On Being Stuck, and Going On

Sending Out 2024, Plotting Out 2025

Setting the stage for the next calendar year with a meditation on fortitude.

Taking Stock: A Writer’s Year

With respect to Substack, this was a banner year. I was named one of the Featured Substack, hit some modest goals for supporting subscribers, found a good and sustainable rhythm for writing even amidst book contracts and ordinary responsibilities. Substack has, without a doubt been the best habit I’ve developed for my writing.

Last time I’ll trot this out, I promise.

Beyond here, it was a great year as well. If you do a Google search, you’ll find my writings hither and yon, and there’s no need to enumerate them. If you go over to Mere Orthodoxy, the Baptist Standard, Comment or Christianity Today, they’re all there. In years past, I’ve spread my essays far and wide, but with plenty of responsibilities in my ordinary job¹, I’ve found it far easier to focus my writing submissions by working with a few outlets with some of the very best editors in the business.

2024 saw the refocusing of this newsletter around some key concerns, moving into a space of writing nearly monthly for Christianity Today, submitting two major writing projects coming out in 2025, and the bringing to a close of a psychology and theology project I’ve been working on for a year and half. It was a busy year, but all ordered around a key thesis which animates my writing:

God will have a people, and the people of God are called to a certain kind of moral existence.

This single sentence helps animate how I think about diverse kinds of social questions, what is ultimately at stake with those questions, and why church matters in the midst of that. It’s a simple statement with a big vision, and one which I hope to spend the rest of my writing career orbiting.

But 2024 was also the year that I closed out some big chapters in my thinking and writing life. In March, I submitted a manuscript which comes out next year, a project I’ve been working at off and on for the last seven years. This Spring, I’ll give two lectures on Christianity, war, and bureaucracy, the transition point in a writing trajectory on Christian nonviolence that has preoccupied me since 2008.

More or less, I view these as the more-or-closing of two books—ecclesiology and Christian nonviolence—whose pages I’ve been writing since my dissertation book, which came out in 2014². And for the first time in over a decade, my writing feels like it’s out over a ledge. I have some ideas and plans of what comes next, and in some ways they are extensions of what lies behind. But it’s also led to bit of a dumbfounding pause.

On Getting Stuck

It’s easy to write when you have a set topic to write on, but for better or worse, this is not how my mind has ever worked: one topic gives way to another, in an endless chain of curiosities, seeking to understand this world God has given us to live in. But there is a kind of paralysis which comes with this: we encounter an object so complex that it becomes overwhelming.

Somewhere in the middle of 40 hours of driving between Texas and Michigan, the following occurred to me:

I go on in this note to say:

But the more important part of what I mean is that, in pursuing big questions, I find myself overwhelmed by a sense of futility about how to go on.

The word will come again. Perhaps tomorrow? But this past two weeks has been a good reminder that eventually, every writer runs into the rock. Or else, they wind up, just saying the same things in different words.

Eventually, if we are honest in our writing, we all wind up being like Zachariah in the temple, Aquinas in his vision, rendered without words, and having to simply observe.

Thomas Aquinas, late in his life, and perhaps because of a stroke, found himself unable to go on, leaving his Summa Theologica incomplete. Legend tells us that he had a mystical vision, that he found all of his writing to be like straw, resulting in the shutdown. I don’t claim anything nearly that audacious happened to me on the drive between Indianapolis and Tulsa, but it was a sobering thought to realize that, given hours of time to think, the well was coming up dry.

Writing is a tricky vocation, because there’s a real economy to it: I write in part because it brings some extra money for the household. The risk here is—like Charles Dickens, writing installment novels by the word—it’s easy to find a topic and write it to death. Some writers, like John Grisham, have made their peace with being churn-and-burn authors, but there are real costs with this, I think: if writing is connected to what we love, then we cease to be a surprise to ourselves any longer.

In writing this way—treating an object as something which good technique can conquer—we no longer pay attention even to the thing which preoccupies our vision. For it is no longer a living object: it is merely an object to be sketched again and again, with some variations in color and theme.

Grisham’s ability to have a career on 15 hours a week is pretty remarkable. And no one can doubt that it’s a pretty amazing living. But saying that “I don’t write the first scene until I know the last scene” is another way of saying that surprise and discovery isn’t part of his game. It’s a mode of being stuck that doesn’t recognize that it’s stuck, I think.

But Dickens—another writer writing for a living—is a good example of how to survive this problem. Like any writer, he had a particular lane he rested in, but that lane had depth. You can catalog Victorian England only so many times before the characters start to feel like tropes, but Victorian England became the living character which became the seedbed for many worlds: the slum gangs of Oliver Twist, the political intrigue of A Tale of Two Cities, the class aspirations of Great Expectations. As an author, he never lost control of his words, even if he found himself in sometimes supernatural corners of Victorian England that surprised even him.

On Going On

Writing—and the moral life—can live in the cul-de-sac, or embrace the dumbfoundedness. We can either stick with the familiar tropes, and find another lawyer who saves the world, or enter into a world which we do not have control, and discover a heroic scoundrel willing to die for another. But to do the latter, we have to know how to go on anyway.

The cardinal virtue of fortitude has been badly misunderstood in recent years because it has been seen under another name: resilience. A quick n-Gram takes nearly a 90 degree turn in 2000, with writing about the term spiking through the roof, and psychological literature routinely conflates the two terms in discussions. Resilience, as typically discussed, has to do with going on in the face of disaster, but fortitude is far more rich than this.

Fortitude has primarily to do with going on in the face of life-threatening circumstances, but we can expand a discussion of it to include anything which threatens to end our movement: being dumfounded at a problem, drowning in despair at difficulties, being paralyzed by fear. The difference is this: resilience is how we reconstruct the self in the face of disaster, but fortitude is how we keep going even if the pieces aren’t all there.

Fortitude is made up of multiple components: giving honor where honor is due, being confident in one’s pursuit, being patient, being willing to move forward in the face of danger. Lacking one of these sub-pieces means that it’s less likely that we move forward when perplexed, much less when we’re afraid. All of these sub-pieces support one another—it’s easier to be courageous when one one’s good work is acknowledged—but all of these also have something to do with awe. For in awe, we encounter something that is bigger than ourselves, but not in a way which stultifies us: it draws us in, calling us up the mountain which we cannot see the top of.

To go back to Thomas Aquinas’ silence, that awe may very well lead us to quit writing, to acknowledging that what we love is bigger than linguistics, and that knowing it requires our prayers more than our letters. It may mean that, like Moses going up the mountain, we come back with words which we do not know the depths of, our faces aglow in testimony. But for most of us, I think it means that our words become kinds of prayers, vain paeans of praise and wonder in pursuit of what lies ever before us. In this way, the words never end, even if, like Dickens, we are not sure whether the next journey will lead us to the gallows of France or to the mist of Christmases future.

1. ll be submitting a ton of grant applications to fund my position (which you can donate to here), on top of student recruitment, and visiting with area pastors.

2. A little dramatic, but not by much. I have a book slated on Dorothy Day at some point in the future, which means I’ll be taking up the question of Christian nonviolence again eventually, and I think there’s one more statement about the nature of church in me, but not for some time yet. Since 2011, these two topics have been animating my writing, and I think I’ve said all I have to say for the time being.