Cinemorphosis

Tag: christianity

  • The Camel, the Needle, and the Man Who Had Too Much

    The Camel, the Needle, and the Man Who Had Too Much

    I like to be financially comfortable—let’s not lie. I like having gravy money: the kind you drizzle over an already-satisfying existence just to make it rich, indulgent, and entirely unnecessary. A decadent dinner, a silly watch, a rare Japanese radio I’ll only use twice—it’s not about need. It’s about comfort laced with a whiff of thrill. But every time I partake, I’m haunted by that grim little proverb: It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.

    The older I get, the more I suspect that money is only part of the problem. The real barrier to heaven isn’t wealth—it’s pleasure. Or more precisely, the addiction to pleasure. Call it spiritual insulin resistance: too much sweetness, too often, until nothing satisfies and everything corrupts.

    A more accurate update to the proverb might be: It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a pleasured man to get into heaven.

    By “pleasured,” I mean a man gorged on delight—hedonistic, unrestrained, swimming in his own self-curated fantasies. A man whose moral compass has rusted from disuse. And when I think of that kind of dissipation, I’m haunted by a story one of my students told me in the early ’90s—an unforgettable parable dressed up as a locker room anecdote.

    This student was a soccer player who spent a season with a club team in Italy. One of his teammates, an American, was almost offensively beautiful: tall, tan, muscular, with a jawline that could slice through marble and hair that obeyed no gravity. When the season ended, he refused to return home. He stayed. He found a nude beach. He became, in every sense of the word, The Stallion.

    Locals called him that without irony. He strutted the shoreline like a marble statue sprung to life. Women adored him, men envied him, and he lived the fantasy to its fullest: a gigolo in linen pants and nothing else. At first, it was all sun-kissed pleasure and consequence-free sex. But then came the rot.

    Somewhere along the way, he crossed an invisible line. He stopped caring about the actual act of intimacy. His addiction mutated. It was no longer about pleasure—it was about being desired. He would stand in clubs in a sheer white shirt, unbuttoned to the naval, chest gleaming, waiting for women to approach. When they did, he would reject them. The proposal was enough. The look in their eyes? That was his fix.

    Eventually, he went mad. His personality fractured like overused glass. When my student returned to Italy months later, he found The Stallion pacing the same beach—sun-kissed, glistening, and vacant. He didn’t recognize his former teammate. He walked past him with a thousand-mile stare, a ghost trapped in flesh, wandering his personal Eden turned hellscape. The pleasure that once adorned his life had hollowed it out from the inside.

    He had reached The Point of No Return.

    And every time I reach for a little unnecessary luxury—something shiny, excessive, self-soothing—I think of him. The Stallion. Proof that there’s such a thing as too much beauty, too much indulgence, too much affirmation. He wasn’t rich. But he was pleasured. And that might be even more dangerous.

  • One Day, One House, No Excuses

    One Day, One House, No Excuses

    This morning, I brewed a pot of delicious Stumptown French roast—molten, bitter, potent—and padded over to my computer feeling dangerously wholesome. A good man with good intentions. Which, of course, is always the start of a problem. I was toying with the idea of living more virtuously: dialing back the animal fat, leaning into tempeh and nutritional yeast, pretending a plant-based diet isn’t just a long goodbye to flavor. You know, the usual summer resolutions—less cheese, more clarity.

    Somewhere between the aroma of roasted beans and my first click of the mouse, I felt something resembling courage. Not the real, bare-knuckled kind, but the kind that sneaks in when the house is quiet and you haven’t yet sabotaged yourself with toast. I thought: Gird up thy loins like a man. (Who says that anymore? Besides prophets and people named Chet.) But still, the idea stuck. Maybe I was finally ready to stop flinching and start living with actual conviction—about food, fitness, morality, and cholesterol.

    And yet I know myself. Talk is cheap. I have spent years writing grocery lists for lives I never lived. What matters is performance.

    Which brings us to today. My summer has officially begun. My wife and teenage daughters are off to Disneyland—a place I regard with the same warmth I reserve for colonoscopies and TikTok. They know this, and mercifully leave me out of the Mouseketeer pilgrimage. Which means: the house is mine.

