William Shakespeare’s 1623 tragedy, Antony and Cleopatra, is renowned for its depiction of a complex and fully developed female character in the person of one of its title figures.  Cleopatra, recalling the inexperience of her youth, exclaims, “My salad days, when I was green in judgment, cold in blood, to say as I said then.”  She had been, in other words, a novice at all things pertaining to life, which might not excuse past behavior, but it certainly explains it.  We have all had our salad days, dear listeners.  Cleopatra merely calls it what it is, and in doing so, reveals a level of self-awareness that is difficult not to admire.  The accumulated years do not escape her.  She knows her finitude.  She makes no effort to avoid it. 

I first encountered these lines as a graduate student in a class on Shakespeare.  I recall my professor – a man likely in his fifties at the time – pausing for a moment on what it meant to be so acutely aware of the passing of time and the sheer brevity of one’s life – a puff of smoke blown away quickly by successive years.  I may or may not have grasped the gravity of what was being considered at the time, but I certainly am able to grasp it now, being a man about to turn fifty-one.  Salad days.  When the years were green and the horizons wide and intoxicating.  Even the rays of the sun were somehow different then. 

The Bard, through his characterization of the historic Cleopatra, was undoubtedly prompting his audience to grapple with the meaning of their own lives – the accumulating years, the many, many memories stacked one upon another – what we are supposed to do with it all if anything.  Just experience it.  Feel it.  Reminisce.  This is a surface interpretation, which still passes muster.  However, we might also consider the larger context.  Cleopatra, after all, was a powerful woman known for her beauty.  This is more than just a character nodding toward her younger days.  This is a figure of some stature acknowledging that stature is not enough.  It is never enough.  Even flowers wilt.  Cleopatra is very much aware of this fact, which gives her character a much deeper layer, indeed. 

Youth, naivete, and idealism all seem to be common enough bedfellows.  I had my own ideals in my salad days, and if I am to be honest, I still cringe at the naivete I so boldly put on display before the world.  My ignorance was a spectacle.  I thank God for the many graces that were extended to me then and now.  Cleopatra’s line in this play, then, should be seen as an example of owning up to the reality of youth.  Being impetuous is a part of the landscape.  More to the point, when one is young, there is just life.  When one has accumulated some years, life naturally divides itself by eras, big and small.  One’s salad days are merely one era.  To see it as such is a sure sign of maturity.  To extend it beyond its proper borders is a sign of immaturity.  Nobody likes a forty-year-old adolescent. 

On that note, Cleopatra would be an outlier in the current age.  The postmodern condition has Tasmanian-devil-like gone after every tradition and common understanding formerly in place, and age was no exception.  While I submit that age really is only a number, some formerly agreed upon values should not have been shown the curb.  The aged do have something of value to offer.  There really is wisdom beneath the gray hairs.  The older should be heeded.  The young should sit quietly and listen.  This does not mean to refrain from questioning.  It means to give respect where it is due and to recognize one’s own salad days for what they are, for even the queen of Egypt was humble enough to do just that. 

Miguel de Cervantes published the first part of his famous work, Don Quixote, in 1605 and then the second part in 1615.  Officially titled The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of LaManchaland, this Spanish classic would influence literature in countless ways.  It follows the story of Alonso Quijano who so voraciously consumes tales of knightly chivalry that, soon enough, he loses his mind and decides to become a knight-errant himself, dubbing himself Don Quixote de la Mancha before recruiting Sancho Panza to be his squire.  Cervantes writes, “Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”  Sleep deprivation, yes, but also too much reading caused him to slip into another world, another persona and dash about Spain, “tilting at windmills” or, to put it another way, fighting imaginary enemies in imaginary battles.  He supplies the illusion; Panza, the Spanish word for gut, supplies the down-to-earth wit.  The pair encapsulate the fantastical and the real, perhaps representative of most if not all human beings.  This might explain the appeal.

