Cinemorphosis

Tag: faith

  • 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.

  • Moses Meets the App Store in My Descent to Hell

    Moses Meets the App Store in My Descent to Hell

    Five years ago, I had a dream that still clings to me like the stench of sulfur on an unwashed sinner. In it, I found myself suspended over a chasm so vast and foreboding it made Dante’s Inferno look like a weekend at Lake Tahoe. This wasn’t just your garden-variety pit of despair. No, this one was styled by some deranged horror set designer who clearly had unresolved issues with gravity and geometry. The rocks jutted out like they’d been forged in spite, sharp enough to slice light itself. Below me? Nothing but an infinite abyss—pitch black, indifferent, and curling with smoke as if Hell had sprung a leak.

    My right hand clutched a pulley system that seemed to have been engineered by Torquemada during a particularly creative phase. It squealed and groaned like it hated me personally. Each tug upward felt like hauling an anchor through molasses with a rotator cuff made of stale bread. My muscles howled, my fingers cramped into arthritic claws, and I could practically hear my body whispering, “Let’s just give up and fall dramatically.”

    Above me, a shaft of light flickered—not a beacon of salvation, but more like someone had dropped a flashlight into a well and forgot about it. It promised hope the way a gas station burrito promises nutrition: with cruel intent.

    Now here’s where the dream leaned hard into surrealism. In my left hand, I held a tablet—equal parts Moses and Steve Jobs. One moment it gleamed with digital sleekness, the next it was stone, chiseled with ancient script and glowing like radioactive guilt. It was a device caught in an existential crisis, flipping between iPad and Ten Commandments with the kind of indecision reserved for suburban dads browsing Netflix.

    On one side of this metaphysical gadget was a tableau of indulgence—a pulsating carousel of temptation: flesh, flames, laughter, madness. The orgy of excess, curated in high definition. On the other side? A searing Divine Light—pure, unblinking, and full of that holy judgmental glow that makes you instinctively cover your bits.

    As I strained upward—toward gray light, away from that unholy carnival—I had the sinking realization that I might not make it. My body was mutinying. My mind, riddled with indecision. And I knew, deep in my marrow, that if I let go, I’d drop—not just into the pit, but into a punchline told by angels over drinks: “Remember that guy who thought he could have both salvation and the sex party?”

    I hung there, torn between moral clarity and high-def carnality, between stone tablet and glowing screen, between self-destruction and self-delusion. And all I could do was pray that I’d wake up before gravity made the decision for me.

  • The Stall Wars: A Faculty Restroom Horror Story

    The Stall Wars: A Faculty Restroom Horror Story


    There I was—distinguished professor of literature, credentialed purveyor of syntax and suffering—perched atop the porcelain throne in the sacred stillness of the faculty restroom, savoring the last vestiges of a sugarless lemon-honey lozenge and the sweet, unbroken silence that comes only from locking the world out, one stall door at a time. Beside me: Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom. Above me: fluorescent lighting dimmer than the future of American democracy. Around me: peace, solitude, and the faint illusion of control.

    Then came the talcum fog.

    That distinct olfactory offense, paired with the telltale wheeze of a Marlboro-ravaged trachea, shattered the silence. I didn’t have to peek between the stall doors. I knew. It was her. Scary Mary. The tenured temp. The mythological grievance machine. The student who had, for over a decade, haunted our campus like a poltergeist with an administrative appeal form.

    “Mary,” I barked from my vulnerable perch, “this is the men’s room. Leave now, or campus police will be called.”

    “But Professor,” came the whine, pitched somewhere between a toddler’s tantrum and a chainsmoker’s aria, “I need to talk to you about my grade.”

    I tried reason. I tried logic. But Mary had the persistence of a nicotine-stained Terminator. “Not until you explain why I got a C.”

    “I read your essay,” I sighed. “Your catering hustle was impressive. One hundred smoked salmon crostini in thirty minutes? Brava. But yes, it was larded with grammatical errors.”

