Still in the current

26 Jun, 2026

A ☕️☕️☕️☕️ read in seven parts.

I.

There is always another one.

A new season drops, or a film, or a limited series, and something in me leans forward before I have made any decision about it. I have been watching Slow Horses with the particular attention I give to things I don't want to end. I watched the new Jack Ryan film on a weeknight when I should have been doing something else, knowing twenty minutes in that it was trading plot for spectacle, watching anyway. I followed Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, which is its own kind of thing, a show that knows it is playing with the tensions between violence and virtue and keeps catching me mid-thought.

I am a theologian, and an ordained United Methodist elder. I have preached nonviolence from pulpits and meant it. I have written about the mythology of redemptive violence and the ways it distorts masculine formation and I believe what I wrote. I also watched a man get shot in a stairwell on a Wednesday evening and felt the specific satisfaction of a well-constructed scene.

These two things live in the same body. I have not resolved them. I am not sure resolution is the right category.

What I am interested in is the pull itself. Not its pathology, not its cure, but its anatomy. Why does the competent man moving through danger with purpose work on me the way it does? Why does Slow Horses feel morally serious in a way the Jack Ryan film doesn't, and why did I watch both? What is the thing these stories are feeding, and what does it mean that they have been feeding it in me for as long as I can remember?

There is a moment I keep noticing, watching these things. Not the violence itself but what happens just before it, the specific quality of attention that assembles in me when the story is about to resolve through force. Something sharpens. Something leans forward. It does not feel like appetite. It feels like readiness, like recognition, like the world briefly making the kind of sense it does not usually make. I have felt it watching Slow Horses, which earns it. I have felt it watching the new Jack Ryan film, which does not. I felt it at eleven years old watching a western on a Saturday afternoon, and I feel it now, and the intervening decades of theological education have not touched it. I have a more articulate relationship with the pull than I did at eleven. I am not sure that is the same as being free of it. The ability to make fine discriminations about the quality of violent fiction is not the same as being outside its formation. Steiner spent his career sitting with the uncomfortable version of that distinction, and I have not been able to stop thinking about it since I encountered his work.¹

My son is ten now. He is old enough to watch some of what I watch, and we have started doing that, carefully, together. He is old enough to have opinions about which stories are good and which are just loud. He is already, without any introduction from me, inside the same current I am inside.

I did not bring him here. The world got there first.

That is the thing I cannot stop thinking about.

II.

My son did not need me to introduce him to any of this.

By the time I started paying attention, he already knew which kids at school played which games, who was good at what sport, which boys were worth being friends with and which ones would make his life harder. He already knew, without being able to articulate it, that the social world of boys runs on a particular currency. Competence. Toughness. The ability to take a hit, literal or otherwise, without making too much of it.

He already knew that boys can be cruel to each other and that cruelty is not, by itself, disqualifying. That is still how they play. If you want friends, you navigate it.

I recognized what I was watching before I had words for it. The cruelty is not incidental to the belonging. It is the belonging. The group forms around a shared willingness to absorb and dispense a certain kind of roughness, and the boy who cannot or will not perform that transaction does not simply miss out on friendship. He signals something the group reads as disqualifying. This is not a failure of individual boys. It is a feature of the formation system itself, built in, passed on, practiced without examination by boys who are themselves still being formed by it. Thompson spent a career documenting exactly this, and reading him was like being handed a map of territory I had already been living in.²

What I keep sitting with is the question of fluency. To belong to the world of boys, you have to be conversant in its language. You have to know who won and who got destroyed. You have to be able to talk about a hit, a tackle, a fight, with the right kind of appreciation. The boys who cannot do that, or will not, pay a social cost that is also formation. The bookish boy who sits out the football conversation learns something about what his body is for and what kind of man he is allowed to be. I know that boy. I was that boy, in some ways. I watched my son navigate the edge of that territory and felt something I could not quite name, recognition and grief in roughly equal measure.

