I did an interview with Grace some months back after her book Ask of the Old Paths came out, and knew that I wanted to talk with her again about fortitude. Grace is a trained medievalist, and knows her ways around the medieval world really well. Case in point: she’s currently retranslating and annotating Julian of Norwich’s Divine Showings, which will be a major feat when it’s done.

In this edition, one of the things which became clear for me was the role of fear in all of these conversations. Granted, that should have been obvious from the beginning: fortitude is the virtue which mitigates and responds to real fear and danger. The examples of great courage—the kind of spectacular acts of great bravery—are praiseworthy in part because they required coming to terms with a real fear of death.

About two-thirds through the conversation, Grace refers to the “grace of fear”, which struck me as being deeply true: fear is that which awakens us to real things we should pay attention to, of real challenges that have high stakes. Without fear, we wouldn’t have these moments of great realization about what doesn’t matter in our lives. But in another way, fear’s grace is only possible if we’re paying attention already. If you’re not paying attention, good things will be threatened right in front of you, and we’ll be too stupified to be afraid of losing them.

This is a point that I want to sit with more, mostly because I don’t think much about fear so much as anger. When I think about losing good things in my life, it doesn’t evoke fear in me so much as a profound sense of injustice about losing that good thing. But fear pokes us to do something about it; anger, interestingly, keeps us concerned about our own feelings rather than the thing that’s happening. When I’m angry, it might motivate me eventually to do something about the injustice, but fear shocks me out of my seat to do the thing right now.

Come check out this great conversation about the medieval world, Joan of Arc, going on in a scarce world, and more.

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Last week, Amy Julia Becker and I visited about her journey with parenting her daughter Penny has changed her view of the good life and what suffering does for our notions of the good life.

When I’ve thought about this topic, one of the missing pieces has been not only how fortitude affects big picture aspects of the moral life like suffering and bearing witness, but more mundane and less glamorous aspects, like parenting. Most of the writing I’ve done in my life has been in cracks and edges, late at night or shoehorned in between other commitments, because the thing I do more than almost anything is parent.

I don’t talk about it hardly ever here, mostly because the Internet is forever, and if I have stories to tell about my kids, I don’t want them archived on Meta’s servers. But being a parent and parenting-adjacent things is what I’m nearly always thinking about. It’s why I leave work early and read late; it’s why I take on extra classes and struggle to maintain anything resembling a hobby. It’s why, at present, I have a collection of destination ball caps: I’m a dad.

In college, I spent two summers at Camp Barnbas, and they were truly transformative summers for me. Barnabas is a camp is southern Missouri for kids with special needs of all descriptions. Being the one-week parent at 20 years old for a cabin full of kids with varying forms of cerebral palsy, or oppositional defiance disorder, or Down’s Syndrome was the kind of experience which put deep pillars into my soul that I’ve never been able to get away from. That kind of work drew new creativity and endurance out of me that I didn’t have at the time.

But the thing about camp is that it ends, and that I hand the kids back to their parents. That’s it. As good and as hard as it was, it was still a short-term job. The spiritual sandblasting which happened in a week is nothing quite like the slow-grade grinding of rough edges which happens in parenting, because you have to keep showing up. That summer gave me great stories, but parenting was, in very real ways, how God gave me something resembling holiness.

Come listen.

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Thank you everyone for tuning into the live video with Bonnie Kristian and Joseph Lear!

Over the last decade, there have been so many books on the excesses of evangelicalism, and this was the book to help cut through the noise, separating half-baked critiques from needed hard words. Bonnie’s forthcoming book, In Defense of Evangelicalism, is very well written, sensitive about all of evangelicalism’s excesses, and as sharp a book on evangelicalism (and all of its recent critics) as one could hope for.

I messaged Bonnie while reading it to tell her that this book was not here to make friends, which is mostly true: there are innumerable critiques and pushbacks on some of the most well-known (and best-selling) books on evangelicalism in the last decade. But in another sense, it’s there to make friends in the best kind of way: by telling a much more full story about what American evangelicalism is.

Check out our conversation, and by all means, please read the book. It’s very good, and so very needed.

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Last week, I had the opportunity to chat with Zachary Wagner about his new book Men of Virtue, and about what it looks like men to be virtuous. Wagner takes the fruit of the Spirit as his starting point for what these virtues look like, and then fleshes them out.

