Cinemorphosis

Tag: christianity

  • Professor of Nothing in Particular

    Professor of Nothing in Particular

    In Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission, François is a man who has already filed his best years under “returned goods.” A writing professor in his early forties, he surveys his life with the cool detachment of a critic reviewing a book he didn’t enjoy but can’t quite put down. He blames, with some justice and more convenience, the moral economy of Western social democracies—systems that canonize money and status while leaving meaning to fend for itself. In this world, desire has been simplified to a shopping list. The only sanctioned faith is consumption; the only liturgy is acquisition. You study, you specialize, you exit the university with a résumé and a pulse, and then you prove your seriousness by acquiring things—objects, experiences, signals—until the performance of satisfaction becomes indistinguishable from satisfaction itself. François finds the spectacle tedious, but tedium does not grant immunity. He is as lonely, as unmoored, as anyone else—another citizen of an Ennui Infrastructure that delivers comfort with the enthusiasm of a sedative.

    His chosen saint is Joris-Karl Huysmans, the Catholic convert who traded decadence for doctrine and found, in surrender, a structure strong enough to hold a life. François studies him the way a starving man studies a menu. He recognizes the appeal—order, ritual, a metaphysical address where one might finally receive mail—but recognition is not conversion. He remains stalled in Agnostic Paralysis, admiring belief as a piece of architecture he cannot inhabit. Literature becomes his compromise: books as companions, authors as lanterns. Yet even a luminous guide cannot substitute for a destination. Huysmans can light the road; he cannot make François walk it.

    The job does not save him. Teaching, for François, is a cleanly run sham—a system that reproduces diluted versions of itself with industrial patience. A handful of students catch fire; the rest learn to approximate. He participates in Replicant Pedagogy with professional competence and private contempt, earning a salary in exchange for maintaining a machine that produces echoes and calls them voices. He is good at it. He is paid for it. He is not sustained by it.

    His relationships are equally provisional—brief alliances with pleasure that end as soon as the lights come on. Women are not partners so much as intervals, pauses between bouts of the same familiar boredom. Bitterness seeps in, not as a dramatic outburst but as a steady, low-grade leak. The pattern is reliable: a spike of sensation, a trough of meaning. François lives on Dopamine Subsistence Living, a diet of small thrills that keep the organism moving while starving the person.

    He envies the faithful with a precision that hurts. They possess what he lacks: structure that does not dissolve, families that do not negotiate their own existence, communities that do not expire at closing time. They are, in the most irritating sense, steadier. This steadiness reads to him as advantage, and advantage breeds resentment. He knows, in a way that knowledge cannot help, that they have found a grammar for living that he cannot conjugate.

    Nothing in his life bends toward change. There is no arc, only duration. He suffers the quiet violence of Spiritual Disinheritance—cut off from inherited meanings without the courage or capacity to invent replacements. The days proceed; the man does not.

    In this, François is less a character than a diagnosis. He is a cautionary specimen of Liquid Modernity—a life conducted without anchors in a culture that mistakes motion for progress. He has choices but no commitments, roles but no center, pleasures that evaporate on contact. He sees the hollowness of the system and lacks the will to exit it; even his longing for faith stalls at the threshold like a guest who won’t knock. What remains is not catastrophe but drift: a consciousness fully aware of its own directionlessness, proceeding anyway. It is the most modern tragedy—nothing collapses, and therefore nothing changes.

  • The Quiet Art of Not Wasting Your Life

    The Quiet Art of Not Wasting Your Life

    If we care about the state of our souls, we have to ask a difficult question: How do we treat time as a sacred, limited gift—something to be used with urgency, yet protected by stillness? In other words, how do we move with purpose without surrendering to the chaos of perpetual hurry?

    My problem—one I can’t dodge—is how easily I waste time while convincing myself I’m doing something worthwhile. I wake up intending to write, but drift into “research”: consumer products I don’t need, fitness principles I already know, or whatever flickers across my screen and triggers FOMO. The drain is subtle but relentless. A morning that should belong to reading and writing dissolves into trivial pursuits. I justify it with a familiar lie: I am a nobody with nothing to say. What difference does it make if I squander a few hours? Why not entertain myself instead?

