make death great again: September 2023 Essay Recommendations
We're talking about God to prospective friends and realizing that plot isn't everything in this early Autumn roundup.
Happy beginning of Autumn, friends! In this first post since vpss turned a year old, we’re going to start by talking about death—because that goes along with nature’s decline into winter and the dying of the year.
make death great again
It’s difficult to decide where to begin with Louise Perry’s epic First Things essay, We Are Repaganizing. The title caught my eye because it seemed related to other research I’ve been doing lately. However, it’s not simply another ‘rise of the new pagans’ analysis; rather it’s an elucidation of the abortion debate from a historic and humanistic perspective.
Perry points out that, among Romans, Greeks, and other ancient cultures, infanticide was a matter of fact within the social structure. Some got rid of girl babies, others got rid of boy babies, and nearly everyone wanted to get rid of sick babies. Americans (of which I am one) tend to act like everything is unique to them, but Perry “plot[s] the acts of abortion and infanticide on a chronological continuum, since they have typically been performed for the same reasons and have been permitted in accordance with the same moral calculus.”
Perry takes a long road to say that the underlying ideas which led pagan cultures to practice abortion and infanticide are very present now, and that without the “moral calculus” of Christianity, we might as well give up on life and let death win the day. I’m refusing to quote more from the piece here because it’s a very considerate one which dialogues with several perspectives. The thing must be taken as a whole. Go read this, I beg you!
not one of those Christians
In Why I Avoid Talking About God,
articulates something I’ve wrestled with but haven’t heard anyone talk about publicly: the urge to imply “I’m not one of those Christians” when talking about what I believe with people who don’t believe the same way. Pengelly illuminates just how much our religious discourse has been overshadowed by politics and social conquesting—as if we can prove our adherence to a sect of faith only by adherence to an additional sect of nonreligious ideology.She writes of her own experience talking to inquisitive “prospective friends”:
…instead of talking about God, I talk around the edges of the divine. In defence mode I offer my off-the-bat rejections of things commonly associated with Christianity-as-Religion (sexism, homophobia, anti-environmentalism), instead of leaning into the less tangible but more numinous reality of my experiences.
This matters because it impoverishes our relationships to each other. Instead of offering our whole selves, we present a sanitised version of our true being, made palatable for whoever our audience is in that moment…
How do we communicate the “numinous reality” of faith—directly, verbally, one-on-one? It’s hard. But it’s something I’ll be praying and thinking about more often. (Btw,
is one of my new favorite substacks.)
everyone under 50 stand up
thinks the creative engines of culture have ground to a stop:We are almost a quarter of the way into the 21st century, but is there anybody under the age of 50 who has as much impact on contemporary narratives as J.R.R. Tolkien (born 1892), Agatha Christie (born 1890), Ian Fleming (born 1908), Stan Lee (born 1922), George Lucas (born 1944), Steven Spielberg (born 1946), or J.K. Rowling (born in 1965)? Even the next tier of long-dead folks—people like Fritz Leiber and Frank Herbert—exert more influence on everything from movies to video games than anybody my age or younger.
I get where he’s coming from. We live in a massively reproduced and reproducible culture, driven by the sheer ease with which art and entertainment are created. Perhaps the cultural artifacts made today cannot influence beyond their immediate acceptance because there’s little space given to allow the effects to seep in. But what do you think? Is our culture stagnating?
teaching writing in the shadow of AI
For obvious reasons, I’m very interested in how the wormy fingers of artificial intelligence could change the way everyone, not just writers, writes. AI has already made significant inroads in the classroom: Why read Moby Dick and write your own analysis when you can ask ChatGPT to do it for you? It’s probably already read Moby Dick anyway.
All that aside, Daniel Herman thinks the way high school kids are taught to write about English literature needed a do-over long before ChatGPT came around. And I think he’s right.
Whatever ChatGPT can say or do about a text, it cannot tell us what it’s like to be a person experiencing that text, how it connects to their specific ideas, background, and beliefs. And here’s the thing: Every student is good at this sort of writing… [When they do it,] they express themselves clearly and effectively, just like they would if you asked them something via text message. After all, it’s possible that the average American teenager in 2023 does more writing, and is more defined by that writing (text messages, Instagram posts), than any generation before them.
Read the full piece, High-School English Needed a Makeover Before ChatGPT, in The Atlantic.
it’s not all about plot
Quiz time: Do you watch movies to be immersed in an impressive and creative production or do you watch to find out what happens next? I do the former, and film critic Scott Renshaw thinks maybe, just maybe, we all ought to do more of that. In his essay, The Case Against Focusing on Movie Plots, he laments how “anything with a story has been reduced to a level of ‘what happens.’” This comes out in numerous ways, not least of which is the obsession over avoiding spoilers every time the next entry in a film franchise comes around.
People like me who write about new releases often dodge talking about certain revelations as a matter of courtesy, but I've started to wonder if doing so is contributing to an infantilization of critical thinking. Every time we emphasize the fact that we're not going to talk about certain things, we inevitably emphasize their role in the overall experience. It’s a cult of the “what happens,” at the expense of the how it happens.
Renshaw goes on to discuss the many elements we can enjoy in a film beyond just and then this happened. Colors, thematic choices, tone, costumes, music, style—there’s so much more to a film than the play-by-play you can inevitably find on a wiki somewhere. “There’s a whole world of art to experience beyond synopsis.”
(h/t to for bringing this one to my attention)
Enjoy October, guys! Get out and experience some art.
Speaking of art, if you live near London (or can get to London once a month), Morphē Arts puts on stellar gatherings around creativity, art, and faith. I’ve been inspired and encouraged every time I’ve attended and met some very cool creative people. The network’s winter program looks incredible.
Last night, we talked about finding a visual language. This month’s discussion is on AI, theology, and the arts. And November’s program will explore “the liquid content of the human body, and its theological significance.” I highly recommend these gatherings!
An impressive roundup! Thank you! I had already read Louis Perry's essay, and it is indeed epic. I haven't engaged much with Ted Gioia's "culture is stagnating" grandstand; my hunch is that we are instead seeing the gradual end of a cycle of the youth- and novelty-obsessed cultural paradigm. Every so often it seems that the new enjoys a magnified importance (in the baroque era, for instance), but at the moment we seem to be rediscovering the value of engagement with old thinkers and cultural products. Whether this is stagnation, "stuck culture," or simply an investment in tradition is up for debate and always will be, but I don't see the cultural landscape in as dismal a light as Gioia tends to see it.
I've thought similar things about movies; perhaps it is time for a genre of ambient film, which can be displayed in the background without requiring focused attention, like ambient music. Malick's "Days of Heaven," Lynch's "The Straight Story," and "2001: A Space Odyssey" would be my picks for this new kind of film aesthetic.
Wish I could join you at Morphe Arts—sounds exactly like the kind of thing I would want to be a part of. Have fun!
Love it. What about watching movies because you care about the character(s)? I can't say that I watch movies to be immersed in a creative production (which is why I don't love marvel, etc.) nor am I interested in plot-driven movies, necessarily... but when a movie/series makes me care deeply about the character-- I'm all in. I take the same approach with novels.