Kevin Williamson:

The Iranians take American bombs and missiles seriously, but—unlike many Americans—they seem to understand that the relevant objectives for the United States in this conflict are political rather than military. The U.S. military did not need to demonstrate that it could, under orders, massacre Iranians on the ground or in the air (or in girls’ schools) as easily as American forces recently massacred boatloads of seagoing civilians in the Caribbean on the thinnest of pretexts. That the U.S. government is able to achieve its desired military outcome in any conventional confrontation with any military anywhere in the world is understood and hardly contested, as much as a frank admission of the fact would bruise the pride of a few old men in Beijing. When it comes to killing people and destroying property, the United States has no equal in the world…

And so while our forces can bomb Iran into rubble and then make the rubble bounce, that will not be enough to win. Winning in Iran is a political project, one that requires intelligence, imagination, and courage, qualities that Donald Trump does not possess.

---

We are on a small raft.
We may never see the ones we love again.
Every poem is a message in a bottle.
Revision is urgency with tweezers.
How to pull out the bit not meant
to be there. […]
I know “love “when simplified to its lowest
common denominator means sorrow
tomorrow. I know it isn’t too late to change.

— From “Accidental Practitioners” by Heather Sellers

---

I mentioned in an email to a friend the other day that immediately following this post I had a lengthy conversation with that same Catholic friend in the post along with one other person. We talked about a lot of topics, from aliens to Epstein to (“faked”) space exploration to JFK and the CIA.

And… Sometimes all you can say or feel after a conversation like this is… Woof. It was an onslaught of one conspiracy after another.

(I’m trying to use that word as neutrally as possible. I’m not slapping the label “conspiracy theorist” on anyone. Each of these conversations have something in common: There was a secret, or some information that was hidden from us, and now we’re learning the “truth.” “Conspiracies” is the right word for that. It also helps understand the goosebumps and pride that go with being part of the Great Unveiling. You’re like a Godly Plato; the Democrats and the Mainstream Media want you to stay in the cave.)

But what I mentioned stood out from the whole thing was the general pleasantness of the chat. It was not like our first chat. For one thing, the third conversation partner added mediation as well as balance considering a) she’s much closer to my Catholic friend and b) she has more overlap with my (self-proclaimed) saner approach to Politics. And I suspect it helps that we had already done the more mercurial task of ice-breaking. But for whatever reason, there was no indication that we could not laugh at the bar or barbecue together afterwards.

I wish I could say that that was the end-moral here. And maybe it should be, maybe it is. But this morning I read Philip Graubart’s Comment essay “Denial and the Evasion of Empathy.”

One of the things Graubart talks about in the piece is a John Mearsheimer video a friend sent him in which Mearsheimer claims that on Oct. 7th Hamas probably did not kill many civilians — it was the Israeli military that was responsible and “Israeli propaganda” is the only reason we think otherwise.

(A personal recommendation: If you don’t already know Mearsheimer, you’re probably normal and healthy-minded and should skip-to-my-Lou right past that rabbit hole.)

When Graubart was reading the book 10/7: 100 Human Stories, he saw the name of someone he knew, someone who had been murdered with her family while “huddling together in bed.”

What would Mearsheimer say about this family? Or, more importantly for most of us, what would someone who finds Mearsheimer so convincing or “interesting” say about this family?

Was it the Israeli army that murdered this family? Did an IDF helicopter pilot execute them while they lovingly reached for each other? Did a psychotic serial killer invade the kibbutz that morning? Or is it all a hoax? Did I make up the story along with Lee Yaron and our cabal of tricksters? What insane questions. Yet millions of people visit websites suggesting something of this sort.

When I got to this point in the essay, the thought of being proud of some ability to peaceably argue, laugh, and barbecue suddenly felt wrong — trivial at best but… definitely worse than just trivial.

