Letters to the Catholic Right

Over at the new site, I’ve got a new post up that starts from Valeria Luiselli’s new book, Tell Me How It Ends, which the Texas Observer calls “the first must-read book of the Trump era.” Luiselli writes “it is never inspiration that drives you to tell a story, but rather a combination of anger and clarity,” and in my post I try to show how that’s reflected in the words and actions my students have put out since the election.

Check it out to learn about Luiselli’s amazing book, and to read my students’ words about the Day Without Immigrants protests that followed February’s ICE raid in Austin. Here, for example, is something a girl in my 4th period class wrote:

“Not many of our parents were able to stay home or miss work. So we as kids fought for our parents. Our parents crossed the border and worked off most of their lives for us. Now it’s our turn as kids to return the favor.”

And from a girl in 5th period:

“Every day when I wake up, the first thing I think of is, ‘What would happen to me if one day my parents get deported?’ I think it is not fair that my parents are afraid to go to work, but they have no choice because they are trying to get money to buy food and to pay the rent. It is hard for me to see my parents afraid of what is happening today in our country.”

I hope you’ll read the whole thing.

I know it’s been a while since I’ve written here. But in case anyone is still checking in or getting notifications from this blog, I just wanted to let you know that I’ve started a new blog, with a broader theme, so I can write about all of the issues that are popping up in the Trump era. Please check it out: scholarlytexan.wordpress.com

From my first post:

In his essay “Why I Write,” George Orwell describes a particularly un-poetic chapter in his  1938 memoir of the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia. In it, Orwell resorted to sheer reportage in defense of Trotskyites who were falsely accused of collaborating with Franco. Orwell worried that the chapter ruined the book. It was too dry, too factual. Nonetheless, he had to include it. “I happened to know,” Orwell explains, “what very few people in England had been allowed to know, that innocent men were being falsely accused.”

What I take from that is that when you have special knowledge of a political situation, you have a special responsibility to share that knowledge. And because of my new job, I happen to know things, too.

I happen to know, for example, what immigrant students write about what their lives are like now, under the Trump regime. I happen to know how they react when they hear the president’s name, or when they hear about anti-immigrant bills like SB4 or HB 383 in Texas. (To generalize, the girls start talking and planning and asking questions; the boys look down and to the side in anger.)

And I happen to know, too, that many Americans–white Americans like me, like the friends I grew up with–will never have to face this reality. I know that many of these Americans are kindhearted and don’t want to see families broken up over decades-old immigration violations. I also know that some of those sameAmericans soothe themselves with the notion that ICE is only going after the “bad guys.” I had one conversation with a Trump voter who told me that she supports the new DHS deportation priorities because, she said, “the same sort of felonies that would land me in prison are the going to land some illegal immigrants back in their home countries.”

I happen to know that’s not the real story. I happen to know, for example, that more than half of the immigrants arrested in February’s ICE raid in Austin had no prior criminal records. I happen to know, too, that many of my students have had parents deported solely for immigration-related offenses, or for “crimes” that would never land a (white) citizen in prison.

Two big things happened last Friday. There was the obvious one: Pope Francis released Amoris Laetitae, “the Joy of Love,” his exhortation on love, sex, marriage, and the family, and a follow-up to the two-year Synodal process he inaugurated in October of 2014. Maybe you missed the other one: Literary Hub announced that the near-unanimous winner of its “Tournament of Literary Sex Writing” was James Baldwin, for a passage from Giovanni’s Room.

Those might seem unrelated to you. But try reading the end of Baldwin’s passage next to the words of Pope Francis.

First, Baldwin:

I started to move and to make some kind of joke but Joey mumbled something and I put my head down to hear. Joey raised his head as I lowered mine and we kissed, as it were, by accident. Then, for the first time in my life, I was really aware of another person’s body, of another person’s smell. We had our arms around each other. It was like holding in my hand some rare, exhausted, nearly doomed bird which I had miraculously happened to find. I was very frightened; I am sure he was frightened too, and we shut our eyes. To remember it so clearly, so painfully tonight tells me that I have never for an instant truly forgotten it. I feel in myself now a faint, a dreadful stirring of what so overwhelmingly stirred in me then, great thirsty heat, and trembling, and tenderness so painful I thought my heart would burst. But out of this astounding, intolerable pain came joy; we gave each other joy that night. It seemed, then, that a lifetime would not be long enough for me to act with Joey the act of love.

Now Francis:

A healthy sexual desire, albeit closely joined to the pursuit of pleasure, always involves a sense of wonder, and for that very reason can humanize the impulses. In no way, then, can we consider the erotic dimension of love simply as a permissible evil or a burden to be tolerated for the good of the family. Rather, it must be seen as a gift from God that enriches the relationship of the spouses. As a passion sublimated by a love respectful of the dignity of the other, it becomes a ‘pure, unadulterated affirmation’ revealing the marvels of which the human heart is capable.

What’s more, Francis writes that sex is “a kind of spontaneity” in which “the human person becomes a gift,” an “interpersonal language wherein the other is taken seriously, in his or her sacred and inviolable dignity,” leading to the kind of joy that is “an expansion of the heart.”

Is there a better illustration of Francis’ vision than Baldwin’s words? For Baldwin, sex is filled with spontaneity, wonder, joy; it’s both spiritual and frankly physical, an occasion for humor and vulnerability. It calls us to something better, even if we usually fall short of that call. In short, it’s an encounter of the most human kind. Exactly as Francis describes it.

Of course, Baldwin’s narrator, David, is remembering an experience with his (male) friend Joey, while Pope Francis dutifully recites the Synod Fathers’ insistence that “there are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar or even remotely analogous to God’s plans for marriage and the family.” But Baldwin’s writing echoes the examples of so many of our LGBT friends and neighbors, and, in Amoris Laetitae, Francis tells us that the examples of our friends and neighbors—more than general rules—are what precisely what we should be paying attention to.

My latest post at the Ploughshares blog focuses on an encounter I had in a Havana taxi with a middle-aged European sex tourist and his jinetera, or bought girlfriend.

It’s a story I’ve thought about telling on this blog several times, because we talk about natural law a lot here. And, sitting in the backseat, watching that fat, fatuous, hairy-eared old man paw the girl next to him, and knowing they would soon be in bed together because he was paying to make it so, one word came to my mind: unnatural.