    I have made a pact with myself. Today, I will submit my final grades, mount the Schwinn Airdyne for a 60-minute sufferfest (estimated burn: 650-750 calories, depending on whether I channel Rocky Balboa or Mister Rogers), and I will rehearse my piano composition—tentatively titled Gene Wilder’s Prelude to Mischief and Madness. If all goes well, I’ll record it and upload it to my YouTube channel, where it will be watched by six people and a bot from Belarus.

    Alone time is rare in a house shared with twin teenage girls, a wife, and the occasional haunting presence of someone asking what’s for dinner. I daydream of a private studio—soundproofed, monk-like, adorned with a grand ebony Yamaha piano and maybe a faint aura of genius. Instead, I have today: a suburban cosplay fantasy in which I pretend to be a cloistered artist, instead of a middle-aged man in gym shorts wondering if tempeh is as bioavailable as the vegan influencers claim it is.

    And yet… it’s enough. Let the performance begin.

  • Be a Poor Speaker at Your Own Peril

    Be a Poor Speaker at Your Own Peril

    On the latest Dishcast, Andrew Sullivan interviewed the ever-cantankerous Chris Matthews—nearly 80 and still sharp enough to cut glass. Matthews, with his gravelly baritone steeped in decades of political brawls, made a blunt but brilliant point: the failed American presidents—Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Joe Biden—shared one glaring flaw. They couldn’t talk. They mumbled, stumbled, or sounded like nervous librarians scolding kids in the back row.

    Now contrast that with the great performers of the Oval Office—Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton, Obama. Each could command a room, a camera, or a nation, not because they had better policies, but because they could speak. Kennedy practiced endlessly, even in the bathtub, channeling Churchill’s thunderous cadence while scrubbing his armpits. Reagan rehearsed like an actor because—well, he was one. Matthews’ thesis? If you’re a politician and can’t speak, you’re in the wrong line of work. There’s no excuse. Oratory is not some divine gift—it’s a muscle, and you’d damn well better train it.

    I couldn’t agree more. In my forty years teaching college students, my most potent teaching tool wasn’t my syllabus or my grading rubric—it was my voice. My persona. My ability to perform indignation, irony, sarcasm, and revelation—all in the same breath. I played a character: part prophet, part stand-up comic, part disappointed parent watching the nation stick a fork in the toaster. And that outraged character got through to students. It entertained while it educated. It gave ideas a delivery system my students could remember.

    So when I watch politicians stumble through speeches like deer on roller skates, I want to scream. You are leading a country. You should not sound like a sedated hostage reading a ransom note. At their worst, some of these men sound like toddlers in a supermarket, lost and wailing, unable to pronounce the word “mommy.” And yet they expect to run a superpower.

    Chris Matthews is right: if you can’t speak, you can’t lead.

  • The Gospel According to Dad: A Parable of Rocks, Regret, and Cabernet

    The Gospel According to Dad: A Parable of Rocks, Regret, and Cabernet

    I was sixteen. My parents were recently divorced. Once a month, I’d visit my father at his swanky apartment and we’d discuss my future.

    One night, my father stared at me across the dinner table, a slab of rare steak leaking its red juices into a mountain of mashed potatoes. He squinted, as if trying to determine whether I was his son or a lost philosophy major who’d wandered in from a patchouli-scented commune.

    “So,” he said, carving off a bloody corner, “what are your career plans?”

    I gave him the truth. “Not totally sure, but I’m leaning toward philosophy.”

    He dropped his knife like I’d just confessed to joining a nudist circus. “Why in the hell would you want to do a thing like that?”

    “The search for meaning,” I said.

    He snorted and chased his chew with a gulp of red wine, as if meaninglessness required lubrication. “Don’t waste your time.”

    “Meaning is a waste of time?”

    He wiped his mouth like he was preparing to deliver a TED Talk from the underworld. “Let me tell you a little story.”