My friends and I did not talk about this specific topic, but, again, it has been one long and remarkably consistent string of conspiracies. And I can’t forget that these conversations started with nothing short of full-throated support for the bombing of civilian boats in the Caribbean.

The thing is, I have friends and family members who traffic in the exact same things as my Catholic friend. And like Graubart, I too have had videos of John Mearsheimer sent to me. The themes of denials and excuses and evasions — it’s so exhausting and very often horrifying. And here’s a very sad but important note to get off my chest: For 10+ years now, I have not a single memory of the truth bearing out in these conversations. Not one. Every conversation, no matter how friendly, is had across a barbed wire fence. Can a veneer of pleasantness or even laughter cover that?

You might be thinking here, Well, why bother having these conversations at all? What’s the point? I actually did get a chance to talk to that third member of the conversation the next day. We were talking about how having these little debates in places like where we were having them — at work — actually can land someone like myself in trouble. And we also remarked about the seeming futility of conversations like this. And she did ask, “Well, why have them?” All I can say is that I just fundamentally believe in it. It’s not that people can never change their mind; I think people often do. But that change, if it occurs, occurs off the set, so to speak. You may never know what effect your conversation will have. But you’re acting in faith that a toleration in practice is better than a toleration in theory. And you’re acting in faith that words between language animals do matter.*

Emphasis on faith.

Graubart does suggest that some of what’s going on here — in saying Israel’s military killed their own people and then blamed it on Hamas — is just “classic antisemitism.”

“But there’s a parallel human compulsion at play,” he says, “equally common and equally pernicious: an evasion of empathy. Humans don’t want to see the pain of their enemies. To truly witness the trauma of another is to engage with their narrative— and that’s something we’d often rather avoid.”

I suspect that we can reach for something even broader — more basic and, though no less pernicious, perhaps less exculpatory for us all. “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” Simone Weil famously said. (There are possible ironies in quoting her here, but nonetheless …) She also said that “something in our soul has a far more violent repugnance for true attention than the flesh has for bodily fatigue.”

When I think of it on these terms, it’s both worse and better. Worse because I don’t know anyone on the right or left side of the political aisle whose soul-attention is in good cardiovascular shape. And better because it means more or less the same task of attention is needed in every direction.

I have never known what I’m doing. I don’t recall the last time I felt sure that what I was doing was the right thing. And that uncertain thought of uncertainty is disturbing to me — and pitiable. But I’m so often surrounded, surrounded, by certainty (mostly the Dunning-Kruger kind) and I can’t say I envy those who have it.**

If you can’t already tell, I have no idea where I’m going with this.

I am aided by a poem my friend John Brady shared:

PAUDEEN

Indignant at the fumbling wits, the obscure spite
Of our old paudeen in his shop, I stumbled blind
Among the stones and thorn-trees, under morning light;
Until a curlew cried and in the luminous wind
A curlew answered; and suddenly thereupon I thought
That on the lonely height where all are in God’s eye,
There cannot be, confusion of our sound forgot,
A single soul that lacks a sweet crystalline cry.

— W. B. Yeats***

Graubart closes with a reflection on the universal “miracle of creation” seen in the hostage reunion scenes of the Israel-Hamas war. “What is more elementally human,” he asks, “than the mad, primal love between a parent and child or husband and wife?

While on one network Israeli hostages fell into the arms of their families, on another network Palestinian prisoners were reunited with their families. Mothers screamed for their children, children ran to their parents, and fathers wept. The messy, joyful human mix played itself out only a few miles from where Israeli mothers hugged their sons. I’m not, of course, equating terrorists and hostages; that’s not the point of this reflection. But if I don’t see the sacred humanity in a mother-child reunion on the other side, I’ve fallen into a dehumanizing denial trap, a trap that lies in wait for us all. 

And that reminded me of another thing Weil said: “The mystery of Creation has its equivalent in us. It is the mystery of charity in our actions.”

