Armor is not strength

21 Mar, 2026

A ☕️☕️☕️ read in seven parts.

I.

I have watched my son do the same thing at soccer practice, at flag football, at swim meets, at the edges of basketball courts in cold January gyms. The setting changes. He doesn’t.

He arrives, and then he waits. Not anxiously—that’s the first thing you notice once you know what you’re looking at. He isn’t hanging back because he doesn’t want to be there or because he’s afraid of getting something wrong. He’s watching. Taking in the other boys, their skill levels, their pecking orders, the particular social weather of this group on this day. He is, without knowing the word for it, assessing. And then, when he has seen enough, he moves—not tentatively but with a kind of considered confidence, as though he has been waiting for permission from his own perception.

Sometimes the action is athletic. Sometimes it’s social. Sometimes, once he has figured out where the group humor lives and how it works, it’s a well-timed joke that gets a laugh and earns him entry in a way that pushing to the front never would have. The restraint is not a withdrawal from participation. It is, somehow, its precondition.

I know this pattern from the inside because I recognize the feeling—the holding back, the watching, the reluctance to be the first one in. What stops me, standing on those sidelines, is that I know what I did with the same instinct. He contemplates and then goes. I contemplated and then, more often than not, didn’t. The watching became the thing itself. The waiting became permanent.

I am only starting to understand the difference between those two things. And most of what I’ve learned, I’ve learned from him.

II.

The Western has always known how to film a man who doesn’t draw.

It is one of the genre’s most reliable visual grammars: the crowd waiting, the hand hovering, the long beat of held breath before the explosion. The restraint is part of the choreography. It makes the violence more satisfying when it comes, the way a held note makes the resolution sweeter. This is not the virtue of restraint. It is restraint in service of force—tactical delay, the coiled spring. The Western celebrates it precisely because it guarantees a more devastating release.

This matters because the genre has shaped, more than most of us want to admit, the emotional vocabulary available to American men thinking about strength. The hero who waits is not waiting because he has learned something about the right ordering of power. He is waiting because he is better at violence than the man across from him, and he knows it, and he is going to prove it. The restraint is instrumental. It has no content of its own. Strip away the eventual explosion and there is nothing there—no account of what the holding back was for, no vision of what it might mean to hold back and not explode at all.

The genre occasionally troubles this, and those are the moments worth attending to.

The genre’s most honest attempt at something more is also one of its oldest.

High Noon is a film about a man who has every reason to leave and cannot make himself do it. Will Kane, the marshal of Hadleyville, is minutes from his wedding and his retirement when he learns that Frank Miller—a man he put away, a man who has promised to kill him—is arriving on the noon train. His new wife wants to leave. His deputies won’t stand with him. The town he has spent his career protecting finds reasons, one by one, to look away. Every person he trusts gives him the same advice: go. The math is simple. There is no good outcome for staying.

He stays.

What makes Kane interesting for our purposes is that his restraint is not tactical. He is not holding back to strike harder later. He is holding something else entirely—a sense of who he is and what that requires, a code that has no enforcement mechanism beyond his own willingness to live by it. The town’s abandonment doesn’t dissolve the obligation. His wife’s ultimatum doesn’t dissolve it. The approaching train doesn’t dissolve it. There is something in Kane that will not be argued out of itself, and the film treats this not as stubbornness but as integrity—the self remaining continuous with its own commitments under maximum pressure to abandon them.

This is closer to the virtue tradition than almost anything else the genre has produced. What Kane is practicing, without the vocabulary, is something like fidelity—the restraint of the self from its own rationalizations, the refusal to let fear or convenience rewrite the account of what is required. It is also, notably, costly in ways the genre usually fudges. Kane does not emerge from High Noon vindicated and celebrated. He throws his badge in the dirt and rides out of town. The community that failed him offers no apology. The code held, and the cost was real, and the film does not pretend otherwise.

