In my word work, I sometimes type words that land so pleasantly with some that I get to thinking they ought to be set down where others can see them.

The soon-to-be-former president of the Southern Baptist Convention said: “God the Father killed his own son instead of killing you.”

I shared the fact of it on the Book of Faces with this framing: “I’ve never heard the heresy put this way before, but it’s helpful. Stay safe, America.”

A journalist I admire very much offered this reply (publicly): “Which of the four main theories of atonement is non-heretical? (Asking for a friend).”

I offered this in reply to his reply: “Thank you for this question. Let me begin by saying that I imagine everyone (or almost everyone) is a heretic of one kind or another. On the matter of Jesus of Nazareth needing to be killed in order to stop God from killing us, that there is, to my mind, a heresy. I would need a quote from Anselm or whomever you have in mind as an atonement theorist before I would know which part of what the person said is mistaken. Having said that, I believe there’s all manner of mystery and wisdom at work in Jesus’ career and empire’s response and God’s purposes. A quick two-sentence formulation I’m comfortable espousing in person and on the Internet is this: Jesus is not our protection against God’s terror. Jesus is God’s loving response to ours.”

The journalist I admire very much “liked” my reply.

I don’t know where anybody else is at on the question of God and the (to me) related question of Jesus of Nazareth. I am sometimes surprised to hear how particular ideas from which I believe I’ve been delivered still linger in the consciousness of others.

For anyone who might be helped or challenged by it, here’s my formulation again: Jesus is not our protection against God’s terror. Jesus is God’s loving response to ours.

We are a beginning.

Editor’s Note: The above image has been purloined from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992). Those familiar with the tradition will note that what we’re seeing here is a rare encounter between Laura Palmer and the Log Lady. In this scene, the Log Lady speaks unto Laura Palmer these words: When this kind of fire starts, it is very hard to put out. The tender boughs of innocence burn first, and the wind rises, and then all goodness is in jeopardy.

There’s the sweet old world. [waves to you from within the sweet old world that you’re also within. That’s you, yes you, reading this.]

There’s beloved community thanks to the sweet old world. You and I are beloved community whether we act like it or not.

And then there’s attention economies within which the measurable expenditure of human attention is real estate or the rocket fuel or the spice. I don’t know how to move the needle within attention economies, but I like to try. I try many times a day.

I’m at it again today when I say SMASH SUMMER HIT when I speak of Superhero’s “Cut It Out.” I heard it on the radio this morning. It’s undeniable. It’s infectious. I kind of want to dare you to try to not like it. I dare you.

I am here to answer questions. I might type out the lyrics at some point.

Let it be known that the fellow in the white t-shirt is the one and only Peter Dark. Know and realize that playing them drums is our James Eichman. The video is the work of Christian Modica. Each of these young men are multimedia artists worthy of close study. I am not their manager. But if you don’t do Meta, and you want to reach out to any or all of them, let me know.

Oh and the mix? Caleb Wright.

Mastering? Samuel Roth.

The album art up there? Brock Pierce.

The Superhero situation, let it be said, does not begin with this summer smash hit.

They’ve been at it for a while.

Are you an I-tunes person? We’ve got you.

Spotify? Behold.

Bandcamp? On it.

Superhero, y’all.

“Slavery was not abolished; it was perfected.” is the title of the piece pictured above. It’s the work of J. Todd Greene. I have so much to say about it, but I believe it speaks for itself. Thoughts?

In recent months, I’ve noted a little more heat than usual from people who seem to think they’ve caught me “being political.” My push back is this: Define politics. Define “political.” What is or isn’t political? Name things. Be specific. If you were to say you don’t like my politics, what parts of me do you imagine you have in mind when you speak of my politics? What parts of yourself are your politics? It’s as if they’ve been trained to avoid such questions like the plague. Their faces go blank. It’s a sight to behold. It’s as if “politics” can and must be deployed as a word with which to fend off dawning moral realizations and to perhaps villainize others as extreme or unprofessional, but it must also never be defined. To define it is to risk getting tagged as “political.” To get successfully tagged as having gotten political when you weren’t supposed to get political is to get pegged as being (or having been) inappropriate. When that happens, you might be out of a job. Or not.

I get into all of this and more in the video at the bottom of this post. I return to Aw Shucks Fascism and related matters in an effort to cast light, for those outside of Tennessee, on the subject of our eye-rubbingly corrupt, Republican elected officials. I am neither a Democrat nor a Republican, but I say “Republican” this time around, because in Tennessee they’re the ones debasing themselves by doing the bidding of a white supremacist terror clown ordering the killing of American citizens while moving between D.C. and Florida and sometimes golfing. They’re being inappropriate. May they each and all repent and be made whole.

What does the Star Fleet Technical Manual have to do with any of this? Let me explain. There’s a living tradition among us called Star Trek. Like Star Wars and Christianity, its witness is sometimes mixed up with marketing and ad revenue and bad faith operatives, but it’s a river of living water to millions. I procured the volume pictured above as a child in the eighties. I’ve been reluctant to part with it, because it marks my own desire to immerse myself within that river by…maybe penning a Star Trek novel or pitching an idea for an episode. If you click the link to the Wikipedia entry you’ll see that, while it started as a beloved document among fans of Star Trek, it eventually got canonized as the author’s insights were incorporated into the films.

In any case, I got to thinking about Star Trek when Stacey Abrams traveled to Nashville to try to persuade Republicans in our state legislature to refrain from morally debasing themselves (and disgracing their families): “This is not democracy. This is cowardice.” You can read her remarks here.

In addition to being an artisan of moral seriousness for our time, Abrams also plays the President of United Earth in Star Trek. Behold

Witness knows no division. I am not suggesting that the United Federation of the Planets was officially represented in a Senate Judiciary Committee in Nashville last week. But I’m insisting beloved community was and will be again. Many within my state and federal governments are being catastrophically inappropriate and alarmingly unsafe people, a threat to themselves and others, hot messes all. But they are everlastingly outnumbered. Empire has a shelf life. It’s inappropriate. Bigotry is doomed.