    These rationalizations amount to treating my life with reckless disregard. They expose something uglier beneath the surface—a low sense of self-worth and a quiet flirtation with nihilism, the belief that nothing really matters.

    Of course, talk is cheap. I can articulate all of this with precision and still change nothing. I tell myself my habits should align with my beliefs, echoing Arthur Brooks from The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness. But knowledge without discipline is decoration. When I waste time online, it doesn’t just distract me—it diminishes me. It acts like kryptonite. I become a lesser version of myself.

    I know the alternative. When I guard my attention, I compose longer, more ambitious piano pieces. When I don’t, I squeeze creativity into leftover scraps of time and produce reheated versions of my past work—safe, derivative, forgettable.

    It is astonishing how easily we waste time and then defend the waste, even when the defense collapses under minimal scrutiny. I remember falling into this pattern around the year 2000, when the internet first began its quiet takeover. Looking back, I think of Jim Harrison’s line: “It’s so easy to piss away your life on nonsense.” The accuracy is almost cruel.

    This realization struck me again this morning. I had “nothing” to write about, yet decided to open John Mark Comer’s The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry. Within two pages, the emptiness I claimed dissolved into a torrent of thoughts—about chaos, distraction, sacred versus profane time, and the psychology of hurry itself.

    Comer has reason to feel overwhelmed. As a pastor delivering six teachings every Sunday to accommodate a growing congregation, burnout is almost inevitable. My situation is the inverse. I am a college writing instructor with an abundance of free time, and with retirement a year away, that abundance is about to expand into something even larger—and potentially more dangerous.

    Comer imagines his future: a successful pastor, bestselling author, and sought-after speaker. By every external metric, he wins. But internally, he sees something else—hollowness, irritability, exhaustion, and a life that feels “emotionally unhealthy and spiritually shallow.” He barely recognizes himself.

    So he steps away. After a decade of acceleration, he takes a sabbatical. He sees a therapist. Stripped of his role as a megachurch pastor—the centerpiece of his identity—he feels disoriented, describing himself as “a drug addict coming off meth.” He has time now, but no clarity about who he is without the machinery of constant activity.

    He frames his book simply: imagine meeting him for coffee in Portland, talking about how not to drown in the “hypermodern” world. His approach is explicitly Christian, rooted in the life and teachings of Jesus, and aimed at answering a deceptively simple question: what does it mean to rest? And more importantly, how does one rest in a culture that equates value with speed?

    I approach this with skepticism. I’ve been a Christian-obsessed agnostic since I was seventeen, and I have little patience for spiritual platitudes. Still, Comer has earned his authority through suffering, not abstraction. He anticipates my resistance and addresses it directly: “If you want a quick fix or a three-step formula in an easy acronym, this book isn’t for you either. There’s no silver bullet for life. No life hack for the soul. Life is extraordinarily complex. Change is even more so. Anybody who says differently is selling you something.”

    That alone earns my attention.

    So I’ll take the invitation. I’ll sit down for coffee and listen to what he has to say in his so-called “anti-hurry manifesto.”

  • Frank Sinatra Sings the Epistles

    Frank Sinatra Sings the Epistles

    Adam Gopnik, in “St. Paul Remade Human History. How Did He Do It?”, answers a parlor question—who matters most?—with a man who never met Jesus in the flesh and still managed to run the table. Paul, Gopnik says, is “the Most Unforgettable Character It Ever Met,” which is one way of saying he took a minor Jewish sect and scaled it into a two-millennia franchise. Not bad for a writer whose archive could fit in a carry-on.

    The record is thin and, at points, suspicious. Of thirteen letters, only seven pass the authenticity test; the rest look like fan fiction with good handwriting. The Acts of the Apostles reads less like sober history than like a travelogue pitched to Roman investors—Romans good, Jews troublesome, Christians reassuringly adjacent to Rome. It also airbrushes the argument between Paul and James, Jesus’s brother, into a polite agreement, because nothing ruins a new religion like founders who won’t share a table.