But High Noon also contains the seed of its own limitation, and the essay needs to name it honestly. Kane’s restraint is exercised almost entirely alone. The communal structures that should have supported it—the deputies, the town council, the church congregation that debates and demurs—have dissolved, and what remains is one man and his code against the world. The film presents this as heroic, and in one sense it is. But in another sense it is the Western’s most persistent fantasy dressed in the clothing of virtue: the idea that genuine formation is finally a solitary achievement, that the code a man carries is self-generated and self-sustaining, that community is at best a backdrop and at worst a disappointment. The tradition this essay is drawing on would say something different. A virtue practiced entirely alone, without the community that named it and the story that sustains it, is not formation. It is willpower. The two are not the same thing, and they do not produce the same man over time.

Kane holds. But he holds alone. And the film, for all its honesty about cost, cannot quite imagine what it would have meant for him not to be alone—what a community actually capable of forming and sustaining that kind of integrity might have looked like. That is the question the Western has almost never been able to ask.¹

In Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry gives us two men who have ridden the same trails, fought the same fights, and arrived at almost the same age with almost nothing in common.² Gus McCrae is a man at ease with himself—talkative, pleasure-loving, genuinely curious about people, capable of violence when violence is required but not organized around it. His restraint is a form of presence. He holds back from nothing that matters; he simply refuses to let urgency crowd out enjoyment. Call, by contrast, is all discipline and forward motion, a man who has achieved extraordinary self-control and somewhere along the way misplaced the self it was meant to govern. He cannot tell his own son he is his son. He cannot acknowledge love that is plainly visible to everyone around him. What looks like virtue has calcified into a wound. The restraint is still there. It has just stopped serving anything alive.

Unforgiven is darker still. William Munny has practiced restraint—from drink, from his old violence, from the man he used to be—and the film treats that practice with genuine respect, up until the moment it breaks.³ When it breaks, Eastwood doesn’t celebrate it. He films it as loss. The man who rides out of the rain at the end is not the hero reclaiming his power. He is a man who has destroyed something he had worked hard to build, and the film knows it, and the audience is not quite sure what to feel. That uncertainty is the most honest thing the genre has produced on this subject.

And then there is Sheriff Bell.

No Country for Old Men gives us a man who looks at what is coming—Anton Chigurh, pure force without remainder, violence unconstrained by anything—and makes a deliberate choice not to engage. Bell arrives at the motel too late, or just in time, depending on how you read it. He does not pursue. He goes home, and then he retires, and then he tells his wife about a dream, and the film ends. The Coen Brothers refuse to condemn him for any of this. They also refuse to fully vindicate him. The question of whether Bell’s non-engagement is wisdom or failure—the restraint of the man who has seen enough, or the abdication of the man who is simply tired—is the question the film declines to answer, and that refusal is almost certainly intentional.⁴

What the genre cannot quite do, even in these better moments, is say what restraint is for. It can show us the cost of its absence. It can show us its shadow side, the way it curdles in Call, the way it breaks in Munny. It can leave the question open the way the Coens do with Bell. But it does not have a language for restraint as a positive form of power, as something a man practices not because explosion is coming but because the practice itself is shaping him into something worth being. That language comes from somewhere older.

III.

Before we can say what restraint is, it helps to understand what its absence costs.

James Gilligan spent decades as a psychiatrist working with violent men—in prisons, in forensic hospitals, in the populations most of us prefer not to think about—and what he found, underneath almost every act of serious violence he encountered, was shame. Not anger, exactly, though anger was usually present. Shame: the experience of the self as so fundamentally worthless, so comprehensively humiliated, that violence became the only remaining means of restoring a sense of existence.⁵ The men who hurt people, Gilligan concluded, were not men overflowing with dangerous feeling. They were men who had been emptied out, who had no other resource for reconstituting themselves. Violence was not the presence of something. It was the symptom of an absence.

