Animal Changes

Animal Changes is the topic of the final episode of Season One of the N*EW* Thoughts podcast! 

I open with a viral Donald Trump claim about immigrants eating pets and use it to explore how we dehumanize people by turning them into “animals.”

I then trace my own journey from a hunting childhood to a Christian conversion and tentative vegetarianism, share stories of my companion pets, and criticize careless hunting and factory farming.

The episode brings in thinkers—Derrida, Ken Stone, Carol J. Adams, Val Plumwood, and Martha Nussbaum—to discuss animal sentience, the predator–prey dynamic in the Bible, and the ethical implications of edibility and sacrifice.

I encourage us to treat sentient animals as beings with species-specific lives, call for more compassionate practices, and close the season by asking listeners to “rest from cruel dominion” and rethink our relationship to animals.

EXPLORE:

Read a preview of Tony’s essay, *The Bible Isn’t Edible.* 

Read Tony’s sermon, *Rest From Cruel Dominion.*

Read *Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy* by Matthew Scully.

Read *The Animal That Therefore I Am* by Jacques Derrida.

Read *Reading the Hebrew Bible with Animal Studies* by Ken Stone.

Read *The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegan Critical Theory* by Carol J. Adams.

Read *The Eye of the Crocodile* by Val Plumwood (edited by Lorraine Shannon).

Read *Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility* by Martha C. Nussbaum. 

Read “Questions of Biblical Ambivalence and Authority Under A Tree Outside Delhi; Or, The Postcolonial And The Postmodern” in *Postcolonial Biblical Criticism: Interdisciplinary Intersections*, by Stephen D. Moore:

Read *Jacob’s Wound: Homoerotic Narrative in the Literature of Ancient Israel* by Theodore Jennings, Jr.

On the Urgent Matter of the Bible; Or, On How Vegetarians Should Use The Bible

AI-generated image depicting Genesis 27, emphasizing vv 16-17, inscribed on the skin of a goat.

“Vegetarianism is an act of the imagination. It reflects an ability to imagine alternatives to the texts of meat.” (Adams 2024 [1990], 180).

  1. How Should Vegetarians Use the Bible?

New Testament scholar Stephen Moore draws our attention to a “notable interfacing” of postcolonial, poststructuralist, and biblical readings in Homi Bhabha’s essay, “Signs Taken for Wonders” (2005, 81). This “is one essay in which Bhabha is more than usually emphatic,” Moore observes, “that the colonized are engaged in active subversion of the colonizer’s discourse, in this case, the colonizer’s Scripture” (2005, 90).

Moore explains that in “Signs Taken for Wonders,” Bhabha describes a gathering in May 1817 of “some 500 souls, men, women, and children, seated in the shade of trees [outside Delhi] and engaged in scripture reading and debate” (2005, 86). The souls gathered in the shade are taught by an Indian missionary, who tells them, “These books . . . teach the religion of the European Sahibs. It is THEIR book; and they have printed it in our language, for our use.” Hearing this, someone replies, “Ah! no, that cannot be, for they eat flesh” (2005, 91, italics added).

The 500 agree to be baptized, but they refuse to receive the Eucharist “because the Europeans eat cow’s flesh, and this will never do for us” (Moore 2005, 91). They decline to complete the Catholic initiation process by receiving the vegetarian Meal of meals, the Eucharist, because Europeans eat meat, especially cow’s flesh.

But what do the Indian people, who believe cows are sacred, do with the Bible of the European meat-eaters? A second missionary observes that “[every Indian] would gladly receive a Bible. Why? That he may store it up with curiosity; sell it for a few pice, or use it for waste paper” (Moore 2005, 92)

For “every Indian,” the Bible of the Western meat-eaters is a collector’s item, a cheap commodity, or toilet paper. Moore describes such uses of biblical literature as forms of “resistant reading of the colonial Bible” (Moore 2005, 92, emphasis original)

Such resistant reading practices, “ones that resist by refusing to read,” hover over the surfaces of the Bible. They enable resistance “by remaining at the level of the material signifier, the papery substance itself—wondrously thin, almost transparent, yet wholly tangible . . .” (Moore 2005, 92).

The nearly 175-year-old example of 500 Indian Christian vegetarians, including children, might shock modern Western vegetarian readers of biblical literature into the realization that the Bible can be used in surprising ways, but it isn’t edible. While the contemporary Bible is plant-based, at least in its printed forms, papyrus is not the material condition of the Bible. The Bible is meatier than it first appears, at least to its modern readers.

As we will soon discover, the intuition of the 500 Indian Christian souls—that the Bible’s meatiness is inside-out—is more than confirmed by the texts that make up biblical literature. In fact, biblical literature is structurally wedded to a predator-prey dynamic. This presents a serious problem for the Bible’s Western vegetarian and vegan readers.

In what follows, I attend to the Bible’s material condition, to the reason for its textual survival—namely, dead animals. I then make the predator-prey logic that runs through biblical literature visible. Finally, through a (re)reading of Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Crisis of Verse” and 2 Samuel 6, I propose a queer vegetarian hermeneutics that refuses the “common sense” of (divine) predation and intervenes in it, letting fall through the meaty “sheet” of the Western Book of books queer possibilities for anti-predatory (non)human animal relations.

This essay is seeking a home in an academic journal; so, the rest of it has been omitted while the essay is under consideration for publication elsewhere. I hope you enjoyed this small preview of its theme and argument!

WORKS CITED

Adams, Carol. J. 2024. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegan Critical Theory. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Original work published in 1990.

Bhabha, Homi. 2004. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge.

Mallarmé, Stéphane. 2007. “Crisis in Verse.” In Divagations. Translated by Barbara Johnson, 201-211. Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press. Original work published in 1897.

Moore, Stephen. D. 2005. Questions of Biblical Ambivalence and Authority Under A Tree Outside Delhi; Or, The Postcolonial And The Postmodern. In Postcolonial Biblical Criticism: Interdisciplinary Intersections. Edited by Stephen D. Moore and Fernando F. Segovia, 79-96. London and New York: T & T Clark International.

The Anti-Homoness of Straight Hipster Politics: On Homo Family Values and the Question of Political Change

David Wojnarowicz, Untitled (Genet), 1990

1.

Hipster irony appeals to overly earnest straight people, especially straight men (and their sometimes adoring queer fans).

Here’s one version of straight hipsterism: Acceptance of homosexuality and homo marriage occurred relatively quickly in the U.S. because homosexuality and homo marriage aren’t really hip.

The homo who desires to marry and build a family wants nothing more, according to the hipster, than to be “one of the boys.” In other words, the legal/political recognition of homos and their family values is not real political change.

2.

Hipsters aren’t wrong, to be fair, for having some fun at the expense of homos who, like hipsters, want to keep their position high up the ladder of respectability and be cool.

Some homos want nothing more than to be straight (but not that straight).

The problem is that hipster self-righteousness requires a sacrifice: homo difference and dignity.

3.

To the hipster, homoness is the enemy of coolness. Homoness is the recapitulation of normie-cis-white-male-straightness. 

That’s why I think hipster irony is just really fucking dull. It’s more of the same: straight (male) resentment and self-righteousness masquerading as progressive politics.

Nothing irritates hipsters more than homo joy and affluence.

4.

That’s why, to riff on David Halperin’s description of straight hipster irony in How To Be Gay (2012), straight hipsters just love to turn homos and their family values into the new normie straight dude. Homos become “fodder for [hispter] irony”: 

By acknowledging straight hipsters’ affection for such quaint cultural forms and practices [like marriage], while refusing to express that affection except in a grotesque, exaggerated fashion, in case someone should get the wrong idea, straight hipster irony maintains and consolidates (though it’s much too cool to flaunt it) a distant and disengaged position for hipsters—that is, a position of relative social privilege (395-96).

Straight hipster irony enables you to distance yourself from your straightness while castigating the desires of homos who want to marry and build families of their own.

5.

Here’s an example of hipster homo (but not that homo) love: “It is weirdly possible to imagine a scenario,” writes one Substack hipster, “where the United States becomes a violently misogynistic white ethnostate, but gay marriage still remains the law of the land.”

