The Professor's Bayonet

William Shakespeare’s 1623 tragedy, Antony and Cleopatra, is renowned for its depiction of a complex and fully developed female character in the person of one of its title figures.  Cleopatra, recalling the inexperience of her youth, exclaims, “My salad days, when I was green in judgment, cold in blood, to say as I said then.”  She had been, in other words, a novice at all things pertaining to life, which might not excuse past behavior, but it certainly explains it.  We have all had our salad days, dear listeners.  Cleopatra merely calls it what it is, and in doing so, reveals a level of self-awareness that is difficult not to admire.  The accumulated years do not escape her.  She knows her finitude.  She makes no effort to avoid it. I first encountered these lines as a graduate student in a class on Shakespeare.  I recall my professor – a man likely in his fifties at the time – pausing for a moment on what it meant to be so acutely aware of the passing of time and the sheer brevity of one’s life – a puff of smoke blown away quickly by successive years.  I may or may not have grasped the gravity of what was being considered at the time, but I certainly am able to grasp it now, being a man about to turn fifty-one.  Salad days.  When the years were green and the horizons wide and intoxicating.  Even the rays of the sun were somehow different then. The Bard, through his characterization of the historic Cleopatra, was undoubtedly prompting his audience to grapple with the meaning of their own lives – the accumulating years, the many, many memories stacked one upon another – what we are supposed to do with it all if anything.  Just experience it.  Feel it.  Reminisce.  This is a surface interpretation, which still passes muster.  However, we might also consider the larger context.  Cleopatra, after all, was a powerful woman known for her beauty.  This is more than just a character nodding toward her younger days.  This is a figure of some stature acknowledging that stature is not enough.  It is never enough.  Even flowers wilt.  Cleopatra is very much aware of this fact, which gives her character a much deeper layer, indeed. Youth, naivete, and idealism all seem to be common enough bedfellows.  I had my own ideals in my salad days, and if I am to be honest, I still cringe at the naivete I so boldly put on display before the world.  My ignorance was a spectacle.  I thank God for the many graces that were extended to me then and now.  Cleopatra’s line in this play, then, should be seen as an example of owning up to the reality of youth.  Being impetuous is a part of the landscape.  More to the point, when one is young, there is just life.  When one has accumulated some years, life naturally divides itself by eras, big and small.  One’s salad days are merely one era.  To see it as such is a sure sign of maturity.  To extend it beyond its proper borders is a sign of immaturity.  Nobody likes a forty-year-old adolescent. On that note, Cleopatra would be an outlier in the current age.  The postmodern condition has Tasmanian-devil-like gone after every tradition and common understanding formerly in place, and age was no exception.  While I submit that age really is only a number, some formerly agreed upon values should not have been shown the curb.  The aged do have something of value to offer.  There really is wisdom beneath the gray hairs.  The older should be heeded.  The young should sit quietly and listen.  This does not mean to refrain from questioning.  It means to give respect where it is due and to recognize one’s own salad days for what they are, for even the queen of Egypt was humble enough to do just that. 

Miguel de Cervantes published the first part of his famous work, Don Quixote, in 1605 and then the second part in 1615.  Officially titled The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of LaManchaland, this Spanish classic would influence literature in countless ways.  It follows the story of Alonso Quijano who so voraciously consumes tales of knightly chivalry that, soon enough, he loses his mind and decides to become a knight-errant himself, dubbing himself Don Quixote de la Mancha before recruiting Sancho Panza to be his squire.  Cervantes writes, “Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”  Sleep deprivation, yes, but also too much reading caused him to slip into another world, another persona and dash about Spain, “tilting at windmills” or, to put it another way, fighting imaginary enemies in imaginary battles.  He supplies the illusion; Panza, the Spanish word for gut, supplies the down-to-earth wit.  The pair encapsulate the fantastical and the real, perhaps representative of most if not all human beings.  This might explain the appeal.Much, of course, has already been said and written about Quijano’s slip into harmless insanity.  The real world is too much.  The world of knights, ladies, and noble missions is much more attractive.  It is this world he yearns to inhabit.  What small yearning do we all have, dear listeners? My interest is not so much to explore this facet we all likely possess but to openly wonder why, especially among the young and impressionable, it seems to be growing at an astronomical rate.  This group, especially, seems to want to throw off the shackles of banal and humdrum and assume identities that are much more interesting and much more controllable. One catalyst for this behavior is certainly the state of our world.  Much of it does not look pretty.  The questions loom large and foreboding.  What does a spirit become if all it has to look forward to is hard work and strife?  Why not cosplay some?  Another catalyst, I would argue, is the usual suspect: the smartphone.  Our lives are lived virtually so much that we are tempted to believe (and some really do) that we can create avatars in our own waking lives as much as we can create them online.  Why not step into a different gender or race or species?  It harms no one.  It pleases me.  Who are you or anybody else to say I can’t? Perhaps it would be useful to call to mind how Don Quixote was treated in the book.  He was mocked.  He certainly received a good many stares.  But on occasion, insights would poke through that revealed something about what was really going on.  Cervantes writes, “I do not deny that what happened to us is a thing worth laughing at. But it is not worth telling, for not everyone is sufficiently intelligent to be able to see things from the right point of view.”  The message?  Not everyone has the presence of mind and intellectual maturity to parse out the delusional from the real.  A thing is a thing, this group might argue, because of a feeling, a hunch.  It amounts to a world built on whims and passing fancies. The great irony, here, is that, while Don Quixote read too much and went crazy, some in our current society are not reading at all and still reaching the same end point.  Ray Bradbury, well-known author of Fahrenheit 451 and Something Wicked This Way Comes, quipped that “You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture, just get people to stop reading them".  It seems, dear listeners, that we have arrived at that point.  Even in college, so has been my experience, books are seen as passé, certainly not anything with which to be troubled.  Therefore it appears that illusions emerge out of two opposing states of affairs: reading too much or not reading at all.  Sancho Panza tempered Don Quixote’s world with his matter-of-fact words.  Are we so stuck in our smartphones that we can’t find the same force now? 

The Bible is filled with them: characters who enter the action and then just as suddenly depart, leaving readers to contemplate their significance in light of the greater story being told – that of God’s everlasting love and His plan to save our souls.  The average student might be tempted to gloss over these characters in their pursuit of the wider interpretation, but Catherine Lawton is no average student.  Nor is she an average writer.  Her 2004 book entitled Face to Face dials into the life of the woman in Luke’s gospel who was afflicted with a condition that made it impossible for her to stand up straight.  Luke writes: “On a Sabbath Jesus was teaching in one of the synagogues, 11 and a woman was there who had been crippled by a spirit for eighteen years. She was bent over and could not straighten up at all. 12 When Jesus saw her, he called her forward and said to her, “Woman, you are set free from your infirmity.” 13 Then he put his hands on her, and immediately she straightened up and praised God.” Scripture quickly pivots to the synagogue leader’s indignance that Jesus healed on the sabbath, rendering the healing of the woman a happy footnote in the battle between Jewish leaders and the Messiah; however, Lawton sees fit to unpack her story because, like everybody who steps into the greatest of stories that is Holy scripture, she is a somebody.  She has a background – a past – and because of the healing ministry of Christ, a future as well.  She is, in a phrase, one of us, which endears her to us, but we also get caught up in the grand thought that miracles are not out of the question for us as well.  In the woman, we see our pain.  In her as well, we see what possibilities await. Lawton takes the craft of storytelling to a new level in this powerful fictionalized account of one woman's eighteen year affliction by a pneuma, a spirit that keeps her bowed and dejected: a pariah to everybody but a few. Once healthy, strong, and with nothing but good prospects on the horizon, a tragic event leaves Joakima, the woman, physically deformed and her life forever changed. As the years go by, Joakima's sense of alienation and hopelessness only deepens until one fateful encounter turns it all around. Lawton permits the woman’s humanity to poke through, even though we know the ending of the story from the start.  Upon hearing that Jesus is near, Lawton writes that the woman “listened to all of the excitement with mixed emotions” only to later try to summon the courage to ask Him to touch her.  The woman, in other words, did not think of herself as worthy.  In effect, her distorted posture, gaze set firmly on the ground in front of her, acts as a metaphor for the posture so many of us assume.  We are consumed by the here and now, heads bowed, our view severely limited.  And we say to ourselves, this is my lot.  There is nothing that can be done.  No change.  No release.  The affliction and I are one. But in Lawton’s dramatization of the life of the bent woman, we get a different message altogether: one of hope and connection.  To be sure, the parallels between Lawton’s story and reality as we see it in the present age are striking.  Many of us are not afflicted with an evil pneuma, but we as a society are certainly bent over, looking at our phones.  You heard me correctly, dear listeners.  I believe there is a valid comparison between one woman’s physical affliction and an entire society’s mental affliction to the extent that both cause pain and isolation.  Consider how some are positively addicted to their devices, unable even to hold a normal face-to-face conversation, sit through an interview, or engage in small talk.  Perhaps we will understand that what claims to free us actually keeps us in chains, for it is certainly not angels who keep our eyes averted. https://www.amazon.com/Face-Novel-Catherine-Lawton/dp/0967038685