I think that reaction is pretty normal. When I tell the story to friends, their response usually starts with a shiver of disgust. I think it’s fair to say that prostitution is less socially acceptable today than it has been in the past. There’s evidence, for example, that men are much less likely to pay for sex now than they have been in the past, and Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner have argued that falling demand for bought sex has drastically reduced prostitutes’ earnings over the past century.

We see this in cultural expressions, too: today’s lit world is hardly the same as the one where “Norman Mailer told Updike he should get back in the whorehouse and stop worrying about his prose style.”

If folks on the religious right are going to stick to the idea that the Sexual Revolution has reduced our sexual ethic to consent, they need to reckon with that shiver. Denny Burk, for example, just responded to Belinda Luscombe’s new Time piece on the dangers of porn by lamenting, “We are at a place in our culture in which sexual morality has been reduced to consent.” Further, he says, it has “delivered to us a generation of men who think of women as objects to be used and abused for their sexual pleasure.”

But the declining demand for prostitution suggests to me that, today, sexual morality has not been reduced to consent. When it involves adults, prostitution is consensual.

Further, the idea that this generation of men (more than previous generations!) thinks of women as objects for use and abuse is a truly bold and hard-to-defend claim. I’d say the reason visiting prostitutes has become less socially acceptable is because it’s harder and harder now to think of women as objects. I know that’s what got me in the colectivo: looking at the guy, I wondered, Why on earth would you have sex with a woman who’s only doing it for the money? Prostitution starts to become unthinkable when you care what the woman thinks.

In other words, when women have a voice in sexual matters, prostitution naturally tends to decline. The same could be said for other conservative freakout-bait, like incest and polygamy. While you may hear advocates for those things using the language of the Sexual Revolution, culturally, those things are less prevalent in modern societies than in traditional ones.

I don’t expect this to convince many commenters on the right, who have invested so much in the narrative of moral decline that they can’t get their minds around any type of good news. If, for you, data showing teenagers are having less sex is a sign that we’re losing our cultural virility, then you can certainly see decreasing prostitution as a symptom of our porn-addled decadence. But I write it anyway, as a reminder that there is another vision of sexual ethics, and that there are other narratives to explain our world.

Plus, I’ll take any excuse to post photos from Cuba. Pico Iyer is right: it’s the easiest place in the world to take pictures.

Anthony Esolen’s recent article at Crisis, “What Would Our Ancestors Think of Us?” is, well, classic Esolen. He starts by comparing modernity to an open sewer, then imagines a conversation between a modern time-traveller and his ancestors, who despair at the state of things in 2016. “How then shall we live?” Esolen imagines them asking.

In an off-key moment, Esolen notes that now “there are far more women in the workplace than ever before,” and that “we have cracked the back of public racism, so that there are no more segregated hotels or restaurants or schools or businesses.”

I assume Esolen includes these observations as concessions to things modernity has gotten right, though the part about women working might be intended as further indictment. There’s certainly no acknowledgment of the fact that these two (pretty important!) developments would shock and appall many of our ancestors.

If the time-traveler were to show his ancestors a photo of a black family in the White House, does Esolen imagine they would congratulate him? Or would their faces darken as one of them asks, again, “How then shall we live?”

And then there’s this:

There is a country road that straggles its way over a mountain nearby. Lovers go there and pull over at a lookout, where they listen to music and engage in what is called ‘necking.’ It never goes beyond that, because most of them are pretty good kids and understand that bearing children is for marriage, and so is the child-making thing. That understanding allows them to be there in the first place. Innocence – even such compromised and sometimes failing innocence as we possess in a healthy culture – makes for freedom. You will have to tell the audience that there is no necking anymore. You will tell them that, as a rule, it is either sex or nothing. For the worst or the weakest among us, then, there is danger and heartbreak and, eventually, the protective callus of nihilism, even the shedding of blood. For the purest among us, and the most responsible, there is loneliness.

Marvel at that, reader. Seriously, re-read it. Of all the Anthony Esolen paragraphs in the world, it may be the Anthony-Esolen-iest.

As with many of Esolen’s points, it’s mostly disconnected from the real world. In the real world, teenagers are less likely to have sex today than they have been at any point in the past twenty five years. And in the real world, plenty of teenagers were engaging in the ‘child-making thing’ at those lovers’ lanes in the 1950s, when teen pregnancy rates were much higher than they are today.

The problem isn’t just that Esolen is wrong–the problem is that Esolen writes like he doesn’t know a single real, live teenager. Teenagers today don’t ‘neck’? Being ‘pretty good’ means a life of loneliness? I’d love to walk Esolen around the school where I work–a school full of good kids–to see if he could maintain those assertions afterward. Just like I’d love for Patrick Deneen to meet my students and still try to say that they’re “perfectly hollowed vessels, receptive and obedient, without any real obligations or devotions.”

But the thing is, Esolen does know real, live teenagers. He teaches at a university; he has a family. He just doesn’t know real, live teenagers. You get what I mean? His hatred for modernity completely blinds him to the world around him. Which frequently makes his writing, well, kind of silly.

Which is a shame because his question, What would our ancestors think of us?, is a crucial one. I’ve been listening to an audio version of Tiny Beautiful Things, a collection of Cheryl Strayed’s Dear Sugar literary advice columns, on my drive home lately. Last week, I got to the devastating letter written by a man grasping for reasons to go on after losing his 22-year-old son to a drunk driver. “How then shall I live” is a good approximation of the question at the heart of that man’s letter.

Strayed uses her own mother’s death to connect to the man’s grief. “The kindest and most meaningful thing anyone ever says to me,” she says, “is ‘Your mother would be proud of you. Finding a way in my grief to become the woman who my mother raised me to be is the most important way I have honored my mother.”

You all know that in the past few years I’ve lost my mother and both grandmothers. I think about them often. Like Strayed, I think about how to be the person they and the generations before them raised me to be.

I think about my great-grandfather, too, whom I never met. Recently on Instagram I shared some letters he wrote, with doodles on the back, to my mom while he was touring Europe. I marvel at his voice, his humor, his knowledge of my mom and her interests. And I try to emulate that. Is my love for my daughter as clear to her as he made his love for my mom?

So that question, What would my ancestors think of me?, stays at the front of my mind. It guides how I think, how I parent, how I teach.