But I don’t mind admitting how uncertain I am. I’ll argue and laugh and barbecue, and I’ll wonder — I’m telling you now, I really wonder — if there is in any true peace in it.

—

* “The information-coding view tends to see language as providing immensely useful instruments for defining and communicating knowledge about the world. But language creates a context for human life and action, including speech, which deserves attention in its own right. We relate to this context not only, or even primarily, as to an instrument which we can pick up or lay down. Rather it is the medium we are in; a feature of what we are. It opens for us other dimensions of existence, which we cannot ignore if we want to understand the nature of language and of our existence in language.” — Charles Taylor, The Language Animal

** “Le doute n’est pas une état bien agréable, mais l’assurance est un état ridicule.” — Voltaire, letter to Frederick William, Duke of Prussia, November 28th, 1770

*** I started to do more with this post, but it’s long enough already. I think I’ve said what I want to say. I also found this analysis of Yeats poem which, if you have a few extra minutes, is absolutely worth your time. It says whatever else I might have said better than I would’ve said it. (Though I’m afraid to ask if it is written by a human or stolen from humans by a computer.)

Nicholas of Verdun, The Birth of Isaac, from the Verdun Altar, c.1181

Gabriel Torretta:

Abraham and Sarah seem doomed to laughter. Abraham laughs at the foolish idea that God would give him offspring from his wizened and childless wife Sarah, and tries to convince God to settle more reasonably on Ishmael instead (Genesis 17:17–18). Sarah herself laughs at the idea that she would bear her husband a son, but quickly dissembles the deed, terrified that she has offended the angel of the Lord (18:12–15).

Yet, when Nicholas of Verdun represented the birth of his and his wife’s child in the monumental twelfth-century Verdun Altar, he re-imagined laughter as a blessing, the sign of God’s fidelity to his covenant.

On the right lies Sarah, whose wrinkles witness to the truth of the inscription’s words that she is ‘full of days’ (plena dierum). On the left, Abraham sits enthroned, extending his hand in a gesture of paternal authority. But between the two of them, nearly unnoticed, a lamp dangles from the ceiling. It recalls the ‘smoking fire pot’ and ‘flaming torch’ that once signalled the Lord’s ratification of the covenant with Abraham (Genesis 15:7–21). The cord from which the lamp hangs cuts through the scene, visually tying together the father, the nursing child, and the womb from which he sprang. The divine promises once cryptically symbolized by dark visions in the night have been unveiled to human sight at last: the beginning of the fulfilment of the covenant is Isaac.

Small wonder, then, that Sarah’s first words since denying her laughter are a praise of God’s laughter: ‘And Sarah said, “God has made laughter for me”’ (Genesis 21:6). In Nicholas’ image, Abraham and Sarah’s faces show no outward merriment because their laughter has outstripped the limits of their own bodies and become a person: Isaac. His name means ‘he laughs’, which Sarah understands first as a reference to God; the Lord is the one who laughs, and his laughter becomes her laughter.

Sarah the new mother laughs, not with her old scepticism, but with the new life she has received from God. Sarah laughs in the birth of Isaac because she is bound now in her heart and her very flesh to the covenant with God. God laughs, and his laughter has become a covenant that will not pass away, which keeps watch over his people like a pillar of fire in the darkness.

Rhody Walker-Lenow’s piece in Comment, on the forgetful way we remember the flood narrative, reminded me of the great Aronofsky debates of 2014 — as in Darren Aronofsky’s 2014 movie Noah. I liked it, and I had so many conversations about it that I think I had honed something of a 3- or 4-point presentation on why Christians should watch it and talk about it.

I don’t recall getting very far with it. There were folks I knew who walked out of the theater mid-movie saying something like “That’s not the Noah I know” or “that is not the Noah of the Bible.”