Boubacar Boris Diop’s riveting account of the 1994 Rwandan genocide should give pause to anyone tempted to place too much stock in humankind’s ability to keep the peace.  Tensions between two ethnic groups, the Tutsis and the Hutu, reached a tipping point, and for a span of around one-hundred days, members of the Tutsi tribe butchered the Hutu by the thousands.  It was, note some, as if the devil were on a rampage in the broad daylight.  The slaughter was extensive and vicious.  The machete was the weapon of choice. Diop’s book recounts the story of Cornelius Uvimana, a history teacher, who returns to Rwanda after working abroad to wrestle with the loss of his entire family to Hutu militia.  In many ways, the book is a meditation on the darkest impulses of humankind.  The Hutus regarded the Tutsis as cockroaches deserving to be wiped off the face of the earth.  They surely tried.  Bloodied bodies lay strewn about every corner of the country.  What Uvimana eventually comes to believe is that only our humanity can save us and that it his mission to bear witness to the massive atrocity that was the Tutsi genocide.  He will not let the world forget.  He would be the voice of the voiceless dead. Years ago, I assigned Murambi, The Book of Bones to an honors class and was struck by how the exchange of ideas evolved.  Yes, there were those who grieved over the events that took place between April and July of 1994 in a country located in central Africa; however, there was one student who shared with the class a startling idea.  If it is simply a matter of truth that we as a species are capable of such sudden brutality, then we should be resigned to that fact. That is who we are: ugly, nasty, cruel but undeniably human. What is more, according to this rubric, such acts of brutality can even be justified, rape included. If the objective is total annihilation, then, yes, the sexual violation of others is justified.  The Hutus were effective.  Why should they be blamed for their success? The student was clearly taking a pragmatic approach, sacrificing morality along the way. Diop’s appeal to humanity was naive. Did he not know what happened in the camps in Nazi-occupied Europe, the gulags in Soviet Russia, the killing fields in Cambodia?  Violence is a part of our collective DNA.  Why deny it?  To be sure, leaning into it could reveal more about who we are a species actually are. Aren’t we after the truth?  Isn’t that what it means to be educated? Cain killed Abel, after all. The current era is one where the very notion of there being an objective truth is coming under fire. This person has this truth; this other person has that truth. We have come to believe that we can imagine whatever we want and then speak it into existence in an instant, making unique realities along the way.  Issues arise, however, when these so-called realities clash, and they always will. Relativism is the secret sauce when it comes to conflict; indeed, it is the very thing that prevents justice from being served because everybody has their own measuring stick. What is wrong for him is right for her and on and on down the line. My honors student had his measuring stick for what was right and wrong.  The Hutus had theirs.  And both resulted in the justification of heinous behavior. The best way forward?  Clearly, justice is predicated on the rock-solid existence of objective truth.  This is the common measuring stick. This is the way to peace.  Perhaps this is how we recover our common humanity.  We do not build our society on opinion and whim, trend and passing fancy.  Our building blocks must be immutable – lofty, not base.  You see, dear listeners, my student was only partially correct.  Yes, the base instincts exist but so, too, do the noble proclivities – the righteous, the virtuous, the honorable.  We have only to calibrate our lives in such a way that we aim for one end or the other: a low opinion of humankind or a great dream of who we could become. 

I would like to begin with a basic question: Can you give me the name of your great-great-grandfather?  How about your great-great-grandmother?  The likely answer is a simple no. The names of those on whose shoulders we stand are lost to time.  And this is to say nothing about their very lives: what they did to bring in money, what dreams they had, the quirks they possessed, the countless intricacies and experiences of what makes a life a life.  Consider your own, dear listeners.  As you listen to this episode, you are endeavoring to accomplish something; you hold feelings for others; you have your fears and anxieties.  I could go on and on.  My point is that just as you are alive now, so, too, were they alive then, and while the details may be different, the very experience of life is not.  Individuals hundreds of years ago admired the dawn, fell in love, wondered what the first gray hairs meant.  You get my drift. In a recent podcast, popular Catholic priest, Father Mike Schmitz, reminded his listeners that one day, they will die.  This will be the first death.  The second death happens when the last person to utter your name dies.  After that, you will be no more.  Your great-great-grandkids will have no idea what your name was, what you did to earn money, your dreams, your quirks, and so on and so forth.  We might conclude that this is merely the way things go and be done with it.  However, I propose that a keen understanding of this reality is needed to better calibrate how we interact with others. Allow me to explain.  One person may put a lot of stock in personal reputation.  Position and titles are important.  Being highly regarded by others is paramount.  These individuals are buoyed by what others think.  It is easy to see the connection, here, to social media.  These applications thrive on outside (and even anonymous) approval.  But scripture reminds us that our lives are like a vapor or mist.  We are here, and then just like that, we are not.  The wise see the pursuit of personal reputation for what it is: vain. Another person might recognize this, and instead of pursuing approval from others, that person might more fully invest in being known by his or her Creator God, the One that person strives to spend eternity with.  People forget, in other words, but God does not.  He knows your name and mine and will not forget it.   Fair enough.  But what is the takeaway?  What do our lives look like if we do our best to be known by God?  What is more, how does that change how we interact with others?  Other vapors?  Other mists? When I was a teenager, I worked for a time for a man named Keith Meade.  He was a widower who lived in town, and he hired me to do odd jobs: mow the lawn, do some weeding, accompany him to Agway to pick up some supplies.  Another job was to clean up around the gravestones of his departed family members.  We were at the cemetery in Youngsville, my hometown.  The sky was a dark blue.  The air was crisp and clean.  Mr. Meade stood on the side of a hill and etched on the gravestones before and just beyond him was his last name.  I stood and watched him take it in.  He knew his time was coming.  I was too young to realize then that the same applied to me.  What is fifty or so years in the grand scheme of time?  Our lives overlapped.  That was significant enough. What legacy should we leave to those who will not know our names?  Perhaps Saint Joeseph gives us the answer.  We must do what we were put here to do.  We must love those around us.  And we must never forget that this life that comes with reputations and titles and positions, etc. is brief and that the life of the world to come is the permanence of heart and true familiarity with others we seek.  We may not know their names now.  We surely will know their names then. 