Here’s me saying a lot of this and more to a camera on my computer and whoever’s listening.

Thoughts?

Editor’s Note: Please note that the art featured up top (via the New York Review of Books) is the work of Didier Viodé. He can be reached via this website.

On my way to sit still with Amanda Lucas of WXNA for her Psychobabble radio show, I reminisced with Todd Greene over Nashville’s local radio scene and the gift it’s been to us over the centuries. I said aloud over the phone that we need to decide ourselves that radio’s gonna stay. Those of our scene will likely hear in that phrasing an R.E.M. reference. Before I knew it, we were pumping each other up over what was and is and also what still remains possible in love and art and self-respect. I was minutes from being on the air and Todd told me he’d listen to it as it happened.

I walked into the studio and beheld a big picture of my dearly departed friend Jim Ridley looking down on me. I noted aloud that I owe an awful lot of wherever and whoever it is I am to Chris Peltier (who has his own shows on WXNA). When we worked together at Brentwood Cinema, Chris appeared before me as a radically independent intellectual with an interest in just about everything. He read voraciously—and in public—whatever grabbed his fancy. We saw Terry Gilliam’s Brazil together. He was and is an inspiration. As Amanda put questions to me, I felt more and more at home.

We talked George Michael and R.E.M. and Octavia Butler and U2 and Andy Ogles and Cantina Band Theory. That last one is especially relevant for those who celebrate May the Fourth (as I do).

You can listen to it all right here. We’re the episode (5/1) archived up top. I am, however, told that it’s only available for two weeks following the airing so grab it while you can. It happened. It really did. But if you want it to happen to you, you’re gonna wanna happen upon it soon.

Did y’all know Micky Dolenz has a cover of “Radio Free Europe?” Well he does. It’s a revelation:

Any questions?

In recent weeks, "It says" and "the Bible says" have surfaced as uniquely perverse phrases in public discourse. When someone in my classroom says "It says..." while looking at a screen, I let them finish saying what they say something says and then I ask "Who said it?" In some cases, they're able to point me to a human being who said the thing they said it said and the possibility of moral coherence between people is restored. To be clear, an unchecked “It says” has a way of spreading. Have you noticed?

Similar exchanges are occasioned by the voicing of the phrase, "The Bible says." Isaiah can say God said something. Paul can say something to someone in a letter. But the Bible, hear this, can't say anymore than Elton John's Greatest Hits Volume II can say. Let’s not bully people with unexamined assertions. Relatedly, let’s not sin against the Bible by mischaracterizing its content.

“Liberals say” and “MAGA says” and “Postmodernism says” and “Islam says” as introductory phrases muddy the waters of discourse—of actually discerning what’s real and what isn’t—similarly. Did a self-described liberal say something? Has a Republican elected official voiced an assertion? Wonderful. Quote them. But don’t ascribe sentences to people groups. That’s crazy.

I have no doubt that lots of folks have been demanding specificity of one another repeatedly over millennia, but that very basic, teensy-weensy exorcism (“Who said it?”) we’re free to perform on one another at anytime comes to me most memorably in an exchange between Patti Smith and Michael Young of Montgomery, Alabama. I consider it at length in a book. Here’s the footage. Young goes hard, “Everybody says…” She asks the magic question (“Who said it?”) with an extra push: “Are you everybody?” Within seconds, Patti Smith has modeled poetic, prophetic behavior in the presence of hot nonsense. People have the power to not play along with it, to not spread it, and to, in fact, stop hot nonsense in its tracks.

When we let hot nonsense (“It says” or “The Bible says” or “Everybody says”) seed itself and spread unchecked, we can find ourselves getting agitated over positions no one person we know of has actually staked out. That can have us losing sleep over phantoms and doing real harm to real people over projections. When we’re in the presence of people who won’t specify when asked, who instead double down in hot nonsense and lash out against anyone who calls into question its veracity, we have something of a mental fight in front of us.

We risk our own mental health when we’re expected to abide or play along with the mental unhealth of others. Getting talked over is exhausting. Sometimes counterintuitively, we have to fight for the right to keep feeling and knowing and saying what’s true. What’s true sets us free. Saying what’s true insistently and repeatedly can be perceived as an existential threat to those who dwell within and bank upon falsehood.

Some of this was brought forcibly to mind when a confrontation occurred at my place of employment. It’s a developing story.

"Hot nonsense” is one way of characterizing the ad revenue ecosystem in which many of us sometimes live and move and have our being. I say “hot nonsense” and “ad revenue ecosystem,” but a man from Chicago recently named the challenge with the word “simulation.” Give his words a look.

Here it is again:

When simulation becomes the norm, it weakens the human capacity for discernment. As a result, our social bonds close in upon themselves, forming self-referential circuits that no longer expose us to reality. We thus come to live within bubbles, impermeable to one another. Feeling threatened by anyone who is different, we grow unaccustomed to encounter and dialogue. In this way, polarization, conflict, fear and violence spread. What is at stake is not merely the risk of error, but a transformation in our very relationship with truth.

There’s so much here. For now, I’m struck by “self-referential circuits that no longer expose us to reality.” It’s awfully hard to exit those dark, psychic corners, but we remain alarming free to put questions to one another when we attempt language together. I myself find myself saying “It says..” every so often and I am fortunate enough to have folks nearby who poke me with a “Who says?” or “Who said it?” If you don’t have folks like that within your ambit. I say find some. Simulation need not be the norm.

I went ahead and said a lot of what I say above on my Youtube channel.

And here’s Dr. David Dault doing me the kindness of a question. I will, barring the unforeseen, have a response in time.

I never know for sure who makes it down this far and who among you has easy access to goings-on in Nashville. But this will be amazing.

That’s buulb at Eastside Bowl at 6pm this Thursday.