And Idunno, maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. But I thought of that again reading Jim Harrison’s “A Dog in Heaven”:

An ancient problem never solved until this moment.
Did Jesus have a dog with him
during the forty days in the wilderness?
Yes. In the village the dog was called Cain
in jest. He would eat anything he could get
in his mouth. He would try to make love to chickens
to the laughter of the children who threw stones
at him, a great sin to throw stones at poor
stray dogs. So when Jesus left the village
at dawn with a loaf of bread and a bedroll
Cain followed and Jesus didn’t have the heart
to yell “Go away” to the woe-begotten Cain.
So Cain trailed happily along and at the end
of the first hot day he stopped, sniffed the air.
He turned left and waited for Jesus to follow.
Cain led the way down a gorge to a spring he knew.
The spring emerged from a tiny cave in the cliff
Cain and Jesus drank deeply and he filled his container.
Then they bathed in the cool water. At twilight they
were next to the north shore of the Sea of Galilee.
Jesus caught a fine fish with a hook and line he had packed
cooking it on a flat rock where they had built a fire.
He picked a bone out of the dog’s gum. A few years later
he told Cain to stay home because he had to be crucified
in Jerusalem. He actually put Cain in the tomb
with a chunk of camel meat and said he’d come back to get
him. On the third day Jesus’s tomb was empty.
Cain had been invited along for the Resurrection ride.

If your view of the Bible — or just of life, really — does not have space for the creative license of Aronofsky or Harrison… Eh. Why do I default to that wording? Why not put it more plainly and less threateningly: I believe our view of the Bible and this interesting religious life we lead should and does have happy room for such creative license. In fact, I doubt it’s possible to do without it — whether we know it or admit it or not.

I like to think about Jesus being the kind of guy who doesn’t smoke but who always has a pack of cigarettes on him just in case someone else needs one. But the point here isn’t so much about whether that’s a “theological accurate” view of Jesus, though I suspect it might be; it’s about how your theology of Jesus handles the offense and what that says about (your) Jesus.

Ross McCullough:

Mr. Payne,

His silence is not a lack of response; his silence is the response. Even though the Grand Inquisitor suffers it; even though we suffer it. How else to still us? If the idiom of the interior life of God is unspeakable, what truer communicatio idiomatum could there be? You suffer like a Caravaggio so you want a Caravaggian Christ, but what if God paints icons?

As for your other point: I had a professor in seminary who used to say that purgatory did not exist until Protestantism. Before the Reformation, every soul had someone performing penance for it, applying the merits of Christ; it was only the denial that anyone was in purgatory that put a stop to it and so stranded souls there. So also hell: it is an exaggeration, but an exaggerated truth, to say that the only reason hell is populated is because people think it is empty. To take it seriously is to avoid it; to take it seriously is to foreclose it for others by your prayers. Purgatory in that sense is a creation of the Protestants, and hell of the universalists. Those who first counsel God’s mercy experience his judgment; those who first counsel his judgment experience his mercy.

We are downstream of so many heresies about these things that you cannot trust your instincts. Hell is real. Purgatory is real. Each is a paradigm of how to hold suffering—as a criminal or as a Christian, as our old ship captain said—and your only choice is between them. “We only live, only suspire / Consumed by either fire or fire.”

In this world of wasted silence, wasted solitude, wasted celibacy, do not waste your suffering.

Ms. Bushra,

I must say, your note took me completely by surprise. I cannot apologize for it, because I am not contrite. But it was also not my idea—if Fatima is interested in Christianity, it must be because of things Felicity has said, and only secondarily perhaps because of what she has seen in this house.

If Felicity is old enough to preach, it seems to me that Fatima is old enough to hear preaching. If you want her to be able to choose for herself, then you cannot complain that she is exploring the options. This does not, then, border on a kind of spiritual statutory rape, as you so delicately put it. You are right that we do baptize infants, but only with their parents consent—only with their own consent, when they are of age. From this indeed was born the behemoth of freedom, long since grown monstrous, and we welcome still its monstrosity, in some moods; only we are able to find that freedom in more than just the individual, we are able to see it in whole traditions.