Much, of course, has already been said and written about Quijano’s slip into harmless insanity.  The real world is too much.  The world of knights, ladies, and noble missions is much more attractive.  It is this world he yearns to inhabit.  What small yearning do we all have, dear listeners? 

My interest is not so much to explore this facet we all likely possess but to openly wonder why, especially among the young and impressionable, it seems to be growing at an astronomical rate.  This group, especially, seems to want to throw off the shackles of banal and humdrum and assume identities that are much more interesting and much more controllable. 

One catalyst for this behavior is certainly the state of our world.  Much of it does not look pretty.  The questions loom large and foreboding.  What does a spirit become if all it has to look forward to is hard work and strife?  Why not cosplay some?  Another catalyst, I would argue, is the usual suspect: the smartphone.  Our lives are lived virtually so much that we are tempted to believe (and some really do) that we can create avatars in our own waking lives as much as we can create them online.  Why not step into a different gender or race or species?  It harms no one.  It pleases me.  Who are you or anybody else to say I can’t? 

Perhaps it would be useful to call to mind how Don Quixote was treated in the book.  He was mocked.  He certainly received a good many stares.  But on occasion, insights would poke through that revealed something about what was really going on.  Cervantes writes, “I do not deny that what happened to us is a thing worth laughing at. But it is not worth telling, for not everyone is sufficiently intelligent to be able to see things from the right point of view.”  The message?  Not everyone has the presence of mind and intellectual maturity to parse out the delusional from the real.  A thing is a thing, this group might argue, because of a feeling, a hunch.  It amounts to a world built on whims and passing fancies. 

The great irony, here, is that, while Don Quixote read too much and went crazy, some in our current society are not reading at all and still reaching the same end point.  Ray Bradbury, well-known author of Fahrenheit 451 and Something Wicked This Way Comes, quipped that “You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture, just get people to stop reading them".  It seems, dear listeners, that we have arrived at that point.  Even in college, so has been my experience, books are seen as passé, certainly not anything with which to be troubled.  Therefore it appears that illusions emerge out of two opposing states of affairs: reading too much or not reading at all.  Sancho Panza tempered Don Quixote’s world with his matter-of-fact words.  Are we so stuck in our smartphones that we can’t find the same force now? 

The Bible is filled with them: characters who enter the action and then just as suddenly depart, leaving readers to contemplate their significance in light of the greater story being told – that of God’s everlasting love and His plan to save our souls.  The average student might be tempted to gloss over these characters in their pursuit of the wider interpretation, but Catherine Lawton is no average student.  Nor is she an average writer.  Her 2004 book entitled Face to Face dials into the life of the woman in Luke’s gospel who was afflicted with a condition that made it impossible for her to stand up straight.  Luke writes: “On a Sabbath Jesus was teaching in one of the synagogues, 11 and a woman was there who had been crippled by a spirit for eighteen years. She was bent over and could not straighten up at all. 12 When Jesus saw her, he called her forward and said to her, “Woman, you are set free from your infirmity.” 13 Then he put his hands on her, and immediately she straightened up and praised God.” 

Scripture quickly pivots to the synagogue leader’s indignance that Jesus healed on the sabbath, rendering the healing of the woman a happy footnote in the battle between Jewish leaders and the Messiah; however, Lawton sees fit to unpack her story because, like everybody who steps into the greatest of stories that is Holy scripture, she is a somebody.  She has a background – a past – and because of the healing ministry of Christ, a future as well.  She is, in a phrase, one of us, which endears her to us, but we also get caught up in the grand thought that miracles are not out of the question for us as well.  In the woman, we see our pain.  In her as well, we see what possibilities await. Lawton takes the craft of storytelling to a new level in this powerful fictionalized account of one woman's eighteen year affliction by a pneuma, a spirit that keeps her bowed and dejected: a pariah to everybody but a few. Once healthy, strong, and with nothing but good prospects on the horizon, a tragic event leaves Joakima, the woman, physically deformed and her life forever changed. As the years go by, Joakima's sense of alienation and hopelessness only deepens until one fateful encounter turns it all around. Lawton permits the woman’s humanity to poke through, even though we know the ending of the story from the start.  Upon hearing that Jesus is near, Lawton writes that the woman “listened to all of the excitement with mixed emotions” only to later try to summon the courage to ask Him to touch her.  The woman, in other words, did not think of herself as worthy.  In effect, her distorted posture, gaze set firmly on the ground in front of her, acts as a metaphor for the posture so many of us assume.  We are consumed by the here and now, heads bowed, our view severely limited.  And we say to ourselves, this is my lot.  There is nothing that can be done.  No change.  No release.  The affliction and I are one. 