Clinton, Arkansas is like any small town in America.  The backdrop for Monica Potts’s memoir, The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America, this far-flung part of the world is, according to Potts, where dreams go to die.  Resources are few if any, and those who live there suffer under the weight of their own ignorance or, worse, self-inflicted wounds in the form of drug and alcohol abuse, broken and/or strained personal relationships, being in and out of jails, and tragic conservatism.  The denizens of Clinton, Arkansas simply do not know what is good for them.  It is certainly not God or tradition.  Potts holds no punches there.  The author’s overt political stance on how to fix rural America is reminiscent of the “deplorable” epithet hurled at those who held different beliefs from those who are supposedly more enlightened about this, that, and the other.  In effect, what could have been a very revealing memoir about why one person from Clinton managed to do well for herself while most from that same town could never successfully launch amounts to a two-hundred and fifty page scolding of hillbilly conservatives by a vastly more informed writer who insisted on going to college out of state, away from the community that nurtured her. I am not here, dear listeners, to offer a scathing critique of a book dripping with progressive points of view.  Not all of her conclusions are unfounded, and she is right to point out that bad choices have bad consequences that can make anybody’s attempt to move forward virtually impossible.  The meth epidemic in this country is real, and like Potts, I have seen firsthand so much potential come to naught.  I could practically smell the cigarette odor and grease wafting up from the pages.  My interest lies in her posturing.  Specifically, I wonder what motivates a person to write a book that highlights the poor choices and misery of a childhood friend, Darci, while diagnosing her life with a set of progressive talking points.  Why did Darci take the route she did?  The patriarchy.  An oppressive church.  Low expectations for women.  Lack of access to birth control and abortion.  Misguided immigration laws.  It is as if the formula for this book is to first identify how Darci and others like her mess up and then prescribe as a solution something the Democratic party champions. For the record, I would have a similar reaction if it were a different political party.  Potts is simply too scripted; indeed, it seems as if she is othering her former community as a way to create more distance between them and herself. To say that Potts is looking down her nose at those who remained in Clinton might be stating the obvious.  The compare/contrast between Darci and Potts runs throughout with the former landing squarely on the bad side and the latter, squarely on the good.  Potts submits herself as the wiser among them.  She got the college education, after all.  Attended a school that her high school guidance counselors did not even have on their map.  Nobody from Clinton had ever gone to that school.  Surely, nobody ever would.  It was just too far out of reach. Perhaps it is the subtle and even not-so-subtle arrogant tone.  I started the book because I wanted to learn Potts’ perspective on the state of small towns in America.  I finished the book because I was hoping to find some redemptive notes – someplace where she pulled back on the lecturing and recognized that we all have struggles and to point the finger at how screwed up someone else is can be seen as the pot calling the kettle black.  To be sure, Potts does not seem to notice the plank in her own eye, choosing instead to make judgment call after judgment call, only pausing on occasion to openly wonder if the brokenness was somehow linked to something she did.  Even nodding toward this unlikelihood shows who the real hero of this memoir is. 

The night is darkest before dawn.  That is the saying, at least.  Just before the first faint rays of the sun arrive, the world is pitch black.  Of course, countless individuals have teased out of this reality analogies that are intended to offer perspective when things are not going well.  When circumstances are rough – really, really rough – take heart because there is about to be a reversal, perhaps even of the glorious sort.  In a broken world such as ours, I am all about hope.  We need more of it.  So many are in the terrible grips of despair.  What I would add to the analogy, however, is an element that should give us all a better sense of agency – a sense that we can actually participate in the rising of the sun and the spreading of its rays, if you will. It began with an observation I made from my bed.  The world was enveloped in darkness.  The sun had yet to make its entrance.  But from that immeasurable vastness – that great and ineffable stillness – came a chirp.  A bird began to sing. It quickly occurred to me, dear listeners, that the songbird may be the bravest of all creatures.  It is not the lion that roars in the day nor the wolf, the bear, the great whales of the sea that utter their greeting but the little bird.  So small.  Frail even.  Huddled against the cool air on the bough of a tree, singing into the deep night and against it.  Such courage in that tiny heart.  Such beautiful boldness.  An example to us all who are wrapped in the folds of our own night, existing with others who are experiencing the same or worse. Saint Thérèse of Lisieux lived from 1873 to 1897, dying that year from tuberculosis.  She was only twenty-four years old.  Called by Pope Pius X “the greatest saint of modern times,” Saint Thérèse who was also called Little Flower was known for performing small tasks with great love and sanctity.  To borrow from current parlance, she did not have a big platform.  She lived as an obscure nun in France and only, if you will pardon the pun, blossomed into popularity after her death.  The curious might wonder why Pope Pius X gave her such an accolade.  Perhaps he recognized in her a model for how the faithful should respond to oppressive darkness.  Understand that the small things really do matter and that it is our collective charge to do them with great love.  We each have a song to sing. And though it may seem to be dwarfed by such a massive and largely faceless enemy, it will be heard.  It does make a statement.  It is vital.  Years ago, when I was around fourteen years old, my dear stepfather handed me some tools and told me to frame out a room above my grandparents’ garage with my cousin, Eric.  The garage is located on some obscure hill in some obscure part of Pennsylvania.  I had never before framed out a room, and the thought itself was intimidating, but by calling me out to the task, saying, in effect, that I could do it – that I was capable of completing the job – my stepfather instilled in me a confidence that only grew and became stronger.  He wasn’t influencing crowds.  He was not leading a nation.  He was influencing me: one person.  One kid. What would the world look like if more individuals adopted the way of the Little Flower?  We are all tempted to believe the lie that greatness is all about numbers: likes and shares.  But if we were to examine our lives for a moment, we might discover that it had been the little things all along.  A small gesture.  A tiny kindness.  A little bird who regarded the great big world and its great big darkness and opened its mouth and made a sound regardless. 

I have commented on Shirley Jackson’s short story, “The Lottery,” in a previous episode – 51 to be precise.  The story is about how a village has a yearly lottery where one person is randomly selected to be stoned to death by the rest.  It is a tale about public execution, in other words, which, on its face, is shocking enough were it not for the fact that the vast bulk of the story is civilized.  The characters engage in a civil exchange about what they are to do.  It is all quite matter-of-fact.  They will follow a well-regulated process to make their selection.  It is only in the final line of the short story that we bear witness to their brutality.   Jackson concludes the story with “and then they were upon her,” leaving it to the imagination of her readers exactly how that act of violence looked. I explored this short story in a recent face-to-face class.  We discussed what might be the true nature of our species in how we build violence into our society and have been doing so since time immemorial. Why?Arguably, AI, ChatGPT, and other such applications are going to make this worse. Consider, dear listener, what happens when a toddler does not get his way.  He pitches a fit.We all know the answer.  The inability to articulate one’s ideas often results in violent outbursts.  With AI, we are now walking away from the opportunity to hone our ability to articulate our ideas and are, instead, deferring to what a program can produce.  Hear me on this: Our increasing lack of the ability to articulate our own ideas ourselves will result in more cases of violent outbursts.  Eighteen-year old, nineteen-year old, twenty-year old toddlers. Add to that our clear proclivity to commit violence, and then we get a recipe for the unthinkable.  Had Shirley Jackson composed “The Lottery” today, there might be a lot more to come after the line, “and then they were upon her.”  We might get the disturbing details of the public execution.  How one stone broke her jaw.  How another stone knocked her down.  How yet another stone made contact with a lifeless body.  There might be more details today because, as my students quickly pointed out, we are desensitized the violence.  We see it every day.  The shootings.  The mobs.  The military conflicts.  We have access to the images and the videos.  We are drawn to them.  And what does this say about us?     From my vantage point as an educator in an institution of higher learning, the prognosis does not look good.  Ten years ago, the struggle was to get my students to read.  Now they are not even writing.  They come to class without the reading, without notebooks, without writing utensils ... only their phones.  They never forget their phones.  And I wonder what, exactly, we are trying to accomplish. If there is some intentionality about getting individuals – mostly the young – to stop thinking for themselves, to stop even trying to form and articulate an original thought then those who are perpetuating this mission are doing a bang-up job.  Pretty soon, we might start abandoning what Jean-Jacque Rosseau called a “social contract” -- that loose set of rules and regulations we use to maintain order and preserve the peace.  The more we embrace and even celebrate that primal proclivity to commit violence, the more we might be tempted to walk away from any artifice of sophistication.  We will not care if we cannot articulate our thoughts.  It will not matter if we depend upon AI and ChatGPT to communicate for us.  Nothing but our base instincts will matter.  Meaningfulness will not be pursued, only the material, the superficial.  Friedrich Nietzshe’s notion of nihilism might be realized.  Nothing matters.  Nothing has meaning.  Only the dog-eat-dog worldview holds any sway because we are nothing but animals at heart – or worse!  Creatures who indulge in the unspeakable.  Creatures who have relinquished their ability to speak at all.  Toddlers wielding clubs, mindlessly grunting our mutual hatred. 

