Every Fourth of July, I find myself thinking about the long summer road trips I took with my family when I was a boy. Three weeks. Buick Electra. My sisters and me wedged into the back seat, not with screens but with library books, watching America pass by through the car windows. My father wanted my sisters and me to see the whole country, not just the parts near our home. My mother made it possible, managing the logistics of moving a family of five across a continent. Today I am more grateful for these trips than I can express.

My father was an artist, and on vacation he used his camera to train his attention, to find the angle, to notice what was worth keeping. Some of that rubbed off. The following five places didn’t just pass through my vision. They stayed.

As we mark the 250^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, I’ve been thinking about what these places gave me.

Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

I was ten years old when my family walked through the battlefield at Gettysburg, and then into the visitor’s center where they made the war come to life with an electric map — lights coming on to show troop movements, the advance and retreat of armies across that Pennsylvania farmland, even the evening campfires. By today’s standards the map was quaint. But I was transfixed. For maybe the first time, I understood that history wasn’t just dates to be memorized for an exam. It was ground. It was men who had stood exactly where we were standing, willing to die for what they believed in. It was there that I first understood the true cost of this country.

Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming

Nothing prepares you for Yellowstone. Not the photographs, not the documentaries, not the descriptions. You have to stand next to a mud pot that is bubbling and hissing and smell the sulfur and watch a geyser blow and then look up to find a bison grazing twenty yards away, utterly indifferent to all of it. The Reformed tradition I was formed in speaks of general revelation — the notion that creation itself testifies to something beyond itself. I didn’t have that vocabulary as a boy, but I felt it at Yellowstone. The natural world is not a backdrop. It is a text. And it is stranger and more alive than we are comfortable admitting.

Grand Canyon, Arizona

I have spent a good deal of my life in church. Which is not necessarily a complaint. Church has been the context for most of what matters to me. But I will confess something: I have rarely felt the sensation that theologians call mysterium tremendum — that overwhelming, vertiginous awareness of something vastly larger than oneself — inside a church sanctuary. I felt it at the Grand Canyon. You walk to the rim, and the ground simply disappears, a mile down, in layers of red and orange and purple going back two billion years. Nobody talks. Nobody needs to. That’s reverence.

Cape Canaveral, Florida

I grew up watching the launches. First, Mercury. Then, Gemini. And finally, Apollo. In our living room, on a black-and-white television, and at school, where my teacher would wheel in a TV set so the whole class could watch together — because these were not private events, they were communal ones, and everyone understood that. When my parents took us to Cape Canaveral, I stood on the ground where those rockets were assembled and then had lifted off, and I felt something I can only call patriotic awe. Not the chest-thumping kind. The quiet kind. The kind that comes from witnessing what human beings are capable of when they decide, collectively, to do something extraordinary. Whatever has happened to us since, we did that. We left the planet. We came back.

Lake Michigan

Years later, I found a different kind of history—not in the soil of a battlefield, but in the water of my own backyard. I live in Holland, Michigan, and I have walked along the shore of Lake Michigan more times than I can count. And it still gets me. The light in the evening, when the sun goes down over the water and the sky turns colors that painters have been chasing for centuries. The size of it — you cannot see the other side — so that it reads, experientially, as ocean. The way it changes by the hour, from glassy calm to whitecaps to something genuinely scary. I did not discover Lake Michigan on a childhood road trip. I discovered it by returning to Michigan in retirement, which turns out to be its own kind of pilgrimage. Some of the most beautiful things in America are not destinations. They are the places you return to until, finally, you see them.

On this Fourth of July, I won’t be thinking much about fireworks. I will think about a boy in the backseat of a Buick Electra, watching America go by. I will think about what that boy was being given, without knowing it — a country to love, in all its complexity and beauty and cost. I will think about his father, camera in hand, looking for the right angle. And I will think about his mother, ensuring we all arrived on time—clean clothes and all. ​Happy 250th birthday, America. You are still worth the trip.

I’m pleased to announce that I was offered a contract last week for my debut novel. My attorney, for whom I’ve been making morning coffee for nearly 50 years, is now carefully reviewing it. And because the contract isn’t signed, I can’t reveal much more — except that the novel is about a clergyman in crisis.

Which means I spent the better part of a year reading novels about clergymen in crisis.

I read Updike. I read Franzen. I read Peter De Vries, who remains the funniest — and possibly the cruelest — writer ever to aim a novel at a Protestant minister. I read Marilynne Robinson, of course. I read a half dozen others whose names you may or may not recognize.

And here is what surprised me: the best novels were written by women.

I’ll come back to that. But first, a confession that shadowed the whole reading project: I almost never recognized myself in these main characters. I rarely recognized my colleagues either. The clergymen in crisis genre that American fiction has produced are largely figures of tragedy, or farce, or both at once — but they are not, by and large, portraits that would cause a real pastor to say, yes, that’s exactly it!

The Women Got It Right

Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and Home are the obvious starting point, and I am not the first person to say so. Gilead remains, for my money, the most persuasive portrait of a clergyman’s inner life in American fiction — not because John Ames is saintly, but because he thinks the way a pastor actually thinks: unable to stop finding the theological meaning in ordinary things. Home gives us the same world through different eyes, and gains something in the process. The two novels together form a kind of stereo portrait of Reformed Protestant ministry that I have not found anywhere else. (The latter two novels in the quartet — Lila and Jack — are also beautiful, but they belong to a pastor’s wife and prodigal son, which are different stories.)

Then there is Susan Howatch.

If you have not read the Starbridge series, I want to say this carefully so you will believe me: these six novels about the Church of England in the twentieth century are compulsively readable, theologically serious, and funnier than they have any right to be. Glittering Images, the first, introduces us to Charles Ashworth, a Cambridge theologian dispatched by the Archbishop of Canterbury to investigate a bishop with an irregular domestic arrangement — which is the Church of England’s way of saying things have gone badly wrong behind a very respectable door. Howatch writes about clergy the way a brilliant insider would: with deep affection, considerable exasperation, and a satirist’s eye for the gap between what the church professes and what its officers actually get up to. I recognized more in these novels — set in England, written by a woman, about a tradition not quite my own — than I did in most of the American Protestant fiction I read.

The Men

Now for the men — and I’ll be brief.

John Updike’s A Month of Sundays gave me Tom Marshfield: adulterous minister, unreliable narrator, so busy performing his own transgression that any genuine reckoning never arrives. The sentences are extraordinary. The man is insufferable. Peter De Vries’s The Mackerel Plaza is genuinely funny, but the humor is the whole project, and his Reverend Mackerel is a perfectly constructed comic figure, which means he is never quite a person. Jonathan Franzen writes beautifully about everything, which is precisely the problem: the clerical life is just more material, observed from the outside with great precision. And Elmer Gantry — which I reread because I felt I should — turned out to be a mistake. Sinclair Lewis wrote a brilliant, vicious novel about a fraud, not a clergyman. Gantry has no inner life worth examining. He is a weapon Lewis aimed at an institution he despised. I was looking for something else entirely.

What I Was Actually Looking For

I learned that clergymen in crisis is a well-populated literary neighborhood, and that most of its residents fall into one of two camps. There is the fraud — Elmer Gantry and his descendants — whose crisis is essentially a secret waiting to be exposed. And there is the voluptuary — Marshfield, in his desert retreat — who has mistaken appetite for depth. Both are useful targets for satire. Neither one is what I was trying to write.

What I wanted — and what I found most fully in Robinson and Howatch — was something quieter and, I think, more honest. A clergyman who believes, more or less, what he says he believes. Who has given his life to something real. Who is in crisis not because he was always secretly a fraud, but because the performance of faithfulness, sustained over decades, has slowly hollowed something out. That is a different kind of crisis. It is less dramatic, and harder to write, and I suspect it is closer to what actually happens.

I never quite recognized myself in the men I read. I recognized myself, uncomfortably and gratefully, in the women’s books.

Caleb Jensen, the minister at the center of my novel, The Secret Heart, is not Elmer Gantry. And he is not Tom Marshfield. What has happened to him — a lifetime of caring for others — has somehow left him a stranger to himself. When you read it, I hope you will recognize someone. Maybe not a pastor you have known. Maybe just someone you have been.

The contract is still being reviewed, probably for the wording about domestic film rights. My attorney is very thorough.

I grew up among the Dutch Calvinists in western Michigan, which is about as far from Brooklyn as you can get, not just geographically but culturally. And yet, when I was in high school, I kept a nearby Waldenbooks in business by reading everything I could find by writers like John Updike, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Chaim Potok. I couldn’t have told you then why these writers spoke to me so powerfully. What I knew was that they were writing about a world I had not yet experienced and that I somehow recognized myself in them.

The Lecture Council

During my senior year at Calvin College, I chaired the Lecture Council, which brought writers and thinkers to campus each month. I drove speakers to and from the airport in my 1968 AMC Javelin and introduced them from the stage of the Fine Arts Center. Among the writers we invited that spring were Anaïs Nin — whom I knew only as the author of a famous diary — and the Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Richard Mouw, our faculty advisor, who later became president of Fuller Theological Seminary, seemed entirely supportive of these choices, which still surprises me.

The speaker I had been most looking forward to was Chaim Potok. Several hundred people turned out for his lecture, including my parents, who drove over to watch their son introduce a famous author. I had read everything Potok had written by that point, beginning in high school, and I had felt in his novels something I couldn’t quite explain — a recognition, a familiarity, as though he were writing about people I knew.

