The hidden king
A ☕️☕️☕️☕️ read in seven parts.
I.
The Boys & Girls Club had a corner near the pool tables where someone had built a cutout bench seat into the wall. I claimed it that summer. I was eight years old, and I had a plan.
The plan was books. Big ones. Robinson Crusoe. Swiss Family Robinson. Treasure Island. I wanted to read them, genuinely. But I also knew they'd score well on the Accelerated Reader program, and I wanted to win.
So that's what I did all summer. The pool tables cracked and rattled a few feet away. Kids came and went. I sat in the corner and read about men who survived alone on islands, who built what they needed from what the world gave them, who didn't require anyone else to become who they were.
At the end of the summer, I won the contest. The prize was a boombox radio cassette player.
I clutched it when my dad came to pick me up after work.
II.
By fifth grade I wasn't getting invited to Nick Post's birthday parties anymore. There was no fight, no falling out. Just the quiet closing of doors I hadn't noticed were doors. Cold shoulders. Rerouted conversations. The subtle recalibration of who belonged where.
I told myself a story about it.
The story wasn't religious, not yet. It didn't have the vocabulary of calling or vocation. It was simpler and older than that. I was different. Not better, exactly, but attuned to something the other boys weren't. They wanted what boys were supposed to want. I wanted books and ideas and the particular solitude of a corner near the pool tables. The gap between us wasn't social failure. It was evidence.
Evidence of what, I couldn't have said precisely. Something more essential. Something that would matter later, when later came.
Nobody told me this story. No teacher pulled me aside and said you're set apart for something. No parent narrated my loneliness as destiny. I built it myself, from the materials available: the books I loved, the contests I won, the gap between what I wanted and what seemed to be wanted from me.
That's what made it so durable. Externally confirmed stories can be challenged. The story you build alone, from pure need, in the corner while the pool tables crack behind you, that one you carry for decades without ever quite examining it.
III.
I had never heard of Joseph Campbell at eight years old. I didn't know about the monomyth, the hero's journey, the structure he mapped across world mythology in The Hero with a Thousand Faces and declared the deep grammar of human experience. I didn't know that what I was doing in that corner, building a story about my essential difference, had a template.
But I was living inside it.
Campbell's argument, stated plainly, is that across cultures and centuries, the hero's story follows the same arc. Departure: the ordinary world can no longer contain him, and he is called out. Initiation: he faces trials alone, descends into darkness, and survives by becoming more fully himself. Return: he comes back transformed, bearing a gift for the world that couldn't hold him.
The structure is elegant. It also does something very specific to masculine identity: it makes the gap between the hero and everyone else the first sign of his greatness. The ordinary world isn't where he belongs. The people who don't understand him aren't simply different. They're evidence. His separation from them is the beginning of the story, which means his loneliness isn't failure. It's departure.
A boy who needed to believe that the closing of doors was evidence of something essential didn't need Campbell explained to him. He just needed the books. Robinson Crusoe doesn't require anyone. Jim Hawkins is braver than the adults around him. The Swiss Family Robinson builds a better world from scratch than the one that shipwrecked them. The template was in the stories long before Campbell named it, and the stories were in my hands all summer.
This is what makes Campbell's monomyth more than a literary observation. It became, especially after George Lucas acknowledged it as the architecture of Star Wars, a prescriptive grammar for what a man's life is supposed to look like. You are called out of the ordinary. You face your trials. You return exceptional. The question isn't whether you're on the journey. The question is whether you're hero enough to survive it.1
What this produces, at the level of formation, is a self that reads its own exclusion as election. Not belonging becomes proof of destiny. The boy at the margins isn't failing to connect. He's departing. And departure, Campbell tells us, is where the story begins.
That's not wisdom. It's a conquest narrative with better lighting.
The problem isn't quest as a category. Alasdair MacIntyre argues in After Virtue that human life requires something like a quest structure to be intelligible at all, that you can only understand a virtue in the context of a practice, a practice in the context of a life, and a life needs narrative shape to mean anything. He's right about that.2 The issue isn't that the boy in the corner was wrong to need a story. The issue is the specific story available to him, the one that said his separation was the point, that his difference was his destiny, that the journey was fundamentally his alone.
