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A ☕️☕️☕️☕️ read in seven parts.

The Boys & Girls Club had a corner near the pool tables where someone had built a cutout bench seat into the wall. I claimed it that summer. I was eight years old, and I had a plan.

The plan was books. Big ones. Robinson Crusoe. Swiss Family Robinson. Treasure Island. I wanted to read them, genuinely. But I also knew they'd score well on the Accelerated Reader program, and I wanted to win.

So that's what I did all summer. The pool tables cracked and rattled a few feet away. Kids came and went. I sat in the corner and read about men who survived alone on islands, who built what they needed from what the world gave them, who didn't require anyone else to become who they were.

At the end of the summer, I won the contest. The prize was a boombox radio cassette player.

I clutched it when my dad came to pick me up after work.

By fifth grade I wasn't getting invited to Nick Post's birthday parties anymore. There was no fight, no falling out. Just the quiet closing of doors I hadn't noticed were doors. Cold shoulders. Rerouted conversations. The subtle recalibration of who belonged where.

I told myself a story about it.

The story wasn't religious, not yet. It didn't have the vocabulary of calling or vocation. It was simpler and older than that. I was different. Not better, exactly, but attuned to something the other boys weren't. They wanted what boys were supposed to want. I wanted books and ideas and the particular solitude of a corner near the pool tables. The gap between us wasn't social failure. It was evidence.

Evidence of what, I couldn't have said precisely. Something more essential. Something that would matter later, when later came.

Nobody told me this story. No teacher pulled me aside and said you're set apart for something. No parent narrated my loneliness as destiny. I built it myself, from the materials available: the books I loved, the contests I won, the gap between what I wanted and what seemed to be wanted from me.

That's what made it so durable. Externally confirmed stories can be challenged. The story you build alone, from pure need, in the corner while the pool tables crack behind you, that one you carry for decades without ever quite examining it.

I had never heard of Joseph Campbell at eight years old. I didn't know about the monomyth, the hero's journey, the structure he mapped across world mythology in The Hero with a Thousand Faces and declared the deep grammar of human experience. I didn't know that what I was doing in that corner, building a story about my essential difference, had a template.

But I was living inside it.

Campbell's argument, stated plainly, is that across cultures and centuries, the hero's story follows the same arc. Departure: the ordinary world can no longer contain him, and he is called out. Initiation: he faces trials alone, descends into darkness, and survives by becoming more fully himself. Return: he comes back transformed, bearing a gift for the world that couldn't hold him.

The structure is elegant. It also does something very specific to masculine identity: it makes the gap between the hero and everyone else the first sign of his greatness. The ordinary world isn't where he belongs. The people who don't understand him aren't simply different. They're evidence. His separation from them is the beginning of the story, which means his loneliness isn't failure. It's departure.

A boy who needed to believe that the closing of doors was evidence of something essential didn't need Campbell explained to him. He just needed the books. Robinson Crusoe doesn't require anyone. Jim Hawkins is braver than the adults around him. The Swiss Family Robinson builds a better world from scratch than the one that shipwrecked them. The template was in the stories long before Campbell named it, and the stories were in my hands all summer.

This is what makes Campbell's monomyth more than a literary observation. It became, especially after George Lucas acknowledged it as the architecture of Star Wars, a prescriptive grammar for what a man's life is supposed to look like. You are called out of the ordinary. You face your trials. You return exceptional. The question isn't whether you're on the journey. The question is whether you're hero enough to survive it.1

What this produces, at the level of formation, is a self that reads its own exclusion as election. Not belonging becomes proof of destiny. The boy at the margins isn't failing to connect. He's departing. And departure, Campbell tells us, is where the story begins.

That's not wisdom. It's a conquest narrative with better lighting.

The problem isn't quest as a category. Alasdair MacIntyre argues in After Virtue that human life requires something like a quest structure to be intelligible at all, that you can only understand a virtue in the context of a practice, a practice in the context of a life, and a life needs narrative shape to mean anything. He's right about that.2 The issue isn't that the boy in the corner was wrong to need a story. The issue is the specific story available to him, the one that said his separation was the point, that his difference was his destiny, that the journey was fundamentally his alone.

Campbell's hero always returns. But he returns as the one who survived what others couldn't. The gift he bears is real, but so is the structure that produced it: I went alone, I endured alone, I came back with something you don't have.

The boy clutching his boombox didn't know he was rehearsing that return. But he was.

Somewhere in the middle of that same season of reading, or the ones that followed close behind it, I found Earthsea.

Ursula K. Le Guin's archipelago, her young wizard Ged, her magic system built on the truth of names: I received all of it as confirmation. Here was a boy set apart by gift. Here was a world that recognized what ordinary life missed. Here was the story I needed, larger and stranger and more beautiful than Robinson Crusoe, and it seemed to be for me in the way that only certain books are for certain readers.

What I didn't understand, and couldn't have, was that Le Guin was pulling the thread on exactly the story I was using her books to tell.

A Wizard of Earthsea begins where Campbell begins: with an exceptional boy in an ordinary world that can't contain him. Ged is gifted beyond his peers, proud of it, and eventually goaded into an act of reckless power that releases a shadow into the world. The shadow hunts him. The novel follows his flight and, finally, his turn. He stops running. He pursues the shadow across open ocean to the edge of the world, and there he names it.

The shadow is himself.

This is not Campbell's structure. In the monomyth, the darkness is external. The hero descends into it, survives it, and returns bearing what he wrested from it. The shadow is the trial, not the self. But Le Guin's Ged doesn't conquer anything. He names his own pride, his own desperate need to be exceptional, as the thing that nearly destroyed the world. The formation move is not mastery. It is recognition.

I read this as a boy and felt seen. I should have felt exposed.

To understand why, it helps to have Julietta Singh's vocabulary in hand. In Unthinking Mastery, Singh makes an argument that runs deeper than any simple critique of power: that mastery is not just something colonial powers impose on others but a formation of the self that the modern humanist tradition considers its highest achievement.3 She traces the logic back to Locke, who defines Man as "Master of himself," as proprietor of his own person and labor. This is the modern subject: self-possessed, self-governing, bounded. To be a man in this tradition is to have achieved a form of interior sovereignty. And Singh's claim, the most unsettling one in the book, is that this self-mastery is not separable from the colonial mastery we might otherwise disavow. They run on the same logic. Mastery, she argues, reaches toward the indiscriminate control over something, whether external or internal to oneself, aiming always for full submission of its object.

The boy in the corner was doing this work, quietly and without any awareness of it. Building a self that would be master of itself. Set apart, disciplined, exceptional, attuned to something the other boys weren't. The solitude wasn't failure. It was formation. And the formation was toward a subject who would eventually return, bearing the gift the world couldn't yet appreciate.

Singh also makes a point about narrative that cuts directly into what Le Guin was actually doing. Mastery, she argues, is fundamentally narrative: it assigns roles and holds them in place across time. The master's narrative has to elicit the participation of its subjects, has to get the boy who is not-yet-master to find himself in the story as the one who will be, as the one whose future recognition is already secured. That's what the quest narrative does. It doesn't just describe an exceptional self. It produces one, by getting the reader to inhabit the story as the hidden hero.4

This is precisely the reading experience I had with Earthsea. Le Guin handed me a narrative whose real argument was the undoing of that formation, and I absorbed it as confirmation. Singh calls this process finding yourself in the narrative, which shapes not just your thought but your affects and your actions. The story got inside me before I had the tools to read it critically, and it shaped what I could receive from the books that were trying to argue otherwise.

What Tehanu, the fourth Earthsea book, does is strip away the architecture entirely. Ged loses his magic. The great wizard becomes an ordinary man, and the novel asks what a man is without the gift that set him apart. Le Guin's answer requires the whole novel to find, but its direction is clear: toward dispossession rather than possession, toward dependence rather than mastery, toward the recognition that what he was before was not the fullness of the self but a particular story about the self that required constant maintenance.5

Singh calls this alternative possibility dehumanism, which sounds alarming and isn't. She means it as the undoing of the Lockean Man, the masterful self-proprietor, toward forms of being that don't require the interior sovereignty the tradition has confused with freedom.

Ged's arc is that undoing. Le Guin spent four novels performing Singh's argument in narrative form before Singh had written a word of it.

And I read it as a boy who needed to believe he was already the hidden king, and I felt confirmed.

That's not a failure of the books. It's a description of how formation works. The badly formed story was already running. It shaped what I could take in. And the story was not only in the books. It was in Locke. It was in Hegel. It was in Campbell. It was the deep grammar of what a self is supposed to be, filtered through a summer of island-survival stories and a corner near the pool tables, and it was already finished with its work before anyone had a chance to offer an alternative.

I haven't reread Earthsea as an adult. That revisitation is still ahead of me. But I know enough now to suspect that the man who goes back will find a very different book waiting, one that was always arguing against the story it felt like it was telling.

The conference was full of people like me.

Ordained misfits, mostly. People who had also sat in corners, who had also retreated from the social worlds that didn't want them, who had eventually found their way into collared shirts and stoles and a system that at least claimed to value what they were. Thoughtful people. Readers. The kind of clergy who quote Barth in casual conversation and mean it, who find the lectionary more interesting than the game on Sunday.

And almost every one of them was narrating their calling the same way I had narrated mine.

We were set apart. We were attuned to something the world missed. We had been misunderstood, excluded, overlooked, and the cost of that had confirmed us. Not better than the people who shut us out, exactly, but called to something more essential than what they were reaching for.

The costume had changed. The stole replaced the corner. But the grammar was identical.

I sat with that for a long time before I knew what to do with it. Because the easy interpretation is ironic: look at the misfits, still telling the same story. But the harder interpretation is structural. The quest narrative didn't lose its hold when we got ordained. It found a new institutional home. Theological education, it turns out, is extraordinarily well-equipped to receive and amplify exactly this formation.

Willie James Jennings, in After Whiteness, makes an argument about theological education that lands with particular force in this context. His target is what he calls the formation of the "self-sufficient" man, the cultured, competent, individually masterful person that theological education has implicitly taken as its product. Jennings traces this ideal to a colonial inheritance: the educated man who stands apart from community, who transcends the particular, who manages others from a position of superior knowledge. The goal of theological education, Jennings argues, has not been belonging. It has been the production of a particular kind of individual who is legible to a white self-sufficient masculine norm. Students are formed toward mastery of texts, traditions, and communities, even when they are forming communities that explicitly reject the language of mastery.6

The ordained misfits at the conference were not escaping this formation. They were inhabiting it in a new register. The bookish boy who needed to believe his exclusion was election grew up, went to seminary, learned the vocabulary of vocation, and found that the tradition had been waiting with a more sophisticated version of the same story. You were called before you were formed. Your difference is not failure but gift. The gap between you and the world is not social, it is spiritual. The discomfort you feel is not maladjustment but prophetic sensitivity.

All of it true, potentially. All of it available for distortion.

Jennings' alternative is not the rejection of calling but its reorientation, away from the self-sufficient individual and toward what he describes as belonging, a form of formation rooted in particular communities, bodies, and places rather than in the cultivation of the exceptional self. The opposite of the masterful cultured man is not the mediocre man. It is the man who knows where he is from and who he is bound to. Formation that produces belonging rather than standing apart.

This is where the quest narrative does its most subtle damage inside the church. Not in the obvious distortions, the warrior-Christ imagery, the muscular Christianity of a thousand men's retreats. In those cases the corruption is visible enough to name. The subtler damage is in the formation of clergy who understand their calling primarily through the grammar of distinction, who have replaced "I am different from the boys who didn't invite me to the birthday party" with "I am different from a world that doesn't understand what the church is for."

The story is the same. The world keeps producing boys who need it, and the church keeps offering them a version that fits the collar.

What I don't know yet, and what I think the essay cannot pretend to resolve, is whether there is a version of Christian calling that doesn't do this. Whether Paul's insistence that "not many of you were wise, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth" can actually hold the weight we ask it to hold. Whether being chosen despite your essential qualities rather than because of them can sustain a man the way the quest narrative sustains him.

I have been ordained for years. I am still not sure I have inhabited that grammar rather than the other one.

Paul is not subtle about this.

"Consider your own call, brothers and sisters," he writes to the church at Corinth. "Not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth." And then, the turn that the quest narrative cannot absorb: "God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are."7

Read carefully, this is not a consolation prize for the overlooked. It is not Paul telling the Corinthian misfits that they were chosen because they had a hidden quality the world couldn't see. It is the opposite. The point of the choosing is precisely the absence of that quality. God chose what is low and despised and not, and the verb matters here, in order to reduce to nothing things that are. The election is not confirmation. It is exposure. What gets exposed is the whole economy of distinction, the entire grammar that says some people are worth more than others, that the gifted are called and the ordinary are not, that the hidden king was always already different from the crowd he came from.

This is a different story than the one the boy in the corner was telling.

In Campbell's monomyth, the hero's separation from the ordinary world is the first sign of his greatness. He departs because he is different, and the journey proves and deepens the difference. He returns bearing gifts the world could not have generated without him. The election confirms the essential quality. Paul's election does the opposite: it recruits precisely those whom no one would have recruited, for precisely the purpose of demonstrating that the recruitment logic itself was wrong.

Karl Barth, whose doctrine of election remains the most thoroughgoing attempt in modern theology to think this through, insists that election is not first an individual matter at all.8 God's choice is first a choice of the community, the people called into being to bear witness to what God is doing in the world, and only derivatively a choice of individuals within that community. This inverts the quest narrative's architecture completely. You are not first a hidden king who discovers his calling and then joins a fellowship. You are first a member of a body, and your calling is intelligible only within that body's story. The individual is not the unit of election. The community is.

This is livable as theology. I believe it. I have preached it, in various forms, more times than I can count.

What I am less certain about is whether it is livable as formation, whether it can do the work the quest narrative was doing for the boy in the corner when he needed a reason to keep reading, when the doors were quietly closing and he had nothing but the story he was building for himself.

The quest narrative is durable because it answers a real need. The boy who is excluded needs something to hold. The story that his exclusion is evidence of calling gives him dignity and direction and a reason to get up in the morning. Paul's counter-grammar, you were not the hidden king, and God chose you anyway, and that is the whole point, requires you to relinquish the story that was holding you together before you have anything else to hold onto. That is not a small ask. It may be the ask of a lifetime.

What makes it harder is that the church has rarely offered Paul's grammar without letting the quest narrative back in through a side door. The preaching of election slides toward the preaching of exceptionalism. The community of the called becomes the community of the set-apart, who are different from the world in a way that confirms rather than subverts the distinction economy. The stole replaces the corner, and the grammar stays the same.

I don't think this is inevitable. I think Paul is pointing toward something real, something that could actually hold a person together differently than the quest narrative does, not by telling him he was always the hidden king, but by telling him he belongs to something that does not require him to be. That the body he is part of includes people who are not like him, whose difference is not a challenge to his calling but constitutive of it, whose presence relativizes his exceptionalism without erasing his particular gifts.

But I have not fully inhabited that grammar. I am not sure I know what it would feel like to have it be the story I actually live in rather than the story I preach.

That may be the most honest thing this essay can say.

The boombox is long gone. I don't remember what happened to it, which feels right. It was never really the point.

What I remember is the corner. The bench cut into the wall. The crack and rattle of pool tables a few feet away. The particular quality of attention that a book produces in a child who needs it badly, the way the room goes away and something else opens up. I was eight years old, and I was building a self from the materials available, and the materials were stories about men who survived alone.

I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't know the story had a grammar, that the grammar had a history, that the history ran from Locke through Hegel through Campbell and into the corner where I was sitting. I just knew the books were good and that I was winning something and that the winning felt like proof.

My dad came after work to pick me up. I clutched the boombox.

There is a version of this essay that ends with resolution, with the man who has worked all this out and can offer his son a better story. I have tried to write that version and it isn't true. What I have instead is the diagnosis, which is not nothing. Knowing the grammar of the story you've been living inside is not the same as being free of it, but it is a beginning. You cannot unthink mastery by resolving it. You can only learn to read for it, to notice where it surfaces, to stay with the trouble it produces rather than routing around it.

The Earthsea books are on my shelf. I haven't reread them yet. That's still ahead of me, and I am writing toward it rather than from it. The boy who received Le Guin as confirmation is going back with different eyes, or at least with eyes that know what they missed the first time. What he finds there, I don't know yet. That's a different essay.

What I can say is this. Ser Arlan of Pennytree, hedge knight, nobody in particular, tells the young man in his charge: a true knight always finishes a story. It is not the kind of thing a monomyth hero says. The monomyth hero returns transformed. Ser Arlan is talking about something simpler and harder: you said you would do this, so you do it. Not because it confirms your destiny. Because you said you would.

Fidelity rather than destiny. Completion rather than conquest. The story is not yours because you are exceptional. The story is yours because you are in it, and being in it means you owe it something.

The boy in the corner was building a self that would eventually return bearing gifts. I am less interested in that self now than I used to be. I am more interested in what it would mean to stay, to belong to a particular place and people and community of practice rather than to stand apart from one, waiting for the departure that confirms the calling.

I am not sure I know how to do that yet. But I think it is the right question. And I think the boy who needed the boombox as proof would benefit from hearing it, even if he isn't ready to answer it.

Even if the man writing this essay isn't either.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. Created by Oti Edozie. HBO, 2024.

Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics II/2. Translated by G. W. Bromiley et al. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957.

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949.

———. The Power of Myth. New York: Doubleday, 1988.

Du Mez, Kristin Kobes. Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. New York: Liveright, 2020.

Jennings, Willie James. After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020. Le Guin, Ursula K. A Wizard of Earthsea. Berkeley: Parnassus Press, 1968.

———. The Tombs of Atuan. New York: Atheneum, 1971.

———. The Farthest Shore. New York: Atheneum, 1972.

———. Tehanu. New York: Atheneum, 1990.

MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. 3rd ed. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007.

Singh, Julietta. Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.

Williams, Bernard. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985.

1. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949) is the primary text, though Campbell developed the monomyth across his career, most accessibly in The Power of Myth (New York: Doubleday, 1988), the book companion to his celebrated PBS conversations with Bill Moyers. Campbell was a genuinely serious comparative mythologist, steeped in Jung and deeply read across world religious traditions, and the men who find his framework compelling are not simply looking for permission to cast themselves as heroes. He identified something real: that across enormously diverse cultures, stories of transformation tend to follow recognizable patterns, and that those patterns do genuine psychological work. The problem is not the observation. The problem is what happened to it. George Lucas's acknowledged debt to Campbell in the making of Star Wars industrialized the monomyth, converting a descriptive account of narrative structure into a screenwriting formula and, eventually, a life-coaching template. What Campbell noticed about stories became what stories are supposed to do, and what a man's life is supposed to look like. The gap between those two things is where the damage lives. Campbell himself was more interested in the psychological and spiritual dimensions of the journey than in its application to masculine self-fashioning, and it is worth noting that his framework has been taken up by feminist mythologists and scholars in ways that complicate the masculine-hero reading that has become its dominant popular inheritance. The critique in this essay is aimed at the Campbell pipeline, not at Campbell's original project, which deserves more careful reading than its popularization has allowed.↩

2. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). The argument about narrative and virtue runs through chapters 14 and 15, where MacIntyre develops what he calls the narrative unity of a human life. His claim is that virtues are only intelligible in the context of practices, practices only intelligible in the context of a whole life, and a whole life only intelligible in the context of a tradition. The quest enters here not as a heroic adventure but as the form that a life oriented toward the good necessarily takes: "the good life for man is the life spent in seeking for the good life for man" (219). This is a deliberately circular formulation, and MacIntyre means it to be. The quest is not toward a known destination but toward a better understanding of what the destination is. That is a very different structure than Campbell's monomyth, which knows exactly what the destination looks like and measures the hero by whether he reaches it. MacIntyre's questing figure is not exceptional. He is not departing from an ordinary world that cannot contain him. He is a person embedded in practices and communities and traditions, trying to understand what it means to live well within them. The individual is not the unit of the quest. The tradition is. This distinction is load-bearing for the argument in this essay: the problem with Campbell is not that he gave us quest, but that he gave us a particular distortion of quest that evacuated exactly the communal and teleological dimensions MacIntyre insists are essential to it. Bernard Williams raised fair objections to MacIntyre's tendency to romanticize the coherence of pre-modern moral traditions in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), and those objections are worth taking seriously. But the diagnosis survives the historical critique: whatever the pre-modern traditions actually looked like, the vocabulary we have inherited is thinner than the practices that once sustained it, and the quest narrative we have been left with is thinner still.↩

3. Julietta Singh, Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018). The Locke passage Singh develops (pp. 13–14) is from the Second Treatise on Civil Government, where Locke defines Man as the being who is “Master of himself” and proprietor of his own person and labor. Singh’s reading is that Lockean Man is not thinkable without this practice of mastery: selfhood, in the liberal humanist tradition, is constituted by the mastery of something that precedes and exceeds the self, something the self has to subdue in order to become free. This is the deep structure of modern masculine formation: to be a man is to have achieved interior sovereignty, to have become master of your own unruly material. Singh’s most contentious claim, and the one most directly relevant to this essay, is what she describes as “the intimate link between the mastery enacted through colonization and other forms of mastery that we often believe today to be harmless, worthwhile, even virtuous” (10). They are not analogous practices. They run on the same logic of splitting, subordination, and control, whether the object being mastered is external or internal to oneself. “Dehumanism” is Singh’s proposed alternative (pp. 4–6), which she is careful to distinguish from dehumanization. She is not arguing for the degradation of the human but for the undoing of the Lockean Man toward what she calls “other ‘modalities’ of the human” (6) that do not require interior sovereignty as their foundation. This is a utopian project in the precise sense: it points toward something that does not yet exist in recognizable form, while tracing its outlines in literary and political texts that have been reaching toward it. Singh’s readings of J.M. Coetzee, Mahasweta Devi, and Jamaica Kincaid are the heart of the book and reward careful attention, though they lie beyond the scope of this essay’s argument.↩

4. Singh develops the narrative argument in the “Narrative and Matter” section of the introduction (pp. 17–18). Her claim is precise: mastery is “a fundamentally narrative problematic” that “assigns particular roles (the master, the slave) and holds those roles in place” in a temporal structure. The narrative does not merely describe an existing hierarchy; it produces one by getting its subjects to find themselves within it. “Through these material changes in a subject who ‘finds’ him or herself in a narrative (either as master or slave), the subject’s actions and affects are informed by narrative, even as these subjects must continually reproduce it.” This is the mechanism the essay is tracing in the boy reading island-survival stories: the quest narrative doesn’t wait for conscious adoption. It elicits participation. The boy finds himself in the story as the one whose departure is already underway, whose future recognition is already secured, and his actions and affects follow accordingly. Le Guin was writing against this mechanism. The problem is that the mechanism was already running before he picked up the book.↩

5. Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea (Berkeley: Parnassus Press, 1968); Tehanu (New York: Atheneum, 1990). The Earthsea series spans six novels and several story collections, but the arc most relevant here runs from the first book through the fourth. A Wizard of Earthsea establishes the formation problem: Ged's exceptional gift, his pride in it, and the shadow his pride releases into the world. The Tombs of Atuan and The Farthest Shore develop the series' increasingly complex account of power and its costs. Tehanu is the decisive turn. Written eighteen years after the first book, it is Le Guin explicitly revisiting and revising her own mythology. Ged returns from the events of The Farthest Shore stripped of his power, and the novel refuses to treat this as tragedy requiring resolution. The great wizard has to learn to be an ordinary man, to be cared for rather than caring, to belong to a household rather than to stand apart from one. Le Guin was candid in interviews that Tehanu was a feminist reconsideration of everything the first three books had taken for granted about power, gender, and heroism. What she produced is one of the more rigorous fictional engagements with the question this essay is circling: what is a man without the gift that defined him, and is what remains enough? Her answer is not sentimental. It is structural. The gift was never the point. The belonging was.↩

6. Willie James Jennings, After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020), chapters 4 and 5 (ProQuest ebook pp. 85–121). Jennings' argument is aimed specifically at theological education, but its reach is broader than the seminary. His diagnosis turns on what he calls the self-sufficient man, the figure who wields power responsibly, identifies ability in others with clarity, and understands the world as properly ordered around those with greater gifts. This is not a caricature but a description of a specific educational ideal, one that Jennings traces to the colonial inheritance of Western formation. The house of theological education, he argues, was built as a duplex: one side devoted to master formation, in which indigenes and others would enter European civilization and humanity through education, and the other to emancipatory formation, in which learning became a weapon of resistance against colonial bondage. His most searching claim is that both sides of this duplex aim at mastery. "Both education as master formation and education as emancipatory weapon aim at cultivating mastery," he writes, whether the freedom of mastery in moral formation or the mastery of freedom in emancipation. What neither side of the house produces is formation in communion, the kind of belonging that does not require standing apart from or over a community but learning to live inside one. Jennings illustrates the self-sufficient man through a student he calls Win, tall, blond, Ivy-educated, every line fallen in a pleasant place, who comes to Jennings asking: "I love my father and my grandfather and the other men in my life. But I don't want to be them. How can I not be them?" Jennings has no plan for him, only the knowledge that Win will have to resist a world organized to build itself freshly on his body. The alternative Jennings points toward, developed in the "Eros" chapter, is theological education as the cultivation of a new belonging, a way of gathering that does not hoard or manage but forms people into genuine desire for one another across difference. This connects directly to Kristin Kobes Du Mez's argument in Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (New York: Liveright, 2020), which traces the specific historical construction of a white masculine Christian ideal in American evangelicalism. Jennings and Du Mez are addressing the same inheritance from different angles: Du Mez shows us what it looks like in its most distorted popular form, and Jennings traces its roots in the educational institutions that were supposed to correct it.↩

7. 1 Corinthians 1:26–29, NRSV. The passage sits within Paul's extended argument with the Corinthian church about wisdom, status, and the nature of the community's life together. The Corinthians were fracturing along lines of allegiance to different teachers, with different factions claiming superior wisdom through their association with Paul, Apollos, or Cephas. Paul's response is not to adjudicate between the teachers but to attack the underlying framework: the assumption that the community's life is organized around the acquisition and display of wisdom, status, and distinction. His counter-move is to point to the composition of the community itself as the argument. Look at who you are, he says. Not many wise, not many powerful, not many of noble birth. This is not false modesty or consolation. It is an epistemological claim: the community's actual constitution is evidence of what God is doing, and what God is doing is not confirming the existing economy of distinction but exposing and subverting it. "God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are" is among the more radical sentences in the New Testament, and it has rarely been allowed to do its full work in Christian formation. The tradition has been far more comfortable with election as confirmation than with election as exposure. Paul, at least in this passage, will not allow the comfort. The choosing is precisely of those who have no claim, for precisely the purpose of demonstrating that the claim itself was always the wrong category.↩

8. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/2, trans. G. W. Bromiley et al. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957). The doctrine of election occupies the whole of this volume, and it remains the most ambitious attempt in modern Protestant theology to think election without making it a mechanism of individual religious privilege. Barth's foundational move is to locate the primary subject of election not in individual human beings but in Jesus Christ, who is simultaneously the electing God and the elected human. From that center, election extends outward: first to the community, the people called into being to bear witness to what God has done in Christ, and only within that community to individuals. This sequencing is everything. The individual is not elected and then incorporated into a community. The community is the primary locus of election, and individuals find their calling within and through their belonging to it. This is not a minor revision of the Protestant tradition's tendency to make election a drama between God and the individual soul. It is a structural inversion of it. For the argument of this essay, what matters is that Barth's account of election is constitutively communal in a way that the quest narrative's account of calling is not. You are not first a hidden king who discovers his destiny and then joins a fellowship. You are first a member of a body, and your particular gifts and calling are only intelligible within that body's story and mission. The individual's exceptionalism is not confirmed by election. It is relativized by it.↩

A ☕️☕️☕️ read in seven parts.

I have watched my son do the same thing at soccer practice, at flag football, at swim meets, at the edges of basketball courts in cold January gyms. The setting changes. He doesn’t.

He arrives, and then he waits. Not anxiously—that’s the first thing you notice once you know what you’re looking at. He isn’t hanging back because he doesn’t want to be there or because he’s afraid of getting something wrong. He’s watching. Taking in the other boys, their skill levels, their pecking orders, the particular social weather of this group on this day. He is, without knowing the word for it, assessing. And then, when he has seen enough, he moves—not tentatively but with a kind of considered confidence, as though he has been waiting for permission from his own perception.

Sometimes the action is athletic. Sometimes it’s social. Sometimes, once he has figured out where the group humor lives and how it works, it’s a well-timed joke that gets a laugh and earns him entry in a way that pushing to the front never would have. The restraint is not a withdrawal from participation. It is, somehow, its precondition.

I know this pattern from the inside because I recognize the feeling—the holding back, the watching, the reluctance to be the first one in. What stops me, standing on those sidelines, is that I know what I did with the same instinct. He contemplates and then goes. I contemplated and then, more often than not, didn’t. The watching became the thing itself. The waiting became permanent.

I am only starting to understand the difference between those two things. And most of what I’ve learned, I’ve learned from him.

The Western has always known how to film a man who doesn’t draw.