To review, generalization is tyranny’s oxygen supply. Specificity cuts it off. Context, y’all!

Stay safe.

Editor’s Note: The screen grab up top is from Children of the Corn (1984). It speaks to me. It even says something. I’m not sure what.

I’m big on nuance. I don’t think there’s much in the way of love between persons without it. Maybe nuance is love. It is as least a form of love. Nuance, applied to people, refuses to envision others degradingly, refuses denying them the content of their own experience, and resists the disgrace of oversimplification. Nuance also has a way of talking us down tenderly from the false ledges we’ve put ourselves on. In my educational efforts, I suspect I write “NUANCE” in the margins of essays more than any other word. Nuance is worth the trouble.

Art memorializes nuance. Art is out there all day long, mostly unpublicized, giving frame and form to what we’re going through.

About a week ago, however, a poem surfaced and keeps on surfacing across God’s internet. There does not appear to have been an organized effort to promote it EXCEPT in the sense that lots of people feel spoken for by it and shared it on (or via) their contraptions. I love when that happens. A bunch of people loving nuance enough to memorialize it themselves and share it with others is where it’s at. That right there is civil society overcoming the algorithms of ad revenue ecosystems and empire. Back to the poem.

Art, let the reader understand, eats empire for breakfast. But it is also the case that empire occasions art. In this instance, an imperial decree issued a little over a week ago got one man arting it up with a poem. That man is Michael F. Dubois. Please don’t let my words get in the way of his.

We become what we stomach. We must therefore be very careful about what we stomach. In the days since Michael F. Dubois offered this lovely counter-liturgy in response to 47’s taxpayer-funded genocide announcement, we’ve been treated to more wickedness in the form of 47 fashioning himself as Jesus via AI and the targeting of Pope Leo by 47 himself and J.D. Vance and Mike Johnson. This is how bad faith operatives wear down a compliant populace. When we get hit with so much horror repeatedly, we’re apt to forget that this is the guy who publicly called for the execution of children when I was in college. He has yet to walk it back. It’s not a secret. It’s known. But the living fact of it is buried by today’s hot nonsense. It’s Republican. It’s federal. By “federal,” I mean it is ours. The hot nonsense, like the steadfast love of God which never ceases, is new every morning.

I hesitate to do it, but, for the public record, I will place before you an annotated version of the Truth Social post that gave rise to Michael F. Dubois’ poem:

Empire is power over. Art is power with. The Truth Social post, crafted and blasted on my dime and my time, is empire. Empire disintegrates.

Michael F. Dubois’ poem is art. Art integrates. Art remembers where empire dismembers. Art invites a body to truly and feelingly know the score. Art insists that we and I be here now.

Y’all know that song? The first words are “Remember now.” It’s George Harrison’s. May it serve as a palate cleanser to the hot nonsense of the Republican death threat.

Here’s Beck giving it a go:

Art memorializes the nuance empire won’t—can’t even—countenance. And art eats empire for breakfast. But experiencing art eating empire for breakfast takes some effort. We have to receive, share, compose, and immerse ourselves in the everyday apocalypses of art to rightly steward the everyday apocalypse we’re experiencing. Michael F. Dubois understood the assignment last week. His understanding is now ours. Let’s make the most of it.

One more thing though. Empire not even being able to countenance nuance, art, and incoming data puts me in the mind of a very weird passage from the Apostle Paul that’s come to make more sense to me in recent years. Paul speaks of persons of sincerity. That’s people possessing—and also moving toward—integrity and wholeheartedness. Paul notes that such people bear a kind of scent, a sweet aroma, especially for those similarly moved and moving along a healing journey. I think of here of all that art is and all that art does for us. Think reckoning. And again, sincerity and seriousness.

But there’s also unseriousness. There is sometimes a refuge built of lies and there are, we must admit, people rushing to it and people hiding within it. Empire is, after all, catastrophically well-funded. For the people of the lie, Paul notes, that sweet aroma is a stinking pestilence. The smell of nuance is an offense to those who are perishing, those dwelling in citadels of militant denial. You can look it up. It’s 2nd Corinthians 2:14-17. The truth of what Pauls’s getting at has been lately verified in my experience.

Lest this come off as doomy, hear this now: We’re all invited to nuance and the memorialization of nuance (art). Let’s have more of it. Amplify nuance always.

Editor’s note: The top image is a statue of Nelson Mandela in London. I took the picture myself. The annotations on the abomination are provided by Marcy Wheeler.

Among the joys afforded me in my place of primary employment is the opportunity to try to ease particular young people out of their sometimes toxic conceptions of God, themselves, and others. I never know for sure how that’s going. But something seems to catch on when we note that the word translated as “hell” in the New Testament is often “Gehenna” which is the Valley of Hinnom which—in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) especially—can be meaningfully read as “dumpster fire.” Jesus of Nazareth is alarmingly specific in his description of dumpster fire as something of a mental health challenge.

Conceiving dumpster fire as a form of corruption is an easy one. Students know the vibe. They’re quite aware of what they’re going through when it comes to contending with people in psychic free fall. They know the small betrayals of the mind. They are not strangers to dysfunction at home and abroad. The overstepping of personal boundaries, performative behavior, trauma, moral injury, and festering enmity does something to people. Discerning what is and isn’t dumpster fire, who is and isn’t safe, all while attending now and then to dumpster fire within is the human assignment. When we don’t deal with our own dumpster fire, we have a way of making it someone else’s problem. All that hell has to go somewhere. Hot nonsense spreads.

But hell being dumpster fire and hot nonsense doesn’t preclude (for me) a day of judgment or reckoning. I believe apocalypse is an everyday—many times a day—phenomenon. Humankind, T.S. Eliot tells us, cannot bear very much reality, but I believe we crave it, we’re made for it, and that the truth and only the truth will set us free. I hold to the wise counsel voiced by Otis Wilbury: Every day is judgement day.