This reframes what restraint is actually doing. It is not merely the suppression of dangerous impulse, a lid on a boiling pot. It is the evidence of an interior structure that can bear the weight of shame without collapsing into it—a self stable enough that humiliation does not become emergency, that the ordinary wounds of living do not require violent repair. The man who can be wronged, embarrassed, diminished, and not explode is not a man without feeling. He is a man whose feelings have somewhere to go that isn’t outward and destructive. The restraint is possible because something is holding.

Which means the question is not only whether a man can restrain himself, but what the restraint is resting on. And here the shadow becomes personal.

I was the kid who held back, and held back, and then didn’t go. I told myself various stories about this over the years—that I was careful, that I was an observer by nature, that there was nothing wrong with watching from the edge. Some of those stories had truth in them. But underneath them, if I am being honest, was something closer to Gilligan’s territory than I wanted to admit: not shame in its violent extreme, but a quieter version of the same structure, the self not quite solid enough to risk the exposure of full participation. The holding back was not preparation. It was protection. The waiting was not praus—power under direction—it was power that had never found a direction because finding one felt too dangerous.⁶

The difference between that and what I watch my son do is not visible from the outside. We are both the kids at the edge of the group. But his stillness has a forward orientation. Mine had a backward one. His is restraint in the classical sense—energy gathered, attention sharpened, waiting for the right moment to move. Mine was closer to what Gus McCrae, that most clear-eyed of observers, would have recognized immediately: a man hiding in the vocabulary of caution.

The virtue and its shadow can look identical until the moment arrives. What they’re made of is entirely different.

IV.

The question that follows from this is not a therapeutic one—not what happened to me, or whose fault it was, or how to process it. Those are real questions, and they have their place, but they are not the questions a tradition organized around formation tends to ask first. The tradition asks something more demanding and more hopeful simultaneously: not what went wrong, but what is actually required, and whether a person is willing to begin acquiring it. That reframe matters. It moves the conversation from diagnosis to practice, from explanation to habituation, from the self examining its own wounds to the self beginning, however haltingly, to be shaped by something beyond them. It is, the tradition would insist, the only move that actually goes anywhere.

The tradition has a word for what my son is doing. Several, actually, and they cluster around the same insight from different angles.

Aristotle called it sophrosyne—usually translated “temperance,” which is unfortunate, because temperance has acquired connotations of prim self-denial that the Greek word does not carry.⁷ Sophrosyne is better understood as self-possession: the rightly ordered relationship between a person and their own desires, appetites, and impulses. Not their elimination. Their governance. The person with sophrosyne is not the person who feels nothing; they are the person whose feelings serve them rather than drive them. It is a condition of interior freedom, and Aristotle understood it as one of the cardinal virtues precisely because without it the others collapse. Courage without sophrosyne becomes recklessness. Justice without it becomes cruelty. The whole edifice of a well-formed life rests on a person who is, in some fundamental sense, in charge of themselves.

Aquinas inherits this and sharpens it in a direction that matters for our purposes. His treatment of mansuetudo—meekness, gentleness, the virtue governing anger specifically—insists that the goal is not a man without anger but a man whose anger has been rightly ordered.⁸ The Desert Fathers called this apatheia, which is easily misread as apathy but means something closer to freedom from compulsion: the state of not being driven by passion, not being at the mercy of whatever feeling arrives most loudly. Evagrius Ponticus, writing in the Egyptian desert in the fourth century, understood anger as a capacity that could be either enslaved to the ego or liberated for love. Rightly ordered, Aquinas would later argue, it becomes something close to zeal—the energy of love encountering what opposes it. The tradition never thought the goal was a man without strong feeling. It thought the goal was a man whose strong feelings had been educated.

Then there is the word the tradition has handled most carelessly, and which repays the most careful handling.

