the mind of benj wesley 10: the possible ghoulishness of retroactively ascribing sacrificial meaning to death
odds and ends
In last week’s newsletter, I mentioned listening to “Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?” by Moby. My friend Keith Long took the trouble of sending me the original song the vocals were sampled from.
I had also been listening to the Moby song “Run On,” which – turns out – sampled vocals from a more obscure recording of a song that has also been sung by Johnny Cash and Marilyn Manson, normally titled “God’s Gonna Cut You Down”. (I never thought I’d enjoy a Marilyn Manson song, but here we are.)
Another “endless repeat” song after I heard it on WXPN in the car this summer: “Cloud Nein” by Man Man.
For those of you who enjoy hearing me play music just because it’s me playing it — I got into Millersville Community Church on Saturday and improvised around some old hymns: https://youtu.be/-YT3w9Hl1do
I’m looking forward to the following free Christianity-adjacent webinars:
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Sunday, Sept. 13, 2:30pm ET
A Christian, a Jew (and a Prophet) in the Belly of a Whale- not strictly related: remember this bop from Jonah: a VeggieTales Movie?
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Wednesday, Sept. 16, 3:30pm ET
How Old Books Help Us Live in an Anxious Time
featuring Dr. Alan Jacobs -
Tuesday, Sept. 22, 7:30pm ET
The Faith of Charles Dickens
featuring Gina Dalfonzo, Dr. Karen Swallow Prior, and Byron Borger
I mentioned reading Hamlet in my last letter. I finished it! I liked it. There were lots of phrases that I’ve heard elsewhere because they’ve now become commonplace! It all wrapped up a bit quickly, but it was very powerful and emotional. I bet that ghost was actually a demon.
I regret to say that some of you Twitterers have not followed me back at my new-er account, @foyercoffee! (It started out as my alt, but it is now my main. The old main account has been deleted.) At the risk of sounding presumptuous… I recommend you rectify this oversight. (Unless you honestly think my tweets are terrible. But even then you could follow and immediately mute me.)
I cannot stress how much I appreciate that Buttondown uses Markdown text formatting. WYSIWYG editing turns out to be highly overrated. If you copy-and-paste the text of, say, a Word document into a plain-text editor like Notepad, all the non-plain-text formatting will disappear. Goodbye, italics, bolds, hyperlinks, and pictures. Markdown is typed entirely in plaintext – but that plaintext is then automatically converted into beautifully and consistently formatted text.
Some of my devoutly Catholic friends went to the recent March on Washington, where they were photographed and interviewed by the Catholic Standard.
the possible ghoulishness of retroactively ascribing sacrificial meaning to death
This strikes me as nearly personally relevant, first of all because my father is an avid motorcyclist (my last newsletter mentioned his book on motorcycle safety) — because of him, I am doubly conscious of motorcyclists on the road. And my father’s father died before I was born, in a collision between the scooter he was riding and the car of a 19-year-old girl. (At least, I think she was 19. Perhaps that number was just thrown out in conversation as an example of an age the driver could have been. It’s my understanding that she was not at fault.)
A thought that may seem unrelated: on the streets of Lancaster, I have occasionally encountered people visibly homeless and/or in need. Every time I do, I keep having to remind myself: “It’s not an object lesson.” (Is the meaning of my refrain clear? Or is this another example of my phrasing thoughts to myself using words that do not make complete sense out loud or on paper?) I mean: if I give $5 in spare cash that I probably shouldn’t spend but which I could just as easily buy a DVD with (even though I’ll end up buying the DVD anyways) to a guy who has perfected his quick sales pitch as a down-on-his-luck-but-not-threatening fellow in need of $16 for a train ticket back to Philadelphia — first of all, I very much do not care about the veracity of such claims, I am firmly convinced distrust of people who make such strong claims on our sympathy is merely an attempt at reducing cognitive dissonance — but if I were to give such a fellow $5, I have not much improved either of our lives, not provided him with what he needs nor vouchsafed myself any great spiritual benefit. More importantly, he is not there to teach me anything about faith or gratitude or giving. He is there because he is there, and to see his purpose as being to somehow serve me through intangible “lessons” is to deny his dignity, to situate him as a cameo role in the all-important story of which I am the protagonist. Saying people with less have “something to teach us” – while perhaps sometimes true – still seems the height of narcissism, to make even that about you.