It is one of the genre’s most reliable visual grammars: the crowd waiting, the hand hovering, the long beat of held breath before the explosion. The restraint is part of the choreography. It makes the violence more satisfying when it comes, the way a held note makes the resolution sweeter. This is not the virtue of restraint. It is restraint in service of force—tactical delay, the coiled spring. The Western celebrates it precisely because it guarantees a more devastating release.

This matters because the genre has shaped, more than most of us want to admit, the emotional vocabulary available to American men thinking about strength. The hero who waits is not waiting because he has learned something about the right ordering of power. He is waiting because he is better at violence than the man across from him, and he knows it, and he is going to prove it. The restraint is instrumental. It has no content of its own. Strip away the eventual explosion and there is nothing there—no account of what the holding back was for, no vision of what it might mean to hold back and not explode at all.

The genre occasionally troubles this, and those are the moments worth attending to.

The genre’s most honest attempt at something more is also one of its oldest.

High Noon is a film about a man who has every reason to leave and cannot make himself do it. Will Kane, the marshal of Hadleyville, is minutes from his wedding and his retirement when he learns that Frank Miller—a man he put away, a man who has promised to kill him—is arriving on the noon train. His new wife wants to leave. His deputies won’t stand with him. The town he has spent his career protecting finds reasons, one by one, to look away. Every person he trusts gives him the same advice: go. The math is simple. There is no good outcome for staying.

He stays.

What makes Kane interesting for our purposes is that his restraint is not tactical. He is not holding back to strike harder later. He is holding something else entirely—a sense of who he is and what that requires, a code that has no enforcement mechanism beyond his own willingness to live by it. The town’s abandonment doesn’t dissolve the obligation. His wife’s ultimatum doesn’t dissolve it. The approaching train doesn’t dissolve it. There is something in Kane that will not be argued out of itself, and the film treats this not as stubbornness but as integrity—the self remaining continuous with its own commitments under maximum pressure to abandon them.

This is closer to the virtue tradition than almost anything else the genre has produced. What Kane is practicing, without the vocabulary, is something like fidelity—the restraint of the self from its own rationalizations, the refusal to let fear or convenience rewrite the account of what is required. It is also, notably, costly in ways the genre usually fudges. Kane does not emerge from High Noon vindicated and celebrated. He throws his badge in the dirt and rides out of town. The community that failed him offers no apology. The code held, and the cost was real, and the film does not pretend otherwise.

But High Noon also contains the seed of its own limitation, and the essay needs to name it honestly. Kane’s restraint is exercised almost entirely alone. The communal structures that should have supported it—the deputies, the town council, the church congregation that debates and demurs—have dissolved, and what remains is one man and his code against the world. The film presents this as heroic, and in one sense it is. But in another sense it is the Western’s most persistent fantasy dressed in the clothing of virtue: the idea that genuine formation is finally a solitary achievement, that the code a man carries is self-generated and self-sustaining, that community is at best a backdrop and at worst a disappointment. The tradition this essay is drawing on would say something different. A virtue practiced entirely alone, without the community that named it and the story that sustains it, is not formation. It is willpower. The two are not the same thing, and they do not produce the same man over time.

Kane holds. But he holds alone. And the film, for all its honesty about cost, cannot quite imagine what it would have meant for him not to be alone—what a community actually capable of forming and sustaining that kind of integrity might have looked like. That is the question the Western has almost never been able to ask.1

In Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry gives us two men who have ridden the same trails, fought the same fights, and arrived at almost the same age with almost nothing in common.2 Gus McCrae is a man at ease with himself—talkative, pleasure-loving, genuinely curious about people, capable of violence when violence is required but not organized around it. His restraint is a form of presence. He holds back from nothing that matters; he simply refuses to let urgency crowd out enjoyment. Call, by contrast, is all discipline and forward motion, a man who has achieved extraordinary self-control and somewhere along the way misplaced the self it was meant to govern. He cannot tell his own son he is his son. He cannot acknowledge love that is plainly visible to everyone around him. What looks like virtue has calcified into a wound. The restraint is still there. It has just stopped serving anything alive.

Unforgiven is darker still. William Munny has practiced restraint—from drink, from his old violence, from the man he used to be—and the film treats that practice with genuine respect, up until the moment it breaks.3 When it breaks, Eastwood doesn’t celebrate it. He films it as loss. The man who rides out of the rain at the end is not the hero reclaiming his power. He is a man who has destroyed something he had worked hard to build, and the film knows it, and the audience is not quite sure what to feel. That uncertainty is the most honest thing the genre has produced on this subject.

And then there is Sheriff Bell.

No Country for Old Men gives us a man who looks at what is coming—Anton Chigurh, pure force without remainder, violence unconstrained by anything—and makes a deliberate choice not to engage. Bell arrives at the motel too late, or just in time, depending on how you read it. He does not pursue. He goes home, and then he retires, and then he tells his wife about a dream, and the film ends. The Coen Brothers refuse to condemn him for any of this. They also refuse to fully vindicate him. The question of whether Bell’s non-engagement is wisdom or failure—the restraint of the man who has seen enough, or the abdication of the man who is simply tired—is the question the film declines to answer, and that refusal is almost certainly intentional.4

What the genre cannot quite do, even in these better moments, is say what restraint is for. It can show us the cost of its absence. It can show us its shadow side, the way it curdles in Call, the way it breaks in Munny. It can leave the question open the way the Coens do with Bell. But it does not have a language for restraint as a positive form of power, as something a man practices not because explosion is coming but because the practice itself is shaping him into something worth being. That language comes from somewhere older.

Before we can say what restraint is, it helps to understand what its absence costs.

James Gilligan spent decades as a psychiatrist working with violent men—in prisons, in forensic hospitals, in the populations most of us prefer not to think about—and what he found, underneath almost every act of serious violence he encountered, was shame. Not anger, exactly, though anger was usually present. Shame: the experience of the self as so fundamentally worthless, so comprehensively humiliated, that violence became the only remaining means of restoring a sense of existence.5 The men who hurt people, Gilligan concluded, were not men overflowing with dangerous feeling. They were men who had been emptied out, who had no other resource for reconstituting themselves. Violence was not the presence of something. It was the symptom of an absence.

This reframes what restraint is actually doing. It is not merely the suppression of dangerous impulse, a lid on a boiling pot. It is the evidence of an interior structure that can bear the weight of shame without collapsing into it—a self stable enough that humiliation does not become emergency, that the ordinary wounds of living do not require violent repair. The man who can be wronged, embarrassed, diminished, and not explode is not a man without feeling. He is a man whose feelings have somewhere to go that isn’t outward and destructive. The restraint is possible because something is holding.

Which means the question is not only whether a man can restrain himself, but what the restraint is resting on. And here the shadow becomes personal.

I was the kid who held back, and held back, and then didn’t go. I told myself various stories about this over the years—that I was careful, that I was an observer by nature, that there was nothing wrong with watching from the edge. Some of those stories had truth in them. But underneath them, if I am being honest, was something closer to Gilligan’s territory than I wanted to admit: not shame in its violent extreme, but a quieter version of the same structure, the self not quite solid enough to risk the exposure of full participation. The holding back was not preparation. It was protection. The waiting was not praus—power under direction—it was power that had never found a direction because finding one felt too dangerous.6

The difference between that and what I watch my son do is not visible from the outside. We are both the kids at the edge of the group. But his stillness has a forward orientation. Mine had a backward one. His is restraint in the classical sense—energy gathered, attention sharpened, waiting for the right moment to move. Mine was closer to what Gus McCrae, that most clear-eyed of observers, would have recognized immediately: a man hiding in the vocabulary of caution.

The virtue and its shadow can look identical until the moment arrives. What they’re made of is entirely different.

The question that follows from this is not a therapeutic one—not what happened to me, or whose fault it was, or how to process it. Those are real questions, and they have their place, but they are not the questions a tradition organized around formation tends to ask first. The tradition asks something more demanding and more hopeful simultaneously: not what went wrong, but what is actually required, and whether a person is willing to begin acquiring it. That reframe matters. It moves the conversation from diagnosis to practice, from explanation to habituation, from the self examining its own wounds to the self beginning, however haltingly, to be shaped by something beyond them. It is, the tradition would insist, the only move that actually goes anywhere.

The tradition has a word for what my son is doing. Several, actually, and they cluster around the same insight from different angles.

Aristotle called it sophrosyne—usually translated “temperance,” which is unfortunate, because temperance has acquired connotations of prim self-denial that the Greek word does not carry.7 Sophrosyne is better understood as self-possession: the rightly ordered relationship between a person and their own desires, appetites, and impulses. Not their elimination. Their governance. The person with sophrosyne is not the person who feels nothing; they are the person whose feelings serve them rather than drive them. It is a condition of interior freedom, and Aristotle understood it as one of the cardinal virtues precisely because without it the others collapse. Courage without sophrosyne becomes recklessness. Justice without it becomes cruelty. The whole edifice of a well-formed life rests on a person who is, in some fundamental sense, in charge of themselves.

Aquinas inherits this and sharpens it in a direction that matters for our purposes. His treatment of mansuetudo—meekness, gentleness, the virtue governing anger specifically—insists that the goal is not a man without anger but a man whose anger has been rightly ordered.8 The Desert Fathers called this apatheia, which is easily misread as apathy but means something closer to freedom from compulsion: the state of not being driven by passion, not being at the mercy of whatever feeling arrives most loudly. Evagrius Ponticus, writing in the Egyptian desert in the fourth century, understood anger as a capacity that could be either enslaved to the ego or liberated for love. Rightly ordered, Aquinas would later argue, it becomes something close to zeal—the energy of love encountering what opposes it. The tradition never thought the goal was a man without strong feeling. It thought the goal was a man whose strong feelings had been educated.

Then there is the word the tradition has handled most carelessly, and which repays the most careful handling.

Prautes—meekness, in most English translations of Matthew 5:5. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. It has been read for centuries as a blessing on the passive, the mild, the self-effacing, and the result has been that generations of men have heard it as a blessing on someone else. But prautes almost certainly carries within it a specific image: the warhorse that has been trained.9 A praus horse is not a gentle horse in the sense of a weak one. It is a warhorse—bred for strength, capable of tremendous force—that has learned to respond to the rider rather than to its own fear and aggression. The power is entirely present. What has changed is its direction. It moves when the rider moves, holds when the rider holds, charges when the charge is called for and stands when standing is what the moment requires.

This is not a blessing on the passive. It is a blessing on power that has been brought under direction. And it reframes the entire question of masculine formation: the goal was never less strength. It was always strength that had learned to serve something beyond itself.

My son, at the edge of the soccer field, reading the group, waiting for the right moment—he is not demonstrating weakness. He is demonstrating something much harder to come by: the capacity to have an impulse and not be immediately owned by it. To feel the pull toward participation and to let that feeling inform rather than compel. He doesn’t know the Greek. He doesn’t need to. He is doing the thing the word is pointing at.

What I was doing, for years, was something the tradition also has a name for. Not a virtue. The privation of one.

The virtue tradition gives us the vocabulary. Theology gives us the ground it stands on.

There is a word in Christian theology for the act of holding power in check—not because the power is absent, but because its restraint is itself a positive act. The word is kenosis, from Philippians 2, where Paul describes Christ emptying himself, taking the form of a servant, becoming obedient to the point of death. The Greek ekenosen—he emptied himself—has generated centuries of theological argument about what exactly was emptied and how, and those arguments matter, but they can obscure something simpler that the passage is doing. It is describing restraint as a form of love.10 The withholding of power not as weakness but as the precise shape that love takes when it is serious about making room for the other. You cannot fill a space you are already occupying. The emptying is the precondition for the encounter.

Iris Murdoch, writing from outside the explicitly theological tradition but in deep conversation with it, called this “unselfing.” In The Sovereignty of Good she argues that the fundamental problem of moral life is the ego’s tendency to colonize everything—to see the world not as it is but as a projection of its own needs, fears, and desires. The moral discipline she points toward is not primarily about action but about attention: learning to look at reality clearly enough that the self’s noise stops distorting the picture. What makes this possible, she argues, is a kind of practiced withdrawal of the self from the center of its own vision. Not self-hatred. Not self-erasure. The self stepping back far enough that something other than itself can actually come into focus.

Simone Weil, characteristically, presses this further than most readers find comfortable. Her concept of decreation—the soul’s voluntary movement toward its own dissolution before God—is the mystical extreme of the same instinct.11 Weil is not always safe to follow all the way, but the direction she is pointing matters: that the self’s willingness to restrain its own expansion is not privation but a specific form of freedom, the freedom of not needing to be everything, of being able to receive rather than only to take.

What these three—Paul, Murdoch, Weil—have in common is the insistence that restraint is not the absence of power but its transformation. The kenotic Christ is not a weak Christ. The unselfed attention Murdoch describes is not passive attention. The decreated soul Weil points toward is not a soul that has given up. In each case, the restraint is generative. Something becomes possible in the space it opens that could not happen otherwise.

Sheriff Bell understands this, or is close to understanding it, which is why he is the most theologically interesting figure in the contemporary Western even though the Coen Brothers are almost certainly not making a theological argument. Bell faces Chigurh—which is to say, he faces a vision of the world in which force is the only grammar, in which every encounter is a transaction of power, in which the coin toss is the only honest account of what existence offers. And he declines to enter that world on its own terms. He has seen enough of what unrestrained force produces, and something in him will not follow it into the dark. He does not pursue. He goes home, and retires, and dreams.

The film refuses to tell us whether this is wisdom or failure, and that refusal is the point. Because from inside the Western’s normal grammar, it is obviously failure: the lawman who doesn’t face down the villain has abdicated his purpose. But Bell is operating with a different grammar, one the film does not quite name. His non-engagement is not cowardice—it is the refusal of a particular lie, the lie that the only meaningful response to violence is more effective violence. Whether he has found anything to put in its place, the film leaves open.

The tradition Bell cannot quite access would tell him this—and here the essay is bringing a grammar the film itself does not speak, though the dream seems to reach toward it: the emptying is not the end of the movement. Kenosis in Philippians 2 does not conclude with the self-emptying. It moves through it—through the cross, through the grave—toward something the restraint alone could never produce. The space opened by the withholding is not meant to stay empty. It is meant to become the conditions for something new.

Bell goes home and tells his wife about a dream. His father is in it, riding ahead, carrying fire in a horn, going on into the darkness to make light. Bell cannot explain it. The film ends before he can.

The tradition would recognize that dream. It has always known that the fire carried forward is not the fire the hero makes by his own hand.12

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a botanist and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and she is not writing about men or masculinity or the Western. But in Braiding Sweetgrass she articulates something about restraint that the virtue tradition approaches from the inside and the Western cannot quite name at all.

She calls it the Honorable Harvest.13

It is a set of protocols, passed down through Indigenous tradition, governing how a person takes from the living world. Never take more than you need. Take only what is offered. Never take the last. Give something back. Ask permission, and attend to the answer. The list sounds simple. What it encodes is a complete reorientation of the self’s relationship to what it encounters—away from extraction, toward reciprocity. The restraint is not deprivation. It is the condition for relationship. You cannot be in genuine relation with something you are only taking from. The withholding is what makes encounter possible.

What the protocols share, and what makes them genuinely demanding rather than merely aspirational, is that they require the practitioner to absorb cost without transferring it. To take only what is offered means accepting that sometimes what is offered is not enough—and bearing that insufficiency rather than taking more to compensate. To never take the last means leaving something on the table even when you are hungry. To give something back means the exchange is never purely in your favor. This is not how the self naturally operates. The self, left to its own devices, optimizes. It finds the justification, constructs the rationale, tells itself that this particular situation is the exception. The Honorable Harvest is a discipline precisely because it runs against that grain—because it asks the practitioner to hold the cost rather than pass it on, and to do so not once in a dramatic moment of sacrifice but in the ordinary, recurring, undramatic texture of every encounter. That is what makes it formation rather than gesture. And that is what connects it, across the considerable distance of cultural and ecological context, to what Aristotle meant by habituation: not the grand choice but the repeated small one, accumulated over time into something that begins to resemble a self.

Kimmerer is working in an ecological register, but the structure she is describing applies with uncomfortable precision to persons. The man who approaches every relationship as a site of extraction—of validation, of labor, of emotional supply—is not in relationship. He is harvesting. And the extraction forecloses the very thing he is, at some level, looking for: the experience of being genuinely met by something other than himself. The Honorable Harvest names what the kenotic tradition names from a different angle: that the self’s restraint is not its diminishment but the precondition for its genuine enlargement.

This is what Gus McCrae knows that Call does not.

Gus is not a saint. He is vain and verbose and considerably more comfortable with his own pleasures than any serious ascetic tradition would endorse. But he is a man who is genuinely interested in the people around him—curious about them, delighted by them, willing to be surprised by them. His restraint is not rigidity but availability: he holds back from nothing that matters because he is not organized around self-protection. He can afford to be generous with his attention because his sense of himself does not depend on controlling every encounter. When he dies, half a continent of people grieve him, and the other half of the novel is about a man who cannot understand why—because Call has never learned to receive what Gus gave freely, which was simply the experience of being genuinely seen.

What the virtue tradition would say about Gus is that he has, without the vocabulary, arrived at something close to sophrosyne—not the prim, self-denying version the word has acquired in English translation, but Aristotle’s original: the self in right relationship to its own appetites and desires, free enough from compulsion that it can actually attend to what is in front of it. Gus wants things. He enjoys things. He is not indifferent to pleasure or comfort or the esteem of people he respects. But his wanting does not overwhelm his seeing. He can be in a situation without needing the situation to confirm something about himself. That freedom—the freedom from needing every encounter to go a particular way—is what the tradition means by interior liberty, and it is rarer than it looks.

Call has everything Gus has in terms of capacity and more in terms of discipline. He is tougher, more reliable, more relentlessly competent. What he lacks is the thing that makes Gus’s competence generative rather than merely functional: the ability to be present to something other than his own forward motion. Call’s self-control has become a kind of armor, and armor, the tradition has always known, is not the same thing as strength. Armor is what you wear when you cannot afford to be touched. Strength is what allows you to be touched and remain standing. Call survives everything the frontier offers. He arrives at the end of the novel intact and utterly alone, having spent a lifetime protecting himself from the very encounters that might have made him more than he was. The restraint is real. But it is restraint in service of the self’s own preservation rather than in service of something beyond it. That is the distinction—quiet, difficult to name from the outside, decisive in its effects over time—between the virtue and its shadow.

Gus knows, without theorizing it, that you cannot be in genuine relation with what you are only protecting yourself from. His availability is not naivety. He has ridden the same dangerous trails as Call, fought the same fights, buried the same friends. He simply refuses to let the danger become the organizing principle of how he meets the world. That refusal is an act of will, sustained over a lifetime, and it is—the tradition would insist—a form of practiced restraint more demanding than anything Call’s rigid self-discipline requires. It is harder to remain open than to close. It is harder to keep attending than to stop. The Honorable Harvest practiced toward persons looks, in the end, a great deal like Gus McCrae at his best: taking only what is offered, giving something back, leaving the other person intact.14

This is not a natural posture for men formed by the Western’s grammar. Extraction is the genre’s default mode, toward land, toward women, toward the communities the hero moves through and leaves. The hero takes what he needs and rides on. That the riding on is filmed as freedom rather than loss is one of the genre’s most persistent distortions.

My son, at the edge of the group, watching and waiting, is practicing something closer to the Honorable Harvest than to the Western’s grammar. He is attending before he takes. He is reading what the group is actually offering rather than imposing what he needs it to be. And when he finally moves—when the joke lands, when he finds his place in the social weather of that particular afternoon—he has not extracted entry. He has earned it, which means something different. The group is intact. He is in it. Something has been exchanged rather than taken.

He is eight years old and he does not know he is doing any of this. Which is, the tradition would say, exactly how virtue is supposed to work.

I am on the sideline again. It is cold, or it is hot, or the gym smells like every gym has always smelled. The details shift. The thing I am watching doesn’t.

He arrives at the edge of the group and begins his work—because it is work, I understand that now, even if it looks like stillness from the outside. He is attending. He is reading the social weather, taking the measure of the other boys, figuring out where the humor lives and who sets the tone and what this particular group on this particular day is actually offering. He is practicing, without knowing the word for it, something that Aristotle spent considerable time trying to name, that the Desert Fathers went into the Egyptian wilderness to learn, that Aquinas worked out in careful Latin, that Simone Weil nearly destroyed herself understanding. He is holding his own impulses in check long enough for reality to come into focus.

And then he moves. Sometimes it’s a pass, sometimes it’s a joke, sometimes it’s just finding his place in the loose geography of boys-at-practice. It is never quite the same twice. What is always the same is the quality of the entry: considered, present, genuinely responsive to what is actually there rather than what he needed to find. He takes only what is offered. He gives something back. The group is intact when he joins it. Something has been exchanged.

I watch this and I feel two things simultaneously, and I have stopped trying to resolve them into one.

The first is something close to marvel. He arrived at this without being taught it, or without being taught it by me, which may or may not be the same thing. The grace, if that is what it is, ran sideways—or forward, from son to father, which is not the direction the tradition usually imagines it traveling. I am learning what the virtue looks like from someone who has not yet learned to be self-conscious about it, which means I am seeing it more clearly than I might if I had encountered it only in books.

The second is harder to name cleanly. It is not quite envy, and it is not quite grief, though it has something of both. It is the recognition, still fresh enough to be uncomfortable, that what I practiced for years under the name of restraint was its shadow: the holding back that never resolved into going, the waiting that became the thing itself, the self protected so carefully from exposure that it never quite risked the encounter that might have changed it. I was not practicing sophrosyne. I was practicing its absence in its clothing.

The tradition is clear that this recognition is not the end of the story. It is, in fact, the beginning of the only part that matters—the point at which a person stops performing a virtue they do not have and begins the slow work of actually acquiring it. Aristotle called this habituation. The Desert Fathers called it practice. The Wesleyan tradition I was ordained into calls it sanctification: the lifelong process by which a person is, by grace and effort together, made into something more than they arrived as. It is not fast. It is not linear. It does not wait for you to be ready.15

I am not sure I am doing it well. I am more sure than I was that I am doing it at all.

My son will move on to other teams, other gyms, other groups of boys whose social weather he will read from the edge before he joins them. He will get faster at it, probably, or more confident, or both. He may lose it for a while in adolescence and find it again. He may not know, for years, that it is a thing worth naming—that what feels like his particular personality is also, from a longer view, a virtue with a history and a tradition and a cloud of witnesses going back further than either of us can see.

When he is ready to hear that, I will tell him. I will tell him about the warhorse and the Greek word and the man in the Coens film who went home rather than ride into the dark. I will tell him about Gus McCrae, who knew how to receive what life offered without needing to take more than that. I will tell him about the Honorable Harvest, and what it means to attend before you take.

And I will tell him, because the tradition requires honesty and so does love, that I learned most of it from watching him.16

Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae. Translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province. New York: Benziger Brothers, 1947. I-II, q. 28, a. 4; II-II, q. 157.

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Terence Irwin. 2nd ed. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999.

Augustine of Hippo. Confessions. Translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Barclay, John M. G. “Does the Gospel Require Self-Sacrifice? Paul and the Reconfiguration of the Self.” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 45 (2023).

———. “Kenosis and the Drama of Salvation in Philippians 2.” In Kenosis: The Self-Emptying of Christ in Scripture and Theology, edited by Paul T. Nimmo and Keith L. Johnson, 7–23. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2022.

Barclay, William. New Testament Words. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1974.

Coen, Joel, and Ethan Coen, dirs. No Country for Old Men. Miramax Films, 2007.

Deloria, Vine, Jr. God Is Red: A Native View of Religion. 30th anniversary ed. Golden: Fulcrum, 2003.

Eastwood, Clint, dir. Unforgiven. Warner Bros., 1992.

Evagrius Ponticus. The Praktikos & Chapters on Prayer. Translated by John Eudes Bamberger. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1981.

Frankel, Glenn. High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic. New York: Bloomsbury, 2017.

Gilligan, James. Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic. New York: Putnam, 1996.

Hauerwas, Stanley. A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013.

MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. 3rd ed. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007.

McMurtry, Larry. Lonesome Dove. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985.

———. Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections at Sixty and Beyond. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999.

Murdoch, Iris. The Sovereignty of Good. London: Routledge, 1970.

The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Translated by Benedicta Ward. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1975.

Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. Translated by Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr. London: Routledge, 2002.

———. Waiting for God. Translated by Emma Craufurd. New York: Harper & Row, 1951.

Wesley, John. “Working Out Our Own Salvation.” In The Works of John Wesley, vol. 3, Sermons III, edited by Albert C. Outler, 199–209. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1986.

Zinnemann, Fred, dir. High Noon. United Artists, 1952. Screenplay by Carl Foreman.

1. High Noon (dir. Fred Zinnemann, 1952), screenplay by Carl Foreman. The film’s production history is itself an instance of its theme, and the coincidence is almost too neat to be believed. Foreman intended the film to serve as an allegory about the blacklist—specifically about Hollywood’s communal failure to stand up to HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee then hunting suspected Communists in the film industry. Foreman was summoned to appear before HUAC during production of the film and, as a result of his refusal to give the names of fellow Party members, was classified as an uncooperative witness and blacklisted by all of the Hollywood studio bosses. The town that abandons Kane is Hollywood. The man who holds his code alone is Foreman himself. Kane’s increasingly frantic efforts to gather support prove fruitless, leaving him to face the threat alone—after which he discards his badge in disgust at the cowardice of those who were unwilling to stand up and defend him when the time came. The film’s communal failure is not incidental to its argument. It is the argument. Which means the essay’s critique of Kane’s solitary virtue is also, at one remove, a critique of the conditions that produced it: a community so thoroughly organized around self-preservation that integrity became, by default, a solitary achievement. The counter-response is worth noting. John Wayne called the film un-American, and he and director Howard Hawks went on to make Rio Bravo (1959) as a direct rebuttal—a film in which the hero has loyal companions and the community is not a disappointment. Wayne’s instinct was not wrong exactly; he sensed that High Noon was indicting something he valued. What he missed was that the indictment was of the community’s failure, not of the value itself. Glenn Frankel, High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017) tells the full story.↩

2. Larry McMurtry’s relationship to the Western myth he helped construct is worth attending to. He spent much of his later career trying to dismantle what Lonesome Dove had accidentally celebrated—the 1999 essay collection Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen is partly a sustained argument that the frontier mythology is a lie and that he had been complicit in telling it beautifully. The Gus/Call contrast is, on one reading, McMurtry’s own argument with himself: Gus is what the myth could have been, Call is what it actually produced. What makes the novel more than nostalgia is that it knows the difference and mourns it. This is also the place to note the connection to the first essay in this series, where the question of what the Western preserves worth keeping runs alongside the question of what it distorts beyond recovery. McMurtry’s answer, arrived at late, was essentially: the landscape, and almost nothing else. The human costs were too high and too consistently ignored. Gus is the exception that proves the rule—which is why his death lands so hard, and why Call’s inability to grieve him properly is the novel’s real subject.↩

3. Eastwood has spent fifty years in the Western simultaneously inhabiting and interrogating its mythology, and Unforgiven is the fullest reckoning. The Man with No Name, Dirty Harry, Will Munny—these are not different characters so much as a single character at different stages of the same argument, the argument about whether the violence the hero carries is a tool or a condition. Unforgiven answers the question the earlier films left open: it is a condition, and it does not stay contained, and the man who believes he has mastered it has only postponed the reckoning. What complicates this reading is that Eastwood filmed it with a visual beauty that keeps seducing the audience into the myth even as the narrative dismantles it—the final sequence is genuinely frightening but also, undeniably, cool. The form and the content are in tension, which may be the most honest thing about it. You cannot fully exit a grammar you have spent a career perfecting.↩

4. The Coens have returned repeatedly to men whose moral frameworks prove inadequate to the world they are navigating—Fargo, A Serious Man, True Grit—and Bell belongs to this lineage. What distinguishes him from the others is that his inadequacy is not comic or ironic. It is genuinely tragic, and the film treats it with unusual tenderness. The dream sequence at the end—Bell’s father riding ahead in the dark, carrying fire in a horn—is the closest the Coens have come to an explicitly spiritual image, and it is worth noting that they give it to the man who has failed by the genre’s standards, not to the man who succeeded. There is a tradition, running from the Hebrew prophets through Augustine through the Wesleyan account of prevenient grace, that insists the fire goes ahead of us into the dark before we arrive—that the universe is not finally indifferent to whether we find our way. Bell does not have access to that tradition, or has lost it somewhere in a career spent looking at what human beings do to each other. The dream suggests it finds him anyway. Whether that is consolation or simply the mercy of sleep, the film will not say.↩

5. James Gilligan, Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic (New York: Putnam, 1996). Gilligan’s central argument is compact enough to state plainly: shame is not a symptom of violence but its cause, and the specific shame that produces violence is the experience of the self as so emptied of worth that only the forcible restoration of respect—real or symbolic—can reconstitute it. What makes the book more than clinical observation is Gilligan’s insistence that this dynamic is not pathological in the sense of being aberrant. It is the extreme expression of something ordinary, a logic of self-worth organized around external validation and status that the broader culture produces and rewards right up until the moment it turns lethal. The men in Gilligan’s prisons are not alien to the culture. They are downstream of it. This is also why his work connects so directly to the Western’s mythology: the genre consistently organizes masculine worth around the capacity for force and the willingness to deploy it, which is precisely the economy of recognition that Gilligan identifies as the engine of violence. The hero who cannot be humiliated without consequence is not a fantasy of strength. He is a fantasy of a self so defended against shame that it has become dangerous. The virtue tradition’s account of sophrosyne is, among other things, an account of a self stable enough that it does not need that defense.↩