We Saw Ourselves in His Characters

The conversation happened at dinner before the lecture, with Potok, Mouw, and the members of the Lecture Council. Someone — it may have been me — tried to explain what his novels meant to us, how the insular, intellectually serious world of Orthodox Judaism in Brooklyn mapped so naturally onto the insular, intellectually serious world of Dutch Calvinism in western Michigan. Both communities were fiercely proud of their faith. Both produced young people who were hungry for the wider world but not entirely sure they were allowed to want it. We saw ourselves in characters like Danny Saunders and Asher Lev. Potok, as I recall, was not pleased. In fact, he seemed irritated by the comparison, as though we had misread him, or perhaps misread ourselves.

The Smile

The next morning I drove Potok to the airport. It was a quiet ride at first, the kind of silence that settles between two people who have said everything they needed to say the night before. And then Potok asked me what my plans were after graduation. I told him I had been accepted at Princeton Theological Seminary and planned to enroll in the fall.

He was quiet for a moment. And then he smiled.

I didn’t need him to say anything. I knew what the smile meant. I was doing exactly what Danny Saunders had done — leaving the only world I had ever known, heading somewhere my community wasn’t entirely sure I should go, “bent forward and eager for the future,” exactly as Potok had described Danny Saunders. Potok had dismissed the comparison the night before. But in my car, on the way to the airport, I think he finally saw it.

Before he left, he signed my copy of My Name Is Asher Lev — the novel about the artist who insists on painting what he sees, regardless of whether his community approves. The inscription read: “To Doug Brouwer, with thanks for your gracious hospitality. Chaim Potok, 9 April ‘75.” Formal, warm, and silent on the question of whether he understood what his novels had meant to me. Which, I have always thought, was an answer in itself.

What the Hero’s Journey Doesn’t Tell You

I have often thought about that smile in the fifty years since. I was twenty years old, about to leave the only world I had ever known, and a writer I admired had wordlessly told me that he understood — that leaving was not a betrayal, but a beginning.

What I didn’t know then, but know now, is that leaving home is only the first part of the story. Writers and scholars sometimes call it the hero’s journey — you leave, you are changed by what you encounter along the way, and then you return. I have lived that journey more than once. I went to Princeton and then to churches in five states and two countries. I have walked the Camino de Santiago more than once. I am still walking.

But here is what no one tells you about the hero’s journey: home changes too. The Grand Rapids in which I grew up, the Dutch Calvinist world that shaped me, the Waldenbooks where I first found Potok — none of it is as I remember it. You can’t go back, not really. You can only go forward, which is what Potok’s Danny Saunders knew, and what I was just beginning to understand on that April morning in 1975, driving a famous author to the airport in my AMC Javelin.

The whisper network brings a novel to your door.

I came to Theo of Golden the way most people seem to have — through a kind of literary osmosis, the whisper network of readers passing a name along.

Allen Levi, a 69-year-old first-time novelist living alone on 1,600 acres of Georgia pine forest, keeping bees, posting homespun music videos, and writing a book he fully expected to take with him to the grave. His stated intention was to present the manuscript to God as a gift when he died. Publication was never the point.

That backstory alone would be enough to make you want to read the book. But the backstory is not the book, and Theo of Golden earns its own attention.

Seeing people the way Theo sees them

The novel is set in the small Southern town of Golden, where a mysterious stranger named Theo arrives without explanation. He purchases pencil portraits of local residents from a coffee shop and returns them to their subjects — a gesture at once strange and oddly tender. What unfolds is less a plot in the conventional sense than a series of encounters, each one an act of seeing. Theo looks at people the way we rarely manage to look at one another: attending to their gifts rather than their failures, noticing what grace is already at work in lives that have been quietly dismissed, including by their own owners.

The novel has been described as allegorical, soft-lit, even Christological in its sympathies. Readers who don’t share Levi’s faith have nonetheless found their way into it, and I think I understand why. The Christianity here isn’t tribal or defensive. It doesn’t have an argument to win. It simply moves through the town of Golden the way light moves through a room — without announcement, and without apology. This is the rarest kind of faith writing: generous without being naive, hopeful without being sentimental.

I’ll admit that I came to Theo of Golden with some of the same reflexive skepticism a career reader develops about anything that becomes a phenomenon. Word-of-mouth smash hits can charm in proportion to their inoffensiveness. But Levi is not inoffensive in the sense of being hollow. He is gentle in the way that serious attention to suffering produces gentleness — not by looking away from pain, but by refusing to let it have the last word.

What happens when you stop writing for the room

What stays with me most, though, is not the novel itself but the man behind it. Here is a writer who spent years laboring over a manuscript with no audience in mind except God. He was not building a platform. He was not positioning himself in the market. He was making something he believed was worth making, and then — almost incidentally — he let it loose in the world. The self-publishing, the grassroots distribution, the fact that it reached the top of the New York Times bestseller list before most of the literary establishment had heard of it: all of this says something about what happens when a writer stops trying to write for the room.

I have been in the room, lately, and I know what that pressure feels like. Theo of Golden is a quiet reminder that the best work comes from somewhere else.

The Message at Coffee Hour

My older daughter, as I may have mentioned in other posts, is a Presbyterian pastor in the Twin Cities. Last week she posted a photo of Pope Leo XIV in full papal regalia — white cassock, pectoral cross, the works — with a pair of Nike running shoes clearly visible beneath the hem. Several of her friends responded with astonishment that no one had said a word about the shoes. No criticism. No phone calls. Nothing.

I read their comments with my own astonishment, because I certainly heard about my own shoes.

It was my first year as an associate pastor, my first real job in the church, and one Sunday morning I had worn brown shoes under my black robe. Before the coffee hour was over, a woman had called the church office to register her displeasure. She didn’t call me directly — that would have been too straightforward. She called the church secretary and left a message: “Tell the new associate pastor to get some black shoes to wear under that black robe.”

The secretary dutifully passed along the message. And the next day I went out to buy a pair of black Florsheim wingtips to go along with the rest of my Sunday uniform. This was, after all, a church where the ushers had until recently worn cutaway coats on Sunday mornings.

I wish I could say I laughed it off. What I realized instead was that I was now a person whose shoes (and much more) were subject to review. Church members over the years have been all too happy to tell me how a pastor should act, speak, think, pray, dress, drive, raise kids, and vote. The role I had taken on came with an invisible dress code, a behavioral code, and a speech code — a whole set of unwritten expectations that I had not been shown and would learn, apparently, by violating them.

My colleagues on the staff responded with the creativity that shared suffering produces. They invented the Brown Shoe Award, given at weekly staff meetings whenever one of us had unintentionally irritated or offended a church member. There was a small ceremony. There was nervous laughter. There was the unspoken understanding that any one of us could be next, because offending someone in the church is nearly impossible not to do.

I regret to say that I received the award more than once that first year.

What Forty Years Teaches

What I didn’t understand then — and only began to understand somewhere in my fourth decade of ministry — was the cumulative cost of that kind of vigilance. It’s not the individual corrections that wear you down. It’s the habit of self-monitoring they produce. You learn to calibrate your words before speaking them. You learn to calculate how much of what you’re thinking you can say aloud. And of course you pay attention to the shoes you wear.

Two years before I actually retired, as I relate the story in my memoir Chasing After Wind (2022), I was talking with a dear friend—someone I’ve known since college—and she asked what I planned to do in retirement. To my surprise, and hers too, I said: “I plan to remember who I am.” As though over forty years I had forgotten. As though the role had absorbed the person so completely that finding him again would require deliberate effort.

It did require deliberate effort. It still does.

Pope Leo's Shoes

Which brings me back to Pope Leo and his running shoes. I don’t know whether the absence of criticism means the church has changed, or whether it means something specific about this particular pope — his ease in his own skin, his apparent comfort with the gap between the grandeur of the office and the ordinariness of a man who likes to run. Perhaps both. But I find myself genuinely moved by the image, and genuinely envious in a way I didn’t expect.

Not envious of the papal office, to be clear. I am a Presbyterian pastor. The thought of the papal office produces in me the same mild panic it would produce in most Protestants. What I’m envious of is the freedom the shoes represent — the freedom to be recognizably human inside a role that could easily swallow a person whole.

The freedom to wear the cassock and the cross and the running shoes all at once, and to let people make of that what they will — that is what I was looking for when I said I needed to remember who I was. It’s what the Brown Shoe Award was really about — not shoes, but the pressure to perform a version of yourself that the institution found acceptable, and the cost of performing it for long enough that you stopped noticing you were performing.

I retired a few years ago. I wear whatever shoes I want on Sunday mornings, sitting in the back pew of my small Presbyterian church in Holland, Michigan. No one has called the church secretary. No one has left a message. The Brown Shoe Award, after forty years of regular distribution, has been permanently retired.

I find, some Sundays, that I am still calibrating my words. Still calculating how much of what I’m thinking I can say aloud. Forty years is a long time. The habit doesn’t dissolve overnight. But I’m working on it. And I confess that I have, on more than one occasion, worn brown shoes.

There was a time — not so long ago — when American literary fiction would take religious experience seriously and do so without apology.

I have been thinking about this because I have spent the last several months trying to find an agent for a novel I’ve written— a novel about a Presbyterian minister whose faith is treated not as a problem to be solved but as a legitimate way of being in the world (tentatively titled The Secret Heart). I have been told, in various ways, that the novel does not fit easily into existing categories. I have come to understand that this is not a criticism of the novel. It is a description of American literature.

When Faith Was Simply Part of Life

John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom carried his Lutheran anxieties through four novels and they were never incidental to the story, never a quirk to be explained, never a problem to be solved, simply part of an American life. John Cheever’s suburban Protestants went to church and felt the gap between what they professed and what they lived, and Cheever treated this gap as tragedy rather than irony. Saul Bellow, not himself a Christian, populated his novels with characters for whom the question of God was as urgent and as unresolved as any other question worth asking.