    Then comes the Roman catastrophe—the Jewish War, the Temple reduced to memory—and the scramble among sects to survive. Paul does more than survive; he pivots. He takes a local messianic movement and repackages it for export: portable, universal, and politically legible. The man who pulls off this trick also carries the best origin story in religious literature—a blinding encounter on the road to Damascus that converts a persecutor into a salesman with divine backing. If you were storyboarding a faith, you’d keep that scene.

    The letters themselves are a mood swing with footnotes. Paul boasts like a prizefighter and then calls himself “the least of the apostles.” He commands, cajoles, contradicts, confesses. He is competitive enough to crown himself and humble enough to kneel in the same paragraph. He admits a “thorn in the flesh”—a chronic deficit he can’t shake—and then turns it into a credential. He advises missionary pragmatism with the line that could double as a consulting slogan: be all things to all people. The man can pivot.

    Gopnik’s most useful correction is cinematic. Don’t picture Paul as a monk scratching doctrine by candlelight. Picture him as an action lead—shipwrecks, jailbreaks, debates that feel like bar fights in Greek. He travels, argues, survives. He makes the faith mobile—“almost single-handedly,” Gopnik writes—while the original disciples eye him like a franchisee who’s rewriting the menu. It’s the kind of role that once tempted Frank Capra to imagine a film starring Frank Sinatra—Old Blue Eyes as the apostle who sang a religion into the world.

    What Paul omits is as telling as what he proclaims. He is strangely quiet about Jesus’s earthly biography—the family, the miracles, the Nativity tableau that later Christianity will frame and hang in every living room. Gopnik suggests the omission is a feature, not a bug. Keep the myth foregrounded and the particulars backstage, and your message travels better. If you doubt it, look at how newer movements grow: the story glows brighter when the details stay conveniently out of focus.

    Then there’s the thornier matter of Paul’s rhetoric about Jews. After the Holocaust, readers have worked hard to domesticate him into a universalist who welcomes everyone to the table. Gopnik reminds us that some passages resist that makeover, cursing the old covenant with language that doesn’t sit politely at interfaith dinners. The effort to sanitize Paul tells you as much about us as it does about him.

    Scholars, understandably, keep trying on different Pauls. There’s the Roman Paul, smoothing edges for empire; the Hellenistic Paul, speaking in a philosophical key; the Jewish Paul, wrestling with a tradition he both extends and overturns. You can find these costumes neatly hung in Paul Within Paganism, edited by Chantziantoniou, Frederiksen, and Young. Try them all on; none quite fits.

    One thread, however, doesn’t fray: Paul’s apocalyptic urgency. The end is near—soon enough to matter, soon enough to act. Whether he believed it literally or deployed it rhetorically is the kind of question historians love and time refuses to answer. Urgency, after all, is useful even when it’s wrong.

    Gopnik’s final warning is against turning Paul into a greeting card. Yes, he writes the line about love that weddings can’t resist. He also draws hard boundaries with a zeal that would make a modern brand manager blush. Christianity spreads not just on the strength of its compassion but on the clarity of its lines. Inclusion, it turns out, travels well when it knows exactly what it excludes.

    Paul refuses to settle into a single portrait. He is the contradiction that works—the salesman who believes, the believer who markets, the penitent who boasts. If Capra had made that Sinatra film, it might have been the truest version: a man with a voice big enough to carry a room, and a restlessness big enough to carry a religion. Love, sung loud enough, can sound like doctrine. And doctrine, delivered with enough conviction, can change the world.

  • Cherry-Picking Does Not Make a Persuasive Book

    Cherry-Picking Does Not Make a Persuasive Book

    Kathryn Paige Harden left the evangelical church of her childhood and is now a behavioral geneticist at the University of Texas at Austin. She is also the author of the insightful, compelling Original Sin: On the Genetics of Vice, the Problem of Blame, and the Future of Forgiveness. After enjoying her long conversation with Andrew Sullivan, I picked up her book on Audible.

    In it, Harden distinguishes between two kinds of sin. Sin with a small “s” refers to individual acts that violate one’s moral code. Sin with a capital “S,” however, describes our enduring tendency to make a mess of things over time—what might be called the arc of human fallibility. To clarify this idea, she quotes Francis Spufford from his book Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense, where he famously defines sin as the “Human Propensity to Fuck Things Up,” or HPtFTU.