I have been in conversations with friends, fathers my age, about what to do with the violent fictions their kids are drawn to. Warhammer comes up. The elaborate lore, the painted miniatures, the campaigns built entirely around organized destruction. Some of these men are thoughtful about it. Their argument is not that the violence doesn't matter. It's that these fictions might be more honest than the redemptive kind. When nobody wins cleanly, when the violence is total and the costs are real and no one emerges without loss, there is something in that which the hero narrative cannot match. The story that refuses to make the violence feel good is at least not lying about what violence does.

I hear that. I find it partially persuasive. I also notice that I am not sure the content of the fiction is the whole question. The Warhammer conversation is also membership. To know the factions, to have opinions about the lore, to have painted a miniature or watched someone paint one: this is the price of entry into a particular kind of belonging. What you know signals who you are. And what you know, in this case, is organized around violence with a great deal of care and attention and love.³

III.

There is a scene in the Confessions that I have never been able to shake.

Augustine is a young man in Carthage, educated, ambitious, on his way to becoming something. He goes to the theater. He weeps. He weeps at the staged suffering, at the fictional grief of characters who do not exist, and he cannot stop going back. He knows something is off about this. He examines it with the particular ruthlessness he brings to everything he examines in himself. Why does the soul seek out suffering it does not have to pay for? What is the pleasure in watching pain from a safe distance? Why does the manufactured grief of the stage feel, in the moment, like something real and worth having?

He does not resolve it cleanly. He names it, turns it over, holds it up to the light. The theater fed something in him that he could not simply dismiss as base appetite, because it felt too much like genuine feeling. And yet it was feeling in the service of nothing, attached to nothing real, costing nothing. He wept for characters who did not exist and walked out into the Carthaginian evening unchanged.⁴

I think about that scene when I think about Wednesday night and the Jack Ryan film.

Not because watching a thriller is equivalent to whatever Augustine was doing in Carthage. But because the structure of the thing is the same. The soul leans toward the suffering it does not have to pay for. The body in the chair feels the pull of the body on the screen, the danger, the violence, the competent man moving through impossible situations, and something in the watching feels like participating. Feels like being, for an hour and a half, in a world where the stakes are clear and the right response to threat is immediate and physical and effective.

That is not my life. My life is meetings and manuscripts and school pickup and the slow work of trying to be a decent husband and father and pastor. The clarity of the action film is not available to me in any of those contexts. Nothing in my actual life resolves the way a Jack Ryan scene resolves. And I wonder, following Augustine's logic, what I am feeding when I feed that hunger. What the soul is reaching for when it reaches for that kind of story.

Augustine has another scene that sits beside the theater. The pear tree.

He and his friends steal pears one night. Not because they are hungry. Not because the pears are particularly good. They steal them because the stealing is pleasurable, and the pleasure is inseparable from doing it together, in the dark, laughing. He throws the pears to the pigs. The whole point was the transgression, and the transgression was the point only because it was shared. The belonging was constituted by the doing of the wrong thing together.⁵

That is the structure of the lunch table conversation about which games are worth playing and which kids are soft. Augustine did not invent this. He just looked at it with enough honesty to name what it actually was, which is harder than it sounds when you are the one who went along.

What I find most useful in Augustine is not his resolution. It is his method. He does not stand outside the theater and condemn it. He sits inside his own experience of it and keeps looking until he can name what is actually happening. The examination is addressed to God, which in practice means it is addressed to someone who already knows and cannot be fooled and does not require a performance of clarity. That frees Augustine to be genuinely uncertain, to follow the thought where it goes without needing to arrive somewhere respectable.

I am trying to do the same thing here, with less success and more interruptions.

I am not outside the pull. I was formed by it before I had any framework for examining it. The westerns I watched as a child. The Star Wars that I loved with a completeness I have never quite replicated. The British spy dramas I return to because they take the moral cost of violence seriously in a way most American action cannot manage. These are not embarrassing admissions I am making before getting to the real argument. They are the real argument. The examination has to start here, inside the thing, or it is not honest examination.

Augustine stood in the theater and wept and did not know exactly why. He stood by the pear tree in the dark with his friends and felt the pull of the wrong thing done together and went along. He spent years afterward looking at those two scenes with as much honesty as he could bring to bear.