Being made conscious of what we’re doing, what we’ve done or left undone, is, I think, a big part of truth setting us free. I know feelingly what a torment it can be to be made to see what I don’t want to see, but consciousness—like integration—is good news. Perhaps eternal reckoning can be helpfully envisioned as eternal realization. I’m not always ready to recognize the incoming data of what’s true of me and our sweet old world in the minute particulars, but I live in hope of eternal realization of what is and was and is to come. It’s a process I associate with William Blake’s assertion that we are each put on earth a little space that we may learn to bear the beams of love.

I think too of conflict giving rise to content and insight, the righteously effective pressure cooker of a problem, a quandary, or a muddle. That’s where transformation occurs, but I can’t be transformed if I’m always avoiding conflict. Better to dwell in the tension to see what might come of it. This isn’t to say it’s easy. Change is sometimes hard as hell. Flannery O’Connor has a word: “All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and change is painful.”

Among my most beloved, albeit remote, mentors on all of the above are U2. I hear “Bad” and “Exit” and “Moment of Surrender” as songs portraying dwellers on thresholds playing with the fire of wholeness and holiness. Maybe that’s everybody all the time. Maybe most any U2 song can be received that way. “Until the End of the World” places Judas Iscariot in that space and, thereby, expands the doctrine of salvation and the movement of rock and roll in under five minutes.

I say all this to note U2’s persisting along this trajectory with the appearance of “Resurrection Song” on U2’s Easter Lily which dropped a little over a week ago.

I am being shown something here. I hear a nod to R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts.” I hear a fierce admonition concerning the living death that standing against or fronting in the face of love is, but it’s right in there with an insistence that hell (like death) has a shelf life. There’s also the sense that there are times when love can only be discerned in the shadows. In any case, the goal is soul. I spy a summons to the work of recognition, to full-body realization in the here and later. Life before death starts now. Love is real.

I welcome your impressions.

Stay safe, y’all.

I have a new favorite Switchfoot album cover.

Y’all give much thought to Switchfoot?

I do. They’re family to me. They turn data into song. They give to airy nothing a local habitation and a name. They’ve sought out new lifeforms and new civilizations across two centuries. They bear witness to John M. Perkins on the airwaves. Their very first demo as a band had a hand-drawn picture of Soren Kierkegaard on the cover.

And now we have this loveliness. Please behold and listen before reading the words that follow:

That there is track one on an album (Forever Now) that won’t drop in its entirety till a ways into June. I am not in a position to say what anything means, but I have feelings and thoughts.

I hear weariness and lamentation AND a determination to confront dysfunction within and without. There’s anger too; a deep registering of the price we pay when we try to suppress or smooth over suffering by, for starters, lying about how we’re really feeling. It’s like we’re hearing the psyche in free fall. But that’s not all!

There is (toward the end) a devastating bridge:

Voice at the end of the line
Which of these voices is mine
Worried of what I might find
Mining the halls of my mind
If truth is freedom and light
Why is it truth that I fight?
Or is it the darkness inside
Scared to be taken alive?

I’m amazed by all of it, but it’s that last part—a darkness within that’s scared of being engaged or made to surface or brought out into the light that gets me feeling and then thinking about the forms my fears clomped up with the accompanying denials about my fears take. This puts me in mind of The Babadook as well as that troublingly helpful saying attributed to Jesus of Nazareth: If the light that is in you be darkness, how great is that darkness. “Wake Up, Mr. Crow,” helps me level with myself a little harder. I need more of this in my life.

I also love that the video looks like it was filmed on the set of Children of Men (2006).

In any case, this song and this album to come are an encouragement to me. I’d welcome anything anyone wishes to say about how it lands with you.

Dark out.

I am often slow to see the connection of dots. I say that to note that they’re connected whether we recognize & act upon the connection or not. Rush’s A Farewell to Kings is a farewell to kings which also contains instruction (Track 1 Side 2) on how to bid farewell to despots properly.

As the offering puts it, the people who hold high places must be the ones who start to mold a new reality closer to the heart. The blacksmith and the artist reflect it in their art by forging their creativity closer to the heart.

Meanwhile, philosophers and ploughpersons must each know their part in the sowing of a new mentality closer to the heart. As captains and co-captains and chart drawers, we sail together into destiny closer to the heart. Closer to your heart. We got this y’all. Let. Love. Rule.

Christianity, when it isn’t fascism, is a prophetic movement of creative nonviolence to which everyone’s invited.

More on that here.

At my day job interrogating and being interrogated by younger-than-me people in our courses of study, our conversations often center around history and speech and freedom and love sweet love and evil.

I find it helpful to speak of evil as something that gets hold of people instead of tagging particular people as evil. I tend to think we succumb to evil in the rush to decree someone (usually a pack of someones) evil. Hell yes, there’s evil. But where and how it originates, takes root, and blooms is more elusive. “THE FACE OF EVIL,” for instance, is a dramatic sounding phrase, but I am not willing to say I’ve beheld it. An evil expression passing over a person’s face? Maybe. But I can’t imagine someone’s sleeping face looking evil to me for long.

Relatedly and mostly in Bible class, we sometimes get to talking about the satan. Please note the “the” and my decision to not capitalize the “s.” satan is Hebrew for accuser. Think opposer or, if you like, adversary. If you’re the lawyer for the prosecution, you’re the satan. It’s a role as well as a position. No need to get weird about it.

Jesus of Nazareth hearing tell of unclean spirits being brought to heel and then saying he saw satan falling like lightning (Luke 10:18) can be read a lot of different ways. I think of it as Jesus observing that wherever his healing movement reaches people, the power of shame and fear and accusation gets defanged to the point of collapse. Wouldn’t that be lovely? Sarah Dark has a song which, to my mind, speaks to this.

If we think of the satan as a posture a person assumes (sometimes for very solid reasons), we can then devise a satanic spectrum to trace degrees on either side of that posture. I once did just that in the margins of a book and only recently drew it out on the back of a notepad (See image above). I realized right away that I was going to run out of room so I drew some arrows. Y’all can make your own, but here’s mine vertically listed.