Chaim Potok brought the tensions of Orthodox Jewish tradition into the mainstream of American literary fiction — especially The Chosen and My Name is Asher Lev — and was received there with the seriousness he deserved, because the literary world of that era understood that someone’s religious life was as worthy of novelistic attention as one’s marriage, work, or country. Philip Roth’s engagement with Jewish identity and guilt and cultural inheritance ran through everything he wrote, even the novels that appeared to be about something else entirely. These were not religious novels in any narrow sense. They were novels about human beings for whom faith and doubt and tradition (and the failure of tradition) were simply part of what it meant to be alive.

Somewhere in the last thirty years, however, something has shifted. I’m not sure exactly when or why, though I have my theories, as anyone who has been paying attention does. What I know, however, is the result: faith in contemporary literary fiction has been largely sorted into two categories, neither of which is adequate to the experience of the many serious, complicated, doubting, practicing people of faith I have known in forty years of ministry.

The Missing Third

The first category is faith as anthropology — the literary novel that treats religious communities as subjects of careful, sympathetic observation, the way a naturalist observes an interesting species. The characters believe; the novelist does not; the distance between them is managed with intelligence and craft, but it is always there, the implicit superiority of the observing consciousness over the observed. These are often very good novels. They are not, however, novels written from inside faith, and that difference matters.

The second category is faith as problem — the novel in which religion is what the protagonist must escape or overcome or survive, the toxic inheritance that the story’s arc of liberation requires. These novels are also, often, very good. They tell true stories about real harm done in the name of God. But they tell only one kind of story, and they tell it so consistently that the literary world has begun to mistake the part for the whole.

What has largely disappeared is the third category: the novel that takes faith seriously as an intellectual and spiritual reality — not observed from outside, not escaped from within, but inhabited, questioned, wrestled with, and neither resolved nor abandoned. The novel that treats a believer’s inner life with the same respect and complexity that literary fiction brings to any other kind of consciousness.

One Writer, Nearly Alone

Marilynne Robinson has written novels in this third category. They have won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and have received the attention of presidents and the admiration of readers across the theological spectrum. And yet she stands, in the current literary landscape, nearly alone.

Just this spring, Douglas Stuart — the Scottish author who won the Booker Prize for Shuggie Bain — published John of John, set among the fiercely Presbyterian communities of the Outer Hebrides. A queer son returns home to his lay-preacher father and the insular community that shaped him, and Stuart renders the Presbyterian world not as backdrop or as villain but as the water these characters swim in, the thing that formed them and that they cannot simply leave behind even when they want to. It is not quite the third category I am describing — faith is the cultural environment more than the explicit subject — but it is closer than most contemporary literary fiction manages, and it suggests that the territory I am describing has not entirely disappeared.

The landscape can change. Landscapes always change, given enough time and enough writers willing to work in the territory that others have abandoned. I am not the writer to change it — I am too old and too unknown for that particular ambition. But I am, perhaps, one of the writers willing to work in the territory.

I’m still hoping to find a publisher.

If you follow me here, you likely know me from one of a few places: we might have survived high school together, you might have had to sit through my sermons for several years, or maybe we met for coffee in Holland recently and I bent your ear about my latest book.

Because you know me, you know that I am—theologically speaking—aware that “pride goeth before the fall.” But as it turns out, knowing the theology doesn’t make me any less susceptible to a well-placed digital ego-stroke.

Lately, my email inbox has been filled with seductive little pings. You know the sound. It’s that little ping from your phone that promises someone, somewhere, has finally realized you are as interesting as you’ve always suspected you were.

The Ping Heard ‘Round My Ego

A week ago, I got the ultimate ping. I received a note that appeared to be from Heather Cox Richardson (see below). Some of us do our morning devotions by reading the Gospel According to Heather Cox Richardson (sometimes known as her daily “Letters From an American” newsletter), and Heather’s morning gospel is read by millions, including me. And here she was, writing to me! She said she loved my work! She said she’d like to keep in touch!

For about twenty minutes, as you can imagine, I was walking on air. I was already practicing my “humble but flattered” face for the eventual interview. I might even have checked my calendar to see if I was free for a trip to Maine in the next day or two. Then, I did a little digging (with the help of a digital assistant), and the truth came out: It wasn’t Heather after all. It was a scammer using Heather’s name to bait authors like me into a “pay-to-play” scheme.

The ping I heard wasn’t a call to greatness; it was just a hook in the water.

This hit home even harder because a dear friend of mine, Christy Berghoef, was recently targeted by an even more sophisticated ruse. Christy is a wonderful, younger writer whom I admire, and she was nearly leveled by someone pretending to be a high-powered New York literary agent. She wrote about the experience with vulnerability in her own Substack — Professionally Broke: My Life as a Cautionary Tale. It’s a heartbreaking, honest look at how these predators operate, and I highly recommend giving it a read.

Olivia Knew Everything — Except That I’d Figure Her Out

A few days before the nice note from my friend Heather, I received an email from “Olivia Smith.” Olivia didn’t just say she liked my writing, she had clearly spent time on my website. She mentioned my time at Calvin and Princeton Seminary. She mentioned my wife, Susan. She even congratulated me on my 2026 Wilbur “Award of Excellence.”

For a few seconds, I was nearly in tears. “Olivia gets me,” I thought.

But then I looked closer. Olivia’s email address was a generic Gmail. Her “Author Spotlight” service had no website. All those lovely details about my life? She didn’t learn them because she loves my prose; she learned them because she knows how to use copy-and-paste from my “about me” page.

It’s a strange feeling to realize that someone is using your own life story as a lure to get you to reach for your credit card. It’s a digital version of the “Grandparent Scam,” only instead of pretending my grandson is in a foreign jail, they’re pretending my book is the next New York Times bestseller. They aren’t targeting my fear; they’re targeting my desire to be noticed.

A Retired Pastor Falls for the Oldest Trick

There is a certain irony in being a retired pastor who writes books about the spiritual life, only to find myself nearly tripped up by a scammer’s flattery. It’s a reminder that we are all, at our core, looking for a bit of validation. We want to be seen.

So, if you see me out and about and I look a little more humble than usual, you’ll know why. I’m just recovering from the realization that I’m not quite the literary sensation Olivia Smith led me to believe I was.

In the meantime, I’ll keep writing—not for the ping, but for the much quieter, much more real joy of connecting with you. Don’t be surprised, though, if I’m a little slower to answer my emails. I’m currently waiting to hear back from the Pope; he apparently loves my reflections on travel, but I’m thinking his Gmail address looks a little suspicious.

A good day! I’ve gone over 1,000 followers/subscribers. Look out HeatherCoxRichardson, I’m right behind you.

HeatherCoXRichardsons 12h

😆 I’m more vigilant than ever now, all thanks to you. But the most important thing is what you feed your subscribers ✨️

Douglas Brouwer 9h

Thanks! You made my day.

HeatherCoXRichardsons 7h

Send me a message anytime, I’d like to keep in touch

The first time I visited Wiley Wilson, I didn’t want to leave. He was seated in a wheelchair — I never saw him any other way — in a room to himself at the Appledorn Assisted Living Center in Holland, Michigan. Whatever had brought him there, he carried it without complaint and without explanation. What I noticed first, after the wheelchair, was the staff. They kept finding excuses to stop by his room and say hello and ask for his advice. In forty years of pastoral visiting I had seen a lot of assisted living facilities. I had never seen anything quite like that.

Pastors are trained to keep visits brief. The person being visited — either hospitalized or in this case assigned to assisted living — doesn’t have unlimited energy, no matter how glad they might be for the company. I knew this. I had practiced it for forty years. But with Wiley I found myself asking one question, and then another, and then another still. The more he offered, the more curious I became. I don’t remember looking at my watch that first afternoon. I didn’t need to. After forty years I could feel when a visit had run long. This one had. I stayed anyway.

A Life on His Own Terms

Over the months that followed, I learned Wiley’s story piece by piece, the way you learn anyone’s story when the conversation is unhurried and the curiosity is genuine. He had grown up in Nashville. His father was a prominent attorney in the area but had some trouble with the law. Wiley didn’t elaborate about that, and I didn’t ask. What was clear was that he had no use for the man, and what was equally clear was that he had long since made his peace with that. He and his mother moved to the bay area of California when Wiley was seventeen or eighteen. He went to college there, and after graduating he spent a year at San Francisco Theological Seminary.

This was the 1960s, when the seminary was by most accounts a hotbed of activism. Wiley — matter-of-fact, clear-eyed, with firm views about what a pastor should and shouldn’t be — decided it wasn’t for him. He expected pastors to act like pastors. What he found there was something closer to political agitation. He left without apology, taught school for five years, and earned a master’s degree in history. Then he switched gears again, got a business degree, and launched into a long career on the management side of the trucking industry.

Wiley lived for a time in northern New Jersey, where the trucking business had its own particular texture. Organized crime was very much a part of the texture in those years, and Wiley had his brushes with it. He told these stories matter-of-factly, though I could tell he knew they were good ones and that I would be interested. What came through most clearly was his pride in how he had handled those encounters — shrewdly, without flinching, on his own terms. I was not surprised. That was entirely consistent with the man I had come to know.

Holland became home for Wiley and his wife Karen in 1990, and he worked for USF Holland Trucking until his retirement in 2002. In retirement he had been active in HASP, Hope College’s lifelong learning academy — where I am also active — before moving to Appledorn. We discovered at some point that he had lived in Wheaton, Illinois, during the same years I served a church there. We did our best to find overlapping connections but couldn’t. Two men whose paths had almost crossed decades earlier, finally meeting at Appledorn.

His Pastor

I discovered early on that Wiley was a reader. His desk was a card table positioned in his room — books, blank paper, perhaps a laptop. It was the desk of a man who still had things to think about. On one visit, without either of us having mentioned it before, I noticed a copy of my memoir, Chasing After Wind, sitting among his books. He had ordered it, read it, and was ready to discuss it. I found myself more honored by that conversation than by almost any review the book received.