    And then came one of Dad’s home-brewed parables—equal parts whiskey, cynicism, and divine apathy:

    “A young man, about your age, stood on a beach and looked up at the heavens. ‘God,’ he said, ‘help me find meaning.’ And God, being the cosmic wiseass that He is, replied, ‘Look at all the rocks around you. One of them has the meaning of life written on it. Go find it.’ The young man looked around—millions of rocks—and said, ‘But God, that’ll take forever.’ And God said, ‘That’s your problem, not mine.’”

    I already regretted everything.

    “Decades passed. The man turned over every rock. He aged like a leather shoe abandoned in the desert. No inscription. He grew sunburned, brittle, and spiritually constipated. Finally, in his nineties, he looked up at the sky, trembling with rage, and shouted, ‘God! I’ve been faithful! No pleasure, no joy, no Netflix—just rock-flipping! And I found nothing!’”

    Dad leaned in, eyes gleaming.

    “And God said: ‘That’s right, you dumb shit. Now die.’”

    There was a silence. Even the mashed potatoes seemed stunned.

    I blinked. “Where in the hell did you hear that story?”

    He leaned back, smug as a snake on a warm rock. “Made it up. For your benefit.”

    “My benefit? What am I supposed to take from this bleak little fable?”

    He ticked the lessons off like commandments: “One, God doesn’t give a shit. Two, there is no meaning. Three, stop thinking so damn much and just live your life.”

    “Easy for you to say,” I muttered. “Cruising around in your fancy car, living in your swanky bachelor pad, drinking overpriced wine.”

    “Worry not, my son,” he said, swirling his cabernet like it owed him rent. “You’ll get yours someday.”

    “So you’ve found paradise?”

    He shrugged. “Far from it. But it’s got central air. And that’ll have to do.”

  • The Apostle, the Fantasist, and the Fallacy of Oversimplification

    The Apostle, the Fantasist, and the Fallacy of Oversimplification

    For decades, I was enthralled by Hyam Maccoby’s The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity—a book that crackled with contrarian flair and gave voice to my suspicions about Paul, the man I once called the theological arsonist of early Christianity. Maccoby offered the ultimate takedown: Paul wasn’t just a problematic apostle; he was a Gentile infiltrator, a second-rate intellect with delusions of rabbinic grandeur, and the architect of a theological Frankenstein stitched together from Jewish scripture and pagan mystery cults. I ate it up.

    But after multiple re-readings and exposure to rigorous critiques—particularly Jaroslav Pelikan’s withering 1986 review in Commentary, “The Real Paul?”—I find myself sobering up from Maccoby’s intoxicating polemic. It’s dawning on me that The Mythmaker didn’t so much reveal Paul as reinforce my own biases. Maccoby flattered the part of me that wanted Paul to be the villain in Christianity’s origin story—the man who hijacked Jesus’ message and replaced it with doctrinal imperialism.

    The prose, which once struck me as prophetic, now reads as grandiose. Maccoby’s tone vacillates between scholarly and shrill, and there’s a whiff of insecurity behind the rhetorical swagger. His portrait of Paul as a self-aggrandizing opportunist is delivered with the juicy intensity of a novelist crafting an antihero, not a historian reconstructing a life. The final chapter, which connects Paul’s theology to the roots of Christian anti-Semitism, still has force—but even there, the execution leans more on indignation than historical rigor.

    Maccoby’s thesis—Paul as a failed would-be rabbi who, thwarted by his mediocrity, built a new religion in his own image—is clever, plausible in parts, and undeniably dramatic. But it’s also marred by speculative psychoanalysis and gaping holes in historical evidence. As Pelikan deftly notes, Maccoby accuses Paul of being a fantasist while committing the same literary sin: manufacturing internal motives and dramatic arcs that aren’t supported by any reliable record. Even the irony is Pauline.

    Pelikan, writing as a Christian scholar, grants that Maccoby’s critique of Paul’s legacy—particularly regarding anti-Semitism—is worthy of serious attention. And he’s right. There’s a case to be made that Pauline theology contributed to the long and bloody shadow Christianity has cast over Jewish identity. But the leap from theological critique to historical assassination is too far, too fast, and too loose with the facts.