Is our hipster arguing that the reason homos and homo marriage gained relatively quick cultural acceptance is that they fit, hand in glove, within the normie logic of “a violently misogynistic white ethnostate”?

Is our hipster asserting that homos and their family values enjoy popular support in the U.S. because they are entirely compatible with normie-cis-white supremacy-straight-guyness (pronouns: he/bruh)? 

Who needs enemies when you have allies like the hipster! 

6.

In his view, homos and their family values have achieved quick legal/political victories because they have chosen to suck the cock of cis-white-straight-dudeness.

“Pointing out that context,” our hipster claims, “is not a critique of the movements that succeeded as being ‘secretly’ conservative or oppressive, but instead a critique of the society that only lets itself do good things for bad reasons” (emphasis added). 

Who needs enemies when you have neighbors like that! 

7.

Anyway, according to the hipster view, Pete Buttegig won the Democratic presidential primary in Iowa in 2019 because he just loves sucking white dick.

Any evidence to the contrary is evidence of a cover-up. 

Yasmin Nair, for example, asserts that even the Buttigieg kids are part of a secret, oppressive conservative plot to win white-normie-straight-bruh political power: 

Given their talent for curation, it’s hard not to wonder if the Buttigieges didn’t also choose their [biracial] children as carefully as Melania Trump chose her outfits. This doesn’t mean that the pair don’t love their incredibly adorable children, but given that even Chasten looks like he was chosen from a catalog of ‘Good Gay Men,’ it’s safe to say that even the most seemingly personal details of Pete’s life are carefully chosen.

8.

Hipster paranoia (i.e., nothing good can happen in people’s hearts or society) may also explain why our hipster fails to mention the HIV/AIDS crisis in his essay.

While the hipster does recognize that straight opposition to homo love was (remains?) violent and horrific, extending well into the 1990s before giving way to growing support for homos and their family values starting in the early 2000s, he does not seem to know that the 1990s were also the worst years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in, for example, Chicago.

The hipster can’t even entertain the idea that witnessing homos suffering and dying in large numbers because of a demonic virus, which our government was too slow to address, might have been a bridge to compassion that led to a genuine change of heart among our fellow citizens. 

9.

And because any legal/political recognition is necessarily a form of assimilation, the hipster can’t risk acknowledging (or take seriously) the substantial legal/political recognitions won by Black and Trans* people over the past few decades.

So, he doesn’t mention that the vast majority of Americans support some form of police reform. Likewise, the hipster doesn’t seem to realize that most Americans do support Trans* people. Our hipster, however, dismisses the very real gender dysphoria experienced by Trans* youth, categorizing it as a common experience for all youth going through puberty.

Also, our hipster doesn’t mention that it was a conservative Supreme Court Justice, Neil Gorsuch, who authored the majority opinion in Bostock v. Clayton County, which declared it unconstitutional to discriminate against Trans* people in the workplace. 

Finally, the hipster’s faith in the straight coddling of homo desire likely blinds him to the fact that the Supreme Court is considering whether or not to relitigate the constitutionality of same-sex marriage on Friday, November 7th, 2025 (Thankfully, the Court chose [for now] not to relitigate homo marriage. It sure must be nice not to have one’s dignity up for routine legal review.)

10. 

Homos and their family values gained quick acceptance, according to sophisticated hipsters, because they offered a lifeline to normie-cis-white-straight-maleness.

In reality, it was the other way around. 

Homosexual activists made surprising use of a straight male invention: the concept of homosexuality.

Homo identity politics was so successful (like all forms of Black, Trans,* and Women’s respectability/identity politics before and after it) precisely because it compromised with the protocols of the dominant masculinist culture, the culture—then, now, and for the foreseeable future—in power.

Specifically, homo identity politics accepted the conservative logic that sex(uality) is gender and gender is sex(uality). 

The idea that homoness is anything more than a sexuality, anything other than a sexual orientation/identity—like a culture, a specific lifestyle, or a uniquely “feminine” way of relating to women, men, and the world—remains a controversial subject in homo circles. 

Take a look at Andrew Sullivan’s Virtually Normal (1996) and Horace Griffin’s Their Own Receive Them Not (2010)–very different versions of homo identity politics.

In How To Be Gay (2012), Halperin cogently analyzes the history of homo identity politics—the history, that is, of what Judith Butler calls a “necessary error” (Bodies That Matter [1993], 175).  

11.

Homo political gains have, indeed, come at the expense of a different history: the history of (homo)sexuality.

The concept of homosexuality was created in the late 1800s (and with the publication of the RSV, incorporated into various biblical texts in the 1940s), but I am more interested in the history of what terms like “homosexuality” are meant to describe—namely, desire. 

We are, in a sense, “born that way.” We are born as wild and wildly desiring animals, entirely dependent on the care of our parents and society—the very “institutions” that frustrate our desires.

Although no one knows what causes one’s sexual orientation, David Halperin offers a promising idea. He claims that “[l]ong before they ever have sex . . . young people have genre” (343).

Briefly, genres are formal rules that govern specific social interactions. Halperin explains that what a server might say to a complete stranger in Ann Arbor differs from what a server in Paris might say in a similar situation without causing a scandal (131). 

Genres are also pragmatic. “[T]hey provide people, in their daily practices, with concrete means of interacting with one another and negotiating specific social situations—and they instruct them in the right ways to do so (132).

Halperin suggests that genre might be all that’s necessary to create consistent, persistent, and insistent non-standard or queer relationships with mainstream cultural forms, including marriage, masculinity, authenticity, abjection, and so on. Halperin writes,

[Genre] may be all [children] need in order to forge certain non-standard relations to normative sexual and gender identities. For by making non-standard emotional connections to cultural forms, they effectively refuse the pressing social invitation to assume a conventional, heteronormative positioning and they effectively acquire non-standard sexual and gender identities, identifications, and orientations (343).

Once acquired, a non-standard relationship to cultural forms becomes, like everything experienced in our youth, difficult to change in adulthood. There are no “fresh starts.”

The second chance that is your adult life is an opportunity to change, to the extent possible, your biological and cultural heritage. If you’re lucky, your adult life is a question: What am I interested in?

12.

Our hipster believes homos have failed to launch. For him, homos and their family values easily fit into the standard mold of normie-cis-white-straight-family values. Acceptance of homo family values is not, according to hipsters, a genuine legal/political change.

Queer theoretical differences, like those between Leo Bersani and Judith Butler (1995), David Halperin and Leo Bersani (1996), Martha Nussbaum and Judith Butler (1999), Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004) and How To Be Gay (2012), are all about the character of and possibilities for real political change.

In a forthcoming essay, I argue that Martha Nussbaum misjudges Judith Butler’s politics as “hip quietism.” Instead, I argue, Butler’s politics is a subtle form of compromised resistance to the norms of straightness.

To be clear, Nussbaum is not opposed to resistance as a political strategy. She is not a radical political figure. For example, Nussbaum does not believe, as Michal Warner does, that “marriage is unethical” (The Trouble With Normal [1999], vii). 

In her review of Warner’s book, Nussbaum highlights the importance of cultural forms and routines for most people (232). Still, I believe she is too optimistic about the kind of change humans can achieve to appreciate the subtlety of Butler’s queer politics. 

13.

It is manifestly true that Butler’s theory is highly pessimistic about the potential for legal/political change. Our being here is premised on being subject to the desires, norms, and influences of the dominant culture. 

Even so, Butler clearly has faith in the possibility of change. Performativity is their term for a limited but creatively resistant form of freedom. 

“The structuring presence of heterosexual constructs within gay and lesbian sexuality,” Butler argues in Gender Trouble (1990), “does not mean that those constructs determine gay and lesbian sexuality nor that gay and lesbian sexuality are derivable or reducible to those constructs. . . . The presence of these norms not only constitute a site of power that cannot be refused, but they can and do become the site of parodic contest and display that robs compulsory heterosexuality of its claims to naturalness and originality” (158, emphasis original). 

The Butlerian subject is us. It is normal and queer. 

