Commonplace VII: hospitality, dependance, embodiment, and the way of Jesus vs. empire

I don’t have an essay quite yet so below is a collection of things I have loved recently and the jumbled thoughts they have inspired. Enjoy.

The Cost of Ambition: How Striving to Be Better Than Others Makes Us Worse, Miroslav Volf. One more for the imaginary syllabus on cultural disillusionment. On the spectrum of destructive ambition, I have more in common with George Costanza1 on the one hand than the college admissions scandal parents on the other, but I am nonetheless fascinated by this kind of driving desire to be the best, regardless of the cost. Volf reminds us by way of Kierkegaard, Milton, and the Apostle Paul of the deep cost of ambition and that this pursuit of winning in every area of life is antithetical to the Christian faith. The American dream and the way of Jesus are contradictory, and that is actually good news.

For most people, striving for superiority regulated by meritocracy, that is the ideal.

Living before God, I don’t accrue credit or merit, and therefore I can’t justifiably think of myself as inferior or superior to anyone else…There is only one true loftiness, one true earthly glory: a human being living Coram Deo in response to God’s call and resting transparently in this way.

Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI, Karen Hao. Speaking of ambition, I started this 18 hour audiobook and then shelved it for now. It is an extremely detailed and fascinating look at the history of OpenAI and the unmatched drive of Sam Altman. Hao spent almost 10 years writing on the tech industry and conducted hundreds of interviews with OpenAI employees. If you have any interest in this topic and want to read only one book, this is the one. Oh, and also have 18 hours to devote to it.

"Each of these puzzle pieces--Sam's ascendance, his character and relationships, the divisiveness he left in his wake, the flows of money and power--speaks to the path that led to his sudden and fleeting ouster. For a brief moment, the rest of the world caught a glimpse into the struggles happening at the highest levels to dictate the future of artificial intelligence. It would reveal just how much the quest for dominance of that technology--already restructuring society and terraforming our earth--ultimately rests on the polarize values, clashing egos, and messy humanity of a small handful of fallible people.”

Jesus Changes Everything: A New World Made Possible, Stanley Hauerwas. This has been an unintentional but surprisingly good pairing to Volf. I like Hauerwas because he is hard to pin down. Part Anabaptist, part anti-capitalist, part pacifist, he is always surprising and not afraid to challenge what we love and remind us how the Kingdom of God clashes with our earthly ambitions and values. This book focuses specifically on the radical nature of the Kingdom of God, how it should effect the church, and how we interact with broader culture. Someone on Substack asked a few weeks ago what a good alternative to Christian Nationalism is. In one word, Jesus. But also, Hauerwas.

Charity is not about removing all injustice in the world, but about meeting the need of our neighbors right where we find them. And Christ shows us who our neighbors are. He expects us to bind up the wounds of those right before us.

The way of the kingdom, as manifest in Jesus, is quite simply extended training in being dispossessed, of becoming liberated by God from all that we think gives us power over our own lives and the lives of others. Jesus changes everything.

On Pentecost: Christ’s disciples have a story to tell in which God in Christ is the main character. They cannot tell that story without becoming part of the tale. For God’s story in Christ is not just another possible story about the way the world is; it is the story of the world as created and redeemed by God…We don’t just have an alternative story, but insofar as we are the church, we are the alternative. We are Gods new language.

Theology of Home: Finding the Eternal in the Everyday, Carrie Gress. This is probably one of the most Catholic books I have read to date but I enjoyed every page of it. Anything that quotes Teresa of Avila, John Paul II, and Thomas Merton I am all about. Similar to Thomas Howard’s Hallowed Be This House, this book is a look at home and hospitality as a Christian practice. I appreciated how “biblical womanhood” took a major backseat in this work on homemaking (it was barely mentioned- there was one whole section on the need of fathers to prioritize home over work, however- very much in the vein of Leah Libresco Sargeant’s piece here), but the primary focus was on sacramental living and cultivating all of our homes as spaces meant for others to encounter the love of Jesus in (while on the other hand, not down playing the contribution of women in this area). This is a very Holy Ordinary kind of book!

On the Christ centered life: Whatever it is that we’re doing, dull or glamorous, in doing it for love of Christ, it becomes an extension of our prayer life and a vehicle for sanctification. If we cannot find Christ in our work where we are now, we will have a hard time finding him anywhere else.