Wiley also arranged, through the activities director at Appledorn, for me to give a talk to the residents about the book. I’m not entirely sure how it came about. What I do know is that Wiley had already sorted it out before mentioning it to me. He wanted, I learned later, for people to meet his pastor.

I was serving a church in The Hague as an interim pastor when an email arrived from Wiley. He mentioned an upcoming surgery. This was unusual — in all our visits he had never once discussed his medical situation, whatever it was that had brought him to Appledorn in the first place. We always had too many other things to talk about. I remember thinking it was odd that he was telling me this. But I was in the middle of a ministry, and news of sick and dying people was part of my daily life. I wrote back something pastoral and well-meaning: I’ll be praying for a good outcome. I sent it without fully understanding what I was responding to.

Only later did it occur to me what Wiley had been doing. He knew — or suspected — that the surgery was serious. He was saying goodbye, in case he didn’t make it. And I had replied with a prayer for a good outcome, not yet understanding that his email was a last communication, and that mine was an unknowing farewell.

Not a Bad Return

I finished my work in The Hague in time to get back for the service at Grace Episcopal Church in Holland. (As it turned out, Wiley had been a member of the Episcopal church in Holland, while his wife was a member of the Presbyterian church.) In forty years I had officiated at hundreds of funerals. I seldom cried during the service itself — there was always the responsibility of holding things together, of being the steady presence at the front of the church. The tears, when they came, usually waited until I got home, until I could sit alone in the den and let them roll.

At Wiley’s funeral I had no such responsibility. I could simply grieve.

His grandson Gabe gave the tribute. I have heard many grandchildren speak at their grandparents’ funerals, and Gabe did a fine job — which is to say, he described the same man I had come to know. That mattered to me more than I expected. Wiley had been exactly who he appeared to be, to everyone who met him. I was relieved to have that confirmed, though I suppose I already knew it.

In the two or three years since Wiley’s death I have been having lunch with his widow, Karen. She was married to Wiley for 59 years, which tells you something about both of them. She grew up in a world where only the husband worked, and so Karen’s considerable gifts found their outlet elsewhere — in the non-profits and civic organizations of Holland, where she served with the same quiet effectiveness that Wiley brought to a card table full of books in an assisted living facility. When the local women’s literary association needed to sell their building, Karen handled it. I have the feeling she could have done Wiley’s job as well as he did, maybe better. He probably knew that too.

What we share over lunch, mostly, are memories of a remarkable man. I went to Appledorn at my pastor’s request, expecting to offer something. I came away with a friend I hadn’t anticipated, a reminder of what I loved most about forty years of ministry, and an ongoing lunch date with his widow.

Not a bad return on a pastoral visit.

A note of gratitude: As this post goes out, “Musings at the intersection of faith and life” has just passed 1,000 subscribers. I’m grateful for every one of you — for reading, for responding, and for the conversations that sometimes follow. Writing this newsletter has given me far more than I expected.

Dear subscribers: I’ve spent forty years in pastoral ministry, and I've had hundreds of conversations like the ones Jared Ayers describes in his new book — people hovering at the edges of faith, not quite willing to leave, not quite able to stay. That’s exactly the territory You Can Trust a God With Scars navigates, and it’s why I found it worth a careful review for the Englewood Review of Books, where it appeared this week. I'm sharing it here as well, because I suspect many of you are either living in those borderlands yourselves, or you love someone who is.

Jared Ayers has been a Presbyterian pastor for more than 20 years, and he currently serves as senior minister of First Presbyterian Church in North Palm Beach, Florida, and as an adjunct faculty member at Palm Beach Atlantic University.

You Can Trust a God With Scars: Faith (and Doubt) for the Searching Soul

Paperback: NavPress, 2025

Jared Ayers begins his new book exactly where many of our most honest spiritual questions are born: over huevos rancheros and an Americano at a neighborhood café in Philadelphia. His companion, a young man named Daniel, would greet him weekly with a question both touching and telling: “What are you preaching about today, Father?”

You Can Trust a God With Scars: Faith (and Doubt) for the Searching Soul is Ayers’ attempt to answer that question for anyone who has ever asked it—whether with a sincere heart or a skeptical eye. Writing as if the reader is standing on the “outside of the decaying ruins of Christendom,” Ayers avoids insider jargon in favor of a raw, honest conversation with those who are barely interested or deeply hurting.

“Think of what follows here as an extension of those conversations Daniel and I had,” writes Ayers. And he makes good on that promise. You Can Trust a God With Scars is a conversation about Christian faith—not with insiders and insider language, but with outsiders, people who are skeptical and, frankly, just barely interested.

The Borderlands Between Faith and Doubt

Ayers, as it turns out, knows his intended audience well. As the book progresses, he has even more conversations with people who are not just skeptical but hurting and disillusioned, lingering in what he describes as the borderlands between faith and doubt. With a fascinating mix of theology, art, Scripture, music, and literature, Ayers invites the reader into a conversation about a Christianity that embraces doubt, mystery, and a God who understands suffering intimately.

Here is a safe, compassionate space to reawaken hope and find meaning in the Christian story, despite living in a fractured world.

What sets Ayers apart from many contemporary theologians is his refusal to stay in a religious bubble. He treats pop culture, philosophy, and classical theology as part of the same vital conversation. In a single chapter focused on sin—titled “Miserable Offenders”—you find references to comedians and actors (Dana Carvey’s “church lady” from Saturday Night Live and the existential wit of Phoebe Waller-Bridge in Fleabag), giants of thought (Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud), theological heavyweights (Martin Luther, N.T. Wright, and Cornelius Plantinga Jr.), literature and art (the poetry of John Milton, the wisdom of G. K. Chesterton, and the haunting melodies of indie folk artist Sufjan Stevens), as well as modern critique (the social science of Jonathan Haidt and the animated skepticism of Lisa Simpson from The Simpsons). Ayers is somehow able to pull this off, and the result makes for some remarkably rich and lively conversations.

Ayers is clearly in touch with contemporary culture as well as current theological thinking, and in weaving all of this together he demonstrates that the Christian story is robust enough to engage with both the high-brow and the low-brow without losing its soul.

For Those Who Are Barely Holding On

In an era where “deconstruction” is more than just a buzzword and disillusionment with organized religion is at an all-time high, Ayers offers something rare: a seat at the table for the skeptics, the wounded, and the spiritually weary. You Can Trust a God With Scars isn’t a collection of easy answers or “just have more faith” platitudes. Instead, it’s a compassionate, intellectually rigorous invitation to look at the Christian story through the lens of a God who doesn’t just watch our suffering from a safe distance but carries the wounds of it.

The book addresses the tension many of us feel: How do you trust God when the news cycle—and your own life—feels like a series of tragedies? Ayers suggests that the answer isn’t to ignore the “scars” but to find a God who has them too. For those lingering in the “borderlands” between faith and doubt, this book provides: honest hospitality (it doesn’t rush you to a conclusion; it sits with you in the mess), intellectual depth (it respects your brain as much as your heart), and a framework for reflection. With questions at the end of each chapter, the book could serve as a practical tool for groups or individuals trying to make sense of a fractured world. I can easily imagine the book being used in a church study group.

You Can Trust a God With Scars is a safe, hospitable space for anyone who wants to see if the “old, old story” of Christianity can still handle the new wounds of the 21st century. It is a timely, beautiful, and deeply human book that reawakens hope without ever asking you to check your questions at the door.

Epilogue: Abigail's Story

In a touching “epilogue,” Ayers tells the story of a young woman named Abigail, a Harvard-educated medical researcher, who has started to attend worship at his church. In their first conversation, she tells Ayers that she is an atheist. After thanking her for her honesty, Ayers asks, “Then why do you bother coming to worship?”

She replies, “I’m not sure. That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”

After several conversations, spanning a few months, she confesses to Ayers that when she stands in worship to say the creed, “I don’t think I’m lying anymore. What should I do?” And then Ayers tells the story of Abigail being baptized on Easter morning and “welcomed into the community of sinners and saints, believers and doubters that we all are.”

When I retired from ministry after nearly four decades, I did what most pastors do: I joined a church.

First Presbyterian Church in Holland, Michigan, seemed like the natural choice. I wrote an email to the pastor — her name was Linda — and told her that I hoped to make this congregation my home, that I was available to help out when needed, and that I was looking for a group to be part of. I had spent forty years being the person others came to with that kind of request. Asking it myself felt strange.

Linda, who is also retired now, responded warmly, as pastors do. She invited me to preach when she was away, and she pointed me toward the men’s book discussion group. She even asked if I would visit an older man named Wiley who had recently moved to assisted living — she couldn’t get over to see him as often as she wanted. I said yes to that too. (That’s a post for another time.) I said yes to all of it, of course. But it was the men’s group that surprised me most. I had started men’s groups throughout my ministry, beginning with my church in Wheaton. I had never been a member of one.

The men I gathered in Wheaton were my age — late thirties, married, with children, navigating the particular pressures of that stage of life. We met on Sunday nights in my office, which was roomy enough for a circle of chairs. My training in small group leadership told me to ask questions and then get out of the way, to let the men find their own direction. And mostly that worked. Once, I suggested a book for reading and discussion. They didn’t like it and said so without hesitation. I took that as a good sign. A group where the pastor’s ideas get rejected without apology is a group that has found its footing. What surprised me was what followed — not just good conversation, but genuine friendship. They knew I was their pastor. I knew it too. But somewhere in those Sunday night circles, that stopped being the most important thing in the room.

