with an ice pick. The dialogue carried the solemn authority of Shakespeare performed by sleepwalkers, while the eerie electronic score suggested that outer space was inhabited not by extraterrestrials but by ghosts.

    At four years old, I lacked the vocabulary to call it surreal. I only knew that I loved it because it made no sense. Fireball XL5 occupied that peculiar territory where wonder and nightmare shake hands, leaving a child convinced that television, like dreams, had uncovered a hidden dimension adults somehow accepted without question.

    Those three snowbound days fused together two emotional worlds that have never since separated. The comforting smell of oatmeal became permanently married to the delicious strangeness of Fireball XL5. This is what I call The Cozy Uncanny: the emotional condition in which domestic comfort becomes inseparable from profound otherness, producing memories that remain both reassuring and dreamlike.

    When my wife’s oatmeal filled our kitchen this morning, it carried me effortlessly back to that motel near Lake Tahoe. A single scent collapsed sixty years. Suddenly I was once again that little boy sitting safely indoors while an unknowable universe waited just beyond the frosted window.

    Perhaps that is why my favorite smells remain the smells of breakfast: rolled oats, French toast, pancakes browning on a griddle, maple syrup warming in the air. These aromas do more than remind me of childhood. They reassure me that no matter how strange the surrounding world becomes, there remains a path back home. I sometimes think that if I were suddenly transported into the bizarre universe of Fireball XL5, the smell of oatmeal alone would give me enough confidence to believe I could find my way back.

    People often predict that religion will eventually disappear, that modernity will finally outgrow humanity’s longing for transcendence. I doubt it. Our deepest desires are not arguments but homesickness. We are creatures who instinctively seek warmth, belonging, and a place where the strange finally becomes familiar. The smell of rolled oats, French toast, or pancakes does not merely awaken nostalgia. It awakens the ancient conviction that somewhere there exists a home we have not entirely forgotten.

    Perhaps our religious impulse is nothing more—and nothing less—than that incurable longing to return there.

  • The Messiah Test

    The Messiah Test

    In The Kingdom, Emmanuel Carrère argues that Paul built Christianity upon a single indispensable claim: the Resurrection. Remove it, Paul tells the Corinthians, and the entire edifice collapses. If Christ did not rise from the dead, then Christian hope is an illusion, preaching is empty, faith is futile, and there is nothing left but to eat, drink, and await extinction.

    Carrère is unconvinced that unwavering belief in the Resurrection can be explained solely by historical evidence. He is more interested in the psychology of conviction. Again and again, he observes, reality does not always weaken faith. Sometimes it hardens it.

    His favorite illustration is a familiar one. A charismatic guru predicts that the world will end on a particular day. The day arrives. The sun rises. Children go to school. Banks open for business. Reality appears to have delivered a humiliating verdict.

    Yet the faithful do not disperse in embarrassment.

    Instead, they reinterpret the outcome. The prophecy did not fail, they insist. A profound spiritual transformation occurred, invisible to ordinary eyes but unmistakable to those with genuine faith. The skeptics see only another Tuesday. The elect perceive eternity breaking into history.

    Failure itself becomes evidence of success.

    Those who abandon the movement demonstrate that their faith was shallow all along. Those who continue believing prove they are the wheat separated from the chaff. As Carrère writes, they learn to distrust their senses. If reason and observation contradict revelation, then reason and observation must yield. The very willingness to appear foolish becomes proof of election. They have passed the test.

    Social psychologists describe this phenomenon as the paradox of commitment under disconfirmation. When identity fuses with belief, contrary evidence no longer serves as an external check. Instead, the evidence itself is absorbed into the belief system and assigned a new meaning. Disconfirmation becomes confirmation by another name.

    Carrère sees Paul confronting precisely this dynamic.

    The Thessalonians have accepted the scandalous claim of the Resurrection, much to Paul’s relief. But another crisis erupts in Galatia. Missionaries have persuaded the Galatians that fidelity to the Jewish law remains essential. Paul responds with extraordinary vehemence. Even if he himself—or an angel from heaven—should later preach a different gospel, he writes, that messenger must be rejected.

    The true gospel has already been delivered.