Prautes—meekness, in most English translations of Matthew 5:5. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. It has been read for centuries as a blessing on the passive, the mild, the self-effacing, and the result has been that generations of men have heard it as a blessing on someone else. But prautes almost certainly carries within it a specific image: the warhorse that has been trained.⁹ A praus horse is not a gentle horse in the sense of a weak one. It is a warhorse—bred for strength, capable of tremendous force—that has learned to respond to the rider rather than to its own fear and aggression. The power is entirely present. What has changed is its direction. It moves when the rider moves, holds when the rider holds, charges when the charge is called for and stands when standing is what the moment requires.

This is not a blessing on the passive. It is a blessing on power that has been brought under direction. And it reframes the entire question of masculine formation: the goal was never less strength. It was always strength that had learned to serve something beyond itself.

My son, at the edge of the soccer field, reading the group, waiting for the right moment—he is not demonstrating weakness. He is demonstrating something much harder to come by: the capacity to have an impulse and not be immediately owned by it. To feel the pull toward participation and to let that feeling inform rather than compel. He doesn’t know the Greek. He doesn’t need to. He is doing the thing the word is pointing at.

What I was doing, for years, was something the tradition also has a name for. Not a virtue. The privation of one.

V.

The virtue tradition gives us the vocabulary. Theology gives us the ground it stands on.

There is a word in Christian theology for the act of holding power in check—not because the power is absent, but because its restraint is itself a positive act. The word is kenosis, from Philippians 2, where Paul describes Christ emptying himself, taking the form of a servant, becoming obedient to the point of death. The Greek ekenosen—he emptied himself—has generated centuries of theological argument about what exactly was emptied and how, and those arguments matter, but they can obscure something simpler that the passage is doing. It is describing restraint as a form of love.¹⁰ The withholding of power not as weakness but as the precise shape that love takes when it is serious about making room for the other. You cannot fill a space you are already occupying. The emptying is the precondition for the encounter.

Iris Murdoch, writing from outside the explicitly theological tradition but in deep conversation with it, called this “unselfing.” In The Sovereignty of Good she argues that the fundamental problem of moral life is the ego’s tendency to colonize everything—to see the world not as it is but as a projection of its own needs, fears, and desires. The moral discipline she points toward is not primarily about action but about attention: learning to look at reality clearly enough that the self’s noise stops distorting the picture. What makes this possible, she argues, is a kind of practiced withdrawal of the self from the center of its own vision. Not self-hatred. Not self-erasure. The self stepping back far enough that something other than itself can actually come into focus.

Simone Weil, characteristically, presses this further than most readers find comfortable. Her concept of decreation—the soul’s voluntary movement toward its own dissolution before God—is the mystical extreme of the same instinct.¹¹ Weil is not always safe to follow all the way, but the direction she is pointing matters: that the self’s willingness to restrain its own expansion is not privation but a specific form of freedom, the freedom of not needing to be everything, of being able to receive rather than only to take.

What these three—Paul, Murdoch, Weil—have in common is the insistence that restraint is not the absence of power but its transformation. The kenotic Christ is not a weak Christ. The unselfed attention Murdoch describes is not passive attention. The decreated soul Weil points toward is not a soul that has given up. In each case, the restraint is generative. Something becomes possible in the space it opens that could not happen otherwise.

Sheriff Bell understands this, or is close to understanding it, which is why he is the most theologically interesting figure in the contemporary Western even though the Coen Brothers are almost certainly not making a theological argument. Bell faces Chigurh—which is to say, he faces a vision of the world in which force is the only grammar, in which every encounter is a transaction of power, in which the coin toss is the only honest account of what existence offers. And he declines to enter that world on its own terms. He has seen enough of what unrestrained force produces, and something in him will not follow it into the dark. He does not pursue. He goes home, and retires, and dreams.

The film refuses to tell us whether this is wisdom or failure, and that refusal is the point. Because from inside the Western’s normal grammar, it is obviously failure: the lawman who doesn’t face down the villain has abdicated his purpose. But Bell is operating with a different grammar, one the film does not quite name. His non-engagement is not cowardice—it is the refusal of a particular lie, the lie that the only meaningful response to violence is more effective violence. Whether he has found anything to put in its place, the film leaves open.