But in Lawton’s dramatization of the life of the bent woman, we get a different message altogether: one of hope and connection.  To be sure, the parallels between Lawton’s story and reality as we see it in the present age are striking.  Many of us are not afflicted with an evil pneuma, but we as a society are certainly bent over, looking at our phones.  You heard me correctly, dear listeners.  I believe there is a valid comparison between one woman’s physical affliction and an entire society’s mental affliction to the extent that both cause pain and isolation.  Consider how some are positively addicted to their devices, unable even to hold a normal face-to-face conversation, sit through an interview, or engage in small talk.  Perhaps we will understand that what claims to free us actually keeps us in chains, for it is certainly not angels who keep our eyes averted. 

https://www.amazon.com/Face-Novel-Catherine-Lawton/dp/0967038685

Boubacar Boris Diop’s riveting account of the 1994 Rwandan genocide should give pause to anyone tempted to place too much stock in humankind’s ability to keep the peace.  Tensions between two ethnic groups, the Tutsis and the Hutu, reached a tipping point, and for a span of around one-hundred days, members of the Tutsi tribe butchered the Hutu by the thousands.  It was, note some, as if the devil were on a rampage in the broad daylight.  The slaughter was extensive and vicious.  The machete was the weapon of choice. 

Diop’s book recounts the story of Cornelius Uvimana, a history teacher, who returns to Rwanda after working abroad to wrestle with the loss of his entire family to Hutu militia.  In many ways, the book is a meditation on the darkest impulses of humankind.  The Hutus regarded the Tutsis as cockroaches deserving to be wiped off the face of the earth.  They surely tried.  Bloodied bodies lay strewn about every corner of the country.  What Uvimana eventually comes to believe is that only our humanity can save us and that it his mission to bear witness to the massive atrocity that was the Tutsi genocide.  He will not let the world forget.  He would be the voice of the voiceless dead. 

Years ago, I assigned Murambi, The Book of Bones to an honors class and was struck by how the exchange of ideas evolved.  Yes, there were those who grieved over the events that took place between April and July of 1994 in a country located in central Africa; however, there was one student who shared with the class a startling idea.  If it is simply a matter of truth that we as a species are capable of such sudden brutality, then we should be resigned to that fact. That is who we are: ugly, nasty, cruel but undeniably human. What is more, according to this rubric, such acts of brutality can even be justified, rape included. If the objective is total annihilation, then, yes, the sexual violation of others is justified.  The Hutus were effective.  Why should they be blamed for their success? 

The student was clearly taking a pragmatic approach, sacrificing morality along the way. Diop’s appeal to humanity was naive. Did he not know what happened in the camps in Nazi-occupied Europe, the gulags in Soviet Russia, the killing fields in Cambodia?  Violence is a part of our collective DNA.  Why deny it?  To be sure, leaning into it could reveal more about who we are a species actually are. Aren’t we after the truth?  Isn’t that what it means to be educated? Cain killed Abel, after all. 