    Paul’s confidence is striking because his authority rests on a different kind of encounter than that of the original disciples. Peter, James, and John knew Jesus during his earthly ministry. Paul did not. His authority derives from visions and revelation rather than firsthand companionship.

    One might suppose that the disciples who ate with Jesus, traveled beside him, and listened to his teaching would possess the stronger claim to authority. Paul turns that expectation upside down. His mystical encounter with the risen Christ, he argues, is not inferior to theirs but divinely authoritative. The churches must trust the revelation given to him, even when it conflicts with competing interpretations.

    Carrère detects the same psychological pattern operating here as in the failed apocalypse. Membership in the community depends not merely upon accepting a proposition but upon accepting a particular source of authority. To believe Paul despite the absence of ordinary historical verification becomes the very mark of authentic faith.

    Paul ultimately prevails.

    His letters come to define Christian theology far more decisively than the remembered voices of those who walked beside Jesus during his earthly life. One might describe this victory as Epistemic Promotion: the elevation of private revelation, mystical experience, or ideological certainty above ordinary evidence, historical testimony, or empirical reasoning. Whether one views that promotion as divine inspiration or as an extraordinary feat of theological persuasion depends largely upon where one stands. What cannot be denied is that Paul’s vision reshaped Christianity more profoundly than that of any other single figure after Jesus himself.

    Paul’s reshaping of Christianity raises an unavoidable question: What were his motives?

    Paul famously writes that prophecy, knowledge, eloquence, and every other spiritual gift are worthless without love. Love, he insists, is the measure by which all religious authority must be judged. But that standard inevitably turns back upon Paul himself.

    Was love the governing force behind his extraordinary confidence?

    Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that Paul was entirely sincere. Even then the question remains. Did he need to prevail over the other apostles because he loved Christ and the churches? Or because he hungered for authority, validation, and the satisfaction of being right? Was it love? Ego? Power? Some unstable mixture of all three?

    These are not merely questions about Paul. They are questions about every religious founder, prophet, guru, apostle, messiah, revolutionary, and ideological visionary who asks us to entrust them with our minds and souls.

    Do they genuinely seek our flourishing?

    Are their methods honest?

    Are they persuading us—or manipulating us?

    Does the enthusiasm of a crowd testify to truth, or merely to the contagiousness of conviction?

    Before surrendering ourselves to any movement, we would do well to apply what I call The Messiah Test: the practice of asking whether a leader’s authority exists primarily to serve those who follow—or to serve the leader himself.

    Carrère subjects Paul to precisely this test.

    He is fascinated by Paul’s insistence that he is Christ’s authentic messenger despite never having met Jesus during his earthly life. To illuminate the audacity of Paul’s claim, Carrère imagines an analogous scene in 1925. A former White Army officer arrives in the Kremlin demanding an audience with Stalin. He announces that he has received a private revelation of Marxism-Leninism more profound than anything the Party itself has ever understood. On that basis, he demands full authority over the movement while refusing to submit to Stalin or the Politburo.

    The analogy is intentionally absurd.

    Carrère’s imaginary officer is no heroic reformer. He is a spectacular crank. His confidence borders on the operatic. His self-assurance is matched only by his breathtaking inability to recognize how implausible his claims appear to everyone around him.

    He suffers from what might be called Revelation Inflation: the tendency to elevate private revelation until it outranks every competing authority. The visionary no longer argues that he possesses a valuable insight. He insists that his insight is the decisive one, superior to history, institutions, eyewitnesses, and every rival claim to truth.

    Whether one ultimately sees Paul as a divinely inspired apostle or as an astonishingly persuasive religious entrepreneur, Carrère’s thought experiment forces the same uncomfortable question: How do we distinguish authentic revelation from magnificent self-certainty?

  • Watermelon Theology

    Watermelon Theology

    In 1979, around the time of my conversion, I was a seventeen-year-old bodybuilder performing barbell curls in the family den while the television droned in the background. On the screen stood a large Southern preacher wearing a green seersucker suit and speaking in a voice that sounded uncannily like Foghorn Leghorn’s. Amid all the sermons I have forgotten, one metaphor lodged itself permanently in my mind.