To rephrase this one more way, do not offer up the suffering of other people as a sacrifice for your benefit.
But here I am, rambling on, when as one might expect, Phil Christman has already rambled on about this topic more eloquently than I can, in the Easter 2020 edition of his newsletter The Tourist. He ponders the death of Leilani Jordan, a 27-year-old Giant grocery store employee who died of COVID-19 this April. Call her a hero, Christman concludes, say she made a heroic sacrifice: but don’t dare use the language of heroism and sacrifice in order to frame her death as a tragic inevitability. He frames his thoughts on Ms. Jordan within the context of the argument (yes, some people actually argue about this) on whether looking at Jesus’ cosmic sacrifice as a sacrifice per say gives short shrift to the fact that our Lord died as a poor man executed by the machinations of an unjust state:
[Leilani Jordan] is dead. And it’s important to note that she’s dead because of a disease, yes, but also because of … the combination of incentivized greed and carelessness and noncoordination and fractioning-off of responsibility that seem especially endemic to capitalism as we know it right now. How much is her death the fault of her shift manager, or the local store owner, or someone at headquarters with a spreadsheet, or the sclerotic federal government that downplayed the virus at first and is, uh, requisitioning medical supplies away from states at this point? How much is it the fault of all of us for the degree to which we voluntarily put up with a system based on exploiting most people to some degree and some people to their deaths, a system that targets black people, women, and people with disabilities? Leilani Jordan is the person in Kimberle Crenshaw’s famous metaphor, hit at once by so many cars you can’t even say which one killed her.
The first thing checks, but does not ultimately frustrate, my immediate impulse to point to the second thing and say “This woman, Leilani Jordan, was a screamingly obvious exemplar of Christ.”
In this context, the objection some liberation theologians have to language about “sacrifice” makes a lot more sense to me than it often does. The basic argument has always driven me a little nuts–of course such language is liable to abuse by bad people; that doesn’t make it untrue, or extricable from Christian narrative. If you needed liberation theology to figure out that abusers and exploiters and oppressors like to talk about the beautiful necessity of sacrifice, then I don’t know what to tell you. And if you think this wasn’t true before colonialism, capitalism, or the slave trade, then I also don’t know what to tell you. But aren’t you sick of seeing oppressed people being noble and getting nothing for it but death or prison or calumny, over and over and over again? Don’t you sometimes feel like there’s no way to talk about it that isn’t tainted because the truth of it is already tainting? …
Part of the problem must be that when we seem to associate the idea of sacrifice with the idea of necessity. If someone has, in some sense, died for others, we want to comfort ourselves by thinking there was no other way. There is a long history of theological dispute regarding whether the fall of humanity and its redemption “had” to happen, and I’m not in a good position to say, although the sentence “Jesus would have had to do this in any case” sticks in my mouth. In the case of Ms. Jordan, there were a million other ways. … This wasn’t necessary. She did not have to be put through this. Her family did not have to be put through this.
But in the circumstances our society gave her, she still risked her own safety. She acted nobly, bravely, and, yes, heroically. The fact that we need to stop extorting greatness from black people, poor people, women, disabled people, and many other groups doesn’t mean the greatness thus extorted isn’t real. We’ll never have a society worth living in if we don’t learn to look at people who do things like this and say not only “God, how exceptional,” but “God, I want to be like that.” Don’t name something as heroism if you aren’t willing to even try to imagine how you’d emulate it. Don’t give yourself that comfort.
David Peters (who wrote the Guardian article on accidental killing) also recently shared this John Piper article on the subject, with his commendation.
I think Piper avoids the pitfall I’ve been, with more-or-less clarity, talking about trying to avoid, the pitfall that Christman wrote about in regards to the deaths of Jesus Christ and Leilani Jordan. We want tragedies (specifically, tragedies that we find ourselves involved in but not the worst recipient of) to mean something, and in searching out that meaning we risk centering ourselves to an unseemly degree. Writing to an accidental killer struggling with a decade of grief, Piper does not say ‘this was for the best; nay, even Providential’. He does, however, say
… Surely one of the great hindrances to ministry after such an unspeakable calamity is the deep sense that if I rejoice or if I delight in some ministry, I will, by that delight, by that joy, treat the death of my grandchild with disrespect; I will, by that joy, minimize the horror of the deed and the loss to the family. So, there hangs over you a sense that you dare not return to any form of normalcy lest you make light of what feels infinitely heavy.
