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As a cultural cherry on the top of the #gamergate cake, Matt Taylor’s confession is hard to beat. Convicted merely of being a clueless dude, who just happened to have helped land a fricking spacecraft on a comet, his tears strike me as another sad product of our over-polarized, over-politicized culture.

This weekend, as I was drinking some great coffee in L.A., I was re-reading Alan Watts on my Kindle. In The Way Of Zen, one of his greats, he wrote the following:

It was a basic Confucian principle that ‘it is man who makes truth great, not truth which makes man great.’ For this reason, ‘humanness’ or ‘human-heartedness’ was always felt to be superior to ‘righteousness’, since man himself is greater than any idea he may invent. There are times when men’s passions are much more trustworthy than their principles. Since opposed principles, or ideologies, are irreconcilable, wars fought over principle will be wars of mutual annihilation. But wars fought for simple greed will be far less destructive, because the aggressor will be careful not to destroy what he is fighting to capture.

Reasonable – that is, human – men will always be capable of compromise, but men who have dehumanized themselves by becoming the blind worshipers of an idea or an ideal are fanatics whose devotion to abstractions makes them the enemies of life.

Our culture is full to the brim of these righteous ideologues right now. Why are we shocked that so much cruelty and fanaticism reign?

Some gems from the weekend: the eighteenth century version of Fox News; the fashionista who made Thatcher punk; the vulnerability of post-Jäger “shot-faces”; the key themes of a sext life; Christopher Nolan’s religiosity in Interstellar; and the natural landscapes of religion.

My personal faves: the poems of Lucille Clifton; and Aquinas on his late-in-life doubt: “Everything I’ve written looks like straw”.

The most popular post of the weekend was What Washington Refuses To Admit; followed by Gruberism And Our Democracy.

We had a big boost in subscriptions late last week, thanks to a reminder email we sent out to lapsed subscribers whose credit cards, by and large, had expired. You can join the recently renewed here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month. A new subscriber writes:

Hi Andrew, saw you on Bill Maher Friday night and, as usual, I found myself agreeing with about 99% of what you said. (Don’t ask me what the other 1% is, I don’t know …).  I’ve been reading your stuff for at least 15 years, and I find The Dish to be one of the best reads around. Even when I don’t agree with what you are saying, I find that how you say it is rational, well thought out, and almost persuasive. On Maher’s show, the one thing I strongly agreed with was … why does the U.S. have to go over and fight ISIS, especially after the failures we’ve experienced there? Let them fight it out.

I’m partly disabled, living on SS Disability and a small pension from Disney, but the $20 bucks I just spent is worth much more than that. Keep up the good work, and get back on Maher!

“Almost persuasive!” We have a new slogan.

See you in the morning.

In The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, Rod Dreher chronicles his decision to return to the small town where he grew up following his sister’s death from cancer. In an interview about the book, he reveals the Catholic saint who inspired the book’s title:

St. Therese, for your readers who don’t know her, was a Catholic saint, who died at age 24. Died young of tuberculosis in a convent in France in the late nineteenth century. She was a nobody. Came from a faithful family, but she was a nobody. Kind of a flibbertigibbet within the convent. After she died, the Mother Superior sent one of the nuns into her room to collect her things, and they found her writings there. They started reading them, and the scales fell from their eyes. They’d realized they had something extraordinary there within their own community.

Within thirty years, Therese was declared a saint and not just a saint. Pope John Paul II on her 100th anniversary of her death declared her a Doctor of the Church, which for Catholics means she was one of the rare saints that has the power to teach the essence of Christianity. She’s recognized as a great teacher. What did she teach? She was just a 24-year-old girl. She taught simplicity. She taught holiness through simplicity. She called it her little way. My sister was not a Catholic. She was a Methodist and not a particularly well-informed Methodist at that, but I think she was a saint because she showed how the simple life in an out of the way place can lead to greatness and to holiness.

That’s the encouragement I want to bring to people who read the book: don’t think your life doesn’t mean anything. God sees, and the people around you see. You never know what God is going to do with that. We’re all part of the great chain. That’s what Dante says too. You see over and over in El Purgatorio about the meaning of community, how Dante has to relearn this about how the chains of connection between the living and the dead, between the people in the community pray for us. What can I do for you? That’s something I’ve had to learn, not because I consciously rejected community, but it’s so easy to forget.

Our Ask Dreher Anything archive is here.