Campbell's hero always returns. But he returns as the one who survived what others couldn't. The gift he bears is real, but so is the structure that produced it: I went alone, I endured alone, I came back with something you don't have.
The boy clutching his boombox didn't know he was rehearsing that return. But he was.
IV.
Somewhere in the middle of that same season of reading, or the ones that followed close behind it, I found Earthsea.
Ursula K. Le Guin's archipelago, her young wizard Ged, her magic system built on the truth of names: I received all of it as confirmation. Here was a boy set apart by gift. Here was a world that recognized what ordinary life missed. Here was the story I needed, larger and stranger and more beautiful than Robinson Crusoe, and it seemed to be for me in the way that only certain books are for certain readers.
What I didn't understand, and couldn't have, was that Le Guin was pulling the thread on exactly the story I was using her books to tell.
A Wizard of Earthsea begins where Campbell begins: with an exceptional boy in an ordinary world that can't contain him. Ged is gifted beyond his peers, proud of it, and eventually goaded into an act of reckless power that releases a shadow into the world. The shadow hunts him. The novel follows his flight and, finally, his turn. He stops running. He pursues the shadow across open ocean to the edge of the world, and there he names it.
The shadow is himself.
This is not Campbell's structure. In the monomyth, the darkness is external. The hero descends into it, survives it, and returns bearing what he wrested from it. The shadow is the trial, not the self. But Le Guin's Ged doesn't conquer anything. He names his own pride, his own desperate need to be exceptional, as the thing that nearly destroyed the world. The formation move is not mastery. It is recognition.
I read this as a boy and felt seen. I should have felt exposed.
To understand why, it helps to have Julietta Singh's vocabulary in hand. In Unthinking Mastery, Singh makes an argument that runs deeper than any simple critique of power: that mastery is not just something colonial powers impose on others but a formation of the self that the modern humanist tradition considers its highest achievement.3 She traces the logic back to Locke, who defines Man as "Master of himself," as proprietor of his own person and labor. This is the modern subject: self-possessed, self-governing, bounded. To be a man in this tradition is to have achieved a form of interior sovereignty. And Singh's claim, the most unsettling one in the book, is that this self-mastery is not separable from the colonial mastery we might otherwise disavow. They run on the same logic. Mastery, she argues, reaches toward the indiscriminate control over something, whether external or internal to oneself, aiming always for full submission of its object.
The boy in the corner was doing this work, quietly and without any awareness of it. Building a self that would be master of itself. Set apart, disciplined, exceptional, attuned to something the other boys weren't. The solitude wasn't failure. It was formation. And the formation was toward a subject who would eventually return, bearing the gift the world couldn't yet appreciate.
Singh also makes a point about narrative that cuts directly into what Le Guin was actually doing. Mastery, she argues, is fundamentally narrative: it assigns roles and holds them in place across time. The master's narrative has to elicit the participation of its subjects, has to get the boy who is not-yet-master to find himself in the story as the one who will be, as the one whose future recognition is already secured. That's what the quest narrative does. It doesn't just describe an exceptional self. It produces one, by getting the reader to inhabit the story as the hidden hero.4
This is precisely the reading experience I had with Earthsea. Le Guin handed me a narrative whose real argument was the undoing of that formation, and I absorbed it as confirmation. Singh calls this process finding yourself in the narrative, which shapes not just your thought but your affects and your actions. The story got inside me before I had the tools to read it critically, and it shaped what I could receive from the books that were trying to argue otherwise.
What Tehanu, the fourth Earthsea book, does is strip away the architecture entirely. Ged loses his magic. The great wizard becomes an ordinary man, and the novel asks what a man is without the gift that set him apart. Le Guin's answer requires the whole novel to find, but its direction is clear: toward dispossession rather than possession, toward dependence rather than mastery, toward the recognition that what he was before was not the fullness of the self but a particular story about the self that required constant maintenance.5
Singh calls this alternative possibility dehumanism, which sounds alarming and isn't. She means it as the undoing of the Lockean Man, the masterful self-proprietor, toward forms of being that don't require the interior sovereignty the tradition has confused with freedom.