Tom Holland does not claim to be a believer.  He does not follow what once was called The Way, yet his sprawling history of Christianity is populated with a host of historical tidbits that could easily win nonbelievers over to the cause.  His book, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, begins in ancient Greece with how the emerging Western culture was, indeed, primed to receive a narrative whose focal point is the son of God on high and ends in our current era of woke in terms of how some ideas are rejected while others are zealously embraced according to a rubric that was built by Christianity yet retains none of its guideposts.  It is, in other words, to be decent – whatever that is – without Christ, without the Ten Commandments, without the turning over of the tables of the moneychangers.  It is a moral compass that only affirms and never, ever challenges.  One might even say that the age of woke is the easy and, I hasten to add, misunderstood parts of Christianity without Jesus.  Holland tells his readers how we got there: an unthinkably long sequence that began with the words of a Jewish carpenter over two-thousand years ago. Holland takes us to the bloody Roman arenas and the lions, and he also gives us a tour of the early days when purchase was gained bit by bit until Constantine the Great converted to Christianity and, in doing so, elevated the faith to an unprecedented level.  Readers also get a glimpsed of the Crusades and how Christianity was politicized in order to curry favor.  Along the way, various councils convened and properly codified Christian doctrine so that believers were, in effect, all reading from the same sheet of music.  Until the arrival of Martin Luther.  He initiated a different conversation – one that led to the Protestant Reformation – and from there, the fallout only continued to build.  Henry VIII, a contemporary of Martin Luther, had and divorced many wives.  Over a century later, the French philosopher, Voltaire, who openly disdained Christianity ignited yet another powder keg.  He, Holland writes, “viewed Christianity with a hatred that bordered on fixation.”  Voltaire endeavored to wrest from Christian intellectuals the heights of European culture.  The Enlightenment – a clear reference to Plato’s famed “Allegory of the Cave” -- was to pull the ignorant out of the dark catacombs of Christianity and into the so-called light of man’s ability to, on his own, reason and give structure and sense to the world. What Martin Luther did to the Catholic Church in questioning many of its long-held doctrines, Voltaire and his ilk questioned the faith itself, causing many to wonder about the worth of a belief system next to modern advancements.  Why look up anymore when the real work was before us? Holland can be commended for his even-handedness in detailing the history of Christianity because on the heels of the Enlightenment, the world bore witness to at least two bloody revolutions – the American and the French – after which came industrialization on a scale never before seen accompanied by a spiritual malaise that pushed many to the edge.  And then a world war.  And then a second.  Two atomic bombs.  A genocide.  I am sure, dear listeners, you could take it from here. Yet Christianity persists.  Indeed, many prominent thinkers believe we are on the cusp of a revolution – one that returns Christianity to its roots by utterly rejecting its critics.  Thanks to Christianity, we have hospitals.  Thanks to Christianity, we have universities.  Thanks to Christianity, we have a notion of human rights.  To whom do we owe thanks for the destruction we see in our world?  Marriages?  The unborn?  Civil discourse? We should judge a belief system by its fruits.  While nobody would claim that followers of Christ are without blemish, doesn't Christianity make more sense?  It has, after all, built and sustained an entire civilization never mind the many attempts to eliminate it.

Clinton Romesha’s New York Times bestselling book, Red Platoon, details the deadly and savage battle that occurred in command outpost Keating in 2009.  This remote battle station in a far-flung part of Afghanistan was overrun by Taliban fighters before most of the American soldiers were even out of bed.  Described as a toilet bowl, command outpost Keating was, geographically speaking, surrounded on all sides by mountainous terrain, ideally suited for the enemy to wage an attack. Its location did not make any sense.  The soldiers inhabiting Keating knew this.  The Taliban fighters banked on it.  An attack was inevitable.  The Taliban threw everything in their arsenal at Keating, hoping to wipe the Americans off the map. Were it not for the sheer grit and quick thinking of the Americans, their plans would surely have succeeded.  The Americans were able to regroup, strategize, gather ammunition, and eventually call in airstrikes.  The battle lasted fourteen hours.  The author of Red Platoon was awarded the Medal of Honor.  Eight American soldiers were killed.  The brotherhood that was forged during those horrible hours cannot be broken. Red Platoon is a fast read.  The account is gripping; Romesha’s minute-by-minute telling of events offers readers a glimpse into what combat is really like.  It is not Hollywood.  It is not pretty or glamorous.  It is brutal and bloody, tragic and oftentimes confusing.  What interests me, though, is who the soldiers actually fought for.  You have likely heard before how the men do not fight for a strategic position or an idea or a political stance or whatever their leaders have dreamed up in their command posts.  No, the soldiers fight for each other. In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s vicious assassination, it is difficult not to see some comparisons.  Academia today is overrun by progressive ideas to the point that many students simply default to that one way of looking at the world.  Challenging the institution-approved orthodoxy will get a person canceled or, as in the case with Kirk, killed.  It does not matter, dear listeners, what you or I think about Kirk’s ideas. The Socratic method has been replaced with the mindless repetition of ideas that have been curated and endorsed by those in power.  Independent thinking is gone.  There is only one sheet of music, one point of view.  And any other will be shouted off campus. It is a battle which makes me think that what we might need is some of the grit that was on display in a dangerously remote part of Afghanistan.  Those who want free inquiry, free speech, and the type of dialogue that builds, not tears down would do well to adopt a stick-to-it-ness posture, bravely standing in the breach against those who are hellbent on silencing those they deem to be dissenters against what is clearly an ever-changing ideology that is only getting more and more radical.  Where will it end?  Is it even designed to end? We should all be mindful of falling into an us vs. them worldview.  This, I believe, would be to capitulate to a way of understanding the world that divides and creates discord.  This would only perpetuate the problem; indeed, it would be to read from the same script as the Marxists.  Our so-called Taliban, I propose, are not like the flesh and blood militants in Romesha’s book.  Our Taliban is made up of broken ideas, dangerous and warped ideas, ideas, to be sure, that bewilder and avert our gaze away from what is true and good.  Of course, someone might counter by asking the question, Who gets to decide what is true and good?  My answer?  Look at the fruit.  Some ideas are sown that become bad fruit: despair, addled thinking, broken families, staggering levels of narcissism.  Other ideas are sown that become good fruit: stability, clarity, purpose, humility.  God’s law is imprinted on every human heart, which means that we know what we know.  May we all find the grit and determination to defend it. 