14.

In the essay on Butler I hope to finish soon, I also argue that How To Be Gay may be read as a redescription of Butler’s political ambition, as initially described in Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter.

Halperin’s understanding of the politics of homo subculture perfectly captures the character of Butler’s queer politics.

Their queer politics “reckons with the world as it is, with the way we lived and still live now, and [seek] less to change the world than to resist its inflictions (even at the cost of appearing reactionary, rather than progressive)—[thereby offering] an important emotional and political resource . . . to many different kinds of socially disqualified people, at least to those whose sense of irredeemable wrongness makes them willing to pay the achingly high price for it” (219-220). 

15.

In summary, participation in what’s normal is not a matter of personal choice.

You can’t choose your sex(uality) or gender (realities created and enforced by the dominant culture before we come into the world and learn to speak its language).

That comforts some homos. And why should homos be different from nearly everyone else? 

In any case, it is also true that the dominant regime can’t completely control what you do with its normative categories. 

As Fester from the Addams Family reminds us, “Normal is difficult to achieve.”

That’s why queer politics also appeals to many homos. Failing to take “normal” too seriously is the point of queer politics.

16.

But our hipster advises us to embrace a politics of fluidity. We are advised not to stress about sex(uality) and gender norms.

I guess we are to entirely forget our hipster’s essay, wherein he ranks similarly situated minority groups on a ladder of value. If homos are even on his ladder, we are farthest away from the heavenly clouds of political coolness.

17.

The hipster seems to believe that recognizing the legitimate suffering of the hip and queer, Black communities, and Trans* people requires a sacrifice: the difference and dignity of homos. 

If that’s right, the hipster’s argument collaborates with HIV/AIDS. It collaborates with evil. 

Meanwhile, the option of carefully attending to admittedly uncool forms of queer desire remains available, if seldom considered and even less often taken—at least by straight (male) hipsters and their adoring queer fans.  

Tearing down the East Wing, Trump 💩 on us.

– AI generated art based on the piece below –

In tearing down the East Wing—something Trump seems to have known he could not announce in advance—the President dramatically, unabashedly took a 💩 on us. 

I know it seems silly. Of all things that could make me aghast in this moment, the destruction of the East Wing should be last on the list. It isn’t. 

I am very attuned to space. In therapy, I spend weeks talking about my therapist’s office. I am curious about where s/he is sitting, what is hanging on the wall and why, and even what is under their chairs. 

In one case, while picking up keys that I had dropped on the floor, I noticed that my therapist had a dozen or so colorful crystals under their chair. The discovery made me laugh. Now, I have crystals all over my study. 

Buildings are important to me as a pastor. Even in my teenage years, I would preach to my elders: the outside says a lot about what’s on the inside (btw: regarding churches, that is almost always true).

I once served a church that was obsessed with the historical status of its main building. In truth, the building was somewhat ugly and, in many ways, entirely impractical—but it did have some charming, standout features. 

I am not contemptuous of any one church’s history—but I do insist that those histories come into the present. Translation is, in my view, the job of the church (to say nothing about outright change, or creating a future). 

But the insistence on preserving the historical structure blocked any consideration of what the building is for now—and even what such a building, what the property, might be for in the future. 

I wanted rocking chairs on the church porticos. I held new member classes outside, in those same spaces. I even wanted to commission a mural that would connect the church’s mission to the city in which it was a central feature. No and no. 

As I think about the now-demolished East Wing of the White House, I am not immune to the pull of translation, of making changes, and so on. Resisting the temptation to worship historical buildings is a good thing. 

Yet, in tearing down the East Wing, Trump tapped into a deeply human connection to historical places, and he 💩 on it. By destroying the East Wing, the President made it very clear how he feels about us—and at a time we are facing runaway inflation, a government shutdown (i.e., layoffs, unpaid time), rising healthcare costs, and increasing social animus. 

Trump also told us how he feels about U.S. democracy. The fall of the East Wing put the 💩 character of his policies on full display: destruction for the sake of the gratuitous, the ugly, and the people willing to pay for it (or, if we end up paying for it, the people who stand to gain—at our expense—by purchasing admission to it). 

First YouTube Short on Sucking at Popularity

My first YouTube short!

I talk about an idea I shared on the recent episode of the New Thoughts Podcast: it’s ok to suck at popularity.

I put some of the ideas/tips I learned from reading Adam Aleksic’s book, Algospeak, into practice.

I am looking forward to creating more shorts for the New Thoughts Podcast, and some others based on the writing I do here.

Enjoy!

Speaking of Unity

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Blessed Damozel (1878).

The following is a sermon based on Ephesians 4:15, entitled Speaking of Unity. I offered it at an annual gathering of pastors and other church leaders.

Ephesians 4:14-15:

We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Messiah.

Organizing Idea: Forsaking anger, we speak the truth in love, and so draw closer together, preserving God’s will: the unity of the body of Messiah Jesus. 

I.

Picture this scene: We fall in love. 

I’m a bit proper, and intimate chat—you know, what the young folks these days call “spicy” talk—that makes me uncomfortable. 

I don’t know how to handle love-talk, so as we walk through your garden, you whisper “sweet nothings” to the roses. 

I laugh as you tell the roses how much you love them.

But there’s one problem: We fall in love during a war. 

You leave to fight in the war, leaving me with instructions on how to care for the roses.

I do my best to keep the roses alive until you return. 

There’s one more problem: one thing you told me to do I won’t do—and that is talk to the roses. 

Why not? Well, that’s ridiculous! 

Honestly, I won’t talk to the roses because I miss you. 

In the letter I send to you, I share that the roses are surviving—but they are not thriving. The roses are alive, but they are not living because they are not getting the conversation they need. 

Why did we fall in love in the middle of a war? What a silly thing for anyone to do. 

II.

What you just pictured is a scene from the new, fabulous Broadway musical Operation Mincemeat.

Jak Malone won the Tony Award for his performance as Hester Leggatt, who sings about falling in love during World War II and caring for the roses while her lover, Tom, is away fighting the war.

For reasons you’ll need to figure out yourself, the song is called “Dear Bill.” 

III.

Roses are, of course, a cliché for love.

Teenagers at prom.
Honeymoon suites.
Romance novels.

But in Hester’s song, the roses are more than cliché.

They’re a revelation.

The roses in Hester’s song reveal what it means to speak of unity. 

Ephesians repeatedly emphasizes that God’s will is to unite everything and everyone (1:10). In fact, God, through the cross of Jesus the Messiah and the ongoing advocacy of the Spirit, has completed that goal. 

Unity is not something we create. 

Our pastors, leaders, youth, members, or visitors can’t command or create unity.

God gives unity to the body of Messiah, to the church. Unity is grace.

That’s why Ephesians urges us to “accept each other with love, and make an effort to preserve the unity of the Spirit with the peace that ties you together” (4:2-3). 

Preserving unity, the unity that God gives us through the weakness of the Messiah, in the Spirit—that is our work. 

Planting, growing, and watering the roses–that’s God’s work. 

Our task is tending to them, giving the roses the conversation they need to thrive. 

But there’s one issue: we are living in wartime. 

IV.

We are in the middle of a serious culture war. One that too often successfully pulls us out of the garden, almost guaranteeing that the roses won’t get the conversation they need to thrive.

Military helicopters are descending on Chicago, targeting communities of color—and ICE, armed like Roman soldiers, are kicking in the doors of citizens and their children, hauling them into the streets.

Rome’s agents ruthlessly round up our fellow human beings without papers—the vast majority of whom are, like all of us, trying to build a good and decent life.

Across this divided land, killers strike our fellow citizens in their homes, on campuses, and as they walk to lunch—and yet we only recognize some victims as saints.

Today, our government is shut down because we refuse to agree that our neighbors deserve affordable healthcare.

V.

We are in the middle of a war, so all the chatter I am hearing in my circles, from both sides of the partisan divide—and everything in between—about buying guns is not so surprising. 

Even Ephesians encourages believers in the Messiah to arm themselves. We are to put on the belt of truth, take up the shield of faith, wear the helmet of salvation, and wield the sword of the Spirit (6:13-17).