But remember, Strayed is writing to a man whose life was centered in his kid. For him, she says, the goal is to “be the man [his son] didn’t get to be,” because “to be anything else dishonors him.” In other words, the influence can–it should— go both ways. We can’t just ask: What would our ancestors think of us? We also have to ask: What will our children think?

When I make Esolen’s question personal, What would my ancestors think of me?, I don’t see a golden past uniting in a line of moral consensus that breaks down in my mom’s generation (or in mine). Instead, I see major disagreements between every generation. Not rancorous disagreements, but big ones, rifts that touch on the core values of race, religion, sex, gender roles, marriage. And I see that, in many of those disagreements, the elder generation was wrong. My mom’s outspoken opposition to racism upset some of her family’s very traditional southern understandings; my grandmother’s gender non-conformity (she was outdoorsy, tomboyish, independent, and raised my mom on her own) troubled my traditional and status-conscious great-grandmother.

To my ancestors’ credit, in many of those generational rifts, the elders recognized they needed to learn from their children. This happened not because they were weak but because they recognized themselves as fallible, and not because they didn’t care about their moral example but because they knew their moral example included the grace of admitting their errors. “He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own proves the width of my own,” said Whitman. “He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.”

Unsurprisingly, Esolen uses LGBT issues as the ultimate measure of how far we’ve fallen. Explain Caitlyn Jenner to your ancestors, he says. Explain gay marriage. The thing is, many of us have done just that. After my sister-in-law’s wedding, my grandmother saw pictures online. “I didn’t know [my sister-in-law] had met a man,” she said when she called. She didn’t, I told her. She married a woman. My grandmother paused, and then replied: “Well, I think that’s lovely.”

My first piece for the Ploughshares blog is up now. It’s on the complicated relationship between jazz legend Ornette Coleman and his (and my) hometown, Fort Worth. I’ve been thinking about this one since Coleman died last summer, so I’m really glad to see it published. To summarize, I argue that what complicated Ornette’s relationship to the city was the race issue, and I suggest that his story can be seen as another example of James Baldwin’s experience of the “great shock” of watching cowboy movies as a kid, and facing the realization that “although you are rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians are you.”

And the timing is really interesting: just last week I was back in Fort Worth for my annual family trip to the Stock Show and Rodeo, the city’s tremendous, month-long cowboy extravaganza. Guess what greeted Stock Show visitors this year as they looked for parking along University Avenue?

A line of about a dozen old men waving Confederate flags. (Note: I didn’t get a picture of all of them. There were several more just out of view.)

Sigh.

1. On Quotes and Tattoos

If this blog had arms, I would tattoo this quote from Michael Curry around its bicep:

“Our commitment to be an inclusive church is not based on a social theory or capitulation to the ways of the culture, but on our belief that the outstretched arms of Jesus on the cross are a sign of the very love of God reaching out to us all.”

For the other arm, I might go with this one from Jim Naughton: “We can’t repent what isn’t a sin.”

Those phrases came, of course, in response to the decision by the Anglican Primates Meeting to suspend the Episcopal Church from decision-making bodies for three years as a result of its support for LGBT rights, including marriage. That decision is disappointing, though, as the Reverend Mike Angell outlines here, it won’t change anything in the day-to-day life of the Episcopal Church. Nor will it result in the church being kicked out of the Anglican Communion, or anything like that.

 2. The Episcopal “Consequence” and the Religious Right

The reaction to the vote by American conservatives is exactly why I’ve paused my conversations with the Religious Right. Here’s old favorite Dwight Longenecker, for example, with “Seven Ways the Episcopalians Will React to the Suspension.”

What bothers me about that post?

The pointlessness of it all.

Before reading a word of response from the Episcopal Church, Longenecker decided we’d be wrong.  If we weren’t too prideful, we’d be too hurt. If we accepted the decision stoically, we’d be “false martyrs,” and if we argued against it, we’d be “counter-attacking” with ruthless rage. The guy who complains we’re wishy-washy Moralistic Therapeutic Deists was now predicting we’d be too defiant.

And I don’t even know what to do with this lovely “prediction”: “The African bishops will be portrayed as homophobic gay killers. They will be portrayed as ignorant jungle bunnies who ought to mind their own business. It will get racist and it will get ugly.”

Sigh.

To give you an idea of just how little Longenecker knows about the church to which he once belonged, here’s Prediction 7: “The Episcopal Church of the USA will leave the Anglican Communion and become just another one of the nearly 150 Anglican style breakaway churches.”

And here’s the end of Curry’s statement: “God is greater than anything. I love Jesus and I love the church. I am a Christian in the Anglican way. And like you, as we have said in this meeting, I am committed to 'walking together' with you as fellow Primates in the Anglican family."

As Ruth Gledhill put it, that is “a genuine turning of the other cheek. He is not threatening to walk away, he is pledging his Church to walk together with all the Primates of the Anglican Communion.”

Does Longenecker see that? No. Or, if he does, he writes it off as “false martyrdom.”

See how it works? There’s literally no response that the Episcopal Church could offer that would satisfy writers like him. Apart, of course, from renouncing all of the theology and moral logic that has led it to its current position.

But, oh, yeah. Longenecker says that theology and moral logic don’t exist. See Prediction 1: “Their response will not be with reasoned argument, proof for same sex marriage from the Scriptures, the church fathers and the tradition of the church. This is not only because there is no such proof, but because they have abandoned the whole idea of objective truth long ago.”

Now, everyone knows that’s untrue. The Christian case for gay marriage has been elucidated over and over and over and over again, with reason and with reference to Scriptures and the tradition of the church. Even secular writers, like Damon Linker, and orthodox Catholics, like Marc Barnes and Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, get that the current push for gay rights unfolds from the basic precepts of Christianity.

If writers like Longenecker want to disagree with the logic that reaches the Episcopal Church’s progressive ends, fine. We can have a conversation. But if they want to pretend it doesn’t exist, if they just stick their fingers in their ears and say lalalalala… I can’t hear you, what’s the point of talking to someone like that?

3. What’s the Point of Talking to Someone Like That?

Sigh again. The point of talking to someone like that is that the example of my Presiding Bishop demands it. Seriously, how can I read Curry’s words and not feel a responsibility to stand with him in rebuke, and both forcefully with all the compassion I can muster, make and remake the arguments that folks like Longenecker want to pretend are not there?

