Tag: jesus

The Forgiveness Trap: When Healing Becomes a Performance

I remember listening to Terry Gross interview Frank McCourt in 1997, right as Angela’s Ashes was climbing every bestseller list like a starving Irish ghost with a publishing deal. At one point, Gross asked the inevitable soft-serve question: had he ever forgiven his drunken, absentee father for drinking away the family’s money and abandoning his wife and children to starvation and shame?

McCourt didn’t flinch. He dismissed forgiveness as “pompous” and “irrelevant”—as if someone had asked him if he’d made peace with bubonic plague. He wasn’t being cruel; he was being precise. Forgiveness, he seemed to argue, is often a performance—a neat, moral bow tied onto a box of horror that refuses to stay shut.

I thought of McCourt again this morning while reading Christina Caron’s New York Times piece, “Sometimes, Forgiveness Is Overrated.” It profiles adults who survived childhoods ruled by sadists, addicts, psychopaths, and the emotionally vacant. These were not flawed parents; they were ethical sinkholes, incapable of even the most basic decency. And yet, the self-help gospel continues to hand these survivors a soft-focus script: Forgive, and you will be free.

Enter Amanda Gregory, therapist and author of You Don’t Need to Forgive: Trauma Recovery on Your Own Terms. Gregory’s argument is refreshingly grounded: forgiveness is not a virtue badge, not a finish line, and certainly not a moral obligation. It’s a slow, private emotional process—if you choose to pursue it. You do not owe a resolution. You do not need to sculpt your rage into affection.

Gregory’s thesis echoes Sharon Lamb’s earlier work from 2002, which cautioned that pressuring victims to forgive can cause more damage than healing. It’s not just naive—it’s cruel. There are wounds that never close, and forcing someone to say, “It’s okay now,” when it’s absolutely not okay is a kind of spiritual gaslighting. It shifts the burden of transformation onto the person who’s already been broken.

And what about the offenders? If they’re remorseful, truly remorseful, perhaps forgiveness enters the room. But what if they’re not? What if they’re still rewriting history or refusing to acknowledge it? Then forgiveness becomes a farce—just another round of victim-blaming wrapped in therapeutic jargon.

In many cases, forgiveness isn’t even the right frame. With time and growth, some of us develop a different emotional posture—not forgiveness, but pity. We see our abusers not as villains to be vanquished or souls to be redeemed, but as feeble, morally bankrupt husks who couldn’t rise above their own dysfunction. We stop hating them because we no longer need to—but let’s not confuse that with forgiveness. That’s not healing; it’s emotional Darwinism.

Forgiveness has its place, but only when it rests on shared truth and genuine contrition. Otherwise, it’s a forced ritual, a bad-faith moral contract, and a way to sell books or fill up therapy time. The therapeutic industry’s insistence that forgiveness is always the holy grail? Honestly, it’s unforgivable.

June 20, 2025
Divorced, Not Damned: Meghan Daum and the Art of Letting Go

In The Catastrophe Hour, Meghan Daum’s 2016 essay “The Broken-In World” explores divorce with the same dry clarity one might use to describe cleaning out a fridge: inevitable, necessary, and oddly liberating. At 45, Daum finds herself in the middle of an amicable divorce—the kind without cheating, bruises, or courtroom melodrama. No one threw a lamp. No one stole the dog. Instead, it was just the slow, steady rot of benign neglect. Quirks once considered “charming” metastasized into full-blown repulsions. “Irreconcilable differences,” she concludes, isn’t a cop-out. It’s a dignified admission that entropy won.

She discovers, to her great relief, that she is significantly less insane living alone. No more haggling over dinner, toothpaste caps, or passive-aggressive silences. Just peace. Divorce, in Daum’s telling, isn’t some tragic unraveling—it’s a grown-up’s fire extinguisher to a low-grade house fire of misery. It’s not weakness. It’s not moral collapse. It’s maturity, quietly slipping the ring off and stepping into air.

Post-divorce, Daum moves to New York, joins the unofficial cult of the self-rescued, and discovers a radical truth: brokenness is the baseline. Normalcy is a myth. Everyone’s dragging a dented suitcase through life. Divorce just makes it public.

Her real epiphany, however, isn’t just about divorce—it’s about the overinflated value of marriage itself. To Daum, marriage never felt like the final level of the video game, no Holy Grail behind velvet ropes. Monogamy had already given her a sneak preview. The ceremony, the legal bind—it was all anti-climax. If marriage is the gold standard, Daum suggests, then maybe we need a new currency.