6. The violent extreme Gilligan documents has a quieter register that his clinical frame doesn’t fully address, and Augustine is the tradition’s most honest witness to it. The Confessions is not primarily a book about dramatic sin—it is a book about the self’s extraordinary creativity in avoiding the exposure that transformation requires, the elaborate detours, the convincing stories, the genuine partial goods that function as substitutes for the real thing. Augustine’s account of his own restlessness—cor nostrum inquietum est donec requiescat in te, our heart is restless until it rests in you—is not a confession of violence but of something more widely recognizable: the self that will not be still long enough to be known, that keeps moving because stillness feels too much like surrender. The avoidance described in this essay’s personal material is in this territory rather than Gilligan’s, and the tradition is honest that the distance between them is one of degree rather than kind. Both are the self refusing the exposure that genuine formation requires. The Desert Fathers called this acedia—the noonday demon, the restlessness that looks like boredom but is closer to a flight from the self. It is worth naming here because the essay’s constructive argument depends on distinguishing between restraint as genuine self-possession and restraint as sophisticated avoidance. Augustine knew both from the inside, which is why the Confessions remains the most useful map of this particular territory.↩

7. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999), III.10–12, 56–61. Irwin’s translation renders sophrosyne as “temperance,” which is standard but unfortunate. The word carries connotations of abstinence and self-denial that the Greek does not—sophrosyne is better understood as a condition of interior order, the self in right relationship to its own appetites and desires. It is worth noting that Aristotle treats it as one of the four cardinal virtues not because pleasure and desire are dangerous but because without their proper ordering everything else becomes unstable. The courageous person without sophrosyne becomes reckless. The just person without it becomes cruel. The whole architecture of a well-formed life depends on a self that is, in some fundamental sense, governable from the inside. This is also why sophrosyne is not a virtue for the passionless—Aristotle is explicit that the person who feels no appetite and needs no governance is not virtuous but deficient, something less than fully human. The goal is not a self without strong feeling. It is a self whose strong feelings have been educated into proper order. The distinction matters enormously for any account of masculine formation that wants to avoid the trap of valorizing emotional suppression as though it were the same thing as genuine self-possession.↩

8. Aquinas treats mansuetudo in Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 157, where he defines it as the virtue that moderates anger according to right reason—not eliminating it but ordering it toward its proper end. His argument that rightly ordered anger becomes zeal, the energy of love encountering what opposes it, is in Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 28, a. 4. The Desert Fathers’ account of apatheia runs parallel to this but approaches it from a different angle: where Aquinas is working philosophically from Aristotle, Evagrius Ponticus is working contemplatively from lived practice in the Egyptian desert. His Praktikos is the primary text—see Evagrius Ponticus, The Praktikos & Chapters on Prayer, trans. John Eudes Bamberger (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1981). Apatheia for Evagrius is not the absence of passion but freedom from compulsion by passion—the state in which the soul is no longer driven by whatever feeling arrives most loudly but has learned to choose its responses. The two traditions, philosophical and contemplative, arrive at the same place from different directions: the goal is a self whose interior life is ordered rather than merely suppressed, free rather than merely controlled. This convergence is not accidental. Both are drawing on the same intuition about what a well-formed human life looks like from the inside.↩

9. The equestrian reading of prautes—the suggestion that the word carries within it the image of a trained warhorse, power brought under direction rather than power diminished—is widely repeated in preaching and popular biblical scholarship, and its genealogy as an interpretation is long enough to deserve respect even where its strict etymological grounding is uncertain. Several New Testament scholars have questioned whether the equestrian meaning is demonstrably primary in first-century Greek usage, and the honest position is that the linguistic evidence is contested rather than settled. What can be said with more confidence is that the interpretation coheres with the word’s usage across the New Testament, where prautes consistently describes not passivity but a specific quality of directed strength—Moses in Numbers 12:3, Christ in Matthew 11:29, Paul’s account of pastoral correction in Galatians 6:1. In each case the person described as praus is not weak but is exercising power with a particular quality of restraint and attentiveness. The warhorse image is best understood as a faithful interpretive tradition pointing at something genuinely present in the word’s usage, even if it cannot be sourced to the etymology with scholarly certainty. The essay uses it on those terms: as an image that illuminates what the text is doing rather than as a settled lexical claim. For the broader range of prautes in the New Testament, see William Barclay, New Testament Words (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1974), 231–35, with the caveat that Barclay is a popular rather than technical resource and should be supplemented by more recent scholarship.↩

10. The primary text is Philippians 2:5–11, and the secondary literature is vast. For the reading this essay is drawing on, see John M. G. Barclay, “Kenosis and the Drama of Salvation in Philippians 2,” in Paul T. Nimmo and Keith L. Johnson, eds., Kenosis: The Self-Emptying of Christ in Scripture and Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2022), 7–23, and his companion piece “Does the Gospel Require Self-Sacrifice? Paul and the Reconfiguration of the Self,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 45 (2023). Barclay’s argument is important for what this essay is doing because he resists the reduction of kenosis to self-negation: Christ does not relinquish divine power but expresses it in a qualitatively different register, and the goal of the whole movement is not emptiness but fullness—not kenōsis but plērōsis, as Barclay pointedly notes. The self-emptying is in service of koinōnia, shared life, oriented toward an ultimate gain rather than a permanent loss. This is the frame the essay needs: restraint understood as a positive act of making room, not as diminishment, and oriented toward something the restraint alone could not produce. The kenotic Christ is not a weak Christ. He is a Christ whose power has found its proper form. The formational implication is direct: the man who practices restraint in this key is not practicing self-erasure. He is practicing the reorientation of his strength toward something beyond himself.↩

11. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge, 1970), especially the title essay, 77–104. Murdoch’s account of “unselfing” is developed in the context of her argument that moral philosophy has been too focused on will and decision and not enough on the quality of attention a person brings to the world. The ego’s noise, she argues, is the primary obstacle to moral perception—not bad intentions but the constant hum of self-referential anxiety that prevents the world from being seen clearly. The practice she points toward is deliberately contemplative: attending to something beautiful, or true, or other, until the self’s claim on the center of its own vision loosens. Simone Weil covers adjacent territory from a more explicitly theological angle in her essays collected in Waiting for God, trans. Emma Craufurd (New York: Harper & Row, 1951), particularly “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” and in her notebooks collected in Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr (London: Routledge, 2002). Weil’s decreation presses further than Murdoch toward the soul’s voluntary dissolution before God, which is not always safe to follow all the way—Weil’s asceticism has a self-punishing edge the tradition should handle carefully. But the direction she is pointing matters: the self that has learned not to need to be everything is capable of a kind of receptivity that the defended, self-insisting self cannot manage. Both Murdoch and Weil are describing, from different angles, what the kenotic tradition describes from above: the space opened by the self’s restraint is not a void. It is the condition for genuine encounter.↩

12. The Wesleyan tradition’s account of prevenient grace is the theological ground beneath the essay’s reading of Bell’s dream, even if Bell himself has no access to it. Wesley’s sermon “Working Out Our Own Salvation” in The Works of John Wesley, vol. 3, Sermons III, ed. Albert C. Outler (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1986), 199–209, is the key text: grace goes before us, prepares the ground, is already active before we arrive at any moment of recognition or choice. The universe is not indifferent. The fire goes ahead into the dark before we get there. This is not a soft doctrine—it is a claim about the structure of reality that has direct bearing on what restraint is ultimately resting on. The man who practices the virtue is not generating the ground beneath his own feet. He is responding to something that has already gone ahead of him. Bell’s dream, on this reading, is not wish fulfillment or simple consolation. It is, however unwittingly, a glimpse of the structure of things: the father carrying fire forward, the son following into a warmth he did not make. The essay brings this grammar to a film that does not speak it, and the imposition is deliberate. The Coens leave the dream as mystery. The tradition would recognize it as something more.↩

13. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013), 175–201 for the Honorable Harvest protocols specifically, though the logic runs throughout the book. Kimmerer is a professor of environmental biology and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and the book’s distinctive achievement is that it refuses to separate scientific and Indigenous ways of knowing—each illuminates what the other cannot see alone. The Honorable Harvest is not a romanticized ethical code. It is a practical grammar of relationship, developed over generations of living with the consequences of getting it wrong, and its central insight is that restraint is not deprivation but the condition for reciprocity. You cannot be in genuine relationship with what you treat only as a resource. This applies with uncomfortable precision to persons, to communities, and—this essay’s argument—to the self’s relationship with its own desires and impulses. The man who approaches every encounter as a site of extraction is not in relationship. He is harvesting. What makes Kimmerer’s frame so useful alongside the virtue tradition is that she approaches the same insight from entirely outside the Western philosophical tradition, which means the convergence is not derivative. Two entirely different ways of knowing the world have arrived at the same place: that the self’s restraint is the precondition for its genuine enlargement, and that what looks like giving up is actually the opening of something.↩

14. Vine Deloria Jr., God Is Red: A Native View of Religion, 30th anniversary ed. (Golden: Fulcrum, 2003). Deloria is a recurring interlocutor in this series, and his presence here is structurally necessary rather than supplementary. Where Kimmerer works primarily in an ecological and relational register, Deloria works in an explicitly theological and political one: the Western’s fundamental posture is one of unrestrained acquisition, and the mythology keeps celebrating it even when it nominally criticizes it. The hero who takes what the frontier offers is still taking, and the tradition that blesses him is still a tradition organized around conquest. Deloria’s argument in God Is Red is that the difference between Indigenous and Western European religious sensibility runs all the way down—to different accounts of time, land, community, and what it means for a people to be located somewhere rather than moving through. The relevance to this essay’s argument about restraint is direct: the Western’s inability to imagine restraint as anything other than tactical is inseparable from a theological inheritance that treats the world as resource rather than relation. Kimmerer and Deloria are not making the same argument, and it would be a mistake to collapse them. But they are both exposing the same root system, and the series has been digging toward it since the first essay.↩

15. Aristotle’s account of habituation is in Nicomachean Ethics II.1–4, 18–27 in the Irwin translation: we become just by doing just acts, courageous by doing courageous acts, and the repetition is not mere repetition but the slow formation of a self that perceives and responds differently than it did before. The Desert Fathers’ account of practice runs parallel—see The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, trans. Benedicta Ward (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1975), where the consistent counsel is not insight but practice, not understanding but the patient repetition of small disciplines until they become constitutive. The Wesleyan account of sanctification holds both of these within a larger theological frame: see John Wesley, “Working Out Our Own Salvation,” in The Works of John Wesley, vol. 3, Sermons III, ed. Albert C. Outler (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1986), 199–209. Wesley insists that sanctification is neither purely human effort nor purely divine gift but their irreducible cooperation—the person works, and grace works through the working, and neither can be collapsed into the other without losing something essential. What the three traditions share is the refusal of a shortcut: there is no moment of insight that substitutes for the long work of formation, no recognition that replaces the practice it is meant to initiate. The recognition the essay arrives at is not the destination. It is, as Wesley would say, the beginning of the only part that matters.↩

16. The act of transmission—handing on what has been received, often imperfectly and always incompletely—has been the series’ underlying preoccupation from the beginning. The first essay asked what the Western’s myth of masculine formation had preserved worth keeping and what it had distorted beyond recovery. This essay has been asking what a more honest account of a specific virtue looks like when the mythology is stripped away. What remains, at the end of both inquiries, is not a system or a curriculum but a relationship: someone who knows something, imperfectly, and a younger person who needs to learn it differently. This is how the tradition has always worked. It does not download. It inhabits. The conversation the essay ends with—telling a son about the warhorse and Gus McCrae and Sheriff Bell and the Honorable Harvest—is not a pedagogy. It is the tradition doing what traditions do when they are still alive: finding their way forward through the people willing to carry them, which always turns out to include people who learned them sideways, late, and from unexpected directions. On the necessity of community for the transmission of virtue, see Hauerwas, A Community of Character, especially chapters 1–3, and MacIntyre, After Virtue, 204–225—both of whom would recognize this ending as the argument they were making all along.↩

A ☕️☕️☕️ essay in seven parts.

It was an ordinary Tuesday evening in October, the kind that arrives in the middle of a season before you've finished adjusting to it. One daughter at soccer practice. The other three kids running around on the open field nearby with a loose energy that falls somewhere between play and negotiation. I was on the sideline, present enough to count heads, far enough away to let them be.

I try not to hover. This isn't something I have to work at particularly hard—I'm a hang-back sort of person by nature, and that carries over into fatherhood. I want to know where they are. I feel the pull of protection the way any parent does. But stepping in before something has declared itself, organizing their experience before they've had a chance to inhabit it—that has never been my instinct. I'd rather be available than present in a way that crowds them.

I noticed the two older boys when they came over. I couldn't hear what was being said, but I could read the shape of it—the slight shift in posture, the way the younger kids' body language changed. Something was happening that wasn't ordinary roughhousing. I held still. I told myself I'd wait.

Before long they came back across the field to find me. The older boys had been using profanity, threatening them, making themselves as large and frightening as they could manage. One of them had picked up their ball and thrown it as far as he could, the way you do when you want someone to know you can take things from them.

My son and his sister had told them, calmly, that it wasn't okay.

What struck me—then and afterward, turning it over—was the calm. Not just that they had stood up for themselves, which mattered, but the way they had done it. They hadn't matched the volume. They hadn't escalated. They had named what was wrong and then come to find me, and by the time they got to me they were mostly just ready to point out where the boys had gone, mildly interested, already returned to themselves. They were, as far as I could tell, okay.

I told them I was proud of them for calmly standing up for what was right. I meant it. But I also found myself sitting with a question I didn't immediately know how to answer, and it was aimed most precisely at my son: what exactly had just held? Some disposition, some small formation of character had been tested in a minor but real way, and it had held. Where did it come from? How does a father participate in building something like that in a boy without quite knowing he's doing it—and without hovering over it so closely that it never gets the chance to become its own?

I don't think this is only a parenting question, though it is that. I think it is a question about what we are forming our sons toward, and whether the account of the good we are handing them is strong enough to hold when the world tries to make cruelty feel inevitable and cynicism feel like wisdom.

There is a particular pose that has become almost ambient in educated online life—a kind of knowing detachment, a willingness to name what's broken without any corresponding investment in what might be better. It shows up in the reflexive irony that greets any sincere assertion. It shows up in comment sections and reply threads where the sophistication of the critique is inversely proportional to any apparent interest in repair. It shows up in the political imagination of people across the spectrum who have become so fluent in what they're against that the question of what they're for has quietly stopped feeling urgent.

Matthew Desmond, in conversation with Ezra Klein, called this chic nihilism—and the word chic is doing important work in that phrase. This is not the nihilism of despair, not the bleak conclusion of someone who has looked long and hard at suffering and found no ground beneath it. It is nihilism as aesthetic, as social performance, as a way of signaling that you are too clear-eyed to be caught hoping for anything. It is, in a specific and uncomfortable way, a form of cowardice dressed as sophistication.1

Trolling is its cruder cousin, and they share a common mechanism. The troll and the chic nihilist are both, at root, practicing a strategy of attention-capture. The troll makes himself the organizing center of your interior life through provocation—the thrown ball, the escalating threat, the cruelty calibrated to produce a reaction. The nihilist does something subtler: he makes cynicism so ambient, so apparently inevitable, that your own impulse toward hope or repair begins to feel naive, embarrassing, insufficiently serious. Both are asking you to be organized around their terms. Both are offering you, underneath the surface noise, an invitation to stop seeing clearly and start reacting instead.

What I want for my son is immunity to both invitations. Not ignorance of what's broken—he will see plenty of what's broken, and I don't want to protect him from that seeing. Not a reflexive optimism that can't survive contact with reality. Something harder and quieter than either: the capacity to look at what is actually there, including the cruelty and the disappointment, and remain oriented toward something worth being oriented toward.

That is a formation question. And it begins, I think, with attention.

The opposite of chic nihilism is not enthusiasm. It is not positivity, and it is not the performance of hope. It is something more disciplined and less comfortable than any of those: the capacity to direct your attention deliberately, to choose what you will allow to organize your interior life, to resist the pull of whatever is loudest in favor of what is actually worth seeing.

William James put it with a compression that has stayed with me. As the art of reading, after a certain stage in one's education, is the art of skipping—so the art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook. The analogy to reading is not ornamental. James is saying that maturity, in any discipline, involves learning to move through a field selectively rather than exhaustively—that the person who tries to give equal attention to everything is not more thorough but less capable, because genuine comprehension requires triage. Wisdom, on this account, is not the accumulation of more but the discipline of less: knowing what to let go in order to hold what actually matters. The line is easy to misread as a permission slip for looking away from what is difficult. It is the opposite. James was describing a discipline—the recognition that attention is finite, that you cannot give yourself fully to everything that bids for your focus, and that wisdom consists precisely in the discernment of what deserves the gift of your presence.2

Simone Weil spent more of her thinking life on this question than almost any philosopher of the twentieth century, and what she concluded is stranger and more demanding than it first appears. Attention, in Weil's account, is not concentration. It is not effort or will or the forceful direction of mental energy toward an object. It is closer to the opposite of all those things—a kind of self-emptying, a receptive waiting, a clearing of yourself so that what is actually there can enter. She describes it as the suspension of your own thoughts, your own needs, your own categories, so that the other person—or the problem, or the situation—can be received on its own terms rather than yours. This is why she calls it the rarest and purest form of generosity. Most of what passes for attention is actually projection. We look at people through the screen of our own interior weather and receive back, largely, ourselves. Genuine attention—the kind Weil means—requires that you get out of the way.3

The implications of this for how we think about cruelty are significant. The troll is not simply inattentive. He is aggressively projective—he does not see you at all. He sees a surface that will produce the reaction he is after, and his cruelty is calibrated to that end. What he wants is not encounter but response, not your actual presence but your reorganization around him. The person formed in Weil's sense is not simply more polite than the troll. They are operating from a fundamentally different orientation—one that takes the reality of the other seriously enough to actually look, which is precisely what the troll's entire strategy is designed to prevent.

The Desert Fathers had a word for the practice Weil is describing: prosoche—watchful attention, the discipline of noticing what is actually present rather than being swept along by whatever is reactive in you. Its opposite in the patristic vocabulary was not inattention but distraction—a word they used with moral gravity, because they understood that a distracted person is not simply unfocused but vulnerable, available to be organized by whatever ambient force is strongest. Formation, in their account, was largely a matter of training the attention: learning to see clearly, to notice accurately, to resist the pull of whatever was clamoring loudest in favor of what was genuinely there.4

Václav Havel, writing from within a very different tradition and a very different kind of danger, arrived at something that rhymes with both of them. What the communist system required of ordinary citizens, Havel observed, was not genuine belief. It was performance. The greengrocer puts the sign in the window—Workers of the World, Unite!—not because he means it but because everyone puts signs in the window, and the performance of allegiance is what the system runs on. It is easier to comply than to refuse, and the compliance does not even ask you to actually see anything. It asks only that you go through the motions, that you be present in body while absent in attention. Living in truth, the alternative Havel keeps returning to, is not primarily an intellectual act. It is a dispositional one—the refusal to perform what you cannot actually see. It requires, before anything else, the capacity and the willingness to look at what is actually there.5

My son, on an October evening, did something that looked a great deal like this. He saw what was happening. He named it without escalating it. He did not let two loud, threatening boys become the organizing center of his response—did not perform either compliance or matching cruelty. He stayed, somehow, himself.

I want to understand how that happened. More than that, I want to understand how to keep cultivating it.

There is a version of the concern I'm describing that gets mistaken for a political argument. What I am after for my son is not that he arrives at the right opinions. It is not that he lands on the correct side of the debates that will define his adult life, whatever those turn out to be. It is something prior to all of that—a disposition of careful seeing that would make his eventual conclusions genuinely his own rather than the product of whatever team got to him first.

The reflexive partisan and the chic nihilist look like opposites. One is loudly committed; the other performs detachment. But they share a common failure: neither is really looking. The reflexive partisan has outsourced his attention to an apparatus that tells him what to see before he's seen it. The nihilist has exempted himself from the obligation to see at all. Both are ways of avoiding the harder and more demanding work of attending to what is actually in front of you—the particular situation, the specific person, the claim that doesn't fit neatly into the available categories.

Havel's greengrocer, who we met in the last section, is worth staying with a moment longer. What makes his situation so uncomfortable to read about is how reasonable the compliance seems. The sign costs him nothing. Everyone has one. The system doesn't ask him to believe anything—only to perform, which is a much lower bar. And yet Havel's argument is that the performance is precisely the problem, because it habituates the greengrocer to a particular relationship with reality: one in which what you publicly enact and what you actually see are permitted to diverge, in which the gap between appearance and truth becomes something you simply live with. The person who has practiced that habituation long enough loses, gradually, the ability to close the gap—loses, finally, the felt sense that the gap matters. Living in truth is the refusal to begin that habituation, which means it has to start early, before the compromises accumulate into a settled way of being in the world. It is, among other things, a formation project.6

Marilynne Robinson has been making a version of this argument from within the American context for decades, in essays that resist capture by any available political faction with a consistency that has made her variously beloved and maddening across the spectrum. What she keeps returning to is the impoverishment of a civic imagination that has forgotten how to be genuinely curious about its fellow citizens—that has replaced the hard work of actually seeing the people around you with the much easier work of sorting them into categories that confirm what you already believed. The loss she is diagnosing is not primarily political. It is attentional. We have stopped looking at each other, and we have stopped noticing that we've stopped.7

The virtue tradition has a name for the capacity both Havel and Robinson are pointing toward: prudence. Not caution in the colloquial sense, but the master virtue that Aquinas understood as the one that makes all the others functional. Prudence is the capacity to perceive a situation accurately before acting—to see what is actually there rather than what your fear or your ideology needs to be there. Courage without prudence is recklessness. Kindness without prudence is sentimentality. The prudent person sees first, then responds, and because they have seen clearly, their response has a chance of being genuinely adequate to the situation rather than merely reactive.8

My son, when those boys came across the field with their profanity and their menace, did something prudent in exactly this sense. He read the situation accurately. He responded to what was actually happening rather than to what the boys were trying to make happen. He did not become a function of their cruelty, did not put the sign in the window. That is not a small thing. In a cultural moment that is constantly generating invitations to react, to perform, to be organized by whatever is loudest—that kind of careful seeing is increasingly countercultural.

It is also the beginning of genuine political formation. Not the installation of correct opinions, but the cultivation of a person who can actually look.

Kindness is not the same thing as niceness, and the difference matters more than it might initially appear. Niceness is essentially social—a performance of warmth and accommodation calibrated to the expectations of the people around you. It is not nothing, but it is fragile. It depends on a cooperative environment, on the other party meeting you somewhere close to halfway, on the absence of serious provocation. The bully shatters niceness almost by design, because niceness has no interior architecture to hold against pressure. It is a surface, and surfaces yield.

What my son demonstrated on that soccer field was not niceness. He was not accommodating, not trying to smooth things over, not performing warmth toward boys who were threatening him. He named what was wrong and declined to be moved. That requires something with more structure to it—a disposition that doesn't depend on the other party's cooperation because it isn't primarily about the other party at all. It is about who you have become settled enough to be.

Ross Gay has been thinking about this, in his own idiom, for years—though he would probably not frame it in the virtue tradition's terms, and the translation is worth attempting carefully rather than too quickly. Gay's project in The Book of Delights and Inciting Joy is sometimes received as a celebration of small pleasures, a kind of literary optimism, which is a significant misreading. What Gay is actually doing is more demanding than that: he is arguing that the practice of noticing what is good—really noticing it, attending to it with the full seriousness it deserves—is an act of resistance rather than an escape from difficulty. Delight, in Gay's account, is not the absence of sorrow. It is what becomes possible when you are present enough to what is actually there to receive it, sorrow included. The two are not opposites. They are, at their roots, the same kind of attention turned toward different aspects of the same real world.9

This is why Gay's tenderness never reads as soft, even when it is gentle. It is the tenderness of someone who has looked at what is actually there and chosen, with full awareness of the alternatives, to stay open to it. That requires courage in a specific sense—not the courage of confrontation but the courage of vulnerability, the willingness to be genuinely affected by what you encounter rather than armoring yourself against it. The armor is always available. The troll has put it on. The nihilist has put it on in a different way. Gay's argument, enacted more than stated, is that the armor costs you the very thing that makes life worth the trouble of living.10

Kindness, understood this way, is the visible form of formed attention. It is what Weil's receptive waiting looks like when it meets another person—the willingness to receive them as they actually are, which is both more and less than what you might have preferred them to be. It is what Gay's practiced delight looks like when it is turned not toward a fig tree or a pickup basketball game but toward the specific, difficult, irreducible human being in front of you. It is not a feeling. It is a practice, which means it can be cultivated, strengthened, handed on.

It can also be tested—and what the test reveals is whether there is anything genuinely there or only the performance of it. Two older boys with profanity and a thrown ball are a minor test, as tests go. But minor tests are where formation either declares itself or doesn't, and what declared itself that evening was something with enough interior structure to hold. My son was kind in the serious sense—not accommodating, not performing, not armored either. He saw what was happening, named it, and remained himself.

That is the thing I am trying to understand how to cultivate. And I am increasingly convinced that you cannot cultivate it directly, cannot install it through instruction or lecture or the repeated assertion of correct values. It grows, if it grows, from something prior—from a practiced orientation toward the world that has been modeled and inhabited long enough to become, finally, the shape of a life.

There is a paradox at the center of this kind of formation, and I have been circling it since that October evening without quite naming it directly. The paradox is this: the things I most want to cultivate in my son cannot be cultivated by direct application. You cannot install careful seeing through a curriculum. You cannot produce settled kindness through instruction. You cannot lecture a boy into the disposition that held on that soccer field, and if you could, it would not be the same disposition—it would be performance, which is precisely what we have been arguing against.

What you can do, I think, is be a certain kind of person in his presence. Consistently, over a long time, without too much commentary on what you're doing.

Oliver Burkeman's argument in Four Thousand Weeks—a book whose cheering title conceals a fairly demanding set of conclusions—is that meaningful attention is only possible when you accept its fundamental finitude. You will not attend to everything. You cannot. The attempt to keep all options open, to remain available to every claim on your time and presence, is not a form of abundance but of flight—a way of avoiding the commitment that genuine presence requires. To actually be somewhere, with someone, you have to accept that you are not somewhere else, with someone else, and that this is not a failure of efficiency but the basic structure of a finite human life. Meaning accumulates in the particular, not in the attempt to remain perpetually available to everything.11

This lands differently when you apply it to fatherhood. The father who is always elsewhere—not physically absent, necessarily, but distributed, dispersed across a dozen ambient anxieties and digital obligations—is not simply failing to be present. He is modeling a relationship with attention that his son will absorb and practice and eventually inhabit as his own. Children do not learn what we tell them about attention. They learn what they watch us actually do with ours.

I am a hang-back sort of person, and this has served my son in ways I could not have designed. Not hovering means there is space between us—space in which he has had to become, gradually, more himself. But hang-back is not the same as absent, and the distinction matters. What I am trying to practice—imperfectly, with regular failures—is something closer to what Weil means by attention than to what our cultural moment means by presence. Not the performance of involvement, not the anxious monitoring that mistakes surveillance for love, but a quality of actual receptivity: available without organizing, watchful without controlling, near enough that he knows I am there and far enough that he has room to discover what he is made of.

The evening at the soccer field was a small illustration of this. I noticed something was wrong. I waited. Not because I was suppressing a powerful urge to intervene—that is not quite my nature—but because waiting was simply the right thing, and I knew it, and I trusted something that had been building between us long enough that I believed it might hold. It held.

What I said afterward mattered. I did not debrief the tactics. I did not explain what they had done well or suggest refinements for next time or offer a pedagogical framework for conflict resolution. I said: I am proud of you for calmly standing up for what was right. One sentence. Then I let it be enough.

That restraint was its own small practice of the thing I am trying to describe. Formation does not require constant commentary. It does not need to explain itself at every turn. Sometimes the most formative thing a father can do is name what is true and trust the child to carry it.

I keep returning to that evening, and I think I finally understand why. It isn't because anything dramatic happened—in the register of things that actually happen to children, two older boys with bad language and a thrown ball barely registers. What I keep returning to is the calm. The specific quality of my son's presence in a moment that was designed, by the boys on the other side of the field, to produce something other than calm.

He did not perform toughness. He did not perform indifference. He did not armor himself or escalate or comply. He saw what was happening, named it, and came back across the field to find me essentially himself—a little indignant, a little interested in pointing out where the boys had gone, and then, within minutes, returned to whatever mattered to him before the interruption. The interruption had not reorganized him. The cruelty had not found purchase.

I do not entirely know how that happened. That is the sentence I keep coming back to, and I think the not-knowing is actually important to sit with rather than explain away. Formation is not a technology. You cannot reverse-engineer a disposition from a single data point and produce a reliable method. What I can say is that something has been accumulating—in the particular texture of our life together, in the quality of attention we have tried to practice toward him and that he has, in his own way, begun to practice toward the world, in the ten years of ordinary days that preceded that Tuesday evening in October and that were, apparently, doing something.