Curry is a perfect example of why my heroes have always been Episcopalians.

 4. A Pattern Language

On a different note, yesterday Rod Dreher pointed out this piece by architect Christopher Alexander. If you’re not familiar with Alexander’s classic book A Pattern Language, definitely check it out. One of my wife’s professors made her buy it in college, and it has been one of my favorite books on our shelf ever since.

Why do I like it so much? I don’t know. A Pattern Language is about, as Dreher puts it, “which architectural patterns produce buildings that please us.” It’s sort of a doorstop-thick Elements of Style for designers, full of bold-type commands like “Wherever paths run along the edge of buildings, build arcades, and use the arcades, above all, to connect up the buildings to one another, so that a person can walk from place to place under the cover of arcades.” Or, “Build waist-high shelves around at least a part of the main rooms where people work.”

I guess what I like about it is what Alexander identifies in this new essay: behind all of these “rules” and commandments is an idea that we can experience the divine in the physical. It’s a sense that Dreher calls sacramentalism, and it’s a notion that always enchants me, whether it comes from Andre Dubus writing about the sacredness of making sandwiches for your daughter or from Casey Cep writing about writing:

One way of understanding the sacraments, perhaps best articulated by liturgist Gordon Lathrop, is that simple things become central things. When Christians refer to the bath and the table, they refer not only to the specific sacraments of bathing and eating, but they point also to the sacramental character of every bath and every table. The setting apart of one table and one bath shows forth the splendor of all tables and all baths.

NOTE: I’m treating this very poetic essay as a piece of autobiographical nonfiction, since that’s how it’s framed in the Introduction to Number 4, Volume 15 of New World Writing, where it was published. Bergman writes both fiction and nonfiction, but this piece is not listed as either on her website. I found it through this essay by Nick Ripatrazone, who also treats it as nonfiction. Bergman’s fiction, including the story “Housewifely Arts,” deals with similar themes.

On New Year’s Eve, I mentioned Megan Mayhew Bergman’s essay “How to Make Collard Greens.” In my last post I wrote about gender and emotional labor. Today I want to tie those two things together, because while I think Bergman’s essay is worth reading  on its own, I also think it’s a great illustration of what we mean when we say “emotional labor.”

Before I start, though, let me confess my personal attachment to the piece. In one of my favorite passages on writing, Gaston Bachelard says:

Thus, very quickly, at the very first word, at the first poetic overture, the reader who is ‘reading a room’ leaves off reading and starts to think of some place in his own past. You would like to tell everything about your room. You would like to interest the reader in yourself, whereas you have unlocked a door to daydreaming. The values of intimacy are so absorbing that the reader has ceased to read your room: he sees his own again.

Basically, according to Bachelard, good writing is when you describe your childhood home and in doing so cause your readers to think about their childhood homes.

The thing is,  “How to Make Collard Greens” rhymes so fully with my own life that it sometimes feels like Bergman’s actually writing about my house, just with some of the furniture rearranged. I found the essay last fall, when I was looking for nonfiction to teach my new class. I was immediately drawn to the title, because, as I’ve written, collard greens are an important symbol of continuity in my family—to me, and to my grandmother, who passed away last April. What made me catch my breath was one of the ingredients that Bergman’s grandmother uses in the piece: hog jowl.

My grandmother also insisted on using hog jowl (she pronounced it hog jole) in her New Year’s Day hoppin’ john. Ham hock wouldn’t do, nor salt pork. Definitely not bacon. In case you’ve never tried, hog jowl isn’t easy to find in every American city. It was not easy to find in exurban Tulsa, where my grandmother was living during my mom’s last years.

I can still see my mom rolling her eyes at her mom, in those hectic days between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, for adding one more errand to her list. The way she could turn into a 50-year-old teenager: Yes, mother. We’ll get the hog jowl.

Mom wouldn’t even eat the hoppin’ john. Like Bergman, my mom turned her nose up at the dish. I don’t know why, exactly. Bergman claims that she didn’t like the smell of the pot, and that she thought making collards on New Year’s was a “superstitious and country” tradition. I suspect my mom would have said much the same, but I also think there was some underlying stubbornness behind it, some attachment to an ancient rebellion.

My mom died of cancer in 2009. Bergman’s evocations of the ugliness of chemo and radiation reminded me of her last months, which my grandmother also witnessed. And Bergman writes about saving her mother’s voicemails: I did that, too.   

In other words, I picked up this essay to read about my grandmother, found myself reading about my mom, and even more than that found myself enmeshed in the relationship between the two. In any event, I’ve been reading this essay—for months—to remember. In that reading, the collard greens mean continuity, and the theme of the essay is loss.

But now that I’ve been thinking about emotional labor, something that should have been obvious has become much clearer to me.

In “How to Make Collard Greens,” the greens aren’t just an emblem of continuity; they’re also an emblem of care. The author hopes (against hope) the dish’s vitamins will cure her mother-in-law; another part of her hopes its good luck will protect her family in the coming year.

This realization has re-centered the essay for me. It’s no longer (for me) just about my mom and my grandmother; it’s about the woman who held me together when I was falling apart from both of those losses. It’s about my wife. She’s the woman who asked my grandmother for her collard green recipe, delighting her. She’s the woman who made sure I called my mom and grandmother when they were alive.  

Somehow, the first few times I read “How to Make Collard Greens” I glided right over the fact that the author was taking care of her mother-in-law, not her mother. The husband in the story is not exactly absent—the piece is addressed to him, in fact—but, rereading, it’s striking how much of the work of family-making falls on the author. And Bergman’s essay makes clear just how devastating that work can be. Here’s an early passage on the decision to have kids:

I would like grandchildren, she said one night over dinner.

What I couldn’t say was this: it is strange to make love in the face of grief.

Another thing I couldn’t say: I am not ready.

And another: I may never be ready.

There are so many layers to that: the work of grieving acting against the responsibility the author feels for providing grandchildren, which in turn acts against the author’s personal fears about pregnancy (“I was afraid of babies and afraid of miscarriage and afraid of everything,” Bergman writes).

Passages like that illustrate the complexity and pervasiveness of the emotional labor typically expected of women. As a result, the piece offers a powerful literary complement to a quickly-expanding conversation on the subject. It’s also great—if anguishing—reading.