    “You used the word larded,” she moaned. “Do you know how that hurts my self-esteem?”

    Self-esteem? I was pants-down in a toilet stall having a mid-thesis debate with a woman violating Title IX, and she wanted to discuss feelings?

    But Mary was just revving up. Her stubby fingers suddenly curled over the stall partition like something out of The Ring, and soon, her jaundiced head and magnified, frantic eyes emerged over the top. She looked like an unhinged librarian perched in a crow’s nest.

    “I can’t afford to flunk this class again!” she gasped, dangling from her makeshift luggage tower like a cirque-de-sociopath act.

    I stood up—pants restored, dignity in tatters—and let it rip: “You want honesty? Your essay reads like it was written by a sleep-deprived raccoon using predictive text. It made me reconsider the entire purpose of education. It gave me a migraine and a minor crisis of faith.”

    Mary recoiled. “You’re a monster!” she shrieked. “The worst professor in higher education!”

    Then physics intervened.

    Mary, all 250 pounds of her, teetered from her wobbly platform and hit the floor with the grace of a collapsing filing cabinet. She screamed. Something about her shoulder.

    I emerged, washed my hands, and surveyed the carnage.

    “You’ll be fine,” I said flatly. “Ice it.”

    “Aren’t you going to help me?”

    Something cracked open in me—some cocktail of guilt, absurdism, and overcaffeinated bravado. “I can fix it,” I said. “My brother dislocated his shoulder in high school. I saw the coach pop it back in.”

    Before she could object, I grabbed her wrist and yanked like a man possessed. There was a meaty clunk and then—a miracle—relief.

    “You’re amazing,” she whispered.

    “I know.”

    She stood up, rubbing her newly aligned limb. “Now that I’m not your student… can we be friends?”

    “Absolutely not,” I said, “but I can offer career counseling.”

    “No hard feelings?”

    “None. Now kindly exit the men’s room.”

    I returned home expecting a hero’s welcome, only to find my family gathered around a platter of French Dip, their eyes glued to gravy-soaked baguettes.

    “Sit down and eat,” my wife ordered, shoveling horseradish onto a sandwich with military precision.

    And so I did.

    And let me tell you, that sandwich could have ended wars. The beef was so tender it practically recited poetry on your tongue. The bread straddled that holy line between crisp and pillowy. And the au jus? It was less of a sauce and more of a religious experience. As I dipped, the day’s trauma melted like Swiss cheese under a broiler.

    In that moment, I understood: some stories deserve to be told. Others should be swallowed with gravy.

  • The Desert Peacock: How I Dressed My Way Into Academic Probation

    The Desert Peacock: How I Dressed My Way Into Academic Probation

    Let me paint you a picture of fashion excess that even Liberace would’ve advised against. There I was, a freshly minted professor in the dusty town of Bakersfield, high on a cocktail of naïveté, unresolved teenage regrets, and the sartorial influence of the International Male and Urban Gear catalogs—an unholy trinity of misguided masculinity if there ever was one. In my 27-year-old mind, those catalogs were less about clothes and more like ancient tomes revealing the very essence of manhood. But this delusion reached a sartorial climax that finally broke the camel’s back—or in this case, shattered the patience of the English Department Chair.

    At first, my colleagues generously excused my increasingly bizarre wardrobe as “youthful exuberance” from a Bay Area transplant trying to assert some “big city” flair in a desert outpost where fashion trends arrive three decades late. But one fateful day, I pushed the boundaries beyond reason. I strutted onto campus like a peacock ready for a ballroom dance-off, dressed in tight Girbaud slacks that practically screamed, “I’m here to give a lecture, but I might also break into interpretive dance.” My feet were clad in Italian loafers, complete with tassels and tiny bells—yes, bells. Who needs socks when you’ve got bells?