Differ

Question

Disagree

Object

Resist

Deny

Accuse

OPPOSE

Belittle

Invalidate

Negate

Vanquish

Destroy

Erase

I like my satanic spectrum, because matters escalate quickly in my heart, mind, and body. They escalate quicker when I give public voice to what’s brewing inside me. Before I know it, I can want someone belittled for real when it all got started with something they said or did that somehow rubbed me the wrong way. Before we know it, a difference of opinion voiced can get characterized as (or transmogrified into) an attack. My satanic spectrum, when I pay it heed, slows things down.

Ever notice how a complaint or even a slight push back can get characterized as an “attack” or a “slam” or “blast” or “blowback?” I have no doubt such words lead to boosts and clicks and “likes” and please (if “please” is the right word) algorithms and generate ad revenue, but the flight from specificity signaled by the unexamined deployment of these words has a menacing effect on mental health. Our imaginations—and therefore our nervous systems—are made to experience stress that isn’t tethered to reality. I have an example.

Family of Fallen Airman Rages at Trump’s ‘Uncalled For’ War

That’s the headline. You can access the Daily Beast article penned by Laura Esposito here. To be clear, I treasure the reporting. Having said that, I don’t see anyone quoted in the piece raging. There are pleas voiced by the family of Tech Sgt. Tyler Simmons (28). Those pleas are directed at voters and Public Servant 47 himself. Sorrow is sounded. Logic is appealed to. I should say that the word, “rage,” does not appear within the piece. Nevertheless, I find the framing catastrophically misleading. The satanic spectrum helps me see why. Here’s that image again.

In our real worlds, I can ask someone to explain themselves or rethink their commitments without attacking them. I can also try to make them aware of and even dramatize the consequences of their action or inaction without opposing them as persons or wanting them dead. With the satanic spectrum, I can highlight these distinctions. I can take it slow and invite others to take it slow too. I can be more precise in my feeling and thinking and speaking and doing. Precision is sometimes everything.

We owe each other precision. I bank my bodily safety on the not-American world not mistaking me for my military and the not-Christian world not mistaking me for all the terror that is and was and will be successfully marketed as Christian.

The extra syllables are worth it, y'all. There’s the people of Russia. And then there’s the Putin regime. Let’s speak precisely of both. [The government of] Russia. [The government of] Iran. [The state of] Israel. There’s a government of Tennessee. But there’s also Dolly Parton of Tennessee. Don't mistake people for their governments or umbrella terms that serve to generalize and minimize persons. Slow the tape. Address the horror with precision. When we don’t, we can find ourselves positioned against people we’ve mistaken for abstractions. Before we know it, we’re carrying water for something we didn’t agree to. Before we know it, we might discover we’re co-signatories of crimes against humanity. Precision saves lives.

So, that there (See image above) is the book within which I wrote out my satanic spectrum. I don’t quote him that much, but I owe an awful lot to Walter Wink. When someone speaks of MAGA or conservatives or liberals or Democrats or Republicans or Muslims or Jews or Christians or any ism as if they’re a monolith united in the saying of one thing and I hesitate or decline to nod knowingly or differ with what they’ve asserted by noting that I wouldn’t put it that way, I have what I imagine I know about Jesus and the prophets in mind, but I am also very likely thinking about what Wink might say. Trying to think with and alongside Wink also gave rise to Robot Soft Exorcism Theory.

Like RSE, my satanic spectrum is unfinished thought. What do you make of it? Any suggestions?

We cannot heal what we cannot feel. And if you’re like me, letting myself feel—really feel—what I’m feeling is an everyday do-over kind of thing. To even begin to approach that task, I need art. Art makes me feel. When I submit to it, I am able to feel more and thereby see and sense and hear more and thereby love myself and others more. I need those others—people far away and nearby—to remember again that we’re all of us invited to art (the healing game).

Look at all that goodness in the image above. That’s my friend, Lanecia Rouse, looking at you. Among her themes is holy seeing. And my learning community is taking up that theme in a series of events tomorrow (Monday, March 15th). It’s all free. You’re invited. I also invite you to tell anyone you know within driving or walking distance of Belmont University that they’re invited too. Parking, by the way, is easy-peasy. The Gabhart Chapel is located within the Janet Ayers Academic Center which has multilevel underground parking.

To begin, there’s a 10am Chapel talk with Dr. Natalie Carnes of Duke Divinity.

Then, at 3:30pm, we have Lanecia Rouse speaking to us from right outside the chapel.

And then, from 6:00-7:30, we have a conversation between Rouse and Carnes and poetry from Gregory Thompson and music from Zandy Mowry and John-Mark McGaha and, the one the only, Peter Dark.

I am personally preemptively persuaded by the entire situation. Perhaps you will be too.

Join us.

I’m trying to be a Christian, and that’s hard work. I’m always amazed when somebody says, I’m a Christian. I think, already? You’ve got it already? Trying to be a Christian is like trying to be a Muslim or a Buddhist or a Shintoist: it’s not something that you achieve and then you sit back and say, now I’ve got it. I’m trying to be a Christian in every moment. That also brings me great joy, and of course the concomitant misery, because according to my teaching I have to admit that everybody else is a child of God—the brute, the bigot, the batterer. I have to admit it, whether he or she knows it or not. So that challenges me, and when I can get over on that, it brings me joy.

Maya Angelou to bell hooks

Brian Phillips speaking of the “entity” has me thinking about Simone Weil on “the Great Beast.”