This week, Dissent unlocked three classic pieces by Irving Howe. In “Strangers” (1977), he explored how American Jews came to find a place in national literature, writing that “with time we discovered something strange about the writing of Americans: that even as we came to it feeling ourselves to be strangers, a number of the most notable writers, especially Whitman and Melville, had also regarded themselves as strangers”:

[T]he Melville book that we knew was, of course, Moby Dick, quite enough to convince us of a true kinship. Melville was a man who had worked—perhaps the only authentic proletarian writer this country has ever known—and who had identified himself consciously with the downtrodden plebs. Melville was a writer who took Whitman’s democratic affirmations and made them into a wonderfully concrete and fraternal poetry. If he had been willing to welcome Indians, South Sea cannibals, Africans, and Parsees (we were not quite sure who Parsees were!), he might have been prepared to admit a Jew or two onto the Pequod if he had happened to think of it.

The closeness one felt toward Melville I can only suggest by saying that when he begins with those utterly thrilling words, “Call me Ishmael,” we knew immediately that this meant he was not Ishmael, he was really Isaac.

He was the son who had taken the blessing and then, in order to set out for the forbidden world, had also taken his brother’s unblessed name. We knew that this Isaac-cum-Ishmael was a mama’s boy trying to slide or swagger into the world of power; that he took the job because he had to earn a living, because he wanted to fraternize with workers, and because he needed to prove himself in the chill of the world. When he had told mother Sarah that he was leaving, oh, what a tearful scene that was! “Isaac,” she had said, “Isaac, be careful,” and so careful did he turn out to be that in order to pass in the Gentile world he said, “Call me Ishmael.” And we too would ask the world to call us Ishmael, both the political world and the literary world, in whose chill we also wanted to prove ourselves while expecting that finally we would still be recognized as Isaacs.

Megan Garber nods in agreement with Forrest Wickman’s declaration that, for the first time, with Interstellar, director Christopher Nolan’s “universe has a God, or something like one.” She remarks on the film’s echoes of Milton’s Paradise Lost and its organ-driven score, among other details:

There’s … a lot of talk of good and evil. There’s a lot of talk of faith. There’s a lot of talk of love—love that is explicitly not romantic (Interstellar is as asexual a blockbuster as you’ll find), but that is, in its best manifestation, selfless. None of which is to say that Interstellar is a Christian—or even a religious—film. It is not, and this is the point. The “they” is not necessarily a metaphysical being; Zimmer’s organ was chosen, he has said, for “its significance to science.” Good and evil, faith and love—these ideas, of course, extend far beyond religion.

What it is to say, though, is that Interstellar, like so many space movies before it, has adopted the themes of religious inquiry. The scope of space as a setting—the story that takes place within the context of the universe itself, across dimensions—has allowed Nolan, like so many filmmakers before him, the permission of implication. Nolan has said that one of his primary artistic influences is the postmodern author Jorge Luis Borges; you can, indeed, read Interstellar, in the most generous interpretation, as you would any complex piece of literature.

Alissa Wilkinson is on the same page:

To me it seems that Interstellar, perhaps more than any of Nolan’s films to date, positively resounds with religious—even Christian—stuff that might not ring as loudly if you weren’t steeped in it to begin with.

To wit: Cooper promises Murph he’ll return to earth, and she despairs of his return, then realizes he’s been talking to her and guiding her all along, which rings awfully sharply of the early Christian church’s assumption that Jesus would return within their lifetimes. And Cooper communicates with Murph through books (hello). He has “become” one of those beings who exists on more than three planes—you know, for a while at least, he’s omnipotent and omniscient and omnipresent. There’s the somewhat unavoidable new-Adam-and-Eve imagery near the end. And did anyone hear echoes of Lewis’s Space Trilogy?

But there’s also the biggest of big religious questions, like these: who are we? What are we made to be? (And should that be determined by others?) Are we worth saving? Can we save ourselves? And should we?

Brett McCracken adds some nuance to this view, noting that Interstellar “feels a bit like a three-hour church service set in the cathedral of space … yet God is not worshipped here or even discussed”:

Unlike similar films like last year’s Gravity or 1997’s Contact, which engaged questions of God and faith (Matthew McConaughey played a Christian leader in the latter), Interstellar exists in a world where God seems to have gone extinct alongside wheat and okra. Despite God’s absence in Interstellar, the film nevertheless feels “church-like” in its artistic grandeur, intellectual curiosity, and probing of big questions about life, death, sacrifice and love (“the only thing that transcends space and time”).

There is also a decidedly eschatological undercurrent to the film, with its themes of a doomed, burning planet and a hoped-for “escape” to a better place beyond the stars. In contrast to a film like Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, which accepts earth’s demise and humanity’s extinction with a sort of nihilistic relief, Interstellar sees it as an opportunity for rebirth and renewal. Though equally as secular as von Trier’s film, Nolan’s film is at least informed and haunted by a religious sense that believes in hope: new life out of the ashes, Lazarus-like resurrection.