    But the crown jewel of this sartorial disaster was the sage-whisper green pirate shirt. And when I say “pirate shirt,” I’m not talking about a whimsical Halloween costume. I’m talking about a translucent, billowing monstrosity that looked like it was plucked from the wardrobe of Captain Jack Sparrow after a particularly wild night of plundering. My bulging pecs were practically hosting their own TED Talk through the sheer fabric, and the effect was more Moulin Rouge than Macbeth.

    Word of my fashion blunder made it to Moses Okoro, our distinguished Chair, a no-nonsense scholar in his fifties who had traded the vibrant streets of Lagos for the dull sands of this backwater town. Moses prided himself on being a man of deep thought, the kind who savored life’s complexities and relished philosophical debates like a connoisseur of fine wine. In the rarefied circles he once frequented, he had been celebrated for his intellectual rigor, a reputation largely sustained by an essay he penned two decades earlier on a celebrated Nigerian novelist. The essay, which dissected themes of post-colonial identity with surgical precision, had been lauded as groundbreaking in its time, securing Moses’s place as a respected voice in academic and literary discussions. But the years had passed, and that once-prominent essay had become a relic—he still leaned on it like a crutch, bringing it up whenever the opportunity presented itself, hoping to rekindle the admiration it had once inspired.

    In Bakersfield, however, Moses’s brilliance was met with blank stares and indifferent nods. The dusty little town was not the place for nuanced explorations of African literature or the intricacies of global politics. The locals, with their straightforward values and pragmatic concerns, found Moses’s musings a touch too lofty, too irrelevant to their daily lives. He would hold court at dinner parties, weaving rich tapestries of thought, only to be met with distracted glances and the awkward silence of guests shifting in their seats. The wisdom he offered—hard-earned through decades of scholarship and contemplation—was like pearls cast before swine. It left him feeling both superior and isolated, like a prophet in a land of the unworthy.

    Moses’s frustration was only amplified by the success of his wife, Olivia, a writer who specialized in best-selling women’s fiction. Her books—full of romantic entanglements, gripping betrayals, and redemptive arcs—flew off the shelves. They were the kind of stories that readers devoured in a weekend, utterly hooked by her knack for creating characters who felt both relatable and dramatic. While Moses dissected literature with a scalpel, Olivia spun tales with the effortless charm of someone who understood exactly what people wanted to read. Her popularity irked him, though he would never admit it openly. She was always jetting off to glamorous book tours and literary retreats, sipping cocktails in Paris with her coterie of fellow best-sellers, while Moses stayed behind, holding the fort in Bakersfield, watching the horizon for intellectual company that never arrived.

    The contrast between them was stark. Olivia lived in a whirlwind of vibrant social engagements and glossy magazine features, while Moses felt marooned in his world of abstract ideas and unsung brilliance. He couldn’t help but feel sidelined, a minor figure in the grand narrative of her life. Though he loved her in his own way, there was a gnawing sense of exclusion, a quiet bitterness that his profound insights seemed valued less than the escapist fiction that had brought her fame and fortune. He felt like an aging lion, majestic yet irrelevant, while Olivia basked in the attention of an adoring public.

    Yet, he never confronted her about it. Moses would retreat into his study, surrounded by shelves groaning under the weight of dense academic tomes, finding solace in the solitude of his thoughts. But even in that sanctuary, there lingered the unspoken truth: the world had moved on, and he was living off the fumes of past glories while Olivia thrived in the present, leaving him behind in the dusty echoes of Bakersfield’s indifference.

    By the time I got the midday summons to his office, I knew I was about to get the fashion red card. I walked in, and there was Moses—feet ensconced in some sort of luxurious foot-warmer device, a necessary accessory for his gout. He flashed me a grin that was half-amused, half-pitying, like a man witnessing someone try to cook a steak with a hairdryer.

    “Jeff,” he began, in a tone that suggested he was both fond of me and horrified by me. “You’re a striking figure, I’ll give you that. But this—” he gestured vaguely at the shimmering monstrosity draped over my torso—“is taking things too far. I can see more than I care to.”