    What Maccoby misses—or refuses to see—is Paul’s theological brilliance. In a world obsessed with glory and power, Paul offered something almost unthinkable: a God who descends rather than ascends, who chooses suffering over status, who empties himself in the service of love. Philippians 2 is not the work of a hack. It is a theological Everest. In the image of a humbled God, Paul delivers something transcendent—an inversion of divine power that has echoed through two millennia.

    No, Paul was not a mythmaker in the pejorative sense. He was, for better or worse, a visionary. Flawed, fiery, and yes, sometimes maddening—but never mediocre.

    In the end, Maccoby gives us a Paul who is more caricature than character—more villainous foil than complex man. The truth is harder to pin down, but also more interesting: Paul is neither saint nor saboteur. He is one of the most consequential minds in human history, a man whose theological imagination reshaped the contours of the divine. That kind of mind deserves more than debunking—it demands engagement, even when it provokes discomfort. 

  • The Summer of Nosebleeds

    The Summer of Nosebleeds

    In the summer of 1985, I was leaking blood from my nostrils like a second-string horror movie extra. Were the nosebleeds stress-induced? Psychosomatic? The verdict is still out. But my therapist, Dr. Groves, had a theory. He believed I needed to be exorcised—not of demons, but of belief. A staunch atheist moonlighting as a university shrink, Groves had made it his personal crusade to save me from hell—not the place, but my fear of it. My religious conversion, which had hit me like a brick to the chest six years earlier, was the parasite he hoped to dislodge.

    Groves was a rationalist to a fault—smug in the way only a chain-smoking empiricist with a beard full of Twinkie crumbs can be. He listened to my struggles with hellfire theology with a bemused look, as if I were a case study in gullibility. I tried to explain that, like Melville on Hawthorne, I could neither believe nor be at peace in my unbelief. I feared that rejecting the orthodox view of hell might be my express ticket there. Groves was unmoved. His mission? Deconvert me and install a nice, clean OS of secular humanism.

    The problem? I had a too-lively imagination—not whimsical, but operatic. Dreams, half-dreams, hallucinations, visions, and the deeply unsettling conviction that the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz was a demonic entity dispatched from the underworld to haunt me in 480p. Every year when the movie aired, I approached it with the same dread most people reserve for colonoscopies. The lion’s twitchy eyes and unsettling facial prosthetics sent me into existential spirals. As a kid, I didn’t think he looked silly. I thought he was what demons actually looked like.

    When I shared this with Groves, he leaned back in his chair, took a drag of his cigarette, and looked at me through the haze like a zoologist observing a talking panda. He’d nod, scratch his beard, and absentmindedly devour another Twinkie. The man exuded the confidence of someone who believed the universe had been definitively explained in a back issue of Scientific American.

    I told him about my panic attacks in class, my fear of women, and my dreams—recurring nightmares where the Cowardly Lion appeared not as a bumbling mascot, but as a harbinger of damnation. Sometimes I’d wake up drenched in sweat, only to discover the nightmare wasn’t over—he was still in the room. Once, I felt him sitting on the bed beside me. My blood iced over. Breathing became an extreme sport.

    Then came the dream that broke the meter. I’d been mainlining Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom and You Shall Be As Gods, trying to cram his brand of secular humanism into the same mental real estate as C.S. Lewis’s tart defenses of Christianity. The dream that followed was a Kafka-meets-Freud set piece: I was sprinting across a field toward a ring of fire, symbolic, I assumed, of Frommian liberation. But before I could reach it, the Cowardly Lion materialized like a bouncer at the gates of meaning. I froze. Couldn’t scream. Couldn’t breathe. Then I “woke up” in bed and began to levitate. Yes, levitate—hovering a foot above the mattress in full cosmic ambiguity.

    When I relayed this to Groves, he suggested a buffet of medications and, more disturbingly, that perhaps I needed a girlfriend. Preferably one with therapeutic talents in bed. That was the beginning of the end for our sessions.