The current era is one where the very notion of there being an objective truth is coming under fire. This person has this truth; this other person has that truth. We have come to believe that we can imagine whatever we want and then speak it into existence in an instant, making unique realities along the way.  Issues arise, however, when these so-called realities clash, and they always will. Relativism is the secret sauce when it comes to conflict; indeed, it is the very thing that prevents justice from being served because everybody has their own measuring stick. What is wrong for him is right for her and on and on down the line. My honors student had his measuring stick for what was right and wrong.  The Hutus had theirs.  And both resulted in the justification of heinous behavior. 

The best way forward?  Clearly, justice is predicated on the rock-solid existence of objective truth.  This is the common measuring stick. This is the way to peace.  Perhaps this is how we recover our common humanity.  We do not build our society on opinion and whim, trend and passing fancy.  Our building blocks must be immutable – lofty, not base.  You see, dear listeners, my student was only partially correct.  Yes, the base instincts exist but so, too, do the noble proclivities – the righteous, the virtuous, the honorable.  We have only to calibrate our lives in such a way that we aim for one end or the other: a low opinion of humankind or a great dream of who we could become. 

I would like to begin with a basic question: Can you give me the name of your great-great-grandfather?  How about your great-great-grandmother?  The likely answer is a simple no. The names of those on whose shoulders we stand are lost to time.  And this is to say nothing about their very lives: what they did to bring in money, what dreams they had, the quirks they possessed, the countless intricacies and experiences of what makes a life a life.  Consider your own, dear listeners.  As you listen to this episode, you are endeavoring to accomplish something; you hold feelings for others; you have your fears and anxieties.  I could go on and on.  My point is that just as you are alive now, so, too, were they alive then, and while the details may be different, the very experience of life is not.  Individuals hundreds of years ago admired the dawn, fell in love, wondered what the first gray hairs meant.  You get my drift. 

In a recent podcast, popular Catholic priest, Father Mike Schmitz, reminded his listeners that one day, they will die.  This will be the first death.  The second death happens when the last person to utter your name dies.  After that, you will be no more.  Your great-great-grandkids will have no idea what your name was, what you did to earn money, your dreams, your quirks, and so on and so forth.  We might conclude that this is merely the way things go and be done with it.  However, I propose that a keen understanding of this reality is needed to better calibrate how we interact with others. 

Allow me to explain.  One person may put a lot of stock in personal reputation.  Position and titles are important.  Being highly regarded by others is paramount.  These individuals are buoyed by what others think.  It is easy to see the connection, here, to social media.  These applications thrive on outside (and even anonymous) approval.  But scripture reminds us that our lives are like a vapor or mist.  We are here, and then just like that, we are not.  The wise see the pursuit of personal reputation for what it is: vain. 

Another person might recognize this, and instead of pursuing approval from others, that person might more fully invest in being known by his or her Creator God, the One that person strives to spend eternity with.  People forget, in other words, but God does not.  He knows your name and mine and will not forget it.   

Fair enough.  But what is the takeaway?  What do our lives look like if we do our best to be known by God?  What is more, how does that change how we interact with others?  Other vapors?  Other mists? 

When I was a teenager, I worked for a time for a man named Keith Meade.  He was a widower who lived in town, and he hired me to do odd jobs: mow the lawn, do some weeding, accompany him to Agway to pick up some supplies.  Another job was to clean up around the gravestones of his departed family members.  We were at the cemetery in Youngsville, my hometown.  The sky was a dark blue.  The air was crisp and clean.  Mr. Meade stood on the side of a hill and etched on the gravestones before and just beyond him was his last name.  I stood and watched him take it in.  He knew his time was coming.  I was too young to realize then that the same applied to me.  What is fifty or so years in the grand scheme of time?  Our lives overlapped.  That was significant enough. 

What legacy should we leave to those who will not know our names?  Perhaps Saint Joeseph gives us the answer.  We must do what we were put here to do.  We must love those around us.  And we must never forget that this life that comes with reputations and titles and positions, etc. is brief and that the life of the world to come is the permanence of heart and true familiarity with others we seek.  We may not know their names now.  We surely will know their names then. 