Looking back, I think the surface reason for starting those groups — too few options for men in a large church — was real but incomplete. The truth is that I have always been drawn to human connection, to what happens when people trust each other enough to speak honestly. I wanted to create the conditions for that. I couldn’t have named any of this at thirty-eight. But I think I knew it, somewhere underneath the ambition and the energy and the busyness of a new ministry. I needed what I was trying to give.

Recently, I wrote a Substack post about my years in ministry, and a man who had been part of that men’s group in Wheaton wrote to me afterward. I won’t use his name, but I want to use his words, because he said something I could not have said better myself. He remembered what we did together in the group — the conversation, the bad jokes, the occasional beer — and then what grew from it: a friendship that eventually took the two of us on a bike trip through Idaho, camping each night near hot springs. At that point in his email, he wrote something that stopped me: I loved the men, the vulnerability, the camaraderie and support, and I hated the weight of all of the real challenges we were each facing. On top of my own, they were often overwhelming.

That sentence has stayed with me. It reminded me almost instantly of the honesty we had in those Sunday night conversations, and it named something true about what genuine community costs — and what it gives. You can’t have one without the other.

The men’s book discussion group that Linda suggested turned out to have an excellent leader who didn’t need my help. Which was, I realized, exactly what I needed.

For forty years my reading had been purposeful to a fault — books that might illuminate a text, deepen a sermon, or help me understand what my congregation was going through. Useful books. Good books, many of them, but chosen with a job in mind. These men chose differently. National Book Award winners. New York Times bestsellers. Weighty, worthy, genuinely interesting works of history, biography, and narrative nonfiction that had absolutely nothing to do with sermon preparation.

I sat down in that circle and thought: I have been reading for the wrong reasons for a very long time. Or rather — I had been reading for the right reasons, for forty years. And now, finally, I could read for myself.

I remember one evening early on when we discussed Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. I would never have chosen it myself — it wasn’t the kind of book I reached for. But there we were, a circle of men with different political convictions, some conservative, some liberal, and what struck me that night was how little any of that seemed to matter. Wilkerson had gotten underneath our defenses. The book was convicting in the way that the best books are — not lecturing, but illuminating something true and deeply uncomfortable about the world we all inhabit. For a few moments we were honest with ourselves and with each other.

I drove home that night thinking that this was what I had spent forty years trying to create for other people. I hadn’t expected to find it for myself. But there it was.

Photos: (above) That’s the men’s hiking group from the International Protestant Church, Zürich, 2014. (middle) Walking and talking. (bottom) Not bad scenery because, uh, Switzerland.

As I was lacing up my Saucony Peregrine trail runners this morning for my daily walk, I realized the shoes were not going to last until October. That’s when I plan to walk the Italian stages of the Via Francigena — a medieval pilgrimage route that runs from Canterbury to Rome and has been drawing walkers toward something they can’t quite name for the better part of a thousand years.

Shoes may well be the most important consideration for a long walk. The state of one’s inner life is a close second.

I walked my first Camino de Santiago in March 2019 wearing a Keen men’s hiking shoe — sturdier than a trail runner, which matters when you have to climb the Pyrenees and then still have 480 miles of Spain ahead of you. Twenty-eight days later I walked into Santiago de Compostela having discovered, somewhat to my surprise, a spiritual practice I hadn’t known I was starving for. I stood in front of the famous cathedral, my eyes filled with tears, not quite believing that I had made it.

What Happens at Three Miles an Hour

What I discovered on that first Camino is hard to explain to someone who hasn’t walked a long distance with no purpose other than to arrive. It is not hiking, exactly, though your legs don’t know the difference. It is not tourism, though you pass through remarkable places. The best I can say is that something happens when you slow down to three miles an hour and stay there for days on end. The world becomes more visible.

I have walked two Caminos — the second was the Portuguese Camino, which ends in the same place — and each time I have carried a different question, once a question I knew I was carrying, the other time a question I didn’t discover until I was well down the road. That is part of what draws me back. Pilgrimage has a way of surfacing what ordinary life keeps buried under its noise and velocity.

Pilgrimage Is Having a Moment

Apparently I am not alone in this. Pilgrimage is having a moment. The Camino de Santiago now draws nearly half a million walkers a year. The Via Francigena, not as famous and considerably less crowded, is growing. And this year, in honor of the 800th anniversary of the death of Saint Francis of Assisi, thousands of pilgrims are walking to Assisi — some of them, I’m told, motivated by the prospect of a plenary indulgence. I smiled when I read about that. My own Camino certificates, awarded at the pilgrim office in Santiago, went straight into a scrapbook where they have not been seen since. My experience is that what pilgrims want is something the certificate can’t confer and the indulgence can’t guarantee. They want, I think, what I wanted: to be changed in ways they can’t yet specify.

I am more drawn to the Francis pilgrimage than I would have expected. There was a time when I would have passed over it entirely — too Catholic, too medieval, too far from my own Reformed tradition. But something has shifted. Francis himself has always been hard to dismiss. Now, closing in on my 73rd birthday, I find I have less interest in defending my theological borders and more interest in following someone like Francis toward what he loved.

What I Cannot Fully Explain

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, my younger daughter and her husband are preparing for their own pilgrimage — the Kumano Kodo in Japan, a network of ancient trails through the forested mountains of the Kii Peninsula, sacred to both Buddhist and Shinto traditions. They’re walking in May, and I find something quietly wonderful in the image of us preparing simultaneously, on opposite sides of the world, for walks we can’t entirely explain to people who ask why.

Which brings me back to my shoes.

I will order a new pair of trail runners this week — Brooks this time, not Saucony, correctly sized, to be broken in gradually, ready for October. I will keep walking my daily miles here in Holland, adding distance as the summer progresses. I will pack light, as I have learned to do. I will meet my walking partner — who walked much of the Portuguese Camino with me — in Italy, and we will set out from Lucca toward Siena through the Tuscan hills, and then to Rome.

What I cannot fully explain, even to myself, is the wonder I feel that I am still doing this. Not just the physical fact of it, though that is wonder enough — that a body closing in on 73 can still walk twelve miles a day through hill country, still recover overnight, still want to go further. But something beyond the physical. That I am still someone to whom things happen on the road. That I can still be surprised, still be changed, still walk into a plaza with my eyes full of tears, not quite knowing why.

I don’t know yet what question I am carrying into this walk. That may be the most honest thing I can say about it. Somewhere between Lucca and Siena, I expect I’ll find out.

Photos: (above) Remarkably, few pilgrims get lost on the various Camino paths because there are LOTS of yellow arrows. (below) That’s me, 20 pounds lighter than when I started, arriving at the Santiago de Compostela cathedral, the reputed burial place of Saint James the Great. And for those who have been to the pilgrim mass, here’s one of the highlights (the “botafumeiro”):

Next week I’ll be moderating a panel discussion for HASP — the Hope Academy of Senior Professionals — on a topic billed as “Clergy Freedom of Speech: Do Protestant Pastors Have It? No? Or Yes, but it’s not easy?” I find myself a little uneasy with that title, and not just because it’s a mouthful.

The title makes it sound like a legal question. And there is a legal dimension — panelist Robert Funicello, an attorney with significant First Amendment experience, will spend about fifteen minutes explaining the Johnson Amendment, the 1954 tax code provision that prohibits churches from endorsing political candidates. It turns out to be both less sweeping and less enforced than most people assume. Then Gordon Wiersma, who has been senior pastor of Hope Church here in Holland since 1999, and Steve Norden, who founded and led New Hope Reformed Church near Columbus, Ohio, for 38 years, will spend the real heart of our 90 minutes telling stories from their lived experience. The moments that went well. The moments they’d handle differently. The silences they regret.

I’ll be moderating. And as I’ve been preparing, I find myself thinking less about the law and more about those silences.

What I remember

I have nearly 45 years of pastoral ministry behind me — Wheaton, Ann Arbor, Fort Lauderdale, and Zürich (Switzerland). Forty-five years of Sunday mornings when I stood up and said something, or didn’t. When I used the language of prophetic witness, or softened it. When I named the thing clearly, or found a way to talk around it.

I remember the night after September 11, 2001. The church was full to overflowing — which almost never happened on a weekday evening, and which I took as a sign of just how frightened and disoriented people were. I remember talking about the nature of evil, prompted partly by President George W. Bush’s repeated use of the phrase “evildoers.” I remember saying, gently but clearly, that “evildoer” is actually a theological term, and that politicians should probably use it carefully — because the category is broader and more unsettling than we might want it to be when we’re angry and afraid.

I remember looking up and noticing the church’s largest financial giver looking up at me at that moment.

And then — this is the part I’m not proud of — I spent the rest of the evening worrying that I had offended him.

The Question Underneath the Question

That worry is, I think, the real subject of next week’s panel. Not the Johnson Amendment. Not the legal framework. The question underneath the question is this: who exactly is a pastor afraid of, and why?

In my 2022 memoir, Chasing After Wind, I wrote honestly about the one area of pastoral ministry where my silence cost me more than I’ve been able to fully reckon with — the experience of LGBTQ people in the congregations I served. Again and again, over those 45 years, I found ways to be pastoral and careful and measured. I told myself that was wisdom. I told myself I was protecting the community. And some of that was probably true.

But some of it, I now see, was the same reflex I had after September 11: I looked up, I saw who was watching, and I adjusted. I policed myself for having said — or for being about to say — the true thing.

The people who paid the price for that adjustment were not the large givers. They were the people who often have no voice in the church, and who were counting on me to find mine. The price of my silence was that I denied them the right to be ordinary members of the body—neighbors, friends, and seekers.

My Older Daughter Figured it Out

I carry that regret into retirement. And I think about my older daughter, Sarah, who is also a Presbyterian pastor — though I like to tease her that she is currently “on loan” to a United Church of Christ congregation. In the past few months, especially, I have watched her stand up, speak out, and march in the streets when ICE operations were terrorizing immigrant communities in the Twin Cities. I admired her enormously. And I found myself wondering, with something between pride and puzzlement, how she found the courage to do what she did — to act without first looking up to see who was watching.