Here’s what I’m suggesting: that minimizing is not going to happen after thirteen years with you; it’s not. The voice of thirteen years of sorrow and ministry paralysis is to show you that you have a disability that you never will leave behind. You will never become chipper about it. You’ll never become frivolous about it. You’ll never become callous about it. You’ll never become indifferent to that awful moment and that immeasurable loss. You won’t. You won’t.
I’m suggesting that the grief and the loss are not a disease that heals; they are an amputation that produces a lifelong limp: you won’t ever run the same. And that limp, I am suggesting, is the miraculous capacity to minister to other people with a kind of joy (mark that word: a kind of joy), and a kind of hope, and a kind of peace that only a person can have who has drunk this bitter cup that you have drunk. It will be unique to you: your particular kind of joy, your hope, your peace.
Two editions of this newsletter ago, I wrote about The Book of Jerry Falwell by Susan Friend Harding. (Again, the book was published 20 years ago and so was not about the guy who just resigned with a $10 million pension plan.) As I wrote then, a stand-alone chapter early in the book nearly took my breath away with its incisive analysis of the rhetoric of fundamentalist Christian witnessing. This chapter – the witnessing session that ensued when Harding interviewed a SBC pastor (to be clear, not Jerry Falwell Sr. himself), and her after-the-fact analysis of the pastor’s rhetoric – touches briefly on accidental death. She extensively quotes the pastor, who in the course of witnessing to her, mentions being an unintentional killer himself, with what is perceived as shocking nonchalance. Harding transcribes Pastor Melvin Campbell’s monologue:
Now if in this life, the Bible says, only we have hope, then we of all men are most miserable. But you see my life, my hope, is in the life to come, and I realize this life is a passing thing. Jeremiah says it’s like a vapor. It appears but for a little while, and then vanishes. We know how uncertain life is. We’re just not sure how long things are going to go. I went to work one morning. I had some work to do on a Saturday morning. And one of my sons was fourteen years old. And the other one was fifteen years old. And we got up that morning. And I went in, and I rassled with my son and rassled him out of bed, the one that was fourteen. And we got up that morning and ate breakfast. We opened the Word of God. We read and we prayed together as a family, my wife, my two sons, and I. And I went on to do some work that morning. It was a Saturday. And I had something I wanted to move. And I was operating a crane. And I accidentally killed him that morning. And I looked at God, and I said, “Lord, you told me in your Word that all things work together for good to those that love you, especially those that are called according to your purpose.” And I said, “I’ve served you faithfully. And I’ve loved you. And I’ve given you my heart, my life, my soul, given you everything about me. And now I can’t understand this, why you’ve taken my son.” And God didn’t speak with a voice that heard with my ear but he spoke to my heart. He said, “Melvin, you know maybe you don’t understand what I’ve done at this particular time, but, can you accept it?” And I said, “yes sir, I can accept it.” …
Reflecting on this, Harding writes that the accidental death of the pastor’s son has been narratively refashioned into a Biblical sacrifice:
… in a split second he delivered a narrative shock: And I accidentally killed him that morning. The sentence disrupts his story. It startles his listener. But before it is absorbed, Campbell shifts to the real point—his conversation with God. God asked Melvin Campbell to accept what he, God, had asked Abraham to accept…
The unborn-again listener wants to know more about Campbell and Campbell’s son, not about God’s son. How did the boy die? How did Campbell really feel about it? What about his pain? His sorrow? His guilt? How could he speak to a stranger about what could be the most tragic moment in his life with such spareness, such calm, such calculation? … The unregenerate listener interrogates Campbell’s story as if it were a system of verbal clues about something outside itself—about the tragic event, his raw experience, the unmediated emotions of the moment, or his subsequent effort to recover and reintegrate—and finds the story distinctly odd, choppy, suspiciously elusive.