I am still watching. I am trying to look at what I am watching with something like his honesty.

IV.

Here is the thing that is harder to name than the obvious thing.

The obvious thing is that we live in a culture saturated with violent entertainment. That is true and not very interesting, because everyone already knows it and the knowing has not changed anything. The parents who worry about screen time and the parents who don't are watching the same news cycle. The theologians who write about redemptive violence and the men who have never heard that phrase are sitting in the same stadium on Saturday afternoon. The saturation is not the problem, or not the whole problem. The problem is what happens to violence when it gets consecrated.

Consecrated violence is not the violence that looks like violence. It is the violence that looks like virtue.

It looks like the athlete who plays through a concussion because his team needs him. It looks like the soldier who follows orders into an impossible situation because that is what loyalty requires. It looks like the action hero who destroys half a city saving it and whom we are never asked to reckon with because the cost is not the point. It looks like the father who teaches his son to take a hit without crying, not because he is cruel, but because he genuinely believes he is preparing the boy for a world that will not be gentle with him. These are not the same thing. But they share a structure: the violence has been folded into the account of what a good man does, what a strong man does, what a man worth following does. It no longer presents itself as violence. It presents itself as character.

I have been formed by that account. I feel its logic when I watch these stories. I feel it when I watch the athlete play through pain and something in me registers it as admirable before I have asked any questions about what it is costing him. The formation happened first. The framework for examining it came later, and the examination has not undone the formation. It has just made me more aware of what I am feeling and why.⁶

There is a moment in almost every game, every film, every crowd event I have ever been part of, when the violence stops feeling like violence. When it feels like resolution. Like the right thing finally happening. The crowd rises. The hit lands. Something releases that feels less like appetite satisfied and more like order restored. The violence that produces that feeling is not the violence that announces itself as violence. It is the violence that feels like justice arriving, like necessity, like the thing that had to happen. That is the violence that does the deepest formation work, and it is the hardest to see from the inside. I recognized that feeling before I had a name for it. Alison gave me the name, and I have not been able to unfeel it since.⁷

What I keep sitting with is how invisible the mechanism is from the inside. The sacred violence does not announce itself as violence. It announces itself as justice, as necessity, as the thing that had to happen. The crowd calling for the crucifixion is not a mob that has lost control. It is a community doing exactly what it was formed to do. That is not a comfortable thing to recognize when you have felt the same release in a stadium, in a movie theater, in front of a screen on a Wednesday night.

I am not drawing an equivalence. I am noting a structure. The structure is the same. And the structure is in me, built there by years of inhabiting these stories, and the question I cannot stop asking is what it means to feel it and still be trying to be oriented toward something else.

The Christianity that baptized this, that turned the warrior into a model of discipleship and told men that dominance was faithfulness: this is not a fringe distortion. It is a dominant strand. And the men who inhabit it are not villains. They are formed, the way I am formed, by an account of what a good man does that has been told with great consistency and conviction for a very long time.⁸

What I am trying to name is not their failure. It is the water we are all swimming in. The consecrated violence is the hardest thing to see precisely because it has been made to feel like virtue, like character, like the thing that makes a man trustworthy. You cannot simply point at it and expect the pointing to undo the formation. The formation goes too deep for that. It went too deep in me, and I have been looking at it for years.

That is not despair. It is the honest starting point. You cannot form a child toward something different if you will not first look honestly at what you are forming him away from, and what it has built in you, and how much of it you have not yet fully examined.

V.

I have been thinking about two men who are trying to hand something on.