Here’s Simone Weil on the Great Beast:

The Great Beast is the only object of idolatry…the only imitation of something which is infinitely far from me and which is I myself…Only one thing can be taken as an end, for in relation to the human person it possesses a kind of transcendence: this is the collective. The collective is the object of all idolatry…Rome is the Great Beast of atheism and materialism, adoring nothing but itself. Israel is the Great Beast of religion. Neither the one nor the other is likable. The Great Beast is always repulsive…The whole of Marxism, in so far as it is true, is contained in the page of Plato on the Great Beast…The power of the social element. Agreement between several men brings with it a feeling of reality. It brings with it also a sense of duty. Divergence, where this agreement is concerned, appears as a sin…The state of conformity is an imitation of grace…The service of the false God (of the social Beast under whatever form it may be) purifies evil by eliminating its horror. Nothing seems evil to those who serve it except failure in its service.

The part of me that wants to leave the passage and the image provided by William Blake alone on the Internet to speak for themselves is, at this moment, overcome by the part that wishes to offer comment. Before reading my commentary, please read Simone Weil’s words again and consider applying them to your particular context(s).

When I try to apply them to mine, I hover over that last part: Nothing seems evil to those who serve it. I don’t imagine hardly anyone sets out to serve evil. But then, there are the arrangements into which we are born and within which we survive and try to thrive and look out for ourselves. These arrangements—agreed upon between people—take on the feeling of reality, and, before we know it, we’re defending them as if they are, in themselves, persons rather than arrangements, sometimes alarmingly arbitrary, between persons. Rome and Israel, Weil reminds us, started out as arrangements agreed upon by vulnerable migrants. By story and song and inscription, they each took on an aura but remain arrangements. The conformity and compliance demanded by such arrangements are an imitation of grace. When we start imagining any arrangement rightly necessitates visiting bodily harm or death upon persons, we have succumbed to idolatry, the Great Beast, and, needless to say, evil.

I don’t know your context(s). My mind turns to children in Tehran and Americans enlisted in Kuwait. I think of my U.S. Navy sinking the IRIS Dena and the fate of its crewmembers. I think too of Senator Tim Sheehy’s decision to assault Marine Corps veteran Brian McGinnis as he exercised his certain inalienable right to speak up in public and on camera. Something less than persons possesses persons asserting they’re defending persons as they terrorize persons. What possesses a person to order—or sanction or normalize or make excuses for—the wounding or drowning or burning alive of other persons? Idolatry. There’s money in it.

I don’t think of a person being possessed by something less than a person as a rare occurrence among persons. I am, myself, often possessed by and even act upon feelings which get me into trouble and which, upon examination, were not, in fact, grounded in reality. False gods are tricky like that. I get to remind myself that a feeling, no matter how powerful, is always something less than a person. To be possessed by idolatry—or idolatrous feelings—is to forget this. Weil speaks of a feeling of reality that gets hold of people and pulls them into very dark corners. They do and say and play along with things unworthy of their best, deepest selves. In such instances, our minds are so darkened that our capacity for truth—for even wanting to know what’s true—is diminished. Weil has a disturbing saying for this form of debasement: “Evil, when we are in its power, is not felt as evil, but as a necessity, even a duty.”

I recently found myself thinking of particular people in my life as “post-truth people.” To do that is useful to a point. In e-mails, private messages, hallways, and sidewalks, I encounter people who are, in their current positioning of themselves, effectively post-truth. When confronted with what’s true, they cannot be counted upon to acknowledge it or to adjust, correct, or revise their testimonies or takes to fit available reality. Circling back toward lived truthfulness appears to be, for them, too costly at this time. The apparent power they feel in not circling back, staying stuck, and doubling down in lived denial (Access, association, protection) is not to be surrendered. In this sense, they are, for now, unsafe people posing a threat to themselves and others.

But those who dwell in darkness are more than the sum of their bad choices. Nobody’s just a post-truth person. There’s always a story that got each of us wherever it is we each of us are right now. Bruce Cockburn’s words are a help to me as my feelings about others get all bunched up: “If somebody chooses to align themselves with darkness, it doesn’t come out of nowhere. There’s a reason that they’re doing that. It doesn’t mean that we have to tolerate their actions, but I think we should try to communicate and to confront each other with respect…You have to have that. Otherwise, you’re just surrendering to the chaos.”

Cockburn says “chaos.” Weil says “the Great Beast.” I say empire. Let’s not surrender to its many manifestations.

In our crisis of disconnection, let’s manifest a counterwitness to the chaos. Amid disintegration, avenues of integration remain open to us in our myriad contexts. I borrow the phrase “crisis of disconnection” from Craig Bamford who dropped the phrase in his characterization of The Rural School of Arts & The People’s Forest. Perhaps there are as many crises of disconnection as there are people in the world. But there are just as many avenues to connection, to art and artfulness—the healing game—amid the chaos. In fact, there are more.

To move toward integration starts with examining my own self (breathing, feeling, thinking) with curiosity and compassion. The compassion part, though, has to be extended to others if I’m going to feel it in my own bones. This is where Cockburn’s counsel intersects with a challenge issued by bell hooks in the form of a question: “How do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?”

That right there is the tension, the holding of space in the radical center. I find the image of the Great Beast helpful in the work of addressing the wrongdoing of others without losing touch with their humanity. When I do lose touch with it, I lose touch with my own humanity too.

In a very deep sense, we all know what’s wrong. The Great Beast is loud as hell. What are we to do? Reader, I am not always sure. But I have a few suggestions.

If you’re like me, you have—in addition to state and local officials allegedly representing your interests—two U.S. Senators and a House Representative over whom you have custody. Put their numbers on your phone and call them. I never get through to them personally, but I’ve developed something of a rapport with some of the folks I pay to take my calls. You can speak to them while walking or doing other things. I know I’m not speaking to the Great Beast when I get personal with a person.

You can also show up for folks being detained, deported, or tortured. The image above is me (with others) standing alongside the family of Kilmar Abrego Garcia last summer. Do you remember him? The entire Trump Cabinet lined up against him. I’m sure they aren’t done trying to terrorize him, but…at least for now…he’s back with his family.