    Meanwhile, I was reading Twilight Zone Magazine like it was scripture. The June 1985 issue featured a story called “Jungle Eyes” and a black panther on the cover. That night, I dreamed I was walking through a Norwegian forest. Tigers approached. Instead of mauling me, they licked my face like affectionate Labradors. I woke up with a bloody nose. But instead of panicking, I let the blood flow freely onto a sheet of paper. A tiger’s face emerged from the drips. I titled it “Tiger’s Blood” and pinned it to my bulletin board.

    Only one person ever saw it: Wade Worthington, keyboardist for a punk band then called Faith No Man. He later helped form Faith No More. Wade was a connoisseur of the bizarre and saw the painting as pure artistic expression. Groves would have seen it as further proof I belonged in a padded room. I kept it to myself.

    Eventually, I dropped Groves and started seeing Dr. Moyers, a Jungian analyst and ex-Seventh-Day Adventist whose office was conveniently close to the wine shop where I worked. Moyers treated my levitation dream, tiger portrait, and nocturnal encounters with the seriousness they deserved. He even invoked Jungian synchronicity. Things were going well until he asked me to play in a sandbox—literally. He had toy soldiers and dinosaurs. I was supposed to commune with my unconscious through sandbox choreography. That’s when I walked.

    By 1987, with a Master’s degree in hand and the desire to appear employable, I decided to repress the entire Summer of Nosebleeds. No more tiger blood. No more levitating. No more Cowardly Lion exorcisms. Rationality was the currency of adult life, and I needed benefits.

    And then, decades later, Dale Allison happened. His book Encountering Mystery cracked open the vault. Reading it at age 61, married with twin teenage daughters and semi-retired in suburban Southern California, felt like receiving a long-overdue permission slip. Here was a scholar admitting that people—sane people—have visions, visitations, encounters with the divine and the infernal. Allison references both William James and David Hufford. Light and shadow. The beatific and the demonic. Finally, someone spoke my language.

    I realized I had never truly processed my four heavenly encounters, which had occurred in a tight, surreal cluster from November 1978 to March 1979. Oddly, they all preceded my Christian conversion—which, it should be noted, was motivated not by love but by fear. Specifically, fear of hell. My conversion, in hindsight, was a theological panic purchase: a desperate grab for Hell Insurance.

    The first encounter came on November 27, 1978—Moscone Night. Dan White had just assassinated Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. Dianne Feinstein announced the news on live TV. I walked outside to our backyard deck and collapsed into a patio chair. That’s when a Giant Me rose from the earth—muscular, aglow, and radiating kindness. He cradled me and whispered, “Be strong. Be good.” It felt real. Too real. But also, too much like a projection. It lacked the unsettling Otherness of what came next.

    A week later, after a Peter Gabriel concert and little sleep, I awoke and saw heaven. Green. Glorious. Humbling. I whispered, “I need to be like this all the time,” and the vision faded like a tide pulling away. That day, I think I had another nosebleed.

    By February 1979, I was working at Taco Bell in Castro Valley. During a break, still wearing the too-small hat meant for smaller craniums, I felt a flood of warmth and heard a message: “Your sole purpose is to love everyone with a pure heart.” A woman at the counter later whispered to her husband, “That young man is very nice.” Little did she know I was a brooding, angry bodybuilder trying to protect a mother unraveling from divorce and bipolar disorder. What she saw was the glow.

    Then, March. Pop Lit class. A joke of a class where the teacher read pulp novels while we filled out book report forms. I was skimming The Weigher of Souls when, out of nowhere, a wave of divine peace overtook me. I said, “I’m at peace,” again and again. I walked out crying, sat in my car, stunned. I think of Pascal’s “Night of Fire.” I called mine Pop Lit.

    Four encounters. Four months. And then—nothing but the cold machinery of doctrine. My Christian conversion in April 1979 was all about HAZMAT theology: God was radioactive, and Jesus was the suit that made divine proximity survivable. Church felt like a cleanup crew at Chernobyl, urging others to put on their gear or face incineration. Penal Substitutionary Atonement, they called it. I called it spiritual trauma.