Ged's arc is that undoing. Le Guin spent four novels performing Singh's argument in narrative form before Singh had written a word of it.
And I read it as a boy who needed to believe he was already the hidden king, and I felt confirmed.
That's not a failure of the books. It's a description of how formation works. The badly formed story was already running. It shaped what I could take in. And the story was not only in the books. It was in Locke. It was in Hegel. It was in Campbell. It was the deep grammar of what a self is supposed to be, filtered through a summer of island-survival stories and a corner near the pool tables, and it was already finished with its work before anyone had a chance to offer an alternative.
I haven't reread Earthsea as an adult. That revisitation is still ahead of me. But I know enough now to suspect that the man who goes back will find a very different book waiting, one that was always arguing against the story it felt like it was telling.
V.
The conference was full of people like me.
Ordained misfits, mostly. People who had also sat in corners, who had also retreated from the social worlds that didn't want them, who had eventually found their way into collared shirts and stoles and a system that at least claimed to value what they were. Thoughtful people. Readers. The kind of clergy who quote Barth in casual conversation and mean it, who find the lectionary more interesting than the game on Sunday.
And almost every one of them was narrating their calling the same way I had narrated mine.
We were set apart. We were attuned to something the world missed. We had been misunderstood, excluded, overlooked, and the cost of that had confirmed us. Not better than the people who shut us out, exactly, but called to something more essential than what they were reaching for.
The costume had changed. The stole replaced the corner. But the grammar was identical.
I sat with that for a long time before I knew what to do with it. Because the easy interpretation is ironic: look at the misfits, still telling the same story. But the harder interpretation is structural. The quest narrative didn't lose its hold when we got ordained. It found a new institutional home. Theological education, it turns out, is extraordinarily well-equipped to receive and amplify exactly this formation.
Willie James Jennings, in After Whiteness, makes an argument about theological education that lands with particular force in this context. His target is what he calls the formation of the "self-sufficient" man, the cultured, competent, individually masterful person that theological education has implicitly taken as its product. Jennings traces this ideal to a colonial inheritance: the educated man who stands apart from community, who transcends the particular, who manages others from a position of superior knowledge. The goal of theological education, Jennings argues, has not been belonging. It has been the production of a particular kind of individual who is legible to a white self-sufficient masculine norm. Students are formed toward mastery of texts, traditions, and communities, even when they are forming communities that explicitly reject the language of mastery.6
The ordained misfits at the conference were not escaping this formation. They were inhabiting it in a new register. The bookish boy who needed to believe his exclusion was election grew up, went to seminary, learned the vocabulary of vocation, and found that the tradition had been waiting with a more sophisticated version of the same story. You were called before you were formed. Your difference is not failure but gift. The gap between you and the world is not social, it is spiritual. The discomfort you feel is not maladjustment but prophetic sensitivity.
All of it true, potentially. All of it available for distortion.
Jennings' alternative is not the rejection of calling but its reorientation, away from the self-sufficient individual and toward what he describes as belonging, a form of formation rooted in particular communities, bodies, and places rather than in the cultivation of the exceptional self. The opposite of the masterful cultured man is not the mediocre man. It is the man who knows where he is from and who he is bound to. Formation that produces belonging rather than standing apart.
This is where the quest narrative does its most subtle damage inside the church. Not in the obvious distortions, the warrior-Christ imagery, the muscular Christianity of a thousand men's retreats. In those cases the corruption is visible enough to name. The subtler damage is in the formation of clergy who understand their calling primarily through the grammar of distinction, who have replaced "I am different from the boys who didn't invite me to the birthday party" with "I am different from a world that doesn't understand what the church is for."
The story is the same. The world keeps producing boys who need it, and the church keeps offering them a version that fits the collar.
What I don't know yet, and what I think the essay cannot pretend to resolve, is whether there is a version of Christian calling that doesn't do this. Whether Paul's insistence that "not many of you were wise, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth" can actually hold the weight we ask it to hold. Whether being chosen despite your essential qualities rather than because of them can sustain a man the way the quest narrative sustains him.