The preface to Dr. Paul Kengor’s 2020 book The Devil and Karl Marx includes the following assertion: “Any ideology (and, here, he is talking about communism) with a trail of rot like this is not of God but of the forces against God.  It is not of God’s creation but a fallen angel’s anti-creation.  It is not of the light but of the dark.”  The impact Karl Marx and his pernicious ideology has had on the world as we know it cannot be understated. Famously calling religion “the opium of the people,” Marx disdained the Christian Church with a passion that is difficult to fathom  To him, the Church served to dupe the poor masses – the Proletariat – into settling for the crumbs left by the upper class, the Bourgeoisie. What Marx wanted was a revolution.  The Proletariat needed to rise up against the Bourgeoisie and reclaim what was theirs all along. From there, the Proletariat would act as a temporary dictator until the new world order would naturally evolve into a classless and, notably, Godless society. What Marx likely purposefully missed, however, was the reality of human nature. Humans do not readily give up power after they have secured it. The state dominated. It was the new godhead.  And anybody who dared to deviate from the script was viciously punished. Disappeared even. This is why Stalin, for example, received such long and energetic applause during his speeches. Nobody wanted to be the first to stop clapping as this might be seen as disloyalty to the party. A common thug in his youth, Stalin knew how to use brute force to get his way, which, it turns out, is quite ironic given whose ideas he used to gird his cult of personality.  Karl Marx, Kengor notes, was a “slob.”  He continues, “[Marx] was sloppy in his home life, in his desire to earn an income, in his keeping of papers, and even in his research.  He avoided the factories and farms for which he devised prodigious plans for their mass nationalization and collectivization. ... He embodied the worst stereotype of isolated academics who never deign to intermingle with the rubes they profess to represent.  The champagne socialist at Columbia University sees no need to actually sit at a kitchen table in Peoria with some farmer-bumpkin who votes Republican and clings to his God and guns.”  To be sure, it seems to be apparent that Marx was a beta male who sought to weasel power for himself any way he could.  The alphas won battles.  The alphas created great industries.  The alphas were inventive and hardworking.  Marx’s answer?  Take it.  Confiscate it.  Redistribute the wealth.  And then lie to the revolutionary powers that made it happen by saying that the dictatorship of the proletariat is only temporary. A part of me is struck by the sheer ignorance of many across college campuses in the United States who openly embrace Marxism and its fraternal twin, Socialism.  But another part of me is able to make sense of this embrace of Marxism.  Is it not easier to take than to earn? To let others do the hard work? Years ago, I was offered firewood.  A few trees had fallen in the backyard of the house of some friends.  All I had to do was cut them into chunks then split them with a go-devil.  I labored by myself all day – cut and split and generated a sizable pile – and toward the end of that day, I noticed something peculiar, something that was not a part of the agreement.  One by one, my friends started taking the split wood away, stacking it up next to their house.  I said nothing.  It was not a big deal.  But I could not help but understand Communism a bit more in that experience.  Without asking, without renegotiating the terms, they left me half the pile and two questions: What proclivities are greenlit by Marxism, and how does a right relationship with God keep these same proclivities at bay?  I certainly have my answer and the callouses on my hands to back it up. https://www.amazon.com/Devil-Karl-Marx-Communisms-Infiltration/dp/1505114446

In fear for his life, Old Testament prophet, Elijah, fled from the evil machinations of Jezebel and into the wilderness whereupon he found a solitary broom tree.  He sat beneath it and prayed for death, saying “Enough, Lord!  Take my life, for I am no better than my ancestors” after which he reclined and fell asleep.  He had had enough.  In his mind, his best days were behind him and what remained of his life would certainly be a hard slog. But this would not be the case. No sooner than he slipped off into a slumber did a messenger touch him – an angel – and said, “Get up and eat!”  The scripture continues, “He (Elijah) looked and there at his head was a hearth cake and a jug of water.  After he ate and drank, he lay down again, but the angel of the Lord came back a second time, touched him, and said, ‘Get up and eat or the journey will be too much for you!  He got up, ate, and drank; then strengthened by that food, he walked forty days and forty nights to the mountain of God, Horeb.” As with so much scripture, a person could angle into this bit in a number of ways.  What is of interest to me, dear listeners, is God’s response to what seems to be Elijah’s existential crisis.  When the Old Testament prophet wants to throw in the towel, God says no.  He has other plans.  Elijah’s story is not over. Likely many of us can relate to Elijah’s feelings of hopelessness.  We are living, after all, in what might be described as a post-postmodern world with its massive fallout of meaninglessness.  Society remains uprooted, and the scramble to make sense of our world and our lives plays out in a variety of contexts.  It is mirrored back to us in our entertainment.  It is the reason so many self-medicate or claim rightly or not some psychological disorder.  If we are lucky, we find God, but the truth remains that even the churched among us struggle.  We may have a foothold and a firm grasp, but the wind still blows hard in our faces, blurring our vision, inciting some fear. In the Catholic Church, a believer who is in danger of death can receive what is called the viaticum.  Essentially, it is a part of the Last Rites; it is the final time the believer receives the Holy Eucharist.  For you non-Catholics, that is the little wafer believers consume during Communion.  The term comes from the Latin word, “viaticum,” which means “provisions for a journey.”  Accordingly, one’s story does not end with the passing from this life to the next; it is merely beginning. Perhaps Elijah’s story is yet another example of how human perception can never measure up to God’s.  We are citizens of the 21st century, and if you are like me, you, too, live in the United States.  Craziness abounds.  So much nonsense seems to rule the day.  It is tempting to be like Elijah: run away into the wilderness, pray a prayer of defeat.  But God says no.  He has a greater plan.  And that includes what happens to us when we leave our mortal coil.  Just as Elijah was refreshed with the hearth cake and jug of water, so, too, are we made ready for a great and wonderful journey with the viaticum, ironically on the place, our deathbed, where the world claims it all ends. Perhaps this is the greatest nonsense of all: to believe that it ends there.  Perhaps the whole of our lives is the runup to something inexplicably beautiful.  Elijah could not see it then.  Maybe we are in the same boat now.  I, for one, rest in the knowledge that my life is a stream that is flowing toward a great river.  I can only hope to be ready when the waters meet, belly satisfied, eyes wide open, eager to put one foot in front of the other. 

David Herbert Lawrence, popularly known as D.H. Lawrence, famously penned a poem entitled “Self-Pity.”  Published in 1929, it reads: I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself. The poem is short, but it captures so much truth about the natural world and ourselves.  What is it about human beings that we sometimes feel self-pity?  We bemoan our lot and fixate on how the universe must be conspiring against us.  Not so with a wild thing.  A bird.  A bunny.  A trout.  A deer.  Self-pity never seems to be in order. I am fascinated by this poem because Lawrence is making a comment on both human tendency and human potential.  On one hand, he acknowledges the proclivity in our species to retreat into a woe-is-me posture; however, on the other hand, he seems to be issuing a challenge to his readers to, in effect, be a wild thing.  Embrace it.  Live it out.  Shun the temptation to pity oneself and, instead, live more boldly. As I look around society today with so many inclined to claim victim status or even special status – look no further than a job application to see what boxes they ask an applicant to check at the end – I wonder if we have built up a culture of self-pity.  Another way to look at it is that, perhaps, we have leaned so far into the phenomenon of putting everybody and everything into distinct social or cultural or political silos that self-pity has become the default way of seeing oneself in the world.  I need special favor because of X.  I should have special accommodations because of Y.  The immutable characteristics about myself are no fault of my own and, therefore, I am powerless.  Deserving of some unique arrangement.  And pity.  Yours and mine. D.H. Lawrence likely wrote this well-known poem at a time when the decadence of the 1920s was at its peak: booze and sex, revelry and thumbing noses at the authorities, which, arguably also suggested that it was a time of spiritual bankruptcy.  Many were trying to fill the God-shaped hole inside with the wrong things, and the outcome was a disaster.  One might even claim that Lawrence’s challenge was to embrace what scripture says about each of us – that we were fearfully and wonderfully made.  God, in other words, made us for so much more than just parties and debauchery.  Self-pity is effectively not a part of our design.  We are stronger than we realize.  We are more capable than we realize.  Who is telling us the lie that we are not?  The answer is clear.  The evil one, of course.  Who but the devil would insist that we are weak and ill-equipped for this life?  To be sure, how would we all act differently if we knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that our very Creator had endowed each one of us with the grit and the tools to live life to the fullest and be content, dare I say happy? If we take the position that self-pity is actually a form of pride in that it is fundamentally inward-looking then like any other form of pride, it should be avoided.  But the question remains: how should the wild get on with the domesticated when the world is built for the latter?  Perhaps, like the bird in the poem, we must simply bide our time for another fall. 