The tradition Bell cannot quite access would tell him this—and here the essay is bringing a grammar the film itself does not speak, though the dream seems to reach toward it: the emptying is not the end of the movement. Kenosis in Philippians 2 does not conclude with the self-emptying. It moves through it—through the cross, through the grave—toward something the restraint alone could never produce. The space opened by the withholding is not meant to stay empty. It is meant to become the conditions for something new.

Bell goes home and tells his wife about a dream. His father is in it, riding ahead, carrying fire in a horn, going on into the darkness to make light. Bell cannot explain it. The film ends before he can.

The tradition would recognize that dream. It has always known that the fire carried forward is not the fire the hero makes by his own hand.¹²

VI.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a botanist and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and she is not writing about men or masculinity or the Western. But in Braiding Sweetgrass she articulates something about restraint that the virtue tradition approaches from the inside and the Western cannot quite name at all.

She calls it the Honorable Harvest.¹³

It is a set of protocols, passed down through Indigenous tradition, governing how a person takes from the living world. Never take more than you need. Take only what is offered. Never take the last. Give something back. Ask permission, and attend to the answer. The list sounds simple. What it encodes is a complete reorientation of the self’s relationship to what it encounters—away from extraction, toward reciprocity. The restraint is not deprivation. It is the condition for relationship. You cannot be in genuine relation with something you are only taking from. The withholding is what makes encounter possible.

What the protocols share, and what makes them genuinely demanding rather than merely aspirational, is that they require the practitioner to absorb cost without transferring it. To take only what is offered means accepting that sometimes what is offered is not enough—and bearing that insufficiency rather than taking more to compensate. To never take the last means leaving something on the table even when you are hungry. To give something back means the exchange is never purely in your favor. This is not how the self naturally operates. The self, left to its own devices, optimizes. It finds the justification, constructs the rationale, tells itself that this particular situation is the exception. The Honorable Harvest is a discipline precisely because it runs against that grain—because it asks the practitioner to hold the cost rather than pass it on, and to do so not once in a dramatic moment of sacrifice but in the ordinary, recurring, undramatic texture of every encounter. That is what makes it formation rather than gesture. And that is what connects it, across the considerable distance of cultural and ecological context, to what Aristotle meant by habituation: not the grand choice but the repeated small one, accumulated over time into something that begins to resemble a self.

Kimmerer is working in an ecological register, but the structure she is describing applies with uncomfortable precision to persons. The man who approaches every relationship as a site of extraction—of validation, of labor, of emotional supply—is not in relationship. He is harvesting. And the extraction forecloses the very thing he is, at some level, looking for: the experience of being genuinely met by something other than himself. The Honorable Harvest names what the kenotic tradition names from a different angle: that the self’s restraint is not its diminishment but the precondition for its genuine enlargement.

This is what Gus McCrae knows that Call does not.

Gus is not a saint. He is vain and verbose and considerably more comfortable with his own pleasures than any serious ascetic tradition would endorse. But he is a man who is genuinely interested in the people around him—curious about them, delighted by them, willing to be surprised by them. His restraint is not rigidity but availability: he holds back from nothing that matters because he is not organized around self-protection. He can afford to be generous with his attention because his sense of himself does not depend on controlling every encounter. When he dies, half a continent of people grieve him, and the other half of the novel is about a man who cannot understand why—because Call has never learned to receive what Gus gave freely, which was simply the experience of being genuinely seen.

What the virtue tradition would say about Gus is that he has, without the vocabulary, arrived at something close to sophrosyne—not the prim, self-denying version the word has acquired in English translation, but Aristotle’s original: the self in right relationship to its own appetites and desires, free enough from compulsion that it can actually attend to what is in front of it. Gus wants things. He enjoys things. He is not indifferent to pleasure or comfort or the esteem of people he respects. But his wanting does not overwhelm his seeing. He can be in a situation without needing the situation to confirm something about himself. That freedom—the freedom from needing every encounter to go a particular way—is what the tradition means by interior liberty, and it is rarer than it looks.