I have been ordained for years. I am still not sure I have inhabited that grammar rather than the other one.
VI.
Paul is not subtle about this.
"Consider your own call, brothers and sisters," he writes to the church at Corinth. "Not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth." And then, the turn that the quest narrative cannot absorb: "God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are."7
Read carefully, this is not a consolation prize for the overlooked. It is not Paul telling the Corinthian misfits that they were chosen because they had a hidden quality the world couldn't see. It is the opposite. The point of the choosing is precisely the absence of that quality. God chose what is low and despised and not, and the verb matters here, in order to reduce to nothing things that are. The election is not confirmation. It is exposure. What gets exposed is the whole economy of distinction, the entire grammar that says some people are worth more than others, that the gifted are called and the ordinary are not, that the hidden king was always already different from the crowd he came from.
This is a different story than the one the boy in the corner was telling.
In Campbell's monomyth, the hero's separation from the ordinary world is the first sign of his greatness. He departs because he is different, and the journey proves and deepens the difference. He returns bearing gifts the world could not have generated without him. The election confirms the essential quality. Paul's election does the opposite: it recruits precisely those whom no one would have recruited, for precisely the purpose of demonstrating that the recruitment logic itself was wrong.
Karl Barth, whose doctrine of election remains the most thoroughgoing attempt in modern theology to think this through, insists that election is not first an individual matter at all.8 God's choice is first a choice of the community, the people called into being to bear witness to what God is doing in the world, and only derivatively a choice of individuals within that community. This inverts the quest narrative's architecture completely. You are not first a hidden king who discovers his calling and then joins a fellowship. You are first a member of a body, and your calling is intelligible only within that body's story. The individual is not the unit of election. The community is.
This is livable as theology. I believe it. I have preached it, in various forms, more times than I can count.
What I am less certain about is whether it is livable as formation, whether it can do the work the quest narrative was doing for the boy in the corner when he needed a reason to keep reading, when the doors were quietly closing and he had nothing but the story he was building for himself.
The quest narrative is durable because it answers a real need. The boy who is excluded needs something to hold. The story that his exclusion is evidence of calling gives him dignity and direction and a reason to get up in the morning. Paul's counter-grammar, you were not the hidden king, and God chose you anyway, and that is the whole point, requires you to relinquish the story that was holding you together before you have anything else to hold onto. That is not a small ask. It may be the ask of a lifetime.
What makes it harder is that the church has rarely offered Paul's grammar without letting the quest narrative back in through a side door. The preaching of election slides toward the preaching of exceptionalism. The community of the called becomes the community of the set-apart, who are different from the world in a way that confirms rather than subverts the distinction economy. The stole replaces the corner, and the grammar stays the same.
I don't think this is inevitable. I think Paul is pointing toward something real, something that could actually hold a person together differently than the quest narrative does, not by telling him he was always the hidden king, but by telling him he belongs to something that does not require him to be. That the body he is part of includes people who are not like him, whose difference is not a challenge to his calling but constitutive of it, whose presence relativizes his exceptionalism without erasing his particular gifts.
But I have not fully inhabited that grammar. I am not sure I know what it would feel like to have it be the story I actually live in rather than the story I preach.
That may be the most honest thing this essay can say.
VII.
The boombox is long gone. I don't remember what happened to it, which feels right. It was never really the point.
What I remember is the corner. The bench cut into the wall. The crack and rattle of pool tables a few feet away. The particular quality of attention that a book produces in a child who needs it badly, the way the room goes away and something else opens up. I was eight years old, and I was building a self from the materials available, and the materials were stories about men who survived alone.
I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't know the story had a grammar, that the grammar had a history, that the history ran from Locke through Hegel through Campbell and into the corner where I was sitting. I just knew the books were good and that I was winning something and that the winning felt like proof.
My dad came after work to pick me up. I clutched the boombox.
There is a version of this essay that ends with resolution, with the man who has worked all this out and can offer his son a better story. I have tried to write that version and it isn't true. What I have instead is the diagnosis, which is not nothing. Knowing the grammar of the story you've been living inside is not the same as being free of it, but it is a beginning. You cannot unthink mastery by resolving it. You can only learn to read for it, to notice where it surfaces, to stay with the trouble it produces rather than routing around it.
