Notes on Northern European Protestantism in Current Year, Twenty Twentysix
Earlier this month I went on a trip that took me to England for about five days, then to Latvia, Finland, and Iceland for a day or two each. I was in England to go to Oxonmoot, which is a Tolkien thing; I was in Finland to visit an online friend, and in Latvia and Iceland getting to and from Finland. This gave me many opportunities to go into beautiful Protestant churches, and even more opportunities to look at them from the outside. Sometimes Catholic and Orthodox churches too; I’m looking forward to seeing how a film photo that I took in Riga, with a sort of herring bruschetta and a glass of kvass in the foreground and the spire of St. Jacob’s Cathedral in the background, came out. If it looks good enough, I’m going to title the photo “Daily Bread,” which is perhaps not exactly me at my most avant-garde.
Kristi “The Body” Noem
Kristi Noem, the United States Secretary of Homeland Security, has had so much plastic surgery and wears such heavy makeup that she no longer even looks like the same person as the Kristi Noem who first entered the House of Representatives fifteen years ago. She gets a lot of attacks and mockery for this, especially from the political left. I think there is a distinctly misogynistic tone to a lot of these attacks and a lot of this mockery, as is the case with other women in Trump’s orbit like Melania Trump and Karoline Leavitt. Yet the kind of hyperfemininity that people are reacting to when they launch sexist broadsides against the women of Trumpworld is off-putting for legitimate reasons. There is something Dorian Grayish about “Mar-a-Lago face,” in the sense that it is an active decision to physically, visually, outwardly represent the inward condition of the soul, only unlike Dorian Gray these people have to wear the portrait over and within their actual faces at all times.
Bird of Paradise
Carole Lombard, the immensely popular comic actress who starred in movies like Nothing Sacred and To Be or Not to Be, died in January 1942 when a plane carrying her crashed into a mountain while returning to Hollywood from her native Indiana. She had been there selling war bonds, very successfully. America had entered World War II the previous month. Lombard died with her mother, to whom she was very close, and with the crew of the plane.
An Open Letter to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops on the Impending Return to Power of Donald Trump
“…I ask that the USCCB not become régime stooges like the bishops did with people like Franco in Spain and Duplessis in Québec…”
Indigenous Religion in Popular Fiction: The Case of Yellowjackets
Note: This essay is, I hope, to be run eventually in some more “august” format such as a journal focusing on theology, on popular culture, or on both; however, the slow pace of publication in many such outlets, in combination with the fact that a third season of the show is currently in production, made me believe that time was of the essence when it came to getting this out in some form or another. Thus I am running it here first.—Saint John’s Eve 2024
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The wildly popular (in some circles) television show Yellowjackets, which so far has two seasons out of a planned five and airs on the American cable channel Showtime, tells the story of a turf war between a Francophone demon and an albino moose for the souls of a team of ambiguously lesbian soccer players.
I hope that the rhetorical strategies I am employing in saying so—attention-grabbing overstatement, deliberately strange wording of concepts that are in fact more ordinary, leading with an extremely confident assertion of a view my actual grounds for holding which are more tenuous—are clear to most readers. I also hope, however, to make it clear that this is a genuinely held interpretation of the program. Not only is it a genuinely held interpretation, it is an eminently defensible one based on Yellowjackets’s style and tone, narrative conceits, and genre antecedents.
An Exercise on Gifts
I got assigned an interesting penance at confession a few days ago, and I was not able to make it to Mass for Epiphany due to a snowstorm, so I did the penance as a bit of spiritual writing instead. Running this publicly is meant to inspire anyone who would like to do the same reflection.
The Last True Conservatives
The very-online extreme right, in addition to its many other faults and failings, tends to have a crass, self-conscious masculinity to it. Either in the “pure” form of jacked douchebags who like yelling slurs or in the “inverted” form of resentful Shiraha-from-Konbini-ningen-type evolutionary-psychology-obsessed incels, an enormous proportion of the online rightosphere consists of people with heavily masculinity-inflected beliefs and concerns. I have not experienced this for myself because I only date women, but I’m told that in some quarters the synthesis of “masculinity in crisis” and far-right channer politics is so advanced that women who are interested in men date seemingly normal people whom they realize only later get their views on the great issues of the day from people with handles like “Bronze Age Pervert” posting screeds in the already-unfortunate “Twitter thread” format all day long. It goes without saying, at least among those in the know, that there is usually something homoerotic about this as well; witness the fixation on the deceased Japanese novelist, bodybuilder, and right-wing political commentator Mishima Yukio (whose output of novels and short stories, if nothing else, deserves better than being associated with these people), or the tendency to idolize early periods of Western cultural development in which many or most literate men were either so misogynistic they wrapped round to being gay or so gay they wrapped round to being misogynists. A recent article in The Atlantic about Bronze Age Pervert—a real person or, to make a distinction that Mishima himself would readily understand, at least a real persona, not just a name I made up as a stick to beat an ideal-type with—addresses this directly and at some length. According to Richard Spencer, the infamous former neo-Nazi leader who these days is happy to go on the record for essays in liberal newsmagazines, Bronze Age Pervert is obviously gay; the article’s author describes Spencer himself as a “homoerotic fascist” as well. But what if there were a distaff counterpart of sorts to all of this, a fringey rightist current heavily laden with lesbian cultural signifiers and preoccupied with the idea that femininity, rather than masculinity, is in crisis in weak, enervated, effete, androgynized modernity? I am not happy, but not not happy, to report that such a current does or did exist, and that it has or had surprising links to several other people, places, and things about which I have written before.
Repent at Leisure
With neither joy nor penitence
In these lethargic times, the one
And only laugh that still makes sense
Comes from a grinning skeleton.
—Paul Verlaine, translated by Norman R. Shapiro
Reading Narnia in My Late Twenties
A couple of years ago I reread the Chronicles of Narnia series of children’s fantasy novels by the British literary figure C.S. Lewis. The series was one that I devoured and greatly enjoyed as a preteen, although it was never as personally important to me as the work of Lewis’s friend J.R.R. Tolkien, and I became interested in seeing how it held up when I became aware of the sizeable, politically and intellectually fractious fandom that the books have online. Moreover, I’ve been reading a lot of Lewis’s non-Narnia writing over the past several years, mostly due to having fallen in with a number of people who greatly admired it when I was in graduate school.