This is what Ross Gay means, I think, when he argues that delight is a practice rather than a mood—that it requires cultivation, repetition, the patient formation of a self that knows how to receive what is actually there. The boy who comes back across the field essentially himself has been practicing something, even if neither of us has called it that. He has been learning, slowly, where to put his attention. He has been learning what is worth seeing and what can be overlooked. He has been learning, in the specific idiom of a ten-year-old's life, the art that William James compressed into a single sentence.

The world will keep generating invitations to be organized by its cruelty, its cynicism, its endless production of reasons why hope is naive and care is weakness and the whole thing is probably not worth the effort of genuine attention. Some of those invitations will be more sophisticated than two boys with profanity and a thrown ball. Some of them will be harder to name and harder to refuse. My son will face versions of them I cannot anticipate, in circumstances I cannot prepare him for, and he will face them without me standing on the other side of the field.

What I am trying to give him, underneath everything else, is a self settled enough to remain itself under that pressure. A self that has somewhere better to put its attention. A self that has practiced, long enough and in enough ordinary moments, the discipline of actually seeing—and that has found, in that seeing, something worth the gift of a life's attention.

I am not finished learning how to do this. I suspect that is also part of what I am trying to teach him.

Brueggemann, Walter. The Prophetic Imagination. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978.

Burkeman, Oliver. Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.

Desmond, Matthew. Interview by Ezra Klein. "The Ezra Klein Show." New York Times, April 21, 2023. Transcript. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/21/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-matthew-desmond.html.

Evagrius Ponticus. The Praktikos & Chapters on Prayer. Translated by John Eudes Bamberger. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1981.

Gay, Ross. The Book of Delights. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2019.

———. Inciting Joy: Essays. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2022.

Havel, Václav. "The Power of the Powerless." In The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe, edited by John Keane, translated by Paul Wilson, 23–96. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1985.

James, William. The Principles of Psychology. 2 vols. New York: Henry Holt, 1890.

Robinson, Marilynne. When I Was a Child I Read Books. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.

———. What Are We Doing Here?: Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018.

Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologiae. Translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province. New York: Benziger Bros., 1947.

Weil, Simone. Waiting for God. Translated by Emma Crawford. New York: Putnam, 1951.

———. Letter to Joë Bousquet, April 13, 1942. In Simone Weil: A Life, by Simone Pétrement, translated by Raymond Rosenthal. New York: Pantheon, 1976.

1. Matthew Desmond, in conversation with Ezra Klein, quotes the theologian Walter Brueggemann on this point: "liberals are really fluent in the language of critique and bumbling in the language of repair or celebration." Desmond then coins the phrase "chic nihilism" to name this as a broader cultural disposition—not merely a progressive failure but a posture of educated detachment that has become its own aesthetic. Matthew Desmond, interview by Ezra Klein, "The Ezra Klein Show," New York Times, April 21, 2023, transcript, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/21/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-matthew-desmond.html. The Brueggemann passage Desmond cites is in Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978), 4, where Brueggemann frames the prophetic task as holding together criticism and energizing—and notes that liberals tend to be good at the first and absent from the second. His formulation is sharper than Desmond's paraphrase: liberals, Brueggemann writes, often "have no word of promise to speak." The theological diagnosis precedes and deepens the sociological one.↩

2. William James, The Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. (New York: Henry Holt, 1890), 2: ch. 22. The full sentence reads: "As the art of reading after a certain stage in one's education is the art of skipping, so the art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook." It appears in the subsection "Different orders of human genius," which the table of contents locates beginning at p. 360; the chapter ends at p. 372 where ch. 23 begins. The exact page can be confirmed by searching the freely available Project Gutenberg text (ebook #57634) for the phrase "art of skipping." Chapter 22 is titled "Reasoning," which locates the line in a larger argument about how the mind selects among available data—making it directly relevant to what this essay is arguing about formation and attention. The reading/skipping analogy is characteristically Jamesian: he grounds an epistemological claim in a practice familiar to any educated reader, trusting the concrete to carry the abstract.↩

3. The "rarest and purest form of generosity" formulation appears first in a letter from Weil to the poet Joë Bousquet, dated April 13, 1942—a source that gives the phrase an unusually intimate and urgent register, written during the war, to a poet who had been paralyzed by a wound in the First World War and who Weil had sought out for conversation about suffering and attention. The fuller philosophical account of attention as self-emptying and receptive waiting—the account this essay is drawing on—is developed in "Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God," in Simone Weil, Waiting for God, trans. Emma Crawford (New York: Putnam, 1951), 57–65. There Weil argues that "attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object." The essay is ostensibly about how students should study geometry, but Weil is clearly making a claim about the structure of all genuine attention—including the attention of prayer, and the attention of one person to another.↩

4. The primary text for prosoche as a spiritual discipline is Evagrius Ponticus, The Praktikos & Chapters on Prayer, trans. John Eudes Bamberger (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1981). Evagrius treats distraction (rhemata) as one of the primary obstacles to prayer precisely because it fragments attention and makes the practitioner available to whatever thought or passion presents itself most forcefully—the ancient equivalent of the attention economy's capture strategy. The tradition as a whole did not treat attention as a natural capacity that could be exercised at will, but as a disposition that had to be formed through sustained practice, which is why it falls under the category of ascesis rather than technique.↩

5. Václav Havel, "The Power of the Powerless," in The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe, ed. John Keane, trans. Paul Wilson (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1985), 23–96. The greengrocer passage appears early in the essay; the extended account of "living in truth" as its alternative runs through sections IV–VI. It is worth noting that Havel's concept was itself influenced by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's 1978 essay "Live Not by Lies"—which means the idea of truth-telling as fundamental resistance has roots in both the Czech and Russian dissident traditions. The application of Havel's framework to formation in democratic culture rather than resistance under totalitarianism is an extension Havel did not make himself, but the logic of the argument invites it: the habituation to performed compliance is not unique to communist regimes. Havel's own later work as a statesman in a democratic republic suggests he understood the problem to be broader than any particular system.↩

6. This is also where Brueggemann's argument in The Prophetic Imagination becomes relevant to Havel's, though they are working from entirely different traditions. Brueggemann argues that the dominant culture maintains itself by making criticism feel like wisdom and imagination feel like naivety—the prophetic task is the precise inversion of that. Havel's greengrocer has been formed by a system that makes compliance feel like prudence. Brueggemann's prophet and Havel's dissident are doing structurally similar things in structurally similar situations: refusing to let the dominant account of reality be the only one available. That refusal is, in both cases, a prior formation question before it becomes a political one.↩

7. The most sustained version of this argument runs through several of Robinson's essay collections. See especially the title essay of Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here?: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), and "Imagination and Community" in Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), 20–37. Robinson consistently frames the failure of civic imagination as a failure of attention before it is a failure of policy—we have stopped being curious about our fellow citizens in a way that makes genuine democratic life impossible.↩

8. Aquinas treats prudence (prudentia) as the master virtue—the one that gives practical shape to all the others—throughout the Secunda Secundae of the Summa Theologiae, particularly at II-II, qq. 47–56. The definition operative here, that prudence is the capacity to perceive a situation accurately before acting (recta ratio agibilium), is from II-II, q. 47, a. 2. The point that courage without prudence becomes recklessness and kindness without prudence becomes sentimentality is an implication of Aquinas's broader account rather than a direct quotation, but it follows directly from his argument that the virtues require prudence to be genuinely virtuous rather than merely impressive-seeming.↩

9. Ross Gay, The Book of Delights (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2019); Inciting Joy: Essays (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2022). The argument that joy is not the absence of sorrow but what becomes possible when you are genuinely present to what is actually there is stated most directly in Gay's introduction to Inciting Joy, where he writes that joy "emerging from our common sorrow—which does not necessarily mean we have the same sorrows, but that we, in common, sorrow—might draw us together." The essay "Grief Suite" in Inciting Joy develops this most fully in relation to masculinity specifically, making it directly relevant to the argument here.↩

10. The phrase "the study of joy might lead us to a wild, unpredictable, transgressive, and unboundaried solidarity" is Gay's own characterization of Inciting Joy's project, from the publisher's description of the book. It captures something the essays themselves demonstrate rather than argue directly: that tenderness and delight are not retreats from difficulty but forms of engagement with it that the armor of troll culture and chic nihilism are specifically designed to foreclose.↩

11. Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021). The argument about finitude and the discipline of choosing what not to attend to runs throughout the book, but is stated most directly in chapters 3 and 4, where Burkeman argues that the attempt to keep all options open is itself a form of avoidance—and that meaningful attention is only possible once you accept that every genuine commitment forecloses something else. The application to fatherhood is my own extension, but Burkeman's framework invites it: the question of what a father actually gives his child his attention to is a question about what he has accepted he will not attend to.↩

A ☕️☕️☕️ read in seven parts.

I was six the year we moved again—this time to North Carolina, new school, new everything—when my father sat me down and gave me a password.

Not a secret. A password. The distinction matters, I think, though I couldn’t have articulated it then. A secret is something you keep. A password is something you use—a key cut to a specific lock, a way of telling the real from the counterfeit in a moment when you might not have time to think.

The instructions were precise. If anyone ever came to pick me up—from school, from a friend’s house, anywhere—and told me my parents had sent them, that there was an emergency, that my mom or dad couldn’t get to me themselves, I was not to go with them unless they could give me the word. It didn’t matter if they were adults. It didn’t matter if they were in uniform.

Not even the police.

I am still so protective of that password that I won’t tell you where it came from, even now, even here, even though it’s obscure enough that the protection is probably irrational. Something in me still wants to keep it safe. I’ll tell you this: it’s still part of the core password I use on my most important accounts. Whatever was handed to me in that conversation has never stopped being load-bearing.

This was the nineties, which means I was also a child who got his Halloween candy inspected for razor blades. Every year, the ritual: dump out the pillowcase, sort through it, check for anything that looked tampered with. My parents weren’t unusual in this. Every parent we knew did it. It was just the ambient texture of childhood danger that decade—a collective anxiety that had taken a specific, almost theatrical shape, organized around the figure of the neighbor who might poison your child under cover of generosity.1 The stranger with candy. The threat dressed as gift.

I don’t think my parents ever actually found a razor blade. I don’t think anyone did. The panic was, it turns out, almost entirely mythological—a handful of documented cases, many of them fabricated, amplified into a national ritual of suspicion.2 But it was real as a cultural practice, real as formation. We were being taught something. We were learning the shape that danger takes, and who might be wearing it.

The password was different. Not in kind, exactly—it was also about danger, also about protection, also about teaching a child to navigate a world that was not uniformly safe. But different in structure, and the structural difference is what I’ve been turning over ever since. The razor blade panic was generic. It aimed at everyone who might hand your child something sweet. It said: the gesture of generosity is itself potentially a vector of harm, and the neighbor behind it is a figure you cannot finally trust. The category produces the threat. Any stranger with candy is a possible razor blade.

The password refused that logic. It was particular where the candy panic was generic, vernacular where the panic was ambient. It didn’t say: be suspicious of everyone. It said: here is a specific commitment between specific people, and that commitment is the thing that makes someone trustworthy—not their uniform, not their authority, not their institutional credential. The badge is not the word. The word is something else entirely. Something that lives between people who have made specific promises to each other, rather than being granted by systems to those who serve them.

My parents checked the candy because that was the deal that decade. But the password was a different kind of teaching, and I think they knew it, even if they never said so in those terms.

What I’ve been thinking about, decades later, is what exactly was transmitted in that conversation. Not just the word. The word was almost incidental—it could have been anything. What was transmitted was a way of reading the world: an insistence that trust is particular, held between people rather than delegated upward to institutions. That the officer in uniform is not automatically the trusted person. That the trusted person is someone who knows the word—which is to say, someone who has been let into a circle of specific obligation and accountability that no credential can replicate.

My parents were not paranoid people. They were careful people. There’s a difference, and it took me a long time to understand it.

Sara Ahmed opens Strange Encounters with a provocation that sounds simple until you sit with it: the stranger is not someone you don’t know. The stranger is someone you recognize as a stranger.3

This is not a semantic quibble. It is a claim about how social space works. Before any encounter occurs, before any words are exchanged, before you have any information about the specific person in front of you, you have already been trained to read certain bodies as familiar and certain bodies as out of place. The stranger isn’t discovered in the encounter. The stranger is produced by it—or rather, produced before it, so that the encounter itself is already structured by a prior decision about who belongs here and who doesn’t.

Ahmed calls this the work of “stranger-danger”—the cultural practice of teaching bodies to be legible to each other in ways that organize safety, threat, proximity, and distance along lines that are never as neutral as they pretend to be. The child is taught to recognize the stranger. What the child is not taught, because the lesson would undermine everything, is that the stranger-figure they’re learning to recognize has already been constructed for them. They are not learning to see clearly. They are learning to see in a particular way that serves particular purposes—purposes organized around race, class, gender, the organization of space into safe and unsafe zones, the distribution of who gets to feel at home where.4

My parents were teaching me something real. The world is not uniformly safe. Some people will use your trust against you. A child needs to know this. I am not interested in retrospectively critiquing the gift they gave me—I am interested in understanding what it was, which is a different project and a harder one. Because what Ahmed surfaces is that the technology of stranger-recognition my parents were trying to give me a more sophisticated version of is not a neutral tool. It comes preloaded. The culture has already done significant work on which bodies get read as dangerous before any parent sits down with any child to have the talk.

The password was, in one sense, a counter-technology. It refused the shortcut. It said: the uniform is not the word. Institutional authority is not the same as trustworthiness. A stranger in a police uniform is still potentially a stranger; a trusted person without one is still trusted. This is, in Ahmed’s terms, a refusal of one particular form of stranger-production—the form that delegates trust upward to institutions and lets the institutional credential do the reading for you. My parents were insisting on something more particular, more demanding, more difficult to systematize.

But Ahmed would press further—and the pressing is important. The refusal of one form of stranger-production does not automatically dissolve the mechanism. It can coexist with other forms. You can refuse to let the badge do your reading for you while still having absorbed, from the ambient culture, a set of other readings that operate below the threshold of decision. The body that looks threatening before it speaks. The neighborhood that registers as unsafe before you’ve had any experience of it. The face that produces a particular alertness before you’ve consciously decided to be alert. These are not individual failures of character. They are the residue of a formation that was given to you before you were old enough to interrogate it.5

This is what makes Ahmed’s argument so uncomfortable for those of us who were formed with good intentions and in genuine love. The mechanism doesn’t require bad people. It requires ordinary people, formed in ordinary ways, passing on what they were given. The parent who sits down to teach their child about danger is not the villain of this story. But they are operating inside a story that has already organized the category of danger in ways they may never have examined, and that organization has a history, and the history is not clean.

Ahmed gives us the mechanism. W.E.B. Du Bois gives us the history—which is to say, he gives us the stakes.

The Souls of Black Folk opens with a question Du Bois had been asked so many times by white Americans that it had become its own kind of answer: How does it feel to be a problem? Not: do you have problems, or face problems, or struggle with problems. How does it feel to be one. To have the stranger-figure projected onto your body so thoroughly and for so long that the projection has become, in the eyes of the dominant culture, simply a description.6

His answer is the Veil. The Veil is Ahmed’s stranger-production mechanism running at civilizational scale across generations—not a single cultural moment of manufactured fear but a structural condition, built into law and custom and spatial organization and the organization of language itself, by which certain bodies are pre-read as out of place before any encounter occurs. The child born behind the Veil does not simply face prejudice. They are formed inside a world that has already decided what they are. Every encounter is already structured before it begins. Every room they enter has already been arranged.7

And then there is double consciousness—the specific psychic cost of living inside that arrangement. Du Bois describes it as the sense of always looking at yourself through the eyes of others, measuring your soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. Two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body. The person formed behind the Veil cannot simply inhabit themselves. They must perpetually negotiate between who they are and who the mechanism has decided they are—between the self they know from the inside and the stranger the culture sees from the outside.8

This is the thing that the dominant formation—the formation that checks the candy, that worries about the stranger with the unmarked van—is specifically organized not to see. The boy being formed inside the dominant mythology is learning to recognize danger, to manage the stranger, to protect what’s his. He is not learning that the stranger he’s learning to recognize is someone else’s child who has been made into a figure by the same mechanism that is, at this very moment, forming him. He is not learning that his safety and their strangeness are produced together, by the same cultural apparatus, at the same time. The formation forecloses that knowledge because the formation requires it to.9

James Baldwin saw this with the clarity that comes from having no alternative. In The Fire Next Time he describes what it costs a Black man in America to walk into a room already wearing the stranger-label—to know that the doormen and the policemen have already read him before he has said a word, and that the reading is not going to be revised by anything he does or says, only perhaps temporarily suspended by sufficient performance of non-threat. The energy that costs. The vigilance required to manage the way you are being read while also simply trying to live. Baldwin is precise about what this does over time: it becomes almost impossible to distinguish a real from a fancied injury, and then you stop trying to distinguish them, and then you stop noticing that you’ve stopped trying.10 The Veil doesn’t just organize space. It reorganizes the person behind it, from the inside out.

This is where Moonlight lives—in the interior of that reorganization. Barry Jenkins’s film is, among other things, the most precise account I know of what Du Bois’s double consciousness feels like from the inside when the person experiencing it is also a child still in the process of being formed. Chiron doesn’t know he’s being formed. He just knows the world keeps telling him what he is—dangerous, deviant, unacceptable—and that the telling has begun to feel like weather. Something that is simply there, that you cannot decide your way out of, that shapes what you do and how you hold yourself and whether you let anyone close enough to actually see you.11

The film’s three-panel structure is Du Bois in cinematic form. Little: the child before the armor is fully assembled, still porous, still capable of being reached. Chiron: the armor doing its work, holding the self together by keeping everything out. Black: the armor complete, the self preserved inside it—but at the cost of almost everything that made the self worth preserving. The man Chiron becomes is safe in the way that a fortress is safe. Nothing gets in. Nothing gets out. He has survived his formation. He has not yet lived it.

Juan is the most important figure here for what I’m trying to argue, and I want to stay with him. He is a man formed entirely inside the logic of the street—violence, hierarchy, the code of masculine dominance that the dominant culture produces and then criminalizes in the same gesture. He sells drugs to Chiron’s mother. He is, in Ahmed’s terms, a participant in the very system that is producing Chiron as a problem to be managed. He knows this. The film does not let him not know it.

And yet. When he finds Little—the child Chiron, running from boys who want to hurt him—Juan does not manage him. He does not categorize him, assess him, decide what threat level he presents. He sees him. He sits with him in silence that is not empty but full—full of attention, of recognition, of a willingness to be present to whatever this particular child actually is. He teaches him to swim. He answers his questions with a directness that treats the child as someone capable of receiving truth. He says: you can be gay. that doesn’t make you less. someone will love you.12

This is not rescue. Rescue would have been simpler and less true. This is witness—the specific act of seeing someone before the mechanism has finished deciding what they are, and refusing to let the mechanism’s verdict be the final word. Juan is not outside the mechanism. He is inside it, complicit in it in ways the film does not excuse. But something in him has learned, or retained, or been given, the capacity to encounter rather than merely categorize. And that capacity—fragile, incomplete, unable to save either of them from what comes—is what I keep trying to find a name for.

Du Bois would recognize Juan. He would recognize the doubled consciousness of a man who knows exactly what the dominant culture has made of him and manages, somehow, to refuse that making as the last word on himself or the child in front of him. That refusal doesn’t undo the mechanism. But it interrupts it, briefly, in one specific encounter, for one specific child. And the film suggests that the interruption matters—that Little carries Juan’s witness forward even after Juan is gone, even through all the armor, even into the silence of the man Chiron becomes. The encounter leaves a mark that the formation cannot entirely cover over.

That is the question this piece is building toward: what makes that kind of encounter possible? What formation produces a person capable of it? Ahmed names the structure they’re both inside. Du Bois names the cost of that structure in full historical weight. But neither of them quite tells us where Juan learned to see. For that we need to go further inside the mechanism—to understand not just how it operates externally but why the self reaches for it, why it feels like necessity rather than choice. Why interrupting it is so hard, and what it actually takes.

The question Juan raises—how does a person formed inside the mechanism manage, even partially, to step outside it?—requires us to go deeper than Ahmed or Du Bois can take us. Ahmed describes the structure. Du Bois describes the cost. But neither of them quite explains why the mechanism is so persistent, so difficult to interrupt even by people who can see it clearly, so prone to reasserting itself even in people who have genuinely tried to refuse it. For that we need René Girard—and, more precisely, we need what James Alison did with Girard, which is something Girard himself could not quite do.

Girard’s central claim is that human desire is mimetic: we do not desire independently, from some inner wellspring of authentic want, but imitatively, in relation to the desires of others. We want what we see others wanting. We learn what is worth wanting by watching what those around us treat as worth wanting. This is not a pathology. It is simply how human beings work—how culture transmits value, how children learn what matters, how social life coheres. The problem is what mimetic desire tends to produce when two people want the same thing. The model of desire becomes the rival. The rival becomes the obstacle. And the obstacle, in the logic of mimetic escalation, becomes the enemy—the one whose existence is the problem, whose removal would resolve the tension, whose being-in-the-way justifies whatever it takes to clear the way.13

This is the interior mechanism that Ahmed’s structural account needs. Stranger-production is not just a cultural practice imposed from outside. It is also something the mimetically-constituted self reaches for, because the self constituted through imitation and rivalry needs somewhere to put the tension that mimetic escalation generates. The stranger is not just a figure the culture manufactures. The stranger is a solution—a way of locating the problem outside the self, of organizing the ambient anxiety of mimetic desire into a shape that can be managed, expelled, or destroyed. The scapegoat. The one whose difference from the group can be made to carry the weight of everything the group cannot otherwise account for.14

This is why Ahmed’s insight—that the stranger-figure is constructed rather than discovered—does not, by itself, dissolve the mechanism. Knowing that the stranger-figure is constructed does not automatically free you from reaching for it. The mimetic self will reach for it anyway, because the reaching is not primarily cognitive. It is structural. It is built into the way desire and rivalry and anxiety move through human communities. You cannot simply decide your way out of it. You cannot think your way to a self that no longer needs the stranger-figure, any more than you can think your way to a self that no longer feels hunger. The mechanism runs deeper than intention.

Girard’s own answer to this was essentially tragic: the mechanism would keep running, the scapegoating would keep happening, the founding violence would keep being covered over and repeated. What he added—controversially, and late in his career—was the claim that the biblical tradition, and specifically the Gospels, represented a unique interruption of the mechanism: a text that told the story from the victim’s perspective, that refused the founding violence its usual innocence, that named the scapegoat as innocent rather than guilty.15 This was a significant move. But Girard was not, finally, a theologian, and what he did with it remained somewhat abstract—a claim about texts and their cultural effects rather than an account of how actual human beings, formed inside the mechanism, might find their way to something different.

James Alison is the theologian who took Girard’s insight and pressed it somewhere Girard could not quite go. Alison’s specific contribution is what he calls the “intelligence of the victim”—the knowing that becomes available when you receive the story from the perspective of the one the mechanism has expelled rather than the perspective of the group that did the expelling.16 The resurrection, in Alison’s reading, is not primarily a miracle in the conventional sense. It is an epistemological event: the victim returns, not in vengeance—which would simply reinstate the logic of rivalry and reprisal—but in peace, and the return makes possible a knowledge that was not available before. You can now see the founding violence for what it was. You can now recognize the scapegoat as innocent. And that recognition—once it has occurred—cannot be undone. You cannot unknow it. The mechanism has been interrupted not by superior force or moral will but by a disclosure that changes what is visible.17

This is why Alison insists that the interruption of the mechanism is not primarily a moral achievement. It is not what happens when good people try harder to be less prejudiced. It is what happens when someone receives—really receives, in a way that reorganizes what they can see—the intelligence of the victim. The knowledge that the stranger was never the problem. That the founding violence was never innocent. That the group’s peace was always purchased at the cost of someone else’s expulsion.

Juan has something like this knowledge. Not in any theological sense—the film does not offer us his interior life with that kind of clarity. But something in his encounter with Little operates as though he has received, from somewhere, the victim’s perspective on what the mechanism does. He knows what it is to be made into a figure. He knows what it costs. And that knowing—however he came to it, whatever it cost him, whatever remains of it alongside all the ways he remains complicit in the same system—enables him to see Little before the mechanism finishes deciding what Little is. The intelligence of the victim, passed along in a single encounter, in a gesture of witness that the mechanism cannot quite account for and that neither of them has words for.18

But Alison would press further—and this is where I begin to find my way toward something genuinely positive rather than merely critical. The interruption of the mechanism, he argues, makes possible a different kind of self: a self that is not constituted by rivalry, not organized around the expelled other, not dependent on the stranger-figure to know who it is. He calls this being “liked into being” by a love that is not mimetic—that does not need a rival, that is not constituted against anyone, that does not require your diminishment in order to secure its own standing.19 Formation in that love is formation away from the mechanism. Not the elimination of desire—that is not what is on offer—but its gradual reorientation toward something that does not require a scapegoat to sustain it.

This is harder to describe than the mechanism it replaces, because the mechanism is familiar and the alternative is not. We know what stranger-production feels like from the inside—we have all felt the particular alertness, the subtle reorganization of attention, when a body we have been formed to read as out of place enters the room. We know the mechanism is running even when we wish it wasn’t. The alternative—the self that can encounter rather than categorize, that can be addressed by genuine otherness without resolving it into threat or stranger—we mostly know by its absence. By the moments when it almost happened and didn’t, when Juan almost became just another man who used Chiron’s mother, and that almost was also somehow true.

What I keep returning to is the question of practice. Not moral achievement—Alison is clear that this is not about trying harder—but the specific relationships, the specific communities, the specific quality of attention that makes a different kind of encounter possible. There is a philosopher who spent his career insisting that this question is not peripheral to ethics but constitutive of it. That the encounter with genuine otherness is not a problem to be managed but the very ground from which ethical life grows. Emmanuel Levinas. And I want to go there now, because I think he is the one who can show us what Juan knew without knowing he knew it.

Emmanuel Levinas begins where most philosophy ends: not with the self, not with consciousness, not with the question of what I can know or what I can do, but with the face of the other. The face that looks at me before I have decided anything. The face that says, without words: do not kill me.

This is not a sentimental claim. Levinas is one of the most rigorous thinkers of the twentieth century, a phenomenologist trained in the tradition of Husserl and Heidegger, and his argument is precise: the encounter with genuine otherness is not a problem that arises after the self is constituted. It is the condition of possibility for the self in the first place. I do not arrive formed and then encounter others. I am called into being by the encounter. My responsibility to the other is not something I choose after I have sorted out who I am. It is prior to that sorting. It is, in fact, what the sorting is always a response to, whether I acknowledge it or not.20

This reverses the entire formation story the dominant culture offers. The Western hero arrives already formed—his virtue is authenticated precisely by its independence, its self-sufficiency, its not-neediness. He encounters others from a position of settled selfhood. He decides what they are, what they need, whether they deserve his help, whether they constitute a threat. The encounter is downstream of the identity. The other is an object of his assessment rather than the source of his address.

Levinas says: no. The other comes first. Your responsibility comes before your identity. And what you are, at the deepest level, is a being who has been addressed—who has a face turned toward you that makes a claim you did not choose and cannot finally refuse without losing something essential about yourself. The face is not information. It is not a signal to be read for threat level, not data to be processed by the stranger-recognition apparatus. It is a call. And the ethical life is the life that has learned—or been formed—to hear it as such.21

What this means for formation is significant. If Levinas is right, the question is not how to produce a self capable of managing its encounters with others from a position of competence and safety. That is the formation story we have inherited, and it is not wrong exactly—competence matters, safety matters, the child needs to know the password—but it is incomplete in a way that distorts everything it touches. The deeper question is how to form a self that remains open to being addressed. That has not armored itself so thoroughly against the claims of the other that the face can no longer get through. That has retained, or recovered, the capacity to be called before it has finished deciding what category the caller belongs to.

This is, I think, what Juan had. Not as a philosophical achievement—Levinas was not on his reading list and the streets of Miami are not a seminar room. But as something he had come to, through whatever route, that allowed him to turn toward Little before the mechanism finished its reading. The face of a frightened child got through. The call was heard. And the response—sitting with him, swimming with him, answering his questions with the directness that treats the other as someone capable of receiving truth—was the response of a man who had not entirely closed himself off from being addressed.22

Peter Weir’s Witness is the film that shows most clearly what happens when a man formed in the Western tradition—competent, capable, genuinely decent in the ways his formation has made available to him—is dropped into a community whose entire way of life is organized around a different account of the encounter. John Book is a good man by the standards of his formation. He is brave, loyal, effective. He protects the people he is responsible for protecting. He is not cruel. But he has one mode of encountering the world, and that mode is assessment. He reads every situation for threat, every person for allegiance or danger, every space for tactical advantage. He cannot turn it off, because it is not a technique he deploys—it is the shape his self has taken.23

The Amish are genuinely other to him. Not strange in the Ahmed sense—not produced as threatening by the stranger-recognition apparatus—but other in the Levinasian sense: people whose faces make claims he does not know how to receive, whose way of being in the world does not translate into his categories, whose alterity cannot be resolved into threat or ally or neutral. They are simply and irreducibly themselves, organized around a refusal of violence so total that it makes Book’s entire formation—his gun, his competence, his capacity for tactical response—not just useless but somehow beside the point. The thing he is best at is the thing they have decided, as a community, they will not do. And he cannot encounter that refusal without his toolkit becoming visible to him as a toolkit rather than simply as who he is.24

He falls in love with Rachel. Of course he does—she is the specific face that gets through, the one whose address he cannot manage back to safety. And the film is honest about what this reveals: that he cannot become someone she could actually be with. Not because he is a bad man but because becoming that would require a formation he does not have and cannot acquire on the run from the men who are trying to kill him. The community that produced Rachel is a community of practice, sustained over generations, organized around specific disciplines of attention and nonviolence that are not available for individual adoption. You cannot decide your way into them. You have to be formed into them, over time, held by specific people who share the practice and will not let you abandon it when it becomes costly.