One day early in our marriage, when my wife and I were living off of Allen Parkway in Houston, some relatives were coming over for dinner and we were trying to get the apartment clean. I thought maybe she was overdoing it. I was 22 or so, not far removed from the days when I’d entertain my parents in a dorm room with an unmade bed. Even though I was growing up quickly (if it had been just me, I definitely would have straightened up some) I couldn’t believe how stressed she was getting.

I tried to make my case: “They’re family, H. They’re not going to be judging us.”

“No, they won’t be judging us,” she replied. “They’ll be judging me.”

We’ve always had what I think of as an egalitarian relationship. We value and support each other’s careers, and I try to make sure that I do as much of the housework as she does. But that moment showed that even when I do the work that goes into keeping up our home, there’s another level of work, of taking on responsibility, that tends to fall to her, and not to me.  

If you’re a heterosexual man, single or in a relationship, and you’re still looking for a resolution for 2016, please read and bookmark this document. It’s a compilation (more than 70 pages) of an incredibly rich discussion thread at the website MetaFilter on the phenomenon of “emotional labor.” If you’re not familiar with the term, “emotional labor” originally referred to paid work, coded as feminine, that was thought to depend on nurturing or supporting others. Jobs like teaching, nursing, working as a secretary. But the phrase can also refer to a sort of unpaid and invisible labor that, in families, is almost always performed by women. The thread catalogues an exhausting variety of this type labor, it responds to major objections to the idea that emotional labor exists or unduly falls on women, and it explores the reasons that men—even progressive men—think they can or should avoid such work.

Basically, emotional labor is care. Caring for, caring about, taking care of others. As commenter Lyn Never puts it in the opening to the document:

“I often talk about emotional labor as being the work of caring. And it’s not just being caring, it’s that thing where someone says, ‘I’ll clean if you just tell me what to clean!’ because they don’t want to do the mental work of figuring it out. Caring about all the moving parts required to feed the occupants at dinnertime, caring about social management. Caring about noticing that something has changed—like, it’s not there anymore, or it’s on fire, or it’s broken.

It’s a substantial amount of overhead, having to care about everything. It ought to be a shared burden, but half the population is socialized to trick other people into doing more of the work.”

I admit it: I’ve said, “I’ll clean if you just tell me what to clean.” And though I said that so I could feel like I was doing my part at home, I was really just off-loading the responsibility for thinking about keeping house onto my wife. And that’s a form of laziness. Or maybe it’s better to call it a form of immaturity, because it’s the thinking of a dependent, a child. It’s the type of thinking that gives life to the common wives’ lament that having husband is like having another child in the house.

Another illustration: three or four of my female relatives are Facebook friends with my wife, but not with me. Why? Because, for them, Facebook is a means of family communication, and family communication is a thing women do.

Those “manliness” websites (secular and religious) that teach you how to, I don’t know, shoot a musket or escape to a scotchy man cave: why don’t they focus more on this stuff? Why don’t they teach how to care for aging parents, how to organize a family schedule, or how to plan a week of meals on a budget?* More to the point, why don’t they emphasize the importance of doing these things? These are the basics of being a grown-up in the 21st Century and, whatever you think about the value of the idea of “manliness,” if you can’t be a grownup, you can’t be a man.

With that in mind, here are a few basic steps you can take to be a better man in 2016:

Notice who’s doing the emotional labor in your life. Thank them. Read the MetaFilter thread and think about how it compares to your life. Is your sister the one who always organizes family gatherings? Is your wife the one who makes sure you’re occasionally calling to check in on your parents? Let them know you’ve noticed. As several commenters on the thread point out, part of what makes emotional labor so burdensome is that it often goes unremarked. Correct that.

Try to carry your own emotional weight. We’re humans, and we’re interconnected, and we all need help with certain things. But the point is that you try to do what you can for yourself. You can keep on top of your own social appointments; you can help your kids write thank you notes for their Christmas gifts, even if your handwriting isn’t as good as your wife’s.

Try to return the favors you’ve been given. Again, we all need help with certain things, so make a habit of noticing and tending to the daily needs of the people you’re connected to. And then take it another step, and try to give the gifts of time and leisure to the people that have supported you.  

Doing this doesn’t make you Feminist of the Year. It’s just being a grown up, and balancing out an unsupportable and unjustifiable imbalance. The bad news is that emotional labor is work and, like all work, it can be frustrating and tedious. The good news is that it’s meaningful work. And, as any manliness website will tell you, meaningful work, done well, brings joy.

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*I should point out here that one manliness website, the Art of Manliness, does occasionally post this sort of thing. On their website, you can learn how to write a thank you note, how to wrap a gift, and how to cook spaghetti carbonara. But the point is that this sort of work should be something men do everyday, not just on special occasions or when trying to impress a new girlfriend. As one commenter puts it in the MetaFilter thread, it’s actually more frustrating to women that men do emotional labor at the start of relationships and on special occasions, because it makes it seem that “for a lot of men, these are the means to an end, where the end is a relationship where they never have to do these sorts of things again.”

In 2015, I finished my PhD, got a new job, started sending my writing elsewhere, and basically abandoned this blog—in part because I got a new job and started sending my writing elsewhere, and in part because the Religious Right’s reaction to Obergefell sent me into a spiral of despair. I mean it. When I wrote a post breaking up with the Catholic Right in July, I thought was being tongue-in-cheek. But every time thereafter I sat down to write something in response to Esolen or Longenecker or Ryan T. Anderson, my heart said meh.

Still, I miss writing here, and so even if my focus changes a little bit in the future, I’m going to try to get blogging again in 2016.

Here’s a quick review of the year in Letters.

I. Some posts I’m glad I wrote:

1.     William Buckley, not Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Bull Connor. This post (or maybe it was the follow-up, On Courage and Coming Out) got me blocked on Twitter by Robert George. I also got blocked by Rod Dreher & Rorate Caeli at about the same time.

2.     Women Reading: Fragonard & Carrie Schneider. It’s just so pleasant to look at.

3.     Posts on my family: The World Sucks and Nothing Makes it Better, A Quick Post on Remembering, and The Father’s Day Paradox That Isn’t. These aren’t my most popular posts but, as I wrote in one:

We remember each other not with things, but with words.