In the midst of reminding the Church that it “exists for one reason only — to carry the story of Jesus forward in history,” James Carroll laments how that story has been obscured and distorted over time, especially “the way in which the full and permanent Jewishness of Jesus was forgotten, so much so that his story is told in the Gospels themselves as a story of Jesus against the Jews, as if he were not one of them”:

Imagined as a zealot who attacked the Temple, Jesus, on the contrary, surely revered the Temple, along with his fellow Jews. If, as scholars assume, he caused a disturbance there, it was almost certainly in defense of the place, not in opposition to it. The narrative denouement of this conflicted misremembering occurred in the 20th century, when the anti-Semitism of Nazism laid bare the ultimate meaning of the church’s religious anti-Judaism.

The horrified reckoning after the Holocaust was the beginning of the Christian reform that remains the church’s unfinished moral imperative to this day. Most emphatically, that reform must be centered in a critical rereading of the Gospel texts, so that the misremembered anti-Jewish Jesus can give way to the man as he was, and to the God whom he makes present in the lives of all who cannot stop seeing more than is before their eyes.

Such retrieval of the centrality of Jesus can restore a long-lost simplicity of faith, which makes Catholic identity — or the faith of any other church — only a means to a larger communion not just with fellow Jesus people, but with humans everywhere. All dogmas, ordinances and accretions of tradition must be measured against the example of the man who, acting wholly as a son of Israel, eschewed power, exuded kindness, pointed to one whom he called Father, and invited those bent over in the shadowy back to come forward to his table.

(Image: El Greco’s Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple, London version, circa 1600, via Wikimedia Commons)

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Laurie Goodstein traces how, over the past year, the Mormon church has quietly posted essays on its website that deal with some of the more controversial aspects of its history, from the ban on blacks in the priesthood to the origins of the Book of Mormon. These include four essays on polygamy, and one of the latest officially admits that Joseph Smith had up to 40 wives:

The essay on “plural marriage” in the early days of the Mormon movement in Ohio and Illinois says polygamy was commanded by God, revealed to Smith and accepted by him and his followers only very reluctantly. Abraham and other Old Testament patriarchs had multiple wives, and Smith preached that his church was the “restoration” of the early, true Christian church.

Most of Smith’s wives were between the ages of 20 and 40, the essay says, but he married Helen Mar Kimball, a daughter of two close friends, “several months before her 15th birthday.” A footnote says that according to “careful estimates,” Smith had 30 to 40 wives. The biggest bombshell for some in the essays is that Smith married women who were already married, some to men who were Smith’s friends and followers.

Marcotte applauds the attention given to the women involved:

The picture that accompanies Goodstein’s story—a statue of Smith gazing into the eyes of Emma, his first wife, that stands in the Temple Square in Salt Lake City—drives home how much the other 30-plus women in Smith’s life—including one who was just 14, and some who were still married to other men—have largely been ignored.

In that context, the lengthy essay posted at the Latter-day Saints website detailing Smith’s erratic history of coming up with varied reasons to marry more and more women feels surprisingly frank, particularly the details of how polygamy affected Emma, who married Smith before he had the revelation that God wanted him to be with all the ladies. “Plural marriage was difficult for all involved,” the essay reads. “For Joseph Smith’s wife Emma, it was an excruciating ordeal.” Indeed, quite a bit of emphasis is put on how confusing and miserable polygamy made many of its participants, including the men (though I remain skeptical that so many men would stick with the practice if it didn’t have some upsides).

Michael Peppard explains why this transparency is coming now:

Undoubtedly the past few years have been a “Mormon moment” in the United States. With high-profile public figures like Mitt Romney and Harry Reid, not to mention approximately fifteen members of Congress and counting, the previously persecuted religion has ascended to the upper tier of political power. Only Jews are more “overrepresented” in Congress, when measured as a ratio of seats to overall population (both religions claim about 1.7% of the population).

And with popular culture showing both fascination with and a kind of begrudging respect for Mormonism’s peculiarities—the Book of Mormon on Broadway; Big Love on HBO—the early 21st century is shaping up to be a period of mainstreaming for the LDS church. The “Information Age” catalyzed by the internet may also play a role.

And Elizabeth Dias looks ahead to the debates these admissions could start:

The Church may be talking about Smith’s marriages more openly, but the conversation will lead to topics far more complex than just polygamy. The disclosures raise deeper questions about how faith works. The essay explains that God sanctioned Smith’s polygamy for only a time. That prompts questions about who God is, how God acts, how humanity should respond to the divine, how divine revelation happens, and why it changes. That’s all on top of the particular revelation about polygamy itself. As the essay itself concludes, “The challenge of introducing a principle as controversial as plural marriage is almost impossible to overstate.”