Call has everything Gus has in terms of capacity and more in terms of discipline. He is tougher, more reliable, more relentlessly competent. What he lacks is the thing that makes Gus’s competence generative rather than merely functional: the ability to be present to something other than his own forward motion. Call’s self-control has become a kind of armor, and armor, the tradition has always known, is not the same thing as strength. Armor is what you wear when you cannot afford to be touched. Strength is what allows you to be touched and remain standing. Call survives everything the frontier offers. He arrives at the end of the novel intact and utterly alone, having spent a lifetime protecting himself from the very encounters that might have made him more than he was. The restraint is real. But it is restraint in service of the self’s own preservation rather than in service of something beyond it. That is the distinction—quiet, difficult to name from the outside, decisive in its effects over time—between the virtue and its shadow.

Gus knows, without theorizing it, that you cannot be in genuine relation with what you are only protecting yourself from. His availability is not naivety. He has ridden the same dangerous trails as Call, fought the same fights, buried the same friends. He simply refuses to let the danger become the organizing principle of how he meets the world. That refusal is an act of will, sustained over a lifetime, and it is—the tradition would insist—a form of practiced restraint more demanding than anything Call’s rigid self-discipline requires. It is harder to remain open than to close. It is harder to keep attending than to stop. The Honorable Harvest practiced toward persons looks, in the end, a great deal like Gus McCrae at his best: taking only what is offered, giving something back, leaving the other person intact.¹⁴

This is not a natural posture for men formed by the Western’s grammar. Extraction is the genre’s default mode, toward land, toward women, toward the communities the hero moves through and leaves. The hero takes what he needs and rides on. That the riding on is filmed as freedom rather than loss is one of the genre’s most persistent distortions.

My son, at the edge of the group, watching and waiting, is practicing something closer to the Honorable Harvest than to the Western’s grammar. He is attending before he takes. He is reading what the group is actually offering rather than imposing what he needs it to be. And when he finally moves—when the joke lands, when he finds his place in the social weather of that particular afternoon—he has not extracted entry. He has earned it, which means something different. The group is intact. He is in it. Something has been exchanged rather than taken.

He is eight years old and he does not know he is doing any of this. Which is, the tradition would say, exactly how virtue is supposed to work.

VII.

I am on the sideline again. It is cold, or it is hot, or the gym smells like every gym has always smelled. The details shift. The thing I am watching doesn’t.

He arrives at the edge of the group and begins his work—because it is work, I understand that now, even if it looks like stillness from the outside. He is attending. He is reading the social weather, taking the measure of the other boys, figuring out where the humor lives and who sets the tone and what this particular group on this particular day is actually offering. He is practicing, without knowing the word for it, something that Aristotle spent considerable time trying to name, that the Desert Fathers went into the Egyptian wilderness to learn, that Aquinas worked out in careful Latin, that Simone Weil nearly destroyed herself understanding. He is holding his own impulses in check long enough for reality to come into focus.

And then he moves. Sometimes it’s a pass, sometimes it’s a joke, sometimes it’s just finding his place in the loose geography of boys-at-practice. It is never quite the same twice. What is always the same is the quality of the entry: considered, present, genuinely responsive to what is actually there rather than what he needed to find. He takes only what is offered. He gives something back. The group is intact when he joins it. Something has been exchanged.

I watch this and I feel two things simultaneously, and I have stopped trying to resolve them into one.

The first is something close to marvel. He arrived at this without being taught it, or without being taught it by me, which may or may not be the same thing. The grace, if that is what it is, ran sideways—or forward, from son to father, which is not the direction the tradition usually imagines it traveling. I am learning what the virtue looks like from someone who has not yet learned to be self-conscious about it, which means I am seeing it more clearly than I might if I had encountered it only in books.