And, as much as I write this blog for others, to advocate and persuade, I also write it for myself, to remember: little things, like the article that captured my attention last Tuesday, and big things, like what it’s like to be married to H this year, what it’s like to have a four-year-old daughter. And my mom.

 4.     Manliness and Joan Didion. I sent this post to The Millions, and they published it in July. The Word Press Freshly Pressed site picked it up shortly after. The timing was propitious, since I was reeling then from the fact that I had graduated without an academic job. My joblessness was totally predictable given the state of the job market, but it was still disappointing. So I needed that validation. The Millions’ acceptance of that post spurred me to send writing to other places, and within two months I had been published at Religion Dispatches, Essay Daily, and Sojourners.

By the way, I just got back from another ranch trip with my daughter. I’m not working there regularly anymore, but we still get out there when we can, and she still follows me around with her little clippers.

 II. One Fight I Wish I Had Picked: Sticking up for the Pres’s Christianity. 

Nobody knows what goes on inside another’s heart. Which is why I get frustrated when it’s taken for granted that our president doesn’t really mean it when he calls himself a Christian. That dismissal is emblematic of the general invisibility of progressive Christianity in our culture. Too often, both progressives and conservatives assume that progressive (or liberal, or whatever term you like) Christians aren’t “real” Christians.  

I had a couple of chances to push back against that assumption this year— I could have said something following the publication of Obama’s conversation with Marilynne Robinson, for example. But the moment I really wanted to write about was his note-perfect response to the Mother Emmanuel shootings in Charleston. His eulogy for Rev. Clementa Pinckney, a 40-minute exposition on the nature of grace, was a powerful marriage of Christian theology and practice, and an example of both what Christianity can be in the modern world, and why we need it so much.

It was a devastating speech. Like his talk earlier this year at Selma, it deserves to be revisited again and again, especially by Christians. Ironically, because it came immediately after the Obergefell decision, it occurred at the exact moment that Peter Leithart insisted in First Things that now “Theology has no public standing, no persuasive force in the culture at large.”

That moment perfectly illustrated the right’s blindness to the very existence of liberal Christianity, and I’m sorry I missed the chance to write about it.

 III. Two Projects I Regret Leaving Unfinished:

I never finished blogging about Anthony Esolen’s Defending Marriage or Robert Reilly’s Making Gay Okay. Bummer. Maybe next year.

  IV. Two Things I’m Glad I Read But Haven’t Shared Yet:

1.     This post by Elizabeth Duffy: “The Most Intimate Encounter.”

2.     Megan Mayhew Bergman’s “How to Make Collard Greens.” My grandmother, who passed away in April, made collard greens every January 1st. I discovered this essay earlier this year, and I’ve re-read it a couple of times in the past few days as I’ve been zipping around to different grocery stores and butchers shops, trying to find the hog jowls that my grandmother insisted were essential to her recipe.

 V. Three Blogs I’ll Never Stop Sharing:

Sorry but I’m not sorry if you’re sick of me mentioning them.  

1.     Bill Lindsey’s Bilgrimage

2.     Michael Boyle’s A Sound of Sheer Silence

3.     Casey Fleming’s (Non)Secular Girl

 VI. Three Things I’ll Be Doing in the New Year:

1.     Starting in February, I’ll be blogging once a month at Ploughshares.

2.     Maybe here, maybe elsewhere, I’ll be writing on Between the World and Me, and what it has meant to me as I’ve started teaching at a majority-minority high school.

3.     Finally, look for a new website from me soon. I’m not sure if I’m going to revive my Scholarly Texan blog or start something new, but I need a place where I can write about teaching, and about Latin American and African-American literature (the subjects of my dissertation), without necessarily trying to fit them into a letter to the Catholic Right.

Sojourners, a great journal dedicated to “faith in action for social justice,” is running something I wrote a while back on the desert as a metaphor. Here’s how it starts:

Last fall, in the middle of my first attempt at the academic job market, I got invited to a wedding in far west Texas. By “far west Texas” I mean Marathon, in the part of the state known as Big Bend, about a seven-hour drive from my house. It’s a beautiful drive, moving from the Hill Country of central Texas into grasslands that, somewhere between Sonora and Ozona, give way into the desert that leads up into the low mountains of Big Bend. Or at least I find the drive beautiful — another wedding guest complained at the rehearsal dinner that there was nothing to look at on the drive.

To be honest, I didn’t look at much on the way up, either, except my laptop and my phone. I sat in the passenger seat typing job documents the whole way. I think I actually applied to three jobs between Ozona and Fort Stockton. But I had some time to go for a run on Saturday morning, so I laced up my shoes and headed down Avenue D, across 1st street and a pair of train tracks. A quarter-mile later (no suburbs or outskirts in Marathon), I was in the desert.

Joan Didion says we’re “well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be” because “otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”

Well, 17-year-old me isn’t as mad as Didion’s younger self sounds, but he was out there in the desert nonetheless, asking, “Why haven’t you been back here?”

It hit me on that run that it had been almost seventeen years — half my life — since I had been in Big Bend country. Which is strange, because the area held an epic importance to me as a teenager. Which itself is strange because I only visited it twice. I guess those two visits made an impression.

The first came after my freshman year in high school, with my (Episcopal) church youth group. The second was the spring of my senior year, as a part of series of field studies for an ecology course at my (Catholic) high school. That second visit gave me words for what I had sensed but not understood on my first trip. Our teacher showed us that what from our bus windows looked empty and barren was actually teeming with life, and not just any life but the most extraordinary, the heartiest, the strangest and most beautiful plants and animals. We went out into the rocks and saw miracles of color. Bluebonnets twice the normal size. Mountain lions. Century plants. Cactus flowers. We learned that what looked “all the same” from the highway was actually an endless series of micro-climates, that, owing to tiny differences in sunlight, elevation, and temperature, creatures that couldn’t exist in one spot were thriving a hundred yards away. He made it impossible, in other words, for me to see a desert and say there’s nothing to look at.

[Unicorns?]

Today I came across this piece, by the Gospel Coalition’s Joe Carter, arguing that there’s no real demand for gay marriage. Using back-of-the-envelope math, Carter figures that, if LGBT Americans were as interested in marriage as straight Americans, we would expect that before Obergefell there would already have been 2.2 million gay marriages in the US. Instead, he says, there were 170,000. Catholic conservative Patrick Deneen caught Carter’s post and tweeted it, saying, “One might conclude that SSM was really a shrewd effort to eliminate Christianity from American life.”