    I glanced down at my exposed chest and, for the first time, realized that my pecs were starring in their own soap opera under that filmy fabric. Moses continued, “I get it—a man with your bodybuilding prowess wants to flaunt it. But, Jeff, this is an academic setting, not Studio Fifty-Four. Be more of a professor and less of a Desert Peacock.”

    He then instructed me to march straight home, ditch the pirate couture, and return dressed in something befitting a person who isn’t auditioning for a Vegas show. Before I could slink away in shame, Moses added with a smile, “Jeff, I like you. You’ve got potential. But let me remind you, this town is a fishbowl. Whatever you do in the morning, the whole town knows by lunchtime.”

    That was the Bakersfield way—a place where the smallest fashion faux pas became a full-blown scandal before the sun hit noon. As I left his office, I knew that my pirate shirt days were over, along with my delusions of dressing like the love child of Captain Morgan and Don Juan.

    With a sigh, I trudged home to swap my dreams of high fashion for something a bit more… professorial.

  • The Resurrection and Other Interruptions to My Nap

    The Resurrection and Other Interruptions to My Nap

    This Saturday afternoon, somewhere between my post-kettlebell stupor and the first REM cycle, I drifted into the odd liminal space where podcasts mingle with dreams. In my AirPods: Andrew Sullivan’s Dishcast, where the ever-Catholic provocateur was in conversation with Francis Collins, the brilliant scientist and evangelical convert who led the Human Genome Project and somehow still believes Jesus flew to Heaven in a flesh-and-spirit upgrade that sounds suspiciously like the beta version of a Marvel character.

    These two men—earnest, erudite, and disturbingly unbothered by the metaphysical gymnastics required—agreed that Jesus was no zombie. No, the risen Christ, they insisted, was something far more sophisticated: a being of glorified materiality, capable of munching on grilled fish one moment and defying the laws of gravity the next. As I lay there, blinking ceiling-ward in the warm afterglow of lactic acid and religious speculation, it hit me: I’m a doubter. Not an edgy nihilist, just your garden-variety agnostic with a decades-long lease agreement in my head, where Jesus and Paul have been living rent-free since I hit puberty.

    The part I can’t swallow—resurrection aside—is substitutionary atonement. The notion that a God supposedly defined by love could only be appeased by orchestrating a cosmic bloodletting reads less like theology and more like something out of a Bronze Age mafia drama. And yet, Sullivan and Collins weren’t foaming zealots—they were thoughtful, gracious, luminously intelligent men. Which led me, mid-nap, to remember Emmanuel Carrère’s The Kingdom, a fever dream of a novel in which the narrator interrogates Luke, the Gospel’s narrator, with a mix of admiration, suspicion, and barely-contained despair. It’s the story of someone trying to understand the story being told by someone who wasn’t sure they believed it either.

    Somewhere between guilt, caffeine, and the ache in my glutes, I sat up and thought: Maybe I should write a novel. Not about Jesus—he already has a publisher—but about me wrestling with Carrère, while Carrère wrestles with Luke, while Sullivan and Collins serenely eat fish with the risen Lord. It’s wildly ambitious, probably self-indulgent, and smells faintly of midlife crisis. But what’s faith—or doubt—if not the ultimate literary prompt?

  • 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.

  • Bloodlust or Civic Ritual? The Moral Dilemma of Watching Football

    Bloodlust or Civic Ritual? The Moral Dilemma of Watching Football

    In his Guardian column, “American football is too dangerous, and it should be abolished,” David Bry doesn’t just critique the sport—he indicts its audience. Football, he argues, is not merely unsafe; it’s immoral. He anticipates the backlash to this charge and admits, with self-deprecating honesty, that he’s no moral saint himself—he still eats foie gras, knowingly prioritizing his pleasure over a duck’s suffering. But to him, there’s a moral line between indulging in ethically murky cuisine and consuming a sport that rewards the destruction of human bodies for mass entertainment. If he values human life more than duck life, he cannot, in good conscience, support a game that feeds off head trauma and early death.