The author of Ephesians encourages us to dress up like Roman soldiers.

That’s no small thing. Fashion moves us. 

Remember that time you finally fit into those tight jeans or that expensive dress you never thought you would fit into… and then immediately booked a flight to New York to walk the runway during Fashion Week? Or, remember the time that you got a great haircut, and you seriously thought, “I could be a rockstar with this hair.”

Playing dress up as a Roman soldier is not as innocent as it seems. 

And before you think I am overthinking this, consider that the author of Ephesians, just a few verses earlier, explicitly commands us to adopt a Roman lifestyle. 

Just before asking us to dress up like Roman soldiers, he commands wives to submit to their husbands, and slaves to obey their masters.

If it’s any consolation, he does request that husbands and masters, masters and husbands, treat their property with kindness (5:21-6:9).

That’s so cringe. I know. 

It’s also very, very Roman lifestyle advice. 

But like every text written in wartime—Ephesians is all about a clash of cultures—it resists simplicity.

VI.

Earlier in the letter, the author of Ephesians declares, “I’m telling you this, and I insist on it in the Lord: you shouldn’t live your life like the [the Romans] anymore. . .” (4:17).  [unstated exegetical note: It is because the author moves in this direction that I emphasize the Roman cultural connections rather than the Jewish ones. The author of Ephesians was likely Jewish. See Daniel Boyarin’s excellent study, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (1999), for an analysis of the overlap between Jewish and Roman cultures, along with its main theme: how Judaism and Christianity eventually became distinguishable religions].

But in the middle of his musical, let’s call it, The Roman Family Musical, the author offers some Roman advice that is actually sound: he tells us to avoid anger. [Underlying source: see Martha Nussbaum, Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice (2016) for a sophisticated and careful analysis of the character of anger.]

The Romans, and the Greeks before them, believed that anger was a female thing. They thought males were rational and disciplined, and females were childish and prone to excess.

One thing is certain: when you lack control over your own body, anger does feel empowering.

Even so, avoiding anger is good Roman advice because human anger is always an injustice. 

Anger always works against God’s will to bring everything and everyone together.

Please don’t take my word for it, the truth is as close to you as your own family.

The author of Ephesians commands children to obey their parents (6:1-4). But this time, there is good reason to comply with his command: 

The commandment to love your parents is the only one that comes with a promise: We should listen to our parents so that everything may go well for us and that we may live a long life.

That’s promising! 

And parents, if you want to command your children’s respect and ensure everything goes well for them, avoid provoking them to anger.

That sounds promising, too! 

I confess, I am surprised; I never took Ephesians for a letter with much promise.

In fact, I typically feel like this dude is a prude.

No drinking. No cussing. No joking. No rock, pop, or blues music. No good sex (it’s all missionary style for him).

But this time, I thought: maybe the perils of anger explain his social conservatism. 

VII.

Nowadays, anger is a respectable thing to feel, especially if you are a male. 

The fruits of male anger are predictable—a terrible tale as old as time: males drink, males boast, males covet the spouses of other males.

Outrage follows. Men die. And women and children are the collateral damage of male anger.

Here is a new thing about anger: it’s especially powerful on social media. 

Rage-baiting is all the rage. Why? We love it. We like it. We comment on it. 

The algorithm gives us more and more of it. Influencers and social media platforms profit from it. 

There is a reason we describe getting angry as “going nuclear.” It is the most potent weapon in our culture war arsenal.

Anger always goes viral. 

Here’s why: Anger is a feeling that is always—and I say again—always related to the pleasures of retribution, of punishment, of revenge, of domination—of really sticking it to someone who stuck it to you. 

The logic of anger is devilishly simple: if I can wound the one who wounded me, I will be made whole again.

Anger is always a form of magical thinking: the thought that revenge will right a wrong. 

It won’t.

Anger is always a verb. It is always about getting even. 

That’s why we should avoid provoking our children to anger and getting angry ourselves. 

“Get angry,” we are told, “but don’t sin” (4:26-27).

In other words, don’t get angry, because anger is always related to sin; it is always opposed to God’s will, to unity and its preservation in the church.

Speaking of unity, I remember visiting family in northern Idaho. 

I was in my mid-twenties, sitting with my brother and uncle in a bar called the Six Devils.

After I enjoyed about six devils, I decided it was time to share some angry thoughts. The result was predictable: more anger.

My brother, a huge, muscular guy (the opposite of me), stormed out of the bar—and my uncle did too, after he started to cry. 

What I said damaged our relationship; it certainly did not bring us closer together.

That’s why the author of Ephesians urges us to forsake anger and begs us to adopt a different lifestyle, one characterized by speaking the truth.  

That’s one word in Greek—it means to speak the truth continuously.

Like anger, speaking the truth is a verb. But it’s not angry speech. It is not permission to say the nastiest things imaginable about people while smiling. 

Well, bless your hearts. 

Speaking the truth–quite unlike anger–is always a matter of love-talk, and love-talk is always talk that inspires–indeed is–the preservation of unity in the body of Messiah Jesus. 

VIII. 

Now, with that in mind, let’s re-imagine what speaking of unity—what giving the roses the conversation they need–looks like. 

Picture this scene: We are back in the garden; the roses are there between us. I start talking to them because I know you don’t like it when I talk too directly about love. Here’s what I say to the roses:

I was asked to preach at the Church of Christ, but I was told there was one topic I could not mention in my sermon. 

So, I angrily left the garden to fight on the Western front of the culture war.

Walking to the battlefield, I was reminded of a time I asked a layperson to avoid a topic. I asked them not to disparage members of the church I was serving from the pulpit.

One member was barely back on his feet after being disowned by his entire family. Another member was coming back to church after she had stayed away for years, fearing abuse from the pulpit. Yet another member had just lost his husband.

Please, I asked, preserve the unity of the Spirit in peace.

This layperson had somehow learned to say yes when he meant no, and he offered a condescending and damaging message that drove people–including me–away from one another and that congregation. His comments severed our unity.

As I marched to war, I considered what it meant to be prohibited, in the name of unity, from preaching a message of extravagant welcome. 

I also started to feel sad. I learned, again, that Rev. Kay Ray was right when he observed that I was excited about ministry because I hadn’t been doing it.

I thought despairingly: If being the United Church of Christ means that one church can degrade and exclude people like me, my family, and our friends, while another church can boldly fight racism, preserving the grace of unity is surely impossible.

The feeling only worsened when I remembered the times that even our leadership expressed the view that folks like me in the church are a “controversial” issue. 

They think it is a sign of faithfulness not to take a position on such a “controversial” issue. 

Here is what should be controversial: 

Rome’s Supreme Court empowers conservative parents to pull their kids out of public-school lessons that entail “controversial” themes and even to send their “controversial” children to conversion therapy. Yet, it denies caring parents of those same children the power to make their healthcare decisions.

“Controversial” adults in North Carolina now have to hand over their false birth certificates, the ones they received at birth, along with their real ones, whenever they require a passport, other necessary documentation, or for identity verification purposes.

What should be controversial is our historical ignorance. 

Did you know that the Greeks thought that males and females were different species? A similar idea, Ibraham Kendi reminds us, enabled some white folks to justify the institution of slavery. 

The Romans got rid of the idea of the sexes. Male and females represented points on a sliding scale—the only difference being that some genitals stuck out while others turned inward . . . . 

What sticks out asserts reproductive power; what turns inward submits to reproductive power. Rome privileged and empowered what asserted itself on women and on both male and female slaves and other non-citizens. 

What we now think of as sex and sexuality are the creations—very real and very unnatural social creations—of the 1700s and 1800s. [Underlying source: see David M. Halperin, “Sex/Sexuality/Sexual Classification,” in Critical Terms for the Study of Gender (2014), 449-486, for this history and a spirited and clear analysis of it].

There is no such thing as “biological truth.” But too many Christians seem to be sticking with Rome. Some of y’all are too Roman for my liking.