The Earthsea books are on my shelf. I haven't reread them yet. That's still ahead of me, and I am writing toward it rather than from it. The boy who received Le Guin as confirmation is going back with different eyes, or at least with eyes that know what they missed the first time. What he finds there, I don't know yet. That's a different essay.
What I can say is this. Ser Arlan of Pennytree, hedge knight, nobody in particular, tells the young man in his charge: a true knight always finishes a story. It is not the kind of thing a monomyth hero says. The monomyth hero returns transformed. Ser Arlan is talking about something simpler and harder: you said you would do this, so you do it. Not because it confirms your destiny. Because you said you would.
Fidelity rather than destiny. Completion rather than conquest. The story is not yours because you are exceptional. The story is yours because you are in it, and being in it means you owe it something.
The boy in the corner was building a self that would eventually return bearing gifts. I am less interested in that self now than I used to be. I am more interested in what it would mean to stay, to belong to a particular place and people and community of practice rather than to stand apart from one, waiting for the departure that confirms the calling.
I am not sure I know how to do that yet. But I think it is the right question. And I think the boy who needed the boombox as proof would benefit from hearing it, even if he isn't ready to answer it.
Even if the man writing this essay isn't either.
Bibliography
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. Created by Oti Edozie. HBO, 2024.
Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics II/2. Translated by G. W. Bromiley et al. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957.
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949.
———. The Power of Myth. New York: Doubleday, 1988.
Du Mez, Kristin Kobes. Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. New York: Liveright, 2020.
Jennings, Willie James. After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020. Le Guin, Ursula K. A Wizard of Earthsea. Berkeley: Parnassus Press, 1968.
———. The Tombs of Atuan. New York: Atheneum, 1971.
———. The Farthest Shore. New York: Atheneum, 1972.
———. Tehanu. New York: Atheneum, 1990.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. 3rd ed. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007.
Singh, Julietta. Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.
Williams, Bernard. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985.
Footnotes
Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949) is the primary text, though Campbell developed the monomyth across his career, most accessibly in The Power of Myth (New York: Doubleday, 1988), the book companion to his celebrated PBS conversations with Bill Moyers. Campbell was a genuinely serious comparative mythologist, steeped in Jung and deeply read across world religious traditions, and the men who find his framework compelling are not simply looking for permission to cast themselves as heroes. He identified something real: that across enormously diverse cultures, stories of transformation tend to follow recognizable patterns, and that those patterns do genuine psychological work. The problem is not the observation. The problem is what happened to it. George Lucas's acknowledged debt to Campbell in the making of Star Wars industrialized the monomyth, converting a descriptive account of narrative structure into a screenwriting formula and, eventually, a life-coaching template. What Campbell noticed about stories became what stories are supposed to do, and what a man's life is supposed to look like. The gap between those two things is where the damage lives. Campbell himself was more interested in the psychological and spiritual dimensions of the journey than in its application to masculine self-fashioning, and it is worth noting that his framework has been taken up by feminist mythologists and scholars in ways that complicate the masculine-hero reading that has become its dominant popular inheritance. The critique in this essay is aimed at the Campbell pipeline, not at Campbell's original project, which deserves more careful reading than its popularization has allowed.↩
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). The argument about narrative and virtue runs through chapters 14 and 15, where MacIntyre develops what he calls the narrative unity of a human life. His claim is that virtues are only intelligible in the context of practices, practices only intelligible in the context of a whole life, and a whole life only intelligible in the context of a tradition. The quest enters here not as a heroic adventure but as the form that a life oriented toward the good necessarily takes: "the good life for man is the life spent in seeking for the good life for man" (219). This is a deliberately circular formulation, and MacIntyre means it to be. The quest is not toward a known destination but toward a better understanding of what the destination is. That is a very different structure than Campbell's monomyth, which knows exactly what the destination looks like and measures the hero by whether he reaches it. MacIntyre's questing figure is not exceptional. He is not departing from an ordinary world that cannot contain him. He is a person embedded in practices and communities and traditions, trying to understand what it means to live