    It got worse. Church friends assured me my Jewish relatives—including those murdered in Auschwitz—were in hell. God loves you, they said, and now here’s your cup of theological cyanide. I felt gaslit by the well-meaning faithful.

    Not all Christians horrified me. That same summer, in the university library, I stumbled across Rufus Jones’s Fundamental Ends of Life. His vision of faith was neither rescue mission nor social engineering project. It was a love affair. A search for God the way a lover searches for the beloved, a saint for holiness. Jones made me weep. His God resembled the Being I’d met in those four months before the conversion machinery kicked in.

    I wish I could say I became a Quaker like Jones, but I didn’t. I remain in theological limbo. Part of me still clings to the watermelon analogy: if Christian doctrine has seeds, I don’t get to spit them out and still claim the fruit. And yet, I’ve spent sixty-plus years chasing vanity projects and spiritual junk food only to find that the real task—the only task—is what Paul describes in Philippians: becoming like Christ, not in dogma, but in descent. To serve. To empty. To love.

    Frankl says we don’t get to choose meaning; life assigns it. The question is whether we answer the call. And if that means sitting alone in the cheap seats of faith, far from the pulpit, clutching my Tiger’s Blood painting and memories of Pop Lit, then so be it. At least I still believe in the show.

  • Smoke, Sheets, and the Spectacle of Faith

    Smoke, Sheets, and the Spectacle of Faith

    This morning, I was deep in the ritual of pre-cleaning for the cleaning ladies. Yes, the Marías—both of them named Maria, as if summoned from a 1960s sitcom or a Vatican registry. I was stripping beds, scrubbing dishes, and hoisting laundry baskets like I was auditioning for a domestic CrossFit competition. Because as every self-deluded homeowner knows: your house must be cleaned before the cleaners arrive, lest they judge you and your sloth.

    In the background, Larry Mantle’s AirTalk droned dutifully on LAist 89.3. Then, mid-sentence, the broadcast was interrupted—an old-school news bulletin, the kind that makes you expect a war or a celebrity scandal. But no. Something rarer: a new pope had been chosen. The signal? White smoke rising from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel.

    I had never heard of this protocol before. My first thought? Not theology. Not history. But the shared aesthetic DNA between this and the Golden Globes. The Oscars. The artificial wonder of Peter Pan’s Flight at Disneyland. If you want transcendence, baby, you’d better stage it.

    The Catholic Church, whatever its flaws, understands showmanship. They know airtight theological arguments are no match for spectacle. You don’t capture the masses with hermeneutics—you hook them with enchantment. Thus: white smoke. Bells. Angels singing in Dolby surround. The Vatican doesn’t inform you a pope’s been picked. They stage it like a cosmic halftime show.

    Religion, in its enduring wisdom, knows austerity is a losing brand. Dry dogma doesn’t sell. You need magic. Mystery. A sense that the universe has backstage lighting and a fog machine.

    Because man does not live on bread alone.

    No, man also lives on bells, incense, pageantry, and the theatrical flourish of divine appointment announced via rooftop smoke signals. What’s the metaphysical takeaway? That God, like Hollywood, knows how to build suspense.

  • Satan Wears Patek: The Couture Demons of Network TV

    Satan Wears Patek: The Couture Demons of Network TV

    After dinner, my wife and I collapsed onto the couch like two satiated lions, still riding the sugar high from a slice of chocolate cake so transcendent it could’ve been smuggled out of a Vatican vault. This wasn’t just dessert—it was a spiritual experience. Fudgy, rich, and topped with a ganache that whispered blasphemies in French, it left us in a state of chocolaty euphoria. And what better way to follow up divine confectionery than with a show called Evil—which, in tone and content, felt like dessert’s opposite number.