My anger was further enflamed when I remembered times that our leadership couldn’t even celebrate the good that the Southern Conference had done, like our fight in 2015, because they couldn’t bring themselves to name it, to mention it explicitly. 

Rome’s Court is—once again—looking for an opportunity to make some of us sit at the back of the bus.

And some of our leaders are uncomfortable even discussing their own desires, fearing they may cause controversy.

Family, unity should not come at the expense of diversity in the church.

We should not be cutting off toes to fit into a Roman sandal.

If unity comes at the cost of the dignity of other parts of the body, it’s just not worth it. 

In fact, it just not unity.

It’s not a just unity.

It’s hostility. 

And it is contrary to God’s will. 

Yes, I was feeling some kind of way when I received your letter. Something about it made me drop my weapons and walk away from war.

Honestly, I missed being together with our roses.

As I walked back to our garden, I did feel like a motherless child. 

I felt like a kid who had grown up without a good enough mother, tossed to and fro because his caregiver was not reliable—except in their efforts to provoke him to anger.

But something about your letter also made me feel like I no longer had to be an angry soldier out fighting the culture war of rage.

Your letter, your hymn, inspired me to think that speaking of unity—giving the roses the conversation they need to thrive, to really live—is an infinitely more pleasurable use of our time.

Your Psalm reminded me: 

It’s good and pleasant when we live together in unity!

Unity feels like precious oil on the head, running down over the collars of robes. 

It’s like the smell of morning dew.

It’s like the simple beauty of water droplets gliding across rose petals. 

It’s life forevermore (Psalm 133, redacted). 

May it be so.

Amen.

You probably think this algorithm is about you. It’s not.

“I believe that there’s absolutely something equalizing about the fact that everything is run through the algorithm” – Adam Aleksic, Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language, 212.

I. You probably think the algorithm is about you.

Adam Aleksic demystifies “the algorithm” in his well-written and spirited book, Algospeak. 

Algologos typically takes two forms. The first is that the algorithm controls you. The second is that the algorithm is you. 

Aleksic offers a much more complex view of the digital world’s algorithmic rhythms. Reading his algorithmic prose, I realized: the algorithm doesn’t care about you.

II. The algorithm is the audience.

“Influencers” don’t care about you either. The algorithm is their audience.

Entering TikTok, for example, is like stepping into your imam’s or therapist’s office. If you want to be heard, you need to use the relevant spiritual terminology or share the details of your recent dream.

Some members of the digital religions or therapies (TikTok, Instagram, X) become “influencers” because they speak the language of the algorithm exceptionally well. That is how they get what they want: not you, virality.

III. Influencer. Wants a secret lover.

According to Aleksic, Reddit once published its algorithm. It looked like this: 

Translation: a Reddit post’s popularity does not determine its chances of going viral. Aleksic notes that “the only variables were u, the number of upvotes minus the number of downvotes, and a, the age of the post. Whatever the output was (here represented by s) determined how high a post would rank relative to other posts” (59). 

Nowadays, the relevant algorithm is unpublished; it is kept secret in the vault of “proprietary information.” Nonetheless, the algorithm remains the enforcer of any one platform’s “creative direction.” 

The only way to discover its contours is to give it what it wants. Influencers, as lovers of the algorithm, are our best sources for understanding the law(s) of the algorithm.

IV. Influencers obey (the algorithm).

Aleksic shares what influencers like him have learned about algospeak or speech “driven by the invisible forces behind social media and its algorithms” (7). What follows are what I take from Aleksic’s book to be the “laws” of algospeak:

Law 1. The line between offline and online is very blurry. Online communities are clearly formed by people who exist offline. Over time, these communities develop their own in-group language. Some words, like “unalive,” emerge in unique offline settings. Words like unalive and gyat are popularized by being taken up and disseminated to the farthest reaches of the online world by the algorithm. Finally, these words return to the offline world–but now as common language.

Law 2. The boundaries between social media platforms are also very porous. Viral TikTok videos, for example, often appear on Instagram, YouTube, and other platforms. 

Law 3. Algorithmic power is productive. The algorithm normalizes its grammar by establishing a zone of exclusion. The word “unalive” is a perfect example of productive algorithmic power.  

The word unalive originated offline. It became TikTok algospeak because the platform banned certain “sensitive words,” including, it seems, speech about killing, death, and suicide. 

Unalive was used by TikTok users to bypass the censoring algorithm, allowing them to discuss political violence or mental illness. The word has become very popular among middle school students in the U.S. Its offline use is the subject of ongoing controversy.

Using evasive language (e.g., referring to Trump as “cheeto”) is called “Voldemorting.” The use of evasive language happens across languages (see chapter 8 of Algospeak). 

Bowdlerization is another technique used to bypass censorship. “The practice of respelling offensive [words] is a centuries-old tradition known as bowdlerization,” writes Aleksic, “named for the Englishman Thomas Bowdler, who is mainly remembered for publishing some egregiously family-safe edits of William Shakespeare’s plays” (17-18).

See words like “seggs” (sex), fuk, fucc, f*ck, fk (fuck), a@@, ahh, gyat (ass, butt), and f*aggot. 

See also evasive art/emojis like 💅🏻 (for “zesty” or gay), 🥷🏾 (for the n-word), 🍉 (for Palestine), 🍆 (for dick), 🍑 (for ass and pussy), and, just for a trending moment, 🪑—but more commonly, 💀(for laughing [to death]). 

Law 4. The algorithm favors what is most likely to boost user engagement. To go viral, you must show the value of your post or its ability to capture users’ attention, earn their likes, stimulate comments, and keep them on the platform as long as possible. 

There are several ways to prove your post’s worth and get past the algorithmic gatekeeper to achieve viral fame. 

Your post is likely to be recommended if it (a) “complies” with current language trends (including using English with a proper accent, like a British accent), (b) is neither too short nor too long, (c) uses trending keywords (gyat, rizzler, sigma), often words created to bypass language restrictions (unalive and seggs), (d) piggybacks on other trending posts (e.g., making fun of viral trends or including a viral musical track in your video) and even if your post is completely unrelated to the trend, (e) evokes strong emotions (passion, anger, sadness) or curiosity, (f) is extreme(ly weird), and (g) features fast-paced talk or noise. 

It’s too good, perplexing, and funny not to mention a specific example of criteria (c) above, the “Rizzler song.” Aleksic notes that the “Rizzler song” is a “TikTok audio that went massively viral in late 2023 for its slang-heavy lyrics: Sticking out your gyat for the rizzler / You’re so skibidi / You’re so fanum tax / I just wanna be your sigma / Freaking come here / Give me your ohio” (44). 

The “Rizzler song” is one example of what is called “brain rot.” Here is another one, a jumble of “keywords.”

“Social media platforms reward using keywords,” Aleksic writes, “because they want the information: Metadata can be turned into index terms that are easier for the algorithm to categorize, and thus know what to recommend to viewers.”

Aleksic admits that “[c]reators want their content to be discoverable, so they mold it around what the algorithm wants. Keywords are a win-win” (46, emphasis added). 

Law 5. Morality is not a variable of the algorithm. As Aleksic points out, evasive language is often trending. In their specific contexts, evasive words, memes, and videos are created to help users communicate their experiences of social oppression. When taken out of their original contexts, the same language can be used to spread social oppression. 

Aleksic argues that Poe’s law explains the spread of dangerous incel ideology online. Poe’s law is

 [a]ny sarcastic expression of extreme views can be mistaken for a sincere expression of those views, and vice versa. Poe’s law explains how dangerous ideas spread as memes. . . . [It] has created a dangerous game of hopscotch. We’re jumping between irony and reality, but we’re not always sure where those lines are. Interpreting words comedically helps the algorithm spread them as memes and trends, but then interpreting them seriously manifests their negative effects (138-139).

Memes spread because they blur the line between serious and unserious. They also show which group(s) are more often socially labeled as unserious. 

Consider the now popular word, gyat. “The word ‘gyat,’” Aleksic writes, “reached social media as a funny word for ‘butt,’ but it actually comes from an exaggerated [African American English] pronunciation of ‘goddamn. . .’” (153). The word’s origins and purpose got lost or erased as it was pushed by the algorithm.