At any event, as innocent as you say Fatima is, that innocence is not necessarily a mark of immaturity, of an impaired freedom. Indeed it may be the opposite, a mark of emancipation. For us, you must know, the freest choice of all came from a first-century Jewish girl, who in amaranthine youth and adamantine habit gave our fiat to the new creation.

From Anne Haven McDonnell’s “She Told Us the Earth Loves Us”:

I forget sometimes
how trees look at me with the generosity
of water. I forget all the other

breath I’m breathing in.
Today I learned that trees can’t sleep
with our lights on. That they knit

a forest in their language, their feelings.
This is not a metaphor.
Like seeing a face across a crowd,

we are learning all the old things,
newly shined and numbered.
I’m always looking

for a place to lie down
and cry. Green, mossed, shaded.
Or rock-quiet, empty. Somewhere

to hush and start over.

Nick Catoggio on Monday:

Last are the loyalists, the Christians who even now will dutifully heed his call to treat the head of the Catholic Church as MAGA’s newest us-and-them enemy. In fact, I wonder if the Jesus image inadvertently made that easier by giving them a way to hedge their coming attacks on Leo. (“I didn’t like the Jesus meme, to be clear, but he has a point about the pope.”) Many evangelicals are destined to fall into this group, some because of old axes to grind with Rome and others because they’ve already transitioned to treating evangelicalism as a political identity rather than a religious one.

Trump is the head of their church, and if he says Leo is a blasphemer, that’s canon.

I can confirm that this bears out. For example, I revisited my Catholic friend the other day, who sang to the exact tune of a good loyalist.

“What do you think about the Trump-Pope battle?”

Long silence.

“Well… I think that people have different opinions. And some people come to those opinions for different reasons. And some of those reasons are good reasons and people can disagree….” And after that disclaimer went on for a few more sentences, the answer came as, “But I do think that the Pope is being a little too political. And I didn’t like him meeting with David Axelrod.”

“What did you think about the meme?”

“Oh I thought that was inappropriate.”

Summary: I didn’t like the Jesus meme, to be clear, but Trump has a point about the pope.

You really can observe the internal struggle to come to terms with her newfound loyalty. And this is from a devout Catholic. You can imagine how much easier this all is with my evangelical friends who hold not a single high view of Catholicism to begin with.

I’ve made jabs at Jordan Klepper before. His show is or was titled “Jordan Klepper Fingers the Pulse.” Hilarious, I guess. Except that Jordan Klepper does no such thing. He finds something like a pulse that fits his joke then blows it up for his audience with his camera and editing crew. I am neither equating nor equivocating when I say that on the list of things demolishing the West, you can write Jordan Klepper’s name — and Seth Meyers and Steven Colbert, as far as I’m concerned — right in there with Donald Trump’s.

But that’s a pet peeve and a digression.

I almost quit Catoggio a couple years ago. Not because I’m not equally or close to equally cynical but because I am equally or close to equally cynical. And what cynical man needs even more cynicism? But I haven’t quit reading him and one reason is this: I have found few people who more regularly and accurately do have a finger on the pulse of American politics.

Here’s Catoggio yesterday:

For a megalomaniac like Trump, there can be no greater test of loyalty for devout Christians who support him than asking them to take his side in a moral dispute with the most authoritative Christian on Earth.

And, with no exceptions, the most powerful Christians in his orbit have.

I still think that at some point — when the cost is negligible, of course — many will decamp and I’ll have to pretend alongside them for the sake of peace that they never really supported it.

But for now, as the good Senator Gracchus knew, he gives them what they’ve wanted — and they still love it.

To borrow from Russell Moore: “Did I say ‘someone’? I meant, I could shoot Jesus himself on Fifth Avenue and not lose a single supporter.”