    “Religion,” he said, “is like a watermelon. You enjoy the sweet fruit, but you have to accept the seeds. A lot of people can’t accept the seeds, so their faith fails.”

    I have been chewing on those watermelon seeds ever since.

    The fruit has never been my problem.

    If I step back from the Bible and read it as the grand narrative of moral order and moral dissolution, of humanity’s perpetual struggle between sanctification and self-destruction, I find myself repeatedly stopping in admiration. Surely there is such a thing as spiritual health and spiritual decay. Surely the person who learns humility, self-control, forgiveness, courage, and sacrificial love becomes someone fundamentally different from the person consumed by vanity, resentment, lust, greed, and appetite. We become what we repeatedly do, and eventually our habits cease to be things we perform; they become the substance of our character.

    Christianity also explains something else with remarkable psychological precision. It understands the persistent ache that seems woven into the human condition. We are creatures forever searching for transcendence while repeatedly mistaking stimulation for transcendence itself. As the Reverend Eugene Peterson observed, many of us pursue moments of escape through recreational sex, drugs, alcohol, celebrity, politics, or the intoxicating madness of crowds. We mistake emotional intensity for spiritual fulfillment.

    The Sermon on the Mount and Paul’s Letter to the Philippians propose something radically different. Happiness is not found through self-assertion but self-emptying. Power is discovered through service. Life is found by relinquishing the desperate project of preserving it. The Gospel’s diagnosis is humiliating precisely because it leaves so little room for self-congratulation. Paul, who knew his own failures intimately, dismissed the self-help philosophies of his age with astonishing brevity. Human beings, he insisted, are not merely uninformed. They are unable. They require grace.

    Whenever I read Jesus or Paul, I cannot escape the feeling that they have perceived something enduring about human nature. This does not strike me as one religion among many, each pointing politely toward the same destination. It confronts me with a diagnosis that continues to unsettle me.

    Then come the watermelon seeds.

    There are, first, the supernatural claims.

    I would be dishonest if I claimed to believe them literally. Noah living nearly a thousand years. The ark. The parting of the Red Sea. The Virgin Birth. The dead emerging from their tombs during the Crucifixion and walking through Jerusalem. Jesus raising the dead. Paul doing the same. Above all, the Resurrection itself.

    Then there are the historical seeds.

    The expectation that the Kingdom of God would arrive within the lifetime of Jesus’ contemporaries appears to have receded as history stubbornly refused to cooperate. Scholars argue that later editors softened or reframed passages whose original urgency had become increasingly difficult to defend.

    Then come the institutional seeds.

    Paul’s breathtaking declaration that “there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” gradually yielded to later church structures that proved considerably more interested in hierarchy than equality. Letters now widely regarded by many scholars as pseudonymous instructed women to remain silent, submissive, and excluded from leadership. The liberating impulse of the earliest Christian communities became entangled with the far less inspiring politics of institutional preservation.

    And finally there is perhaps the hardest seed of all.

    Hell.

    Infinite punishment for finite creatures.

    A doctrine that has haunted Christian thought for centuries.

    The temptation, of course, is simply to spit out the seeds.

    Many people do.

    The miracles become metaphors.

    The Resurrection becomes symbolic.

    Sin becomes psychological maladjustment.

    Judgment becomes poor self-esteem.

    Christianity quietly dissolves into a soothing spirituality where every religion points toward the same divine reality, nobody is terribly mistaken, vice is largely a matter of perspective, and the highest commandment is simply to relax and enjoy yourself because life is short.

    Once I begin removing the seeds, how do I know which ones are merely unpleasant and which ones are load-bearing?

    Where does revision end and reinvention begin?

    At what point have I ceased pruning Christianity and quietly invented another religion that merely borrows its vocabulary?

    This is what I have come to call Foundational Anxiety: the fear that questioning one foundational belief will begin a cascade of doubt that ultimately leaves a person without any stable moral, philosophical, or spiritual ground.

    It is also why I think of my predicament as Watermelon Theology.

    Watermelon Theology is the attempt to preserve the nourishing moral and spiritual fruit of a religious tradition while wrestling honestly with doctrines, miracles, and historical claims that resist belief. It refuses both naïve certainty and fashionable dismissal. It insists that the fruit is too nourishing to discard lightly, even while acknowledging that the seeds remain stubbornly lodged between one’s teeth.