Clinton, Arkansas is like any small town in America.  The backdrop for Monica Potts’s memoir, The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America, this far-flung part of the world is, according to Potts, where dreams go to die.  Resources are few if any, and those who live there suffer under the weight of their own ignorance or, worse, self-inflicted wounds in the form of drug and alcohol abuse, broken and/or strained personal relationships, being in and out of jails, and tragic conservatism.  The denizens of Clinton, Arkansas simply do not know what is good for them.  It is certainly not God or tradition.  Potts holds no punches there.  The author’s overt political stance on how to fix rural America is reminiscent of the “deplorable” epithet hurled at those who held different beliefs from those who are supposedly more enlightened about this, that, and the other.  In effect, what could have been a very revealing memoir about why one person from Clinton managed to do well for herself while most from that same town could never successfully launch amounts to a two-hundred and fifty page scolding of hillbilly conservatives by a vastly more informed writer who insisted on going to college out of state, away from the community that nurtured her. 

I am not here, dear listeners, to offer a scathing critique of a book dripping with progressive points of view.  Not all of her conclusions are unfounded, and she is right to point out that bad choices have bad consequences that can make anybody’s attempt to move forward virtually impossible.  The meth epidemic in this country is real, and like Potts, I have seen firsthand so much potential come to naught.  I could practically smell the cigarette odor and grease wafting up from the pages. 

 My interest lies in her posturing.  Specifically, I wonder what motivates a person to write a book that highlights the poor choices and misery of a childhood friend, Darci, while diagnosing her life with a set of progressive talking points.  Why did Darci take the route she did?  The patriarchy.  An oppressive church.  Low expectations for women.  Lack of access to birth control and abortion.  Misguided immigration laws.  It is as if the formula for this book is to first identify how Darci and others like her mess up and then prescribe as a solution something the Democratic party champions. 

For the record, I would have a similar reaction if it were a different political party.  Potts is simply too scripted; indeed, it seems as if she is othering her former community as a way to create more distance between them and herself. 

To say that Potts is looking down her nose at those who remained in Clinton might be stating the obvious.  The compare/contrast between Darci and Potts runs throughout with the former landing squarely on the bad side and the latter, squarely on the good.  Potts submits herself as the wiser among them.  She got the college education, after all.  Attended a school that her high school guidance counselors did not even have on their map.  Nobody from Clinton had ever gone to that school.  Surely, nobody ever would.  It was just too far out of reach. 

Perhaps it is the subtle and even not-so-subtle arrogant tone.  I started the book because I wanted to learn Potts’ perspective on the state of small towns in America.  I finished the book because I was hoping to find some redemptive notes – someplace where she pulled back on the lecturing and recognized that we all have struggles and to point the finger at how screwed up someone else is can be seen as the pot calling the kettle black.  To be sure, Potts does not seem to notice the plank in her own eye, choosing instead to make judgment call after judgment call, only pausing on occasion to openly wonder if the brokenness was somehow linked to something she did.  Even nodding toward this unlikelihood shows who the real hero of this memoir is. 

The night is darkest before dawn.  That is the saying, at least.  Just before the first faint rays of the sun arrive, the world is pitch black.  Of course, countless individuals have teased out of this reality analogies that are intended to offer perspective when things are not going well.  When circumstances are rough – really, really rough – take heart because there is about to be a reversal, perhaps even of the glorious sort.  In a broken world such as ours, I am all about hope.  We need more of it.  So many are in the terrible grips of despair.  What I would add to the analogy, however, is an element that should give us all a better sense of agency – a sense that we can actually participate in the rising of the sun and the spreading of its rays, if you will. 

It began with an observation I made from my bed.  The world was enveloped in darkness.  The sun had yet to make its entrance.  But from that immeasurable vastness – that great and ineffable stillness – came a chirp.  A bird began to sing. 