On hospitality: We do not love God if we do not love the stranger he sets before us. But because we cannot love what we do not know, love for the stranger can only be rooted in love for God, the one whom we do know. Rarely in modern times are we confronted with a stranger at our doorstep seeking shelter, but for most of us, we are out in the world daily interacting with and encountering strangers. Each encounter is an opportunity to "receive" them in kindness in the spirit of hospitality. Even with those whom we do know, their inherent dignity can become obscured at times. Whether we are hosting a party or sheltering a family in crisis, each of these encounters is an opportunity to receive another, naturally and without performance, greeting the image of God in them.

How About Now: Poems, Kate Baer. Another stellar collection from Kate Baer on motherhood, middle age, and embracing the life you have right in front of you. The poems are packed with humor and curiosity. These poems aren’t as striking as I found the And Yet collection to be, but are still fun to read.

How About Now?

We are born dying, which is one way to look at it.

Another is to wake up knowing

we are made of impossible things:

crystal caves, singing dunes,

dark matter held in mortal hope.

It’s true, time has a way

of making lists and ledgers.

You say you want a garden,

beds of lavender and daffodils.

You say we have a lifetime.

Love, we’re in our lifetime.

How about now?

Remembering Dr. John Perkins, Carmen Joy Imes. I loved the reflection here about the impression of meeting John Perkins in an elevator at ETS. Perkins embodied what it means to be free in Christ to love others and to allow the Gospel to bring reconciliation and renewal2. He was a voice in the black church who called out to white evangelicals that “opposition to racism was not a supplemental or optional activity but was core to living out the truth that would bring renewal and restoration to “the places long devastated” (Isa. 61:4).” CT’s obituary here is also a beautiful tribute.

Our encounter was arresting. Here was a man who’d been invited to address thousands of mostly white participants. He was neither cocky nor self-centered. He wasn’t offended that we didn’t recognize him. He had no chip on his shoulder about being a minority. He simply exuded joy. In our brief conversation he celebrated our presence at a conference that was planned, led, and addressed by only men. He saw us.

In a matter of moments he extended his enthusiastic welcome to a space where he likely felt like an outsider himself.

Everyone is Eventually a Burden, Plough, Matthew Burdette. This was a beautiful piece on how being a burden is an essential element of being human. In our post-Christian world where bodily autonomy is just standard thinking, it’s no wonder things like medically assisted suicide have gained traction. No one wants to burden anyone else and our bodily weakness is the thing we despise the most. This is a fundamentally human reaction, but Jesus makes a way for us to allow the uncomfortable friction we feel to be transformed into love, vulnerability, and care for one another. “In this way, the persistent presence of our ailing, suicide-eligible bodies will be, in God’s ironic providence, the means by which he will offer salvation for souls.” See also, The Dignity of Dependance by Leah Libresco Sargeant for an entire book on this topic.

the pastoral caregiver must deal with real life, in complete truthfulness, with precise attention to those aspects of life where there is resistance, which is to say, where there is friction. That is the only way to touch the soul. The polite easing of friction is antithetical to pastoral work.

the element of Christianity that has been lost is not necessarily kindness or compassion, but the biblical recognition that to be human is to be a burden, and that human flourishing therefore requires that we learn to be burdens and learn to bear burdens.

Knowing What Time It Is, John Ehrett, Plough. OK this is a lot to process, but the ideas here on where we are with a post-religious right on our hands are fascinating. I am mostly interested in how this relates to the ideas of the pursuit of common good (a historically American ideal, albeit with a checkered past), ethics, and how the post-religious right has abandoned it for pursuit of a “privileged few who escape the limits of the body.” Throw in Big Tech and we are left with post-humanism and atavism.3 What does this mean for embodiment? The project of post-consciousness is at odds with living here and now in flesh and blood. Is the work of the Kingdom to transcend this consciousness or is it duty to love and care for the bodies we have been gifted (both our own and of those who are in need around us?). “There is one battlefield upon which a traditional Christian ethic must finally collide, unavoidably and utterly, with the post-Christian right: bioethical questions of dependence and care.” Whether it’s our neighbor, unborn infants, children, the elderly, immigrants, or anyone who can’t transcend their bodies or by might or strength claw to the top. The post-religious right is a deceptive alternative to a true Christian social ethic (however much it appeals to “natural law”).