    Can I resolve this dilemma in a thousand-word essay?

    Hardly.

    Millions of people have spent two millennia arguing over these very questions. Many of them are smarter than I am. Augustine stood in this line. Aquinas stood in this line. Luther, Calvin, Kierkegaard, Bonhoeffer, C.S. Lewis, and countless others stood here as well.

    I do not get to complain that the line is long.

    I simply take my place in it.

  • The Professor Who Told Me I Wouldn’t Make It

    The Professor Who Told Me I Wouldn’t Make It

    In 1979, on the first day of freshman composition, my professor read my writing sample, looked up, and matter-of-factly informed me that I was not going to make it.

    He recommended that I enroll in a remedial writing course to repair my grammar and expand my vocabulary before attempting freshman composition.

    He looked exactly like the sort of Catholic high school teacher Hollywood used to cast: bald, square-jawed, stern-faced, and economical with words. He possessed the kind of commanding presence that could silence a room without raising his voice. There was nothing theatrical about him. He was not cruel or sarcastic. He simply carried himself with the quiet authority of someone who respected standards too much to pretend they didn’t exist.

    What he gave me that morning was not encouragement but reality.

    He measured me honestly and showed me, without apology or condescension, where I stood. My writing was not yet good enough.

    Looking back, I realize that his verdict was one of the greatest gifts a teacher ever gave me. He refused to flatter me with comforting illusions or lower the bar so I could feel accomplished. Instead, he pointed me toward the work I needed to do.

    Nearly half a century later, I remember him not with resentment but with gratitude. Sometimes the most compassionate teacher is the one who tells us the truth before anyone else is willing to do so.

  • The Great G-Shock-Seiko Divide

    The Great G-Shock-Seiko Divide

    Jeremy lives in Louisiana, but over the past decade he and I have shared the peculiar fraternity that develops among people who have spent far too much time thinking about watches. He has followed my YouTube channel long enough to witness my latest affliction unfold in real time.

    It began six months ago with a Casio G-Shock Frogman GWF-1000.

    Then came the Rescue GW-7900.

    Soon afterward I was fully initiated into the cult of Multiband-6. Every night while I slept, invisible radio signals synchronized my watches to atomic clocks, and every morning I awoke to the intoxicating certainty that the digits on my wrist displayed the exact time—not approximately, not close enough, but the precise time.

    Jeremy watched this transformation with sympathy until he made the fatal mistake of buying a few Multiband-6 G-Shocks himself.

    Recently he wrote to confess that his own hobby had entered a state of upheaval.

    Not ruined.

    Upended.

    He had contracted the same addiction.

    Like me, he had become enslaved to the quiet pleasure of glancing at a digital display that never needed correction. Like me, he found himself staring at mechanical divers worth several thousand dollars and struggling to justify putting them on his wrist. His collection, like mine, had suffered what I call The Great Divide.

    Mine is specifically the G-Shock–Seiko Divide.

    Jeremy’s divide is somewhat different. His luxury mechanical pieces wear both Swiss passports and Japanese ones, but the conflict is identical.

    Two incompatible ideas of what a watch should be now compete for the same wrist.

    Ironically, this essay began as something far more trivial.

    I intended to make a YouTube video reviewing my Seiko divers on Divecore Waffle straps made from Hydrogenated Nitrile Butadiene Rubber. Three of my twenty-millimeter Divecore Waffles currently adorn my Seiko SLA055, SLA051, and SLA023. My SBDC203 remains on its original Seiko “Chocolate Bar” rubber strap, while my Seiko Tuna SBBN049 wears a twenty-two-millimeter Divecore Waffle.

    I genuinely miss my Divecore FKM HP straps. They were magnificent. Yet the lingering discussion surrounding PFAS—the so-called “forever chemicals” associated with fluorinated materials—finally persuaded me that they were an unnecessary source of anxiety. My suspicion is that the straps are probably harmless. But “probably harmless” is an awkward companion for something strapped to your skin every day. Why carry even a hypothetical worry when the Divecore Waffles are every bit as handsome?