    Bry insists the game can’t be meaningfully reformed. The violence is not incidental—it’s structural. Helmets and rule changes may offer cosmetic fixes, but the fundamental problem lies in the collisions themselves: the brain, he writes, “sloshes around and smashes against its bone casing.” No amount of tweaking can erase that brutal fact. While his friend Todd defends the freedom of adults to play if they choose, Bry shifts the focus from the players to the fans. The deeper immorality, he claims, lies not on the field but in the stands and living rooms, where audiences cheer and fund the spectacle that maims its participants.

    This position challenges evolutionary theorists like Jonathan Gottschall, who argue that violent sports are hardwired into us. From his view, sports like football are not moral failures, but social adaptations—ritualized combat that establishes hierarchies and offers a controlled outlet for natural male aggression. If we don’t have football, we’ll invent some other surrogate for the same primal thrill.

    And here lies the moral paradox: If we are biologically inclined to enjoy violence in symbolic form, can we still be held ethically accountable for watching it? Or does evolutionary determinism become a convenient alibi that masks complicity? Is football a barbaric indulgence we should outgrow—or a necessary safety valve that prevents worse outcomes?

    This tension gets at the philosophical core of the football debate. Are we morally responsible for what we watch, or are we acting out ancient instincts that override reason and empathy? If Bry is right, we’re sanitized Romans in bleachers, watching men destroy themselves for our pleasure. If Gottschall is right, those same bleachers might be the only thing keeping us from something darker, something more chaotic, something even harder to justify.

    Ultimately, the question is not whether football is violent—we know it is—but whether our appetite for it can be governed by ethics or will simply reinvent itself in another uniform, another arena, another “acceptable” outlet. Are we spectators or just better-dressed predators?

  • Brains for Glory: How Football Became the Lottery of the Left Behind

    Brains for Glory: How Football Became the Lottery of the Left Behind

    In Alana Semuels’ “The White Flight from Football,” we meet Shantavia Jackson, a single mother working the night shift at Home Depot. With three sons—ages 11, 12, and 14—she turns to youth football not just for recreation but as a form of structure, mentorship, and protection. Coaches become surrogate father figures, teaching discipline and teamwork. For her son Qway, who lives with a mental disorder, football provides a stabilizing force: a team that functions as his support system.

    For Shantavia, football isn’t just a sport—it’s an escape hatch. She can’t afford to send her sons to college, and she sees football as the only viable route out of a life circumscribed by poverty. It’s a desperate gamble, but in communities like hers, desperate gambles are often the only kind available.

    Against this backdrop, research continues to pile up showing that tackle football can cause severe and irreversible brain trauma. In response, many parents—particularly white and affluent—are pulling their children out of youth leagues. The ability to make that choice is, at its core, an expression of privilege. While white participation in youth football declines, Black participation remains disproportionately high: 44 percent of Black boys play tackle football, compared to just 29 percent of their white peers. This racial divide plays out on the national stage: today, Black athletes make up nearly half of all Division I college football players, up from 39 percent in 2000, while white athletes have dropped from 51 percent to 37 percent.

    The implication is grim: Black children are more likely to accept long-term risks because they have fewer short-term options. White children, cushioned by economic security and broader educational opportunities, can afford to walk away. The more the science reveals about the dangers of early head trauma, the more it becomes clear who is left holding the risk.

    And the science is damning. A 2017 Boston University study found that athletes who began playing tackle football before age 12 were twice as likely to develop behavioral problems and three times as likely to suffer from clinical depression. A separate study by Wake Forest University revealed that boys who played just one season of tackle football between the ages of 8 and 13 showed diminished brain function. The greatest fear is CTE—chronic traumatic encephalopathy—a degenerative brain disease caused by repeated hits to the head, not just concussions. Even subconcussive blows can cause lasting damage. In 2017, researchers examined the brains of 111 deceased NFL players. They found CTE in 110 of them.