    Evil, for the uninitiated, is what happens when The X-Files and The Exorcist have a baby and then dress it in Prada. Our hero is David Acosta, a priest so genetically gifted he looks like he was sculpted during an abs day in Michelangelo’s studio. He partners with Kristen Bouchard, a forensic psychologist with both supermodel cheekbones and a Rolodex of PhDs, and Ben Shakir, a tech bro turned ghostbuster, who handles the EMF detectors and keeps the Wi-Fi strong enough to livestream from hell. Together, they investigate cases of alleged possession, miracles, and demonic mischief—all lurking, naturally, in two-story suburban homes with open-concept kitchens.

    What really juices the narrative is the will-they-won’t-they tension between Kristen and Father Abs. Their chemistry crackles with forbidden longing, as if every exorcism could end in a kiss—had David not taken a vow of celibacy (and the producers not wanted to nuke the Catholic viewership). It’s less faith versus science and more eye contact versus self-control.

    And then there’s Leland Townsend, the show’s resident demon in Dockers. He’s less Prince of Darkness and more Assistant Manager of Darkness—slick, smug, and oily enough to deep-fry a turkey. He slinks into scenes oozing unearned confidence and pathological glee, like Satan’s regional sales director. You can practically smell the Axe body spray of evil.

    Let’s pause here for fashion. The wardrobe department on Evil deserves an Emmy, a Pulitzer, and possibly a fragrance line. Everyone’s rocking cinematic outerwear that belongs in the Louvre. Kristen’s coats are so tailored they could cut glass. Acosta’s wrist is adorned with a Patek Philippe that suggests his vows may include poverty of the soul, but not of the Swiss variety. Honestly, the outfits are so distracting you half expect Satan to comment on the stitching.

    In one late-night scene, Kristen’s daughters are using ghost-detecting iPad apps at 3 a.m., their faces bathed in eerie blue light. It’s a chilling tableau of children, tech, and probable demonic activity—basically a 2024 parenting blog. Just as the show was about to unravel the mystery, my wife hit pause and delivered a horror story of her own: teachers using AI to grade papers with personalized comments. Comments so perfectly tailored they could bring a tear to a parent’s eye—and yet, no human had written them.

    “What’s the point of teachers anymore?” she asked, already knowing the answer. I nodded solemnly, watching the paused image of Father David, his coat pristine, his watch immaculate. I had neither. And I live in Los Angeles, where “winter” is defined as turning off the ceiling fan.

    But something in that moment shifted. The show wasn’t just mocking the digital devil—it was embodying him. That wristwatch mocked me. The coat judged me. I wasn’t watching Evil; I was being possessed by it. By envy, by consumer lust, by the creeping suspicion that maybe—just maybe—I wasn’t living my best, most stylized demon-fighting life.

    It’s not the show’s demons that haunt me. It’s their wardrobe.

  • If Paul Feuded with His Rival Apostles on Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen

    If Paul Feuded with His Rival Apostles on Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen

    Title: The Real Apostles of Jerusalem: Pentecost and Pettiness on Bravo

    [INT. Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen – The studio is lit like a Roman bathhouse crossed with a New York tiki bar. Andy Cohen sits gleaming between a grimacing Paul the Apostle, in an impeccably tailored robe with Roman stitching, and Peter, who looks like he’d rather be crucified upside-down again than share a couch with Paul. To the left, Bartholomew checks his cuticles while James the Lesser sips merlot like it’s judgment day.]

    ANDY COHEN
    Welcome back to Watch What Happens Live! We are blessed tonight—literally. It’s an apostolic showdown, honey. On my left, we have Peter, James, John, and the boys from Galilee. And to my right, the man who insists he’s also a real apostle—Paul of Tarsus!

    PAUL (tight smile)
    I’m not just a real apostle, Andy. I’m the apostle to the Gentiles. I practically invented the church. And yet I’m never invited to the literary salons in Antioch, never quoted at theology brunches. I wrote thirteen letters—some of which people still read. Unlike certain fishermen whose only contribution was foot-in-mouth disease.

    PETER (fuming)
    Oh give me a break, Saul—I mean Paul. You show up years after the resurrection, claim you saw a “light,” and suddenly you’re the CEO of Jesus, Inc.? The rest of us actually knew the man. We walked with Him. We ate with Him. We heard Him snore. You had a seizure on a donkey and decided you’re the oracle of salvation.