The first is John Ames, the aging Congregationalist minister in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, writing letters to his young son because he knows he will not live to raise him. Ames is a good man, genuinely, not in a sanitized way but in the way that someone is good who has paid attention to goodness for a long time and still finds it difficult. He is trying to hand his son something real, something that will hold, and he knows as he writes that he cannot fully account for what he is handing on. He gives the boy his attention, his way of looking at the world, his account of what makes a morning beautiful or a life worth living. He gives him a posture. He does not give him certainty, because he does not have certainty to give.⁹

What moves me about Ames is not his wisdom. It is his honesty about the limits of what he can transmit. He can tell his son what he has noticed. He can tell him what he has loved. He cannot guarantee that the loving and the noticing will take root in the boy the way they took root in him, because formation is not transfer. You cannot hand a tradition to someone the way you hand them a book. You hand them yourself, which is the tradition as it has been filtered through one particular life, with all the distortions and gaps and unexamined assumptions that implies.

The second man is Stevens, the butler in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, who gave everything he had to serving a tradition he believed was noble and discovered too late that his service had enabled something monstrous. Lord Darlington was not a villain. He was a man of genuine principle who was wrong about the most important thing, and Stevens served him with total devotion and total absence of examination and passed on nothing to nobody because there was nothing left of Stevens to pass on. He had poured himself entirely into the performance of a role, and the role turned out to be in service of something he had never looked at directly.¹⁰

Stevens is the shadow version of Ames. The man who did not examine what he was serving until it was too late to do anything with the examination.

I think about both of them when I think about what I am handing my son.

I am not handing him a clean tradition. I do not have one. What I have is a tradition that includes genuine goods and profound distortions woven together in ways I am still trying to map, a tradition that taught me real things about strength and loyalty and the protection of the vulnerable and also taught me that a man's worth is underwritten by his capacity for violence kept on a short leash. I received that whole, undifferentiated, before I had any framework for sorting it. I loved the westerns before I knew what the westerns were doing. I felt the pull of Star Wars before I had any account of what the pull was feeding. The formation happened first. The examination came later, and it is still not finished.

What I am trying to hand my son is not the cleaned-up version of that tradition, because the cleaned-up version would be a lie. It would pretend the distortions were not there, or that I have resolved them, or that I am standing on ground more solid than it is. He will see through that, probably sooner than I expect. Children are good at detecting the gap between what a parent performs and what a parent actually is.

What I am trying to hand him is something more like the examination itself. The willingness to keep looking at the thing you love and asking what it is actually doing in you. The refusal to either condemn it wholesale or defend it without scrutiny. The practice of staying inside the question long enough to see it clearly, which is harder and slower than arriving at an answer and requires a tolerance for uncertainty that our formation systems do not generally reward.

That is not nothing. It may even be something. But I want to be honest about how thin it feels some days, how inadequate to the actual weight of what he is entering. He is going into a world that has very clear and consistent accounts of what a man is for, accounts told with enormous skill and production value and that meet real hungers in real people. I am offering him a practice of attention and an unfinished examination.

Ames writes to his son knowing the boy will grow up without him, formed by the world and by his mother and by accident and circumstance and by all the forces Ames cannot anticipate or control. He writes anyway. Not because the writing will determine the outcome but because the writing is itself an act of faithfulness, a way of being present to the boy across the distance of death, a way of saying: this is what I noticed, this is what I loved, this is what I was still trying to figure out when I ran out of time.

I am not running out of time, not yet. But I feel the weight of the same thing Ames felt. The tradition I am handing on is the tradition as it exists in me, which means it includes everything I have not yet examined and everything I have examined and not yet resolved and everything I received before I knew I was receiving it. That is what gets passed on. Not the clean version. The actual version.

Stevens handed on nothing because he never looked. Ames handed on everything he had, which was partial and limited and still worth having.

I am trying to be Ames. I am aware that the trying is not a guarantee.

VI.

I want to talk about a wound.

Not as metaphor. As the specific thing that happened to a specific body in a specific place, under a specific set of cultural assumptions about what bodies are for and what it means when a body gets opened.

Jesus was crucified by Romans. That is a historical fact that has been so thoroughly processed by two thousand years of theology and devotion and art that it is almost impossible to feel its original weight. We have made it beautiful. We have put it in gold above altars and pressed it into silver around necks and painted it with a luminosity that transforms the execution into something that looks, from a sufficient distance, like transcendence. That is not wrong exactly. But it risks losing the scandal of the thing, which is the part that matters for what I am trying to say.