I don’t have a clean answer to that. Maybe she learned something I didn’t teach her. Maybe the tradition we share taught her better than it taught me. Maybe it’s simply generational — that she came of age in a church that had already paid certain costs, and she understood more clearly what silence costs too.

“Clergy freedom of speech” sounds like a civil liberties question. I think it’s really a question about courage — and about fear. Courage, as any pastor will tell you, is not something you settle once. It’s something you practice, or fail to practice, every single Sunday morning, in front of people you know, some of whom are watching. My daughter seems to have figured that out. I, on the other hand, am still working on it.

Photos: (above) Julia Taubitz on Unsplash; (next) Josh Applegate on Unsplash

Last week I found myself updating my CV. Not because anyone asked for it—the last time I needed one was last year for a writing residency application—but because something in me needed to do it. Needed to see it all laid out: the pastorates, the editorial positions, the degrees, the essays and reviews. Needed to scroll through and take stock.

My editor at the Reformed Journal insists on describing me as “retired pastor,” even when I turn in a bio without the word “retired.” He’s not wrong, exactly, but he’s not entirely right either. I did retire—from a 45-year career that took me from Iowa City, Iowa, to Zürich, Switzerland, with a few other stops along the way. I have a pension. I no longer preach every Sunday. By most definitions, I qualify.

And yet.

Somewhere in that scrolling, the real question surfaced. Not “is the CV current?” but something older and more unsettling. Is this enough? Have I done enough? Has my life, laid out in tidy lines on a page, amounted to something? Anything?

It’s the kind of question that tends to arrive uninvited. I suspect most people my age know the question well. You don’t ask it out loud very often. But there it is, in the early morning hours when you can’t get back to sleep.

The answer, when it finally came, surprised me with its simplicity. No, it’s not enough—because I’m not finished.

My Father’s Paintings

My father was a painter, a watercolorist. Not professionally—he owned an advertising agency—but seriously, devotedly, in the way that some people reserve their truest self for the thing they do when no one is paying them for it. From around age 60, when he sold his business, until his mid 80s, he painted nearly every day. Then one day he stopped. Not because someone told him to, not because his hands gave out, but because he decided, in his own quiet judgment, that he could no longer do it well enough. That was his call to make, and he made it.

I think about that a lot. He didn’t stop because he was finished in any external sense—no one was waiting on another painting; no deadline had passed. He stopped because he decided the work no longer met his own standard. Until then, he just kept going. Showing up. Painting.

That’s the model I want. Not productivity. Not legacy. Just the work itself, done with full attention, for as long as I can do it well.

Whatever Your Hand Finds

The Preacher in Ecclesiastes has seen everything, done everything, and arrived at the conclusion that most of it is vapor—hevel, the Hebrew word usually translated “vanity,” though “breath” or “mist” might be closer. Here today, dispersed tomorrow. He is not a cheerful man. But he is an honest one. And every so often his honesty tips into something that sounds almost like defiance. “Whatever your hand finds to do,” he writes, “do it with all your might.”

My hand finds writing. It has for a long time, but never quite like this—never with the freedom that comes from having no congregation to disappoint, no publisher’s deadline bearing down, no particular need to be useful.

John Ames, the aging pastor-narrator of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, writes that “for me writing has always felt like praying, even when I wasn’t writing prayers, as I was often enough. You feel that you are with someone.” Yes. Exactly that. When I write, I feel as though I am connected.

So yes, I’ll keep submitting my bio to the Reformed Journal without the word “retired.” And my editor, careful and gracious man that he is, will keep putting it back. We have reached, you might say, an understanding. He is describing what I was. I am describing what I am.

The CV sits in a folder on my desktop. It is, in the end, beside the point. The point is the next sentence. The next page. Whatever my hand finds to do.

Photo: That was my, uh, farewell from the church I served in Zürich, Switzerland.

I have a confession to make.

I have been writing fiction since the fifth grade. Short stories, mostly — school contests, the odd notebook filled and abandoned. Then came seminary, ministry, and a few published nonfiction books with real publishers. The fiction went quiet, the way certain longings do when life gets serious and purposeful and full.

But it never quite went away.

For the past year, tucked away in my home office, I have been writing a novel. Not a memoir, not a collection of essays, not another work of practical theology — a novel. Literary fiction. With characters I invented, dialogue I agonized over, and a plot that kept surprising me even as I was writing it.

I finished it in January. And then I did something that felt almost as vulnerable as writing it: I tried to get it published.

I have seven published books to my name — with real publishers, like Eerdmans, the kind that require peer review and pay royalties. I have cover blurbs. I have a track record. I am, by any reasonable measure, a published author.

And yet here I am, refreshing my email each morning like a man who should know better.

What They Don’t Tell You

Nonfiction, it turns out, is a fundamentally different beast. You propose. You outline. You establish your platform. Publishers evaluate your argument and your audience. There’s a transactional logic to it that I understand: here is what I know, here is who wants to know it, here is why you should publish it.

Fiction doesn’t work that way. Fiction asks something stranger of you. You have spent years — in my case, most of a year — building a world, inhabiting characters, listening for the right voice. And then you compress all of that into a query letter that must somehow compress the novel’s soul into three paragraphs or less. The query letter is an almost comically inadequate vessel for what a novel actually is.

On Rejection and the Pastoral Ego

Here’s something I didn’t expect: being turned down hurts more than I thought it would.

I am seventy-some years into a life that includes forty-five years of ministry. I know about rejection. I’ve been with people in their worst moments. I’ve preached sermons that landed with a thud. I’ve navigated church conflicts with my dignity (mostly) intact. I thought I had developed, if not a thick skin, at least a resilient one.

Apparently not.

There is something about a novel — this novel — that feels different from a manuscript proposal. It’s not just a professional submission. It carries something more personal, more exposed. A nonfiction book is what I know and think. A novel is something closer to who I am. To have it passed over, silently, by forty-some agents feels less like a professional setback and more like... I’m searching for the right word. Being unseen.

The pastor in me recognizes this feeling from the other side of the desk. How many times did I counsel someone who felt invisible — to an institution, to a family, to God? And what did I say to them? Something about how being unseen by the world is not the same as being unseen by the One who matters. I believed that then. I believe it now. But I notice it’s easier to believe at a pastoral distance than in one’s own being.

What the Mystics Might Say

I’ve been thinking about this process in terms of what the Christian mystical tradition calls the purgative way — that stage of spiritual formation characterized by stripping away, by the slow erosion of self-sufficiency. It’s uncomfortable almost by design. You can’t hurry it. You can’t negotiate your way out of it.

The query process has that quality. It resists impatience. It resists cleverness. You can improve your letter, sharpen your pitch, calibrate your comps — and still hear nothing. There’s a kind of enforced passivity in it that runs deeply against the grain of the achieving, publishing, platform-building writer I’ve trained myself to be.

Maybe that’s the point. Or maybe that’s just what we tell ourselves when we can’t control the outcome.

I’m genuinely not sure which.

Still Waiting

A couple of agents have requested the full manuscript. That’s not nothing — that’s actually something, and I try to remember it on the days when the silence feels total. The novel is out there, being read or at least sitting unread on someone’s desk in New York. I wrote the best book I know how to write. I put real people in it — composites, yes, but real struggles, real faith, real failure.

What happens next is not up to me.

There is probably a sermon in that. There usually is.

The Secret Heart is a novel about a Presbyterian pastor navigating a personal crisis. Not a romance novel, though there is some romance in it, and it is currently looking for a home. So, apparently, am I.

I cry easily. Always have. I cry when something is beautiful beyond my capacity to hold it. A beautiful piece of music, for example. A moment of unexpected grace. A Lake Michigan sunset. Or a line in a novel that names something I’ve always known but never said aloud. The experience almost exceeds description — and then the tears come, uninvited, as if the body has to do something with what the soul just received.

I have a grandson with what his parents call “big feelings.”

When I watch him, I see myself. He seems to have inherited one of my traits. Not necessarily the one I would have expected, but there it is. The intensity, the overflow, the way experience arrives without buffering. In a culture still suspicious of men who feel things fully, this can look like a problem to be managed.

But I want him to know — earlier than I came to terms with it — that what he has is not a weakness. It is a way of being alive that puts him in long and distinguished company: warriors and kings, apostles and theologians, presidents who couldn’t finish a poem and composers who wept at music they could no longer hear. I’ll get to a few in a moment.

My father, a World War II veteran, never knew what to do with my tears, but he didn’t judge me for them either. He left room for something he couldn’t name. Looking back, I am grateful for that, but I hope I can do better. I want to give my grandson the name for it — and the history behind it — so that when the tears come, as they will, again and again, he understands what they are.

They are not a weakness. They are the seam showing — the place where the finite self brushes up against something it cannot quite contain.

I have spent most of my adult life at the intersection of faith and words. I became a pastor. I wrote books. I sat with people in their worst moments (and occasionally even their best). And through all of it, I have cried easily — at beauty, at goodness, at the moments that brush up against something larger than themselves. I always assumed this was simply a quirk, a minor eccentricity, maybe something to be embarrassed about.

I did not know it had a history, and I certainly did not know it had a name.

Researchers have a Sanskrit term for what I’m describing. It’s kama muta — being moved to tears. It is distinct from crying in grief or pain. It is the overflow that happens when an experience exceeds the capacity of ordinary language or thought. The autonomic nervous system gets briefly flooded, and tears are the body’s release valve for emotion that exceeds its container.

Psychologist Elaine Aron’s research on highly sensitive persons suggests that 15 to 20 percent of people have a nervous system that processes experience more deeply — noticing more, feeling more, being more easily overwhelmed by beauty (as well as by chaos). What is striking to me is that this appears to be a largely heritable trait. It is not immaturity. It is not pathology.