One can also start with available connectedness. If you have one person you admire and with whom you feel connected, check in and let them know the gift they are to you. If you admire them and feel disconnected from them, perhaps now is a good time to reach out. Circle back with the real ones.

There’s more than one way to give voice to what bothers you. Mother Ann Lee is said to have said, “Every force evolves a form.” Sit with the feelings, feel their force, give them a form. There are so many ways to bear witness, so many ways to access and even enjoy our own moral power, so many ways to not give in to fear. So many ways to inconvenience empire’s hirelings and invite them to rethink their positioning. So many ways to stand up and make the right kind of noise. So many ways to stay human.

Editor’s note: The top image is William Blake’s “The Great Red Dragon and the Beast from the Sea.” The second image is Marco Rubio commemorating Ash Wednesday while also normalizing tax-funded horror on camera. The third image, captured by Roberto Schmidt, is Pam Bondi refusing to look at survivors of the Epstein cabal.

Editor’s Note: Steady readers of Dark Matter will likely recall my friend and neighbor Lynne McFarland who often does me the great kindness of permitting the reprinting of her online posts here. Even wondering what Lynne might say about something I’m looking at or considering restores my sense of myself and others and our sweet old world. I hope each of you has people like that in your life. The image above comes from Lynne too. It’s an illustration from The Illuminated Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks, illlustrations by Michael Green. Here’s Lynne.

For us (the beings of this world, this planet) the mode of our being is “embodied.” We are, we have, bodies. From a single cell to a whale, from a fleck of mold to a forest, we live in bodies.

Don’t get me started on us humans and our bodies. If we want to punish people, we punish their bodies. If we want to destroy, we kill the body. In passion, we yearn to possess the body of another. In the condition we could call Empire Ego, we wish to possess bodies in order to enrich ourselves.

In the Christian tradition, the story we tell is that God came to earth in a body. His body was destroyed and rose again in another, transformed, body. And then He was disembodied, became pure Spirit, and sometimes we want that too, pure indestructible Spirit, but to dust we’re born and to dust we shall return, so that’s a problem.

When we want to make an idol (a bad thing, no?), we make a body, perhaps of gold or jewels, or we find the ideal bodies of our culture and elevate these to a place of importance. But a part of us believes that we ought instead to be seeking a “higher” good, the Idea, the Ideal, Reason, the Spirit, the Absolute, the Good in all caps, and it’s always dis-embodied, right? Something we can’t quite put our fingers on, just out of grasp, an Intelligence that at most exists in words or formulae, or dare I say it, algorithms?

Back in the Old Testament, it says God created us “in His own image,” like He had a body. Like us. Embodied, yes? And if the Holy Spirit is left with us (as supposedly it is), is it not then embodied?

Birds are embodied song. Dogs are embodied love.

Just stick with me for a moment. Go with this: the mode of our being is embodied.

To know that which is embodied requires us to be open toward it, to draw near it, and be present. To be with an embodied being, not in the mode of destruction or possession, is to let it reveal itself to us and for us to perceive it.

It is a form of “being with.” Not power over.

It is opposite to the manner and method of a corporate project, what Rev. Lawson called Plantation Capitalism, in which the goal is to control, to extract, to objectify and commodify bodies of all sorts, human, animal, mineral, for gain and profit.

I get it, this manner and method of a corporate project, this possession and destruction: first, you de-sacralize it. Remove the deep being, the way that our being is an embodied being, and what remains is just “dead matter,” and who cares about that—go ahead and take it and get rich off it. Kill the Indian, save the man. Plow over Gaza for fun and profit. Detain and deport. If it’s people you’re talking about, de-humanize them, call them criminals.

Today, in the midst of smoke and death again, I will be with a group of people who lead with life and joy and power-with, who love the earth and who embrace the reality that we are body and soul, all of us. Embodied.

The artisans of moral seriousness pictured above are Larry Mullen Jr., Adam Clayton, the Edge, and Bono. They are the effort, the movement, the band called U2. I like them so much I can hardly stand it.

They understand the human task: Stand where you must stand. Be human there. They’ve been taking it up together with myriad feats of attentiveness and group courage for fifty years. I’ve been drawing on that courage remotely since I was twelve.

Art is integration, a long healing game to which everyone is invited. Art makes us feel. The more we feel, the more we can acknowledge, grieve, celebrate, and act upon what we’ve experienced, what we’re seeing and taking in. Consider “American Obituary.”

Art is news that stays news. There is so much here. Commemoration, lamentation, moral summons, love letter, sloganeering, holy decree. The lived witness of Renée Good is hereby sacramentalized. Her federal government’s attempt to smear her is hereby countered by art. The Department of Justice she funded refuses to open an investigation into her murder. The U2 op, however, has other plans. Art eats empire for breakfast.

And listen, “American Obituary” is just Track One on Days of Ash which dropped last week on Ash Wednesday. I am going to pace myself by saving further commentary on remaining tracks for future posts and my forthcoming book Explain All These Controls: U2 and the Inner America.

For now, I wish to note that we’ve been here before. In U2’s vision quest, America is a promise and a crime scene. “Vertigo” is its own distinct signal flare, but it started out as “Native Son” which honors Leonard Peltier. Their witness amplifies the witness of others. I am grateful and also a little ashamed that, at fourteen, it was this song appearing on MTV that focussed my mind and made me aware of the killing of Dr. King up the road in Memphis.

“American Obituary” persists down U2’s singular trajectory of seeing themselves in the mirror they hold up to the God-blessed, Christ-haunted USofA. Here’s Bono speaking of America in 1987. Read it twice:

I think rock & roll can make real the situation a country finds itself in….[In America] I found the people open. They wanted to be positive rather than negative. But this sort of openness makes Americans quite vulnerable to manipulation, vulnerable to what I call the new fascism. The new fascism will come with a warm handshake…and a smile. And through the media, people will be manipulated en masse. The potential is there. A nation as powerful as the United States must not elect a leader because of his suitability for television.