Book has to leave. The Western hero always has to leave—that is the genre’s founding gesture, the lone rider returning to the horizon, and it usually reads as dignity. In Witness it reads as loss. Not failure exactly, not moral condemnation. Just the quiet tragedy of a man who glimpsed something he could not reach, because reaching it would have required a different life than the one that made him who he is. He is good at what he is good at. He is also, the film suggests without belaboring it, someone who will go back to a world that does not ask him to be addressed in the way Rachel’s face addressed him. And the going back will cost him something he will probably not have words for.25

Levinas would say that cost is always there, for everyone, whenever the face is turned away from rather than received. The difference is whether your formation has given you the capacity to feel it as cost—to know what you are refusing when you resolve the other back into a manageable category—or whether the resolution happens so automatically, so far below the threshold of decision, that no refusal is registered at all. Book feels it. That is what the film gives him: the specific ache of having been addressed and not having been able to answer. It is not nothing. It may even be the beginning of something. But it is not formation. Formation would have had to start much earlier, in a community organized around the practice of receiving the face rather than managing it.

Which brings me back to the password. And to what I am trying, with considerably less clarity than I would like, to hand to my son.

Let me try to say what these four voices are saying together, because separately they are each only part of it.

Ahmed: the stranger is produced before the encounter occurs. The mechanism is cultural, spatial, bodily. It organizes who belongs where and who gets read as threat before anyone has said a word. Du Bois: the mechanism runs at civilizational scale, across generations, and its costs fall asymmetrically. The person the mechanism has been applied to cannot afford the luxury of not seeing it. The person inside the dominant mythology can spend an entire life not seeing it, which is itself a form of damage—a contracted world, a thinned humanity, a self that has never been asked to reckon with what its safety cost someone else. Girard and Alison: the mechanism is not just external. It is built into the structure of mimetically-constituted desire, which means it cannot be dissolved by good intentions or superior information. It can only be interrupted—by the intelligence of the victim received in a way that reorganizes what is visible, that makes the founding violence no longer innocent, that opens the possibility of a self not organized around expulsion. Levinas: the encounter with genuine otherness is not a problem to be managed but the ground of ethical life. The face makes a claim that precedes identity. Formation toward encounter is formation toward remaining open to that claim—toward a self that has not armored itself so completely that the face can no longer get through.

Together they describe something I did not have a name for when my father sat me down and gave me a password. Something I am still trying to find a name for when I stand in the kitchen watching my son.

What they describe, together, is the difference between threat-management and encounter. And they agree—from very different angles, in very different vocabularies—that the difference is not primarily a matter of attitude or intention. It is a matter of formation. Of what you have been made capable of seeing, and by whom, and at what cost, and sustained by what community.

Walter Wink spent his career arguing that the Powers—institutions, systems, the structured forms of human social life—are not neutral instruments that good or bad people happen to operate. They have, in his language, an interiority: a spirituality, a way of organizing human life around particular values that shapes the people inside them whether those people are aware of it or not.26 The badge is not a neutral credential worn by a person who remains otherwise unchanged. The badge is the material form of a particular institution’s spirituality, and that institution has been organized—historically, structurally, in ways that are still very much active—around the production and management of certain kinds of strangers. My parents understood this. Not in Wink’s vocabulary, probably not consciously as a theological claim. But in the practical wisdom encoded in the password: the badge is not the word. The institution does not vouch for the person. Trust is something that happens between specific people who have made specific commitments to each other, and no credential can replicate or replace it.

This is not paranoia. It is the kind of knowing that Ahmed and Du Bois and Wink converge on from different directions: that the institutions organizing public life are not neutral, that their credentials are not guarantees, that the person behind the uniform is being formed by the uniform in ways worth being clear-eyed about. My parents were being clear-eyed. They were also, in the same gesture, offering an alternative—a vernacular technology of trust that refused to delegate to the institution what only a specific relationship could provide.

The password was, I now think, a small act of ecclesial imagination. I mean that precisely. What the church has always been, at its best, is a community organized around an alternative account of who belongs and who doesn’t—organized, specifically, around the refusal of the stranger-production mechanism, around the insistence that the one the dominant culture has expelled is the one at the center of the community’s life.27 The church I am pointing toward is not the one that baptized the Western hero’s violence or organized its life around the same racial cartography as the surrounding culture and then called it Christian. It is the one that takes seriously the claim that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free—that the mechanism of expulsion and stranger-production has been interrupted at its root, and that the community formed around that interruption is called to embody the interruption in its actual life together.28

What would formation toward encounter look like in practice? Not as an abstract ideal but as the specific, daily, embodied work of making a person capable of receiving the face?

It would look like communities organized around practices of attention—specific disciplines that slow down the automatic reading, that create space between the stranger-recognition impulse and the response, that form the habit of asking who this person actually is rather than what category they fit. It would look like relationships in which the cost of the mechanism is made visible—in which the person inside the dominant mythology is brought into genuine contact with what their safety has cost, not as guilt-induction but as the expansion of what they can see. It would look like the kind of friendship Alison describes: being liked into being by a love that does not need you to be anyone’s inferior, that is not organized around rivalry, that makes it possible to encounter the other without needing them to be less in order for you to be enough.29

It would look, in some ways, like the Amish community John Book cannot enter—not because the Amish have it all figured out, they do not, every human community is a compound of genuine wisdom and specific failure—but because they have organized their life together around a practice of nonviolence that is not merely an opinion about violence but a formation in the disciplines that make a different encounter possible. The Ordnung is not a rule book. It is a technology of formation. It produces, over generations, people capable of receiving the face without reaching for the gun. That is not a small thing. That is, in fact, the thing.30

And it would look like a father sitting down with a child and saying: here is a word. This word belongs to us—to our specific family, our specific set of commitments to each other. No uniform makes someone trustworthy. No institution vouches for the person. Trust is what happens between people who know each other’s names and have made specific promises and will be held to those promises by the specific weight of the relationship. The badge is not the word. The word is something the system cannot grant and cannot take away.

My parents gave me that. I did not know, at seven, that it was also an account of ethical life. I did not know it was a small theological act, a refusal of institutional stranger-production, a vernacular technology of genuine encounter. I just knew the word, and held it, and have never quite been able to let it go.

The question now is what I am trying to give my son. What word I am trying to hand him. And whether I have yet found the community that can help me hand it on.

My son is ten years old and he is learning, right now, in real time, what the world thinks he is.

Not in any single dramatic moment—formation is rarely dramatic, which is part of why we miss it while it’s happening. It comes in accumulations. The way certain rooms receive him. The way certain adults address him versus the way they address his sisters. The way his body, which is still a child’s body, is already being read by some people as something that requires management. He does not have words for this yet. But he is learning to feel it, which is how the mechanism always begins—not as knowledge but as sensation, a subtle reorganization of how you hold yourself in certain spaces, a barely conscious adjustment to what you expect when you walk through certain doors.31

I watch him navigate this and I feel two things simultaneously, which I have not yet found a way to resolve into one thing. The first is the instinct to protect him—to give him a password, some vernacular technology of trust that will help him know who can be relied on and who cannot, some specific preparation for the specific world he is going to have to live in. The second is the knowledge, hard-won and still not fully digested, that protection is not the same as formation. That a child formed primarily toward threat-management will be equipped for some of what the world will ask of him and systematically underprepared for the rest. That the armor, however necessary, is also a cost.

What I want to give him—what I am trying, with incomplete understanding and no clean template, to actually give him—is something more like what Juan gave Little. Not rescue. Not a set of techniques for navigating danger, though those matter and I am not going to pretend they don’t. What Juan gave Little was the experience of being seen before the mechanism finished deciding what he was. Of having a face turned toward him that received his face in return, that treated his questions as questions worth answering, that did not manage him back to a safe distance. The experience of genuine encounter, which is to say the experience of being genuinely other to someone and having that otherness received rather than resolved.

This is harder to give than a password. A password is precise—a specific word, a specific instruction, a clear protocol for a specific situation. What I am describing is more like a disposition, a capacity, a way of being present to the world that has to be grown rather than installed. And it cannot be grown in isolation. Alison is right about this, and Hauerwas is right about this, and the Amish are right about this in their practice even when they cannot fully articulate it in their theology: formation requires community. You cannot hand a child a disposition the way you hand them a word. You have to surround them with people who embody it, sustained by practices that make it possible, held by a story large enough to give it somewhere to go.32

I have been part of communities that tried to do this and found it harder than the trying. The church I grew up in meant well and passed on genuine things and also replicated, with remarkable fidelity, the dominant culture’s account of which bodies required management and which did not. The communities I have found since have been better and also incomplete, which is the condition of every human community that has ever existed and is not an excuse for the specific failures but is worth naming honestly. The tradition I am drawing on—the one that insists the mechanism has been interrupted at its root, that the expelled one is at the center, that the community formed around that interruption is called to embody it in its actual life—that tradition has been more honored in the breach than the observance for most of its history. This does not make it wrong. It makes it unfinished. Which is, I think, the only kind of tradition worth belonging to—one that knows what it is for even when it cannot fully live up to itself, and that holds the gap between the ideal and the practice as an ongoing call rather than a settled verdict.33

What I actually do, on the days when I am trying to do this well, is much smaller than any of this makes it sound. And writing this has helped me see that some of what I need to do I have not yet done—that the writing itself has been its own kind of formation, surfacing possibilities I could not quite see before I had the language for them.

Some of them are small enough to start tomorrow. Ahmed’s argument suggests that naming the mechanism out loud—not as a lecture but as an observation, the way you might point at weather—is itself a practice. Not here is a lesson about how the world works but did you notice what just happened there, why do you think that room felt different when he walked in. Making the automatic visible before it calcifies into assumption. Creating, in the specific moments when the mechanism is running, a small deliberate pause between the read and the response.

Du Bois suggests something harder: that my son needs sustained exposure to the perspective of the person the mechanism has been applied to. Not as a diversity exercise—not the curated multicultural bookshelf that substitutes representation for encounter—but as an epistemic discipline. The voices that see the mechanism clearly because they’ve had no choice but to see it. Baldwin’s letter to his nephew in The Fire Next Time is written for a boy not much older than mine. I have been thinking, since I started writing this, about reading it to him together. Not to instruct him but to let him hear a man telling a boy the truth about the world and about what love requires in it. That seems like something worth trying.

Girard and Alison suggest the question I could begin to ask with him when conflict arises—at school, in his friendships, in the news: who is being made into the problem here? Not as an abstraction but as a recurring figure in every social situation he will inhabit for the rest of his life. Teaching him to look for the scapegoat before the mechanism has finished its work, before the verdict has been naturalized into simple description.

And Levinas suggests the smallest practice of all, which is also in some ways the most demanding: the discipline of the name. Learning and using the names of the people the culture treats as interchangeable or invisible. The school custodian. The lunch server. The neighbor whose presence the ambient culture registers as background. Names are the minimum unit of face-reception. You cannot receive the face of someone whose name you have never learned. This costs almost nothing and requires almost everything—a consistent, daily refusal to let the mechanism’s categories do your seeing for you.

I do not do all of these things. I do some of them badly. The gap between what this writing has helped me see and what I actually practice in the daily life of being this child’s father is real and probably wider than I want to admit. But the gap is not the end of the story. It is the story. Formation is not the achievement of a state in which the gap is closed. It is the practice of continuing to take the gap seriously, of not letting the failure become a verdict, of returning to the code not because you have earned the right to it but because it is worth returning to. The tradition never promised that formation was clean. It promised that the practice was worth continuing.34

My father gave me the password and I am still carrying it, decades later, in the most protected part of my digital life. Whatever was handed to me in that conversation has outlasted almost everything else from that period of my childhood. Not because the word itself is magic but because the word was the concentrated form of something real—a specific account of trust, a specific refusal of institutional delegation, a specific insistence that the relationship between specific people is the irreducible unit of genuine encounter. You cannot get that from a badge. You cannot get it from a credential. You can only get it from someone who knows your name and has made you a promise and will be held to it by the specific weight of what you are to each other.

That is what I am trying to give my son. Not the password—he will need his own word, cut to his own lock, held in his own life. But the understanding underneath it. The knowing that trust is particular, that encounter is possible, that the face in front of you is not a problem to be managed but a call to be answered. That the mechanism is real and running and can be interrupted. That the interruption is not a solo project but requires community, practice, specific people who will not let you become less than you are.

That there is a word. That it lives between people. That the badge is not the word.

Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004.

———. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.

———. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. London: Routledge, 2000.

Alison, James. The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin Through Easter Eyes. New York: Crossroad, 1998.

———. On Being Liked. New York: Crossroad, 2003.

———. Raising Abel: The Recovery of the Eschatological Imagination. New York: Crossroad, 1996.

Augustine of Hippo. Confessions. Translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. New York: Dial Press, 1963.

Banaji, Mahzarin R., and Anthony G. Greenwald. Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People. New York: Delacorte Press, 2013.

Best, Joel. "Halloween Sadism: The Evidence." Updated periodically. University of Delaware.

Cohen, Stanley. Folk Devils and Moral Panics. London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1972.

Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. Chicago: A.C. McClurg, 1903.

Girard, René. I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. Translated by James G. Williams. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2001.

———. The Scapegoat. Translated by Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.

———. Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. Translated by Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987.

———. Violence and the Sacred. Translated by Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.

Hauerwas, Stanley. A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981.

Jenkins, Barry, dir. Moonlight. A24, 2016.

Jennings, Willie James. The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.

Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998.

———. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969.

MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. 3rd ed. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007.

Peperzak, Adriaan. To the Other: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1993.

Steele, Claude M. Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do. New York: Norton, 2010.

Tatum, Beverly Daniel. Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations About Race. New York: Basic Books, 1997.

Weir, Peter, dir. Witness. Paramount Pictures, 1985.

Wink, Walter. Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1992.

———. Naming the Powers: The Language of Power in the New Testament. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984.

———. Unmasking the Powers: The Invisible Forces That Determine Human Existence. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986.

1. The sociological literature on moral panics is useful here. Stanley Cohen’s Folk Devils and Moral Panics (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1972) established the framework: a condition, episode, person, or group emerges as a defined threat to societal values and interests, the moral barricades are manned, experts pronounce their diagnoses, and then—often—the panic recedes, leaving the social landscape subtly rearranged. The Halloween candy panic fits the model almost perfectly, including the “folk devil” at its center: the anonymous neighbor, the stranger who lives next door, who uses the ritual of giving to harm rather than connect. What Cohen’s framework helps us see is that the panic is not simply a response to a real threat. It is also a way of organizing social anxiety into a manageable, actionable form—something you can do something about, unlike the larger, more diffuse fears that actually structure everyday life.↩

2. The journalist Joel Best has done the definitive debunking work on Halloween sadism—see his “Halloween Sadism: The Evidence,” which he has updated periodically since the 1980s. The short version: documented cases of strangers deliberately harming children through Halloween candy are vanishingly rare, and the cases that received the most media attention often turned out to involve family members rather than strangers. The myth persisted not because it was true but because it was useful—it gave the stranger-danger formation a seasonal ritual, a yearly rehearsal of the lesson that the person you don’t know is the person who might hurt you.↩

3. Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (London: Routledge, 2000), 21. The book repays close reading across its entirety, but the opening theoretical chapters are where Ahmed builds the conceptual apparatus most carefully. Her argument draws on phenomenology—specifically the question of how bodies come to feel at home or out of place in particular spaces—and puts it in conversation with postcolonial theory in ways that are genuinely illuminating. Ahmed has continued developing these ideas in The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004) and Queer Phenomenology (2006), both of which are worth the time.↩

4. Ahmed is careful not to reduce stranger-production to a purely individual psychological process. The production happens at the level of culture, space, and discourse—it is built into the way cities are organized, the way news is reported, the way schools talk about safety. This is what makes it so durable and so hard to simply decide your way out of. You cannot individually opt out of a formation that is ambient. You can become more conscious of it, which is the beginning of something, but consciousness is not the same as freedom from it.↩

5. This is where Ahmed’s work connects productively with the psychology of implicit association—the literature on automatic cognition and racialized threat perception that emerged from the work of Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald. See Banaji and Greenwald, Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People (New York: Delacorte Press, 2013) for the accessible version of this research. The connection matters because it shows that Ahmed’s cultural and philosophical argument has empirical correlates: the prior readings she describes are not metaphorical but neurological, laid down in the formation process before reflective consciousness has any purchase on them. This is not a counsel of despair—the research also suggests that formation can be reshaped—but it does insist on the depth of the problem.↩

6. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A.C. McClurg, 1903). The opening question appears in the first pages of “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” and sets the terms for everything that follows. Du Bois was thirty-five when the book was published and had already been living inside that question for his entire adult life. The book’s power comes partly from its form—it is neither sociology nor autobiography nor essay collection but something that exceeds all three categories, organized around the recurring image of the Veil and the recurring device of the “Sorrow Songs” that open each chapter. It is worth reading whole, slowly, more than once.↩

7. The Veil is Du Bois’s governing metaphor but it is also a precise analytical concept. It describes the barrier that structures perception in both directions: white Americans cannot see Black Americans as they actually are, only as the Veil’s distortions allow; Black Americans must see themselves both as they are and as the dominant culture sees them, simultaneously, at all times. This double vision is both burden and gift—it produces the second sight Du Bois describes, the capacity to see the dominant culture’s self-deceptions with unusual clarity precisely because you cannot afford to share them.↩

8. The psychological literature on the costs of what Claude Steele called “stereotype threat” provides empirical depth to Du Bois’s phenomenological account. See Steele, Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do (New York: Norton, 2010). Steele’s research demonstrates that the awareness of being seen through a negative stereotype consumes cognitive resources and degrades performance—not because the stereotype is true but because managing the awareness of it is itself an enormous tax on attention and working memory. Du Bois described this in 1903 as a phenomenological condition. Steele measured it in laboratory conditions a century later. The convergence is striking.↩

9. This is the specific point where Ahmed and Du Bois need to be read together. Ahmed gives you the mechanism of stranger-production from the perspective of how it operates culturally and spatially. Du Bois gives you its human cost from the perspective of the person it is applied to. Neither account is complete without the other, and the dominant formation—which tends to produce readers more comfortable with the abstract mechanism than with the embodied cost—needs both.↩

10. Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, 68–69. The passage is worth sitting with: Baldwin describes how the strategy of intimidating doormen and policemen before they can intimidate him has become automatic, below the level of decision, and how he cannot risk assuming that their humanity is more real to them than their uniform. This is not paranoia. It is the rational adaptation of a person who has learned, through accumulated experience, that the assumption of good faith is a luxury he cannot afford. It is also, Baldwin is honest enough to say, its own kind of damage—a state in which having learned to expect the worst, one finds it very easy to believe the worst. The Veil does not leave its inhabitants untouched.↩

11. Moonlight, directed by Barry Jenkins (A24, 2016), screenplay by Barry Jenkins, based on the play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue by Tarell Alvin McCraney. Jenkins’s formal choices—the close attention to faces, the fluid camera that gets physically close to its subjects, the color palette that shifts register across the three panels—are inseparable from the film’s argument. You cannot describe what the film does without describing how it looks, because the looking is the argument. It is a film about being seen, made by a filmmaker who has learned to see.↩

12. The scene in which Juan answers Chiron’s questions about what “faggot” means, and whether he is one, is one of the great scenes in recent American cinema precisely because of what Juan does not do. He does not deflect. He does not give the child a sanitized version. He does not manage the question back to safety. He sits with it, answers it honestly, and then says something that costs him nothing materially and everything ethically: you can be gay. that doesn’t make you less. The scene is a model of the kind of witness this piece is trying to describe—presence without agenda, attention without management, an encounter that treats the other as someone whose actual question deserves an actual answer.↩

13. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), and The Scapegoat, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). The fullest accessible account of the mimetic theory is I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2001), which Girard wrote late in his career with a wider audience in mind. The mimetic theory is one of those ideas that sounds simple and becomes more vertiginous the longer you sit with it—it has implications for literary criticism, anthropology, theology, political theory, and the psychology of desire that Girard himself spent fifty years drawing out.↩

14. The connection between Girard’s scapegoat mechanism and Ahmed’s stranger-production is not one either of them makes explicitly—Ahmed is working in a postcolonial and phenomenological tradition that is largely separate from Girard’s anthropological and literary one. But the convergence is real and significant. Ahmed gives you the cultural and spatial dimension of how the stranger-figure is organized and distributed. Girard gives you the interior psychological and social dimension of why communities reach for it. Together they describe something more complete than either does alone: a mechanism that is simultaneously external (built into the organization of space and culture) and internal (built into the structure of mimetically-constituted desire), which is precisely why it is so durable and so difficult to interrupt.↩

15. Girard develops this argument most fully in Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987). The claim that the biblical tradition represents a unique cultural interruption of the scapegoat mechanism was the most controversial of Girard’s positions, the one that made secular critics most uncomfortable and theological critics most interested. It is also, I think, the most important—though it requires Alison to develop it into something that can actually do formation work.↩

16. James Alison, Raising Abel: The Recovery of the Eschatological Imagination (New York: Crossroad, 1996), and The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin Through Easter Eyes (New York: Crossroad, 1998). Alison’s On Being Liked (New York: Crossroad, 2003) is the more accessible entry point into his thought, and the title essay is as compressed and precise an account of what a non-mimetic love might look like as anything I’ve read. Alison was a Dominican priest who left the order and has continued writing and teaching from outside institutional structures—a biographical fact that gives his account of the mechanism a particular texture, since he has experienced both its ecclesial forms and its interruption.↩

17. This is the move that separates Alison from straightforward Girardian theology. For Girard, the Gospels interrupt the mechanism at the level of text and cultural influence—they tell the story differently, and telling it differently gradually changes what is culturally thinkable. For Alison, the interruption happens at the level of the recipient’s consciousness: the risen victim’s return in peace reorganizes what the disciples can see, makes available a knowledge they could not have reached by moral effort or philosophical argument, and that reorganization is what the New Testament calls conversion. It is not a change of opinion. It is a change of what is visible.↩

18. I am aware that I am reading Juan with more theological generosity than the film may strictly authorize. Jenkins does not offer us Juan’s inner life in the terms I am using here. But the film does show us a man whose encounter with Little operates differently from every other relationship in Chiron’s world, and the difference is precisely in the quality of attention—the willingness to be present to who this child actually is rather than who the mechanism has decided he is. Whatever we call that capacity and wherever Juan got it, it is recognizable as what Alison means by the intelligence of the victim made available to someone else through the medium of genuine witness.↩

19. Alison, On Being Liked, 1–14. The phrase “liked into being” is his, and it is doing precise theological work: the love in question is not approval earned through performance but the prior regard that makes the self possible in the first place. This is Alison’s account of what grace actually is, stripped of the juridical and transactional frameworks that have often deformed it—not a reward for merit or a compensation for deficit but the condition of possibility for a self that is not organized around rivalry and expulsion.↩

20. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), and Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998). Totality and Infinity is the more accessible of the two, though “accessible” is relative—Levinas is not easy reading, and he is not trying to be. The difficulty is part of the argument: the other’s alterity resists the kind of conceptual mastery that clear systematic prose tends to enact. For a readable secondary account, Adriaan Peperzak’s To the Other: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1993) is the best place to start.↩

21. There is a specifically theological resonance here that Levinas—who was Jewish and deeply formed by the Talmudic tradition—was aware of but careful about in his philosophical writing. The face that says “do not kill me” echoes the commandment, but Levinas wanted the philosophical argument to stand on its own terms, not to require theological commitment for its validity. Whether it can do this is contested. Some readers find the argument complete without the theological background; others—I am among them—find that it gains considerable depth when read alongside the tradition that shaped it.↩

22. I want to be careful not to sentimentalize Juan in a way the film does not. He sells drugs to Chiron’s mother. He is part of the system that is destroying her and, through her, threatening Chiron. Mahershala Ali plays this without evasion—you can see the knowledge of it in his face in the scene where Chiron asks him directly whether he sells drugs and whether that is bad. Juan says yes to both. He does not excuse himself. The film holds both things simultaneously: this is a man capable of genuine witness and a man complicit in genuine harm. That simultaneous holding is itself a kind of moral seriousness that most films about men like Juan do not manage.↩

23. Witness, directed by Peter Weir (Paramount Pictures, 1985), screenplay by Earl W. Wallace and William Kelley. The film won Academy Awards for editing and original screenplay, but what it deserved recognition for most is Weir’s direction of Harrison Ford—who was, at the time, the biggest movie star in the world partly because of his capacity to embody competent, effective masculine heroism—in a role that systematically exposes the limitations of that competence as a complete account of human life.↩

24. The Amish theology of nonviolence is not identical to the Levinasian account of the face, but they are in productive conversation. Both insist that the encounter with the other makes a claim that cannot be resolved by force without something essential being lost. The Amish Ordnung—the body of practice and discipline that organizes community life—is precisely the kind of communal formation that makes a different mode of encounter possible. It is not a set of opinions about nonviolence. It is a way of life, sustained by a community, practiced in specific daily disciplines, that forms people capable of receiving the other’s face without reaching for the gun.↩

25. There is a scene near the end of the film in which Book and Rachel stand across from each other and she says, simply, “what you are taking with you”—a sentence the film leaves unfinished because what he is taking is not something language can quite hold. It is the knowledge of the encounter. The specific weight of having been addressed and having been unable, finally, to answer. Weir frames it as a doorway between two worlds that cannot merge, and the framing is right. The door does not close. But Book walks through it anyway, back to the world that formed him, carrying something he has no framework for and will probably spend the rest of his life not quite finding words for.↩

26. Walter Wink, Naming the Powers: The Language of Power in the New Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984); Unmasking the Powers: The Invisible Forces That Determine Human Existence (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986); Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1992). The three volumes together constitute one of the more serious attempts in twentieth-century theology to think about the relationship between spiritual realities and social structures. Wink’s “interiority of institutions” argument is the most useful thing he does for this piece’s purposes: the claim that institutions are not simply neutral instruments but have a spirituality, a way of organizing human life around particular values, that shapes their participants whether those participants are conscious of it or not.↩

27. This is Hauerwas’s argument in theological dress, and I am drawing on it consciously. The church as contrast community—the community that makes visible to the world what the world cannot see about itself—is only possible if the church is actually organized around a different account of who belongs. When the church simply replicates the dominant culture’s stranger-production mechanism with a Christian vocabulary layered over it, it has ceased to be the thing it is called to be. This is not a small failure. It is the central failure, the one that makes all the other failures possible.↩

28. Galatians 3:28. The verse is routinely cited and rarely taken seriously in its full implications, which include the implication that the community organized around the interruption of the mechanism is called to embody that interruption in its actual social life—not just as a spiritual truth about individual souls but as a visible, material, political reality. The history of the church’s failure to do this is long and damning. So is the history of communities within the church that have insisted on taking it seriously anyway.↩

29. This is also where hooks returns—because her account of love as discipline and practice, as the daily work of attention and truth-telling rather than sentiment or feeling, is exactly what formation toward encounter requires at the level of intimate relationship. The man who cannot encounter genuine otherness in the stranger is usually also the man who cannot encounter genuine otherness in the person he lives with, the child he is raising, the friend he thinks he knows. The mechanism runs all the way down. So does the interruption, if it runs at all.↩

30. I am aware that the Amish community has its own internal stranger-production mechanisms—that the Ordnung’s peace is partly purchased by the shunning of those who leave, that the community’s coherence depends on exclusions that carry their own costs. No human community is outside the mechanism entirely. What the Amish represent for this argument is not a perfect model but a demonstration that formation in nonviolence is possible—that a community organized around specific practices over generations can actually produce people for whom the gun is not the answer to the face.↩

31. This is Du Bois’s double consciousness beginning to form in real time—the child becoming aware, before he has concepts for it, that he is being seen through a framework he did not choose and cannot simply opt out of. The developmental literature on racial socialization is relevant here: children become aware of race and its social meanings earlier than most white parents expect, and the formation that happens in that early awareness—whether it is named and processed or left to work on the child unconsciously—shapes what is available to them later. See Beverly Daniel Tatum, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations About Race (New York: Basic Books, 1997), especially the chapters on racial identity development. Tatum’s work is accessible, rigorous, and deserves to be more widely read among parents who imagine that not talking about race is a neutral choice.↩

32. This is the specific point at which the individualism of the dominant masculine formation story fails most completely. The lone hero does not need a community to sustain his virtue—his virtue is, in fact, authenticated by its independence from any community that might compromise it. The tradition I am drawing on insists on precisely the opposite: that virtue is not a private achievement but a communal practice, that you cannot become who you are called to be without specific people who know your name and will hold you to it.↩

33. This is MacIntyre’s argument about living traditions—that a tradition capable of self-correction is different from a dead one precisely in its capacity to acknowledge its failures as failures rather than redefining them as successes. The Christian tradition’s failures on race, on gender, on the specific question of which bodies get welcomed and which get managed—these are real failures, not peripheral to the tradition but often central to its institutional life. Acknowledging them is not the same as abandoning the tradition. It is, in fact, what the tradition at its best requires.↩

34. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). The Confessions is, among other things, the story of a man who knew the gap between what he professed and what he practiced for a very long time before the gap could be addressed. What makes it endure is not the conversion but the honesty about the length and sincerity of the evasion—and the insistence, throughout, that the tradition was waiting for him even while he was running from it. You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it repose in thee. The restlessness is the formation, even when it does not feel like it.↩

A ☕️☕️☕️ read in six parts.