The medieval mystical tradition had a word for it too. They called it compunctio — a piercing of the heart by beauty or holiness. Augustine wept at music. Calvin wrote of the sensus divinitatis — an innate awareness of the divine that surfaces unbidden. Tears at transcendence are the soul recognizing something it already knows.

But the trait can be found in more than theologians.

Jesus, as we all know, wept at Lazarus’s tomb — not from ignorance of what was about to happen, but from solidarity with those who were grieving. He wept with them rather than above them. The shortest verse in the Bible is also one of its most theologically loaded.

Abraham Lincoln, I have read, wept at funerals, at music, even reading poetry aloud. He frequently had to stop mid-stanza because he couldn’t continue. Those who knew him understood his tears as inseparable from the depth of his moral seriousness.

Karl Barth — okay, another theologian, I’m sorry, but arguably the greatest Protestant theologian of the twentieth century — wept while listening to Mozart. He wrote about Mozart with an almost embarrassing tenderness, as if the music were a parable of grace: ordered, free, luminous, unearned.

Most people experience joy at a slight remove — they note it, appreciate it, file it away. I seem to receive it fully, and then my body has to do something with what my soul takes in. The tears are not a loss of control. They are a form of yes — involuntary, uncalculated, beyond the reach of self-presentation.

Getting there took some time, but I have come to think of this trait as a gift: a pastor who cannot be moved is a pastor with limited range. The willingness to receive — to let beauty land, to let grief land, to let the weight of a moment register in the body — may not be incidental to the work of ministry. It may be essential to it.

Now that I think about it, I am delighted that one of my grandchildren inherited this trait. He tells me he wants to be a scientist someday, but maybe he’ll be a famous theologian who weeps over Mozart.

(Photos: He’s older now, of course, but that’s me holding him when he was a few days old. Nothing quite like it.)

I was sitting at my desk in a tiny office, cleverly created by using the space beneath a stairway, when the telephone rang. The caller was a woman I didn’t know. She was the secretary to a man who had died a week or two before, and she said she had seen me “up front” at the funeral service.

The reason for her call was that the ten- or eleven-year-old son of the man who died suddenly—of a heart attack while hunting—had just phoned his dad’s office and had asked to speak with his dad.

The man’s secretary said, “I told the boy that his dad wasn’t here and wouldn’t be coming back. And then I called you.”

The year was 1977, and I was a student pastor, serving a small church in Iowa City, Iowa. Three months into my year there the senior pastor left to accept a call in Colorado, which was closer to the ski slopes, and I—at the tender age of 23, newly married, and with two years of seminary under my belt—was the only pastor available on that particular afternoon.

I should mention that I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a pastor. I had gone to seminary because I worked for one summer during college at a Christian publishing company and noticed that the editors had degrees from theological schools. And so, I applied to Princeton Theological Seminary. What I didn’t notice, somewhere in the fine print, was that “field education” was a requirement for graduation. Who knew that a Master of Divinity degree required actual church experience?

So, between my second and third years of seminary—to get my “field education” requirement out of the way, which is how I thought of it—I signed up for an internship as far from New Jersey as I could get. What I didn’t realize until that afternoon when the telephone rang was that I had no idea what I was doing.

I put down the phone, found my car in the parking lot (in the middle of the week it was the only one), and drove over to the home of the boy who had just called his dad’s office. My pastoral care skills at the time were limited to a single course on the subject and no practical experience.

When I arrived at the boy’s home, he explained that his mom wasn’t around when he came home from school and that on impulse he made a call to the office where his dad had always been. Then he led me down a narrow, carpeted stairway to a basement where I could see a well-worn bumper pool table stationed beneath a large light fixture.

The boy and I played pool for the next two hours. I don’t remember whether we played one game or twenty. What I remember is that the boy talked and I listened. He told me stories about family vacations and fishing trips, times spent with his dad that had become lasting memories. I assume that playing bumper pool in the basement was another of those memories. I must have made encouraging sounds to show that I was listening, but mostly I was quiet, attentive, and of course concerned.

At some point, the boy’s mother came home, but she didn’t come downstairs. She had seen my car and must have realized that I had stopped by to spend time with her son. She simply stood at the top of the stairway and said, “I’m home!”

There was a moment, I think, when my new young friend ran out of things to say, and I realized it was time to go. He gave me a look that seemed to say “thank you for listening,” and as I left the house his mom gave me a similar look that was almost too painful to see. I drove back to the church aware that something in me had changed. I had been invited into another person’s pain and grief.

Sitting in a windowless office at a publishing company, looking at pages from a manuscript, was not what I wanted to do with my life. This, whatever it was—ministry, I suppose—was what I knew I had been called to do. I wasn’t very good at it, and I knew that I had a lot to learn, but being present with people, especially at the difficult moments of their lives, suddenly seemed like the most important thing I could do with my life.

And so that’s what I did for more than forty-five years.

(Photos: Yes, I know, the second photo is a bumper pool table, not the top photo.)

Always Remember: The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, the Horse, and the Storm
Charlie Mackesy

Hardcover: Penguin Life, 2025
Buy Now: [ BookShop ] [ Amazon ] [ Kindle ]

Reviewed by Douglas Brouwer

Always Remember is not quite a children’s book, though children can read it (if they can read cursive handwriting). It’s not quite a self-help book, though it offers comfort and guidance. It’s not quite philosophy either, though it grapples with profound questions. Maybe the best way to describe the book is an “illustrated fable for all ages” or a “philosophical picture book.” It exists in that rare literary category occupied by The Little Prince, The Velveteen Rabbit, and Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

Where Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull is about transcendence, striving, and breaking limitations, Charlie Mackesy’s work is about acceptance, kindness, and being enough as you are. One reaches upward, the other reaches inward and toward others.

Mackesy, both author and illustrator, has created a sequel to his well-received 2019 book, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse. That foursome is back together, telling a deceptively simple story filled with wisdom. The book is not overtly religious, though it expresses spiritual longing and an undercurrent of faith.

To describe Always Remember as “comfort literature” might seem like a criticism, but it isn’t. The book resonates with the reader in difficult moments: “One day you’ll look back and realize how hard it was, and just how well you did.” “Be patient with yourself. Shouting at a flower won’t make it bloom.” “Hope is the quiet song in your heart that can sing in spite of everything.”

Mackesy is an artist, and his illustrations, while simple, are rich and compelling. My favorite is a page that appears to be torn, with musical notes emerging through the tear. “Look at the music,” said the mole. “It often comes through where things are broken.”

I need to read more books like this one.

(You can find my other reviews on Englewood Review of Books here.)

Over the Christmas break my older daughter and I had a long talk (while hiking in the Arizona desert near Tucson) about starting a podcast, featuring a millennial-daughter arguing discussing important issues with her boomer-father.

I feel proud of myself for having a Substack newsletter because everyone on the planet seems to have one, but I am also feeling left out because nearly everyone seems to have a podcast too. And now Substack is even offering the option of a podcast, so what is my excuse?

Full disclosure: Hosting a podcast was actually my daughter’s idea. When I suggested writing a book together about our shared interests (she is also a Presbyterian pastor, for example), she snorted at the idea, as if to say, “No one reads books anymore, Dad.” Which was tough for me to hear, after devoting a big chunk of my life to writing a few.

So, the best path to cooperation between us seems to be a recorded conversation, including guests whom we would interview, available on platforms such as Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, or Pandora.

Here are some of the issues that I imagine we would argue about discuss civilly together:

1. Technology as culture, not just tools. I belong to a generation that treats digital life as optional, while for my daughter it’s the primary space where her generation builds community, organizes movements, and experiences the world. Plus, she hates helping people my age with simple internet tasks, like logging onto a Zoom call.

2. The evolution of activism. I did my part back in the day to protest the war in Vietnam, but my daughter organizes and participates in protests (in Minneapolis where she lives) through social media. A photo of her asking Gov. Tim Walz to adopt gun safety laws after a mass shooting at Annunciation Catholic School (a few blocks from where she lives) went viral.

3. Economic realities shaping worldviews. My daughter and her husband live in a nice house, but homeownership has become a fantasy for many in her cohort. How do fundamentally different economic conditions shape attitudes about work, loyalty, “paying your dues,” and success?

4. Faith and institutional trust. Millennials have fled institutional religion in droves, but many remain deeply spiritual (“spiritual but not religious”). Ryan Burge, who teaches at Washington University in St. Louis, recently published a study that shows how dire the situation is for all U.S. denominations. When boomers die, he wrote, “it’s gonna get bad. Really fast. No one is ready.”

5. Mentorship vs. mutual learning. The old model (from my era) was unidirectional wisdom-transfer. But my daughter knows things I don’t (and not just about TikTok). Can boomers and millennials genuinely teach each other, or will someone always be “educating” the other?

Here’s my dream guest list: Kate Bowler (she teaches at Duke University and her work on suffering and the prosperity gospel bridges generational church experiences), Ta-Nehisi Coates & Ibram X. Kendi (a great combination to discuss different approaches to writing about race and justice), Krista Tippett (on her NPR program she models intergenerational spiritual dialog), Ezra Klein (he’s got his own podcast and models charitable disagreement), David Brooks (he’s a boomer but he writes often about social fragmentation and bridge-building), Anne Helen Petersen (she’s a culture writer who’s made a career explaining millennial burnout to everyone), Roxanne Gay (she’s unafraid to call out generational BS from any direction), Malcolm Gladwell (he’s a boomer whom millennials actually read), and Jia Tolentino (she would definitely push both of us).