According to Aleksic, 

Studies have shown that non-Black people are disproportionately likely to use reaction GIFs and images containing Black people, because they find those memes funnier. If you’ve ever been sent the “Crying Michael Jordan” or “Michael Jackson Eating Popcorn,” those subtly play into racial stereotypes by using Black reactions as an exaggerated response. This phenomenon is called digital blackface, and it’s very present in the social media age (155, emphasis original).

See law 1 above: the offline is always-already online (and vice versa). Popularity is the same ole normal.

V. The algorithm is designed to kill you.

One lesson you can learn from the above “laws” is that the algorithm is designed to kill you.

Aleksic notes that “social media algorithms are best at recommending personalized videos when we give them information. Since that translates to social media success, we create metadata simply because the algorithm wants metadata in order to push our content to others” (164).

The algorithm polices content. Influencers supply compliant content. You watch it, and like it, and like it, and like it–and sometimes comment on it. The algorithm pushes and pushes and pushes more like content for you to like. The platform profits.

Aleksic explains it this way: “Algorithms are the culprits, influencers are the accomplices, language is the weapon, and you, dear reader, are the victim” (78).

As if under the spell of the White Witch (remember The Chronicles of Narnia?), you, dear reader, consume the abundant images provided by the algorithm until you collapse under the weight of your own skin.

You “unalive” yourself with social media satisfaction.

VI. The algorithm is designed to kill you with happiness.  

Happiness is deadly. The AI of The Matrix understood, according to Mr. Smith, that humans require frustration to advance, to stay alive.

In Civilization and Its Discontents, the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, makes a similar point. “The price we pay for our advanced civilization,” Freud states, “is a loss of happiness” (Standard Edition, 21:134). Misery or frustration is an inherent component of our advancement.

The online world, like the offline homes we confine ourselves in to avoid “stranger danger,” eliminates frustration. It does so by always giving us more of what (we tell it) we want.

The price we pay for online satisfaction is a glut of happiness. The algorithm’s acidic power achieves this.

The algorithm burns away all flesh, anything that may disturb you and dislodge you from, say, TikTok. The following offline example perfectly mirrors the corrosive power of algorithmic laws, amply illustrating the cost of your virtual happiness.

In R.A.V. v. St. Paul (1992), a case Judith Butler discusses in Excitable Speech (1997), the Supreme Court ruled that banning cross-burning was unconstitutional. The case involved a white man burning a cross on a Black family’s front yard. 

Butler notes that the Court justified its decision by ignoring the fact that the cross was burned on a Black family’s property. “The stripping of blackness and family from the figure of the complainant . . . refuses the dimension of social power,” Butler writes, “that constructs the so-called speaker [i.e., cross burner] and the addressee of the speech act in question.” Moreover, Butler continues, “it refuses as well the racist history of the convention of cross-burning by the Ku Klux Klan” (55).

Similarly, words, memes, and videos go viral online by stripping away all specificity (even the accent of the creator). The algorithm does not reward context. Specificity or difference is too unpopular or frustrating.

VII. The algorithm “liberates” the ego from social life.

You are frustrating, according to Freud. Here is how I understand the compelling story Freud tells about your psyche:

Your psyche is made up of three “agencies.” The Id, the ego, and the superego.

The superego is that part of the psyche akin to a parent or the pope. It judges the ego for failing to live up to its ideals.

“The ego,” Freud argues, “is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself a projection of a surface” (The Ego and the Id, Standard Edition, 19:26).

Your ego is like your skin. It is on the frontline of your satisfaction. Like the algorithm, it seeks to exclude what is disturbing, frustrating, or different from recognition.

The ego and the superego are “dipped” in the Id, the sphere of exiled uncivilized/unconscious desire. Uncivilized desire resists exile.

One way naughty desire resists its exclusion is in and through the dreamwork. In dreams, uncivilized desire is reinterpreted, reimagined, and recontextualized in ways designed to escape the watchful ego.

We wake up from our dreams when the process of redescription fails. We get woke when the censor “detranslates,” recognizing the disturbing thought, the wolf, in sheep’s clothing. 

The ego’s project of satisfaction is frustrated by the Id and the superego. On the one hand, it is beset by disturbing desire (the Id). On the other hand, the ego is bullied by the judging superego.

The psyche is you, and your internal life mirrors your social life. You are caught between antisocial desires and obedience to the (moral) law. If you are lucky, you learn to live with your frustration.

The algorithm, much like the homes our parents began fearing us into back in the 1980s (see Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation, for more on “safetyism”), is akin to oxycotton. On the algorithm, the ego is liberated from the pressures of social life or life in the presence of others.

VIII. The algorithm wants to unlive you, but misery loves company.

Recently, I attended a lecture by Adam Phillips at the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute. At one point in his lecture, Phillips made a simple observation. He noted that when you walk into your analyst’s office, you walk into a language.

I was reading Algospeak, a book I heard about on the podcast Offline with Jon Favreau, just before attending the lecture. So, I think that is why Phillips’s obviously correct comment struck and stuck with me.

I heard him say: When you walk into your analyst’s office, you are walking into an algorithm.

After explaining what I had heard to him, I asked him a question. If Adam Phillips were on TikTok, what would he say to grab our attention about our wanting or desiring?

Phillips’s response to my query was something like this: People do lose attention. That’s inevitable. When I talk to myself, that’s when people want to listen.

I understood Phillips to mean that when we don’t comply with the algorithm, other people want to listen to us. In other words, you are what other people find most interesting.

To be sure, you won’t go viral by talking to yourself online. The grace of unpopularity is the feeling of an enlivening misery.

Second Chances?

“As an object of desire, Freud discovered, a second chance was a mixed blessing. The promise of the new was always being waylaid by the allure of the past; there was something almost addictive about the sufferings of childhood.” – Stephen Greenblatt, Second Chances: Shakespeare and Freud, 22.

“Only the omnipotent, we might think, only God can live without second chances. And, Freud adds, only the omnipotent need to believe in them” – Adam Phillips, Second Chances: Shakespeare and Freud, 180.

Life without second chances is unalive. You are likely aware—if not all too aware—that you are (un)likely to take your second chances.

Greenblatt and Phillips remind us that the characters of Shakespearian tragedy and Freudian psychoanalysis are, among other things, risk averse. Tragic heroes don’t believe in second chances.

Each of us, according to Freud, finds tragedy all too alluring. Beset both by disturbing internal desires and the societal frustration of those same desires—we entertain, Greenblatt observes, “wildly unrealistic and destructive cravings for power and autonomy.”

“[T]he second chance Freud offered with psychoanalysis,” Greenblatt writes, “was a more realistic, and therefore potentially more satisfying, apprehension of what he took to be our true nature: the second chance of not living as a wishful, and therefore permanently enraged and vengeful, fantasist” (25). Taking a second chance is a genuine achievement.

Second chances are premised on a first chance. Our first chance is the experience of growing up.

Growing up is hard. Leaving home is really fucking hard.

Leaving home is how Phillips describes the resolution of the Oedipus complex. In Shakespeare’s plays, according to Greenblatt, leaving home is akin to getting lost at sea or kidnapped or overcome with love.

Shakespeare seems to have thought that various happenstances force us to castaway from home. Offered this second chance, we often ride the tides back home.

Second chances as repetitions of the first are divine. “In a life of omnipotence,” Phillips writes, “there is no such thing as a second chance, for there is no need for one. (God, by definition, does not have, and could not possibly need, second chances)” (145).

Tragic heroes don’t believe in second chances. Tragedy is the stuff of self-seriousness, the unwillingness or inability to experience disappointment with one’s self.

Greenblatt describes tragedy, in the words of Macbeth, this way: “It is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing” (59). Tragedy is life sans irony.

To use “algospeak,” unalive is what a lack of irony gets you. There is more than one pathway to unaliveness.

“The antisocial act,” Philips observes via Winnicott, “is the child’s attempt to be given a second chance at development, as though the child’s delinquency was a kind of unconscious performance art for the parents, or for anyone willing to be sufficiently attentive” (185). Consider Henry IV. 