There is a movie poster for Open Range that I keep returning to, not entirely sure what I’m looking for when I go back.

The image is simple. Kevin Costner’s cowboy stands silhouetted against a barn, a gun held forward into the light, the weapon luminous against the shadow of his body. Behind him, barely visible, the suggestion of a town worth protecting. Ahead of him, at the far edge of the frame, a line of riders coming to kill him. And beyond the riders, beyond the threat and the violence and the earthly muck of the whole confrontation, a horizon—vast, open, suffused with a light that has nothing to do with gunfights. The tagline: No place to run. No reason to hide.

I know what this image is doing. I have spent enough time with the history of the mythology, with the scholars who have traced its genealogy from the colonial moment through the dime novel through the Hollywood Western through the Supreme Court chambers where men who watched too much Gunsmoke decided what the Constitution meant—I know the icon and its operations and what it costs the people it was never designed to protect. I know all of that. And when I look at the poster, I still feel the pull.

It arrives first as nostalgia. A wistfulness for a childhood where the good guys and the bad guys were clearly defined, where the reluctantly armed man standing on principle had a sharp clarity to it, where the moral universe organized itself around a single silhouetted figure and you knew exactly where you stood in relation to him. Something in me still lives in that childhood, still responds to the image with a recognition that is older than my critical education and more stubborn.

But when I stay with it longer, the nostalgia gives way to something else. The image is not only backward-looking. It has the formal structure of a Caspar David Friedrich painting—the lone figure at the edge of the known world, the sublime horizon beyond the immediate conflict, the sense of standing at the threshold between the earthly and something infinite that has not yet been encountered. The cowboy is not just an artifact of an idealized past. He is oriented toward a future. The horizon behind the threat is open, terrifying, full of a light the violence cannot account for. He is going somewhere, and the gun is not the destination—it is the passage.

I once found that image aspirational. The grief of the world-weary knight, still called out to do battle with one more monster, once felt like a form of nobility—the promise that if you would take up the burden and fight for the good, the inevitable end was not merely exhaustion but a kind of fulfillment. The stoic tired champion with his trusty weapon: this was the shape a man’s life could take. Open Range, like so many mythological works of art, affirmed that the grief was real and the fulfillment was real and the two arrived together, inseparable.

I do not want that identity anymore. I want to be honest about that, and honest about what honesty costs. The wanting is gone—not suppressed, not refused under duress, but genuinely relinquished, through a process I will come to later in this essay, a formation that broke something open in me and left me standing differently. I do not want to be the stoic gunslinger. I do not want to hand that mythology to my son. I know too much about what the image is carrying, whose bodies were on the wrong side of the gun it promises, what story I would be entering if I stepped into the silhouette and called it home.

But the sadness I feel when I look at the poster is not the sadness of a man who found something better and cleaner on the other side of the refusal. It is the sadness of a man who gave up a clarity he is not sure he has replaced. The icon organized something. It threw the silhouette into sharp relief—this is who you are, this is what you stand for, this is the shape your life makes against the light. Without it, I find myself more in the position of Friedrich’s figure seen from the front: standing at the edge of a sublime and overwhelming horizon, the infinite stretching out in every direction, the earthly bearings dissolving, the self ill-defined against the openness. It is not a bad place to stand. It may even be the right place to stand. But it is not the place the poster was promising, and I would be lying if I said I never feel the difference.

Willie James Jennings writes that those of us who have angled our lives to teach and preach and write against violence often fail to recognize the aesthetic and community-forming power of weapons—their beauty, their seductive pull, their capacity to organize desire and identity and belonging.1 He is right, and the failure he names is not intellectual. You can know the history of the gun and still feel what the gun promises. You can refuse the mythology and still grieve the clarity it provided. The icon does not release you simply because you have decided to refuse it. It stays in the body, doing its work, long after the mind has made its choice.

This essay is an attempt to understand what that work is, and what it costs, and what it means to be a man who is still—after everything—not entirely free of the sound.

The house where I grew up from eight to eighteen sat at the rural edge of a county that was still mostly farmland, in a subdivision where everyone had at least an acre and the woods pressed in close on most sides. Our backyard ended at a creek, and beyond the creek was someone else’s tobacco field. My parents both worked nearly an hour away—my father on alternating night shifts for the transportation department, my mother as a transcriptionist at a hospital. Our time together at home was limited during the weeks, and when I think now about what it must have felt like to leave a family in a house at the edge of the woods and drive an hour into the night, I start to understand the provisions they made for us.

My parents still lock the door behind you when you come to visit. It’s not a gesture—it’s a reflex, and it tells you something about the disposition that ran through the household I grew up in. Not paranoia. Something more like clear-eyed attention to the gap between what you love and what the world might do to it. My father is the kind of man who looks at a situation and identifies what could go wrong and make arrangements—a trait I am grateful to have learned from him. The arrangements were not dramatic. They were practical, unglamorous, specific to the actual shape of the threat. A bat in the low cutout along the floor behind their bed. A knife tucked away on the headboard. Martial arts—years of it, a body trained for the kind of distance a bat required.

And at some point, a shotgun.

I don’t remember the make or model. I was always scared of it, and my father didn’t treat it as anything more than a perceived necessity, which meant I had no occasion to get past the fear toward familiarity. He took my mother out to the tree line to practice—loading shells, learning the weight of it, the recoil. She wasn’t particularly keen to keep up the practice. I don’t think she was meant to love it. She was meant to know it, which is a different thing. My father was making arrangements again, trying to close the gap between what he could provide while present and what she would have available while alone.

The shotgun lived for a while in a small cutout in the floor behind their bedframe. Not a rack, not a case, not anything that announced itself. A hiding place that was also a reach-away—tucked under the lip of the bed, accessible in the dark without rising, without crossing a room. When my sister was old enough to crawl, it disappeared. I’m not sure where it went. The provisions shifted as the household shifted. Nothing was permanent except the attention behind them.

But I’ll never forget the sound.

The pump action on a shotgun makes a sound that is almost impossible to describe to someone who has heard it, because they already know what you mean, and almost impossible to describe to someone who hasn’t, because no description is adequate. My father, who did not speak dramatically about most things, said once: I don’t even have to load it. Someone breaks in and you pump that gun, he’s going to get out as fast as he can. He said it the way he says most things—plainly, as a report on the world rather than a performance for it. The gun’s primary purpose was acoustic. He was keeping a sound.

What I didn’t understand then and have spent some years understanding since is why the sound works. It works because everyone knows it. And everyone knows it because they have been formed, by a culture older and wider and stranger than any single family or county, to respond to that particular sequence—the chunk-chunk of shell chambered, mechanism cocked, weapon made ready—with the knowledge that what comes next will be final. My father was right that he didn’t have to fire it. But the sound’s power was not his. He had borrowed it from somewhere else, drawn on a cultural reserve he hadn’t built and didn’t entirely control. The shotgun deterred because the mythology preceded it.

I was scared of the gun. I want to be careful about why. It was not my father I was afraid of—he is measured and careful, a man whose provisions are expressions of love rather than power, and nothing about the way he kept the shotgun suggested otherwise. The fear was about the object and what it was for. About its immensity. A bat requires your body to already be in the same room as the threat. A gun reaches through walls, across yards, into the dark beyond the tree line. It extends what a man can be responsible for beyond what his body alone could cover. That extension was what frightened me.

But underneath the fear of the object was another fear that I did not have language for at eight or twelve or fifteen and am only now finding words for. The culture had already told me that a gun was proper to a man’s hand. The Western mythology—the poster I would not yet encounter but had already in some sense absorbed—had already established that there would be a moment, a threshold, when I would need to be the kind of man who could hold one and use it. And I looked at my father’s shotgun in its floor cutout and felt the question forming. When will my hand have to hold this. Will I be able to. What if I’m not. What if I don’t want to be.

This is not a question my father asked me to ask. He said almost nothing about the gun except that one line about the sound. He was making provisions for his family, not making claims on his son. But the mythology had arrived in the house before the shotgun did, and it asked the question whether he intended it to or not. The son is always watching the father’s hands, reading them for information about what his own hands will eventually be required to do.

Jennings identifies a trinity as formative of American life as any other: the father, the son, and the gun.2 He doesn’t mean this casually. He means that the transmission of masculine identity in this country has been structured around the weapon the way other transmissions are structured around other shared objects—the meal, the book, the practice. The gun as the thing passed from the hands that know it to the hands that are learning. The gun as the site where a boy learns what is expected of him.

My father and I never had that transmission. He didn’t put it in my hands. He kept it in the floor. He moved it when my sister could crawl. He treated it as a perceived necessity and nothing more, which was, I think, a form of grace—a refusal to let the icon do more work than the provision required. But the question the icon was already asking could not be refused so easily. It had arrived before the gun. It would remain after the gun was gone.

I am still working out what to do with it.

Before my father bought the shotgun, the shotgun had a history. Before it arrived in the floor cutout beside his bed, it had been traveling toward that moment for centuries, carried in the hands of men who were building something and protecting something and claiming something—and the mythology that made my father’s deterrent work, that made everyone know that sound, was the same mythology that had been doing that work all along.

This is what I did not know as a boy and have been learning since: that you cannot inherit a cultural object without inheriting the story it was already telling. The shotgun was not neutral. No gun ever is.

Jennings traces the genealogy carefully. From the beginning of the colonial moment, gun culture formed within dreams of masculinity bound to land ownership—a dual possessive gesture that structured everything that followed: this is my land and this is my gun. The two belong together in this logic, each one requiring the other. The land needs the gun to remain land—possessed, bounded, defended. The gun needs the land to remain legitimate—purposeful, protective, rooted in something worth defending. Masculine identity formed in the new world at the junction of these two possessions, and the man who held both was the man the culture called complete.3

This dynamic is older than the Western. Kelly Brown Douglas traces it further back, through Tacitus’s Germania, through the Puritan covenant theology that made the new world a promised land requiring conquest, through the doctrine of Manifest Destiny that gave that conquest divine sanction. The Anglo-Saxon myth—a people exceptional by nature, ordained to expand, entitled to defend their expansion with force—is not American in origin. It arrived on these shores already formed, already knowing what it was for, already telling its story about whose ground could be stood upon and whose body could stand on it.4

But ideology requires victims, and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz names them. In Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment, she makes the specific historical argument that the Second Amendment was not primarily legislation for individual self-defense or frontier adventure. It was enabling legislation for two specific forms of organized violence: slave patrols in the South, and militia operations against Indigenous peoples on the expanding frontier. The “well regulated militia” that the Second Amendment protects was not protecting homesteaders from outlaws. It was clearing land—Indigenous land—so that the dual possessive gesture could be completed. This is my land required, as its precondition, that the land be taken from someone. Dunbar-Ortiz names who. The frontier mythology romanticizes what was in historical fact a war of dispossession, and the gun was its primary instrument.5

The Western genre is the transmission system that turned this history into mythology. Richard Slotkin spent three massive volumes demonstrating what most Americans feel without being able to articulate: that the frontier myth is America’s foundational story, that the violence of that myth is not incidental but central, that regeneration through violence—the idea that the self is purified and renewed through its encounter with the savage, the threat, the wilderness—is the deepest structure of American identity.6 The Western hero is the figure who knows when institutions have failed and law cannot reach and the individual man with the gun is all that stands between civilization and chaos. He reluctantly draws. He solves what the law cannot. He walks back into the sunset alone, having done what was necessary, having remained clean in the doing of it. What he has done, in historical fact, is dispossession. What the myth calls it is heroism.

Malcolm Gladwell, in a 2023 podcast series on gun mythology, found the transmission system working in a specific and verifiable way. The fictional Dodge City of Gunsmoke—the most popular television show in American history, running for twenty seasons across three decades, watched by tens of millions—had a homicide rate eighty times higher than the real Dodge City of the 1870s. The real Dodge City had a sign at the bridge coming into town: The carrying of firearms strictly prohibited. Visitors checked their guns at the sheriff’s office. The cattle-town lawmen Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson were, in historical record, aggressive gun control advocates. None of this made it into Gunsmoke. What made it into Gunsmoke was a Dodge City where violence was perpetual and legitimate authority was weak and the individual man with the gun was the only reliable instrument of justice. The show taught its lesson with the regularity of liturgy, season after season, decade after decade, until the lesson wasn’t a lesson anymore—it was simply how things were.7

Gladwell makes a point that should be more disturbing than it tends to register: the Supreme Court justices who wrote the majority opinion in D.C. v. Heller, establishing an individual right to bear arms as constitutional bedrock, were operating from a historical understanding of the American West that was closer to Gunsmoke than to the actual historical record. The mythology had migrated into jurisprudence. The fiction had become the ground on which real law was decided.8

This is what the community-forming power of weapons actually looks like at scale. The gun doesn’t just protect. It teaches. It passes on a way of understanding the world—who is the threat, who has the right to stand their ground, whose presence requires the ready hand. The mythology is not neutral about these questions. It never was.

Barack Obama asked the question that reveals the mythology’s load-bearing structure. Following the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the killing of Trayvon Martin, Obama said at a White House press briefing: if Trayvon Martin had been of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk?9 Kelly Brown Douglas, writing as both theologian and mother of a Black son, makes this the center of her analysis. The answer the culture gave—the answer the law gave—was no. Stand Your Ground was not written for Trayvon Martin. The doctrine of the man entitled to defend his ground against the threat approaching him encodes, in its very structure, a prior judgment about which bodies are the threat and which bodies are the ones with ground worth standing. The mythology that made my father’s sound work is the same mythology that made Trayvon Martin’s presence read as danger.10

I want to sit with that for a moment before moving through it, because I think it’s possible to receive it as a political point and miss it as a formation point. The mythology is not simply unjust—it is formative. It has been making people into a particular kind of person for centuries, telling them what to fear and what to protect and what a man looks like when he is doing his job. My father’s provisions drew on that formation without his consent or full awareness. So did mine. The sound of the pump-action works on me too—I feel it, the low-voltage alarm, the animal recognition—and I did not choose to be formed that way. The formation was completed before I was old enough to examine it.

My father is a careful and loving man making provisions for his family. He is also a man who had been formed by a story older than both of us, and the story had opinions about what protection looked like and who needed protecting and what a man held in his hand when the moment came. He didn’t know the full history of what he was borrowing. Neither did I. Neither, I suspect, did most of the men who passed the mythology along—fathers to sons, screens to living rooms, pulpits to pews, decade after decade, until everyone knows that sound and no one remembers learning it.

That’s how formation works. That’s what makes it dangerous. And that’s why the question of what you hand on to your son is never a simple question. You are never handing on only what you intend. You are handing on everything the story has already put in your hands.

Ida B. Wells carried a gun.

This is not a footnote to her legacy—it is close to the center of it. After three of her friends in Memphis were lynched in 1892, killed not for the crime the mythology required but for the crime of running a grocery store that outcompeted a white-owned one nearby, Wells documented the pattern no one wanted documented and published the analysis no one wanted published. A white mob destroyed her newspaper office in response. She was out of town. She did not go back.

What she wrote in the aftermath is worth sitting with: A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every Black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.11

Notice what she is not saying. She is not saying guns are redemptive. She is not saying the armed individual is civilization’s last defense. She is not standing in front of a barn with the weapon held forward into the light, promising something. She is saying something colder and more precise: the law has declared itself unavailable to you. The institutions that exist to stand between the vulnerable and the threat have determined that you are not the vulnerable—you are the threat. Given that specific abandonment, given that specific situation, what do you have left?

The Winchester in Wells’s argument is not an icon. It is what remains after every icon has failed.

This is the distinction the mythology collapses and the essay has been working toward: the icon and the provision are not the same thing. The icon promises sovereignty—the man alone against the chaos, the body that extends its authority outward through the weapon, the self that is completed by the thing held in its hand. The provision is different in kind. It asks nothing about sovereignty or completion or the fulfillment of masculine destiny. It asks only: when the state will not protect you, what do you have? It is a question born not of fantasy but of abandonment. And the answer Wells gave—unglamorous, clear-eyed, specific—was the Winchester.

My father’s provisions were closer to this than to the poster. The shotgun in the floor cutout was not performing anything. There was no mythology being inhabited, no version of self being completed. There was a man calculating what his family would have available in the dark when he was an hour away, drawing on what the culture had given him to draw on, trying to close the gap between what he owed them and what he could provide. He was not Costner silhouetted against the barn. He was a man on a night shift hoping the sound would be enough.

But here is what I have to say honestly, from where I actually stand: I cannot fully inhabit Wells’s argument. I can understand it. I can recognize its force and its necessity. I can see that it is not the mythology in different clothing but something genuinely different—a refusal of helplessness rather than a performance of power, a last resort named clearly as a last resort. But I cannot claim it as mine, because the abandonment she was writing from is not the abandonment I have experienced. The state has not organized itself against my body. The law has not declared itself unavailable to me. My nonviolence—the principled refusal I will come to in the next section—costs something real, but it does not cost what it would cost a Black woman in Memphis in 1892, or a Black man in Minneapolis in 2026.

Alex Pretti was legally carrying at a protest in Minneapolis on January 24, 2026, when he was shot ten times in under five seconds by U.S. Border Patrol agents.12 He was doing exactly what the Second Amendment mythology says the good man with a gun does—present, lawful, positioned to protect. The myth said his weapon made him legitimate. The state said his body made him the threat. The Gun Owners of America defended him. The Trump administration called him an assassin. Sean Illing, in a conversation shortly after, noted what the Pretti case revealed: that the Second Amendment is tribal rather than principled, that its protections have always been administered with a specific body in mind, that the moment a Black man exercised the right the mythology claimed was universal, the mythology declined to show up for him.13

This is Obama’s question made lethal. If Trayvon Martin had been of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk? The answer the culture gave Trayvon Martin is the same answer it gave Alex Pretti. The provision Wells was pointing to—the gun as what remains when the state declines to protect you—remains necessary for the same reason it was necessary in 1892, because the state is still declining in the same directional way. The Pretti killing is not a historical data point. It is present tense.

So where does this leave a man like me, trying to think clearly about what he hands on?

I cannot hand on the myth. The myth is a lie—about history, about the West, about whose ground can be stood and whose body is the threat. The myth has been doing damage for centuries and I will not pass it to my son in the name of formation. That refusal is real and it is mine.

But I cannot dismiss the provision as illegitimate either, as though the people who need it most should be satisfied with my principled distance from it. Wells needed the Winchester. Pretti exercised his legal right and was shot for it. There is a version of nonviolence that functions as a luxury available to the people the state has decided to protect—a principled position made affordable by the very arrangement that makes it unaffordable for others. I do not want that version of nonviolence. I do not think it is actually nonviolence. I think it is comfort wearing the clothes of conscience.

What I am left with is a distinction I cannot fully resolve and am trying to be honest about: the icon belongs to a mythology I refuse, and the provision belongs to a situation I do not fully inhabit, and the space between those two things is where the essay is standing. Not a tidy position. But an honest one.

I came to seminary late, at twenty-five, leaving another graduate program behind. I was not new to church—I had grown up inside it, knew its rhythms and its language, had a faith I would have called genuine. But I was new to the deeper ends of the theological pool, and I did not know how deep the water went until I was already in it.

My new wife and I were helping lead a church plant, young and earnest and excited in the way that people are when they are building something together and have not yet learned how much can go wrong. And into that season arrived a set of teachers who were doing something I had not seen done before: taking Jesus seriously. Not seriously as in solemnly, not seriously as in rigidly—seriously as in, if this story is true, then almost everything else has to be reconsidered in its light. Stanley Hauerwas. Will Willimon. Willie James Jennings. Fleming Rutledge. Marva Dawn. I was being introduced to a Christianity that was more demanding and more coherent than anything I had encountered, and the coherence was what got me. I had always suspected that faith might ask more than it had been asking. Here, finally, was the more.

What Hauerwas did—what the whole tradition he was drawing on did—was teach me to see the resurrection as a political claim. Not metaphor, not consolation, not private spiritual experience. A claim about the structure of reality: that death is not the final word, that the logic of redemptive violence has been broken at its root, that the story ends differently than the myth says it ends. If God raised Jesus from the dead, then the thing the gun promises—resolution through force, the self preserved by its capacity to threaten—is not just morally wrong. It is cosmologically incoherent. It operates from a story that the resurrection has already interrupted.14

I had never heard it framed that way. And when I heard it framed that way, something happened that I can only describe as recognition—not of something I had known before, but of something I had dimly suspected was possible, a consistency and seriousness that faith had always seemed to be reaching toward without quite arriving. Oh, I thought. This is what it actually asks. And then, almost immediately, following behind the recognition like a shadow: this means the gun can never be mine.

Not that it had been. I had not carried one, had not been on the verge of carrying one, had not been making provisions the way my father made provisions. But the possible identity—the one the poster was promising, the one the boy standing in his parents’ doorway had wondered if he would be adequate to—had been alive in me in the way that possible identities live: as a question still open, a door not yet closed. Hauerwas closed the door. Or rather, the resurrection closed the door, and Hauerwas helped me see that it had.

The loss was specific and real. Not the loss of a practice or a possession but the loss of a shape. The stoic world-weary champion, the tired knight called out for one more monster, the man whose grief and resolve and willingness to stand between the innocent and the threat gave his life its silhouette—that figure had organized something in me, had thrown my sense of self into sharp relief against the light, had promised that if I would take up the burden the identity would be clear. And now it was gone. Not taken by force, not argued away, but dissolved by a claim about what had already happened on a Sunday morning outside Jerusalem. The resurrection turned out to be incompatible with the gun, which turned out to be incompatible with the silhouette, which turned out to have been doing more organizational work in me than I had known.

What I found on the other side of the dissolution was not a cleaner and better-defined identity. I found the Friedrich horizon—the sublime and terrifying openness, the self ill-defined against the infinite, the clarity of the silhouette replaced by something more like weather. I am still standing in that horizon. I have not resolved it into a new and satisfying shape. The refusal was real and it was right and I would make it again. But it cost the clarity, and the clarity had been something, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty.

My father and I have talked about this. It has never been contentious between us, which is its own kind of ache. He receives my theological nonviolence the way a loving father receives a son’s academic enthusiasms: as something the education afforded, an interesting position available to those with the leisure to hold it, not necessarily something more fundamental than that. He does not say this unkindly. He is not dismissing me. He is a man who made provisions in a floor cutout for his family’s survival in the dark, and from where he stands, the resurrection may look like a less serious engagement with reality than a pump-action shotgun.

I cannot fully correct him, and I am not sure I should try. He is not wrong that the position costs me less than it would cost someone the state has actually abandoned. He is not wrong that there is a version of principled nonviolence that functions as a luxury, a comfort wearing the clothes of conscience. What he cannot see—what I cannot make him see—is that for me it was not a position adopted from a distance but a ground shifted underfoot, a possible self dissolved, a door closed on something I had been moving toward without knowing it. The Hauerwas formation was the most disorienting thing that ever happened to my sense of who I was.

The gun was never in my hand. The mythology was always in my body. Hauerwas got the mythology. What replaced it is still being worked out.

My son is ten years old, and the mythology is already in him.

He wants Nerf guns. He wants to battle it out in the yard, to ambush his friends from behind the fence, to feel the satisfying chunk of the trigger and the arc of the foam dart and the clean uncomplicated joy of the thing. At the community pool in summer he is ruthless with a water gun, laughing, entirely alive, the weapon in his hand nothing more than pleasure and light. He knows we won’t buy the foam darts. He finds this deeply unreasonable, a parental failure on par with the most tragic deprivations of childhood, evidence that his mother and father have lost the plot entirely.

What I tell him is this: we don’t own guns, and we’re not okay with them in any form, and we don’t want to pretend that pointing a gun at someone can ever be a game worth playing. He receives this the way a ten-year-old receives a cosmological argument—with the particular combination of frustration and pity reserved for adults who have clearly missed something obvious. All his friends are doing it. It looks like play from inside it. He cannot see what I’m protecting him from, because the mythology looks like summer from where he’s standing.

We did watch The Mandalorian together, though. All of it, the two of us, over a stretch of evenings I remember fondly even now. And I have thought about what we were watching.

Din Djarin is the sorrowful gunslinger in his purest contemporary form—the lone armed man bound by a code, the helmet as literal icon, identity so complete that removing it feels like exposure. This is the Way. He lives inside the Creed the way the poster’s cowboy lives inside the silhouette: defined by it, organized by it, the shape of his life made legible by the thing he carries and the rule that tells him when to carry it. He is world-weary and competent and entirely alone, which is what the mythology has always said the real man finally is.15

And then the child arrives. Grogu—unchosen, inconvenient, impossibly small—and the Creed has nothing to say about him. The code that organized everything does not cover this. What the child requires is not a man who knows when to draw. It is a man who knows how to stay. And Din Djarin, slowly, over seasons, becomes that man—at the cost of the helmet, the Creed, the clean silhouette of the identity he had built. He lays it all down for the foundling. The mythology gets undone by love.

Except it doesn’t, not entirely. He keeps getting pulled back. The armor goes back on. The gun is still there. The show is honest enough to know that you cannot simply walk out of a formation that deep—that the man who chooses the child over the code still has the code in his hands, still knows how to use it, still finds the world requiring it of him. The tension doesn’t resolve. It continues.

I watched all of this sitting next to my son, who wanted Nerf guns and found my refusal baffling, and I thought: he is watching the mythology be honest about itself. He is watching the gunslinger get undone. He may not have the words for it yet. But he is seeing a man choose the child, and seeing what that choice costs, and seeing that the man keeps making it anyway. That is not nothing. That might even be formation.

And I am not entirely sure I can explain it to him yet—the full weight of why we hold the line on the foam darts, why the pretending matters, why the gun is never just a game. The explanation requires him to have lived longer inside the thing I’m asking him to refuse. You cannot hand on a reckoning to someone who hasn’t yet accumulated what needs reckoning with. What I can do is hold the line and hope that what he sees when he watches me hold it is something worth inheriting—not the rule but the reason behind the rule, not the refusal but the man doing the refusing and what that man is made of.

What he sees when he watches me, I honestly don’t know.

This is the thing about formation that the mythology never admits: it happens in the dark, in the gap between what the father intends and what the son receives, in the space between the hand that reaches out and the hand that takes. My father kept the shotgun in the floor cutout and took my mother out to the tree line to practice and said once, plainly, that he didn’t even have to load it—and I received all of that as love and provision and a question I wasn’t sure I could answer. He was not trying to transmit the mythology. He was trying to protect his family. What I received included both, indistinguishably, the provision wrapped in the story the culture had already told about what provisions looked like.

I have tried to hand on something different, even if only by a few degrees. I have tried to refuse the icon while honoring the provision, to refuse the gunslinger’s silhouette while keeping what was real in my father’s arrangements—the love that makes itself responsible, the willingness to stand between the vulnerable and the threat, the refusal to look away from what the world might do to the people you are trying to protect. Whether I am succeeding I cannot tell. The formation is still happening. My son is still ten. The gap between what I’m reaching toward and what he’s receiving is not yet visible to either of us.

What I know is this: the gun is still there. Not in my house, not in my hands—but there, just at the edge of the light, at the boundary between the shadows and the open country beyond. I look at the poster and I still feel the pull of what it promises. I still carry in my body the reflexes the mythology installed before I could object. I still hear the echo of a sound I may or may not have actually heard, in a house at the edge of the woods where my father was trying to close the gap between what he owed his family and what he had available to provide. The sound is still doing its work. Everyone knows that sound. I know it too, and knowing the history of it has not made me unhear it, and I expect I will know it for the rest of my life.

What the resurrection gave me was not a new silhouette. It did not replace the stoic gunslinger’s clarity with a different but equally defined shape. What it gave me was a claim about what had already happened—that the story ends differently than the myth says it ends, that death is not the final authority, that the logic that makes the gun necessary has been interrupted at its root. That claim dissolved the possible identity, closed the door on the figure I might have become, left me standing in the Friedrich horizon with the infinite opening out in every direction and no clean line to stand on.

I am still standing there. I am standing there in front of my son, who watches me the way sons watch fathers—reading the hands for information about what his hands will eventually be required to do. And what I want to hand him, what I am reaching toward even from inside the unresolved openness, is not the silhouette but the man inside the silhouette, trying to be honest about the grief and the refusal and the cost. Not the gun. Not the myth. Not the icon or its promise or the clarifying violence that makes the horizon legible.