Now, I don’t know what your facebook feed has looked like over the past few years, but mine has been full of gay marriages. In just the past two weeks, I’ve watched three gay couples celebrate their wedding anniversaries; all of them got married in the months after gay marriage became legal in their home states. My timeline is also full of gay friends preparing for their upcoming weddings, gay couples who recently got married, and straight friends posting pictures of themselves at same-sex weddings. I did a quick tally of my out gay friends on facebook, and found that about half are either married or engaged.

The plural of anecdote isn’t data, though, and it’s possible my friends are exceptional. It’s definitely true that they represent a demographic (educated, youngish) that’s more likely than average to get married (And more likely stay married. And more likely to support SSM. Make of that what you will). Still, it’s hard to believe the discrepancy between my experiences and Carter’s statistics could be that profound. Are my friends that rare?

I didn’t think so, so I checked Carter’s analysis. Surprise, surprise—I found some glaring flaws.

First, Carter uses data that ends in 2013, and presents it as if it came from later. The 170,000 number that Carter says represents the number of gay couples married before Obergefell actually comes from data collected between January and December of 2013. That matters—big time—because with marriage equality, dramatic legal changes happened in a very short time period. And that time period happens to be exactly the gap that Carter is ignoring.

Specifically, at the start of 2013, only nine states and the District of Columbia allowed gay marriage, and three of those (Washington, Maine, and Maryland) had had it for less than a month. And all of those states were clustered in the Northeast, with the exceptions of Iowa and Washington (where SSM started in December of 2012). Several more states gained gay marriage during 2013, but all of those were added in the second half of the year and therefore would not have been fully reflected in the data Carter cites.

So when Carter blithely bases his analysis on the assumption that “any lesbian or gay couple who wanted to get married could have either married in their own state or crossed state lines to get a marriage license”… um, well, no.

In fact, at the start of 2013, a gay couple in Austin would have had to travel 930 miles to get married in Des Moines; a couple in San Francisco would have had to go 800 miles to wed in Seattle; one in LA would have had to go at least 1100 miles. That’s not feasible for lots of couples.

Without that assumption, Carter’s argument falls apart: it turns out the number of gay marriages in 2013 wasn’t low because gays didn’t care about marriage; it was low because most gays in the US couldn’t get married then.

Carter misrepresents the timeline of SSM legalization elsewhere, too. “By that year,” Carter writes of 2014, “35 states allowed same sex marriage.” In fact, at the start of 2014, only 16 states performed legal gay marriages, and seven of those—including the largest, California, had only started in the last half of 2013. 

These timeline mix-ups—clear cut, factual mistakes that an honest writer (and I assume Carter is honest) will admit and correct—allow Carter to suggest that, at a time when virtually all LGBT Americans could legally wed, only 340,000 (roughly 4%) had chosen to do so.

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But even putting aside Carter’s chronology confusion, his suggestion is problematic because it takes an inappropriate point of comparison for LGBT marriage rates. He writes, “Based on those assumptions (all of which I think are more than plausible), we should expect to see 2.2 million same-sex marriages even before the Supreme Court ruling.”

Carter bases that number, 2.2 million, on the fact that nearly half of all American adults (49.8%) were married. Carter estimates that there are 8.5 million LGBT Americans, divides that by about half, and then pairs that 49.8% off.

But while it’s true that half of Americans are married, very few Americans get married in a given year. See the difference? 159 millions Americans were married in 2014, but all of those Americans didn’t wed in 2014. Some of them tied the knot in 2013, some in 2012, and some twenty, thirty, fifty years ago.

Furthermore, marriage isn’t a right that, when given, you can exercise like free speech. You can’t just walk outside and say, “I’m married!” You have to either a) be in a relationship with someone you want to marry (and not everyone is), or b) find someone you want to marry, build a relationship with them, and convince them to marry you. That takes time. And while we all loved watching couples rush down to the courthouse, the reality is that most people want a wedding, and that takes time to plan. I’ve written about my sister-in-law, for example: marriage became a real possibility for her when SSM was legalized in New York in July of 2011—that was the event that led her wife to propose—but she didn’t actually get married until December of 2012.

It’s absurd to suggest that, if gays were really interested in marriage, 2.2 million of them would have wed by 2013.

A more useful number to keep in mind is 6.8: that’s the number of weddings per 1000 Americans in 2012, the last year for which statistics are available. That means that only about 1.36% (.68% x 2) of Americans got married in 2012.

Let’s take a look, then, at Carter’s predicted SSM numbers keeping that number in mind. Let’s say that marriage became truly feasible for the vast majority of gay couples with its legalization in New York in July of 2011—which, again, is a BIG stretch. Over the next two years, if gay couples were as interested in marriage as straight couples, we would expect about 119,000 couples (238,000 individuals) to have married by July 2013. According to Carter’s estimate, 170,000 couples (340,000 individuals) had.

Now, we would expect the number for gays to be higher (maybe much higher) than that of straights due to pent-up demand. As best we can tell, it was higher. And, of course, some gays have been able to marry since 2004, so that skews things a bit. But, again, it’s simply not the case that marriage was feasible for most gays by 2013. Gays (like my sister-in-law) who married before Windsor faced geographical, financial, and legal barriers that straight couples did not, and they wed without any guarantee that their home states or the federal government would recognize their relationships. Given those facts, the number of couples who went ahead and jumped the broom is, in my opinion, pretty impressive.

The percentage of married LGBT Americans will undoubtedly increase over the coming years. How dramatically? I don’t know. Will it ever equal the 49.8% average of all Americans? Again, I don’t know, but that doesn’t really matter. The fact that some gays might not be interested in marriage is no reason to deny the right to all of them.

What is absolutely clear is this: my friends are not unicorns. My sister-in-law is not a mirage. Nor are they elaborate covers for some sinister secular plot to eliminate Christianity from American life. You can rest easy, Deneen. You’re welcome.

When you’ve been arguing with the religious right over gay marriage for a while, you get used to having certain comparisons thrown your way: gay marriage is like calling a circle a square, it’s like calling a tail a leg, calling a cat a dog, yada yada yada.