In a song, many things can be true at once and an oracle birthed in one context can prove applicable to another. Do y’all know “Get Out Of Your Own Way” from Songs of Experience (2017)? It’s aged well. Behold:

It lands a lot of different ways: personal, universal, foreign, domestic. I sometimes hear it as a parent addressing a broken-hearted child. It also reads like a note written to oneself. A pep talk, certainly. And yes, there’s America. Four grown men based in Ireland addressing a nation of 340 million? Actually, yes. I think that’s one of the things going on in this song. It pairs well with “American Obituary” in which we’re told, “We love you more than hate loves war.” And lest anyone feel preached at, Adam recently cited the phrase (“Get out of your own way”) as a personal mantra in the work of surrendering to God instead of trying to control outcomes. More on that here.

Quick funny thing. Days of Ash appeared on God’s internet at 11:AM last Wednesday. After my first listen, I walked my route from my office to Bongo Java and back and stopped to tell anyone I knew in my path that there’s a new U2 album among us. Within half an hour, two teenagers told me they were unaware of its existence, but they wanted me to know they were named after U2. One’s middle name is Clayton. The other’s first name is Joshua with the middle name of Tree. I was also alerted concerning a dad who named his dog Bono. True story.

Here’s me rambling on related matters.

Part of me wants to assure you that we’ll return to not-related-to-U2 matters shortly. But, in truth, I don’t believe in unrelated phenomena.

I welcome your thoughts on all of the above.

Behold the beauty of the book above. I have only just begun reading it but badly want to get it in front of everyone in my path. Resistance, agitation, & love, y’all. What a way of putting it. Read all about it here.

At an event celebrating its release, a panel reminded us that Reverend Lawson was not a fan of the word “protest” as a way of saying what he was up to together with others. He preferred demonstration. In the work of nonviolent direct action, the job is to demonstrate the absolute ridiculousness of the aggressors’ position. Show how silly and unconscionable it is and also show what love and self-respect can do. Love and self-respect are attractive. Group courage is contagious.

Greg Boyle, who knew and worked with Lawson, once told me that the Jesuits he met as a younger person amazed him with how funny and serious and joyful they were. He found them irresistible because they were “hilarious and prophetic.” He wanted in on their act. I feel that. I want to be hilarious and prophetic too.

I didn’t have the words for it at the time, but I found A Wrinkle In Time to be all of that and more as a child. I found that Bad Bunny show hilarious and prophetic. I spy a trajectory. More on that here:

Relatedly: Jared Cheek of Bloomington Community Radio was kind enough to put some questions to me. You can hear that here. We talk about Nashville’s winter storm as an apocalypse. I remind listeners of the Christian Zionist fanfiction called the Left Behind series and the bitter fruit—Think political rollout—its yielded and still yielding in our world today. Empire—Think tech broligarchy fused with white supremacist terror—is discussed alongside art eating it up at every turn. A lot of Brian Eno. A bit of Daniel Berrigan. U2 as a rogue planet. “This Little Light of Mine.” All the stuff.

All the stuff will be on offer this evening at Morgenstern’s in Bloomington. My good friend Stephen Deusner has consented to engage me in conversation. Tell your friends.

Be the group courage you want to see in the world.

The gates of Hell are always standing wide open. The lost are perfectly free to leave whenever they like, but to do so would mean admitting that the gates were open, that is to say that there was another life outside. This they are afraid to admit, not because they get any pleasure from their present existence, but simply because the life outside would be different, and if they admitted its existence they would have to lead it. They know all this. They know that they could leave and they know why they don’t. Their knowledge is the flame of Hell.

W.H. Auden, The Prolific and the Devourer

The only way to keep the space from imploding is to fill it, to prop up the walls: to claim all the room there still is for speaking, writing, publishing, protesting, voting. It’s what the people of Minnesota appear to be doing, and it’s something each of us needs to do — right now, while we still can.

That right there is M. Gessen speaking to us from within The New York Times. The space in danger of imploding is freedom. It is indeed fragile. Read up on Gessen’s experience and you’ll see that this insight and this urgent advice is hard-won. Securing and tending to spaces in which persons can mostly bank on freedom from bodily fear for themselves and others is a long, slow, steady work made up of myriad moves, “nuancy decisions” (William Stafford’s phrase) that add up to what can be called civil society, safe spaces cultivated by demonstrably safe people, art beating back empire.

The job, I think, is to know and feel your own power and act on it. Know your context. Be who you are when you are where you are. Be free.

It only recently occurred to me how easy it might be to film myself speaking freely about items of interest and curiosity and concern and publishing the footage.

I was so pleased that I did it again the next day.

Here’s a link to the poem and the essay. And you know what? I did it again.

And, growing accustomed to the situation, I went longer.

So…I suspect there will be more. I have not, up till now, been someone who subscribes to Youtube channels or bothers to “like” videos, but this might be one meaningful way to do my small part in claiming all the room there still is for being free and behaving freely together with others.

On that note, give this a look:

I’ll be standing and talking and reading to people in Louisville at Carmichael’s this week (Tuesday night). Know somebody who might enjoy being there? Tell them. Registration’s here.

And another thing, I’m going to be in Los Angeles as well with a bunch of other people. That’s this week.

You can sign up here.

And wait. There’s more.

Morgenstern Books is in Bloomington. You can sign up for that one here.

I’ll also be in Lexington on February 7th at Joseph-Beth. I appreciate their willingness to number me among their local authors. It’s at 1:00 in the PM.

One last thing. If you're like me, you have people you've known and even loved who are trying to pull you into a dark corner to insist that Renee Nicole Good tried to take Jonathan Ross out with a car. My advice: Don't give them your energy. There might be a day in the future when you can help them out of that dark corner, but my guess is...today and the next week or two isn't the time for that. Your energy, I suspect, is needed elsewhere. Amplify true testimonies where you find them. Protect those in need of your protection. Nurture spaces of candor, courage, and conscience. Stay safe.

Love is real.