    I had planned to spend twenty minutes discussing rubber straps.

    Then I stopped myself.

    Who cares about straps?

    I already made peace with abandoning steel bracelets years ago.

    The straps weren’t the story.

    The story was that I had reached a point where every glance at my watch box required choosing between two entirely different philosophies.

    My Seikos are objects of astonishing beauty.

    Their dials possess depth, warmth, texture, and craftsmanship that industrial resin can never hope to imitate. On today’s used market my five Seiko divers are probably worth around nine thousand dollars. They are miniature works of art.

    My G-Shocks, by contrast, are worth perhaps a thousand dollars altogether.

    They are molded from industrial resin.

    They resemble equipment more than jewelry.

    They synchronize themselves every night.

    They weigh almost nothing.

    They display the exact time in large, unapologetic digits.

    They ask nothing of me.

    The Seikos appeal to my aesthetic imagination.

    The G-Shocks satisfy my practical mind.

    Guess which one wins about ninety percent of the time.

    It would be easy to write one of those tiresome minimalist sermons declaring that I should have skipped expensive mechanical watches altogether and bought only affordable G-Shocks. Such hindsight is wonderfully economical because it edits out the actual life that was lived.

    For more than twenty years I sowed my horological oats among mechanical watches.

    There was obsession.

    There was ecstasy.

    There was irrationality.

    There was financial excess.

    There was genuine beauty.

    There was hard-earned knowledge.

    Without those decades, I would never appreciate the peculiar satisfaction of glancing at a Mudman GW-9500 and knowing that the time displayed is as accurate as physics presently allows.

    Counterfactual histories are comforting fantasies. They allow us to imagine that wisdom could have arrived without tuition.

    It cannot.

    An hour before writing this, I was wearing my beloved Seiko Uemura. I admired its magnificent dial, then found myself squinting to determine the approximate time.

    Approximate.

    A few moments later I quietly removed it and fastened the Mudman to my wrist.

    Jeremy understands exactly why.

    My suspicion is that thousands of other watch enthusiasts do as well. Once you’ve crossed the Great Divide, you never entirely return. The two worlds continue to coexist, each beautiful in its own way, while your wrist quietly votes for only one.

  • My Adventures in Threshold Tourism

    My Adventures in Threshold Tourism

    You insist on living near the ocean, but not because you have any romantic desire to surf, bodyboard, or frolic in the waves like a sunscreen commercial. The beach serves a higher purpose. It calms you simply by existing. You need to smell the salt air, hear the muffled percussion of the surf, and watch the horizon dissolve into infinity. What you do not need is to step into the Pacific’s suspicious broth of runoff, seaweed, sunscreen residue, and whatever else civilization has politely donated to the tides. Nor do you wish to experience the tactile indignity of sand infiltrating every crevice of your body, clothing, luggage, and soul. During vacations in Oahu or Miami, you dutifully reserve a room overlooking the beach, then spend the day luxuriating beside the resort pool, periodically glancing toward the ocean with profound gratitude that you are not actually in it.

    Deserts present a similar paradox. From a safe distance they possess a cinematic grandeur, a landscape sculpted by eternity itself. Up close they reveal themselves to be an elaborate rehearsal for the apocalypse. Every cactus appears armed, every rock radiates hostility, and every gust of wind feels like the opening chapter of Mad Max. Your lips chap. Your skin shrivels. Your eyeballs seem to lose moisture by the minute. After forty-eight hours you become convinced you are quietly mummifying while still alive.

    Snow fares no better. Others speak reverently of winter wonderlands. You see an aggressively inhospitable climate masquerading as a Christmas card. Snow closes roads, freezes lungs, transforms ordinary errands into survival expeditions, and renders every hillside one unfortunate sneeze away from an avalanche. Even aesthetically it disappoints. An endless field of white is less majestic than monotonous, as though nature had forgotten to finish painting the landscape. Icicles, meanwhile, look less like decorations than nature’s collection of sharpened stakes awaiting an unfortunate passerby. One of your life’s quiet triumphs has been constructing a life that requires almost no interaction with snow whatsoever.