In contrast, the born-again believer, or the unbeliever who is being born-again, listens to the cadence and phrasing of Campbell’s words, to the esthetic shape of his story and the multidimensional biblical universe it presupposes, and hears nothing but the truth, that is, the world evoked, the world constituted, by the story. Campbell’s tale sounds homespun but its threads are thousands of years old. In the story’s rich weave are echoes of the trials of Job, and paraphrasings of David’s songs in Psalms and of Paul’s letters to the Romans and the Phillippians [sic]. … But what made his story truly captivating and potentially transformative was its placement at the end of a sequence of biblical stories which, looking back, fashioned a series of interlocking sacrificial altars, and, looking forward, fashioned one upon which a sacrifice was due. …
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Campbell wanted the listener to understand that she, her life, bore the same relationship to the story of Christ’s sacrifice that that story bore to the story of Abraham and Isaac. Her story would fulfill Christ’s in the same way that Christ’s fulfilled the Old Testament tale. The moment of salvation is precisely the moment when a lost soul realizes that Christ died for you. Suddenly, the story of Calvary, the Bible as a whole, becomes “relevant.” The context in which biblical stories are meaningful and the context of one’s personal life collapse into each other, and the fusion evokes a sense of great insight, of miracle. …
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Campbell’s final story about his son’s death replicated the biblical stories in the obvious thematic sense—a father sacrifices his son. … Campbell’s story fulfilled Christ’s, which fulfilled Abraham’s. … But like their stories, his too was incomplete. It evoked a haunting sense of something missing. Why did Campbell’s son die? Or, more precisely given the typological sequence, for whom did Campbell’s son die? The answer, of course, had already been provided by the previous stories. He died for me. The Reverend Campbell sacrificed his son, narratively speaking, for me.
The selection I have just quoted at hopefully forgivable length has tied in better with the Phil Christman selection than I anticipated. Writing 20 years apart, Susan Harding and Phil Christman have both heard of tragic, unintended deaths and saw meaning ascribed to these deaths essentially by calling these tragedies “sacrifices.”
David Peters does not – cannot – imply the death he unintentionally caused was in any way somehow for a greater good or even his own personal growth. Rather, he admits feeling a need to sacrifice. He writes:
I believe accidental killers feel guilt, in spite of everyone telling us it wasn’t our fault, because of a deep-in-our-bones instinct that a life must pay for a life. Even if it was an accident, someone has to pay. Years after my own accident, I bought a motorcycle and rode it obsessively, reasoning that justice would be served if I crashed and died.
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… In the case of the ancient Jewish concept of the Cities of Refuge, accidental killers were offered reconciliation when the high priest died; it was as if his death paid the debt for every accidental killer in the land.
Without quite stating it outright, David Peters implies that Jesus — the Christian’s “great high priest” — has likewise sacrificially paid that debt with his death:
My own religion, Christianity, is no exception in the importance it places on themes of blood debt. Christians regard Jesus Christ as having died for our sins, and liturgies and teachings about Christ’s atonement on the cross often emphasize a cleansing of sin, especially the kinds of sins and transgressions that are impossible to reconcile with a simple apology.
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For me, there is never a time when I’m not thinking about the accident. There’s also never a time when I don’t remember kneeling in an empty church with a priest, his hand on my head, pronouncing these words: “Now there is rejoicing in heaven; for you were lost, and are found; you were dead, and are now alive in Christ Jesus our Lord. Go in peace. The Lord has put away all your sins.”
I didn’t think I could tie in any more articles yet find myself contractually obligated to again mention Alan Noble’s piece of cultural analysis, “Franz Kafka and McGee and Me”, which might relate to me more directly.
See, I merely fear causing accidents on the road; I sometimes dream (literally) about decisions that can never be undone once taken and experience bittersweet relief as I gradually awake and feel that time has in fact been wound back. I have committed what seemed at the time to be irreversible errors, only for life to proceed much the same as it ever did.
Alan Noble writes about similar literal dreams of guilt, of having committed some vague crime and anxiously awaiting inevitable judgment; finally concluding that his dreams were caused by
this fear that no matter what I did, no matter how cautious I was, I had probably done something wrong some moment in my life that had led to a series of terrible consequences, and there really was no way to know what or how or to repay it.
“The weight of being in the world is unbearable,” Noble writes, “because the suffering we cause is our responsibility and yet out of our control.”