After the celebrity photo hackings earlier this year, Jenna Wortham decided to explore “the way that our phones … foster intimate interactions that feel so personal and deep, despite being relayed through a machine.” She elaborates on why she started her “Everybody Sexts” project, which pairs illustrations of NSFW selfies with short interviews:

I think that everybody sexts. Not everyone sends nude photos, of course, for a variety of reasons. But many people I’ve talked to define a sext as anything sent with sexual intent, be it a suggestive Gchat exchange, a racy photo, a suggestive Snapchat, or even those aqua-blue droplets of sweat emoji.

I asked people I knew — and many I didn’t — to talk to me about sexts and the stories behind them, the risks, perceived and real, and why they did it, knowing that they could be shared beyond their control. Lastly, I asked them to share a nude that they had sent to someone. And so many people did, without hesitation, or requiring anything in exchange. I was floored by their openness, and the expanse of human emotions and experiences on display. What I discovered, mainly, is that sexting — like anything else done on our phones — was mostly just meant to be fun, for fun, grown folks doing what grown folks do.

How “K,” a 30-year-old writer in Chicago, describes her sext life:

I sent my first sext the very first second cell phones with cameras were invented. It was very posed — white sheets semi-covering artfully displayed boobs. Now, I send them whenever the mood strikes, or I feel like I look especially great. It has to be someone I’ve been seriously dating for a long time and someone who will be properly in awe of my magnificent everything. I would not send a nude to someone I was not in a trusted relationship with, and anyone in a trusted relationship with me knows better than to trifle with that trust.

I sent this [image] to my girlfriend in July, when she was off on tour with her band. She was sharing rooms with her bandmates every night and had zero privacy, and I wanted to torture her. She really, really liked it and sent me several desperate texts an hour for the rest of the day. This is the exact effect I hoped for.

Another entry:

S, 25
Cultural worker, Brooklyn

Q. Tell me about this image [seen above].
A. I sent this photo to my boyfriend, from his bedroom. He leaves much earlier for work than I do. I wanted to show him what he was missing.

Q. What was his response?
A. “Oh my lord.”

Keep reading here for more.

(Illustration by Melody Newcomb)

Noting the release of a new Jacques Tati box set from Criterion, Michael Wood recalls a standout scene from Playtime:

Playtime settles down into the masterpiece it finally is at a very specific moment: the satire vanishes, and you realise the work is not about the folly of advertising and conformity but about the way we enthusiastically build worlds we can’t live in – and live in them.

Hulot meets an old army friend on the street. The friend invites him into his brand-new flat for a drink, and we witness the whole thing from outside. The flat is on the ground floor and the living room has a vast picture window, as if domestic life were a department store display. Hulot greets the man’s wife and daughter, and takes his leave when they are all set to show him a home movie. The film we are watching is a silent one at this point because of the glass, or silent as far as its action is concerned: we can hear the buses and cars on the street. Then the camera moves slightly to the right, showing the next picture-window flat, different people, similar scene. After a while the camera lifts to show the flats on the next floor, and we now see four pretty much identical apartments (and scenes) at once. The effect is of a split screen, four separate shots combined. But the screen isn’t split, this is rectangular, quadruplicated city life. Why are the people so happy here? Why aren’t they screaming, as Philip Larkin might say. For good measure … one of the inhabitants of one of the flats turns out to be the man Hulot has been trying all day to see in his glassy office. Now he meets him on the street when the man walks his dog, and they have the conversation they have been failing to have.

From Neal Pollack’s entertaining 1,700-word opus titled “I Shat Myself In A Lexus Press Car”:

My house was about 14 miles away, most of it on open highway. I turned on the seat heaters, along with Sirius XM Radio. The station, I believe, was “Willie’s Roadhouse.”

Something unpleasant hitched in my gut.

Huh, I thought. That’s weird.

Then it hitched again. There was a gurgle, and a churn. Suddenly, I felt a strong pressing on my abdomen. It was very strange. I had eaten a light dinner that night. At the movies, Ben and I had shared a bowl of popcorn, and I’d had a beer, but it had been a long movie, and I wasn’t full.

But there it was.

My stomach gave an audible groan. I felt a full-on descent in my colon.

Oh no.

I began to sweat. My exit wasn’t for several miles. The station began to play Your Cheatin’ Heart, by Hank Williams.

Your cheatin’ heart

Will make you weep

You’ll cry and cry

And try to sleep…

I tried to focus on the road, but it was hard. My forehead began to melt. My stomach churned like the fetid waters beneath an urban pier. Whatever had invaded my gut insistently pressed downward. It had to come out.

Please God, I thought. No.

You’ll never guess where this ends.