——

Addendum (that I actually meant to go search for yesterday) — Here’s Catoggio in his May 9th, 2025 newsletter:

America is poised to do a lot of damage to the world in its death throes as a liberal society and global power, and not just material damage. Trumpism will have a malign moral influence on the world as liberalism’s discontents abroad look to it for political inspiration. …

Shouldn’t the Catholic Church, of all institutions, be proactive in trying to limit that malign influence?

Trumpism has always been best understood as a moral project, not as an ideology. It’s too dependent on the president’s daily whims to be a coherent political program, but its moral vision is clear and consistent: “Strength” is the cardinal virtue and unapologetic ruthlessness in advancing one’s interests is the way in which that virtue is practiced. I wouldn’t equate it with “might makes right” because it expresses no interest in the concept of “right,” only in what might be gained in any situation.

[…]

Any influential American who’s not openly on the side of MAGA is a provocation to the president, but until now he’s always had options to neutralize the threat. If you make trouble for him he can revoke any federal privileges you might enjoy, shrink your customer base by blackballing your company from government work, or whip up his fans to threaten your life.

There’s not much he can do to silence a pope, though, and that will eat at him. The mere fact that he now has an immigrant-loving rival for the title of Most Influential Living American will irritate his tender ego and eventually trigger his impulse to try to dominate those who threaten him. He will pick a fight with the pope, as totally moronic as the idea of such a thing is, because that’s who he is. The church provoked him by offering a different model of moral leadership to Americans and tacitly inviting them to pledge their allegiance to it. They’re coming after Trump’s people. He’ll take it personally.

But this is what happens sometimes between rival religions, right? Because they worship different gods, they fight.

Hannah LaGrand:

On the one hand, the lost sheep of the parable can be me or you or anyone reading the story. That coin could be any sinner, and we can all see ourselves as the prodigal son. And yet what is so striking in each of these stories is precisely the specificity: not a sheep and a coin and a son, but my lost sheep, the coin that I had lost, and this son of mine.  

To be a parent, perhaps, is an education in haecceity. It is a realization that happens all at once, in the instant you are handed a crying baby to bring to your chest: The perfect, blurry image of the child you imagined is replaced with this child, with your child, and there is no going back. But it is also a realization that happens in fits and starts as this child comes into focus day by day—this child who doesn’t sleep through the night, who is sick, who is quick to anger and quick to laugh. This child who doesn’t want to play baseball or read or go to college. The way she worries. The way he talks with his hands. All at once, and then slowly again and again, one realizes that this living, breathing individual is not a pale imitation of some imagined ideal. That generic perfect child could not hold a candle to this one who exists.  

To see our children in this way is not to hold illusions of their perfection. We still have hopes for them. We can be dismayed at their decisions. We suffer with their suffering. However, importantly, these hopes and frustrations are not (at least when we are at our best) the result of a comparison to some abstracted ideal child. We do not want a happy child. We want this child to be happy. The vision of flourishing we have for our children is a particular vision, not one in which the particular disappears into generic perfection. To be a parent is to recognize that the father in the parable who sees his son coming from a long way off, in that moment, feels not like a saint but like the luckiest man in the world.  

I mentioned a few years ago that I hoped to see more from the excellent spark of Jennifer Banks’ Natality. LaGrand’s wonderful essay is that, and both are a great insight into what I have loved about Hannah Arendt.

And though I can’t, or don’t want to, explain why, I thought of Danusha Laméris poem “Arabic.” Do yourself a favor and read or listen to it as well.

From LaGrand’s closing paragraph:

There is much reason to despair in the world. One need not look far to find stories of great human suffering and great human evil. And yet, even as we mourn, we must be careful that this despair is not rooted in a two-dimensional vision of a restored kingdom whose calculus has no way to account for how a bleary-eyed child stumbling into a lap might change everything. If the work of loving the world is also the work of seeing the world, then we may be surprised at what we find when we put our clipboards down and take seriously the reality that “God so loved the world” means that God so loved this world. And amid all the renewal we long for, this world will not be abandoned.