Why Should You Support This Substack?
An Excellent Question, Answered in Two Parts
It was good to spend some time in the woods with family before things ramp up this month. I’m running a sale—ending Tuesday midnight—on supporting subscriptions.
Apologies for the interruption. Normal programming resumes tomorrow, on the commandment concerning parents.
A Brief Word of Befuddlement
My review of Bonhoeffer has taken off beyond anything I could have expected. As of today, it’s the #1 viewed piece on the site for the last week and a half! The review has been picked up and discussed (and picked apart1) in a few different places, but suffice it to say, the response to the review has been bonkers.
So, thanks for being the OG readers!
I feel conflicted about more people reading this than the stuff I’ve been writing here over the last three years. There’s no value in writing something negative for the sake of being negative2: everyone remembers a really great takedown, but they remember it because it was witty or because it made noise, not because it contributed something substantive in and of itself. My hope is that the negativity of the review contributed something substantive to how we view film, and more specifically, what counts as heroism.
There are real stakes in what cultural artifacts like film teach us about the moral life. In this case, the stakes were how we think about participation in political violence , and how we see the relationship between theological and political commitments. These have been questions close to the heart of my work for a number of years now, and ones which I think are worth disputing vigorously.
In honor of this little review, I’m having a 50% off sale for supporting subscribers, which ends Tuesday at midnight.
With so much free stuff to read, why support this? I’ll give you my best three reasons:
Three Things Supporting This Substack Gives You
Book Clubs
One of the best parts has been the after-hours book discussions we’ve done over the last three years: on Benedict’s Rule, on Sandel’s What Money Can’t Buy, on Favale’s The Genesis of Gender, to name a few.
Next up is a three-parter, beginning in January, on Alisdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. The book club is designed to go deep on significant books and give folks time to process with others on Zoom.
Additional Writing
Every week3, I aspire toward two pieces: one free for everyone, and one for supporting subscribers. The free series has been on the Decalogue, and the supporting subscriber pieces have been more capacious: engagements with music, the very occasional newsy commentary, the ongoing advice column, Oh No! In 2025, I’m anticipating doing some more particular explainers, like a theological vision of migration.
The work I do here is an extension of the ordinary work I do as a professor of theology and ethics, a kind of rough draft thinking in the wild that helps sharpen the saw. Supporting subscribers get to help make this possible.
A Sharpened Awareness of the Christian Moral Life
Let’s be frank: there’s a lot of writing competing for your time that’s downright delightful or whimsical. I will not promise that. The Bonhoeffer review is a good example: I don’t aspire to be critical or cranky, but it doesn’t do anyone any good to just say the nice parts if there is more that needs turning over.
The moral life begins with learning to attend to God. And so, one of the overall theses of this newsletter is to largely ignore buzzy things and dig into true things. It’s better for our fractured and distracted minds to learn how to focus, to dig in, to ask better questions, and have better arguments about important things.
There are innumerable resources and all kinds of questions I want to introduce us to. Some will be explored systematically, like John Cassian on the vices, or Bonhoeffer on whether you need a “rule of life”, or Augustine and Howard Thurman on the Sermon on the Mount. Sometimes, it’s small series, on the danger of thinking that church should be a space where no one does harm. Sometimes, big and rangy questions preoccupy us like the nature of bureaucracy and the moral life.
But above all, I want this work to be a way that we all grow in the love of God with our lives, and dig deep into the riches of that kind of life. Risk being holy, weird, and true.
We get one life. Don’t spend it doom-scrolling. Don’t waste time assuming that the moral life is just our feelings. Spend your one life thinking richly, seeing the world in all of its complexity and splendor, and living wisely. The writing here has been immensely helpful for me on that count if no one else.
I’m not an argumentative person by disposition, but the older I get, the more I find great solace in a good interlocutor. So, here, we argue with and about good things, curiously and charitably, and try to avoid the noisy things. If that sounds good to you, I’d love to have you be a commenter and supporter.
Three Things This Substack Won’t Give You:
How-Tos4. I don’t offer five steps to reclaiming your brain, or becoming more honest, or to solving North American immigration5. The moral life isn’t like that: most life worth living isn’t like that. A newsletter that routinely trades on this is either wishful thinking6 or downright snake-oil.
Cultural Cache. As of last Friday, the review had been read over 60,000 times. But it’s a super-outlier: the most reads any of my newsletters have ever had is just south of 3,000. Supporting this newsletter won’t make you cooler. Angel Studios surely doesn’t think I’m cool. I don’t think my mom thinks I’m cool, though she does love me.
Okay, maybe a little cultural cache:
Hot Takes on Breaking News. Very occasionally, I delve into newsy commentary, and for good reason. There are plenty of places that do journalism and the offer breaking commentary on current events. I have chosen, for the last three years, to do something different: to write about the moral life as if current events weren’t the most important thing about how we become moral beings. There are present events which will become foundational, but chances are high that most of the things that we hear on the news won’t be remembered in a week7.
So, the ask is this: I’d love for you to be a supporting subscriber and join in on all the fun. PSA is over: we’re back to normal programming this week, and Lord willing, through the Christmas break into 2025.
LiVecche misunderstands Bonhoeffer as having “competing duties”, arguing that there is a time to set aside loving your enemies for the sake of doing something else. LiVecche’s framing is indebted to Reinhold Niebuhr, who held that there is an ideal ethic which judges us and that we make choices in the frailties of reality. Bonhoeffer studied with briefly in New York and found his ethics underwhelming. Nonetheless, there was an entire vein of Bonhoeffer interpretation which was determined as viewing Bonhoeffer as a tragic figure, caught between competing duties, justifying his participation in conspiracy as the greater of the duties. Bonhoeffer, by contrast, explicitly says that he couldn’t justify anything and knew that he had to throw himself on God’s mercy.
My wife is pretty sure that the negative review is part of why it’s had such an afterlife, and she’s probably not wrong.
The last few weeks have been exceptional, so with some grains of salt.
For the most part. I have a couple in mind, but very sparing.
No, I don’t have a policy blueprint, not that anyone has asked.
Jon Malesic’s recent essay on how looking at art doesn’t do anything for repairing your attention is a great rejoinder to the bevy of Substack essays which propose that This Simple Trick will combat an entire culture of distraction. Jon’s work consistently throws cold water on the One Simple Trick, and I appreciate him for it.
Neil Postman calls this the “and now this” mode of news delivery, where events are presented without context and without order: things you “should be aware of”, as if awareness of something was the same as understanding or attention.
I am currently disabled due to chronic illness so money is tight as we are a one income family, but I most certainly will subscribe when my T-shirt business picks up and I have a little more breathing room.