Just the standing. The honest, ill-defined standing. The refusal to leave even though the gun is there, just over there, at the edge between the shadows and the light, still beautiful, still offering what it has always offered.

My father kept the sound. I am keeping the keeping—the love that makes itself responsible, the willingness to remain, the provision that does not require the icon to be real.

Whether that is enough to hand on, I don’t yet know.

Neither does my son.

Neither, for that matter, did my father.

Deloria, Vine, Jr. Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. New York: Macmillan, 1969.

Douglas, Kelly Brown. Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2015.

Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2018.

Estes, Nick. Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. New York: Verso, 2019.

Favreau, Jon, creator. The Mandalorian. Seasons 1–3. Disney+, 2019–2023.

Gladwell, Malcolm. Revisionist History. Season 8. 2023. Podcast.

Hauerwas, Stanley. The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983.

Hauerwas, Stanley, and William H. Willimon. Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989.

Illing, Sean, and Tyler Austin Harper. “You’re Right to Bear Arms.” The Gray Area. February 2026. Podcast.

Jennings, Willie James. “Where Violence Lives: Notes for a Pedagogy of Aftermath.” Religious Education 110, no. 4 (2015): 375–380.

Obama, Barack. Remarks at White House press briefing. July 19, 2013.

Open Range. Directed by Kevin Costner. Touchstone Pictures, 2003.

Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1973.

———. The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890. New York: Atheneum, 1985.

———. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Atheneum, 1992.

Wells, Ida B. Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. New York: New York Age Print, 1892.

1. Willie James Jennings, “Where Violence Lives: Notes for a Pedagogy of Aftermath,” Religious Education 110:4 (2015), 376. The full passage: “And guns are beautiful. We who have angled our lives to teach, preach, and write against violence often fail to recognize the aesthetic and community forming power of weapons in general and guns in particular. Guns are formed at the highest level of craft, creativity, engineering, and technology and they hold unrelenting seductive power.” This is not a concession to the mythology. It is a demand for honesty about what we are actually dealing with—which is a precondition for dealing with it at all.↩

2. Jennings, “Where Violence Lives,” 376. The full passage on the trinity: “The father, the son, and the gun—here is a trinity as formative of life together as the original.”↩

3. Jennings, “Where Violence Lives,” 376. On the colonial formation: “From the very beginning of the colonial moment, gun culture formed within dreams of masculinity bound to land ownership… Thus masculine subjectivity formed in the new world within a dual possessive gesture—this is my land and this is my gun.”↩

4. Kelly Brown Douglas, Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2015), especially chapters 1–2. Douglas traces the Anglo-Saxon myth from Tacitus through English Protestant theology through American exceptionalism with the rigor of a scholar and the urgency of a mother. She is explicit that this is not a peripheral story about fringe ideology but the constitutive mythology of mainstream American self-understanding.↩

5. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2018). Dunbar-Ortiz’s argument is the necessary complement to Douglas’s —where Douglas traces the ideological formation of Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism, Dunbar-Ortiz traces its operational deployment against specific peoples. The Second Amendment’s original function, she argues, was not individual liberty but collective violence: enabling the slave patrols that enforced the racial order in the South, and enabling the frontier militias that prosecuted the wars of Indigenous dispossession in the West. The frontier hero of the mythology is, in historical fact, a soldier in a war of extermination. The romanticism of the Western genre is inseparable from that erasure. For the Indigenous account of what the frontier actually was—told from inside the experience of dispossession rather than from outside it—see also Vine Deloria Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (New York: Macmillan, 1969), the foundational text of Indigenous critique of the very mythology this essay is analyzing; and Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (New York: Verso, 2019), which places that critique in direct continuity with contemporary Indigenous resistance.↩

6. Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1973); The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (New York: Atheneum, 1985); Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Atheneum, 1992). Slotkin’s trilogy is the scholarly foundation under everything in this section—Gladwell is essentially popularizing what Slotkin documented exhaustively across three decades of research.↩

7. Malcolm Gladwell, Revisionist History, Season 8 (2023), “Getting Out of Dodge” and related episodes. The historical research on Dodge City is striking enough on its own, but what Gladwell’s episode forces into view is the Heller problem—see the following footnote.↩

8. Scalia’s majority opinion in Heller—District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008)—is a bravura piece of originalist reasoning, and if you love Supreme Court opinions the way some people love a particularly aggressive chess game, it’s genuinely fun to read. Scalia marshals colonial-era dictionaries, militia statutes, English common law, and a parade of founding-era sources with the confidence of a man who has decided in advance what the history says and is now proving it. His central move is to establish that “keep and bear arms” in the Second Amendment refers to individual self-defense rather than collective militia service—that “bear arms” was ordinary usage for carrying weapons personally, not a technical term of military art. Stevens’s dissent is equally fun and considerably more persuasive, marshaling many of the same sources to argue that every single piece of Scalia’s evidence, read in context, points toward the militia interpretation. Two brilliant lawyers, same founding-era record, opposite conclusions. This is either a sign that originalism is a sophisticated jurisprudential method or that it is sophisticated enough to reach any conclusion its practitioner prefers, depending on your priors. What neither opinion does is examine where the majority of its historical intuitions about guns and the American tradition actually came from. The founding-era sources are cited; the intervening two centuries of mythology are not. The Gunsmoke Dodge City—in which gun control is weakness and the armed individual is civilization’s last line—is the water the opinion swims in, invisible precisely because it is everywhere. Scalia was not drawing on the historical West. He was drawing on the West as it had been transmitted to him, to his clerks, to the legal culture that produced the briefs and arguments, through seventy years of television and film and political mythology. The historical record was being read through a lens the opinion didn’t know it was wearing. This is not an argument about the right outcome in Heller—that’s a different essay. It’s an observation about formation: you can be a rigorous textualist and still be, underneath the rigor, a man who watched Gunsmoke. The methodology doesn’t immunize you against the mythology. Nothing does, entirely. That’s the point.↩

9. Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President on Trayvon Martin,” James S. Brady Press Briefing Room, The White House, July 19, 2013, 1:33 P.M. EDT. Full transcript available at obamawhitehouse.archives.gov. The remarks came six days after George Zimmerman’s acquittal on July 13, 2013, in the killing of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, on February 26, 2012. Obama’s question is not rhetorical decoration — it is the mythology’s internal contradiction made visible: the doctrine was designed for a specific body, and the question simply asks it to account for a different one.↩

10. Douglas, Stand Your Ground, 87–120. Douglas’s meditation on Obama’s question as a mother runs throughout the chapter. The question’s power is that it doesn’t require a lengthy argument—it simply asks the mythology to account for itself, and the mythology cannot.↩

11. Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (New York: New York Age Print, 1892), “Self-Help.” The pamphlet is organized by titled sections rather than page numbers, and the Winchester passage opens the “Self-Help” section, the pamphlet’s final movement. Wells is not advocating violence as such but making a precise accounting of what remains available when legal remedy has been systematically foreclosed. The distinction matters.↩

12. Alex Pretti, 37, an ICU nurse and lawful gun owner with a Minnesota permit to carry, was shot and killed by federal immigration enforcement agents — a Border Patrol agent and a Customs and Border Protection officer — near the intersection of Nicollet Avenue and 26th Street in Minneapolis on January 24, 2026, during Operation Metro Surge. Forensic audio analysis confirmed ten shots fired in under five seconds. See: Liz Navratil, “Report: Border Patrol agent yelled ‘He’s got a gun!’ before Alex Pretti was killed,” Minnesota Star Tribune, January 27, 2026; “A minute-by-minute timeline of the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti involving federal agents,” ABC News, January 25, 2026; and the preliminary CBP report to Congress, January 27, 2026. That it was Border Patrol specifically is not incidental. Border Patrol is the frontier mythology made institutional — the armed man stationed at the threshold between civilization and the threatening outside, standing the ground the myth always said needed standing. The agency was created to police a border, which is to say a boundary, which is to say the exact liminal space the Western hero has always occupied: the man at the edge of the known world, deciding who may pass. That this institutionalized embodiment of the frontier myth shot a legally armed Black man at a domestic protest is the essay’s argument compressed into a single event. The mythology always knew whose body belonged on which side of the line.↩

13. Sean Illing and Tyler Austin Harper, “You’re Right to Bear Arms,” The Gray Area podcast, February 2026. Harper’s analysis of what the Pretti case reveals about the tribal rather than principled nature of gun rights advocacy is the clearest account I’ve encountered of how the Second Amendment functions as administered rather than as written—not a universal right but a right whose exercise is quietly conditioned on the body exercising it.↩

14. Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989). This is the most accessible entry point into the argument that reshaped my theological imagination — the claim that the church is not a chaplain to the culture but an alternative community formed by a different story, and that the political implications of the resurrection are not incidental to Christian faith but central to it. Hauerwas’s more systematic treatment of nonviolence is in The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983). The argument is not pacifism as mere policy preference but pacifism as witness — the claim that the church’s refusal of violence is intelligible only within the story that makes the resurrection the definitive word on what power actually looks like.↩

15. Jon Favreau, creator, The Mandalorian, seasons 1–3 (Disney+, 2019–2023). The show is conscious of its relationship to the Western genre in ways that reward attention — the lone gunfighter, the frontier setting, the code of honor, the reluctant use of violence in service of the innocent. What it adds to the tradition, and what makes it worth watching alongside a ten-year-old who wants Nerf guns, is its willingness to let the code be insufficient. Din Djarin does not transcend the mythology. He is undone by love within it, and the tension between the two never fully resolves. That honesty is rarer than it looks.↩

A ☕️☕️☕️ read in seven parts.

I wasn't expecting to feel anything in particular when I sat down to watch the season finale of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. I'd enjoyed the show—genuinely enjoyed it, the way you enjoy something that is doing its job well and not asking too much of you. Good characters. Beautiful to look at. A story I already knew in outline. I was ready to be satisfied and move on.

What I wasn't ready for was to find myself, somewhere in the middle of it, trying to explain to myself why I was moved. Not just entertained. Moved. Something in me was responding to something in the show that I didn't immediately have words for, and I've learned to pay attention when that happens—especially when the feeling is accompanied by a faint discomfort, the sense that the thing you're responding to is pointing back at you.

The show follows Ser Duncan the Tall, a hedge knight of no particular lineage, no castle, no claim to anything except the code he lives by and the enormous body through which he lives it. He has a squire named Egg, who is secretly a prince and openly a nuisance, and the two of them wander a Westeros that is already beginning to fray at the edges, a kingdom a hundred years before its eventual collapse. It's a show about small things against a large background: one man, one boy, a horse, a question about what it means to do right when the world doesn't particularly reward it.

What stopped me was something harder to name than plot or character. It was the quality of Dunk's attention. When someone weaker than him is being wronged, he doesn't calculate. He doesn't weigh his options or consider his positioning. He simply moves—and then lives with the consequences, which are often significant and sometimes terrible. His code isn't a performance for an audience. It appears to be constitutive, which is a theological word for something simple: it's what he's actually made of.

I kept thinking: when did I last see this? Not the hero with darkness in his past who is learning to be better. Not the man performing emotional vulnerability as a kind of new masculinity. Not the anti-hero whose moral ambiguity is the point. Just a man with a strong sense of what is right and wrong, who acts on it, who fails sometimes, who carries the failure honestly, and who gets back up. Played straight. Without irony.

And then, uncomfortably, I thought: this is what I'm trying to give my son. And I'm not sure I know how.

We are, by almost any measure, in the middle of an extended cultural conversation about men. It shows up in op-eds and podcasts and think-tank reports with titles like "Men Are Lost" and "Of Boys and Men" and "The State of American Men." It shows up in the viewing figures for Jordan Peterson's lectures and Andrew Tate's videos—different in almost every respect except the hunger they're feeding. It shows up in Joe Rogan's persistent popularity and in Scott Galloway, the NYU business professor and podcaster, who is not reactionary and not a manosphere prophet, and who has nonetheless been making an increasingly urgent case that we have abandoned boys and young men, that the data is damning, and that nobody on the respectable left wants to say so out loud. It shows up in the 2024 election results, which produced enough commentary about young men drifting toward authoritarianism to fill several libraries. We are, apparently, aware that something has gone wrong.

What's harder to find is any agreement about what should replace it.

The conversation tends to split in ways that feel less like genuine disagreement than like people answering different questions. On one side, a necessary and largely correct project of deconstruction: name what's toxic, strip it away, make space for men to be vulnerable, emotional, relational. This work is real. The stoicism-as-suppression, the dominance hierarchies, the jock machismo of a thousand locker rooms—these have done genuine damage, to women first and most severely, but also to the men who performed them, who learned to inhabit a version of themselves with no room for the full range of being human. The deconstruction was overdue.

But deconstruction is not formation. You cannot raise a son on "not that." And the therapeutic alternative—be vulnerable, go to therapy, let yourself feel things—while genuinely valuable, tends to be reactive, still defined against what it's replacing rather than oriented toward something. It answers the question of what we're against without quite answering the question of what we're for. Christine Emba, in a Washington Post essay that generated more than ten thousand responses and clearly touched something raw, named this gap honestly: the dismantling of bad models has created a vacuum, and the vacuum is dangerous because it doesn't stay empty. She called for a fresh start. The fresh start has been slower in coming.1

On the other side, voices that have identified the same hunger and are feeding it differently. Peterson's mythology of masculine archetypes. Galloway's insistence that men need purpose and competition and the particular dignity that comes from being needed—which is not wrong, exactly, but stops well short of any account of what they'd be competing for or needed by. And then further out, the various manosphere prophets who have found enormous audiences among boys who are genuinely lost and are being handed a map that leads somewhere worse. What these voices share, beneath their significant differences, is that they have correctly diagnosed the hunger for formation, for a code, for something that tells you what you're for—and have answered it with frameworks that are ultimately about the self: self-improvement, self-sufficiency, dominance as its own justification.2

Here is the problem underneath the problem, and it requires a short detour into a kind of thinking that has largely dropped out of our cultural conversation about men, even though it is precisely the thinking we need.

In After Virtue, published in 1981 and more unsettling to me now than ever, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre made an argument that I find myself returning to constantly. He proposed that Western moral culture had suffered a catastrophe—not a dramatic one, not a single moment of collapse, but a slow fragmentation that left us speaking the language of virtue while having lost the tradition that made the language meaningful. We use words like courage, integrity, honor, justice—but we use them, MacIntyre argued, the way someone might use the instruments of a science they no longer understand: going through the motions of a practice whose rationale has been lost. The words float free of the stories, communities, and practices that once gave them their content and their direction.3

The diagnosis lands hardest, I think, when you apply it to the conversation about men. We are extraordinarily fluent in the vocabulary of masculine virtue—strength, courage, discipline, protection, responsibility—and extraordinarily confused about what any of it is for. The words are everywhere. A sense of the purpose or the end that the virtues are in service of has largely vanished. And without that vision of purpose, the virtues don't cohere. They become a list of admirable traits rather than the shape of a life oriented toward something worth orienting toward.4

MacIntyre's own word for what's missing is telos—from the Greek, meaning "end" or "purpose." Aristotle's moral philosophy, which MacIntyre is largely recovering, insisted that you cannot understand what a virtue is without understanding the kind of being that exercises it and the kind of life that counts as its flourishing. Courage is not courage in the abstract. It is courage in the context of a particular kind of life, ordered toward particular goods, practiced within a particular community that sustains and judges and transmits it. Strip away the community, the narrative, the account of human flourishing, and what you have left is not virtue. It is performance.

This is where MacIntyre's diagnosis is more useful than his prescription—and being honest about that distinction is part of what it means to take him seriously rather than simply invoke him.5 His prescription, roughly, is a recovery of local communities of practice—something like the Benedictine option, small enclaves of people who share a tradition and practice it together against the grain of the surrounding culture. This is not nothing. But it risks a kind of withdrawal that the tradition at its best was never about—the knight's code was never about protecting the enclave. It was about moving outward, toward the vulnerable, into the mess. The diagnosis is essential. The prescription is incomplete.

What MacIntyre does not quite supply—and this is where Stanley Hauerwas becomes indispensable for me, too—is an account of the specific community and specific narrative that could do the work of formation in our moment. Hauerwas, drawing on MacIntyre but pressing further, argues that the church is precisely this community and not as an institution to be defended or a tradition to be conserved, but as a people formed by a particular story about what human life is for and what it looks like when it goes well.6 The virtues are not private achievements. They are the fruit of belonging to something, of being held by a story large enough to give your strength somewhere worthy to go.

I am aware that invoking the church in an essay about masculinity risks a particular kind of misreading, given what a certain strand of American Christianity has done with masculine formation—the muscular Christianity of the men's movement, the providential nationalism that has made the warrior-protector into an idol rather than a vocation. Du Mez's Jesus and John Wayne is the recently definitive account of that distortion, and it is not a small thing.7 But the distortion of a tradition is not the tradition. The church I am pointing toward is not the one that baptized the Western hero's violence or told men that dominance was discipleship. It is the one that insists, against every surrounding culture and even against itself, that strength is for the weak, that the last will be first, that the code derives its authority not from the warrior's honor but from the one who laid his down.

Which is why I found myself arrested by a hedge knight in a medieval fantasy, wondering why he felt more legible to me than almost anything the culture had actually produced on the subject.

I grew up on Westerns. Not in any particularly self-conscious way—they were just there, on the television on Saturday afternoons, in the movies my father liked, in the ambient cultural air of a certain kind of American boyhood. John Wayne. Clint Eastwood. Kevin Costner, who has spent essentially his entire career as a kind of Western true believer, returning again and again to the genre with a sincerity that Hollywood has never quite known what to do with. Tombstone, which I watched probably a dozen times before I was old enough to fully understand why Doc Holliday moved me more than Wyatt Earp did. And Lonesome Dove, which is something else entirely — Larry McMurtry's great loving demolition of the Western myth, where Gus McCrae managed to be funny and tender and lethal and melancholy all at once, and where the code the men lived by was shown to be both genuinely noble and genuinely insufficient for the world as it actually was.8 The man who rides into town, restores order, and rides back out. The code of the frontier: don't draw first, keep your word, protect the weak, die with your boots on. It was a moral vocabulary delivered through squinting and silence and the particular eloquence of a man who doesn't say much because he doesn't need to.

There is something genuinely there. I want to say that before I say anything more complicated, because the complicated things are true but they don't cancel out what's genuinely there. The Western hero at his best—Shane, Will Kane in High Noon, even the Man with No Name at his most inexplicably decent—embodies something real about the relationship between strength and restraint, between capacity for violence and the discipline that directs it. He is not violent because he enjoys it. He is capable of violence because the world requires someone to be, and he has accepted that burden so that others don't have to. There's a moral seriousness in that, underneath the mythology.

But the Western genre has a founding sin it has never quite escaped, which is that it ultimately grounds all of this virtue in redemptive violence. The good man is finally good because of what he's willing to do with a gun. The code resolves, always, in the showdown—and the showdown is the moment when the hero's willingness to kill proves that he means it. Virtue is underwritten by lethality. Which means, underneath the squinting and the silence, the message to boys watching on Saturday afternoons was: the thing that makes a man trustworthy is his capacity for destruction kept on a very short leash. Character is essentially threat management.

James Baldwin saw this essence of character more clearly than anyone. In Nobody Knows My Name—his 1961 essay collection, and specifically in his account of his complicated friendship with Norman Mailer—Baldwin identified something that I have never been able to unsee since reading it. He opens by saying he knows something about American masculinity that most men of his generation don't, "because they have not been menaced by it in the way that I have been." That sentence does a great deal of work. Baldwin's clarity about the American mythology of toughness, danger, and frontier strength comes precisely from having been given no choice but to see it clearly—the white American man could romanticize danger because he was not finally required to inhabit it on the terms that Black men were.9 The Western hero's code of violence-as-virtue was not a neutral inheritance. It was constructed against a backdrop of racial terror that the mythology simultaneously depended on and erased, a mythology of a frontier that needed taming was already inhabited, of a strength being celebrated was partly the strength to dispossess.

This is not an argument for abandoning the tradition. It is an argument for knowing what you are actually inheriting when you inherit it, for being honest about the compound of genuine virtue and profound distortion that the Western moral imagination contains. Baldwin was not interested in simple condemnation. He was interested in truth telling as the precondition for anything better. And Baldwin's critique has a companion that goes further: the frontier the Western hero was taming was already someone's home, which means the mythology doesn't only distort the experience of those it conscripted—it requires the erasure of the people whose dispossession the whole story is built on.10 You cannot recover what is genuinely valuable in a tradition by pretending the damage was never done. You can only recover it by going through the damage honestly, which is a harder and longer route than either uncritical celebration or wholesale rejection.

Taylor Sheridan—the increasingly omnipotent showrunner behind Yellowstone, Landman, and Hell or High Water—has been the most serious recent custodian of this tradition, and his work is genuinely good partly because he's honest about the cost. His men are not triumphant. They are elegiac. They know the world their code was built for is gone or going, and they inhabit their virtue like a set of clothes that no longer quite fits the occasion. There's tragedy in it, and Sheridan earns the tragedy. But his answer to the tragedy is essentially to double down—to insist that the code still matters even in a world that has moved on, to find dignity in the last man standing. It is a beautiful dead end. The world the code was built for is not coming back, and Sheridan knows it, and his men know it, and the knowing is what gives the work its particular ache. But an elegy is not a formation. You cannot hand an elegy to your son and tell him this is what you're for.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is drawing from the same visual and moral well—the lone warrior, the wandering protector, the man defined by his code rather than his credentials—but its roots go back behind the Western to the tradition the Western was always, half-consciously, imitating. The chivalric ideal. The knight.

This matters more than it might seem, because the chivalric tradition was not originally about the warrior's personal honor. It was about the direction of his strength. The historical emergence of knighthood as a moral category—shaped substantially by the church's attempts in the eleventh and twelfth centuries to direct warrior culture toward something other than plunder—was precisely an argument about telos. What is all this capacity for violence for? The answer the tradition worked out, imperfectly and against significant resistance, was: it's for the widow, the orphan, the pilgrim, the weak. The knight's strength is not his own. It belongs to those who have none.11

C.S. Lewis, in a short essay called "The Necessity of Chivalry," put it with characteristic precision. The chivalric ideal was a "double demand"—that the same man be ferocious and meek, a terror to evildoers and a gentleness to the vulnerable. This is not a natural combination. It doesn't happen without formation. And that's exactly the point: the tradition was an argument that the warrior needed to be shaped by something beyond his own code of honor, needed to be ordered toward a good outside himself, or his ferocity would simply become another form of predation.12 Stanley Hauerwas, working in a very different key than Lewis would have been comfortable with, makes an adjacent argument about the church as the community that forms people capable of a particular kind of life—that virtue is not a private achievement but a communal practice, that you cannot become the person the tradition calls you to be without a community that sustains that calling and holds you to it.13 Lewis identifies the ideal. Hauerwas insists on the community required to produce it. Both are necessary, and the Western genre has conspicuously lacked both. It holds the ideal floating free of any community that could make it real, which is precisely why it keeps producing elegies instead of formations.

Dunk lives inside this older tradition, not the Western revision of it. His violence is not redemptive. It costs him enormously, implicates him in deaths he didn't intend, leaves him carrying weight that doesn't resolve. But his orientation is clear: he moves toward the vulnerable. He doesn't calculate. He doesn't wonder whether the small girl with the dragon egg is worth the trouble she will certainly cause him. He simply moves. And it's that direction—strength ordered outward and downward rather than upward toward glory—that makes him feel different from almost everything else presently on television.

Which is not to say he's uncomplicated. He isn't. And we'll get to that.

There is a moment near the end of David Lowery's The Green Knight—the 2021 A24 film starring Dev Patel as Gawain—that I have thought about more than almost any other scene in recent cinema. Gawain has spent the entire film running. Running from his oath, from the test, from the Green Knight's axe that waits for him at the Green Chapel. He has lied, stolen, abandoned a woman who loved him, grasped at every possible exit from the commitment he made in a moment of reckless bravado at Arthur's Christmas court. And in the film's extraordinary final sequence, we are given a vision—whether dream or prophecy is deliberately unclear—of what his life becomes if he continues running. He gets the kingdom. He gets the crown. He gets everything the ambitious young man wanted. And he loses everything that would have made any of it worth having. His honor. His relationships. Eventually his head, taken not by the Green Knight in a ritual of mutual respect but by enemies who simply want what he has.

And then he wakes up. Still at the Green Chapel. Still facing the axe. And he removes his own protection—the magic girdle he'd been clutching like a talisman—and he bows his head.

That's it. That's the film's answer. Not triumph. Not even survival, necessarily. Just the willingness, finally, to keep the oath. To be the person who showed up when it cost something.

I've heard the film described as a deconstruction of the chivalric ideal, and it is, but only in the way that surgery is a deconstruction of a body. The point is not destruction. The point is to find out what's actually there. Lowery takes Gawain apart to see whether there's anything inside worth saving, and the answer the film gives—tentatively, at the last possible moment—is yes. There is. It just took everything else being stripped away first.

This is a different kind of moral imagination than we usually get. The dominant mode of prestige television and literary fiction right now is what you might call the Sophisticated No: the work that demonstrates, with great intelligence and craft, that the heroic codes are illusions, that the men who claim to live by them are hypocrites or fools, that honor is a story the powerful tell to keep the powerless in line. This is sometimes true. It's also, at a certain point, a way of avoiding the harder question, which is: what then? If the code is a lie, what do you put in its place? Deconstruction as a permanent posture is its own kind of evasion.

The Green Knight earns the right to its reconstruction because it doesn't skip the deconstruction. Gawain is genuinely hollow at the film's opening—a young man who wants the reputation of virtue without the cost of it, who sits at the edges of Arthur's court hungering for a story to tell about himself. The Green Knight's challenge is almost a gift: here is your chance. Here is the test. And Gawain spends most of the film refusing it, which is to say he spends most of the film being entirely recognizable. Most of us, if we are honest, spend a significant portion of our lives refusing our tests. Choosing the comfortable version of ourselves over the true one. Keeping the girdle on.

What redeems the film—and what makes it more than a beautiful exercise in medieval aesthetics —is that it refuses to let Gawain's failure be the final word. The vision of what he becomes if he keeps running is not presented as freedom. It's presented as a kind of death in life, a self that accumulates everything and loses everything that matters. And in the moment of his choosing, when he finally removes the girdle and bows his head, the film suggests something the Sophisticated No cannot quite access: that the code was real. That it was waiting for him the whole time. That it is possible, even after significant failure and evasion, to finally consent to who you are supposed to be.

This is, it occurs to me, a very old story. It is in fact the story of every saint who took the long way around.14

But here's what The Green Knight cannot quite give us, for all its beauty: a model of formation. Gawain arrives at virtue through catastrophe and near-total self-failure. He has to see the complete vision of who he becomes without it before he can choose it. The code reaches him, finally, but it reaches him from the outside—as judgment, as consequence, as the axe he can no longer avoid. There is no one who formed him. No community that sustained the tradition. No relationship in which the virtues were practiced and habituated and slowly made his own. He is, at the end, a man who has finally said yes. But a yes wrested from despair is different from a yes that has been growing in you for years, tended by someone who believed you were capable of it.

That difference is what A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is interested in. And it is, I think, the difference between conversion and formation. Between the moment of crisis and the long slow work that either precedes it or—if we're lucky, if someone helped us—makes the crisis unnecessary.

So let me be honest about Dunk.

The first half of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is largely about a man trying to justify entering a tournament he has no business entering. He wants the glory and the prize money and, underneath both of those, the confirmation that he is what he believes himself to be: a true knight, worthy of the name. The hunger is understandable. It is also, the show is clear-eyed enough to show us, not entirely clean. There is vanity in it. There is a need to be seen that sits in some tension with the code he claims to live by.

And then there is the lie. In a significant departure from George R.R. Martin's novellas, the television show reveals that Dunk was never formally knighted. His mentor, Ser Arlan of Pennytree, taught him decency and how to wield a sword—gave him everything that knighthood is supposed to mean—but died before completing the ceremony. Dunk has been calling himself Ser Duncan the Tall on the strength of a knighthood that never technically happened. He is, as the show puts it with characteristic precision, a knight in name only.

This is not a minor detail. It is the fault line the entire season runs along. And it refuses to resolve cleanly, which is exactly what makes it so interesting. Because the question the show keeps asking is not whether Dunk deserves the name, but what the name actually means. The chivalric virtues shaped Dunk as he grew beyond Flea Bottom. He remains committed to those vows, whether he said them before the gods or not. Aerion Targaryen, who was formally and correctly knighted, has forgotten every vow he ever made. Dunk, who said no vows at all, lives as though he said them all. It's why Baelor sided with him over his own blood, why Lyonel rallied to his cause: Aerion forgot these vows, but Ser Duncan never did.