By starting with specifically Christological contours to what virtue looks like, Wagner reframes traditional categories away from those virtues which are shared by creation. These “natural” virtues (prudence, fortitude, justice, temperance) are typically the ground floor of virtue, the way that all creation is meant to live.

But the cost of beginning with the so-called “natural” virtues is, in one way, that it gives room for pernicious kinds of masculinity to flourish. The “manosphere” positions itself as a kind of retrieval of “natural” manhood, beneath all of the cultural accretions: men have been, on this reading, trained to be like sheep instead of their more natural posture of courageous conquerors.

By beginning with something specific—the way that human virtue appears in Christ—men are able to recover something even more natural to us than nature, something more specified than generic. The vision of manhood is one which emerges in and through what we see in Jesus, refracted by the biology of manhood.

Come check out the conversation!

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I had the pleasure of talking with Jen Pollock Michel about her latest book, A Rule for the Rest of Us, and reflecting on how the very ordinary practices which these involve open up much bigger questions for what our lives are for.

Jen and I met at a writer’s meeting last Fall in Pittsburgh, and I’ve been looking forward to this book. About two years ago, I wrote an article arguing that you don’t actually need a rule of life, but thankfully, the thing I wrote against is also what Jen’s project opposes. There’s a wide gulf between a rule of life as a technique of self-perfection, and a rule of life which helps us to live well and honor the lives God has given to live.

Part of what I found so interesting about our conversation was the way that Jen helped me to see that the habits of being able to go on are different than “time management” kinds of habits. To have a rule is about having a vision of what is important about the life which God has given us, and about the habits which help us to become the kinds of people living that life. But, importantly, the rule is not about goals, but about character: our lives are largely out of our hands, and so, any kind of rule which is about goals is disappointment waiting to happen.

Come check out the whole conversation!

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Kevin is one my favorite people in life, and a fellow educator to boot. So, of course we’ll talk about the question of “How To Go On”, drawing in as much literature as possible.

In this one, we raise the question of how reading prepares us to deal with ambiguity in our own stories, the value of a truthful narrator in helping us navigate hard stories (in literature and life), and whether God is only true narrator.

Come check it out!

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Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

This was a great conversation with Kyle Strobel, and wound up getting into some deeper waters about where exactly virtue comes from. I won’t spoil the conversation, except to say that Kyle’s framing of the questions left me pondering over some things which I hope to spend more time writing through in the future.

Chief among the questions this conversation raises for me is, “Is there a difference between the fruits of the Spirit and virtue”, and “Is there a way to think about being good that doesn’t end up in idolatry?” I have some thoughts, but for another time. For now, check out this thought-provoking conversation with Kyle.

To dig deeper on the questions he’s asking here, check out his books When Prayer Becomes Real, and When God Seems Distant.

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I’ve been doing a series of these conversations on How To Go On this summer, but this one might have been one of my favorites. Yi Ning Chiu is a minister and writer in the Oakland area, who I met at a Christianity Today gettogether in Pittsburgh last Fall.

In this conversation, we get into how to show charity and endure amidst differences in church communities, what to do when church becomes difficult, how to love our actual neighbors, and how to listen. She also graciously asked me a bit about my most recent book, Contesting The Body of Christ, and how writing them helped me think about this question of how we go on amidst difficulty.

N.B. There are a number of times when I’m looking off camera here. It’s because I’m keeping my Lochby field journal open just off-camera and furiously taking notes on everything. These sessions are so rich and illuminating, and opening up a lot for me; I hope they are for you as well.

Come listen!

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If you’ve been to any bookstore, you’ve heard the term “resilience” more times than you know what to do with. It’s a relatively recent term, meant to exemplify the ability to go on in the face of difficulty. But it’s also a term which can deprive of us of a deeper truth: that sometimes, good things die, and that we are called let God create something that’s not quite the same.

Ashley Hales is a writer for Christianity Today, and co-leads the The Willowbrae Institute, and is the author of the recent essay in Christianity Today, “We Don’t Need Resilience. We Need Resurrection.”

Come listen as we parse out what resilience does and doesn’t offer, and how Nicholas Taleb’s concept of being “anti-fragile” may help us get closer to what we need.

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Alan and I chop it up on his new book on virtue, To Live Well, the virtue of fortitude, and how our aversion to suffering inhibits our moral and spiritual growth.

Thank you everyone for tuning into this live video with O. Alan Noble! Join me for our conversations next week, with Ashley Hales and Kyle Strobel, as we continue to dig into how we go on anyway.

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