It quickly occurred to me, dear listeners, that the songbird may be the bravest of all creatures.  It is not the lion that roars in the day nor the wolf, the bear, the great whales of the sea that utter their greeting but the little bird.  So small.  Frail even.  Huddled against the cool air on the bough of a tree, singing into the deep night and against it.  Such courage in that tiny heart.  Such beautiful boldness.  An example to us all who are wrapped in the folds of our own night, existing with others who are experiencing the same or worse. 

Saint Thérèse of Lisieux lived from 1873 to 1897, dying that year from tuberculosis.  She was only twenty-four years old.  Called by Pope Pius X “the greatest saint of modern times,” Saint Thérèse who was also called Little Flower was known for performing small tasks with great love and sanctity.  To borrow from current parlance, she did not have a big platform.  She lived as an obscure nun in France and only, if you will pardon the pun, blossomed into popularity after her death.  The curious might wonder why Pope Pius X gave her such an accolade.  Perhaps he recognized in her a model for how the faithful should respond to oppressive darkness.  Understand that the small things really do matter and that it is our collective charge to do them with great love.  We each have a song to sing. And though it may seem to be dwarfed by such a massive and largely faceless enemy, it will be heard.  It does make a statement.  It is vital.  

Years ago, when I was around fourteen years old, my dear stepfather handed me some tools and told me to frame out a room above my grandparents’ garage with my cousin, Eric.  The garage is located on some obscure hill in some obscure part of Pennsylvania.  I had never before framed out a room, and the thought itself was intimidating, but by calling me out to the task, saying, in effect, that I could do it – that I was capable of completing the job – my stepfather instilled in me a confidence that only grew and became stronger.  He wasn’t influencing crowds.  He was not leading a nation.  He was influencing me: one person.  One kid. 

What would the world look like if more individuals adopted the way of the Little Flower?  We are all tempted to believe the lie that greatness is all about numbers: likes and shares.  But if we were to examine our lives for a moment, we might discover that it had been the little things all along.  A small gesture.  A tiny kindness.  A little bird who regarded the great big world and its great big darkness and opened its mouth and made a sound regardless. 

I have commented on Shirley Jackson’s short story, “The Lottery,” in a previous episode – 51 to be precise.  The story is about how a village has a yearly lottery where one person is randomly selected to be stoned to death by the rest.  It is a tale about public execution, in other words, which, on its face, is shocking enough were it not for the fact that the vast bulk of the story is civilized.  The characters engage in a civil exchange about what they are to do.  It is all quite matter-of-fact.  They will follow a well-regulated process to make their selection.  It is only in the final line of the short story that we bear witness to their brutality.   Jackson concludes the story with “and then they were upon her,” leaving it to the imagination of her readers exactly how that act of violence looked. 

I explored this short story in a recent face-to-face class.  We discussed what might be the true nature of our species in how we build violence into our society and have been doing so since time immemorial. Why?

Arguably, AI, ChatGPT, and other such applications are going to make this worse. Consider, dear listener, what happens when a toddler does not get his way.  He pitches a fit.

We all know the answer.  The inability to articulate one’s ideas often results in violent outbursts.  With AI, we are now walking away from the opportunity to hone our ability to articulate our ideas and are, instead, deferring to what a program can produce.  Hear me on this: Our increasing lack of the ability to articulate our own ideas ourselves will result in more cases of violent outbursts.  Eighteen-year old, nineteen-year old, twenty-year old toddlers. 

Add to that our clear proclivity to commit violence, and then we get a recipe for the unthinkable.  Had Shirley Jackson composed “The Lottery” today, there might be a lot more to come after the line, “and then they were upon her.”  We might get the disturbing details of the public execution.  How one stone broke her jaw.  How another stone knocked her down.  How yet another stone made contact with a lifeless body.  There might be more details today because, as my students quickly pointed out, we are desensitized the violence.  We see it every day.  The shootings.  The mobs.  The military conflicts.  We have access to the images and the videos.  We are drawn to them.  And what does this say about us?     