As a married person reading her work, you’re invited—no, cornered—into imagining a counterlife. The one where you’re single. I thought of the comedian and podcaster (soon to retire) Marc Maron: early sixties, unmarried, encircled by cats, vinyl, artisan boots, and a galaxy of fellow eccentrics. His life is cluttered, creative, obsessive. He has no wife, but he has a world.

Daum’s point: we will find connection. If not through spouses and children, then through podcasts, group chats, improv classes, dogs, or elaborate hobbies that consume our evenings and fill the fridge of our loneliness with something edible. Marriage isn’t the only valid architecture for a life, and singleness isn’t a synonym for solitude. The real issue is connection. Not how we find it—but that we must.

Now in her fifties, Daum is single, scraping by with podcast revenue and teaching gigs. No financial safety net. No partner to split the rent or cover her if she breaks a hip. But what she does have is agency. A voice. Essays that hum with intelligence and self-awareness. She doesn’t glamorize her choice. She doesn’t hold it above yours. She simply claims it as hers—and owns the wreckage and wisdom that came with it.

She’s not superior. She’s just no longer married. And for her, that is enough.

June 18, 2025
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.

June 17, 2025
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.”

May 14, 2025
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.

May 12, 2025
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.

May 10, 2025
The Wedding Oracle and His Shrink-Wrapped Gospel

In early 2025, I dreamed I was a professional wedding guest—not a guest of honor, not even a plus-one. More like emotional drywall. A freelancer of festivity, dispatched to limp nuptials across the land to ensure they didn’t collapse into the dead-eyed purgatory of a DMV lobby.

I had one suit, perpetually wrinkled, in a shade best described as regretful charcoal. It screamed, “I belong here, but please, God, don’t hand me a microphone.” My sole obligation? To present the bride and groom with a Styrofoam tray of raw hamburger. Apparently, in the twisted logic of dream-world symbology, true love is best commemorated with shrink-wrapped ground chuck. Forget champagne. Forget cake. The holy grail of marital bliss is beef that bleeds on the gift table.

Between gigs, I squatted in a beachside apartment that hovered between quaint and post-apocalyptic. Pajamas were my uniform of leisure. My diet consisted solely of dry cereal eaten by the fistful while I absorbed wisdom from The Three Stooges. Every episode felt like a philosophical fable: three idiots trying to fix a pipe, failing catastrophically, then assaulting each other with blunt tools until the problem either resolved itself or became someone else’s.

Meanwhile, the world decided I was some kind of wedding oracle. Strangers wandered into my apartment at all hours, begging for advice on florals, favors, and whether it was socially acceptable to DJ your own reception. I ignored them. Moe was about to electrocute himself with a toaster, and I had priorities.

Then came the call—from my boss, the high priest of ceremonial meat. His voice was steeped in the weariness of someone who’s officiated more parking-lot elopements than he cares to admit.

“Keep up appearances,” he said, grim as a man reciting his own Yelp reviews. “Smile. Hand out tips. Make people believe in romance.”

I glanced at the hamburger on my counter, still sweating onto the Formica like it was contemplating its own existential horror. “Gotta go,” I muttered, suiting up, grabbing the beef, and heading out the door like a dead-eyed courier for the Cult of Matrimonial Carnivores.

This was my fate: a never-ending circuit of awkward receptions, clinging to the delusion that my presence—and my lukewarm ground beef—might ignite the dying embers of love.

Once the bouquet was tossed to an empty dance floor and the mother of the bride cried in the restroom, I’d retreat back to Moe, Larry, and Curly. My companions. My priests. My lifestyle coaches.

Until one night, it hit me. As I watched Curly get his head lodged in a vise grip for the 117th time, I said aloud, “This can’t be my life.” And right then—bam—the TV flickered.

Walter Cronkite appeared.

He looked directly at me with that father-of-the-nation disappointment usually reserved for presidents and felons. “And that’s the way it is,” he intoned, like a man handing down a divine verdict.

“No,” I whispered. “There’s got to be more than hamburger diplomacy and Stooge theology.”

Cronkite sighed. “I’m sorry. That’s just the way it is.”

And I woke up. Alone. Two a.m. Christmas Eve. The living room reeking of uneaten cookies and fading ambition. My only comfort? The faint echo of Cronkite’s voice as it dissolved into the darkness like the aftertaste of a bad decision.

May 7, 2025
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.

May 6, 2025
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.

April 28, 2025
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?

April 19, 2025