    Instead, you are captivated by what you call Unicorn Cities—those mythical communities that seem to have discovered the cheat code to geography. They enjoy unusually pleasant weather, attract unusually decent people, and somehow escape the afflictions suffered by neighboring regions. Port Angeles occupies a privileged place in this private mythology. Nestled within Washington’s Banana Belt, it promises milder temperatures than logic suggests it deserves. You are endlessly fascinated by it. You consume photographs, weather reports, and travel videos with almost devotional enthusiasm. Yet you have no real desire to go. Visiting would replace imagination with reality, and reality almost never survives comparison with imagination.

    So congratulate yourself for remaining loyal to your quiet corner of Southern California, where you leave town only reluctantly, tan in your own backyard for fifteen minutes a few afternoons each week, and venture to Hawaii or Miami once or twice a year merely to sit beside an immaculate swimming pool while gazing at the ocean from a respectful distance.

    You are, after all, a Threshold Tourist.

    A Threshold Tourist prefers to remain at the edge of an experience rather than surrender to it, extracting its beauty, symbolism, and emotional nourishment while politely declining its inconveniences. The destination is not meant to be conquered or consumed. It is meant to be contemplated. Paradise, in your estimation, is best appreciated from the balcony.

  • The Young and the Larval

    The Young and the Larval

    A year ago, I attended a family birthday party in Studio City. Hundreds of cheerful, talkative guests wandered around a lavish backyard pool shaded by thick stands of trees. The setting felt less like Los Angeles than a country estate in Provence. Beneath a canopy, guests feasted on fragrant Middle Eastern food while a white-haired band by the deep end of the pool played one boomer anthem after another. It was a celebration of long lives, old friendships, and accumulated memories.

    Most of the guests were in their seventies.

    While eating lunch, I spoke with my cousin’s husband, a retired ophthalmologist and former hospital administrator. A man who had once occupied positions of enormous responsibility, he told me the greatest surprise of old age wasn’t aching joints or declining stamina.

    It was invisibility.

    “People look right through you,” he said.

    His remark landed with the force of an unwelcome prophecy. Your accomplishments, reputation, expertise, and decades of experience quietly evaporate. Whatever authority once entered the room ahead of you no longer accompanies you through the door. You undergo what I call Aura Expiration: the quiet disappearance of the prestige, authority, and social recognition accumulated over a lifetime once age strips away the culture’s fascination with achievement and status.

    Yesterday’s distinguished physician becomes today’s anonymous old man standing patiently in line at Trader Joe’s.

    Aura Expiration ushers you into something even stranger. You enter what I think of as Social Hades: the peculiar stage of life in which a person remains physically present while gradually disappearing from society’s field of vision. You are neither fully among the living nor entirely absent. You become ghostlike—a witness rather than a participant—despite possessing more knowledge and experience than many of those who unconsciously dismiss you.

    Your very existence reminds younger people of the one truth they spend enormous energy avoiding: they, too, are running out of time.

    Naturally, there are ways to resist. You can dye your hair, chase fashion, cultivate the illusion of perpetual youth, or loudly insist that you are “still relevant.” But there is something tragic about watching a person wage war against chronology. The struggle itself often accelerates the indignity. Better to heed the biblical warning against kicking against the goads. Some losses are not defeats but transitions.

    Reading Emmanuel Carrère’s The Kingdom, I was struck by his observation that the Greeks imagined the afterlife as Hades, “an underworld where men’s shadows lead a sort of half-life: slow, comatose, larva-like, hardly aware.”

    I cannot help wondering whether this image grew partly from ordinary observation. Perhaps Hades resembled the fate awaiting the elderly in every civilization: still alive, yet treated as shadows; still capable of thought, yet gently ushered to the margins where they could cease interrupting youth’s fantasy of immortality.

    I have little interest in fighting that social reality. At best, younger people will treat me with courteous indifference. At worst, they will regard me as an inconvenient reminder that every fashionable face eventually wrinkles and every energetic stride slows.

    There is, however, one form of aging against which I intend to fight with all the stubbornness I possess.

    I refuse to let my mind become larval.

    I intend to keep reading difficult books, pursuing arguments, changing my mind when evidence demands it, writing essays, asking inconvenient questions, and remaining incurably curious. I would like to live forever, if only because I desperately want to know what happens next.