The second is harder to name cleanly. It is not quite envy, and it is not quite grief, though it has something of both. It is the recognition, still fresh enough to be uncomfortable, that what I practiced for years under the name of restraint was its shadow: the holding back that never resolved into going, the waiting that became the thing itself, the self protected so carefully from exposure that it never quite risked the encounter that might have changed it. I was not practicing sophrosyne. I was practicing its absence in its clothing.

The tradition is clear that this recognition is not the end of the story. It is, in fact, the beginning of the only part that matters—the point at which a person stops performing a virtue they do not have and begins the slow work of actually acquiring it. Aristotle called this habituation. The Desert Fathers called it practice. The Wesleyan tradition I was ordained into calls it sanctification: the lifelong process by which a person is, by grace and effort together, made into something more than they arrived as. It is not fast. It is not linear. It does not wait for you to be ready.¹⁵

I am not sure I am doing it well. I am more sure than I was that I am doing it at all.

My son will move on to other teams, other gyms, other groups of boys whose social weather he will read from the edge before he joins them. He will get faster at it, probably, or more confident, or both. He may lose it for a while in adolescence and find it again. He may not know, for years, that it is a thing worth naming—that what feels like his particular personality is also, from a longer view, a virtue with a history and a tradition and a cloud of witnesses going back further than either of us can see.

When he is ready to hear that, I will tell him. I will tell him about the warhorse and the Greek word and the man in the Coens film who went home rather than ride into the dark. I will tell him about Gus McCrae, who knew how to receive what life offered without needing to take more than that. I will tell him about the Honorable Harvest, and what it means to attend before you take.

And I will tell him, because the tradition requires honesty and so does love, that I learned most of it from watching him.¹⁶

Bibliography

Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae. Translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province. New York: Benziger Brothers, 1947. I-II, q. 28, a. 4; II-II, q. 157.

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Terence Irwin. 2nd ed. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999.

Augustine of Hippo. Confessions. Translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Barclay, John M. G. “Does the Gospel Require Self-Sacrifice? Paul and the Reconfiguration of the Self.” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 45 (2023).

———. “Kenosis and the Drama of Salvation in Philippians 2.” In Kenosis: The Self-Emptying of Christ in Scripture and Theology, edited by Paul T. Nimmo and Keith L. Johnson, 7–23. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2022.

Barclay, William. New Testament Words. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1974.

Coen, Joel, and Ethan Coen, dirs. No Country for Old Men. Miramax Films, 2007.

Deloria, Vine, Jr. God Is Red: A Native View of Religion. 30th anniversary ed. Golden: Fulcrum, 2003.

Eastwood, Clint, dir. Unforgiven. Warner Bros., 1992.

Evagrius Ponticus. The Praktikos & Chapters on Prayer. Translated by John Eudes Bamberger. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1981.

Frankel, Glenn. High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic. New York: Bloomsbury, 2017.

Gilligan, James. Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic. New York: Putnam, 1996.

Hauerwas, Stanley. A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013.

MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. 3rd ed. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007.

McMurtry, Larry. Lonesome Dove. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985.

———. Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections at Sixty and Beyond. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999.

Murdoch, Iris. The Sovereignty of Good. London: Routledge, 1970.

The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Translated by Benedicta Ward. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1975.

Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. Translated by Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr. London: Routledge, 2002.

———. Waiting for God. Translated by Emma Craufurd. New York: Harper & Row, 1951.

Wesley, John. “Working Out Our Own Salvation.” In The Works of John Wesley, vol. 3, Sermons III, edited by Albert C. Outler, 199–209. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1986.

Zinnemann, Fred, dir. High Noon. United Artists, 1952. Screenplay by Carl Foreman.

Footnotes

#American mythology #Aristotle #High Noon #Lonesome Dove #Wesleyan theology #fatherhood #masculinity #parenting #restraints #sanctification #virtue ethics