Rome had a very clear account of what a male body was for. The Roman male body was defined by its capacity to dominate, to remain inviolable, to act upon the world rather than be acted upon. The body that could not defend itself, the body that was penetrated, the body that was opened against its will: this was the body of defeat. Of shame. Of the man who had lost, finally and publicly, the thing that made him a man. Roman crucifixion was designed to communicate exactly this. The condemned body was stripped, exposed, fixed in place, subject to whatever the crowd and the soldiers chose to do to it. The piercing was not incidental to the execution. It was the statement the execution was making.¹¹

The church has consistently underestimated the actual violence of what happened, softened it into a transaction or a symbol rather than sitting with it as the specific thing it was. The sanitizing is not only a failure of historical imagination. It is a failure of formation. Because the scandal of the crucifixion is not incidental to what it forms us toward. It is the point. Rutledge has been saying this for years, and I think she is right.¹²

John's Gospel lingers on the wound in a way the other Gospels do not.

The soldier pierces Jesus's side and blood and water flow out. John tells us this happened and then tells us he is telling us the truth about it, which is an unusual move, the kind of thing a writer does when he wants you to understand that this detail is not decorative. The body is opened. Something flows out. The evangelist wants you to see it.

And then, after the resurrection, the wounds are still there.

This is the thing I keep returning to. The risen body is not repaired. The glorified body, the body that has passed through death and come out the other side, the body that will ascend and sit at the right hand of the Father: this body still has holes in it. Thomas is invited to put his finger into the mark of the nails. To put his hand into the side. The invitation is extraordinary when you sit with it. The body that Rome opened to demonstrate its defeat is now the body that opens itself, willingly, to Thomas's doubt. To his need for evidence. To his inability to believe without touching.

The wound that was meant to end the story becomes the place where the story continues.

The opening that was meant to demonstrate the failure of a man's power becomes the means of recognition, of encounter, of the specific knowledge that this is the same body that died and is now alive. The wounds are not scars. They are open enough to put your hand into. They are, in John's account, the most important thing about the risen Christ. Not evidence of what was survived. The means by which he is known.¹³

I have been sitting with what that means for the formation question this essay has been circling.

The culture is offering my son the intact body. The inviolable body. The body that wins by remaining closed, by absorbing damage without showing it, by being capable of force and never fully subject to it. That is the account encoded in every action film, every sports broadcast, every schoolyard hierarchy that rewards toughness and punishes vulnerability. The Marvel hero takes the hit and rises. The action star bleeds but does not break. The athlete plays through pain because stopping is the one thing the formation system cannot accommodate. The intact body is the body that wins. The opened body is the body that failed.

The risen body of Jesus refuses this account at its root.

Not by being invulnerable. Not by demonstrating that he could have stopped it if he had wanted to. Not by rising in a form that erases the damage and proves Rome wrong on Rome's own terms. The resurrection does not undo the wounds. It carries them forward. The glorified body is the wounded body. The victory is not the elimination of the opening but the transformation of what the opening means.

That transformation is the counter-image the essay has been moving toward. Not a prescription for how to raise a nonviolent son. Not a formation strategy. An image of what a man looks like when he is fully himself, which turns out to be not the man who remained intact but the man whose wounds became the place where others could reach him.

I do not always know how to hand that image to my son directly. It is not the kind of thing you explain at the dinner table. But I think it is the image underneath everything I am trying to do when I try to form him toward something other than what the culture is offering. Something that can be opened and still rise. Not a body without wounds. A body that carries its wounds differently.

That is not the same as weakness. The Desert Fathers called the disciplining of the passions not their elimination but their redirection. The strength does not go away. It gets oriented toward something worth being oriented toward. The body does not stop being capable. It stops understanding its capability as the thing that finally proves its worth.¹⁴

The pierced body is not an answer to the violence of the world. It is a different picture of what strength is for. And the Thomas encounter suggests something else that I find I cannot stop thinking about: that the wounds are not private. They are offered. Thomas is not stumbling upon the damage accidentally. He is invited into it. The risen Christ opens himself to be known through the place where he was broken.