    JAMES THE LESSER (leaning in)
    Let’s be real. If Paul had a PR team any better, he’d be trending on Messianic TikTok. The man has a scroll drop every month. “To the Galatians,” “To the Ephesians,” “To My Haters.” Please.

    ANDY COHEN
    Wow, okay! So Peter, what’s your biggest gripe with Paul?

    PETER
    He’s always subtweeting us in his epistles! “Even if an angel preaches a different gospel, let him be accursed.” Oh gee, I wonder who he meant. Then he throws in a “those who seemed to be something meant nothing to me.” That’s me, Andy! He means me! I was the rock! Now I’m a footnote?

    JOHN (muttering)
    I wrote a whole gospel and he still called me “pillar adjacent.”

    PAUL (exploding)
    You accuse me of ambition, but I suffered for this calling. I was shipwrecked! Imprisoned! Bitten by snakes! You lot had fish and loaves—I had near-death experiences and unpaid missionary tours! If I boast, I boast in the Lord. And maybe also a little in my rhetorical genius.

    BARTHOLOMEW (finally speaking)
    He called himself the least of the apostles and then made himself the brand.

    PAUL
    The Spirit speaks through me!

    PETER
    The Spirit told you to call me a hypocrite in front of the Galatians?

    PAUL
    If the sandal fits.

    ANDY COHEN (grinning like a man feeding Christians to lions)
    Oof! Okay, we are flaming tonight—like the bush, not the brunch. Final thoughts? Can we bury the hatchet like it’s buried at Golgotha?

    PETER (snatching his wine glass)
    Sure. I’ll bury it right here.

    Peter hurls the wine in Paul’s face. The studio erupts. Paul stands, soaked and fuming, quoting 2 Corinthians about his sufferings while John rolls his eyes and checks his scroll for quotes about loving one another.

    ANDY COHEN (gleeful)
    Okay, that’s the gospel according to Bravo! Next week: Mary Magdalene claps back at Judas in The Real Disciples: Women Tell All! Goodnight, everybody!

    [Cue the theme song: “Turn the Other Cheek (Remix)” by DJ Pontius Pilate.]

  • If Blaise Pascal Listened to 10cc’s “I’m Not in Love”

    If Blaise Pascal Listened to 10cc’s “I’m Not in Love”

    If Blaise Pascal listened to 10cc’s “I’m Not in Love”—that haunting anthem of denial, repression, and the unbearable weight of vulnerability—he would recognize a soul attempting to cloak longing in irony, and failing beautifully. Pascal might scribble in his notebook, pen dipped in both skepticism and sorrow:

    1.
     Man denies love not because he is free from it, but because he is enslaved by it. The louder he insists he feels nothing, the more we hear the tremor of devotion in his voice. “I’m not in love” is merely a liturgy of protest against the heart’s verdict.

    2.
     He removes her picture—not to forget her, but to stop trembling at the sight of it. In doing so, he seeks mastery over his affections by performing indifference. But emotion, like God, does not vanish because man has ceased to name it.

    3.
     He insists: “It’s just a silly phase.” But only those who are drowning need to rename the water. The one who plays casual most often suffers the deepest cut, for pride clutches at dignity even as the soul dissolves in yearning.

    4.
     We would rather say, “I don’t care,” than risk the shame of caring too much. Man arms himself with detachment the way cowards wear armor—not to protect the heart, but to avoid ever using it.

    5.
     Every word he utters is a mask stitched by fear. He cannot love openly, for he believes vulnerability is weakness. And yet, in avoiding weakness, he becomes truly pathetic—a captive of what he dares not name.

    6.
     To say “don’t think you’ve won” is to reveal that one has already lost. The war is over. The heart surrendered in the second verse. Only the mind marches on, planting flags on a battlefield already buried in flowers.

    7.
     There is no cruelty greater than pretending not to feel. It is a lie told to oneself in the presence of truth. Love, when denied, becomes not less real—but more dangerous, like a flame hidden under dry cloth. It will burn eventually.