    I was surprised that Harden, an ex-evangelical, would draw on a self-described Christian apologist, so I decided to read Spufford’s book myself. It quickly became clear that he is an exceptional writer with sharp insights into the Christian faith. He captures what he sees as the core message of Jesus: that one must give of oneself freely and without limit, loving and serving others with a pure heart. Intention, in his view, is everything.

    Still, something triggered my skepticism. Spufford repeatedly claims that Judaism and Islam, unlike Christianity, emphasize rule-following over inner intention. He uses the term orthopraxy—right action—as opposed to orthodoxy, or right belief. But this struck me as a reductive and biased claim, especially given the abundance of Jewish and Islamic teachings that stress sincerity, purity of heart, and the dangers of hypocrisy. The more he pressed this point, the harder it became to see him as merely insightful; he began to seem like a brilliant writer with a credibility problem.

    That problem deepened as I read on. Spufford appears willing to sidestep or reinterpret scripture when it conflicts with his more liberal views, particularly on issues like gay marriage and eternal damnation. There is a certain irony here. He praises Christianity for its emphasis on inner transformation and intention, yet he cherry-picks the Bible and reshapes Jesus to align with his own sensibilities. That project—recasting a religious tradition in one’s own image—strikes me as a task that calls for more self-scrutiny, especially before critiquing other religions for lacking moral depth.

    I say this as an agnostic. I’m not troubled by Spufford’s liberal commitments. In fact, I wish the Augustinian notion of eternal damnation were not true. But Spufford seems to want both the moral authority of traditional Christianity and the freedom to revise it at will. He presents the demanding ethical vision of Jesus—love without limits—while setting aside inconvenient passages that might complicate that vision.

    Harden, for her part, had the clarity and courage to leave the faith of her upbringing. Spufford also left his childhood religion, but his return to it—on his own carefully edited terms—would benefit from a bit more humility.

  • The Theology of Winter: Genius, Power, and the Will to Prevail

    The Theology of Winter: Genius, Power, and the Will to Prevail

    I can admire the intellect of Augustine of Hippo and John Calvin without signing on to their theology. Their vision—infants consigned to damnation, humanity stamped at birth with moral rot—feels less like illumination and more like a spiritual winter that never thaws. It is rigorous, yes. It is also airless.

    Set against that severity, Pelagius reads like a man arguing for oxygen. He offered a more generous account of human possibility, one that trusted effort and moral agency. History did not reward him for it. Augustine prevailed, sanctified and institutionalized, while Pelagius was exiled to the margins, labeled a heretic for his trouble. The verdict tells you as much about power as it does about truth.

    I don’t doubt the sincerity of Augustine or Calvin. But sincerity is not the same as innocence. The unconscious has its own ambitions, and theirs often read like combat. These were not only theologians; they were fighters—relentless, articulate, and unwilling to yield an inch of doctrinal territory. They argued to persuade, but also to dominate. They didn’t just defend a vision of faith; they enforced it.

    You can see the lineage in Paul the Apostle himself. At his best—Philippians, luminous and humane—he sounds like a poet of grace. At his worst, he is a man sharpening his pen against rivals, guarding authority with the ferocity of someone who feels it slipping. The contrast is jarring, but revealing.

    Augustine, Calvin, Paul—each too large to be reduced to a single impulse, each capable of brilliance and depth. But running through their work, like a low electrical current, is something harder: the instinct of the embattled mind, the need to be right, to prevail, to settle accounts. It is the scent of the theological pugilist—the man who doesn’t just seek truth, but victory.

  • The Cruel Question Every Writer Must Answer

    The Cruel Question Every Writer Must Answer

    When you pitch a book, the publisher asks a question that feels less like business and more like interrogation: Why must this exist? Why this book, now, and not another? What justifies its presence in a world already swollen with print? The question has teeth. It strips away the soft fog of aspiration and leaves you standing with nothing but purpose—or the absence of it.

    A book is not a monument to your desire to “be published.” It is not your name in lights, your moment on the marquee. That impulse—vanity dressed as vocation—is the surest path to creative mediocrity. Purpose is the only defense. Without it, the work collapses under its own self-importance.