The showrunner Ira Parker frames this through Baelor Breakspear's choice to stand with Dunk in "the Trial of Seven," a seven-on-seven trial by combat that hadn't been invoked in over a century. Baelor didn't have to do it. He chose it. And Parker's gloss on that choice is worth sitting with: "virtue untested is no virtue at all." Baelor's past reputation, his victory at Redgrass Field, his standing as the realm's greatest knight—none of it counted as virtue until he chose, in a specific moment, to act on it when it cost him everything. Which it does. He dies. The heir to the Iron Throne dies for a hedge knight who was never technically knighted, and the show presents this not as tragedy exactly but as the system working as it should—as proof that the code is real, that it has weight, that it makes claims on those who profess it.15

And yet. Dunk carries Baelor's death as a wound that doesn't close. The finale—titled "The Morrow" — is substantially about a man sitting with the wreckage of his choices, trying to understand whether the right thing done badly is still the right thing. "What is a lie if it produces virtue? Where does necessity end and rot begin?" The show doesn't answer those questions. It just makes sure Dunk can't stop asking them. Which is, I would argue, precisely what genuine moral formation looks like from the inside.

This is what separates Dunk from the Western hero and from Gawain alike. The Western hero doesn't carry his choices that way—he rides out of town, and the camera doesn't follow him home to see what the killing cost him. Gawain carries his choices, but as a man who has been ambushed by their weight—the cost arrives all at once in the form of a catastrophic vision. Dunk accumulates. Each choice adds to a ledger he can't stop reading. He is being formed in real time, and the formation is inseparable from the failure.

But he is not being formed alone. And this is where the essay has to turn toward Egg.

Aegon Targaryen—fifth of his name, future king, currently a bald and brilliant boy who has shaved his head to disguise his identity and attached himself to a hedge knight who has no idea what he's gotten into—is not simply Dunk's squire. He is Dunk's conscience and his corrective and his reason to keep going, all at once. When Dunk is tempted toward the easier version of himself, it is frequently Egg's presence that makes the easier version unavailable. Not through lecturing or moralizing but through the simple fact of being watched by someone who believes you are better than you're currently acting.

This is an Aristotelian point about friendship that tends to get lost in contemporary discourse about men, which frames friendship primarily in terms of emotional support and vulnerability. Those things matter. But the deeper account of friendship in the virtue ethics tradition is that a true friend is someone who calls you toward your own excellence—not your comfort, not your self-esteem, but the best version of what you are actually capable of being. The friend holds up a mirror that shows you not who you are but who you could be, and the relationship creates the conditions in which becoming that person is actually possible.16

Egg does this for Dunk. And here is what makes it complicated and true: Dunk does it for Egg in return. The highborn boy who has lived inside privilege so total he cannot quite see it needs a man with no privilege at all to show him what the world actually looks like from the ground. Egg's moral clarity—his refusal to accept the comfortable lies of his station, his insistence on seeing people as they are rather than as their rank requires—is partly native to him. But it is also being formed by what he sees in Dunk. They are making each other. The formation is mutual.

This is, I think, what I have been trying to find language for since my son walked away crying from his sisters, and I stood in the kitchen not knowing what to say.

I am about my son's age when I remember this most clearly.

Saturday morning. A school soccer field, the grass still wet. My father and another dad, both of them former athletes, have brought us out to practice—to run drills, to scrimmage, to get better at a thing I was not naturally good at and did not feel naturally good doing. The other boy was quite good. The dads were good. I was not, and I knew I was not, and the knowing was its own particular weight on top of the physical effort.

My father would push. Not harshly—I want to be precise about this, because the story is easy to flatten in a direction that isn't quite true. He wasn't cruel. He wasn't a screamer. He pushed the way men of his generation and formation pushed: steadily, with a kind of cheerful relentlessness that left no obvious handhold for objection. The scrimmages would go long. He would goad me, lightly, in the way that was supposed to fire something up. And many times—more times than I want to remember, out there on that turf grass in front of the other boy and the other dad—I ended up upset and crying, saying I didn't want to do this anymore.

And my father would say: quitting isn't an option. We (which I think even then I took as a gendered identifier as much as anything) don't quit.

I have spent a long time with those words. Long enough to know that they were not simply wrong—that there is something real in them, something I have in fact lived out in ways I'm grateful for. I have finished hard things. I have stayed when staying cost me. Some of that is his. I know it is his, and I don't want to take that away from him or from myself.

But I also know what it felt like to be a crying boy on a wet soccer field being told that what he was doing—crying, wanting to stop—was not something men did. The message underneath the words was not quite "you can do hard things." It was closer to "the version of you that is currently visible is not acceptable." The tears were the problem. The wanting-to-quit was the problem. The solution was to become someone who didn't have those responses, or who had them privately, or who had learned to perform their absence convincingly.

This is what I mean when I say the virtue was real and the delivery mechanism was shame.

My father believed—I understand this now in a way I couldn't then—that the world was fundamentally indifferent. That it would not make accommodations for your feelings or your limitations. That you had to be able to care for yourself because no one else reliably would. The pushing was love filtered through that vision: I am preparing you for a world that will not be gentle with you, and the kindest thing I can do is make you ready. The armor was not cruelty. It was provision. He was giving me what he had been given and what he believed had kept him standing.

He was not entirely wrong about the world. The world often doesn't care. Perseverance is real. Doing hard things matters. I have needed the things he gave me.

But here is the fault line, the place where the transmission carried something it didn't know it was carrying: the world my father was preparing me for was a world without grace. The stoic armor makes complete sense if you are finally alone—if there is no safety net, no community, no one who will catch you when the ground gives way. Men don't quit is the code of a man who cannot afford to quit, who has learned not to rely on anything beyond his own capacity to endure. It is, in the deepest sense, a formation for a world in which you are the only load-bearing wall.17

What I want to give my son is formation for a different story. Not a naive story, not a world without suffering or failure or genuine danger, because that world doesn't exist and preparing him for it would be its own form of negligence. But a world in which strength can be oriented outward because you are not finally alone. Where the code is not a survival mechanism but a vocation. Where you don't have to armor yourself against everything because you belong to something and someone that will not abandon you when the armor fails—and the armor always fails, eventually, for everyone.

This is the difference, I think, between the Western hero and the knight in the older sense. The Western hero is finally alone. That's the genre's founding image: the lone rider, the man who came from nowhere and will return to nowhere, whose virtue is authenticated precisely by its independence from any community or tradition that could compromise it. He doesn't need anyone. That's what makes him trustworthy.

Dunk needs Egg. The needing is not a weakness in the story. It is the story. And Egg needs Dunk. The code they are building together is not the property of either one of them individually. It lives in the relationship, in the specific weight of what each one expects from the other, in the particular shame of falling short in front of someone whose opinion of you matters more than your own comfort. This is formation as the tradition always understood it: not a solo project of self-improvement but a communal practice, embedded in specific relationships, sustained by specific people who know your name and will not let you become less than you are.18

My father gave me the virtue stripped of the community that could have sustained it. I don't say that as an accusation. He gave me what he had. What I am trying to figure out—standing in the kitchen after my son has walked away crying, trying to find words that are honest—is how to give my son the virtue and the community together. How to say: yes, you have to do hard things, and you are not alone in doing them. How to say: your anger is real and it matters and it is not the problem. The question is what it loves, what it's for, who it's protecting.

How to say, without quite having the words yet: there is a code, and it is worth living by, and I will help you learn it, and neither of us will be perfect at it, and that is not the end of the story.

My son is nine years old and he has a rage in him that I recognize.

Not because it frightens me—though it does, a little, in the way that anything powerful and not yet directed frightens you. But because I remember it. The heat of it. The way it rises faster than thought, faster than any decision about whether to let it rise, and then it's just there, filling the room, and you're on the other side of it looking back at the person you were a moment ago wondering what happened.

He had been playing with his sisters. Something went wrong. It doesn't matter what, it never quite matters what, it's always something small that isn't really about the small thing. Suddenly he was shouting, almost screaming, and then he was walking away and crying, the anger and the grief arriving together the way they do when you are nine and have not yet learned to separate them or suppress one in favor of the other.

I followed him. And I stood there trying to find words that were honest.

Here is what I knew I couldn't say: calm down. The instruction to calm down is an instruction to disappear—to take the thing that is happening inside you and make it not visible, which is not the same as helping it become something else. I have spent too much of my own life calming down in that sense, swallowing things that needed to be said or felt or worked through, and I know what it costs.

Here is what I also knew I couldn't say, or couldn't say simply: men's anger is dangerous. It's true. The statistics are not ambiguous, the history is not ambiguous, and I am a pastor who has sat with enough wreckage to know exactly how true it is. But to put that on a nine-year-old boy in the middle of his grief about something that happened with his sisters is to hand him a weight that will bend him wrong. To make him ashamed of the anger rather than responsible for it. To repeat, in a different key, the same move that was made to me on the soccer field.

So I stood there. And I said something inadequate. I said something about how the anger was okay and the shouting wasn't, which is true but incomplete, which got us through the moment without quite getting us through the question.

I have been thinking, in the weeks since, about James Baldwin's letter to his nephew—the letter that opens The Fire Next Time, written on the hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, addressed to a boy of fifteen who was inheriting a world Baldwin wanted to tell him the truth about. What strikes me most about that letter, returning to it now as a father rather than as a student, is its refusal of false comfort alongside its absolute insistence on love. Baldwin does not tell his nephew that everything will be fine. He tells him something harder and more sustaining: that he comes from people who have endured, that what the world has tried to make of Black men is not what Black men are, and that the task—the vocation, really—is to know the difference and to refuse, with everything he has, to accept the diminished version.19

What Baldwin is doing in that letter is what I am trying to do in the kitchen, clumsily and with far less eloquence: telling the truth about what my son is up against while insisting on who he actually is. The world will make claims on him. Some of those claims will be about what men are and what men do and what men don't do. Some of them will come from good people who love him. Some of them will be the jock machismo of a thousand locker rooms, updated for whatever form it takes in his generation. And underneath all of it will be the same basic offer: become this smaller, harder, less fully human version of yourself, and we will accept you.

Baldwin's answer to that offer is that the refusal has to be grounded in something stronger than defiance. Defiance is reactive, still defined by what it's refusing. The ground Baldwin is pointing toward is love: a love fierce enough to tell the truth, capacious enough to hold the full complexity of what a person actually is, demanding enough to refuse the easy versions.20

This is where bell hooks becomes indispensable. In The Will to Change, hooks makes an argument that I think most of the cultural conversation about men has not yet caught up with: that men are not simply the perpetrators of a system that damages women. They are also its casualties. The emotional shutdown that patriarchal culture requires of boys—the early and brutal instruction to perform a selfhood that has no room for tenderness, grief, vulnerability, need—is not a neutral fact about male psychology. It is a most dolorous stroke. And the recovery hooks calls for is not the therapeutic project of getting men to express their feelings, though that's part of it. It is something older and more demanding: the recovery of love as a masculine capacity. Not sentiment. Not softness as the mirror image of hardness. But love as a practice, a discipline, a form of attention to the world and the people in it that requires more strength than any armor.21

hooks writes about her own father with a complexity that I recognize: a man formed by damage, who passed damage on, who also passed on something genuine, who was doing the best he could with what he had been given and what he had been told he was. The tenderness she extends to him without excusing him is the model I am trying to find for writing about my own father in this essay and for talking to my son about what it means to be a man. You can honor what was given while being honest about what it cost. You can refuse the diminished version while loving the person who handed it to you.

The question is what it means to hand something better on.

I don't fully know how to do this. I want to say that plainly, without false modesty and without despair. I am a pastor and a theologian and a father and I am working it out in real time, which is to say I am doing what every parent has always done: trying to hand on something true while being honest about my own incomplete grasp of it. The tradition I'm drawing from knew this. It never promised that formation was clean or finished or fully understood by the one doing the forming. It promised that the practice was worth continuing, that the failures were not the end of the story, that the code was real even when the people who professed it were not yet equal to it.

The question I keep returning to—the one that A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms surfaced for me in a way I wasn't expecting—is not how to protect my son from his anger or manage it into socially acceptable channels. It is how to help him understand what his strength loves. Because the anger is not the problem. The anger is the signal—the indicator that something he cares about has been violated, that something matters enough to him to produce this heat. The formation question is not how to turn the signal off but how to help him understand what it's pointing at, and then how to build the habits and the relationships and the practices that give that caring somewhere good to go.22

Dunk doesn't not get angry. He gets furious: when the weak are being harmed, when the code is being violated, when someone with power uses it to crush someone without. But his anger has a direction. It moves him toward something rather than simply out of the room. The formation that Ser Arlan gave him—imperfect, incomplete, ending in an unfinished knighthood ceremony on the side of a road—was formation of the anger's direction. Not suppression. Not management. Orientation. Ser Arlan was a good man, the show tells us in its final movement. Dunk might be a great one. The difference between good and great, in this telling, is not talent or strength or even courage. It is the depth of the formation. It is a matter of how far down the code goes, how completely it has become constitutive rather than performed, how thoroughly the direction of the strength has been made his own.

This is what I want to give my son. Not the armor. Not the performance. Not the code as survival mechanism or status symbol or shield against a world that doesn't care. But the code as vocation—as the shape that love takes when it has been formed by something worth being formed by, when it knows what it's for and who it's protecting and what story it belongs to.

And I want to give him the community that makes the vocation possible. Not just the ideal floating free, the way the Western hero's code floats free of any community that could sustain it. But the actual people—the church, the friendships, the family, the specific relationships in which he is known and held and called toward the best version of himself. Hauerwas is right that the virtues require a community, that you cannot become what the tradition calls you to be in isolation, that formation is always embedded in specific practices and specific people who mean it alongside you.23 I cannot give my son a tradition by explaining it. I have to inhabit it in front of him and invite him in.

I don't fully know how to do this. I am still learning what the code is for. I am still finding out, in specific moments. Discovering it in kitchens, on soccer fields, in the particular weight of a boy's trust, in what it means to have a strength that loves something outside itself.

But I know that it matters. I know that the practice is worth continuing. I know that failure is not the end of the story—that Gawain gets to remove the girdle at the last possible moment, that Dunk gets to keep riding with Egg even after the Trial costs more than he meant to pay, that my father kept showing up on the wet grass because he believed I was worth the pushing even when I couldn't believe it myself.

And someday—I hope, I believe, I am trying to make it possible—my son will be standing in a kitchen of his own, looking at a child of his own, trying to find words that are honest. And maybe he will remember something. Not a lesson delivered, not a speech made, but a presence sustained. A father who was also figuring it out, who didn't pretend otherwise, who kept showing up anyway.

Who had a code. And meant it. And was not yet finished learning what it was for.

Aelred of Rievaulx. Spiritual Friendship. Translated by Lawrence C. Braceland. Collegeville: Cistercian Publications, 2010.

Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae. Translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province. New York: Benziger Bros., 1947.

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Terence Irwin. 2nd ed. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999.

Augustine of Hippo. Confessions. Translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Baldwin, James. "As Much Truth as One Can Bear." New York Times Book Review, January 14, 1962.

Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. New York: Dial Press, 1963.

Baldwin, James. Collected Essays. Edited by Toni Morrison. New York: Library of America, 1998.

Deloria, Vine, Jr. Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. New York: Macmillan, 1969.

———. God Is Red: A Native View of Religion. Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 1994.

Du Mez, Kristin Kobes. Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. New York: Liveright, 2020.

Emba, Christine. "Men Are Lost. Here's a Map Out of the Wilderness." Washington Post, July 10, 2023.

Evagrius Ponticus. The Praktikos & Chapters on Prayer. Translated by John Eudes Bamberger. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1981.

Hauerwas, Stanley. A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981.

———. The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983.

hooks, bell. The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. New York: Atria Books, 2004.

Kaeuper, Richard W. Holy Warriors: The Religious Ideology of Chivalry. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.

Lewis, C.S. "The Necessity of Chivalry." First published in Time and Tide, August 17, 1940. Reprinted in Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays, edited by Walter Hooper, 13–16. New York: Harcourt, 1986.

MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. 3rd ed. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007.

———. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988.

Martin, George R.R. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. New York: Bantam Books, 2015.

McMurtry, Larry. Lonesome Dove. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985.

Peterson, Jordan B. 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Toronto: Random House Canada, 2018.

———. Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.

Reeves, Richard. Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2022.

Wesley, John. "Working Out Our Own Salvation." In The Works of John Wesley, vol. 3, Sermons III, edited by Albert C. Outler, 199–209. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1986.

Williams, Bernard. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985.

1. Christine Emba, "Men Are Lost. Here's a Map Out of the Wilderness," Washington Post, July 10, 2023. The essay generated unusual public response and remains one of the more honest centrist accounts of the formation vacuum. Richard Reeves' Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2022) provides the empirical backbone for much of this discourse, and is worth reading alongside Emba as the data behind the diagnosis.↩

2. This is where Peterson is worth taking seriously before being disagreed with. Jordan B. Peterson's 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2018) and Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (New York: Routledge, 1999) are the primary texts. He has read his Jung and his Solzhenitsyn and he is not stupid, and the men who find him compelling are not simply dupes. His framework fails, I think, because it ultimately grounds virtue in the individual's confrontation with chaos rather than in belonging to something beyond the self—it's a heroic individualism dressed in mythological clothes. The community, the tradition, the specific person you're protecting: these are not quite load-bearing in his account. They're scenery for the hero's journey. Galloway's framework fails differently—grounded in economic utility and competitive achievement rather than mythology, but sharing the same structural problem: the self remains the primary reference point. Both men have identified a real hunger. Neither has found the food.↩

3. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 1–5. The opening chapters establish the "disquieting suggestion" that drives the book: that contemporary moral discourse is in a state of grave disorder precisely because we have lost the theoretical and social contexts that once gave moral language its meaning.↩

4. MacIntyre's account of the fragmentation of virtue language is itself contested—Bernard Williams, in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), argued that MacIntyre romanticizes the coherence of pre-modern moral traditions and underestimates how much internal conflict and plurality those traditions always contained. This is a fair criticism. No tradition was ever as unified as MacIntyre's narrative requires. But I think the diagnosis survives the criticism even if the historical account requires nuance—we don't need to believe in a golden age of moral coherence to recognize that something has been lost in translation, that the vocabulary we have inherited is thinner than the practices that once sustained it.↩

5. There is also a political dimension to MacIntyre's prescription that needs honest acknowledgment. The recovery of tradition and community can slide into conservatism—into a defense of whatever tradition happens to be locally available, regardless of what that tradition has done to those it excluded or harmed. MacIntyre addresses this in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), arguing that living traditions are always involved in argument about their own adequacy, that the capacity for self-correction is part of what distinguishes a living tradition from a dead one. I find this persuasive as far as it goes. It requires, as a practical matter, that the recovery of tradition be undertaken with genuine accountability to those the tradition has harmed.↩

6. Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 50–51; and The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983). On those pages Hauerwas makes the argument in its fullest form: "Jesus is the story that forms the church." The church's social function is not merely internal formation but what Hauerwas calls a "contrast model"—it makes visible to the world what the world cannot see about itself without it, including the oddness of a politics built on power rather than truth, and the possibility of a community where the otherness of the other is welcomed as gift rather than threat. All of this turns on the particularity of a story: the universality of the church is grounded not in abstract doctrines of tolerance but in being "trained to be disciples of Jesus," which is to say, in formation. The virtues are not private achievements. They are the fruit of belonging to something, of being held by a story large enough to give your strength somewhere worthy to go.↩

7. Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (New York: Liveright, 2020). Her argument—that a particular toxic Christian masculinity was deliberately constructed and weaponized in American evangelicalism, drawing heavily on Western imagery and frontier mythology—is historically meticulous and theologically damning. Reading her book is a necessary part of knowing what you're not trying to do.↩

8. Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985). This novel deserves more space than this essay can give it, and I'm already planning to return. McMurtry does something with Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call that I don't think any other Western has quite managed—he shows us a divided masculine soul and refuses to resolve it. Gus has everything the code lacks: warmth, humor, genuine tenderness, the capacity to say "I love you" to another man without it costing him anything. Call has everything Gus lacks: discipline, reliability, the ability to finish what he started. The tragedy—one of several in a book full of them —is that Call has a son he cannot acknowledge, a boy who needed exactly what Gus could have given and what Call could never provide. The transmission fails not because the father had nothing worth transmitting but because he had no language for the transmission. McMurtry loved the Western myth enough to show us exactly where it breaks.↩

9. James Baldwin, "The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy," in Collected Essays, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Library of America, 1998), 269–85. The opening claim—that Baldwin knows something about American masculinity "because they have not been menaced by it in the way that I have been"—appears on p. 269 and is the epistemic hinge on which the whole essay turns. The more specific critique of Mailer and Kerouac's romanticization of Black cultural forms runs pp. 277–79, where Baldwin asks pointedly why it should be necessary to borrow the language of Black suffering in order to feel alive. The argument in the body text draws on both passages.↩

10. The line appears in James Baldwin, "As Much Truth as One Can Bear," New York Times Book Review, January 14, 1962. Baldwin was not interested in simple condemnation. He was interested in truth telling as the precondition for anything better—and that essay, a reflection on the responsibilities of the American writer, is as clear a statement of that commitment as anything he wrote. The companion critique gestured at in the body text comes from Vine Deloria Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (New York: Macmillan, 1969). Deloria's argument is both broader and more fundamental than Baldwin's in one specific respect: where Baldwin identifies what the white masculine mythology costs the people it conscripts and romanticizes, Deloria identifies what it requires you to not see at all. The Western genre's founding act is the erasure of indigenous presence—the "frontier" that needed taming was a populated world, and the hero's code of protecting the vulnerable was operating inside a story that had already written the most vulnerable people out of the frame. Deloria is also, for what it's worth, very funny about this. Custer is not a dirge. It is a book written with considerable wit by a man who had developed a sharp eye for the ways white America used Native people as mirrors, props, and screen-tests for its own mythology. The chapter on anthropologists alone—"anthropologists need Indians to survive"—should be assigned reading in any American cultural studies program. His later God Is Red: A Native View of Religion (Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 1994) extends the argument into theological territory, examining what the Christian imposition of a linear, history-obsessed worldview did to indigenous cosmologies that were fundamentally place-based and cyclical. That book is directly relevant to any theological argument about formation and tradition, and I flag it here because this essay doesn't have room for it but someone should write the essay that does.↩

11. Richard W. Kaeuper, Holy Warriors: The Religious Ideology of Chivalry (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). Kaeuper is honest about the tension between the chivalric ideal and its grotesque failures in practice—the Church was trying to direct warrior culture toward service, and warrior culture was resisting and distorting that direction at every turn. The ideal was real. So was the failure to live up to it. This is actually part of the argument — the tradition knew what it was for even when it couldn't live up to itself, which is different from a tradition that has lost the plot entirely.↩

12. C.S. Lewis, "The Necessity of Chivalry," first published in Time and Tide, August 17, 1940; reprinted in Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: Harcourt, 1986), 13–16. Lewis's argument is compact and worth reading in full—it takes less than four pages and says more about the chivalric ideal than most book-length treatments.↩

13. Hauerwas, A Community of Character, especially chapters 1–3. This is MacIntyre's argument in theological dress, and Hauerwas is explicit about the debt. The specific application to masculine formation is not Hauerwas's own focus, but the framework applies with uncomfortable precision: we have been trying to form men in virtues whose supporting community and narrative have largely dissolved, and then wondering why the formation doesn't take.↩

14. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) is the obvious reference—the Confessions is essentially the story of a man running from his test until he can't run anymore, and its power comes precisely from the length and sincerity of the evasion. The tradition has always known that the long way around is still a way. What it has been less good at is helping people take the shorter route — which is why formation matters, why the community matters, why it is not enough to simply wait for catastrophe to do the work that patient habituation could have done earlier and with less wreckage.↩

15. There's a theological structure here that the show may or may not be conscious of but that is hard to miss if you're looking for it. Baelor dies for Dunk in something that at least rhymes with substitutionary logic—the innocent standing in for the guilty, the cost being borne by the one who could least afford to bear it and most chose to. I don't want to over-Christianize a secular fantasy, but the chivalric tradition is historically downstream of Christian moral theology, and these resonances are not accidental. The knight who lays down his life for another is drawing from a very deep well.↩

16. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999), VIII–IX, 119–55. This is Aristotle's account of philia — the friendship of virtue rather than the friendship of utility or pleasure. It's also close to what the monastic tradition means by spiritual friendship. Aelred of Rievaulx, Spiritual Friendship, trans. Lawrence C. Braceland (Collegeville: Cistercian Publications, 2010) is the great medieval elaboration of it. Aelred, writing in the twelfth century about friendship between monks, quotes Cicero and then corrects him: where Cicero says "a friend is another self," Aelred says a friend is another Christ—someone in whom you encounter not just a mirror of yourself but a call toward something beyond yourself. The Dunk-Egg relationship is not quite that, but it is reaching toward the same thing.↩

17. There is a Wesleyan point here that feels important to name. The Wesleyan tradition—my tradition—has always insisted that grace is prevenient: it goes before us, prepares the ground, is already present before we arrive at any moment of choice or formation. See John Wesley, "Working Out Our Own Salvation," in The Works of John Wesley, vol. 3, Sermons III, ed. Albert C. Outler (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1986), 199–209. This is not a soft doctrine. It is a claim about the structure of reality—that the universe is not finally indifferent, that we are not finally alone, that the armor is not the only option because something has already gone ahead of us into every situation we will face. I think my father's formation, like much American Protestant formation of his generation, had lost this note. The grace had been functionally replaced by grit. Both are real. Only one of them is load-bearing.↩

18. This is why the church matters for this argument. The tradition I'm drawing on—virtue ethics, chivalric formation, Wesleyan grace—was never meant to be practiced alone or even in isolated pairs. It requires a community of practice: people who share a story, who hold each other to a common account of what it means to live well, who can say to each other "that is not who you are" and be believed. The crisis of masculine formation in our moment is inseparable from the crisis of community. See Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000) for the empirical account of institutional dissolution that forms the backdrop of this crisis. You cannot download a tradition. You have to inhabit one.↩

19. James Baldwin, "My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation," in The Fire Next Time (New York: Dial Press, 1963), 1–10. The argument runs throughout the letter: Baldwin tells his nephew that the "details and symbols" of his life have been constructed to make him accept white people's definitions of him, and that survival depends on refusing those definitions rather than internalizing them. The refusal is not defiance for its own sake—it is premised on knowing the truth of where you come from and what has actually been done, rather than accepting someone else's account of it.↩

20. The philosophical formulation of love as demand rather than sentiment is most fully developed in "Down at the Cross," the second section of The Fire Next Time, though its logic is already active in the letter to the nephew, where accepting white people "with love" is described not as forgiveness but as the only means of forcing them to see themselves clearly. The "Down at the Cross" passage makes explicit what the letter enacts: love in Baldwin's sense is not the "infantile American" version oriented toward personal happiness but something closer to a commitment to reality—a refusal to let anyone, including yourself, flee into comfortable untruth. It is this quality that makes it a ground for refusal rather than mere defiance.↩

21. bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (New York: Atria Books, 2004), 1–20. hooks frames the damage clearly: "no male successfully measures up to patriarchal standards without engaging in an ongoing practice of self-betrayal" (12). The recovery she points toward is the inverse of that—not the performance of toughness but the work of love, which hooks consistently frames as "work" or the "art" of loving rather than sentiment or feeling. She is also precise about how widely the fear spreads: patriarchal maleness, she argues, binds everyone in the culture, men and women alike, in a shared fear that makes love impossible (8–9). hooks' argument that patriarchy damages men as well as women is central to the book's project and is worth taking seriously as a corrective to accounts that treat masculine formation purely as a problem men have inflicted on others. This is also the place to note what this essay has not addressed directly: what it means to hand this tradition on to daughters. That's not evasion—it's the recognition that those are genuinely different questions deserving their own serious treatment. But hooks understood better than almost anyone that the liberation she was pointing toward was not the feminization of men but the humanization of everyone. The direction of strength and the formation of love are not exclusively male questions, and the tradition at its best never treated them as such.↩

22. The Desert Fathers called this the training of the passions, not their elimination but their redirection toward God and neighbor. See Evagrius Ponticus, The Praktikos & Chapters on Prayer, trans. John Eudes Bamberger (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1981). Anger, in this tradition, is not simply a problem to be solved but a capacity to be formed: rightly ordered, it becomes what Aquinas called zeal—the energy of love in the face of what opposes it. Aquinas treats zeal as an effect of love in Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 28, a. 4, where he argues that zeal arises from the intensity of love and that "the very fact that a man hates whatever is opposed to the object of his love, is the effect of love"—making zeal a function of charity rather than wrath. The tradition never thought the goal was a man without strong feeling. It thought the goal was a man whose strong feelings had been educated by love.↩

23. Hauerwas, A Community of Character, 50–51. On those pages Hauerwas frames the church as the community that provides the conditions—the descriptions, the story, the cross as testing ground—by which we learn to negotiate all other claims on our lives. The church is not simply one community among others offering social belonging; it is the community organized around a particular story that reframes everything else. This is not a tribal claim—it is not an argument that only Christians can be virtuous. It is an argument that the virtues require formation, and formation requires community, and the question for any person is which community they are being formed by and toward what end. An important footnote on what is not in this essay: I am aware that it has said very little directly about what it means to hand this tradition on to daughters. That's not evasion—it's the recognition that those are genuinely different questions deserving their own serious treatment. What I'll say briefly is this: the tradition I've been drawing on was always, at its best, about the direction of strength and the formation of love—and those are not exclusively male questions. hooks understood this better than anyone: the liberation she was pointing toward was not the feminization of men but the humanization of everyone.↩