Thiel’s vision of Christianity locates the classic Christian promise of resurrection and eternal life through God’s grace – of the sharing in God’s nature known as theosis – to the place where Bacon, Condorcet, and Fedorov looked for it: radical, species-altering technological progress. This is, in Thiel’s view, the kind of cooperation with God to which humans are called – rather than the traditional Christian vision of a modest technological meliorism and the charge to tend the living world to bring it into greater fruitfulness in accord with its own nature and the sustaining will of God.

How will this technology affect human beings? A technological future only becomes “inconceivable” when the basic reference point – human nature itself – becomes contestable. If our technological future is truly “inconceivable,” it is only so because we have ceased to be recognizably human.

In a bitter irony, the progressive logic of absolute autonomy, and the post-Christian rightist logic of biological determinism, end up in the very same grave.

from Nicaea to America, Haley Baumeister. Snuck this in right as I was finishing the draft because it connects to so many topics here! Haley dives into a wild historical fact: one of the first orders of business at the Council of Nicaea was regarding the practice of castration as a means of by-passing virtue (not as a mark of piety). What does this have to do with us? A lot. We evangelicals struggle with the same disregard for the created good of the body and/or struggle to have a set of ethics that accounts for it beyond either despising it or falling into the trap of bodily autonomy. “Ontological violence” is such a good term for where we are now, beyond just the obvious in reproductive ethics. As Hauerwas said, if we as Christians do well, we will be “known as ‘those peculiar people who don’t kill their babies or their old people.’” Or will we?

Abhorrence at creation’s goodness will leave a bland, unbearable lightness. It breeds spiritual apathy, sadness, ontological unease, and a perplexing witness. Yet Christianity doesn’t leave us to the lightness of our whims. In love, we are tethered to the weight of a created order. There we find a boundaried delight. There we suffer with our Lord. There we become the flavorful salt of the earth.

Hopefully, as with the literature we have on the case of castration in the early church and Williams’ on abortion in America’s churches (to speak nothing of all the other topics that could be listed) we will have more books written. They might show with similarly honest documentation the ways in which Christians deliberated, clarified convictions, and changed course on other matters…We are in our own particular moment, filled with numerous shades of “ontological violence.” When historians look back, how will Christians have been shown to handle current assisted reproductive practices and other ways in which we have become complicit in modern medicine’s penchant for a “bleaching out of the density of things”?

How to Get to Heaven From Belfast, Another brilliant show brought to us by Lisa McGee on Netflix. This one is part murder mystery, part dark comedy, part manifesto on adult female friendship. There is also a UNESCO literary trail planned for Northern Ireland so we can all go walk through the world of McGee, Swift, Beckett, and Heaney!

I kept coming back to the show instead for its bleakly funny portrait of middle-aged friendship. “We’re dying now? That’s it, is it? That’s the latest?” Robyn says, outraged, when she hears the news about Greta. “We should not be dying. We’re thirty-four years of age!” “We’re thirty-eight,” Dara corrects her. These are women who know one another too well. They have heard every anecdote, every gripe, hundreds of times. It’s an intimacy that is both infuriating and joyful, and deeply satisfying to watch. - Anna Russell, for The New Yorker

Overnight Oats. I aspire to be the kind of person who can make cute breakfasts in a jar the night before but rarely am I thinking about breakfast after cleaning up supper. However, a friend made the best overnight oats for a trip a few weeks back and has inspired me. Now to get the tiny jars…

Qobuz. As musicians and concerned citizens, we have officially left Spotify after they announced their new pay-out model for artists (no money until any song hits 1000 plays…a new strategy for Spotify to funnel money into their own curated playlists and incentivize AI music- which doesn't receive royalties). So on to something new! Terrible name, but Qobuz has everything Spotify has and allows you to purchase albums for your own library (and bonus, it pays out much better royalties to musicians). You can even import your previous Spotify library and playlists to simplify the transition. Fight the Machine in any small way you can.

In Summary:

Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving…The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing. - This is Water, David Foster Wallace4