    The same cross-examination applies to everything else we produce. A blog post, a video, a channel—why does it exist? To collect attention? To be applauded by a tribe? To monetize a persona? To assemble the vague scaffolding of a “brand”? These are not answers; they are evasions.

    What, then, is my brand? Nothing coherent. I wander. I collect. I react. I move through the culture like a flâneur with a notebook, jotting down whatever strikes the nerves—ideas, trends, obsessions—and trying to distill some fragment of meaning from the debris. This is not a brand. It is a habit of attention. It resists consolidation. It refuses to become a product.

    I did write a book recently—a real one, nearly seventy thousand words. But even that resisted form. It wasn’t a narrative or an argument so much as a catalog of compulsions about watch enthusiasts: short, sharp definitions of obsessive behavior. A lexicon of affliction. Did it need to exist? I can argue that it did. The market delivered a quieter verdict. A few dozen copies moved. Meanwhile, a fifteen-minute video built from the same material drew thousands. The idea survived in video form. The book format did not.

    This is the final insult: even if you can construct an airtight case for a book’s existence, the audience may still decline to care. You can formulate the perfect product—nutrient-rich, elegantly packaged—but if no one consumes it, it sits on the shelf like expensive dog food no dog will eat. And its silence asks the only question that matters, the one you thought you had already answered:

    Why does this exist?

  • The Frogman Fidelity Oath

    The Frogman Fidelity Oath

    Dear God, hear the humble prayer of a watch addict who is trying—heroically, if imperfectly—to stay faithful to his G-Shock Frogman. Grant me the strength to appreciate the magnificent amphibious creature already on my wrist and to resist coveting other G-Shocks, especially the cheaper ones that whisper seductive promises of practicality and convenience. Protect me from the restless itch that sends me wandering through YouTube at midnight, where cheerful reviewers with macro lenses and enthusiastic voices assure me that the next watch will transform my life, my character, and possibly my posture.

    Please quiet the anxious machinery in my brain that insists on researching watches I do not need. Help me understand that the Frogman already fulfills every rational requirement a man could have for a digital timepiece: it is solar, atomic, indestructible, and built like a submarine designed by an engineer with trust issues. Remind me that my obsessive excursions into the G-Shock ecosystem are not noble acts of research but rather neurotic pilgrimages through a desert of comparison charts and unboxing videos.

    And please, dear God, intervene quickly, because the temptation is growing stronger by the hour. I can feel myself drifting toward the purchase of a GW-7900—not because I need it, but because my mind has begun whispering the most dangerous phrase in the collector’s vocabulary: “backup watch.” I tell myself the 7900 would merely protect my Frogman from harsh conditions, as though the Frogman were a delicate orchid rather than an armored amphibian designed to survive the Mariana Trench.

    If this prayer sounds familiar, you already understand the Frogman Fidelity Oath: the solemn pledge made by the watch enthusiast who believes he has finally found the perfect G-Shock and now begs for the strength not to betray it. The oath is heartfelt, sincere, and deeply moving—and it usually lasts right up until the moment the addict watches two enthusiastic YouTube reviews and convinces himself that buying a second watch is not an act of infidelity but an act of responsible stewardship.

  • Losing My Religion and Moving to G-Shock Avenue

    Losing My Religion and Moving to G-Shock Avenue

    The watch obsessive is not built for moderation. He does not dabble; he converts. Every new habit arrives like a revelation. Kettlebells are not exercise—they are a doctrine. Veganism is not a diet—it is a moral awakening. Yoga is not stretching—it is a portal. Watch collecting is not a hobby—it is a worldview. For this personality, change is never incremental. It is seismic. Each new pursuit feels like joining a movement, crossing a border, renouncing a former life in favor of a larger, more meaningful order.

    Eric Hoffer, in The True Believer, understood this temperament long before the first unboxing video. The True Believer is drawn to total transformation, fueled by a chronic dissatisfaction with stagnation and the quiet suspicion that life, as currently configured, is insufficient. The appeal of any new system—fitness, philosophy, or timepieces—is its promise of renewal, structure, and identity. The danger, of course, is intensity without insulation. When the believer commits, he commits completely. Nuance is weakness. Doubt is betrayal.