Arthur Miller’s 1949 stage play, Death of a Salesman, resonates with me even today.  Willy Loman, the aged and sad protagonist, wants nothing more than to be liked: by his clients, by his boss, by his sons and wife.  Being liked is what gives his life meaning.  Being liked is what gives Willy Loman purpose. But time waits for no man, and after a failed business trip to Boston, Willy, at the prompting of his wife, Linda, approaches his boss to see about getting a local assignment.  The grind of traveling up and down the East coast has caught up with Willy, and he would like to get a less taxing arrangement.  Howard, his boss, agrees that Willy is tired, but instead of reassigning him, he lets him go, saying that Willy is no longer permitted to represent the company.  Willy loses his temper; the scene is painful to watch. From there, Willy Loman’s life descends into a frantic search for something to hold onto, something that will help him make sense of losing his job and getting old while simultaneously dealing with his two wayward sons, Biff and Happy, and the discovery by one of his boys of an affair Willy had in Boston some time ago. Life as he knows it is unraveling, and the safe spaces are becoming fewer and fewer.  Even his own kids turn on him, pretending not to know him in public.  He is not liked.  A man who worked his entire life to pay off a mortgage lives in a house nobody wants to visit.  Which explains the first suicide attempt.  Unsuccessful.  And the second.  A success.  Few attend his funeral.  His popularity merely a figment of his imagination. It is difficult not to feel pity for a man who tried so hard.  As his name suggests, he was the epitome of the little guy – low man – who played by the rules and, perhaps, even dared to believe that he had a reputation – that people valued him as a human being and not only as a cog in some vast money-making machine.  But the latter really was the truth.  Willy Loman was a nobody who thought he was a somebody, and he pushed his sons, especially Biff, to believe the same.  Biff used to play football.  He was poised to be a real star on the gridiron.  But in a moment of weakness, he stole a pen, foiling the entire plan.  He made nothing of himself, preferring instead to work in the open air with his shirt off. He knew his father for what he was: a man who cheats on his wife.  Biff could never subscribe to Willy’s worldview.  The damage was too great.  The facade was exposed for what it was: a facade, a pretense, a charade. This play, dear listeners, has much to teach us about social media and our addiction to likes.  We only show our best selves on whatever platform and enjoy the dopamine rush when our posts garner likes or hearts.  But, if we are to be honest, are we one in the same as Willy Loman?  We not only create worlds where everyone likes us, but we actually believe them, too.  We are victims of our own desire to belong and be liked, which means that we will carefully curate what is seen on social media and what is not.  Biff, you see, in his discovery of Willy Loman’s infidelity, finds out the truth.  And it damages him.  He becomes disillusioned with it all.  He wants to quit.  He wants to walk away.  Tear his shirt off.  Work outdoors. What does it mean, then, to live a life searching for likes?  Perhaps the answer is staring at us from the stage.  Willy Loman dies alone.  Does the quest for more and more likes result in the exact opposite of the intended purpose?  Look at the current generation, glued to their screens, subscribed to a half-dozen social media platforms.  And depressed.  Addicted.  Anxious.  Lost.  But not old.  Irony of ironies.  A despair that did not take a lifetime to reach. 

Scott Gould can be forgiven for plot structures that are a little too on the nose and convenient. The events that unfold in his book, Peace Like A River, are neatly stacked, making the story feel a bit contrived. He can also be forgiven for being a trifle too liberal with endowing each and every character with some quirk. The formula chaffs; indeed, it compromises Gould’s ultimate thesis, which, in the end, very much manages to transcend stylistic choices and blossom into a poignant and, in this day and age of father-knows-nothing, timely rallying cry for the uncompromising importance of being a dad and what that means in terms of navigating death, aging, guilt, and loss while at the same time summoning up the guts to be hopeful despite it all. Elwin confesses that he hooked up with a woman who was too young for him. This admission sets the tone for a story in which time factors heavily into relationships. For the middle-aged protagonist, this creeps up in clever ways. Thom, the mildly autistic son who was the result of said one-night stand, is described as talking like a person much older than the mere thirteen years he has accumulated on this earth. Another thirteen-year-old, Lonnie Tisdale, was a boyhood friend of Elwin, and he made a decision that seemed to shape how Elwin views the world – indeed, how he came to understand his relationship with the Old Man, his father, who had once taken him to the Black River to bathe in its mysterious waters as a way to begin to heal. There is even something to be said about the motel room he rents – number 113 – that underscores how the hourglass is an unspoken character in Gould’s just over two-hundred page novel. Elwin is not the only character who experiences romance in the book. Thom, too, finds love or, likely, infatuation with the bookish daughter of the motel’s proprietor. The parallel Gould draws between his coming-of-age through the untimely death of his friend and Thom’s coming-of-age through his first tender experience with feminine charms is appropriate given the larger trajectory of his story: a man coming from despair and aimlessness to clarity and stability. It all ultimately comes down to a small piece of property and the river that glides by it. The Black River, a place where some deaths were cheated and others not, remains central to the literary tapestry Gould weaves for this very reason. Like life, the current can go any way. It can be capricious and dangerous, refreshing and, yes, fun, but, in the end, it is, in this story, the single backdrop for Elwin’s own life journey. A chapter concludes with the death of the Old Man. A chapter begins with a reordered relationship with his son. He never had any choice but to stay. Perhaps this is the real peace on offer from the river. Peace Like A River may be too scripted in parts. The arrival and fast-friendship of Willie Nelson, the cat, to Thom would give cat owners their doubts. Gould’s vision, however, manages to break free of this and other creative choices to become a story worth reading – a tale about fathers and sons and the life that occurs between and among them. That he accomplishes this feat at all is a testament to his ability to see what really matters. It is on this final point, though, that I would like to editorialize.  The literary canon is not without its stories about father/son relationships.  To be sure, it is arguably upon this sort of story that Western culture was built.  It is in our society’s DNA, which, therefore, begs the question why father/son stories do not enjoy more visibility.  The boys need help, and I contend that books like Gould’s are in a position to do just that: create mental space to ask questions about what it means to be authentically male.  Not toxic. Not some silly caricature.  But real.  In line with God’s blueprint.