Here’s another common one: gay marriage is like saying 2 + 2 = 5.

Here’s Anthony Esolen, saying that with Obergefell the Supreme Court "has recently decreed that two and two are five”; here’s Ben Carson making the same analogy a year earlier.

The idea is that the Church, and the wiser elements of society, are supposed to reject that sort of funny math and stand up for the good old square arithmetic that we all learned in grammar school. Rod Dreher lays it out here in an exchange last year with Andrew Sullivan:

We have been over and over and over this, and all the vehemence and foot-stomping in the world will not change basic Christianity on this point, and certainly will not change Roman Catholicism. Two plus two will always equal four in Catholicism.

Dreher, in Dreherian fashion, follows that with a dig at my church: “There is a church that takes Andrew’s line on sex; it’s called the Episcopal Church.” No surprise there.

Now, I’ve got really smart readers, so what follows may not be news to many of you, but I’m not a math guy, and this blew me away when I read it last year in Jordan Ellenberg’s “How Not to Be Wrong” column at Slate. Ellenberg, a mathematician at the University of Wisconsin, asks, “Is the repeating decimal 0.999… equal to 1?” And he answers yes, it is. 

Here’s the reasoning:

Everyone knows that

0.333… = 1/3

Multiply both sides by 3 and you’ll see

0.999… = 3 / 3 = 1

If that doesn’t sway you, try multiplying 0.999… by 10, which is just a matter of moving the decimal point one spot to the right.

10 x (0.999…) = 9.999…

Now subtract the vexing decimal from both sides.

10 x (0.999…) - 1 x (0.999…) = 9.999… - 0.999…..

The left-hand side of the equation is just 9 times (0.999…), because 10 times something minus that something is 9 times the aforementioned thing. And over on the right-hand side, we have managed to cancel out the terrible infinite decimal, and are left with a simple 9. So we end up with

9 x (0.999…) = 9.

If 9 times something is 9, that something just has to be 1—doesn’t it?

Ellenberg ties his answer to a handful of fascinating paradoxes, including Grandi’s series, named after the 18th Century mathematician who argued that, despite appearances, the sum of the series 1 – 1 + 1 – 1 + 1 – 1 +… equals ½.

Like I said, I this blew my mind. And then, when I read a) that Guido Grandi was a Benedictine monk who tied his findings to the mysteries of creation and b) that divergent series like Grandi’s have been called “the invention of the devil,” my parabolic mind got to work.

Because there is a lesson in there, and I think the lesson is this: the Church’s job is not to teach 2 + 2 = 4. If that’s all she does, then what’s her point? You can learn that counting on the skeletal fingers of Christopher Hitchens’ inanimate corpse.

[Sorry for the image, but it’s the least church-y thing I could come up with.]

 This story hits all my favorite things: sports, marriage equality, Texas.

[photo from @erinmcleod18 / Twitter]

Houston Dash teammates Ella McLeod (née Masar) and Erin McLeod married immediately after the Women’s World Cup, and were back in Houston in time for the Dash’s July 12th game against the Chicago Red Stars.

[Got a box full of letters, think you might like to read.]

You know that feeling when you’re sixteen and you and your girlfriend/boyfriend are going through a weird patch? You hear they want some space, that they’re spending all this time with someone new? They’ve been slagging you off to their friends?

What do you do?

You make a mixtape.

Why?

It’s hard to say. Your motivation changes from song to song. Obviously, you’re sad—you want them to feel that. But you want to do it coolly, in a way that shows how stoically you’re dealing with all of this. Because maybe there’s a little part of you that thinks this is the way to win them back?

So you start with something cool, like Wilco. Then maybe go to something ironic, show you haven’t lost your sense of humor:

[Don’t you want me, baby?]

But sometimes you misstep: it’s hard to hold the balance between reminding them of the good times (which makes you sad) and playing it cool.

[The ride with you was worth the fall, Catholic Right.]

And honestly, there’s some jealousy: Who is this Benedict? When did that become an option? 

[Another version of me? Is she perverted like me?]

But then you read what they’ve been writing and realize that it’s all a bunch of adolescent fantasies and you wonder what the hell you ever saw in this person anyway. And you hear what they’ve been saying about you, and you’re all like Fucking go.

[Because I do know what’s good for me. And I’ve done what I could for you.]

[America, may God thy gold refine.]

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If you’re looking for some 4th of July reading to fill the time while you wait for fireworks, I recommend Ralph Ellison’s “Going to the Territory.”

It was published in his 1986 book of essays by the same name; originally, it was a speech Ellison gave at Brown University in honor of Inman Page, the first black graduate of Brown, who had also been the principal of Ellison’s segregated high school in Oklahoma City.

Why do I like it so much? And why should you read it today?

Well, it’s an argument for Ellison’s complicated, sometimes contradictory vision of America, which I would say is the dominant theme in all of his writing. It’s at once a conservative view—fully embracing the “irrepressible force” that Ellison says our Founding Fathers “set in motion over two hundred years ago with the founding of this nation”—and a radical one. “By seeking to move forward,” Ellison writes, “we find ourselves looking back and discovering with some surprise from whence we’ve come.” To know where to go from here, Ellison tells us, we have to look back—but when we do, we need to prepared to be surprised by we see.

“Going to the Territory” surprises us by giving us a glimpse of early-20th-century black culture where we don’t normally expect to find it: the prairies of the American West and Southwest. Ellison lovingly describes his Oklahoma City teachers (including Page and Page’s daughter, his music teacher Mrs. Zelia N. Breaux), and the ways those teachers sought to prepare their students for entry into mainstream society by inculcating them with bourgeois values. At the same time, Ellison describes the fertile, anti-bourgeois jazz community—he went to high school with Charlie Christian and grew up hearing Jimmy Rushing’s voice ringing through the neighborhood—that developed in a sort of (loving) opposition to those teachers.

By focusing on Oklahoma City and the communities that developed around black migration into the West, Ellison takes an American myth—westward expansion—and places black culture at its center. What’s unstated in the essay is that Ellison’s father, Lewis, served in the 25th Infantry Regiment of the US Army, one of the so-called “Buffalo Soldier” units that paved the way for the “taming” of the western territories. In other words, Ellison understood that placing blacks at the center of American myth was no mere conceit: it’s a fact of our history.