    Besides, history has a wicked sense of irony.

    Many young people imagine themselves to be in the thick of life merely because they inhabit the latest trends, wear the correct clothes, speak the approved vocabulary, and faithfully repeat the fashionable opinions of their tribe. Yet conformity has a way of anesthetizing curiosity. The mind quietly hardens while the body remains young.

    That is the true danger.

    Such people suffer from what I call The Larval Mind: a state of intellectual dormancy in which curiosity, skepticism, and independent judgment have withered away, leaving a person easily manipulated by fashion, ideology, algorithms, or tribal consensus. Their bodies pulse with youthful energy while their minds drift through life half-asleep.

    An eighty-year-old wrestling with Paul, Carrère, Darwin, artificial intelligence, and the future of civilization may be far younger than a twenty-five-year-old who has surrendered his thinking to TikTok, political orthodoxy, influencer culture, or whatever intellectual narcotic happens to dominate the moment.

    Perhaps youth has less to do with birthdays than with curiosity.

    Perhaps the opposite of old age is not youth at all.

    Perhaps the opposite of old age is refusing to become larval.

  • The Book That Failed to Cure Me of Paul

    The Book That Failed to Cure Me of Paul

    For more than twenty years, I have lived under the spell of Hyam Maccoby’s portrait of the apostle Paul in The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity. No book has done more to persuade me that Christianity might be the brilliant invention of a single, insecure, wildly ambitious genius. In Maccoby’s telling, Paul transformed a small Jewish sect into a universal religion by fusing Judaism, paganism, and strands of Hellenistic thought into something Jesus himself would scarcely have recognized. In the process, Paul elevated his own authority, turned Christianity against Judaism through supersessionism, and helped lay the theological foundation for the antisemitism that would spread through Western history like a centuries-long contagion.

    It is an intoxicating argument.

    Maccoby writes with the confidence of a prosecutor who has already secured the conviction before the trial begins. His prose is lucid, forceful, and relentlessly persuasive. He marshals his evidence with such authority that resistance feels almost irrational. Reading The Mythmaker is less like weighing competing historical interpretations than being swept into a courtroom drama where every witness seems to strengthen the case against the defendant.

    I was hardly alone in falling under its influence. On Amazon, the featured review is by the late novelist Anne Rice. After spending what she called “twelve earnest years” trying to become a Christian, her faith collapsed beneath what she regarded as Paul’s supersessionist theology and well-worn theological clichés. Maccoby, she writes, finally explained the confusion that had haunted her. Although she did not endorse every argument, she declared that the concluding chapter alone justified the price of the book.

    In many ways, I envy Rice.

    Maccoby gave her precisely what she had been searching for: an intellectually satisfying deconversion. His argument untied the theological knot that had troubled her and allowed her to walk away with a sense of clarity and peace.

    My own journey has been perversely different.

    The deeper I investigated Maccoby’s claims—and, just as importantly, the criticisms of his excesses—the less certain I became. Instead of confirming my doubts about Paul, the evidence steadily eroded my confidence in Maccoby’s portrait. The elegant certainty I once admired began to look increasingly overstated. The villain proved more elusive than the indictment suggested.

    Today I find myself in an unexpected place. My admiration for The Mythmaker has diminished, while my fascination with Paul has grown. Not because I have ceased asking difficult questions, but because Paul has become a far more complex, intelligent, passionate, and psychologically compelling figure than Maccoby allowed him to be.

    Much of that transformation can be traced to Emmanuel Carrère’s The Kingdom, my favorite novel. Carrère approaches Paul from almost the opposite direction. He does not write as an apologist, nor does he write as a prosecutor eager to secure a conviction. An agnostic by his own description, Carrère remains captivated by Paul, Luke, and the improbable chain of events that produced Christianity. He grants them neither sainthood nor villainy. Instead, he treats them as astonishingly gifted human beings whose words continue to exercise an almost gravitational pull on the Western imagination.

    That difference has mattered enormously to me. Maccoby offered the comforting simplicity of a conviction already reached. Carrère offered something rarer and ultimately more valuable: the unsettling experience of remaining in the presence of a man who refuses to become either hero or monster.