I don’t know when we’ll get around to starting our podcast. My older daughter has been, uh, a bit busy lately with the surge of ICE agents in the Twin Cities. Her church in St. Paul even hosted a training session on peaceful protest (in minus-20 degree weather) for some of the 600 clergypersons who descended on the area to join the protests. But when she’s ready, I’ll have my earphones on, my microphone plugged in, and my laptop powered up. I intend to represent boomers well.

What do you think? Would you subscribe to a conversation like that?

Photos: (above) The Joe Rogan Experience is easily the most-listened-to podcast today, with more than 11 million listeners per episode. (next) That’s Sarah with Gov. Walz. (below) Believe it or not, the Crime Junkie is the next most-listened-to podcast today, hosted by Ashley Flowers and Brit Prawat. (My favorite podcast happens to be Freakonomics Radio, hosted by Stephen J. Dubner.)

I'm sometimes a guest on other podcasts. Here’s the most recent, posted on Sunday, a fun conversation with an able podcast host, to promote my latest book. The podcast is “The Story of Us” with Jeff Ellison.

Corrie ten Boom was a hero in the Dutch-American culture in which I was raised.

In The Hiding Place, she describes how her family hid and protected many Jewish families from the Nazis during World War II. Ten Boom herself was eventually arrested and sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany. She somehow survived, and after the war she wrote about her experiences and told her story to admiring audiences in more than 60 countries.

Most people I knew back then liked to imagine that, if they found themselves in similar circumstances, they would have resisted…just like ten Boom.

But the truth is that only a tiny minority of people in Germany (and the Netherlands, where ten Boom lived) resisted. Most people collaborated with the Nazis. In fact, it was a Dutch informant, Jan Vogel, who told the Nazis what the ten Boom family had been doing, leading to their arrest and imprisonment.

I had not thought much about ten Boom’s story until July 2016 when I found myself living in Berlin and taking German language classes (for my Swiss work permit). During noontime walks around the Goethe Institute, I stumbled upon my first set of Stolpersteine, which is the German word for “stumbling stones.” They are 10cm x 10cm brass plates installed in front of the last known address of people who were arrested and deported by the Nazis.

In addition to Jews, the Nazis also arrested Sinti and Romani people (often called “gypsies”), Poles, homosexuals, the physically or mentally disabled, Jehovah’s Witnesses, members of the Communist Party, the anti-Nazi Resistance, the Christian opposition, Freemasons, conscientious objectors, “habitual criminals,” and others.

More than 100,000 Stolpersteine have now been installed in 26 countries throughout Europe, and they are sobering reminders (especially in Berlin which once had a very large Jewish population) of what came to be known as the Holocaust. They are the work of German artist Gunter Demnig, who has overseen nearly every installation.

When I returned to Europe in 2022-2023 to serve as an interim pastor in The Hague, I once again encountered Stolpersteine, this time on the street I walked each day to and from my church.

Here lived Robert K. Herrmann, born 1896, deported 1944, murdered January 16, 1945, Bergen-Belsen.

Here lived Gertrude F.J.M. Herrmann-Katz, born 1901, deported 1944, murdered February 3, 1945, Bergen-Belsen.

Seeing their names every day, I came to think of them as my neighbors. One day I brushed away some pine needles and leaves in order to take a photo. I knelt in front of them, as if in prayer.

Robert and Gertrude lived in a very nice rowhouse, much like the one where I lived, and I could imagine waving to them as I walked by each day. The question I found myself asking was, Would I have done anything — anything at all — to protect my neighbors from deportation?

Watching videos of masked ICE agents snatch men, women, and teenagers from the streets of Minneapolis, I find myself asking the same question, with renewed urgency, mostly because it is no longer an abstract question. Sadly, deporting unwanted groups of people is a present reality.

Will I have the courage of Corrie ten Boom, who was once held up as a role model for me? Or will I tell her (and the Dutch-American people who once adored her) to “let law enforcement do their job”?

Photos: (top) Robert and Gertrude Herrmann were my “neighbors” in The Hague. (middle) Corrie ten Boom. (bottom) These Stolpersteine were the first ones I ever encountered — on a sidewalk near the Goethe Institute in Berlin. They memorialize a mother and two daughters (ages 10 and 14) who were arrested, deported, and murdered in Auschwitz. (I owned a fancier camera in 2016 and took a better photo.)

I can think of a bunch of reasons why I shouldn’t like the TV series Alone — I hate camping, for example — but I think it’s one of the best shows on TV today, certainly the best reality show.

For those who somehow have never heard of it, Alone is a survival competition series, first shown on what was The History Channel and now featured on HULU. The series follows 10 men and women as they survive alone in the wilderness.

Except for medical check-ins, contestants are isolated from other people. They may withdraw from the competition — or “tap out” — at any time, or they may be removed by failing a medical check-in, usually when a contestant’s BMI falls below 17. In the early years, the final remaining contestant received $500,000. That amount was raised to $1,000,000 with season 7. All contestants receive a stipend to cover lost wages while they are away from home.

The seasons have been filmed in a range of remote locations — most recently in the Great Karoo region of South Africa.

Since Alone first appeared in 2015, several spinoffs have appeared, including The Beast, Frozen, and The Skills Challenge. A Danish version (Aline i Wildmarken) was introduced in 2017 and became one of the most popular shows ever broadcast in Denmark. Interestingly, Danish contestants do not compete for prize money, only glory.

Alone also represents a significant evolution in the genre of survival television. Survival competitions on TV began with great complications — tribes, elimination games, challenges, votes, and so on. Alone offers none of that: Ten people are dropped into the wilderness with ten items of their choosing (no guns). Oh, and they must film themselves. Unlike The Real Housewives, for example, there are no producers to instigate conflict and drama.

Not all contestants are likeable. In the first season, two contestants were men who spent their lives with guns. One a police officer, the other a rabid gun enthusiast — both had gruff, hyper-masculine demeanors. When they found themselves alone in the wild, however, the primitive conditions rather quickly unmade them. Terrified by the bears, the police officer tapped out first. He made it 12 hours and may still hold the record for earliest tap out. The gun lover went next, lasting just two days, because he was tormented at night by howling wolves. Most of us, watching from the comfort of our living room sofas, wouldn’t have lasted an hour, but most of us don’t claim to be survivalists, as those men did.

Sometimes the appeal of the show is feeling superior to the contestants. I like to gloat over obvious mistakes. Not building a shelter in the first couple of days is a typical mistake. Drinking un-boiled water is another. (I may not like camping, but I am good at imagining parasites and waterborne illnesses.) In Season 11, contestant Cubby Hoover had to leave after just four days because an arrow had fallen out of his quiver and seriously wounded his thigh. I felt sorry for him, but thought, “C’mon, man!”

Other contestants are amazing. I found myself in awe of Roland Welker, the winner of season 7, who survived 100 days in the Canadian Arctic by building himself what came to be known as the “rock house” and successfully hunting a musk ox on day 29. I think the guy could easily have lived there the rest of his life.

Another favorite contestant was the winner of season 2, David McIntyre — maybe because he was from Kentwood, Michigan, or maybe because he was the oldest contestant to win (at age 50). McIntyre had been a Christian missionary to Brazil and the founder of a wilderness ministry there, but his missionary career came to an end when his wife of 15 years divorced him. Sadly, David died in November 2024.

The show provides contestants with safety equipment and personal items (including a toothbrush and two pairs of thermal underwear), in addition to those 10 items I mentioned. This is where the strategizing begins. Hunters take bows. Handymen might take a folding saw to make lumber for shelters. Fishermen (and women) might take paracord to weave gill nets (no professional rods or lures are allowed). But choices carry risk. If you make yourself a gill net, what happens if there are no fish in your stretch of the river?

Not everyone likes Alone. A critic once referred to it as “The Blair Witch Project with prize money.” Other people have noted that Alone shows us ten people who are slowly starving to death. But many more people love the show. According to Nielsen, 20 million people watched season 9, and that number continues to grow.

My reasons for liking the show have less to do with survival skills and more to do with what happens to contestants psychologically. Many of the them have lots of survivalist experience, but even the highly skilled contestants find themselves tapping out because of what it is happening inside them. Long-time viewers become skilled at detecting the first signs of a contestant who won’t last. When contestants begin to mention family members in a way they didn’t in their first days after drop off, the end is in sight.

So, the show is about strategy, but also psychology. It’s a show about the beauty and power of nature. It’s a show about the ingenuity and resilience of human beings. And it’s also a show about human fragility, nutrition, and hunger. So much hunger. But it’s a hunger that feels to me like a metaphor. What the show wants us to imagine, I think, is the viability of the American socio-economic project. Is the American way of life capable of providing sustenance to the average person? Is there enough “nutrition” in the daily grind to keep a person going?

Alone does not directly answer these questions. It does, however, choose its contestants from a relatively narrow pool of seekers and discontents that makes the question hard to avoid. Then it gives them a chance to achieve the American dream by vaulting them into the middle class with a big cash prize.

The show’s contestants have not thrived in American society. This becomes obvious when viewers see footage of their homes as they say goodbye to loved ones. As one reviewer has noted, “There are no corporate CEOs, union presidents, real estate developers, or Wall Street traders on the show’s contestant rosters. Starving yourself to death for money is not a rich man’s game.” Most of the contestants are family men and women who also happen to adhere to “alternative lifestyles” like homesteading or subsistence farming. It seems clear that they are trying to survive by winning a small fortune. It’s telling, I think, that contestants never say that they want to use the money to establish a profitable working farm or even a sustainable home off the grid.

In terms of its contributions to public discourse, Alone provides an interesting and subtle contribution to a broad critique of the American dream. The show’s conceit of survival in the wild proves to be a metaphor for survival in a capitalist system for people who have been alienated from any belief in the possibility of conventional success.

(Season 13 of Alone is expected in late spring 2026.)