    I remember the moment my own conversion instinct detonated. It was 2005. I had been faithfully attending gyms since the Nixon administration, but there I was at forty-three, trapped on a stair-stepper, surrounded by blaring pop music, multiple televisions tuned to courtroom melodrama, and a crowd of spandex philosophers discussing their protein strategies. The revelation hit me like a heavyweight uppercut: I had to get out. Not tomorrow. Now.

    In the pre-social-media wilderness, I found my escape route—home training through yoga DVDs by Bryan Kest and Rodney Yee. What they offered was intoxicating: rigor without noise, intensity without spectacle, effort in solitude. No parking lots. No smoothie counters. No communal cold-virus dispensers disguised as cardio machines. I trained in silence, in sweat, in control. It felt less like exercise and more like discovering the operating manual for my own nervous system. Naturally, I became an evangelist. True Believers don’t quietly improve their lives; they recruit.

    That same year delivered another conversion event: my first serious watch, a Citizen Ecozilla. What followed was a twenty-year descent into horological theology. Eventually I became known as a Seiko man, a defender of the mechanical diver, a parishioner in the Church of Spring Drive and Hardlex. Seiko was not merely a brand. It was an identity system. It explained who I was.

    Which raises the uncomfortable question: is it still?

    Recently, a G-Shock Frogman took up permanent residence on my wrist. The Seikos remain in their box, silent and increasingly irrelevant. Worse, they no longer evoke romance. They remind me of anxiety—tracking accuracy, managing rotations, maintaining the machinery of enthusiasm. The Frogman, by contrast, feels like the day I left the gym for my quiet yoga cave: simple, dependable, frictionless. Not excitement. Relief.

    This is the part Hoffer understood that enthusiasts often ignore. The True Believer doesn’t just convert. He also deconverts. Sometimes the system that once promised liberation begins to feel like confinement. When that happens, the exit feels less like betrayal and more like a jailbreak.

    Have I left Seiko for good? I don’t know. Ask me in a year. True Believers are notoriously unreliable narrators of their own permanence.

    But lately, there’s a soundtrack playing in the background—R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion.” And the song isn’t really about religion. It’s about release.

    What it describes is something we might call Deconversion Relief: the quiet exhale that comes when a former passion stops demanding emotional tribute and loosens its grip. There is no dramatic announcement. The forums simply grow quieter in your mind. The old grails lose their authority. What once felt urgent now feels optional, like a city you once lived in but no longer feel compelled to visit. The change arrives not with adrenaline but with space—lighter mornings, fewer mental tabs open, less internal negotiation.

    It’s a strange realization. The new high isn’t excitement.

    It’s peace.

    And for the former True Believer, that may be the most radical conversion of all.

  • Evil With a Vacant Face: The Turpin Case and the Myth That Mental Illness Explains Everything

    Evil With a Vacant Face: The Turpin Case and the Myth That Mental Illness Explains Everything

    I remembered the Turpin case the way most people do: as a headline too grotesque to metabolize. Thirteen siblings chained, starved, beaten, and imprisoned by their parents until one of them finally escaped in 2018 and called the police. I hadn’t revisited the story until I saw an update, The Turpins: A New House of Horrors. In it, Diane Sawyer interviews three of the children who survived their parents’ private dungeon—only to be handed over by social services to another household that abused them all over again. The people who adopted them have since been convicted. The rescue, it turns out, was only a handoff to a new nightmare.

    What struck me immediately was how eerily gothic the parents appear, as if the story had summoned its own visual shorthand for evil. The mother, Louise Turpin, radiates menace—her face tight with cruelty and mental fracture. The father, David Turpin, looks equally arrested, a sixty-year-old man wearing the shaggy hair and slack affect of a disturbed adolescent. Both faces are blank, glum, almost vacant. And yet once you hear what they did—years of systematic starvation, torture, and control—you understand that the vacancy is not emptiness but concealment. Behind those dead expressions worked a tireless, inventive cruelty.