From my vantage point as an educator in an institution of higher learning, the prognosis does not look good.  Ten years ago, the struggle was to get my students to read.  Now they are not even writing.  They come to class without the reading, without notebooks, without writing utensils ... only their phones.  They never forget their phones.  And I wonder what, exactly, we are trying to accomplish. 

If there is some intentionality about getting individuals – mostly the young – to stop thinking for themselves, to stop even trying to form and articulate an original thought then those who are perpetuating this mission are doing a bang-up job.  Pretty soon, we might start abandoning what Jean-Jacque Rosseau called a “social contract” -- that loose set of rules and regulations we use to maintain order and preserve the peace.  The more we embrace and even celebrate that primal proclivity to commit violence, the more we might be tempted to walk away from any artifice of sophistication.  We will not care if we cannot articulate our thoughts.  It will not matter if we depend upon AI and ChatGPT to communicate for us.  Nothing but our base instincts will matter.  Meaningfulness will not be pursued, only the material, the superficial.  Friedrich Nietzshe’s notion of nihilism might be realized.  Nothing matters.  Nothing has meaning.  Only the dog-eat-dog worldview holds any sway because we are nothing but animals at heart – or worse!  Creatures who indulge in the unspeakable.  Creatures who have relinquished their ability to speak at all.  Toddlers wielding clubs, mindlessly grunting our mutual hatred. 

Tom Holland does not claim to be a believer.  He does not follow what once was called The Way, yet his sprawling history of Christianity is populated with a host of historical tidbits that could easily win nonbelievers over to the cause.  His book, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, begins in ancient Greece with how the emerging Western culture was, indeed, primed to receive a narrative whose focal point is the son of God on high and ends in our current era of woke in terms of how some ideas are rejected while others are zealously embraced according to a rubric that was built by Christianity yet retains none of its guideposts.  It is, in other words, to be decent – whatever that is – without Christ, without the Ten Commandments, without the turning over of the tables of the moneychangers.  It is a moral compass that only affirms and never, ever challenges.  One might even say that the age of woke is the easy and, I hasten to add, misunderstood parts of Christianity without Jesus.  Holland tells his readers how we got there: an unthinkably long sequence that began with the words of a Jewish carpenter over two-thousand years ago. 

Holland takes us to the bloody Roman arenas and the lions, and he also gives us a tour of the early days when purchase was gained bit by bit until Constantine the Great converted to Christianity and, in doing so, elevated the faith to an unprecedented level.  Readers also get a glimpsed of the Crusades and how Christianity was politicized in order to curry favor.  Along the way, various councils convened and properly codified Christian doctrine so that believers were, in effect, all reading from the same sheet of music.  Until the arrival of Martin Luther.  He initiated a different conversation – one that led to the Protestant Reformation – and from there, the fallout only continued to build.  Henry VIII, a contemporary of Martin Luther, had and divorced many wives.  Over a century later, the French philosopher, Voltaire, who openly disdained Christianity ignited yet another powder keg.  He, Holland writes, “viewed Christianity with a hatred that bordered on fixation.”  Voltaire endeavored to wrest from Christian intellectuals the heights of European culture.  The Enlightenment – a clear reference to Plato’s famed “Allegory of the Cave” -- was to pull the ignorant out of the dark catacombs of Christianity and into the so-called light of man’s ability to, on his own, reason and give structure and sense to the world. 

What Martin Luther did to the Catholic Church in questioning many of its long-held doctrines, Voltaire and his ilk questioned the faith itself, causing many to wonder about the worth of a belief system next to modern advancements.  Why look up anymore when the real work was before us? 

Holland can be commended for his even-handedness in detailing the history of Christianity because on the heels of the Enlightenment, the world bore witness to at least two bloody revolutions – the American and the French – after which came industrialization on a scale never before seen accompanied by a spiritual malaise that pushed many to the edge.  And then a world war.  And then a second.  Two atomic bombs.  A genocide.  I am sure, dear listeners, you could take it from here. 