Henry is a proper kid who plays at being transgressive, at disappointing his father. He ends up teaching us that there are no second chances for fathers and sons.

That’s one way to read the lesson of Shakespeare’s second chance. Mostly abandoning his family (a wife, two daughters, and a son) in Stratford to pursue his acting career in London in his early twenties, Shakespeare returns home for good (or for ill?) in his late forties.

By this time, his son is dead. His daughters are grown up. 

If we read The Winter’s Tale as Shakespeare’s way of thinking about (his) second chances, then I think we must give sufficient attention to the testimony of Leontes’s wife. When Hermione (whom Leontes tried to have killed) and Leontes are reunited, she does not address him.

Instead, Hermonie speaks to her daughter, Camillo (Leontes tried to have her killed, too). “I stayed alive for you,” she says.

Shakespeare’s return home is not a repetition of his first chance. His son is dead; the status of his relationship to his wife is an open question; one daughter is married and living her own life away from home; he does not know the daughter who has remained at home.

Shakespeare’s return home is a second chance, his chance to be a husband and a father to his daughter. His second chance is a chance to repair the life he sabotaged—but whether or not repair is possible, that’s is simply not within his power alone to decide.

Two lessons. We are as likely (more likely?) to sabotage the life we desire as we are to live it.

“Freud described people as essentially and inventively self-sabotaging,” Greenblatt again reminds us, “as though the pressures of life, both internal and external, were somehow excessive and unbearable. . . . More particularly, [people] were adept at creating, as Macbeth or Leontes do, a life they could only loathe” (102-103).

“Self-destructiveness—the compulsion to do the self-harming, devastating thing, so powerfully displayed in Leontes—is,” Greenblatt believes, “the course that a great many people assiduously follow” (103). That’s the first lesson.

The second lesson is that second chances are beyond our control. Greenblatt notes that“[i]f in your own life you suffer a trauma, and, contrary to every rational expectation, you wind up getting a second chance, it will not, the play suggests, be because you have actively brought about the happy outcome.”

Second chances, Greenblatt asserts, “happen because of chains of circumstances beyond your control, because of changes invisible to you and outside the control of your will. . . .” And if you are willing, as Leontes seems to have been, to heed what may be defined as pastoral advice, second chances “happen because you have against all odds been patient, because you have learned to face your failings and to live with your trauma” (120). Second chances are possible futures.

Narrating Adolescence

Jamel Shabazz, Back in the Days, photos from 1980s NYC.

Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation (2024) and Matt Richtel’s How We Grow Up (2025) are stories about adolescence. I will be talking through each book in the next episode of the New Thoughts Podcast, but here are a few, quick thoughts (subject to significant future revision) about adolescence—as it is narrated by Haidt and Richtel. 

Haidt and Richtel likely experienced happy childhoods. If they didn’t, they have become the type of adults capable of imagining such a childhood (a huge achievement either way!). Their growing up stories are about evolution, cells, hormones, social media, mental health, adventure, play, and (mostly) second chances (tragically, not everyone survives growing up).

At least two substantive threads link the books together: biological determinism (by which I mean that they seem to think that, if left undisturbed, a genetic process will unfold, a second birth, making us who we are) and social media. They both agree that adolescence is a fraught period of time when our genetic composition unfolds in surprising and obviously highly consequential ways.

Haidt and Ritchel (and the best existing evidence) agree: social media fucks up our unfolding. The solution, Haidt argues, is two-fold: much, much less social media, holding off exposure to it (ideally) until we are 18—or (more realistically) until we are 16—combined with opportunities for risky, less adult rule-based play.

Richtel’s narrative is appealing because he starts out with a philosophical question: What is adolescence? He then introduces us to the history of adolescence (not a thing until the 18th-century) and to the history of adolescent studies, beginning with Stanley Hall (1904).

Tracing the development of adolescent studies from Hall to modern neuroscience, Richtel further introduces what he considers the “outdated” theories of psychoanalysis. He cites Anna Freud’s description of how this momentous time feels to tweens and teens:

I take it that it is normal for an adolescent to behave for a considerable length of time in an inconsistent and unpredictable manner . . .  to fight his [sic] impulses and to accept them; to ward them off successfully and to be overrun by them; to love his parents and to hate them; to revolt against them and to be dependent on them; to be deeply ashamed to acknowledge his mother before others and, unexpectedly, to desire heart-to-heart talks with her; to thrive on imitation of and identification with others while searching unceasingly for his own identity . . .  (How We Grow Up, 39, emphasis added).

Haidt’s narrative is mostly about Gen Z. They are the first to go through puberty with the smartphone and social media apps like Facebook and Instagram.

Haidt focuses on the mental health decline of adolescents caused by social media—especially the devastating impact of Instagram on tween and teen girl mental health (tween and teen boys have not fared better, but for different reasons)—from 2010 onward. His story is historically rich and complicated, starting out in the 1980s with rise of “safetyism” in parenting.

It’s an important development, as the parental imposition of the phantasm of danger on the real world traps kids inside the home, or under the eye, if you will, of their parents. And thereby fucking up their genetic unfolding.

With the advent of the smartphone in 2007, further developed in 2008 to download social media apps, the virtual world breaks into the inner lives of increasingly real world averse kids. In 2009, Facebook and Twitter evolve to include the “like” (FB) and “retweet” (Twitter) buttons, making these apps nearly irresistible to developing young minds.

The real world, however, is also turbulent with change. Physical strength, for example, has become less relevant in the real world. Nowadays, the information complex real world requires skills like emotional regulation, negotiation, and empathy.

Brains kill the villain (Musical trivia! In what musical does a sensitive prince found in a book teach this?). Girls are doing much better in the real world.

Boys find a type of “salvation” in the virtual world of video games and porn. The evidence is clear: more and more boys are failing to castaway (Richtel) or to launch (Haidt) into the world as competent adult males, lovers, and citizens.

One real world way to solve for failure to launch is, according to Haidt’s story, more male mentors for boys. Research suggests that boys need male teachers in their extended family, neighborhoods, and in their schools to help them castaway or to launch, to discover their unique adult male voices.

Normative or traditional psychoanalytic theory supports the idea that “normal” development, leaving home, for boys entails identifying with their fathers. The point is: only a male can save males.

From 2010 on, boys and girls arrive at the same, hellish spot—though by different pathways. The X is revealed in certain empty emergency rooms (an overstatement, of course).

Less risky play (i.e., minimally supervised play in the world with other tweens and teens) means fewer thrilling experiences the brain needs to develop well—and fewer broken bones. Interestingly, Richtel points out that between 900-1500 C.E., broken bones = the experience of growing up—and, until very recently, such injuries were common, especially for boys.

Real world averse, boys are ending up in a place traditionally more populated by girls: the world of internalized discontent (boys have more traditionally acted out). Social media apps are causing skyrocketing rates of sadness, anxiety, and loneliness among both tween and teen boys and girls. Emergency rooms are filling up as a consequence of internalized or mental health wounds.

All that makes sense to me—and while the situation is bleak, especially for cis straight white boys from lower-income households (a social fact backed by a bunch of data)—it is well within the reach of our collective power to co-create a world in which all our kids can thrive.

One way to redeem the hellscape of contemporary tween and teen mental health is not mentioned (but there is still hope, as I have not yet finished Richtel’s book): non-exclusionary feminism for tweens and teens.

While Richtel cites Anna Freud’s description of how adolescence feels—he makes nothing , so far, of what Freud identifies as the longing of (male?) tweens and teens to have “heart-to-heart talks” with the maternal figure(s) in their lives. Freud’s idea does not seem “outdated” to me.

In fact, given that women are finding success in a rapidly changing real world—a world that is often actually harmful to them—does it not make sense to create social pathways by which both girls and boys can learn from inclusionary feminists—and perhaps even learn to identify with various maternal figures with whom they can fashion “heart-to-heart talks”?