Twentieth-century French philosopher Jacques Derrida famously argued that there is slippage in language, resulting from the break between the signifier and the signified.  A signifier is the word we see – on a piece of paper, a billboard, a computer or smartphone screen, wherever – and the signified is what that word points to in order to give it meaning.  We see the word “cat,” for example – a signifier – and the signified would be the image we conjure up or the reality before us: a whiskered creature with soft fur, a long tail, paws, and the ability to make a sound, meow.  Or we see the word “candle” -- again, the signifier – and we envision a cylindrical object with a wick in the center of one of its flat sides that can be lit to give off light and ambiance.  This is the signified.  We have the word – the signifier – and we have what that word denotes. What might be obvious already, dear listeners, is that while I might see the word “dog” and immediately think of my beloved and incredibly needy canine companion, Arrow, someone else may see their dog or the memory of a dog or the neighbor’s dog who might not be particularly friendly.  Slippage.  The signifier and the signified are not always if rarely aligned.  One person’s cat is a cuddly, rainy-day friend.  Another person’s cat is a quick trip to the pharmacy to buy allergy medication. Where I would like to direct our collective attention is on the peculiar return of modern hieroglyphics to public discourse, if we even want to call it that.  Of course, I am talking about emojis – those cartoon-like pictures we inject into written correspondence.  Emails.  Texts.  Reviews.  Threads in discussions.   They have become an extension of our alphabet.  Different letters, if you will, that shape the tone of what we are trying to convey.  It is, I would argue, a fascinating return to what our distant ancestors did on the walls in caves and pyramids.  Pictures to capture content.  Images to communicate reality.  All very rudimentary.  A regression to how we first tried to understand ourselves and the world around us. This could mean a couple of things.  One possibility might be that the emoji phenomenon is an indication that Derrida’s so-called slippage has reached its limits.  For a species to survive, there must be common ground.  That requires shared meaning, pure and simple.  Perhaps we have reverted to the use of images to communicate precisely because they are basic.   We are starting afresh.  We are returning to the fundamentals. The other possibility is that the signifier/signified slippage has been so great that reconciliation is impossible and that the emoji phenomenon points directly to the absurdity that our species is poised to eliminate itself, not by some terrible war or disease, but by remaining alone and isolated.  We do not have the language to get along anymore, in other words.  We just have cute images, and we are happy to defer what they mean, what our intent in using them might be in order to avoid both conflict and, importantly, contact.  Birthrates in the Western world are already plummeting with many individuals in their childbearing years choosing to forego parenthood and instead adopt a dog.  Or a cat.  And what sort?  Whatever they can imagine.  They prefer the cave.  The cave is safe.  The cave provides shelter.  But now it is not the fire that illuminates their faces but the screen.  Always now the screen with its many hieroglyphs.  As for which possibility is more predominant, dear listeners, I will leave it to you to decide.  Understand, though, that Jacques Derrida was very much correct in how he linked language to the health of a society.  Words have meaning, and how we use them matters.  A cat emoji might be harmless.  And so, too, a dog emoji and a smiley face.  But we have all seen the smiling poop emoji.  What will be written about us in centuries to come?  Would any of it even be recognizable to the concerned literate of today? 

Years ago, my paternal grandfather taught me about the benefits of lying fallow. It is an agrarian term, meaning to leave alone for a period of time a piece of land typically used to grow produce. Simply put, it is the act of not sowing seed.  Let the field grow as it may. No planting. No fertilizing. No weeding.  Nothing.  The idea is to let a piece of land naturally replenish itself. Rest. Not be worked.  Be. Grandfather shared this idea with me at time in my life when I was all about doing, running from task to task, doing my best to get it all done.  It was a busy time, indeed.  I was taking classes, preparing to take more, and strategizing about how the beginning of my career would look.  I was, in a phrase, getting ready to launch, which is why Grandfather’s advice came at the right time. My work as a college professor involves leading and even joining my students in mentally wrestling with ideas, but it also involves a good deal of advising.  Many times, it is not the text that matters so much as it is why my students are studying the text at all.  Students are, of course, more than just minds; they are individuals with hopes and aspirations.  A true educator knows this to be true.  We mold the whole human being, not just the brain.  We help them to become better versions of themselves in all their facets. All of this is to say that I have had many students who do not want to be in class. They are not quite ready for the workforce, and the military was never really an option, so they enroll in college, forgetting that their experience in high school was lackluster. This explains the quiet hostility I sometimes receive from those who are in class only because they did not know what else to do with their lives.  They will show up late, if at all.  Scroll mindlessly on their cell phones.  Nod off.  Neglect to turn in any work.  And, I hasten to say, stand dumbfounded when they inevitably fail the class.  They ask, Why?  I ask, Why? right back at them.  And if they do not take careful stock of themselves, then all of that time has been wasted, and the college experience takes on a bitter flavor.  It happens every year. I have grown to sympathize with these students because I know what society demands of them.  Society wants constant action, constant success.  It is a go-go-go existence that leaves no room to take a breath and reflect.  This is where the concept of lying fallow can potentially become an absolute necessity. Before I turned the page on one chapter of my life and began writing the next, I took some down time; I allowed myself to lie fallow.  I have to wonder if this wouldn’t benefit so many of my students as well.  How would it positively impact a student for them to lie fallow for a season?  Would they be replenished?  Recharged?  Would they have a better understanding of what they are being called to be, called to do in their lives?  For me, the answer is yes.  But what would lying fallow look like for you, dear listeners?  How are we hurried?  How are we inhibited from pausing to reflect on the state of our lives, where we are going, what we might like to do? Time can be a tyrant.  We only have so much of it, so the tendency is to want to fill it with accomplishment after accomplishment.  We try to use our time wisely, but is it always the prudent thing to be active 24/7?  My grandfather did not think so.  Good farmers do not think so.  And I have come to agree with them both.  Even in scripture, we are called to observe a sabbath day.  It was never a random demand.  To be sure, it is a demand that has our best interests in mind.  We were not created to be bitter or constantly tired or perpetually harried.  We were created to be.  Human beings, not human doings. You have no doubt seen the concept before.  So identify an area where you might be stymied. And let the weeds grow.  Let the rains fall.  Do not take your plow to it. It is not yet ready. The direction you seek will come in its own good time. 

In an early episode, I shared how much the Transcendentalists impacted my decision to major in English.  Ralph Waldo Emerson, in specific, captured my imagination with his erudite rallying calls to trust thyself, to never imitate others, to believe in the sacredness of your own mind.  In retrospect, I can see how this would be quite appealing to a young man full of ambition and (ahem) himself; however, it was not the Sage of Concord who first introduced me to the power of language.  That honor goes to Chuck D. of Public Enemy fame.  You heard correctly, dear listeners.  Before I studied Emerson and his contemporaries with the zeal of someone parched for wisdom and direction, I was listening to songs on cassette tapes with lyrics like “fight the power” and “Never badder than bad cause the brother is madder than mad at the fact that’s corrupt as a senator.”  Looking at the lyrics now, I am amazed that I was ever able to make sense of them all those years ago.  Perhaps Chuck D.’s delivery matters.  His passion.  His intensity.  The beat was simply there to scaffold the message. This, I believe, was my introduction to the power of literature.  Yes, the words are important, but there is something about how they come together to become more than the sum of their parts.  A good work of literature – indeed, a good song (rap, country, pop, what have you) -- has a soul, if you will, which means that a reader seeking to understand the work dissects the language, yes, but also peers into its core.  Mulls over how the words are juxtaposed.  Intuits motivation.  Appreciates diction.  And, importantly, recognizes the work as a living thing.  Public Enemy’s songs were appealing not because of their linguistic merit, per se, so much as they were appealing, at least to one kid growing up in rural Pennsylvania in the late eighties, because they had a spirit.  And once I grew to understand that, I could easily pivot to a study of the so-called classics to look for the same.  Chuck D. introduced me to Ralph E.  Emerson.  Ralph Waldo Emerson.  And he had friends.  Thoreau.  Whitman.  Fuller.  Douglass.  Transcendentalists by name or, certainly, beneficiaries of an intellectual movement that championed individualism and self-determination.  A movement whose members labored to throw off the shackles of groupthink and mindless conformity, fighting their own power so that, as Emerson writes, we can “hitch our wagon to a star” and become all that God wants us to be. I would, therefore, make the following argument about the humanities: It will not perish.  Indeed, it cannot perish because we are all hardwired to seek out the boundless wisdom that can be found therein.  We can all recognize the spirit in something.  We certainly gravitate to different genres.  For me, rap music served as a gateway into poetry and prose.  I admit that sounds odd but whatever.  Our paths do not have to be orthodox.  Indeed, I submit to any one of you, dear listeners, who might now have the enormous responsibility of raising children, teaching, or even mentoring somebody that what you might perceive in your charges as silly or wasteful or nonsensical as possibly being part of a much grander plan that has more color, more texture than you can imagine.  I am a tenured full professor of English at Georgia State University – Perimeter College.  Decades ago, playing and rewinding and playing again, rewinding again, on and on, I was a youth whose curiosity was piqued by the lyrical vehemence of a man whose life experience was nothing like my own: urban-dwelling and black.  But Chuck D. flipped a switch, illuminating a room that still overflows with urgent, impassioned voices. 