    In response, some former players and medical experts now advocate delaying tackle football until high school, when bodies are more physically mature and kids are better able to understand and implement safe tackling techniques. But the sport is growing, not shrinking, and its profitability only reinforces the risk. At Texas A&M University, football generates $148 million a year. That revenue stream depends on a constant influx of young talent—often from families like Shantavia’s—eager for a scholarship and a shot at something better.

    The decision to play football, or not to, has become yet another expression of America’s racial wealth divide. As of 2021, the median wealth of white households was $250,400—about 9.2 times that of Black households, which stood at just $27,100. Though there have been modest gains in Black wealth, the gap remains vast. In 2022, the median wealth for Black households rose to $44,890—still far behind the $285,000 median for white households. This disparity isn’t merely numerical; it’s structural, baked into the opportunities people can or cannot access.

    In this context, football becomes less a sport and more a bloodletting ritual—one that disproportionately brutalizes the bodies of those with the fewest alternatives. For children growing up in neighborhoods with failing schools, limited healthcare, and short life expectancies, football isn’t just a game. It’s a high-stakes wager: risk your brain for a future, or settle for no future at all.

  • Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up? Elaine Pagels and the Search for a Transformative Truth

    Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up? Elaine Pagels and the Search for a Transformative Truth

    In Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus, Elaine Pagels—now in her eighties—recounts her lifelong obsession with the figure of Jesus, not as a doctrine, but as a presence: a message of love and transformation in a world saturated with darkness. From a young age, she noticed a glaring contradiction. The Jesus of her local Methodist church was soft-edged and suburban, tailored to soothe middle-class anxieties. Meanwhile, the Catholic church she visited with a friend introduced her to a far more shadowy vision—one where sin reigned, and a priest, cloaked in mystery, handed out judgment like grades on a cosmic report card.

    Hungry for something real, she threw herself into faith. She attended a Billy Graham “Crusade for Christ” at Candlestick Park and, in a moment of tearful surrender, accepted Jesus as her savior and joined an evangelical church. But the honeymoon didn’t last. When her Jewish friend died in a car accident, she turned to her church community in anguish—only to be met with a chilling theological shrug. Was he saved? they asked. When she answered no, they calmly consigned him to hell. That moment of smug certainty shattered something in her. She walked away from the church—and never looked back.

    But the ache didn’t go away. Instead, it deepened into a lifelong question: Why did the story of Jesus strike me so deeply? Was it about Jesus himself? Or was it something broader—something in the architecture of religious experience that opened people up to realities they couldn’t explain?

    That question led her to Harvard’s Study of Religion, where she discovered a Christianity far more fractured, contested, and diverse than the one she’d been taught. The four canonical gospels were only a sliver of the story. Written decades after Jesus’ death, by authors who retrofitted their names to evoke apostolic authority, these texts were shaped by literary tropes and cultural myths of the Greco-Roman world. Beyond them were the apocryphal books and the Gnostic gospels, each offering competing visions of who Jesus was. Even after Constantine made Christianity the state religion and tried to enforce orthodoxy, believers couldn’t agree on what “true” Christianity actually meant.

    Still, Pagels returns to the core question: What kind of person was Jesus? Why did he endure when gods like Zeus faded into mythology? Why are there so many versions of him—prophet, rebel, savior, mystic, divine son?

    As she peels back the layers of history and doctrine, Pagels isn’t looking for the “correct” Jesus. She’s looking for the one that moved her, the one that cracked open the world with possibility. And in this, her search feels less like an academic pursuit and more like a human longing—to believe that, in spite of the noise and contradiction, there is still something true at the heart of the story.

    Like the old game show To Tell the Truth, we’re all watching the contestants declare, “I am Jesus.” And the question still echoes: Will the real Jesus please stand up?

    ***

    As usual, Pagels’ book is engaging. As I read about Matthew and Luke’s different accounts of the virgin birth and church people blithely telling Pagels that her Jewish friend is in hell, it occurs to me that I despise piety; but moral debauchery and smug nihilism are just as odious.