That is the formation I am trying to point my son toward. Not the closed body that wins. The open body that rises. And the knowledge, which I do not have cleanly and am still trying to inhabit, that those two things are not the same and that the difference between them is everything.

VII.

There is a new season coming.

I don't know yet what it is. There is always something. A trailer surfaces and something in me leans forward before I have made any decision about it, the same lean I have felt since I was a boy watching westerns on Saturday afternoons, since the first time the Star Wars opening crawl moved up the screen and I understood that I was inside something I would never entirely leave. The pull does not diminish with examination. That is one of the things I have learned from Augustine, who examined his loves with more rigor than almost anyone in the Western tradition and remained, to the end, a man who felt them fully.

I am still watching these things. My son is ten years old and already inside the current and I did not put him there. The soccer field put him there. The lunch table put him there. The world, which arrived before I did and will remain after I am gone, put him there.

I have not found the clean exit and I am not looking for one. The exit is not the point. The point is whether there is a way to be inside the current, formed by it, genuinely implicated in it, and still be oriented toward something else. Not above it. Not free of it. Inside it and oriented differently.

I think there is. I am not certain. The not-certainty is load-bearing here, not a rhetorical gesture but an honest account of where I actually am. I have the image of the wounded risen body and I believe it is true and I do not always know what to do with it on a Wednesday night when the new episode drops and something in me leans forward and does not ask theological questions first.

What I have is a practice.

Not a solution. Not a formation strategy. Not a set of rules about what my son can watch and when. A practice of looking at what I am drawn to and asking what it is doing in me. A practice of staying inside the question rather than resolving it prematurely. A practice of trying to be, in front of my son, a man who takes these things seriously without being consumed by them, who can feel the pull and name it and still be recognizably oriented toward something other than what the pull is offering.

That is what Augustine was doing in the Confessions. Not arriving at clean ground but learning to walk on unclean ground with his eyes open. The examination did not free him from his loves. It changed the quality of his attention to them. He kept watching. He kept feeling the pull. He kept asking what the pull was for. That practice, sustained over a lifetime, is what the Confessions actually is. Not a record of arrival but a record of sustained attention.

John Ames writes to his son knowing he will not be there to see what the boy becomes. He writes anyway, because the writing is itself an act of faithfulness. What he hands on is not certainty but presence, a way of being with the question, a voice that says: this is what I noticed, this is what I loved, this is what I was still trying to figure out.

Stevens handed on nothing because he never looked.

I am trying to look. I am trying to do it in front of my son, not as performance but as practice, so that what he receives from me is not a set of conclusions but a way of looking. The tradition I am handing on includes the westerns and Star Wars and Slow Horses and the specific pleasure of watching a competent man move through danger with purpose. It also includes the question underneath all of that, the question I cannot stop asking, which is what all of that is doing in me and what it is forming me toward.

The wounded risen body sits underneath that question. Not as answer. As orientation. As the image I return to when I need to remember what a man actually looks like when he is fully himself, which turns out to be not the man who remained intact but the man whose wounds became the place where others could reach him.

My son will be formed by things I cannot control and cannot anticipate. He will find his own version of the pull. He will feel it before he has any framework for examining it, the way I did, the way every boy does. The world will get there first, the way it always does.

What I can offer him is a father who is still asking the question. Who has not arrived at clean ground but is trying to walk on unclean ground with his eyes open. Who loves the westerns and knows what the westerns are doing and watches them anyway and keeps asking what that means. Who believes, with whatever certainty he can muster, that the body that rose still wounded is the truest image of what a man is for.

And who is still, slowly, imperfectly, trying to be formed by that image rather than by the other ones.

That is not enough.

It is what I have.

Footnotes

Bibliography

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———. Raising Abel: The Recovery of the Eschatological Imagination. New York: Crossroad, 1996.

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———. Confessions. Translated by Sarah Ruden. New York: Modern Library, 2017.

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———. When I Was a Child I Read Books. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.

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———. Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman. New York: Atheneum, 1967.

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