well within them. The individual is not the unit of the quest. The tradition is. This distinction is load-bearing for the argument in this essay: the problem with Campbell is not that he gave us quest, but that he gave us a particular distortion of quest that evacuated exactly the communal and teleological dimensions MacIntyre insists are essential to it. Bernard Williams raised fair objections to MacIntyre's tendency to romanticize the coherence of pre-modern moral traditions in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), and those objections are worth taking seriously. But the diagnosis survives the historical critique: whatever the pre-modern traditions actually looked like, the vocabulary we have inherited is thinner than the practices that once sustained it, and the quest narrative we have been left with is thinner still.↩
Julietta Singh, Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018). The Locke passage Singh develops (pp. 13–14) is from the Second Treatise on Civil Government, where Locke defines Man as the being who is “Master of himself” and proprietor of his own person and labor. Singh’s reading is that Lockean Man is not thinkable without this practice of mastery: selfhood, in the liberal humanist tradition, is constituted by the mastery of something that precedes and exceeds the self, something the self has to subdue in order to become free. This is the deep structure of modern masculine formation: to be a man is to have achieved interior sovereignty, to have become master of your own unruly material. Singh’s most contentious claim, and the one most directly relevant to this essay, is what she describes as “the intimate link between the mastery enacted through colonization and other forms of mastery that we often believe today to be harmless, worthwhile, even virtuous” (10). They are not analogous practices. They run on the same logic of splitting, subordination, and control, whether the object being mastered is external or internal to oneself. “Dehumanism” is Singh’s proposed alternative (pp. 4–6), which she is careful to distinguish from dehumanization. She is not arguing for the degradation of the human but for the undoing of the Lockean Man toward what she calls “other ‘modalities’ of the human” (6) that do not require interior sovereignty as their foundation. This is a utopian project in the precise sense: it points toward something that does not yet exist in recognizable form, while tracing its outlines in literary and political texts that have been reaching toward it. Singh’s readings of J.M. Coetzee, Mahasweta Devi, and Jamaica Kincaid are the heart of the book and reward careful attention, though they lie beyond the scope of this essay’s argument.↩
Singh develops the narrative argument in the “Narrative and Matter” section of the introduction (pp. 17–18). Her claim is precise: mastery is “a fundamentally narrative problematic” that “assigns particular roles (the master, the slave) and holds those roles in place” in a temporal structure. The narrative does not merely describe an existing hierarchy; it produces one by getting its subjects to find themselves within it. “Through these material changes in a subject who ‘finds’ him or herself in a narrative (either as master or slave), the subject’s actions and affects are informed by narrative, even as these subjects must continually reproduce it.” This is the mechanism the essay is tracing in the boy reading island-survival stories: the quest narrative doesn’t wait for conscious adoption. It elicits participation. The boy finds himself in the story as the one whose departure is already underway, whose future recognition is already secured, and his actions and affects follow accordingly. Le Guin was writing against this mechanism. The problem is that the mechanism was already running before he picked up the book.↩
Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea (Berkeley: Parnassus Press, 1968); Tehanu (New York: Atheneum, 1990). The Earthsea series spans six novels and several story collections, but the arc most relevant here runs from the first book through the fourth. A Wizard of Earthsea establishes the formation problem: Ged's exceptional gift, his pride in it, and the shadow his pride releases into the world. The Tombs of Atuan and The Farthest Shore develop the series' increasingly complex account of power and its costs. Tehanu is the decisive turn. Written eighteen years after the first book, it is Le Guin explicitly revisiting and revising her own mythology. Ged returns from the events of The Farthest Shore stripped of his power, and the novel refuses to treat this as tragedy requiring resolution. The great wizard has to learn to be an ordinary man, to be cared for rather than caring, to belong to a household rather than to stand apart from one. Le Guin was candid in interviews that Tehanu was a feminist reconsideration of everything the first three books had taken for granted about power, gender, and heroism. What she produced is one of the more rigorous fictional engagements with the question this essay is circling: what is a man without the gift that defined him, and is what remains enough? Her answer is not sentimental. It is structural. The gift was never the point. The belonging was.↩