    They are plainly evil people. They also appear mentally ill. Those two facts do not cancel each other out. Narcissism, for instance, is a recognized pathology, but it often carries a moral charge—a pleasure in domination, a delight in harm. Watching the Turpin parents, I was reminded of M. Scott Peck’s The People of the Lie, a book I read decades ago that argued precisely this point: that evil can wear the mask of sickness, and sickness can provide cover for evil. Louise and David Turpin fit that category with chilling precision—malignant narcissists cloaked in religious piety, manipulating their children while feeding off their suffering.

    What makes Sawyer’s interview watchable, even bearable, is what comes after. The children speak about therapy, recovery, work, and the slow construction of a life that does not revolve around fear. Sawyer notes that they “won the hearts of the country,” and it’s true. They are lucid, self-possessed, and deeply sympathetic. You don’t pity them so much as root for them.

    The clearest light in the story is their sanity—and how visibly it flows from their love for one another. These siblings endured the same menace together. They shared it. They protected one another where they could, and afterward, that bond became ballast. They are not just survivors; they are witnesses for one another. Watching them, you come away with a rare conviction that sounds sentimental until you see it embodied: that love, stubborn and mutual, can outlast even prolonged, institutionalized evil. In this case, it appears to have done exactly that.

  • No Backup World: Martin Hägglund, C.S. Lewis, and the Moral Urgency of Now

    No Backup World: Martin Hägglund, C.S. Lewis, and the Moral Urgency of Now

    Philosopher Martin Hägglund, in This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, advances a stark and unsettling claim: genuine goodness is impossible unless we accept that death is final. There is no afterlife to balance the books, no celestial extension cord supplying meaning from beyond the grave. This life—finite, fragile, irrevocable—is all we have. Faith in eternity, Hägglund argues, is not a comfort but a distraction, a metaphysical detour that siphons urgency away from the hard, unglamorous work of building justice here and now. To make his case, he turns to an unlikely witness: C.S. Lewis. In A Grief Observed, written after the death of his wife Joy Davidman, Lewis—Christian apologist, defender of heaven—finds his theology torn open by loss. Scripture offers no shelter. Promises of eternal reunion ring thin. Lewis admits to “bitter resentment,” to madness, to a grief so absolute that it flattens piety on contact. What he wants is not God, not eternity, not consolation—but Joy. Her absence exposes a truth Lewis cannot escape: the intensity of love is inseparable from its fragility. Love hurts because it can be lost. Its power comes from time running out. Hägglund presses the implication Lewis cannot fully accept: even if eternity existed, love could not survive there. With no stakes, no risk, no irreversibility, existence would congeal into something inert—an endless, consequence-free duration. Heaven, in this view, is not fulfillment but sedation. To imagine God as a valet who merely returns our loved ones to us is, for both Lewis and Hägglund, a form of idolatry. But where Lewis is torn—desperate to hold faith and grief in the same trembling hands—Hägglund feels no such strain. For him, religion does not deepen love; it dilutes it. It shifts responsibility elsewhere. It turns this world into a waiting room and this life into a rehearsal. Secular living, by contrast, is an act of commitment without backup plans. There is no “later” to fix what we neglect now. That is precisely why what we do here matters so much.

    If you are a political-sapien, this conclusion feels not bleak but bracing. History—not heaven—is where salvation must be worked out. There is no eternal kingdom hovering offstage, no divine reset button waiting beyond the clouds. This world is the only stage, and its outcomes depend on the quality of the institutions we build and maintain. Moral authority does not descend from above; it emerges from human reason struggling, imperfectly but persistently, toward fairness. People, in this view, are not saints or sinners by nature so much as products of systems—capable of decency when the scaffolding is sound, capable of cruelty when it is not. Politics therefore becomes the highest moral labor: not a sideshow to spiritual life but the arena in which justice either materializes or fails. AI machines enter this worldview as probationary instruments. They are not saviors and not demons. They earn trust only insofar as they distribute power downward, widen access, and reduce structural inequity. If AI flattens hierarchies and democratizes opportunity, it is a tool worth refining. If it concentrates wealth, authority, and decision-making into fewer hands, it ceases to be innovation and becomes a threat—something to regulate, constrain, or dismantle in defense of the only life that counts.