Want your work reviewed and featured?https://48bconsulting.com/book-reviews/Much has been said and written about John Steinbeck’s classic 1937 novella, Of Mice and Men. The tale of two bindlestiffs, Lennie and George, teaches readers about loyalty and love, sacrifice and justice while also imparting the value of parallelism and foreshadow in storytelling.  For those who would benefit from a refresher, Lennie and George are two Depression-era laborers who crisscross the countryside looking for work. The story opens with the two about to arrive at a ranch.   Lennie has been hiding a dead mouse in his pocket.  George, clearly his caretaker, demands that his dimwitted but powerful charge give it up.  George is the intelligent member of the pair while Lennie is simple and childlike.  After a small protest, Lennie concedes. Those familiar with this novella know that Lennie has always been enamored of soft things: mice, bunnies, puppies, and the hair of attractive women.  He got himself in some trouble at their previous place of employment, which makes readers attentive to how he might do the same at the ranch.  Lennie’s fate is practically sealed from the beginning.  Too dumb to stay out of trouble, he quickly enough gets into trouble with the wife of the boss’s son, breaking her neck as he gets lost in petting her head.  He flees.  The ranch-hands put tother a posse.  But George finds him first and, after distracting his large and simple-minded friend, shoots him in the head in an act of love and protection.  The debate continues still. What is interesting throughout this masterpiece is Steinbeck’s command of timing.  Before George kills his friend, Carlson, a ranch-hand who has been pestering Candy, another ranch-hand up there in years, to put his equally old dog down, finally gets his way.  Carlson says to the old man, “If you want me to, I’ll put the old devil out of his misery right now and get it over with.  Ain’t nothing left for him.  Can’t eat, can’t see, can’t even walk without hurtin’.”  to which Candy, clearly affected by the thought of losing his beloved pet replies, “Maybe tomorra.  Le’s wait till tomorra.”  Carlson is not having it, and very reluctantly, Candy gives in.  “Awright -- take ‘im,” he says before refusing to look at his dog and laying back on his bunk and staring at the ceiling. Carlson retrieves his Luger and gently leads the old dog outside.  The anticipation begins to build. Someone offers to play cards.  Someone else hears a gnawing sound coming from under the floor and suggests that it might be a rat.  Candy remains motionless.  Everybody is waiting for the gunshot.  What is, in my humble opinion, dear listeners, genius about this scene is that the time it takes to read from the moment the dog is led outside to the inevitable gunshot is, roughly, the amount of time it would really take to perform this act in real life.  Steinbeck brings the reader to that sad and charged moment in how he inserts some awkward small talk into the scene.  The reader is present with Candy and the others in those dreadful moments before Carlson pulls the trigger.  Time is leveraged in such a way as to make the killing of Candy’s dog just as painful to the reader as to Candy himself.  The event is anchored to a common passage of time -- one fictional, the other very much real – and the result delivers a gut-punch of raw emotion. Of course, this shooting foreshadows the final shooting.  Candy later laments that it should have been him who put down his dog.  George clearly recalls this detail when he makes the decision to “put down” his friend, Lennie.  Running through it all, however, is a pacing we are all familiar with – a sense of time that is not foreign to our everyday experience – and the overall result is the ability to see the characters as we see ourselves, flawed human beings doing our best every second, every minute, every hour we are gifted. 

Popular during medieval and Renaissance Europe, The Great Chain of Being is a hierarchical concept that organizes the entirety of the universe, beginning with God and going down to the lowest of life forms.  It ranks every member of creation as a way to understand it and, hence, give deference where deference is due.  First, there is the Trinitarian God, and beneath Him, the various orders of angels. After that comes humankind, and then the animal kingdom with its proper order and then the plants followed by the minerals. On one hand, this cosmic hierarchy is indicative of humankind’s deep urge to organize and classify surrounding creation.  We all have a penchant for establishing order out of chaos, which, itself, is indicative of the nature that was bestowed upon us by God.  As God established order out of the formless void so, too, do we do the same in our own small but significant ways.  On the other hand, however, when we look at what humankind has done with hierarchies, in general, we see quite plainly that their use unleashes in us the baser impulses, namely to assert power over others.  We see a hierarchy, and we want to jockey toward the front or, at least, as far as we can go.  So we began to expand on the hierarchy.  No longer was it just humankind; now the hierarchy broke down to the varieties of humans. I do not want to get into an exploration of colonialism.  I have covered it here and still may cover it more down the road.  My point is that the lust for power may be humankind’s most prominent Achille’s heel.  We as a species are able to look at a thing – in this case, The Great Chain of Being – and manipulate it to the extent that it favors some and not others. We continue to this day to have conversations about inequality in our midst.  Not too long ago, the place to jockey for was decidedly male and Caucasian.  That was deemed the high point, the favored position. I submit, however, that we are currently in a far worse state of affairs.  The goal in this hierarchically-framed contest is to jockey as far to the front as possible.  Many decades ago, once again, that position was white and male.  What if the new impulse is to jockey even further than that?  Toward the angelic?  Toward God even? Consider, dear listeners, what I am proposing. The Great Chain of Being served humankind well in terms of understanding creation.  There is a ranking order.  God is at the top.  But the stain of sin prompted humankind to abuse that hierarchy – add to it classifications that benefitted some and hurt others.  But while we have largely reconciled that wrong, though, admittedly, not perfectly and not completely, the stain of sin remains, which means the Achille’s heel remains. Not vanquished as we have believed.  But morphed into an even more dangerous thirst.  Being white and male has no more appeal because it has been stamped out by an army of progressives.  Now the prize is a higher order.  No longer natural but supernatural. And what would be the result? What was the result before?  The answer is already before us.  Abuse.  Violence.  Degradation of every sort. And though believing that anybody could actually jockey toward and become the angelic or godly is the very height of delusion, this would not impede those who are convinced that they have achieved the impossible from looking down their noses at mere mortals and unleashing a torrent of ill-treatment. The days of colonization of the outsiders by the insiders are not over.  It has only evolved to the point where those in power have god-complexes – have an understanding of themselves that puts them far above the majority in The Great Chain of Being.  Therefore, some questions remain: How far will that majority let them run with their delusion?  How long before the law of tooth and claw takes over?  When will the majority refuse to be pacified by gods of their own making?  Though time will certainly tell, history is not without answer.