Willie James Jennings, After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020), chapters 4 and 5 (ProQuest ebook pp. 85–121). Jennings' argument is aimed specifically at theological education, but its reach is broader than the seminary. His diagnosis turns on what he calls the self-sufficient man, the figure who wields power responsibly, identifies ability in others with clarity, and understands the world as properly ordered around those with greater gifts. This is not a caricature but a description of a specific educational ideal, one that Jennings traces to the colonial inheritance of Western formation. The house of theological education, he argues, was built as a duplex: one side devoted to master formation, in which indigenes and others would enter European civilization and humanity through education, and the other to emancipatory formation, in which learning became a weapon of resistance against colonial bondage. His most searching claim is that both sides of this duplex aim at mastery. "Both education as master formation and education as emancipatory weapon aim at cultivating mastery," he writes, whether the freedom of mastery in moral formation or the mastery of freedom in emancipation. What neither side of the house produces is formation in communion, the kind of belonging that does not require standing apart from or over a community but learning to live inside one. Jennings illustrates the self-sufficient man through a student he calls Win, tall, blond, Ivy-educated, every line fallen in a pleasant place, who comes to Jennings asking: "I love my father and my grandfather and the other men in my life. But I don't want to be them. How can I not be them?" Jennings has no plan for him, only the knowledge that Win will have to resist a world organized to build itself freshly on his body. The alternative Jennings points toward, developed in the "Eros" chapter, is theological education as the cultivation of a new belonging, a way of gathering that does not hoard or manage but forms people into genuine desire for one another across difference. This connects directly to Kristin Kobes Du Mez's argument in Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (New York: Liveright, 2020), which traces the specific historical construction of a white masculine Christian ideal in American evangelicalism. Jennings and Du Mez are addressing the same inheritance from different angles: Du Mez shows us what it looks like in its most distorted popular form, and Jennings traces its roots in the educational institutions that were supposed to correct it.↩
1 Corinthians 1:26–29, NRSV. The passage sits within Paul's extended argument with the Corinthian church about wisdom, status, and the nature of the community's life together. The Corinthians were fracturing along lines of allegiance to different teachers, with different factions claiming superior wisdom through their association with Paul, Apollos, or Cephas. Paul's response is not to adjudicate between the teachers but to attack the underlying framework: the assumption that the community's life is organized around the acquisition and display of wisdom, status, and distinction. His counter-move is to point to the composition of the community itself as the argument. Look at who you are, he says. Not many wise, not many powerful, not many of noble birth. This is not false modesty or consolation. It is an epistemological claim: the community's actual constitution is evidence of what God is doing, and what God is doing is not confirming the existing economy of distinction but exposing and subverting it. "God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are" is among the more radical sentences in the New Testament, and it has rarely been allowed to do its full work in Christian formation. The tradition has been far more comfortable with election as confirmation than with election as exposure. Paul, at least in this passage, will not allow the comfort. The choosing is precisely of those who have no claim, for precisely the purpose of demonstrating that the claim itself was always the wrong category.↩
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/2, trans. G. W. Bromiley et al. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957). The doctrine of election occupies the whole of this volume, and it remains the most ambitious attempt in modern Protestant theology to think election without making it a mechanism of individual religious privilege. Barth's foundational move is to locate the primary subject of election not in individual human beings but in Jesus Christ, who is simultaneously the electing God and the elected human. From that center, election extends outward: first to the community, the people called into being to bear witness to what God has done in Christ, and only within that community to individuals. This sequencing is everything. The individual is not elected and then incorporated into a community. The community is the primary locus of election, and individuals find their calling within and through their belonging to it. This is not a minor revision of the Protestant tradition's tendency to make election a drama between God and the individual soul. It is a structural inversion of it. For the argument of this essay, what matters is that Barth's account of election is constitutively communal in a way that the quest narrative's account of calling is not. You are not first a hidden king who discovers his destiny and then joins a fellowship. You are first a member of a body, and your particular gifts and calling are only intelligible within that body's story and mission. The individual's exceptionalism is not confirmed by election. It is relativized by it.↩