Free Speech, Free Reign: The Pious Speech of Andrew Sullivan

– Another chapter in the radicalization of young Andrew Sullivan, generated by AI based on the essay below –

“Words connect with the rational part of our brains; images target the sub-rational. And in a sub-rational world, liberal democracy simply cannot exist” – Andrew Sullivan 

Andrew Sullivan can’t get enough of the video of Charlie Kirk’s murder. In a recent Substack, he claims to have “watched that video a couple of times.” 

The video of Kirk’s shooting, along with the recording of a young Ukrainian woman’s murder on a train in Charlotte, North Carolina, especially the quasi-beheading character of the killings, seem to have reinvigorated Sullivan’s old-world imagination. 

Sullivan correctly notes that these truly horrific murders attack two core principles of any decent democratic society: “the right to be safe in public, and the right to speak freely without fear.” Sadly, Sullivan goes on to write a Tudor-era fiction, and he needs villains.

Andrew enlists “the woke” as his story’s villains: Muslims, critical theorists of all kinds, anti-exclusionary feminists like Judith Butler, faggy gays, Trans* activists, Black activists, and others. These villains are those who Sullivan believes can’t handle the truth: speech is never violent. 

“The woke left, especially in the fringes the mainstream left adamantly refuses to rein in, condemn, or control,” Sullivan asserts, “bears some responsibility [for Kirk’s murder], because it has long equated speech with violence.” The “deeply illiberal idea” that a “bullet is no different in kind than a verbal provocation” has, according to Andrew, been forced upon a nonconsenting “young generation” by “the academic and journalistic left.”

Sullivan believes that speech and violent behavior are fundamentally separate realities, and he ridicules the supposedly woke notion that speech and violent actions can—and do—overlap. However, every democracy acknowledges a connection between speech acts and violent or hateful conduct. 

In the U.S., the law makes a distinction between what is considered harm and actual harm. For example, it may hurt Andrew’s feelings if I call him a twat—but legally, my disagreement with Andrew is actionable only if I slap or scratch him. Actual harm involves a physical toll (Martha Nussbaum points out that courts recognize that smell can cause actual harm. See Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame and the Law [2004], e.g., 158-163). 

A similar logic applies when distinguishing between speech, protected by the First Amendment, and conduct, which the law can restrict. Consider R.A.V. v. St. Paul (1992), a case Judith Butler discusses in Excitable Speech (1997).

In R.A.V. v. St. Paul, the Supreme Court ruled that a white person burning a cross in a Black family’s front yard is speech, not violent or harmful conduct. Therefore, St. Paul’s ordinance banning such burnings was declared unconstitutional. 

The Court corrected itself in Virginia v. Black (2003). In this case, the Court ruled that Virginia’s law banning all cross burnings, regardless of context, is unconstitutional. However, the Court also decided that when context shows that a speech act, like cross burning, is intended to cause harm, it becomes unprotected speech and may be lawfully regulated. 

U.S. courts distinguish between speech and violent acts (e.g., burning a cross at a klan rally). In these cases, words can—and do—act like bullets, piercing our psyches with unforgiving force, but that doesn’t make them unlawful or punishable by law. 

U.S. courts also acknowledge a connection between speech and violent acts (e.g., a klan member burning a cross on a Black family’s yard). Every democracy affirms that words can—and do—act like bullets when they are fired off with the intent, for example, of inciting a mob to attack the U.S. Capitol.

Andrew’s beef with his young woke despisers (he’s consistently miffed that the young woke don’t like him) is that they won’t make a distinction between speech and violence. Thus, the young woke believe, according to Sullivan, that violence/self-defense/legal regulation is always justified agianst speech they don’t like because such speech is always actually harmful speech.

Sullivan, on the other hand, contends that speech is never actually harmful. Words can never actually hurt us. Thus, violence/self-defense/legal regulation is never justified against speech.

So what?

Denying any overlap between speech and violent conduct enables Sullivan to neatly drop all speech acts in one bucket and all violent acts in another. Charlie Kirk’s public murder on a college campus in Utah, the young Ukrainian woman’s slaying on a train in Charlotte, and George Floyd’s death at the knees of a white cop in Minneapolis all go in the same bucket. 

Likewise, arguments against gay marriage and abortion are treated similarly to arguments that deny or demean Trans* existence and oppose parents’ rights to make healthcare decisions for their Trans* children (while at the same time justifying the right of religious conservatives to determine the character of their children’s public school education [see also the New Thoughts Podcast, episode 4, Sex Changes]). 

Sullivan’s refusal to recognize any link between speech and violent or hateful behavior allows him to take rhetorical aim from a high position on the whitewashed tomb of piety. “Tell the truth fearlessly,” Andrew preaches, “but always be open to correction. Decency, civility, nonviolence, humor, humility, grace: these are the virtues a free society needs to endure.” 

Yet, without irony, humor, or humility, Sullivan claims, “It is never ‘hate’ to tell the truth: that men are not women; that children cannot meaningfully consent to sex changes. . . ,” while insisting that “the mainstream left . . . rein in, condemn, or control” the so-called “woke left,” including, presumably, parents of Trans* children (emphasis added). 

It is dishonest, absurd, and manifestly wrong to either (a) collapse the distinction between speech and violent actions or to (b) deny any connection between speech and hateful acts. But what should a fair democracy do about and with disturbing speech?

The delicious irony is that Sullivan’s answer to that question (i.e., no regulation) closely resembles Judith Butler’s, as it is presented in Excitable Speech (1997).

Although Butler does acknowledge the overlap between speech and harm—arguing that speech can harm the human subject (i.e., the human being) because the subject is made of language—their solution to hurtful speech is resistant speech: more speech (of a different kind).

In fact, it is Butler’s reasonable, in my view, insistence that resistant speech acts–rather than political/legal intervention/regulation, are the solution to, say, fascist speech acts, that contributes to Martha Nussbaum’s damming assessment of Butler’s theory–worked out in Gender Trouble (1990) through to The Psychic Life of Power (1997)–as “quietism.”

Nussbaum concludes that Butler’s theory “collaborates with evil” (see Nussbaum, Philosophical Interventions [2012/1999], 215; responses and Nussbaum’s reply, 215-222).

I cover the specifics of Butler’s theory and Nussbaum’s critique of it in a forthcoming essay. For now, I want to emphasize what is at stake (at least for us villains) in denying any link between speech and violent or hateful behavior, namely, the monarchic spirit manifestly possessing some speech acts is allowed to go entirely unchecked.

As I was reading Sullivan’s Substack, I kept thinking about Anne Boleyn as she’s portrayed in the Broadway musical SIX. In the song “Sorry, Not Sorry,” Boleyn reflects on her tonsorial audacity. 

Speaking of Catherine of Aragon, she says, “[King Henry VIII] doesn’t wanna bang you / Somebody hang you. . . . / Mate, what was I meant to do? . . . / Sorry, not sorry ’bout what I said / I’m just tryna have some fun / Don’t worry, don’t worry, don’t lose your head / I didn’t mean to hurt anyone.” 

Later, Anne recalls Henry taking issue with her flirtatious behavior with other men. She responds, “Mate, just shut up / I wouldn’t be such a b- / If you could get it up. . . . And now he’s going ’round like off with her head. Yeah, I’m pretty sure he means it (seems it).”

Even while lamenting that Trump is incapable of cooling the rhetorical temperature, and demanding that we “[c]ool the rhetoric,” Sullivan denies that what he—and any of us—says has any real consequences. Kirk/Andrew desperately wants us to believe that he is just having some good ole, traditional political fun. Like, what is he meant to do?

Don’t lose your head, Andrew. 

Kirk/Andrew’s “free” speech leads to the free reign of conservatives over the most vulnerable in U.S. society, such as immigrants, Trans* adults and children, Muslims, and others. 

That’s why any just democracy should make speech acts that re-create and re-enforce a U.S. caste system, speech acts that come at the cost of the dignity of others, speech acts that demean and subjugate fellow citizens—and those who aspire to become citizens—not worth the cost of such illiberal behavior. 

We can begin to rid our democracy of its monarchic spirits by supporting, defending, and fully funding a rigorous public school education in the sciences and humanities.