Phil Christman, in the newsletter excerpted earlier, pondered whether our participation in “capitalism as we know it” indicts most (all?) of us in the deaths of Leilani Jordan and those like her. (He has also argued with me on Twitter about the degree we ought to individually feel guilt for our participation in a collective system. I think it’s an interesting thread.) Noble faces this guilt and finds it unable to be reckoned with:
I wonder if there’s any of us who hasn’t unknowingly done some wrong that has led to someone’s death. We leave indelible marks on the world just by virtue of being alive. And some of those marks will be scars. Our existence is too weighty to keep from harming others, and there’s no way for us to know the extent of our harm or for us to undo it…
But Noble concludes, similarly to Peters’ article, that “atonement” lies not in personally setting right all we have done wrong, if only because it’s impossible to do so. And, somehow, the answer to that impossibility is Christ:
Our being in the world is not impossibly heavy, but not because we move through life taking on our burdens by repaying our debts, making our being in the world light and airy and incorporeal by rising above life. No, our being in the world is good because of Christ’s prodigal grace–a grace which makes our being new in all its weightiness, a grace which is sovereign over all the catenations of our failures. His is a grace which forgives and redeems infinitely–the only burden-bearing which could possibly overcome our unbearable weight of being in the world.
epilogue: considering cars themselves
I reluctantly have to admit that Prufrock is a good newsletter to subscribe to, though it’s a bit right-wing for my tastes. The September 7th edition pointed me in the direction of an extensive book review lamenting the end of American car culture, not to mention the sad rise of driverless cars and public transportation. You’ll be entirely surprised to learn that, on the whole, I liked the review, disagree as I do with its conclusions. On driverless cars:
Sad or not, the future will be justified in terms of safety. Safety surely is a good thing, and unsafe drivers surely are not. But you can have too much of a good thing, and we do. … It is hard to argue with safety, especially when projections of human lives lost on the road are much easier to quantify than the loss of human spiritedness that we will accept instead.
(emphasis mine)
And so, when human lives are lost on the road — but appear to our view as statistical numbers and not as individuals — we now know which god they may be rightly sacrificed to: “human spiritedness”.
I do not drive stick-shift, nor do I trust my ability to, but when I was 17 and just learning to drive, I did have lessons in a manual transmission car. It was just enough that I understand the appeal of stick-shift, which is that you feel that the car is an extension of yourself. I don’t know I could adequately put the difference into words until I read the review I just so derisively quoted, which states:
The way we drive our cars increasingly resembles the way we maintain them — which is to say, we do less and less of it. “With no shifter and no clutch, you don’t really feel that you are doing anything,” [Matthew] Crawford observes [in Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road]. “This lack of involvement is exacerbated by features that partially automate the driving task, such as cruise control.” Navigation is largely automated too, thanks to GPS. “Between the quiet smoothness, the passivity, and the sense of being cared for by some surrounding entity you can’t quite identify, driving a modern car is a bit like returning to the womb.”
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Today the young American who wants to tinker with his car faces an entirely different set of challenges. Matthew B. Crawford, a political philosopher and motorcycle mechanic (and a fellow contributing editor to this journal), writes in his 2009 book Shop Class as Soulcraft, “Lift the hood on some cars now and the engine appears a bit like the shimmering, featureless obelisk that so enthralled the proto-humans in the opening scene of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Essentially, there is another hood under the hood.” We’ve traded genuine ownership and mastery for a combination of aesthetics and access to expert help.
The monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey
I am fully grateful to author Matthew B. Crawford and reviewer Adam J. White here for this eloquent imagery (the car as womb, the engine as 2001-style monolith). Even without being in a self-driving car, using automatic transmission and cruise control are the first steps on a path towards feeling that your car is driving you, not you your car. That your car obeys you, rather than being an extension of you.
They have likewise hit on an obvious yet profound truth when they praise the virtues associated with old-fashioned car ownership, the exemplary — dare I say masculine? — ethic of grit, care, and carefulness inherent to making such a weighty purchase and being responsible for the upkeep of such a complicated machine, not to mention the responsibility of vigilant driving.