Yet Christianity persists.  Indeed, many prominent thinkers believe we are on the cusp of a revolution – one that returns Christianity to its roots by utterly rejecting its critics.  Thanks to Christianity, we have hospitals.  Thanks to Christianity, we have universities.  Thanks to Christianity, we have a notion of human rights.  To whom do we owe thanks for the destruction we see in our world?  Marriages?  The unborn?  Civil discourse? 

We should judge a belief system by its fruits.  While nobody would claim that followers of Christ are without blemish, doesn't Christianity make more sense?  It has, after all, built and sustained an entire civilization never mind the many attempts to eliminate it.

Clinton Romesha’s New York Times bestselling book, Red Platoon, details the deadly and savage battle that occurred in command outpost Keating in 2009.  This remote battle station in a far-flung part of Afghanistan was overrun by Taliban fighters before most of the American soldiers were even out of bed.  Described as a toilet bowl, command outpost Keating was, geographically speaking, surrounded on all sides by mountainous terrain, ideally suited for the enemy to wage an attack. Its location did not make any sense.  The soldiers inhabiting Keating knew this.  The Taliban fighters banked on it.  An attack was inevitable.  The Taliban threw everything in their arsenal at Keating, hoping to wipe the Americans off the map. 

Were it not for the sheer grit and quick thinking of the Americans, their plans would surely have succeeded.  The Americans were able to regroup, strategize, gather ammunition, and eventually call in airstrikes.  The battle lasted fourteen hours.  The author of Red Platoon was awarded the Medal of Honor.  Eight American soldiers were killed.  The brotherhood that was forged during those horrible hours cannot be broken. 

Red Platoon is a fast read.  The account is gripping; Romesha’s minute-by-minute telling of events offers readers a glimpse into what combat is really like.  It is not Hollywood.  It is not pretty or glamorous.  It is brutal and bloody, tragic and oftentimes confusing.  What interests me, though, is who the soldiers actually fought for.  You have likely heard before how the men do not fight for a strategic position or an idea or a political stance or whatever their leaders have dreamed up in their command posts.  No, the soldiers fight for each other.

In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s vicious assassination, it is difficult not to see some comparisons.  Academia today is overrun by progressive ideas to the point that many students simply default to that one way of looking at the world.  Challenging the institution-approved orthodoxy will get a person canceled or, as in the case with Kirk, killed.  It does not matter, dear listeners, what you or I think about Kirk’s ideas. The Socratic method has been replaced with the mindless repetition of ideas that have been curated and endorsed by those in power.  Independent thinking is gone.  There is only one sheet of music, one point of view.  And any other will be shouted off campus. 

It is a battle which makes me think that what we might need is some of the grit that was on display in a dangerously remote part of Afghanistan.  Those who want free inquiry, free speech, and the type of dialogue that builds, not tears down would do well to adopt a stick-to-it-ness posture, bravely standing in the breach against those who are hellbent on silencing those they deem to be dissenters against what is clearly an ever-changing ideology that is only getting more and more radical.  Where will it end?  Is it even designed to end? 

We should all be mindful of falling into an us vs. them worldview.  This, I believe, would be to capitulate to a way of understanding the world that divides and creates discord.  This would only perpetuate the problem; indeed, it would be to read from the same script as the Marxists.  Our so-called Taliban, I propose, are not like the flesh and blood militants in Romesha’s book.  Our Taliban is made up of broken ideas, dangerous and warped ideas, ideas, to be sure, that bewilder and avert our gaze away from what is true and good.  Of course, someone might counter by asking the question, Who gets to decide what is true and good?  My answer?  Look at the fruit.  Some ideas are sown that become bad fruit: despair, addled thinking, broken families, staggering levels of narcissism.  Other ideas are sown that become good fruit: stability, clarity, purpose, humility.  God’s law is imprinted on every human heart, which means that we know what we know.  May we all find the grit and determination to defend it.