And thus they bemoan the “human spiritedness” that will be lost in the name of “safety”, when the robust, fundamentally American car culture of yesteryear is edged out in favor of self-driving cars and buses, at the behest of Silicon Valley and against the will of the virtuous automobile enthusiasts. As if American car culture, lauded as individualistic in the best way, was created by individuals and not corporate machinations such as Crawford and White seem to believe are on the verge of replacing proper automobiles with a system of public transportation halfway effective for its intended purposes! And — perhaps I’m not one fully qualified to talk, as a once-avid-bus-rider turned frequent-driver-who-prefers-not-to-look-under-the-hood, but I daresay it is nearly offensive to me to imply that riding the bus is an easy alternative to driving. Being the True Driver that American car culture is supposed to produce so many of, may entail hours of washing, waxing, and getting underneath it to change out the oil and know it’s done right. Riding the bus required careful planning, and, walking time included, about 6 times the time needed to get between any two given places as with a car. It was a different sort of investment, a different type of needed carefulness. This is all not even to mention that possessing the mindfulness and responsibility lauded as the lessons of Car Culture would likely cause many today to eschew cars altogether, for, if we are to accept our automobiles as ours alone and not shuffle off the glory or ignominy associated with their use on the truly systematic forces that made cars common and a commitment to public transportation or pedestrianism painful, then how can the truly responsible contribute to the environment’s destruction so?
In short, there are truly benefits to fully partaking in American car culture, but I find it dishonest to talk about the hypothetical impending rise of self-driving cars and ubiquitous buses as being guided by corporations — as if similar efforts a century ago aren’t what gave us “car culture” to begin with; and furthermore, I doubt the full expression of car culture’s virtues are fully compatible with driving in this day/age.
Even shorter: Ladies, get you a man that takes care of his own car; better yet, find one who bikes instead.
(If I may: I do have a suggestion for how us younger generations may learn the virtues presumably endemic only to car-ownership — home-ownership! How that will be economically possible is beyond me, but in my limited experience, homes tend to have enough moving and breaking parts that they ought to equally qualify as large investments, ideally obtained in early adulthood, requiring extended amounts of care and tending.)
It is becoming increasingly common knowledge that the word “jaywalker” was a ploy by the automobile industry to dodge responsibility for pedestrians’ deaths. These roads we have made connecting every part of America — you only have the right to partake of them if you have a car. Walk on them, and you do so at peril to your own life. And thus we have so many accidental deaths to begin with: split-second individual decisions where all fault is considered to ultimately lie, if anyone is considered responsible at all. As my friend Anthony Barr recently pointed out to me, it’s a societal contract: so many deaths a year, in return for so much efficiency.
And, of course, the inestimable benefit of human spiritedness.
- “What Happens To Your Life After You Accidentally Kill Someone?” - David Peters, The Guardian
- The Tourist–Volume 102 (April 12, 2020) - Phil Christman
- “How Do I Recover from an Unbearable Tragedy?” - interview with John Piper, Desiring God
- “Franz Kafka and McGee and Me“ - Alan Noble, Christ and Pop Culture
- “The End of History and the Fast Man” - Adam J. White, The New Atlantis
A brief guide to Christian movies currently free on Tubi you might actually want to see
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Assassin 33 A.D.
Christian Twitter lit up with amazement when we collectively realized there’s a movie about Muslims traveling back in time to assassinate Jesus before his crucifixion, so he can’t come back from the dead, also Jesus speaks English and has apparently watched The Passion of the Christ using his God powers and liked it? Anyway, you can watch it for free now. -
Shadowlands (1985)
A legitimately good television film made by mid-80s BBC, starring Joss Ackland as C.S. Lewis, telling the story of his falling in love with Joy Davidman and her premature death. It was remade in 1993 with Anthony Hopkins in the lead role, but I haven’t seen the later version. (I first found Shadowlands through my old Baptist church library—copies of this were apparently abundant at LifeWays—and I was just so shocked when I realized I found an actual good movie, not a sermon in narrative form.) -
The Pilgrim’s Progress
recent, CGI take on John Bunyan’s allegory (not to be confused with the 1970s live-action version that was bizarrely Liam Neeson’s first film role, which is also on Tubi) -
That timeless Kirk Cameron trilogy: Left Behind, Left Behind 2, and Left Behind 3
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The 1979 biopic of Joni Eareckson not-yet-Tada, starring Joni Eareckson as herself. I read it’s rather good, actually.
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Pier Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964), often reputed as the best religious film ever made.
Hey. If you’ve somehow made it this far (or even just scrolled to the end), let me know, why don’t ya? I’d love to hear any thoughts you have—doesn’t even have to be thoughts on anything I wrote about here. Just click reply, and your response will come my way.
All best, Benjamin